The days when energy companies could flirt with outright climate denial are gone (outside of the US, but the US has always been an outliar). The evidence has piled up, the reputational and access-to-policymaker risks too high.Why run the risks when you can achieve the same results, enact the same predatory delay, by pushing the line of ‘realism’?
you paint yourself an adult, a sensible centrist and your critics as hysterical children. It’s a win-win.
On the question o practical/pragmatic, the best thing I ever read was this-
“… the word praktisch had been a two-syllable club he’d been beaten with by fellow students and teachers and businessmen and clergy all through the nightmare years. “Stop being such a god-damned idealist! Be practical!” “Practical means I know right from wrong but I’m too fucking scared to do what’s right so I commit crimes or permit crimes and I say I’m only being practical. Practical means coward. Practical frequently means stupid. Someone is too goddamn dumb to realize the consequences of what he’s doing and he hides under practical. It also means corrupt: I know what I ought to do but I’m being paid to do something different so I call it practical. Practical is an umbrella for everything lousy people do.”
(Quote from Brendan Phibbs amazing book The Other Side of Time: a Combat Surgeon in World War II Little Brown & Co, New York (1987)
you can read more here…