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What I don't understand is why this is so controversial. I clicked on a link in the article, leading to this article: https://techcrunch.com/2019/05/06/new-stud

What I don't understand is why this is so controversial. I clicked on a link in the article, leading to this article: https://techcrunch.com/2019/05/06/new-study-shows-human-development-is-destroying-the-planet-at-an-unprecedented-rate/ https://techcrunch.com/2019/05/06/new-study-shows-human-deve.... The comment on it is extremely dismissive about climate change. I see this on pretty much every news website nowadays. First of all I don't see how man-made climate change is even controversial with the amount of evidence we have, but furthermore I don't see why we shouldn't transition to renewable energy asap anyway. Even if climate change would be a hoax (which it is not), then why would it be a bad thing to make changes to prevent it from happening anyway? Why would it be a bad thing to get rid of air pollution? Why would it be a bad thing to switch to an energy source that doesn't run out in ~20 years simply because it isn't renewable?

k_ 7y ago
I'd say because we're in a fucked-up world of short-term profit. I just can't come up with any other reason for such madness.
saagarjha 7y ago
Comments on news articles tend to be very poor indicators of public views.
- dpwm 7y ago
  And are an easy opportunity for lobby groups to get their message across unedited.
- tty2300 7y ago
  Are you sure you aren't just in a bubble? After talking to more people it seems like the general public really is like this.
  - TeMPOraL 7y ago
    I'm increasingly starting to agree. "The genpop can't all possibly think like that" is how you get blindsided by surprising outcomes of elections.
avip 7y ago
Pretty clear case of It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it
ptah 7y ago
many US conservatives have been radicalized by corporate oil lobby propaganda
- lowken10 7y ago
  What planet do you live on? The only radicals I see are on the left. Do you know how many poor people would die if the green new deal was ever implemented? Probably thousands would die and if that isn't radical I don't know what is. And the green new deal with have zero effect on global temperatures.
jeffwass 7y ago
Because powerful parties possess considerable vested interest in the current carbon-consumption status quo. Ironically many of these interests could realise the new opportunities of growth in the energy space instead of focusing on potential impact to current business lines.
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  Think of it like optimization algorithm stuck in a local minimum. There's a deeper valley just over there, but you have to first climb a small hill to get there. The market is pretty much everyone executing an algorithm like this, with the extra tweak that staying too high relative to your friends for too long will kill your business.
  - jeffwass 7y ago
    Exactly. And there’s a path dependence too, first movers to accept the pending disruption can be at a considerable advantage.
lm28469 7y ago
Because it's much easier to deny something that big than to take care of it. We'd need a economic/cultural revolution at a global scale. Everything has to scale down, no more ICE, not more plastic, no more food imported from the other side of the world, reduce meat consumption, reduce traveling &c. The current system is based on unlimited and exponential growth, everything else is considered a failure. An unlimited growth in a finite environment isn't possible, it's called instability. The second problem is that many people convince themselves that "Science" will save us, that we'll terraform Mars or that shifting to electric cars will be enough, but that's too little, too late. Even if we'd hit our ecological goals, and we're not, we'd be far from fixing the problem. We don't need to slow down, we need a complete paradigm shift. It's like when you move form a basic 40sq meter flat to a fancy 250sq meter house, going back is very hard.
- kmlx 7y ago
  > An unlimited growth in a finite environment isn't possible, it's called instability. but our environment is the universe, and the universe is infinite in resources...
  - swarnie_ 7y ago
    > but our environment is the universe, and the universe is infinite in resources... Get a human permanently and self-sufficiently out of LEO and i'll agree a limited part of the solar system is our environment. For the foreseeable future our environment is earth and not a lot else.
    - kmlx 7y ago
      for the foreseeable future we're planning on mining asteroids and the having a base on the moon... so i don't understand your point.
      - lm28469 7y ago
        See that's exactly what I'm talking about. We have a very real thing happening right now on earth with extreme consequences: major species extinction, air pollution, water pollution, soon to be ecological refugees, &c. But the answer is mining asteroid and having a moon base. Why would we care about asteroid gold and the few (<100) people that might go to the moon and live an extremely strenuous life. It's not like we'll all go to the moon, crack open a cold one and watch the moon superbowl.
mehrdadn 7y ago
> What I don't understand is why this is so controversial. Thankfully I hope this will decline. Interesting tidbit I learned today: Mitch McConnell has finally admitted humans are causing climate change. Now the only (herculean) problem is getting him to tackle it properly. https://www.washingtonpost.com/video/politics/mcconnell-says-he-believes-in-human-caused-climate-change/2019/03/26/5450b254-6d6b-499a-865f-b0107fb1c514_video.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/video/politics/mcconnell-says...
- mrguyorama 7y ago
  Much more likely that just leads to him getting voted out by his fanatical base
kmlx 7y ago
personal responsibility? it's much easier to blame someone else for your troubles than admitting that you've voted with your feet for the past decades.
coldtea 7y ago
>Even if climate change would be a hoax (which it is not), then why would it be a bad thing to make changes to prevent it from happening anyway? The concern is not necessarily that it's a hoax, but that hasty data will be used to push for specific policies, benefiting some, making money for others, and so on. It's also very easy to turn into some semi-fascist "state of emergency" governance, if you have something all-encompassing as the climate to base your legitimacy on. Of course it would be a good thing to get rid of air pollution, replace energy sources to cleaner ones, and even more so, cut down on consumerism and industrial production of all kinds of crap (that's the hardest part, and one that every corporate interest will be against, but without "reduce", alternative energy and recycle are just environment theater).
ars 7y ago
> What I don't understand is why this is so controversial The amount of CO2 is not controversial. What's controversial is what we should change. There are tons of people who fully believe in climate change but vehemently disagree on what we should do about it. There are also those who don't think it's a reason to worry so much or panic. All of those people get reworked by the controversy hungry Media and converted into climate change deniers, and the result is the political world we live in right now. If we could disentangle all those things it would help a lot. But instead we get believers and deniers, i.e. basically religion. There are also those who believe that exaggerating the problem is the best way to get people to do something. In my opinion that has backfired majorly.
crispinb 7y ago
What I don't understand is why this is so controversial. Meticulously planned political & media interference campaigns run by fossil fuel companies and related think tanks. They understood the implications of climate change by the late 1970's and knew the writing was on the wall. They executed plans to delay political action for as long as possible in exactly the same way corporations had done with regard to tobacco regulation since the 1950s. These conspiracies against science and the public interest were remarkably successful. In some cases (eg. Heartland Institute) the very same organisations were involved in both campaigns.
- piokoch 7y ago
