Mian Crist
speaker
152 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2026
last heard 26 Jul
Mian Crist’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
in terms of climate change and in terms of a global civilization that has sort of ballooned on cheap fossil products is complexity itself.
And this isn't something that our society is necessarily going to solve, but it's something that we've now come up against, which is different than, you know, how to solve climate change.
It's really like we are living in a society that can no longer continue as it has been up until now.
I'll read a little bit also from the introduction about pessimism because you're right.
He's been working in this vein for a long time, I think.
And he often is held up sort of in the climate sphere as a doomer, like a quote unquote doomer.
I think sometimes pessimism
This is done by folks who feel that it is irresponsible to speak about climate change in a way that suggests that things are going to be really, really bad.
Right.
This is something he addresses later, the sort of cultural pressures toward optimism.
I also think sometimes he is misread as either a nihilist or as being totally hopeless or sort of suggesting that nothing can or should be done.
And I think his arguments are more complex than that.
And I think that this book is in some ways a response to the misreadings of his earlier pessimism.
And it's interesting, as you say, that this is, in fact, a more pessimistic book.
He's sort of leaning into it.
So here he writes,
The problem we face with climate change isn't just unsustainable carbon waste from excessive energy use, and it isn't just the planetary metabolic disequilibrium our excessive energy use has caused.
The deeper problem is complexity itself.
Our global industrial civilization has grown unsustainably expensive as well as vulnerable to environmental stress, which climate change and related ecological crises will provide in spades.
And although numerous smart people have labored earnestly to imagine systemic transformation, international agreements, carbon taxes, carbon scrubbers, energy transition, seawalls, cold fusion, communist revolution, degrowth, donut economics, geoengineering, and countless other technology and policy hacks, what we face is not just a, quote, wicked problem.
Showing 41–60 of 152 · page 3 of 8
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