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@@ -4,6 +4,86 @@ title: Dissertation log
 author: Joe Carstairs
 ---
 
+## 2026-05-05
+
+### Meeting with David de Pomerai
+
+I met David (for the first time properly, having only seen him at the
+dissertation proposal assessment day) at the Mound Café at 11am for 1 hour.
+
+We had a long, unfocused discussion about the subject matter. It's clear he
+finds the subject matter interesting and important. We weren't immediately on
+the same page, which challenged me to explain what I've found and what I'm
+trying to do with my research. He listened well and seems on board with the
+project. We didn't have any extended disagreements that I recall.
+
+Some particular problems:
+
+- Green rhetoric seems to be moving away from apocalyptic forms, and with good
+  reason: why jump on board a sinking ship?
+- What else but apocalypse can communicate the appropriate urgency?
+- In John's Apocalypse, only the elect/martyrs are saved, but climate change
+  will harm everyone, even the rich and powerful
+- Apocalypses should be told from the perspective of John of Patmos, not Caesar:
+  do you and I, then, have any right to use apocalypse in green rhetoric?
+- Martyrdom ethics seems foreign to a culture where few die for any great cause,
+  but is costly resistance/sacrifice part of martyrdom ethics?
+- He agreed that contemporary green apocalypse echoes nuclear rhetoric
+- He came to agree that the idea of a future, sudden catastrophe on the model of
+  a nuclear war is not an appropriate model for a threat like climate change
+- He seemed resistant to the idea that you and I can't really do anything about
+  climate change
+
+I made him aware that my proposed dates for handing in draft chapters are only
+guidelines and are likely to get shoved around: he didn't seem bothered by this
+in the slightest.
+
+We agreed to meet approximately once a month or more frequently if we needed to
+discuss something specific. Tuesdays work well for him.
+
+We had protracted difficulties communicating over email: some system between me
+and him seems to be blocking communication. We agreed to communicate over
+WhatsApp in future, and he gave me his phone number.
+
+### @{ritchie-not-the-end}
+
+Ritchie pulls out a lot of stats to try and persuade the reader that, with the
+right individual consumption choices and government policies, the world's major
+ecological problems are resolveable, and it's not a moonshot, it's very
+feasible. The responses she proposes:
+
+- Eat less meat and dairy
+- Improve global crop yields
+- Reduce system food waste
+- Don't do indoor farming
+- Swap fossil fuels for renewables and nuclear
+- Swap driving for public transport, walking and cycling
+- Stop cooking on wood and charcoal
+- Remove sulphur from fossil fuels before burning them
+- End winter crop-burning in India
+- Rich countries pay poor countries to not chop forests down
+- End world poverty
+- Government should force industry to pay for the cost of dealing with plastic
+  pollution
+- Fine fishermen for losing plastic goods in the ocean
+- Rich countries stop sending plastic waste to poor countries
+- Grow economies in the developing world, so they become rich like us and demand
+  their governments to stop leaking plastic everywhere
+- Build better landfill sites in the developing world
+
+@{quentin-salt-2023} had major issues:
+
+- Cherry-picking optimistic facts and ignoring possible threats to support her
+  'urgent optimistic' conclusion
+- Rests hope in renewables, cutting beef consumption, improving crop yields and
+  so on, to enable sustainable economic growth, ignoring the fact that so far,
+  economic growth has been strongly linked to all her indexes of environmental
+  harm, no evidence of decoupling at a global scale, ignoring the question of
+  whether we even have time to 'grow, slow and then stop', assumes that
+  environmental harms are reversible and manageable...
+- Ignores the role of vested interests in preventing society-scale change
+- Ignores the elephant in the room: tipping points
+
 ## 2026-05-04
 
 My key task for today is to collect a list of 'core apocalyptic forms'. What are