  But why Greenpeace and majority of other environmentalists where so strongly against nuclear energy? Were they the part of this conspiracy? It would be good to know, as all those eco organizations are still functioning and likely they are still governed by the people who were involved in this conspiracy?
  - kaybe 7y ago
    I think they were blindsided by how huge of an issue climate change has become. If we had started decades earlier (and the knowledge was there), it might still have been a somewhat comfortable path, even without nuclear. And nuclear does have its problems. I used to be against it, but right now the risk and problems are just not an issue compared to the consequences of carbon emissions.
  - mrguyorama 7y ago
    I view Greenpeace on the same level as PETA, a front for power hungry people to do whatever they want and have fanatical followers. I do not believe they are trying to genuinely push for a better world
icebraining 7y ago
I'm no expert on climate-change denial, but the general idea I gathered is that they consider "green energy" one or more of: - an expensive solution to a non-existing problem, for the profit of a few - a plot to undermine Western countries (or the US in particular), reducing its competitiveness - a geopolitical attack on oil-producing countries
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  I don't feel green energy is the main issue here. Regular people I know or see around me all seem to think that "green is cool, if they build it and it works that's nice", but that's about the extent of their opinion. The main contention points with individuals seem to be about changes necessary. For instance, I've been criticized and called names (usually related to communism) by people just for mentioning that maybe taxing carbon emissions isn't a bad idea at this point. There are few things that get people so angry so fast than suggestion that gasoline should cost more, and that maybe we should drive less, so that half of this gasoline isn't burned down in traffic jams.
y0ghur7_xxx 7y ago
> I don't see why we shouldn't transition to renewable energy asap anyway I am no expert, and I think neither are you, so we are just making some small talk here, but: I think we don't have the tech to go all in on renewable. Solar is cool and all, but where do we store the energy? Batteries don't scale at a global level (for now). I mean look at Germany: they tried. They got off nuclear and now they emit more CO2 than when they started because they had to revert back to coal. I see no easy solution to this. Not for now. And for sure it's not something like "let's just switch to wind and solar and we are good".
- _ph_ 7y ago
  You are wrong. The carbon emissions of electricity production in Germany are in a constant decline. Germany never had a large amount of nuclear energy in the mix, so we are not "reverting to coal", we unfortunately keep our coal plants running at full steam (literally). But this also was large part to some economics of the market. Still, the CO2 emissions of the electricity production are going down, last year, we had about as much reneweables in the mix as coal, this year the reneweables should be larger than coal. There is enough data showing, that about 80% reneweables in the mix are possible without larger storage facilites, if the gaps are covered by gas power plants which can change their output power quick enough to react on the demand. Neither coal nor nuclear can do this. That Germany is missing its emission targets has two reasons. One is, that coal is not ramped down aggressively enough, which has mostly economical reasons, coal is to profitable for the power companies, but recent forced closures of some coal plants shifted a bit here. And the other elephant in the room is the raising fuel consumption for transportation. Going electric for cars would have a large impact there.
  - macspoofing 7y ago
    You're importing coal-based power from your neighbors. That's what you did to replace your nuclear energy generation. Let me ask you this, if solar is capable of replacing fossil fuels, why did Germany sign a multi-decade/mult-billion-euro deal to buy Russian gas?
    - 7y ago
jonasvp 7y ago
You're making a big assumption that simply doesn't hold: it's not a matter of "let's switch to renewables and keep everything else the same". Fossil fues have an energy density that's unparalleled anywhere else in nature and most renewables are simply riding off of that (the machines, factories, trucks and ships producing and transporting wind towers and solar cells are not and won't be running on electricity). Read up on EROEI (energy returned on energy invested) if you're interested in the topic. I just read a calculation how automatic milking machines will turn a tidy profit on milk into a loss with energy costs per kwh just 10 cents higher. Milking by hand will be _more_ profitable with that small a difference. So it's controversial because doing something about climate change involves massive changes to our way of life. Not simply switching your SUV for a Tesla, we're talking up to and including economic collapse and deindustrialization.
- icebraining 7y ago
  Machine and factories producing solar cells don't run on electricity? What do they run on?
  - jonasvp 7y ago
    Diesel, fuel oil and coal. Admittedly, the latter mostly goes through a power plant to turn into electricity first - with the concomitant losses on the way.
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  Retooling would be a better word. Saul Griffit (via Bret Victor[0]), calls switching to clean energy "more like retooling for World War II, except with everyone playing on the same team". The scale of expenditure and impact on the economy seems appropriate. -- [0] - http://worrydream.com/ClimateChange/ http://worrydream.com/ClimateChange/
  - jonasvp 7y ago
    Not to forget that WWII was a war won by oil. Whoever was able to mobilize the most energy (in the form of oil) could win (a great book about that: Oil, Power and War[0]). Retooling in the face of declining energy availability will be a different matter. [0]: https://www.chelseagreen.com/product/oil-power-and-war/ https://www.chelseagreen.com/product/oil-power-and-war/
Torwald 7y ago
> First of all I don't see how man-made climate change is even controversial with the amount of evidence we have This is a strong assumption. How can we have evidence for that? We do not understand climate enough to make such an assertion. This is the answer to your question. Enough people see that strong assertions for man-made climate change are not necessarily backed up. Hence the controversy. > but furthermore I don't see why we shouldn't transition to renewable energy asap anyway Because that comes with it's own problems? For instance, around here there are a lot of wind wheels, these machines create problems. It's not just "energy for free". For example one problem is they kill a massive amount of insects. There are also people advocating for nuclear energy, improved ways of providing nuclear energy. Maybe they are right? > Even if climate change would be a hoax (which it is not), then why would it be a bad thing to make changes to prevent it from happening anyway? This is a good question I asked myself many times as well. I don't know. One part of the answer could be priorities. We can't do everything at once. SO what comes first?
- crooked-v 7y ago
  > How can we have evidence for that? https://xkcd.com/1732/ https://xkcd.com/1732/
  - ckuehne 7y ago
    Note that the chart in the linked comic begins in the middle of the last ice age. It ends one or two degree celsius above the mean temperature of the previous 500 years (or so). The big hockey stick at the end is a prediction! At the point in the chart at about 16000 BCE it states that the short warming or cooling spikes have probably been smoothed out (after all, those ancient temperatures are only available by proxy).
oceanplexian 7y ago
I don’t necessarily agree with that person, but he didn’t deny climate change, only that humans are at the cause, and, in a not so delicate way suggested that climate change studies may not be accurate and may be colored by politics. What if (Man Made) climate change was simply a set of natural processes and feedback loops? Wouldn’t alternative energy be better? Absolutely. It’s quieter, more efficient, and cleaner, especially nuclear energy. But a lot of the malthusian politics and negativity would have to go. Perhaps you could have a bigger house and not feel guilty about it? Maybe you won’t shame a neighbor for having another kid? Perhaps millions of people in the developing world can live a better life without being told they should stop to save the planet.
