One of the main reasons I am not able and will never be able to get on board with the liberal project fully is that an article of faith (and I use “faith” here deliberately) among most of the left is that people should live in immiserated conditions as a punishment for past sins.

I don’t think this is the way the world must work, or even can work, even in the context of attempting to mitigate or adapt to climate change. If I thought it’d even help, I might have some tolerance for this self-flagellation. But alas this idea of redemptive suffering — firmly a Judeo-Christian ideal from those who mostly claim to be agnostics and atheists — has no moral or expiative value of any kind.

It’s a dead end ideologically and pragmatically. Most people who aren’t die-hard liberal flagellants will never get behind such an undertaking, and certainly none of the center or the right will be much swayed by the dream of living in a concrete box and licking algae out of glass containers. It’s not so much a plan as a dream of remission of sin and of ascetic transcendence via self-abnegation, which is needless to say something most people have absolutely no interest in.