I’ve learned to be very suspicious of claims that loudly proclaim themselves to be “pragmatic” or “realistic”. More often than not, those are code words for “we don’t want anything to change so we’ll block all reform, pretending that it’s useless.”

I get that vibe from an initiative by the folks who publish Foreign Affairs magazine, but I’m not entirely sure. It’s called the Climate Realism Initiative and is led by an engineer who has started an AI firm.

Climate Realism is the name of a sophomoric climate-change-denying site from the hard-right Heartland Institute, but I don’t see an obvious connection. Foreign Affairs magazine is a long-running and legitimate source of news and analysis.

The Climate Realism Initiative makes no attempt to downplay the climate emergency. Its main point is belief that humanity will never get its act together enough to change the disastrous trajectory so we might as well accept it and prepare for the worst. Renewables won’t do it, they say; the only possible hope is geoengineering – putting stuff in the atmosphere to block sunlight – and even that is uncertain.

Part of me agrees with this, I must admit. Methane and CO2 emissions are still *rising* for crying out loud while temperature records keep falling, flash flooding and flash droughts keep happening, and global ice cover keeps shrinking. The site is correct that the current approach isn’t working.

But throwing up your hands and saying “devil take the hindmost” doesn’t seem much different than saying “climate change is a hoax” as far as making life better for my grandchildren. It’s might be true that we can’t avoid a semi-apocalypse but dammit, we shouldn’t give up this early.

I may have exaggerated how blinkered the Initiative’s approach is. If you have some spare time, you can check it out.