macspoofing 7y ago
> I don't see why we shouldn't transition to renewable energy asap anyway. Because solar and wind (+ battery) cannot replace coal and gas.
perfunctory 7y ago
It's very simple - powerful vested interest. See #ExxonKnew. The question is, once we know it, what are we gonna do about it?
gameswithgo 7y ago
co2 and air pollution are not the same thing (if global warming weren't real). While it is fairly viable economically to scrub mercury emissions out of a coal plant, or carbon monoxide out of a car,it is effectively impossible to scrub co2. So people in the industry that depends on fossil fuels know this, they know the only answer to getting co2 out of the atmosphere is to not use fossil fuels at all, which is an extremely hard/expensive thing to do. Moonshot level project, globally. Some just worry about their own riches, others rightly worry it would cause global disaster (it could if we did it wrong!)
dakna 7y ago
I don't understand it either, so I had to come up with an explanation for myself. I think it is controversial because the cost of this transition is not priced into the modern human lifestyle. So either the lifestyle changes or it gets a lot more expensive. And it challenges the business model of fossil fuel companies and the global power balance of oil producing countries. It can't get much more disruptive than this transition. You are thinking in terms of what is good for human society. But the world is run by capital, and now that mass disinformation is relatively cheap to accomplish, it is even easier do discredit science if you have a descent amount of money to spend.
taf2 7y ago
It’s about money. The oil industry learned a lot from the tobacco industry
krageon 7y ago
There will always be people that claim something in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. It's not a rational position, so it quickly becomes very complicated to figure out why someone would keep holding on to it. It can be (and frequently is) different for each person that holds an identical position so it is also not a super useful thing to figure out. Unless you are trying to unpack why a loved one holds an irrational position, of course. But the venue for that is maybe not HN :)
throwawaymanbot 7y ago
You are missing out that certain people are paying to manufacture anti-renewable fervor! -- There's literally no logical reason for not progressing technology wise.. but Big Oil think differently.
bufferoverflow 7y ago
> First of all I don't see how man-made climate change is even controversial with the amount of evidence we have It's because it's very hard to prove causation. We have lots of evidence of correlation, and the scientific consensus, but that's not 100% proof to many people.
lazyjones 7y ago
> What I don't understand is why this is so controversial. Our attention is a finite resource too. When some issue is in the news daily and obsessed about by a whole bunch of interest groups, from European-style liberals who have new taxes in mind (Macron) to the radical left who want us to live a frugal, Eastern-Bloc lifestyle, while we all see no real effects by this CO2 monster on our daily lives, it's bound to meet some resistance. > I don't see why we shouldn't transition to renewable energy asap anyway. Germany is transitioning to renewables quickly and has put a huge burden on households with high electricity prices (€0.30 per KWh average, even affecting EV adoption after some sensationalist "EV more expensive than Diesel fuel" themed articles) while the industry gets it cheap. Is this reasonable? > Why would it be a bad thing to get rid of air pollution? This is a great idea, but it has nothing to do with CO2 (= not air pollution in the usual sense, we all exhale it). I wish we could invest 1/10 of the efforts currently underway against CO2 in just getting rid of pollution in cities - from heating (with "renewable" wood), cars, industry, ships, airplanes (where's the CO2 tax and why do these things happen? https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6993173/Actress-Emma-Thompson-spotted-carbon-spewing-BA-plane-jetting-New-York.html https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6993173/Actress-Emm...).
rossenberg79 7y ago
Because if you live in the first world, like most of these companies, you will feel the effects of climate change the least. Climate change is a bigger problem for developing nations with birth rates way too high and limited resources.
patricius 7y ago
It is much more about economic reality than ambition. Replacing fossil fuel energy sources with renewable energy sources is an expensive process. Some argue that it is the responsibility of the nations of this world to make sure it's implemented, i.e., the governments, but it's difficult to see how this can be done efficiently through either a democratic or undemocratic process. Getting the state to produce anything puts you at risk of ending up with the Trabant version of whatever product or service we're talking about. Furthermore, it's difficult to foresee which problems will arise from replacing fossil fuel energy with renewables like wind or solar.
- andygates 7y ago
  Capex on new solar is cheaper than opex on old coal. It's not an expensive process, not any more. Objections that it is are just out of date - fairly common for objections to tech.
  - patricius 7y ago
    According to someone, sure. But it is an expression of human arrogance to think that climate change can be fought just by following this here recipe and that we can look into the future and see that there will be a net benefit to changing to this or that energy source.
    - crooked-v 7y ago
      > But it is an expression of human arrogance to think that climate change can be fought just by following this here recipe The causes of anthropogenic climate change are extremely well documented and easily measureable, and "reduce the amount of carbon put into the air and recapture carbon already in the air if possible" isn't very complicated, just expensive.
      - patricius 7y ago
        > The causes of anthropogenic climate change are extremely well documented and easily measureable, and "reduce the amount of carbon put into the air and recapture carbon already in the air if possible" isn't very complicated, just expensive. An honest question: If I were to go about convincing myself of anthropogenic climate change and possibly that these changes would lead to a horrible future for humankind, where should I look? What should I read? Which videos to watch? The mainstream media portrays the science as settled, i.e., anthropogenic climate change is real and horrible consequences will follow, even though it isn't difficult to find disagreeing opinions - both from people on the fringes and from Nobel-winning scientists. I hear convincing arguments from both sides. I should mention that I am extremely sceptical of anything the state does, so I am biased against any solution involving the state. I fear that the fight against anthropogenic climate change is just another tool to increase state power, like the war on drugs or the war on poverty.
AnaniasAnanas 7y ago
> I don't see why we shouldn't transition to renewable energy asap anyway Most of the arguments that I see concern the low effectiveness of renewable energy sources and the pollution caused by the batteries (either during their creation or when trying to get rid of them). What I do not see is why we should not transition to modern thorium-based nuclear power plants.
lowken10 7y ago
