Between 2010 and 2022, some 500 maternity wards closed across the United States, leaving a majority of rural hospitals with no labor and delivery units. And those numbers are from before the Dobbs decision came down and allowed for the criminalization of abortion — a move that pushed even more obstetricians out of conservative states, and made access to maternity care even scarcer.

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Now, anti-abortion Republicans are putting their resources not into expanding care for the women they’re forcing into motherhood, but into enforcing abortion bans — including those that make women risk their lives and health in pregnancy, drive up maternal injury and mortality, and push health care providers out of the workforce or out of state. State budgets are limited, and how lawmakers spend the money they have tells us a lot. Idaho, for example, is using some of its dollars to fight a Biden administration rule requiring that hospitals do what’s necessary to save women’s lives and preserve their health, even if that means offering them an emergency abortion.

Let that sink in: The state of Idaho, which has lost nearly a quarter of its practicing OB/GYNs and has seen several labor and delivery wards close since banning abortion, is spending taxpayer dollars to argue that they do not have to save a woman’s health in a medical emergency if she is pregnant and the best course of action is a termination.

I highlight this case next to the data on the closures of labor and delivery wards because these things are, in fact, related — and not just because abortion bans are sending doctors fleeing and forcing maternity ward closures, although they are. Abortion bans are not single issues fought for by a single-issue party; they are part of a much broader kaleidoscope of policies or lackthereof that all reflect a particular worldview. And that worldview cannot in any credible way be described as “pro-life.”

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It is one of the everlasting quirks of humankind’s time on this earth that many of the bad ones, the ones who are responsible for the deaths and misery of millions, are not big, famous, showy generals, or the elected or unelected leaders of nations, but rather milktoasty little functionaries who sit at desks and execute their ugly, murderous plans out of sight of the public. They are not elected to office. They don’t earn rank during long military careers and time in battle. They are, evermore, contemptible miscreants like Stephen Miller, little people who are given power because their morals match the lying, heartless, fascist men who appoint them.

Miller went on Fox News’ “Sunday Morning Futures” and told slavering host Maria Bartiromo that on Inauguration Day, his master, Donald Trump, plans to “issue a series of executive orders that seal the border shut and begin the largest deportation operation in American history.”

It’s a crime against decency and the English language that the words “deport” and “deportation” are flung around so blithely, not only by Trump and his hand-puppet, Stephen Miller, but by the mainstream media. What those words describe is the kidnapping, imprisonment, and trafficking of human beings under cover of an executive order that is not a law, but the administrative whim of one man, Donald Trump. When Donald Trump sits down at the Resolute Desk on Inauguration Day and signs a piece of paper put in front of him by Stephen Miller or some other White House functionary, he will not be signing into law a bill that has been passed by the Congress. He will be photo-opping a campaign promise that will be challenged by lawsuit within hours, but in the meantime, lives of immigrants will be upended, and people will die, as they did the last time Trump rounded up undocumented immigrants and stuck them in cages on the Texas border with Mexico.

Remember that? The mainstream media hasn’t reminded you what happened back then, so I will. NBC News reported on May 29, 2019: “At least seven children are known to have died in immigration custody since last year, after almost a decade in which no child reportedly died while in the custody of U.S. Customs and Border Protection.” One case was that of a teenage migrant who died of the flu. The flu. That’s how careful Trump’s border agents were when they detained migrants in hastily-constructed camps along the border the last time. NBC reported that in late 2018, a seven-year-old child “succumbed to a rapidly progressive infection that shut down her vital organs.” This was after CPB agents sent her on a 90-mile bus ride from one CPB location to another, even though she was showing symptoms of vomiting and dehydration. In the eight months following the death of the seven-year-old child, several more migrant children died while being held in facilities that had concrete floors and thin mats to sleep on.

So, let’s have a show of hands: How many readers who have children allowed them to sleep overnight someplace where all they had was a thin mat laid on a concrete floor, and the lights were left on all night? I have three children. I’ve never sent one of them to a summer camp or a sleepover at a friend’s house where they would be treated like that.

Why was this done to migrant children in 2018 and 2019 during Trump’s first term in office? Because Donald Trump and Stephen Miller didn’t see brown-skinned migrant children as human beings. They saw them then and see them now as among the ten million “undocumented immigrants” they plan on “deporting,” starting, as Miller and Trump and the rest of them have said, on “day one.”

