Russell: As far as I can see, the energy propelling climate communication initiatives that aim to change popular culture, like the Covering Climate Now communication programs of The Guardian and The Nation Institute is less scientific than ideological, as are overt efforts to change public behavior by executive action, rather than lawmaking by elected representatives,

Russell, whether you have the patience for it or not, Ima tell you in detail why your fears are misplaced. I chose to err on the side of completeness, over strict brevity. Like always, all y’all can scroll past if tl;dr. But I took such care with the HTML 8^D!

First: Covering Climate Now is journalism, Russell. Its explicit mission is mobilizing collective action to mitigate an objective global crisis. From their About page:

As the climate crisis accelerates and the journalism landscape rapidly evolves, we invite all journalists and newsrooms worldwide — newsletters as well as newspapers, social media as well as television, independent investigative sites as well as a reader-funded non-profits — to join the Covering Climate Now community and help your fellow journalists produce exceptional work that engages audiences, holds power to account, and inspires change.

How is CCN justified? For more than 200 years the international peer community of scientists who publish research on the physics of climate, has evolved its own rigorous standards for empiricism and intersubjective verification. I think you’ll agree it has fulfilled its obligation to investigate, with as little bias of any kind as feasible, the physical causes of accelerating changes in the weather, that are already inflicting expense and grief on people around the world. And you’ll agree those consequences aren’t value-free.The confidence we place in science’s findings, strongly depends on our perception of its value-neutrality. Those findings, however, are normally known only to those who seek them out. That’s self-evidently not enough to avert a global crisis: a value all but universally shared!

As you know very well, the next step for a self-governing polis is to act collectively to limit the crisis. That requires more than value-free physical, biological and behavioral science. National decarbonization further requires enough sovereign individuals to learn enough about the actual climate crisis to recognize the need for collective intervention. That’s where responsible journalism comes in: only if reliably informed of the full dimensions of the climate crisis, can we choose leaders to enact collective decisions on our behalf. Journalists must at least counter the social and psychological forces of denial!

Second: here’s where politics takes over. In my humble private value system, our political leaders should use all the knowledge and the tools of science legally available to them, to achieve the overriding public good of reducing our fossil carbon emissions to zero in as short a time as possible under the rule of law: another widely shared value. Like physical scientists, social scientists must carry out and publish their research as free of values as their discipline’s professional culture demands. “Social engineering” is what’s done with the results. It was once called simply politics. And Executive Orders are called governing. As you know, the Executive branch of our government shares power with the Legislature, with the SCOTUS having the penultimate authority, subject only to Constitutional Amendment – a difficult task, last done over 30 years ago. Still the old normal, Russell. And now our country and the world are in a crisis, confronting a new, more destructive normal every day.

Now, the science of Economics informs us that objectively poor people around the world have suffered loss of homes, livelihoods and lives far out of proportion to the fossil carbon they’ve emitted, while having far less wherewithal to recover and adapt than “coal-rolling” Westerners do: still the old normal. Recognizing and acting on that objective inequality requires Westerners to harbor prosocial values: not normal enough to decarbonize us yet. OTOH, Economics also tells us literally everyone on Earth will incur some private diseconomy due to anthropogenic greenhouse emissions. Even from self-interest alone, a value normally shared by all and often expressed as ideology, everyone but carbon capitalists ought to hope CCN and Executive Order 13707 achieve their value-laden intent: merely to maintain the old normal weather while meeting America’s and the world’s growing energy demands.

Getting to the point: I suppose you could say I’m a consequentialist libertarian, when choosing between mutual coercion and global devastation. That fossil carbon is still being burned by the gigatonnes annually, demonstrates the requirement for mutual coercion to end the practice. OK, so let’s mutually agree to halt the rise of global heat content by targeted collective intervention in the otherwise-free global energy market. When that’s accomplished, we can go back to the normal bellum omnium contra omnes in a stable, albeit warmer, climate!

Lastly: recall former professional Libertarian disinformer Jerry Taylor’s mid-career epiphany, as reported to a journalist:

Just because the costs and the benefits are more or less going to be a wash, he said, that doesn’t mean that the losers in climate change are just going to have to suck it up so Exxon and Koch Industries can make a good chunk of money.

As always, when evaluating arguments for or against collective decarbonization, consider the source and follow the money. And we know where the money for denialism comes from.