It's so funny because that comment on TechCrunch.com is true. You think you are correct because enough people have told you how to think. When you actually look at the science. When you examine the data and ask critical question the theory of man made global warming falls apart. Do global temperatures change over time? Of course. There have been five ice ages in the history of the earth. Did you know that we are currently in an ice age? In fact we are in an interglacial period that began about 11,000 years ago. So what drives global temperatures? Is it CO2? Let's look at the history of this planet to answer this question. Can we do that? It turns out we can do that... We can use ice core data (and to a lesser extent tree rings) to look back thousands of years of global temperatures. We also have co2 levels from air bubbles captured in the ice cores. So is there a relationship between co2 and global temperatures? There is. But... the relationship is the opposite of what Global Warming alarmists what you to believe. Global temperatures drive co2 levels. This means that when global temperatures rise co2 levels rise hundreds or thousands of years later. And when global temperatures fall co2 levels fall hundreds or thousands of years later. This is a fundamental fact that any honest scientist will not dispute. And this fact throws the entire theory of mand made global warming into the trash can. By the way what does drive global temperatures? Look up in the sky and you see this big ball of burning gas. That is the entity that drives global temperatures and not trace amounts (co2 is 0.04 percent of earths atmosphere).
RcouF1uZ4gsC 7y ago
>Even if climate change would be a hoax (which it is not), then why would it be a bad thing to make changes to prevent it from happening anyway? Why would it be a bad thing to get rid of air pollution? Why would it be a bad thing to switch to an energy source that doesn't run out in ~20 years simply because it isn't renewable? If we look at carbon footprint, single use paper bags have the lowest footprint. https://stanfordmag.org/contents/paper-plastic-or-reusable https://stanfordmag.org/contents/paper-plastic-or-reusable So if we prioritized limiting carbon footprint, we would encourage single use plastic bags. However, we are not, we are discouraging them. If environmentalists had signed on to encourage carbon free energy, they would have pushed for reducing the roadblocks to nuclear power even at the cost of making them more unsafe. That is not what happened. Instead, environmental groups were one of the biggest opponents to nuclear power. If you really believe climate change is the biggest problem facing humans, you will need to do things and encourage things that may be dangerous or harmful but that can help slow down climate change.
ikeboy 7y ago
>Even if climate change would be a hoax (which it is not), then why would it be a bad thing to make changes to prevent it from happening anyway? Because those come at significant cost, and if there's nothing to worry about then why spend tens of trillions of dollars to stop it? I mean you might as well use Pascal's wager to argue for religion if you're only looking at potential benefits and ignoring costs.
- rezeroed 7y ago
  But renewables are more decentralised. I can't stick a coal plant on my roof. Decentralisation means less corrupt monopoly, less need to regulate.
  - ikeboy 7y ago
    Are you trying to make an argument that regulations on carbon would pay for themselves due to decentralization? I don't think economists would agree with that.
    - rezeroed 7y ago
      No.
  - deadmik3 7y ago
    Yeah sunlight and air are more decentralized but how many companies make solar panels and windmills?
    - rezeroed 7y ago
      Countless?
- thebokehwokeh2 7y ago
  > if there's nothing to worry about then why spend tens of trillions of dollars to stop it? Extremely shortsighted thinking. If we're talking about cost, this should be the argument: tens of trillions < the future of humanity.
simonebrunozzi 7y ago
Not to disagree, but CO2 levels are not just about energy; they are also about food - livestock, in particular. Furthermore, CO2 levels are one aspect of a larger problem, "pollution", and I'm not entirely convinced it's necessarily the worst part of it.
pdonis 7y ago
> I don't see how man-made climate change is even controversial What's controversial (at least, if we're talking reasonable discussion) is not that climate change is happening, nor that human activities cause at least a good portion of it, but whether we understand all the factors involved well enough to predict with high confidence that spending trillions of dollars on drastic measures to reduce or eliminate CO2 emissions will stop it from happening. If we don't have high confidence that spending the trillions of dollars will do that (and I don't, nor do I see how anyone could given that climate models are overpredicting warming and our ability to predict economic consequences is even worse than our ability to predict future climate), then we shouldn't be spending the trillions of dollars--or at least, not on measures aimed directly at drastically reducing or eliminating CO2 emissions. That's not to say, however, that there aren't other things we could be doing, that might help with climate change as a side effect. One is switching to non-fossil-fuel energy sources (see below). Another is making our infrastructure more robust, which helps civilization to withstand change in general. Still another is bringing more people out of poverty, since the richer people are, the more easily they can adapt to change. > I don't see why we shouldn't transition to renewable energy asap anyway A better term than "renewable" would be "non-fossil-fuel", since that would include nuclear (which is not considered "renewable" by most definitions). I agree that switching to non-fossil-fuel energy is something we should be doing anyway, both for scarcity reasons and for national security reasons: much of the money we spend on foreign oil ends up funding terrorism. I wish more people would realize that we don't need to agree on climate change alarmism in order to work on switching energy sources.
epistasis 7y ago
There's been a very well coordinated propaganda campaign around climate change denial. This campaign improved upon the tactics that tobacco industry lobbyists used to deny the connection between smoking and cancer. In particular, by tying climate change denial to political identity, and casting climate research as immoral for its lying, it created a passionate base of climate change denalists to call into every radio show, to swarm message boards, and to harass those who speak publicly about climate change. If you can listen to podcasts, the best summary of this is from the Drilled podcast, in my opinion: https://www.criticalfrequency.org/drilled https://www.criticalfrequency.org/drilled
war1025 7y ago
A major part of it is just branding. The left gains a strategic advantage by making the right look bad when it comes to climate / environment / etc. For that reason, things are purposefully not phrased in ways that would appeal to people on the right. And even when the motivation is not so sinister as that, people who care about the topic have a particular world view, and they don't spend the time to figure out how their world-view differs from those who aren't as concerned. What motivates one group is not one motivates another. If climate activists are serious about fixing the problem, then they need to abandon the branding aspect and find language that appeals to those not in their target market. Otherwise it's all just a lot of value-signalling.
- epistasis 7y ago
  That's a very odd spin on this, the "left trying to make the right look bad" comes from decades of concerted efforts from climate change denalists courting Republican and right media, and the media gobbling it up. Claiming that environmentalists aren't phrasing things correctly for the right to care about the environment is pretty much the definition of tone policing. Republicans could easily take up the fight against climate change on their own terms, but the very very few Republicans that have tried have been shunned by the rest of the party.
  - war1025 7y ago
    And if you are truly convinced that it is a life-or-death problem, then you need to be pushing up against that over and over, working to get buy-in. "Well, we tried." is not good enough. And if it is, then there isn't really a problem to begin with.
    - epistasis 7y ago
      Really weird framing to say that the people that are factually correct have an obligation to argue others out of their self imposed lies and self deception. Rather, let's blame the true villain here, the political ideology that places itself as more important than truth or science, the political ideology that says "if I'm wrong and you can't convince me with science then it's your fault for not trying hard enough." What sort of epistemically closure is acceptable?
RyanAF7 7y ago
For me, it's not that heterogenic climate change isn't possible or likely, it's the predictions of what it means that are in question. CO2 is not a pollutant, and no one knows what will happen with increasing levels.

