Irina Slav’s substack on climate adaptation is excellent
Tom KirkmanIndependent Project Manager
Excellent substack post about *Climate Adaption* from the always-witty Irina Slav.
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“… Why is there no talk about *adaptation* in the Great Planet-Saving Narrative?
Adaptation is what makes survival possible across species.
Adaptation is how I interpret the “fittest” part of that survival quote.
● Adaptation is the ultimate tool of evolution – you can’t evolve if you died out because you refused to adapt.
● And yet this is exactly what we see: a refusal to even discuss adaptation to a changing climate because, yes, the climate is changing – as it always has.
… Ironically, it is exactly adaptation that the climate crusade army is pushing on all of us – adaptation not to a changing climate but to a changed energy system purported to be able to arrest the changes in the climate.
… We need to get used to lower energy consumption, we are told.
We need to get used to a lower standard of living, to save the planet and the climate, although how you save the climate is beyond me.
We need to get used to more expensive food and less reliable electricity, and so on and so forth.
The obvious question – why don’t we just try and get used to different weather – is carefully omitted in favour of incessant harping on about “extreme weather”, where the phrase means absolutely anything that the ones using it want it to mean.
Extreme weather is what we say it is.
… Indeed, some climate activists openly and loudly condemn adaptation as an option.
One would think that they have a personal beef with the idea.
… Elsewhere, it might be a decent idea to plant some more trees instead of building ever more residential buildings that stay empty for years due to impossible real estate prices.
Trees make a huge difference in the summer heat and good city planners know it and make their cities green.
● … This is why activists don’t talk about adaptation.
● It’s a host of boring little, common sense things that do not require any cutting-edge technology or artificial intelligence to do.
● They also don’t require trillions in investments in stuff that is being repeatedly proven to not work well enough to replace the energy sources we already have.
Granted, there are different scales of adaptation and tech could certainly help with the larger-scale adaptation endeavours.
For most of us in our everyday lives, however, it’s the small, boring stuff that’s usually enough.
Stay out of the sun when it’s in scorching mode and stay in when it’s -30 and snowing heavily because, guess what, it’s winter and it has all happened before.”