This is an excerpt from my weekly Salon column. To read the rest, go here:

The "deportation" lie

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In 1968 Garrett Hardin wrote an essay (pdf), The tragedy of the commons, in which he argued that common ownership of assets such as land or fishing waters was incompatible with people being the selfish rational maximizers of economic theory. This is because if every herdsman can graze his cattle for free on commonly-owned pasture land each will want to put as many cattle on it as he can - until the land becomes over-grazed and barren. In this way wrote Hardin, "freedom in a commons brings ruin to all."

The same problem, warned Hardin, applies to pollution:

The rational man finds that his share of the cost of the wastes he discharges into the commons is less than the cost of purifying his wastes before releasing them. Since this is true for everyone, we are locked into a system of "fouling our own nest," so long as we behave only as independent, rational, free-enterprisers.

In saying this, Hardin was expressing in economic terms what many philosophers have pointed out - that there's a potential tension between the assertion of individual freedom and a thriving public realm. In 1935 John Macmurray wrote:

If the forces making for individual independence and initiative - for individualism in fact - become overmastering, they disrupt social unity and produce a catastrophe. (Reason and Emotion, p69)

Or as Charles Taylor put it:

A society of self-fulfillers...cannot sustain the strong identification with the political community which public freedom needs. (Sources of the Self, p508)

Many on the right used to be alert to this. They criticized alternative lifestyles such as "free love" and homosexuality on the grounds that they eroded traditional communities.

Today, though, we face the conflict in another context - that of the public sphere, the area in which questions get (or don't get!) debated.

This, like common land, a public good. A culture which values free scientific inquiry and the pursuit of truth, for example - and which embeds these in institutions such as universities - is likely to produce technologies and medicines which benefit us all. Likewise, most people believe that it's in all our interests that political debate facilitate good policies and good governance. One reason why John Stuart Mill and his followers valued freedom of speech and thought was that they believed these fostered better ideas from which we all might benefit.

Which brings us to the problem. Our public sphere as it now exists does not do this. Under Musk's ownership Twitter has degraded from a common forum into what Christina Pagel has called a means of weaponizing anger and disinformation. And Hardeep Matharu writes:

Social media platforms rife with conspiracy, disinformation, and hate are what people are seeing daily – and where they develop their sense of the world they live in. Social media is now the media. In this ecosystem, what matters is what resonates, regardless of how outrageous.

Which vindicates Hardin. Musk's pursuit of self-advantage has ruined a (once-) important part of the commons. But the problem is not just Twitter. Anyone who remembers the Sun in the 80s knows that the legacy media has always pumped out lies and hate. What's more recent, though, is that in an attempt to staunch losses caused by falling circulation, newspapers have slashed the number of specialist reporters. That, writes Sam Freedman in Failed State, "has degraded the quality of coverage and made it easier for politicians to pursue bad policy and avoid scrutiny." And our political ecosystem too often selects for snake-oil sellers, charlatans, liars and the incompetent.

We have therefore a tragedy of the commons.

So what are the alternatives?

To see some, remember that there's nothing inevitable or universal about the tragedy of the commons. Far from it. As Elinor Ostrom pointed out (pdf), common ownership of resources can very often be successful, under particular conditions.

What's needed here is that users of the commons do not "behave only as independent, rational, free-enterprisers". Instead, they must limit the extent to which they exploit the commons - a practice known as stinting (pdf). In our context, stinting would consist of something like what Habermas called discourse ethics: norms of honesty, openness, diversity and rationality. That's why there was traditionally a strong convention in parliament against lying to the House.

In principle, such rules could be voluntary, with users of the public sphere having the necessary virtues. Many, however, do not. In discharging hate and lies into the public sphere, they are fouling the nest for the rest of us. "Political entrepreneur" should be an oxymoron.

Virtues, then, must be complemented by sanctions. Historically, those who despoiled the commons were sometimes subjected (pdf) to "rough music", a form of public shaming. The latter-day equivalent of this is the mocking or correcting quote-tweeting of hateful or wrong claims. The problem with this, however, that it (sometimes) backfires. As Tim Harford has written:

Repeating a false claim, even in the context of debunking that claim, can make it stick. The myth-busting seems to work but then our memories fade and we remember only the myth.

This leaves another possibility: common ownership. Hardin's tragedy of the commons could be retitled the tragedy of private ownership, because if cattle or fishing boats were commonly owned the community could agree to restrain their exploitation of the commons. In our context, this argues for common democratic ownership of the media or at least for a media ecosystem more diverse than one controlled by a few billionaires.

