Perhaps I'm just more sensitive to techno-optimistic silliness as an engineer than you are, but, I see it as actually a small part of the problem that has some policy implications. This is not just his response to Pope Francis, this is his response to everyone who doesn't think there's a market solution for climate change on anything near the time scale required.
To ground this with example, Peterson (who is far worse in this regard, not drawing a direct comparison between them) recently tweeted about a carbon sequestration technology, with some shitty quip somewhere along the lines of what Pinker does here. Meanwhile, anyone with a basic command of arithmetic (and
@Cuauhtemoc certainly qualifies) would notice from the very article that the technology in question is several (like 5 or 6, IIRC) orders of magnitude off. From an economics perspective, it doesn't take into account that carbon is free, at the moment and thus there is no market case for Liberalism^(TM) to go to work. But here's where policy comes in: techno optimism is currently being invoked in Canada currently by the conservative party who now admits that ''something must be done'' about Climate Change. Their solution? If you pollute more than a certain amount (40kT per year CO2 equivalent) then you have to invest in ''green technology research.'' The investment can be in your own company. What a fucking joke. At the moment, a carbon tax, which is just flat out the best economic approach to the problem is being portrayed as drastic, and irrational, and harmful to Canadians etc. what we need is ''Technology, not taxes.'' And Pinker would probably agree. And he's wrong.
