Don’t read "Don't Look Up" too narrowly [Matt Yglesias] [Media Notes 65c]

The film’s creators say it’s a satire about climate change. But what do they know? Yglesias says:

If you insist on listening to the creators and seeing it as about climate, then while you might appreciate a few moments, I think you’ll mostly be annoyed and then start saying “but it’s not even funny” blah blah blah.

But that’s not the only way to read a text.

In policy terms, there’s not some sharp tradeoff between taking steps to minimize the risks of climate catastrophe and taking steps to minimize other kinds of catastrophes, and I don’t love framings that put it that way. But the use of a story about a comet collision as a metaphor for climate change — which I actually think works really well as a direct lesson about the risk of a comet hitting the planet as depicted in the film — struck me as funny. And I really encourage people to watch it with an open mind and see it as part of the cinema of existential risk and not just quibble about climate change.

I agree. It works as a story about a collision with a comet, but it works best if we read it more broadly, much more broadly.

On climate change:

The fundamental problem of climate change is that it involves asking people to make changes now for the sake of preventing harms that occur largely in the future to people living in other countries. It’s a genuine problem from hell, and it’s not actually solved by understanding the science or believing the factual information. This is exactly why ideas like McKay’s Manhattan Project [on carbon capture] are so important. While there is a lot we can do to improve the situation with more aggressive deployment of the technology we have, we also really do need more technological breakthroughs that will make lots of tradeoffs less painful and make progress easier.

Yglesias goes on to talk about the existential risk actually posed by comets, by supervolcanos, and but future pandemics.

Back to the film:

... in this case the message is much bigger than climate change. There is a range of often goofy-sounding threats to humanity that don’t track well onto our partisan cleavages or culture war battles other than that addressing them invariably involves some form of concerted action of the sort that conservatives tend to disparage. And this isn’t a coincidence. If existential threats were materializing all the time, we’d be dead and not streaming satirical films on Netflix. So the threats tend to sound “weird,” and if you talk a lot about them you’ll be “weird.” They don’t fit well into the grooves of ordinary political conflict because ordinary political conflict is about stuff that happens all the time.

So read Ord’s book “The Precipice” and find out all about it. Did you know that the Biological Weapons Convention has just four employees? I do because it’s in the book. Let’s maybe give them six?

For all that, though, I am genuinely shocked that the actual real-world emergence of SARS-Cov-2 has not caused more people to care about pandemic risk. The havoc that this pandemic has wreaked just in terms of economic harm and annoyance has been devastating.

There’s more.