But, but, but. We do have an organization which was founded in part precisely to resist the tragedy of the commons and to foster a flourishing public realm: the BBC. Its first boss, Lord Reith, saw its role as shoring up the public sphere:

As we conceive it, our responsibility is to carry into the greatest possible number of homes everything that is best in every department of human knowledge, endeavour and achievement.

In an anticipation of Hardin, he thought that private ownership could not do this. "No company constituted on trade lines for the profit of those composing it can be regarded as adequate" he said.

You only have to watch Laura Kuenssberg or (worse still) listen to Jeremy Vine to appreciate that the BBC is no longer fulfilling Reith's objectives*, preferring instead to give a platform to billionaires' gimps or even to outright racists. Which tells us that common ownership on its own is not sufficient. But what is? How can we democratize the media without it falling under the influence of cranks and fanatics pushing their own agendas?

The problem is that the degradation of the public sphere means that not only is there no adequate forum for answering this question, there isn't even interest in asking it; a big fault with our political system is that some important issues are off the agenda whilst trivial ones are on it. And this is one of the tragedies of the commons.

* Of course, there's far more to the BBC than current affairs. Ironically, the BBC meets Reithian principles better when making commercial programmes than when fulfilling its public service remit.

Specific rules and protocols aside, the basic ethics code for government is to provide service to the public, not to gild the financial future of our elected leaders and friends.

That was the thinking behind Donald Trump’s big public show at the start of his first term of putting The Trump Organization in the hands of his sons and away from the White House.

As we saw his administration unfold, those ethical lines came and went along with transactions of passing interest, exorbitant hotel rentals to the Secret Service and foreign visitors, and post-administration deals that have continued to benefit Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and investments by Trump’s company, among other financial dealings that draw criticism under a lumped “grifting” complaint that continue to spill out today. There are Trump Bibles, sneakers, coins, digital cards and more for sale, as if the presidency is a constant Black Friday sale.

This time around, the Trump transition team had resisted even signing the required General Services Administration documents meant to swear off potential conflicts for weeks, delaying the on-the-groundwork of transfer of power among federal agencies to designated Cabinet members and heads of departments.

Several weeks after the election, Team Trump finally presented an ethics plan, but it includes nothing about Trump himself, prompting criticism from such groups as the Campaign Legal Center over lack of transparency and CREW over potential legal consequences for Trump.

As The New York Times reported, a check of records and statements indicates that this time around, The Trump Organization aims to issue a more limited ethics plan that still allows Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr. to pursue international deals — even if they run afoul of other government programs or prohibitions.  Eric Trump, who is running the company, is “expected to forgo deals directly with foreign governments. But he is not planning to revive the promise the company made eight years ago to swear off all other foreign deals while his father occupies the White House.”

As president, Trump legally can skirt conflict of interest laws that would otherwise require a senior federal official to sell holdings in companies that might benefit from his actions. It has been left to individual presidents to voluntarily take such action.

Hidden in Plain Sight

As a matter of practical politics, Trump is engendering so many other controversies at once as to make mere financial gain while in office seem a lesser target of concern.

Trump’s choices for his inner circle are replete with financial conflicts with existing government programs, policies and contracts. Nevertheless, what controversy has arisen over some of the more contentious appointees have involved their personal behaviors and some of their expressed disdain for the agencies they would head. There has been less said to date about direct or indirect conflicts of business interests with the public’s business.

The most glaring of these involve Elon Musk, the billionaire Trump whisperer, whose holdings in social media, electric car manufacture, space and defense contracting bring him into direct conflict between serving the public interest and serving his own. Musk is being kept to an advisory role, which puts him outside of any binding ethical rules or Senate confirmation or oversight.

Nevertheless, Musk has the assignment to lead a government cut program on the scale of a business takeover. That means as head of Space X, he will review NASA spending, or as the brain behind Tesla, he will be reviewing tax credits for electric vehicles and all kinds of rules that will affect his car manufacturing rivals. As a major defense contractor, he will be looking at enforcement of contractor rules at the Defense Department.

His companies are major government contractors, taking in nearly $20 billion over the past 16 years, according to a USA TODAY analysis. Over the past decade, SpaceX alone received $14.4 billion from NASA and $5.3 billion from the Department of Defense. A New York Times analysis found that Musk’s companies had nearly 100 contracts with 17 federal agencies, totaling $3 billion. Tesla, Musk’s electric car maker, has received $41.9 million in federal contracts since 2008, including $13.6 million from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, $10.8 million from NASA and $9 million from the Department of Defense. Since 2010, the company has been the biggest beneficiary of federal tax credits on electric vehicle purchases.

