I think there should be some eponymous law somewhere that says if you use rape as an analogy, then your argument is almost inevitably flawed. Rape is such a dee

I think there should be some eponymous law somewhere that says if you use rape as an analogy, then your argument is almost inevitably flawed. Rape is such a deeply emotional topic that invoked drives out logical reasoning. If you can't find a less loaded analogy that still works, then it likely implies that your argument is in fact false. A rape analogy is a flashbang grenade thrown to obscure the lack of truth in your argument. A better analogy might be forest fires. What the author is saying is that you can't be against forest fires unless you also never light a candle in your home. Or perhaps that you can't be against pollution if you ever throw something in the trash. I disagree with his implicit presumption that "solving" climate change necessarily involves willfully lowering one's quality of life. Austerity is not a goal, it is possibly a necessary step to fixing the problem. But just martyring yourself will not magically fix climate change. In fact, ideal solutions to climate change do not involve lowering quality of life because that makes them much easier to adopt. When asbestos was discovered to cause cancer, we didn't fix that problem by having every individual tear the insulation out of their homes and make a personal commitment to freeze their ass off every winter. We outlawed it and used our existing large-scale systems like the law to solve what was a large-scale systemic problem. That in turn drove innovation to find better alternatives and here we are all now mostly safe from that problem.