Long Sigh

I am perhaps unreasonably angry about two Kevin Drum blog posts (first, second). In the first post, he writes:

Let me put this in concrete terms. If you truly believe that climate change will broil the planet in the next 50 years or so, the very least you should do is immediately get rid of your car and adopt a vegan diet. How many of you have done that? How many of you have even considered it? Virtually none of you.

In the second post, he writes:

Climate change isn’t a game, and trying to make people feel bad about living their lives isn’t going to increase support for the kinds of things that really make a difference.

Okay.

Now in fairness to Drum, his consistent position appears to be that no one should feel obliged to change behavior to fight climate change, and no one should support policies such as carbon taxes that might address climate change by altering the behavior of large numbers of people. What is called for is the invention of technologies that will allow us (meaning affluent Americans) to keep our current lifestyles while limiting global temperature increases to manageable levels.

Still, if that's what you believe, I think it really behooves you not to write troll-bait like the passage I quoted from Drum's first post. I suppose his (honest) response would be something like, "For a lot of people, if they don't hate-read me they won't read me at all," but it is really very unhelpful to the underlying substantive argument. (Which, by the way, is stupid as hell.)