A Bitcoin Reserve Bill by Sen. Cynthia Lummis, R-Wyo., would require the U.S. Treasury to buy one million Bitcoins over five years and be held for at least 20 years — a blatant industry-specific bailout of holders of cryptocurrency, according to MSNBC’s Chris Hayes. As of Friday, Bitcoin was trading at $100,000, which means purchasing that many Bitcoins at that rate would cost $100 billion, Mediaite reported. Both Trump sons and Musk have crypto businesses. 

Built-in Conflicts

You could see much of the same in the selections for people to run various health, environmental and energy sectors.  Trump has drawn many of his loyalist appointees from the ranks of successful businesspeople who have done deals with the agencies or rules that they now would oversee.

That may not be unusual for either party, but what is different is the public disdain in shunning any interest in protecting the people’s interest over personal gain.

Cabinet secretaries are required to file a form disclosing how much money they make, the value of what they and spouses and children own, the amount of debts they owe, and the gifts the receive. The reason is not invasion of privacy, it is meant as a guidepost for serving voters rather than self.

Federal law prohibits government officials from participating in activities that affect their financial interests, enforceable by prosecution. That’s why turning a blind eye to such rules matters.

Just yesterday, Trump’s businesses were sending out a pitch for a perfume at $199 that was being advertised with an image of Trump sitting with a smiling Jill Biden at the Notre Dame renovation ceremony. It seems doubtful that she was asked to approve, but why is the incoming president of the United States hawking a Trump perfume?

The Trump approach makes it almost a joke that a minute ago, Trump was insisting on rooting out Joe Biden’s supposed crossing of ethical lines — corruption, Trump said — in allowing his son, Hunter, to suggest that closeness with his dad would help in his international business dealings a decade ago.

Sharp government, nonprofit and journalistic reporting will be required to match the financial interests of specific individuals in the inner circle to the fate of programs aimed at serving the public.

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The post Tracking Team Trump Ethics appeared first on DCReport.org.

Today, Shitbag-Elect Donald Trump used a photo of himself and Jill Biden in an advertisement on Truth Social to sell his shit perfume call “Fight Fight Fight”.  Yes, he used WITHOUT PERMISSION a photograph of Jill Biden taken in a CHURCH, to sell fucking perfume. The photograph was taken prior to the Notre Dame reopening ceremony.  Much thanks to the French government for putting Jill in such close proximity to a convicted felon and sexual abuser.  More proof that he doesn’t give a flying fuck about anyone and feels free to use any and all people to his own advantage.

To reiterate: Donald Trump doesn’t give a flying fuck about anyone or anything but himself.  He has such disrespect for others (especially the Bidens) that he’s happy to use others for his own gain.

A few weeks ago, seven political philosophers at my department, who regularly meet to discuss issues related to sustainable futures, met to discuss Hannah Ritchie’s book Not the End of the World. That book quickly appeared on the bestseller’s lists. For everyone who read her book, or is perhaps thinking about reading her book, here’s what we thought about it (which, regular readers of this blog will notice, is an example of Team Philosophy which we discussed here a while ago.)

Our review can be found below the fold.

The limits of number-crunching: Hannah Ritchie’s Not the End of the World

Jamie Draper, Jeroen Hopster, Hannah McHugh, Catarina Neves, Jos Philips, Ingrid Robeyns and Naomi van Steenbergen.

Should those who care about climate change worry less about whether food is locally sourced or comes wrapped in plastic? Should they worry less about rising rates of energy consumption, and more about changing their diets? In Not the End of the World, Hannah Ritchie tries to dissolve such quandaries by arguing that many people make decisions like these on the basis of poor information, which makes them ineffective in addressing climate change and ecological crises.

According to Ritchie, data scientist at Oxford University, environmentalists typically worry about the wrong things. There are indeed some things that are more harmful than environmentalists often presume, such as picking fights with people who have slightly different ideas of the best climate-friendly solutions. But when it comes to most of our decisions about climate action, we should be worrying less, not more. And crucially, we should not fall prey to doomism that tells us that humanity cannot be saved. In Not the End of the World, Ritchie sets herself the task of showing that, while the problems of climate change and other ecological crises are serious and urgent, there has been more progress in solving them than we are inclined to think.

