Watch your language

I’m a sucker for a good metaphor takedown. You know—when someone points out that a metaphor being used to describe a situation doesn’t actually hold water.
I loved Matt Taibbi’s incandescent rage over Tom Friedman’s persistent metaphor malpractice in 2009. I loved James Fallows’s dogged determination over a series of years to eliminate the “boiled frog” analogy from modern discourse. (His point, simply, is that while people liken passive reactions to slowly worsening situations to a frog sitting in a pot of water whose temperature is increasing, in reality a frog slowly being boiled alive will jump out of the pot, whereas a frog thrown into a pot of already-boiling water will die immediately.)
So I was a happy reader last Friday, seeing this section of Garrett M. Graff’s otherwise grim Politico story on all the things that could go wrong with the November election:
People often deploy the “perfect storm” metaphor incorrectly, using it to describe a surprise collision of events that catches its victims off guard. But that’s not how perfect storms really work: In Sebastian Junger’s book about a deadly Atlantic Ocean gale that popularized the term, the storm was a well-foreseen event, with serious warnings, that people saw coming and chose instead to ignore—until it was too late, and the waves overwhelmed them. That’s how this election is starting to look to experts.

This also, of course, describes the climate crisis pretty well. It’s not that a bunch of events have collided in an unforeseeable and destructive pattern. We—and that includes both fossil fuel companies and policymakers—know what actions we need to take. We’ve received the warnings; we’re mostly not heeding them. The misused “perfect storm” metaphor obscures the role of human choice. But choices have power.

On that note, here are two climate pieces I’d like to draw your attention to. Last week, I promised Apocalypse Soon would have things to say about the wild Ohio bribery case, wherein the state’s Republican house speaker was arrested over a $61 million conspiracy to subsidize coal and nuclear plants while gutting renewable and clean energy programs. The New Republic’s Kate Aronoff has now penned a thoughtful piece about the broader context: a changing energy landscape in which coal companies, increasingly desperate for state assistance, have turned on their former allies, the utility companies.

Eleanor Cummins’s wide-ranging and incisive look at wellness culture is also out today. It’s a deep dive into the way self-care rhetoric encourages people to buy things—an individualistic response to climate anxiety, which in fact urgently needs collective action. I’d be saying it was worth your time even if “rose-quartz neoliberalism,” which she coins in the sixth paragraph, wasn’t my new favorite phrase of 2020.

—Heather Souvaine Horn, deputy editor