k_ 7y ago

I'd say because we're in a fucked-up world of short-term profit. I just can't come up with any other reason for such madness.

saagarjha 7y ago

Comments on news articles tend to be very poor indicators of public views.

dpwm 7y ago
And are an easy opportunity for lobby groups to get their message across unedited.
tty2300 7y ago
Are you sure you aren't just in a bubble? After talking to more people it seems like the general public really is like this.
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  I'm increasingly starting to agree. "The genpop can't all possibly think like that" is how you get blindsided by surprising outcomes of elections.

avip 7y ago

Pretty clear case of It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it

ptah 7y ago

many US conservatives have been radicalized by corporate oil lobby propaganda

lowken10 7y ago
What planet do you live on? The only radicals I see are on the left. Do you know how many poor people would die if the green new deal was ever implemented? Probably thousands would die and if that isn't radical I don't know what is. And the green new deal with have zero effect on global temperatures.

jeffwass 7y ago

Because powerful parties possess considerable vested interest in the current carbon-consumption status quo. Ironically many of these interests could realise the new opportunities of growth in the energy space instead of focusing on potential impact to current business lines.

TeMPOraL 7y ago
Think of it like optimization algorithm stuck in a local minimum. There's a deeper valley just over there, but you have to first climb a small hill to get there. The market is pretty much everyone executing an algorithm like this, with the extra tweak that staying too high relative to your friends for too long will kill your business.
- jeffwass 7y ago
  Exactly. And there’s a path dependence too, first movers to accept the pending disruption can be at a considerable advantage.

lm28469 7y ago

Because it's much easier to deny something that big than to take care of it. We'd need a economic/cultural revolution at a global scale. Everything has to scale down, no more ICE, not more plastic, no more food imported from the other side of the world, reduce meat consumption, reduce traveling &c. The current system is based on unlimited and exponential growth, everything else is considered a failure. An unlimited growth in a finite environment isn't possible, it's called instability. The second problem is that many people convince themselves that "Science" will save us, that we'll terraform Mars or that shifting to electric cars will be enough, but that's too little, too late. Even if we'd hit our ecological goals, and we're not, we'd be far from fixing the problem. We don't need to slow down, we need a complete paradigm shift. It's like when you move form a basic 40sq meter flat to a fancy 250sq meter house, going back is very hard.

kmlx 7y ago
> An unlimited growth in a finite environment isn't possible, it's called instability. but our environment is the universe, and the universe is infinite in resources...
- swarnie_ 7y ago
  > but our environment is the universe, and the universe is infinite in resources... Get a human permanently and self-sufficiently out of LEO and i'll agree a limited part of the solar system is our environment. For the foreseeable future our environment is earth and not a lot else.
  - kmlx 7y ago
    for the foreseeable future we're planning on mining asteroids and the having a base on the moon... so i don't understand your point.
    - lm28469 7y ago
      See that's exactly what I'm talking about. We have a very real thing happening right now on earth with extreme consequences: major species extinction, air pollution, water pollution, soon to be ecological refugees, &c. But the answer is mining asteroid and having a moon base. Why would we care about asteroid gold and the few (<100) people that might go to the moon and live an extremely strenuous life. It's not like we'll all go to the moon, crack open a cold one and watch the moon superbowl.

mehrdadn 7y ago

> What I don't understand is why this is so controversial. Thankfully I hope this will decline. Interesting tidbit I learned today: Mitch McConnell has finally admitted humans are causing climate change. Now the only (herculean) problem is getting him to tackle it properly. https://www.washingtonpost.com/video/politics/mcconnell-says-he-believes-in-human-caused-climate-change/2019/03/26/5450b254-6d6b-499a-865f-b0107fb1c514_video.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/video/politics/mcconnell-says...

mrguyorama 7y ago
Much more likely that just leads to him getting voted out by his fanatical base

kmlx 7y ago

personal responsibility? it's much easier to blame someone else for your troubles than admitting that you've voted with your feet for the past decades.

coldtea 7y ago

>Even if climate change would be a hoax (which it is not), then why would it be a bad thing to make changes to prevent it from happening anyway? The concern is not necessarily that it's a hoax, but that hasty data will be used to push for specific policies, benefiting some, making money for others, and so on. It's also very easy to turn into some semi-fascist "state of emergency" governance, if you have something all-encompassing as the climate to base your legitimacy on. Of course it would be a good thing to get rid of air pollution, replace energy sources to cleaner ones, and even more so, cut down on consumerism and industrial production of all kinds of crap (that's the hardest part, and one that every corporate interest will be against, but without "reduce", alternative energy and recycle are just environment theater).

ars 7y ago

> What I don't understand is why this is so controversial The amount of CO2 is not controversial. What's controversial is what we should change. There are tons of people who fully believe in climate change but vehemently disagree on what we should do about it. There are also those who don't think it's a reason to worry so much or panic. All of those people get reworked by the controversy hungry Media and converted into climate change deniers, and the result is the political world we live in right now. If we could disentangle all those things it would help a lot. But instead we get believers and deniers, i.e. basically religion. There are also those who believe that exaggerating the problem is the best way to get people to do something. In my opinion that has backfired majorly.

crispinb 7y ago

What I don't understand is why this is so controversial. Meticulously planned political & media interference campaigns run by fossil fuel companies and related think tanks. They understood the implications of climate change by the late 1970's and knew the writing was on the wall. They executed plans to delay political action for as long as possible in exactly the same way corporations had done with regard to tobacco regulation since the 1950s. These conspiracies against science and the public interest were remarkably successful. In some cases (eg. Heartland Institute) the very same organisations were involved in both campaigns.