For Ritchie, this becomes obvious if one considers the data. Take deforestation: worries about losing the ‘lungs of the earth’ abound, but looking at the data of the last century, forests have actually made a comeback in rich countries, she argues. The data, Ritchie claims, tell us that we can be the first generation that will reach sustainability. The pathway to sustainability is clear if we look at the data on the ecological crises that we face.

Ritchie outlines three key levers for driving environmental change: a demanding citizenry, financial investment, and political will. Ritchie argues that quick, large-scale action is possible when these factors align, drawing on historical successes like combating acid rain and repairing the ozone layer to demonstrate how international cooperation can yield rapid results.

The book stresses that the most urgent priority is to stop burning fossil fuels and highlights that technological and policy solutions already exist. However, Ritchie critiques simplistic narratives like relying solely on recycling or energy-efficient light bulbs, calling for more impactful actions. She emphasises that overlapping environmental issues, such as climate change, air pollution, and deforestation, can be tackled simultaneously due to their interdependencies.

There are, to our minds, two very important contributions that Not the End of the World makes. One is to keep hammering the point home that we need to look at the facts about the effectiveness of different courses of action if we want to know what to focus on in our environmental efforts, whether we are individuals, organizations, or policy makers. The other is to show that there are a large number of technologically feasible pathways towards a more sustainable world. Ritchie tells us that if we consider both, we should be more optimistic, and realize that we might be the first generation to reach sustainability.

The goal of sustainability

However, examining the book from the perspective of philosophy of science, ethics, and normative political philosophy we concluded that it has significant shortcomings.

The first concerns the goals that Ritchie advocates. Ritchie takes the aim of our efforts to tackle climate and ecological crises to be to achieve sustainability. In her understanding of what this entails, however, she takes a rather self-serving interpretation of the Brundtland definition of sustainable development: “meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs”. Relying on this definition allows her to make the grand claim that we will be the first generation who can be sustainable. But that is misleading, even in its use of the Brundtland report, which is in the first place concerned with the question how development can be sustainable – not development as a goal as such (though the importance of the latter is taken as a given). More appropriate in the present context is to work with a concept of ecological sustainability. This can take different forms, but must at least involve the notion of staying within the carrying capacity of ecosystems; in other words, not depleting resources as we use them. From this perspective, it is evident that human beings have lived in ecologically sustainable ways in the past, but not at high levels of development. More accurately, then, we can say that (1) in contrast to some periods of the past, the human species is currently living in a deeply ecologically unsustainable way, and (2) we have never reached a world in which everyone’s basic human needs were met and which was at the same time ecologically sustainable.

This points us to another question, namely: why restrict ourselves to the two goals of ecological sustainability and development? These are inevitably normative goals – as the huge literature in development ethics and environmental philosophy shows – and cannot themselves be read off the data that Ritchie presents. And these goals can be either in line with, or in tension with, other normative goals. It is conceivable to have a world that is ecologically sustainable, yet does not meet minimal criteria of fairness or democratic equality, just as it is conceivable to have a world that is geared towards reaching all these goals. Ritchie’s book aims to tell us which technological and policy strategies are able to bring us to ecological sustainability without jeopardizing development for all, but she respects the status quo on any other possible societal or political goal. This is one way in which her implicit suggestion that her book does not rely on normative or politically partisan choices cannot stand up to scrutiny.

Truth’s political import

Ritchie’s avowedly non-partisan approach leads to an important tension in her book. On the one hand, Ritchie thinks citizens are entitled to the truth about the ecological crises that we face. On the other hand, she is not willing to point fingers, or make any statement regarding who is causally to blame or who bears moral and political responsibility to take the actions that are needed to overcome those crises. The same data that Ritchie draws on to set out a pathway to sustainability also document the gross inequalities of the ecological crises. The scholarly literature in climate and environmental ethics, as well as in the work of systems and transitions scholars, treats these inequalities as crucial obstacles for achieving a fair, not merely technically feasible, ecological transition. Avoiding questions of responsibility is a real shortcoming of the book, for two reasons. First, if citizens are entitled to the truth, they are entitled to the whole truth, and hence also the truth about causal responsibility. Second, the question about what needs to be done is not a question that can be answered in a merely technical way, but also requires an analysis of these questions of fairness.

