Climate Change Inaction and Meaning
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
Dear editors,
To be honest: this article should not have been sent out for review. It fails to meet the standards of academic writing.
The article states that its purpose is to give “examples of the consequent contradictions in public discourse and suggests how, in a kind of direct action, they could be challenged to bring about more truthfulness.” That is not a scientific research question or meaningful verifiable hypothesis. Is it possible to find contradictions in public discourse? Of course. But what scientific aim is served by showing the obvious? What is the scope of the article, which specific discourse is investigated? What is the methodology used? How is this article embedded in previous work by other authors? The topic is too broad and consequently the discussion is much too superficial.
The article reads as one long chain of opinions that are insufficiently related to the wide academic literature. There is a wide economic literature on the (im)possibility of green growth, for example. The author spends two paragraphs on the issue without any useful references. Where is a discussion of weak and strong sustainability, and a discussion on substitutability? The author shortly mentions Herman Daly, but how does the article relate to this previous work?
Terms like ‘dishonesty’ and that persisting ‘with a close approximation to business-as-usual, is little short of murder’ can be used in opinion papers in the media, but not in scientific journals. Or write an in-depth academic article about the moral and legal meaning of the word murder and why the acts of an individual government meet those requirements.
Moreover, the paper lacks a logical structure and a clear introduction explaining the setup of the article.
But these are only a few of the reasons why the paper fails to meet the standards of academic writing.
Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: 
Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 2 Report
Dear author(s),
Found your article a joy to read. It flows very well and does a great job in exploring the contradictions in concepts such as green growth, or how we disregard environmental limits, thereby in a sense "burying our heads in the sand". Your section on conformity is equally thought provoking, and how this leads to inability to dissent.
My main comment though would be in the sections dealing with direct action. Essentially, you only discuss this in three short paragraphs in section 13. You provide some examples of what individuals could do, and why they should take direct action, but what is missing is reflection on what will need to change in order for individuals to take direct action. Individuals or organizations will not somehow magically challenge the boundaries of conformity and engage in direct action. In other words, I think the argument will be strengthened if you could reflect on this area as well.
Minor comments:
Heading numbering in section 6 is wrong.
Author Response
Please see attachment.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 3 Report
Comment on “Climate change, Inaction, and meaning”
Let’s imagine someone, let’s call him Sam, running into an ICU during what turns out to be a never-ending pandemic. He screams at the nurses for not prodding their union to hire more nurses, and he swears at the anesthetist for failing to order more ventilators, and he hollers at the little old lady in the hallway for having put her husband in harm’s way by putting him in a nursing home in the first place, and he shrieks at the woman at the front desk for not ensuring that the hospital capacity was sufficient to handle the crisis. After thoroughly insulting everyone, Sam leaves with a self-satisfied grin knowing that, as a result of his tantrum, at least he, unlike those others, has contributed to making the world better.
The present article, like the other articles in this trilogy, is just that, a tantrum. It is a whole lot of screaming, shrieking, and hollering that will have virtually no impact except to expand the self-righteousness of the individual having the hissy fit.
What is needed here is not a tantrum, but specific suggestions. Should we eliminate whole swaths of people so as to curtail the need for continuing economic viability? Should we bomb the lab that has just made a vaccine against malaria—a “cure” that will save approximately ½ million humans every year that otherwise would not have survived? Or why not refuse to give out vaccination for Covid-19 altogether—that would presumably decrease the demand for housing?
The author is not alone in his/her frustration. A government intending to build yet more roads is enough to “gag a magot.” And the never-ending housing shortage to shelter the never-ending increase in human numbers leaves one struck dumb. But venting frustration in a philosophy journal is just that.
We humans have created for ourselves a wicked problem with a gazillion complex interacting parts—as the author him/herself notes. For instance, on lines 239-241, s/he notes that the Scottish government is between a rock and hard place when trying to decide whether to issue a drilling licence for a new deep-water oil field near the Shetland Islands, the oil industry having supported 100,000 jobs and contributed £9bn a year to the Scottish economy—money that is needed to fund education, health care, social services, and potentially public transit that might (ironically) help decrease emissions.
Instead of having a hissy fit, a more nuanced and detailed description of what a no-growth economy would look like is what is needed. Hissy fits, even if they come in threes, seem no more noble or helpful than the hypocritical diatribes that the author criticizes ad nauseum throughout this trilogy.
On line 467, the author quotes Kevin Anderson as saying that we are ‘clever enough to understand the problem [of climate change] but too stupid … to respond’ [96]. This seems to be an appropriate comment on the author’s present undertaking.
SPECIFIC EDITS:
10-comma after conforming
101—coma after “in other words”
355--Many of our various institutions exist to respect evidence yet accept global warming without dissent. This sentence seems at odds with general tenor of the paper. It seems to imply that we should not accept that there is global warming.
400-comma after 2021
513—comma after admission
563 says “W.H. Auden’s epigraph”—it is supposed to say “W.H. Auden’s Epitaph”?
Author Response
Please see attachment.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Round 2
Reviewer 1 Report
My previous comments were not understood and have not led to improvements. So my judgement also remains the same.
Reviewer 2 Report
Dear author,
Thank you for addressing my comments in a satisfactory manner. The point about inevitability that you are now making answers my question. Also, the changes you made in the paragraphs discussing the BBC and IPCC respectively have made them clearer. Again, I will repeat again that I really enjoyed reading your work!
