I think this swings a little the other way¹, with things like:

> The Netherlands became rich, not poor while adapting to life below sea level

However, most of what I can see is not rhetoric, which is unusual. I think this is worth a read. It's got stuff like:

> The most important thing for reducing air pollution and carbon emissions is moving from wood to coal to petroleum to natural gas to uranium

> 100 percent renewables would require increasing the land used for energy from today’s 0.5 percent to 50 percent

mixed in with the usual bad arguments, so I expect it to be informative, even if the author's intermediate conclusions are shaky.

¹: By this, I mean "using rhetoric to argue against something" – really, this is swinging the same way, but with a different aim, but… well, that kind of wording gets confusing.

This is a really solid piece; it's unfortunate that it's written in a way that pushes a specific narrative view; and I would be interested in what the writing would have been like on another 'intellectual' site like Nautilus or Aion.

While he doesn't outright say that anthropogenic climate change is a thing, it's there. Hidden behind a paragraph telling you how he was supportive of the Sandinista movement in Nicaragua - which, unfortunately, for a large portion of quillette's audience puts him in the camp of "I was a radical anarcho leftist, I've defected." Hidden in the weeds about how we've taken institutional and systemic steps to reduce emissions. Hidden behind a reasonable common sense path to reduce carbon emissions (wood -> coal -> petrol -> ng -> nuclear).