It may also be that a fair ecological transition, rather than any technologically feasible ecological transition, requires limiting what we can do, both collectively and individually. But Ritchie avoids discussing this: she only wants to frame the necessary changes as opportunities, not as something that might be required of us on grounds of fairness or respect for human rights. There is a growing body of scholarly work arguing that the necessary transitions towards sustainable development can only be achieved if we move the entire human species within a consumption corridor in which they do not have too little to consume, but also not too much (see, for instance, here, here, here, here, here and here). This literature is crucial for the very points she aims to make. Yet Ritchie sets this body of work aside in less than two pages in the first chapter. This doesn’t fit with the claim that readers are entitled to the truth.

Ritchie’s non-partisan approach could be consistent with a world in which the extreme poor have their bare basic needs met only because billionaires, who are disproportionately responsible for ecological destruction, have now been granted a business opportunity to roll out the policies that will make the world ecologically sustainable. That in such a world the middle classes pay, and we move further away from a democracy to a plutocracy, is something that Ritchie’s analysis wouldn’t be concerned with – because her normative goals are limited, and because she is unwilling to attribute blame and thus make some specific agents responsible for the necessary actions, or for the cost of paying for them.

Theory of social change and political economy

What, then, are Ritchie’s recommendations? Her core recommendation is that we, citizens, put pressure on our governments to implement the fiscal changes (such as a carbon tax) and the technological changes that her analysis shows can help us move towards sustainability. There is, however, not a word on how we should do this, nor on the domestic or geopolitical hurdles that have prevented climate action. Ritchie doesn’t talk about the vital role of environmental activists who are doing precisely that kind of work, instead being inclined to paint activists as ‘doomers’ who actually halt positive change. She doesn’t talk about the need for citizens to fight for democracy first, which is important given that most radical right political regimes have a proven track-record of not caring about ecological concerns, let alone people whose lives are threatened by climate change and environmental disasters. Most strikingly, she doesn’t tell us what should be done by – or about – those who are right now massively worsening the ecological crises. For example, the one million dollar question in the climate transition is how we will make Big Oil companies stop selling fossil fuels as quickly as possible – but Ritchie’s book does not have the beginning of an answer to that question.

The book adopts the premise that optimism about the future is not only grounded in the past, but will motivate political action. This is not something to simply presume – such a claim needs to be empirically grounded. It is unclear that optimism will indeed motivate the demanding citizenry, financial investment, and political will that Ritchie argues is needed. Moreover, in seeking to avoid a ‘blame game’, Ritchie misses how blame can be crucial in developing the ability to take action for change. An important concern is that if blame and pessimism are excluded from considerations of responsibility, agents will consider themselves to have something akin to what Martha Nussbaum has referred to as a ‘moral free pass’. For the simple reason that time marches on, it is difficult to maintain the idea that we have responsibilities towards climate change, but can be blameless if they are not taken up. Taking effective action will involve the ability to attribute responsibility for duties together with concern and blame for failures to adopt them.

A best-light interpretation of Ritchie’s push for optimism could be seen as a form of ‘hope grounded in history’, in order to avoid ‘optimism that breeds complacency’. History tells us that democracy and social transformation have come with political battles for the just attribution of responsibility. Recognising that many key actors are failing to act may be reason to worry more, not less. Any motivating force of optimism should be explained. Without this explanation, there is a risk that the rhetorical effect of Ritchie’s book will breed complacency.

It might seem quick or easy to criticise a book for what it leaves out, but this omission is hardly inconsequential. If we want to know what we should be worried about when it comes to ecological crises, the plutocratic tendencies of high-emitting societies and the structural obstacles to breaking the power of those with a vested interest in the fossil fuel economy should come high on our list. If we want to be effective in our ecological actions, then we do not only need to know how to do good, but also how to make those who do evil stop. An account of what is technologically feasible will not get us there: at least as important is a theory of social change and a clear-eyed view of the political economy of the ecological crisis.

The limits of data science

Not the End of the World is a book written by a data scientist who explicitly claims authority based on the data that she provides. Yet it is misleading to pretend that data alone can answer these questions. There simply isn’t any non-partisan position if we talk about transitions. We need to know who is responsible so that we know what will be a fair distribution of climate duties, we need to have a proper analysis of political economy and a theory of social change, and we need to not only focus on changes that can be framed as opportunities, but also on changes that require malign parties to stop doing great harm. If we want readers to know the truth, let’s give them not a misleading slice of it, but instead all of it.