Matthew Yglesias Is Misleading You About Climate Change

Twitter personality Matthew Yglesias has an opinion on everything: the “good people” of the NYPD, the economics of pre-revolutionary Russia, film criticism, climate change, inflation, who was at fault at Camp David & Taba, the pressing need to invade North Korea. But do any of these opinions hold water? How does a nice boy from the Dalton School in Manhattan – home to co-luminaries such as Jeffrey Epstein – end up filling his head with so much information, yet so little wisdom?

In this video, Alex Sheremet discusses Matthew Yglesias’s views on the Inflation Reduction Act and climate change more broadly. He assesses the misleading rhetoric of Yglesias’s tweets, going back to Yglesias’s earliest writings, and considers what genuine activists think of the Biden administration’s climate change policies. Other topics include: the coming climate refugee crisis, the limits of private school education, fresh attacks on Bernie Sanders.

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Timestamps:

0:00 – introducing Matthew Yglesias; how a media career was handed to Matt; why those who are repeatedly wrong fail upwards; Matt’s misleading tweet on climate change “survivability”; understanding global warming against the near-impossibility of human extinction; the coming climate refugee crisis; how non-linear global warming leads to chaos / unpredictability in climate systems; Matthew Yglesias & rhetorical strategy; what happens at 4 degrees of warming; how private school hyper-education leads to intellectual stasis; Matt Yglesias as neoliberal Ben Shapiro

24:28 – some historical tweets from Yglesias: celebrating George W. Bush’s attempts to gut the Endangered Species Act; a total ignorance of Israel / Palestine & the Camp David/Taba negotiations; Yglesias cheerleading invasions of Iraq & Afghanistan, support for an invasion of North Korea; Matthew eggs on “dirty” anti-war protesters getting their “heads crushed” by the “good people of the NYPD”; do photos of Matthew Yglesias suggest a desire for revenge against childhood bullies; Yglesias as Fyodor Dostoevsky’s mouse of “exaggerated consciousness” until he is totally divorced from reality

53:56 – the Inflation Reduction Act; what we mean by a ‘good’ vs. ‘good enough for…’ climate bill; how Democrats (and the whole world) continue to shift climate goal posts; how phrases like “survivable levels” are simply means of protecting pundits; establishing objective metrics for climate change

01:08:56 – why Food & Water Watch is one of the best climate-related organizations; Food & Water Watch critiques the Inflation Reduction Act as corporate handouts & climate hypocrisy dependent on untested and untestable models; tax credits vs. genuine public investments

01:26:54 – Jordan Weissmann’s article on the Inflation Reduction Act in Slate; strawmen arguments, false pragmatism, & misunderstanding of climate change; how neoliberal climate change policies push a regressive tax on the most vulnerable communities in the world; Matthew Yglesias willfully misunderstands “choice”

01:37:00 – Bernie Sanders gets attacked by child-like Reddit grunts

01:47:20 – subjective experiences of climate change; climate refugees are already here; America lags in climate spending vs. China

Tags: #MatthewYglesias, #climatechange, #InflationReductionAct