piokoch 7y ago
But why Greenpeace and majority of other environmentalists where so strongly against nuclear energy? Were they the part of this conspiracy? It would be good to know, as all those eco organizations are still functioning and likely they are still governed by the people who were involved in this conspiracy?
- kaybe 7y ago
  I think they were blindsided by how huge of an issue climate change has become. If we had started decades earlier (and the knowledge was there), it might still have been a somewhat comfortable path, even without nuclear. And nuclear does have its problems. I used to be against it, but right now the risk and problems are just not an issue compared to the consequences of carbon emissions.
- mrguyorama 7y ago
  I view Greenpeace on the same level as PETA, a front for power hungry people to do whatever they want and have fanatical followers. I do not believe they are trying to genuinely push for a better world

icebraining 7y ago

I'm no expert on climate-change denial, but the general idea I gathered is that they consider "green energy" one or more of: - an expensive solution to a non-existing problem, for the profit of a few - a plot to undermine Western countries (or the US in particular), reducing its competitiveness - a geopolitical attack on oil-producing countries

TeMPOraL 7y ago
I don't feel green energy is the main issue here. Regular people I know or see around me all seem to think that "green is cool, if they build it and it works that's nice", but that's about the extent of their opinion. The main contention points with individuals seem to be about changes necessary. For instance, I've been criticized and called names (usually related to communism) by people just for mentioning that maybe taxing carbon emissions isn't a bad idea at this point. There are few things that get people so angry so fast than suggestion that gasoline should cost more, and that maybe we should drive less, so that half of this gasoline isn't burned down in traffic jams.

y0ghur7_xxx 7y ago

> I don't see why we shouldn't transition to renewable energy asap anyway I am no expert, and I think neither are you, so we are just making some small talk here, but: I think we don't have the tech to go all in on renewable. Solar is cool and all, but where do we store the energy? Batteries don't scale at a global level (for now). I mean look at Germany: they tried. They got off nuclear and now they emit more CO2 than when they started because they had to revert back to coal. I see no easy solution to this. Not for now. And for sure it's not something like "let's just switch to wind and solar and we are good".

_ph_ 7y ago
You are wrong. The carbon emissions of electricity production in Germany are in a constant decline. Germany never had a large amount of nuclear energy in the mix, so we are not "reverting to coal", we unfortunately keep our coal plants running at full steam (literally). But this also was large part to some economics of the market. Still, the CO2 emissions of the electricity production are going down, last year, we had about as much reneweables in the mix as coal, this year the reneweables should be larger than coal. There is enough data showing, that about 80% reneweables in the mix are possible without larger storage facilites, if the gaps are covered by gas power plants which can change their output power quick enough to react on the demand. Neither coal nor nuclear can do this. That Germany is missing its emission targets has two reasons. One is, that coal is not ramped down aggressively enough, which has mostly economical reasons, coal is to profitable for the power companies, but recent forced closures of some coal plants shifted a bit here. And the other elephant in the room is the raising fuel consumption for transportation. Going electric for cars would have a large impact there.
- macspoofing 7y ago
  You're importing coal-based power from your neighbors. That's what you did to replace your nuclear energy generation. Let me ask you this, if solar is capable of replacing fossil fuels, why did Germany sign a multi-decade/mult-billion-euro deal to buy Russian gas?
  - 7y ago

jonasvp 7y ago

You're making a big assumption that simply doesn't hold: it's not a matter of "let's switch to renewables and keep everything else the same". Fossil fues have an energy density that's unparalleled anywhere else in nature and most renewables are simply riding off of that (the machines, factories, trucks and ships producing and transporting wind towers and solar cells are not and won't be running on electricity). Read up on EROEI (energy returned on energy invested) if you're interested in the topic. I just read a calculation how automatic milking machines will turn a tidy profit on milk into a loss with energy costs per kwh just 10 cents higher. Milking by hand will be _more_ profitable with that small a difference. So it's controversial because doing something about climate change involves massive changes to our way of life. Not simply switching your SUV for a Tesla, we're talking up to and including economic collapse and deindustrialization.

icebraining 7y ago
Machine and factories producing solar cells don't run on electricity? What do they run on?
- jonasvp 7y ago
  Diesel, fuel oil and coal. Admittedly, the latter mostly goes through a power plant to turn into electricity first - with the concomitant losses on the way.
TeMPOraL 7y ago
Retooling would be a better word. Saul Griffit (via Bret Victor[0]), calls switching to clean energy "more like retooling for World War II, except with everyone playing on the same team". The scale of expenditure and impact on the economy seems appropriate. -- [0] - http://worrydream.com/ClimateChange/ http://worrydream.com/ClimateChange/
- jonasvp 7y ago
  Not to forget that WWII was a war won by oil. Whoever was able to mobilize the most energy (in the form of oil) could win (a great book about that: Oil, Power and War[0]). Retooling in the face of declining energy availability will be a different matter. [0]: https://www.chelseagreen.com/product/oil-power-and-war/ https://www.chelseagreen.com/product/oil-power-and-war/

Torwald 7y ago

> First of all I don't see how man-made climate change is even controversial with the amount of evidence we have This is a strong assumption. How can we have evidence for that? We do not understand climate enough to make such an assertion. This is the answer to your question. Enough people see that strong assertions for man-made climate change are not necessarily backed up. Hence the controversy. > but furthermore I don't see why we shouldn't transition to renewable energy asap anyway Because that comes with it's own problems? For instance, around here there are a lot of wind wheels, these machines create problems. It's not just "energy for free". For example one problem is they kill a massive amount of insects. There are also people advocating for nuclear energy, improved ways of providing nuclear energy. Maybe they are right? > Even if climate change would be a hoax (which it is not), then why would it be a bad thing to make changes to prevent it from happening anyway? This is a good question I asked myself many times as well. I don't know. One part of the answer could be priorities. We can't do everything at once. SO what comes first?

crooked-v 7y ago
> How can we have evidence for that? https://xkcd.com/1732/ https://xkcd.com/1732/
- ckuehne 7y ago
  Note that the chart in the linked comic begins in the middle of the last ice age. It ends one or two degree celsius above the mean temperature of the previous 500 years (or so). The big hockey stick at the end is a prediction! At the point in the chart at about 16000 BCE it states that the short warming or cooling spikes have probably been smoothed out (after all, those ancient temperatures are only available by proxy).

oceanplexian 7y ago

I don’t necessarily agree with that person, but he didn’t deny climate change, only that humans are at the cause, and, in a not so delicate way suggested that climate change studies may not be accurate and may be colored by politics. What if (Man Made) climate change was simply a set of natural processes and feedback loops? Wouldn’t alternative energy be better? Absolutely. It’s quieter, more efficient, and cleaner, especially nuclear energy. But a lot of the malthusian politics and negativity would have to go. Perhaps you could have a bigger house and not feel guilty about it? Maybe you won’t shame a neighbor for having another kid? Perhaps millions of people in the developing world can live a better life without being told they should stop to save the planet.

