I haven’t read Hannah Ritchie’s new book “Not the End of the World” yet, but to be honest, I’m already jealous of it as it is causing a lot of debate. Ritchie’s argument is “yes the problems are bad, but we can fix them.” This has triggered a furious response from the climate doomsters.

A post on LinkedIn led me to the Mongabay Newscast where Ritchie was said to have been thoroughly taken apart. I listened to the podcast and found her interviewer, Rachel Donald, rude and condescending, at one point responding to a perfectly cogent response by Ritchie with a dismissive ‘tchuh’. Another question starts “Another thing I want to pull you up on…”, hardly a neutral tone. Repeatedly Ritchie is confronted with arguments made against her book on Twitter as if that is a source of authority. The podcast also edited in extra commentary on ‘decoupling’ to counter Ritchie’s arguments without giving her a chance to respond.

Donald’s main problem with the book is clearly Ritchie’s failure to blame capitalism for everything. It isn’t clear whether Donald is calling for socialism as an alternative, but she might want to reflect on socialist Venezuela threatening to invade a neighbour in order to purloin its oil reserves. The atmosphere doesn’t care whether a tonne of carbon is released under capitalism or socialism, it’s a tonne of carbon.

Back on the LinkedIn post, the podcast was hailed as some sort of great victory, with one comment saying “Climate optimists are worse than climate deniers.” I find this celebration of hopelessness bizarre and wrongheaded. Eco-anxiety is becoming a really big issue and one of the main symptoms of anxiety is inability to act, so doomsters are locking us into the very catastrophic trajectory they say is unavoidable.

I remain optimistic about tackling climate change as leading climate scientists such as John Mann say there is still a window of opportunity, and we need to have hope to get us through that window. Climate change deniers want no change to business as usual, and they must find climate doomsters rather useful idiots in helping them achieve that. Doomsters should be careful what they wish for.