DAVID APPELL SPANKS BILL MCKIBBEN:

McKibben makes no real argument why we should stop now except that he likes his life, his running, his humanity just the way it is now. But many people do not have McKibben’s life. Some, instead, live a life of great physical pain for which medicine has no answers, or mental torment for which psychology offers no solution. Billions yearn to live at the standard McKibben lives, yet doing with today’s technology–even our best technology–would wre[a]k havoc on the planet. Yet McKibben has the audacity to say that our answers can be found in the world as it exists today, as if scientists, engineers, policy makers, and technologists just haven’t been trying hard enough?

McKibben, I believe, would be making this argument whenever he happened to be alive — 5,000 B.C., a century ago, or two thousand years from now. Preying on fears sells news, articles, and books, and offers a shot at piety at the same time. Finding real honest-to-god solutions does not do as well.

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