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Right, and that's the more compelling rebuttal. The public health effects of fossil fuels are broadly underrated.

ashtonkem 6y ago
Humans have a really hard time balancing consistent, boring risk against low frequency high impact risk.
Melting_Harps 6y ago
> Right, and that's the more compelling rebuttal. The public health effects of fossil fuels are broadly underrated. I agree, the externalities are seldom felt in real time; in fact some of us were/are addicted to the smell of 103 Octane, it burns sweet. And the cancerous nature of them is often never a big concern, even from someone like myself who worked in a lab diagnosing Leukemia and Lymphoma at one point; but the key difference is that we can undo the green-house emission and carbon footprint through effective infrastructure, optimized utilization and prioritization of it as wel ultimately transitioning to EV. Just look at how much better the air quality is from people WFH, this can be reduced even further if we simultaneously undertook a large enough planting of trees and plants in Urban areas with CO2 requisitioning centric crops, like hemp, to remediate soils and our air. With Nuclear getting it wrong once, be it from Natural causes or Human error, has dire consequences that can't be undone even if its deemed to be 'contained': just look at Chernobyl during the fires this year. We were in no way ready to deal with that issue given a simultaneously dreadful pandemic sweeping the Planet. When it comes to Energy usage, I think we have to move away from solely a short-sighted quick profit based calculus, and look at it more through risk assessment approach. Where rather than think about spending money in some study looking at the affects of near extinct squirrels we see this for what it is: a very volatile planet that is hostile to Man's infrastructure with ever-changing variables. I think that's the biggest underrated opinion of all as it shatters the conveniences of modernity in the West we've all come to expect.

Humans have a really hard time balancing consistent, boring risk against low frequency high impact risk.

> Right, and that's the more compelling rebuttal. The public health effects of fossil fuels are broadly underrated. I agree, the externalities are seldom felt in real time; in fact some of us were/are addicted to the smell of 103 Octane, it burns sweet. And the cancerous nature of them is often never a big concern, even from someone like myself who worked in a lab diagnosing Leukemia and Lymphoma at one point; but the key difference is that we can undo the green-house emission and carbon footprint through effective infrastructure, optimized utilization and prioritization of it as wel ultimately transitioning to EV. Just look at how much better the air quality is from people WFH, this can be reduced even further if we simultaneously undertook a large enough planting of trees and plants in Urban areas with CO2 requisitioning centric crops, like hemp, to remediate soils and our air. With Nuclear getting it wrong once, be it from Natural causes or Human error, has dire consequences that can't be undone even if its deemed to be 'contained': just look at Chernobyl during the fires this year. We were in no way ready to deal with that issue given a simultaneously dreadful pandemic sweeping the Planet. When it comes to Energy usage, I think we have to move away from solely a short-sighted quick profit based calculus, and look at it more through risk assessment approach. Where rather than think about spending money in some study looking at the affects of near extinct squirrels we see this for what it is: a very volatile planet that is hostile to Man's infrastructure with ever-changing variables. I think that's the biggest underrated opinion of all as it shatters the conveniences of modernity in the West we've all come to expect.