reading log: flannery 2024

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@@ -6,6 +6,47 @@ author: Joe Carstairs
 
 ## 2026-04-21
 
+### @{flannery-2024}
+
+Flannery offers five big reasons why 'climate apocalypse' is unhelpful and
+should be avoided.
+
+1. 'Apocalypse' is reduced in many folks' imaginations to 'end of the world',
+   missing out the world-creating aspects of traditional apocalyptic, inspiring
+   despair and thus leading to inaction.
+2. (For many evangelical Christians) if climate change is identified with the
+   end times, that encourages people to welcome climate change instead of fight
+   it.
+3. If climate change is the end times, human action to avert it is irrelevant,
+   or given over to a scientific/technological/industrial saviour.
+4. Apocalypses punish the wicked and vindicate the righteous. When climate
+   apocalypses are told in e.g. the US, this suggests that the US is a victim,
+   not an instigator, of climate change, which is perverse.
+5. Climate apocalypse obscures the fact that human beings are responsible for
+   climate change.
+
+Before that, he makes a few big points:
+
+- Industrial CO2 is causing major climate change, causing unprecedented
+  existential threats to human civilization and wellbeing. The scientists tell
+  us that we must cut emissions sharply immediately to avoid the worst effects
+  and setting off tipping points. Our leading prospect for change, international
+  collective action by nations, is unlikely to deliver the necessary change in
+  time.
+- Journalists and campaigners are increasingly using 'climate apocalypse'.
+- Audiences' intentions, moods, and actions are guided by millenia of social
+  memory, which embed associations between 'apocalypse' and a web of meanings,
+  even unconsciously.
+
+I think Flannery exposes some real and serious dangers with climate apocalyptic.
+However, he under-explores positive possibilities: the world-creating aspects of
+traditional apocalyptic, unconsciously embedded in social memories even by those
+who think 'apocalypse' = 'end of the world.'
+
+It would be worth responding to all these criticisms of climate apocalypse,
+especially points 2, 3, 4, and 5. I have inklings how this might be done, to the
+end that some climate apocalyptic is bad, but some avoids these problems.
+
 ## 2026-04-17
 
 ### @{revelation-vision-of-a-just-world}