macspoofing 7y ago

> I don't see why we shouldn't transition to renewable energy asap anyway. Because solar and wind (+ battery) cannot replace coal and gas.

perfunctory 7y ago

It's very simple - powerful vested interest. See #ExxonKnew. The question is, once we know it, what are we gonna do about it?

gameswithgo 7y ago

co2 and air pollution are not the same thing (if global warming weren't real). While it is fairly viable economically to scrub mercury emissions out of a coal plant, or carbon monoxide out of a car,it is effectively impossible to scrub co2. So people in the industry that depends on fossil fuels know this, they know the only answer to getting co2 out of the atmosphere is to not use fossil fuels at all, which is an extremely hard/expensive thing to do. Moonshot level project, globally. Some just worry about their own riches, others rightly worry it would cause global disaster (it could if we did it wrong!)

dakna 7y ago

I don't understand it either, so I had to come up with an explanation for myself. I think it is controversial because the cost of this transition is not priced into the modern human lifestyle. So either the lifestyle changes or it gets a lot more expensive. And it challenges the business model of fossil fuel companies and the global power balance of oil producing countries. It can't get much more disruptive than this transition. You are thinking in terms of what is good for human society. But the world is run by capital, and now that mass disinformation is relatively cheap to accomplish, it is even easier do discredit science if you have a descent amount of money to spend.

taf2 7y ago

It’s about money. The oil industry learned a lot from the tobacco industry

krageon 7y ago

There will always be people that claim something in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. It's not a rational position, so it quickly becomes very complicated to figure out why someone would keep holding on to it. It can be (and frequently is) different for each person that holds an identical position so it is also not a super useful thing to figure out. Unless you are trying to unpack why a loved one holds an irrational position, of course. But the venue for that is maybe not HN :)

throwawaymanbot 7y ago

You are missing out that certain people are paying to manufacture anti-renewable fervor! -- There's literally no logical reason for not progressing technology wise.. but Big Oil think differently.

bufferoverflow 7y ago

> First of all I don't see how man-made climate change is even controversial with the amount of evidence we have It's because it's very hard to prove causation. We have lots of evidence of correlation, and the scientific consensus, but that's not 100% proof to many people.

lazyjones 7y ago

> What I don't understand is why this is so controversial. Our attention is a finite resource too. When some issue is in the news daily and obsessed about by a whole bunch of interest groups, from European-style liberals who have new taxes in mind (Macron) to the radical left who want us to live a frugal, Eastern-Bloc lifestyle, while we all see no real effects by this CO2 monster on our daily lives, it's bound to meet some resistance. > I don't see why we shouldn't transition to renewable energy asap anyway. Germany is transitioning to renewables quickly and has put a huge burden on households with high electricity prices (€0.30 per KWh average, even affecting EV adoption after some sensationalist "EV more expensive than Diesel fuel" themed articles) while the industry gets it cheap. Is this reasonable? > Why would it be a bad thing to get rid of air pollution? This is a great idea, but it has nothing to do with CO2 (= not air pollution in the usual sense, we all exhale it). I wish we could invest 1/10 of the efforts currently underway against CO2 in just getting rid of pollution in cities - from heating (with "renewable" wood), cars, industry, ships, airplanes (where's the CO2 tax and why do these things happen? https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6993173/Actress-Emma-Thompson-spotted-carbon-spewing-BA-plane-jetting-New-York.html https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6993173/Actress-Emm...).

rossenberg79 7y ago

Because if you live in the first world, like most of these companies, you will feel the effects of climate change the least. Climate change is a bigger problem for developing nations with birth rates way too high and limited resources.

patricius 7y ago

It is much more about economic reality than ambition. Replacing fossil fuel energy sources with renewable energy sources is an expensive process. Some argue that it is the responsibility of the nations of this world to make sure it's implemented, i.e., the governments, but it's difficult to see how this can be done efficiently through either a democratic or undemocratic process. Getting the state to produce anything puts you at risk of ending up with the Trabant version of whatever product or service we're talking about. Furthermore, it's difficult to foresee which problems will arise from replacing fossil fuel energy with renewables like wind or solar.

andygates 7y ago
Capex on new solar is cheaper than opex on old coal. It's not an expensive process, not any more. Objections that it is are just out of date - fairly common for objections to tech.
- patricius 7y ago
  According to someone, sure. But it is an expression of human arrogance to think that climate change can be fought just by following this here recipe and that we can look into the future and see that there will be a net benefit to changing to this or that energy source.
  - crooked-v 7y ago
    > But it is an expression of human arrogance to think that climate change can be fought just by following this here recipe The causes of anthropogenic climate change are extremely well documented and easily measureable, and "reduce the amount of carbon put into the air and recapture carbon already in the air if possible" isn't very complicated, just expensive.
    - patricius 7y ago
      > The causes of anthropogenic climate change are extremely well documented and easily measureable, and "reduce the amount of carbon put into the air and recapture carbon already in the air if possible" isn't very complicated, just expensive. An honest question: If I were to go about convincing myself of anthropogenic climate change and possibly that these changes would lead to a horrible future for humankind, where should I look? What should I read? Which videos to watch? The mainstream media portrays the science as settled, i.e., anthropogenic climate change is real and horrible consequences will follow, even though it isn't difficult to find disagreeing opinions - both from people on the fringes and from Nobel-winning scientists. I hear convincing arguments from both sides. I should mention that I am extremely sceptical of anything the state does, so I am biased against any solution involving the state. I fear that the fight against anthropogenic climate change is just another tool to increase state power, like the war on drugs or the war on poverty.

AnaniasAnanas 7y ago

> I don't see why we shouldn't transition to renewable energy asap anyway Most of the arguments that I see concern the low effectiveness of renewable energy sources and the pollution caused by the batteries (either during their creation or when trying to get rid of them). What I do not see is why we should not transition to modern thorium-based nuclear power plants.

lowken10 7y ago

It's so funny because that comment on TechCrunch.com is true. You think you are correct because enough people have told you how to think. When you actually look at the science. When you examine the data and ask critical question the theory of man made global warming falls apart. Do global temperatures change over time? Of course. There have been five ice ages in the history of the earth. Did you know that we are currently in an ice age? In fact we are in an interglacial period that began about 11,000 years ago. So what drives global temperatures? Is it CO2? Let's look at the history of this planet to answer this question. Can we do that? It turns out we can do that... We can use ice core data (and to a lesser extent tree rings) to look back thousands of years of global temperatures. We also have co2 levels from air bubbles captured in the ice cores. So is there a relationship between co2 and global temperatures? There is. But... the relationship is the opposite of what Global Warming alarmists what you to believe. Global temperatures drive co2 levels. This means that when global temperatures rise co2 levels rise hundreds or thousands of years later. And when global temperatures fall co2 levels fall hundreds or thousands of years later. This is a fundamental fact that any honest scientist will not dispute. And this fact throws the entire theory of mand made global warming into the trash can. By the way what does drive global temperatures? Look up in the sky and you see this big ball of burning gas. That is the entity that drives global temperatures and not trace amounts (co2 is 0.04 percent of earths atmosphere).

RcouF1uZ4gsC 7y ago

>Even if climate change would be a hoax (which it is not), then why would it be a bad thing to make changes to prevent it from happening anyway? Why would it be a bad thing to get rid of air pollution? Why would it be a bad thing to switch to an energy source that doesn't run out in ~20 years simply because it isn't renewable? If we look at carbon footprint, single use paper bags have the lowest footprint. https://stanfordmag.org/contents/paper-plastic-or-reusable https://stanfordmag.org/contents/paper-plastic-or-reusable So if we prioritized limiting carbon footprint, we would encourage single use plastic bags. However, we are not, we are discouraging them. If environmentalists had signed on to encourage carbon free energy, they would have pushed for reducing the roadblocks to nuclear power even at the cost of making them more unsafe. That is not what happened. Instead, environmental groups were one of the biggest opponents to nuclear power. If you really believe climate change is the biggest problem facing humans, you will need to do things and encourage things that may be dangerous or harmful but that can help slow down climate change.

ikeboy 7y ago

>Even if climate change would be a hoax (which it is not), then why would it be a bad thing to make changes to prevent it from happening anyway? Because those come at significant cost, and if there's nothing to worry about then why spend tens of trillions of dollars to stop it? I mean you might as well use Pascal's wager to argue for religion if you're only looking at potential benefits and ignoring costs.

rezeroed 7y ago
But renewables are more decentralised. I can't stick a coal plant on my roof. Decentralisation means less corrupt monopoly, less need to regulate.
- ikeboy 7y ago
  Are you trying to make an argument that regulations on carbon would pay for themselves due to decentralization? I don't think economists would agree with that.
  - rezeroed 7y ago
    No.
- deadmik3 7y ago
  Yeah sunlight and air are more decentralized but how many companies make solar panels and windmills?
  - rezeroed 7y ago
    Countless?
thebokehwokeh2 7y ago
> if there's nothing to worry about then why spend tens of trillions of dollars to stop it? Extremely shortsighted thinking. If we're talking about cost, this should be the argument: tens of trillions < the future of humanity.

simonebrunozzi 7y ago

Not to disagree, but CO2 levels are not just about energy; they are also about food - livestock, in particular. Furthermore, CO2 levels are one aspect of a larger problem, "pollution", and I'm not entirely convinced it's necessarily the worst part of it.

pdonis 7y ago

> I don't see how man-made climate change is even controversial What's controversial (at least, if we're talking reasonable discussion) is not that climate change is happening, nor that human activities cause at least a good portion of it, but whether we understand all the factors involved well enough to predict with high confidence that spending trillions of dollars on drastic measures to reduce or eliminate CO2 emissions will stop it from happening. If we don't have high confidence that spending the trillions of dollars will do that (and I don't, nor do I see how anyone could given that climate models are overpredicting warming and our ability to predict economic consequences is even worse than our ability to predict future climate), then we shouldn't be spending the trillions of dollars--or at least, not on measures aimed directly at drastically reducing or eliminating CO2 emissions. That's not to say, however, that there aren't other things we could be doing, that might help with climate change as a side effect. One is switching to non-fossil-fuel energy sources (see below). Another is making our infrastructure more robust, which helps civilization to withstand change in general. Still another is bringing more people out of poverty, since the richer people are, the more easily they can adapt to change. > I don't see why we shouldn't transition to renewable energy asap anyway A better term than "renewable" would be "non-fossil-fuel", since that would include nuclear (which is not considered "renewable" by most definitions). I agree that switching to non-fossil-fuel energy is something we should be doing anyway, both for scarcity reasons and for national security reasons: much of the money we spend on foreign oil ends up funding terrorism. I wish more people would realize that we don't need to agree on climate change alarmism in order to work on switching energy sources.

epistasis 7y ago

There's been a very well coordinated propaganda campaign around climate change denial. This campaign improved upon the tactics that tobacco industry lobbyists used to deny the connection between smoking and cancer. In particular, by tying climate change denial to political identity, and casting climate research as immoral for its lying, it created a passionate base of climate change denalists to call into every radio show, to swarm message boards, and to harass those who speak publicly about climate change. If you can listen to podcasts, the best summary of this is from the Drilled podcast, in my opinion: https://www.criticalfrequency.org/drilled https://www.criticalfrequency.org/drilled

war1025 7y ago

A major part of it is just branding. The left gains a strategic advantage by making the right look bad when it comes to climate / environment / etc. For that reason, things are purposefully not phrased in ways that would appeal to people on the right. And even when the motivation is not so sinister as that, people who care about the topic have a particular world view, and they don't spend the time to figure out how their world-view differs from those who aren't as concerned. What motivates one group is not one motivates another. If climate activists are serious about fixing the problem, then they need to abandon the branding aspect and find language that appeals to those not in their target market. Otherwise it's all just a lot of value-signalling.

epistasis 7y ago
That's a very odd spin on this, the "left trying to make the right look bad" comes from decades of concerted efforts from climate change denalists courting Republican and right media, and the media gobbling it up. Claiming that environmentalists aren't phrasing things correctly for the right to care about the environment is pretty much the definition of tone policing. Republicans could easily take up the fight against climate change on their own terms, but the very very few Republicans that have tried have been shunned by the rest of the party.
- war1025 7y ago
  And if you are truly convinced that it is a life-or-death problem, then you need to be pushing up against that over and over, working to get buy-in. "Well, we tried." is not good enough. And if it is, then there isn't really a problem to begin with.
  - epistasis 7y ago
    Really weird framing to say that the people that are factually correct have an obligation to argue others out of their self imposed lies and self deception. Rather, let's blame the true villain here, the political ideology that places itself as more important than truth or science, the political ideology that says "if I'm wrong and you can't convince me with science then it's your fault for not trying hard enough." What sort of epistemically closure is acceptable?

RyanAF7 7y ago

For me, it's not that heterogenic climate change isn't possible or likely, it's the predictions of what it means that are in question. CO2 is not a pollutant, and no one knows what will happen with increasing levels.