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Because the anti-CO2 coalition is primarily an environmental coalition whose main skills are condemning, taxing, and lecturing the public about grave injustices
by rsj_hn 5y ago
Because the anti-CO2 coalition is primarily an environmental coalition whose main skills are condemning, taxing, and lecturing the public about grave injustices.
But when it comes down to actually lobbying for the deployment of mass industrial processes at scale, or recognizing which solutions are viable and which are not, then they feel very uncomfortable advocating for mass buildout of nuclear. They pretend that we can all adopt solar and then handwave away the issues with reliability.
And when confronted with these problems, you hear things like "well, of course we can't have reliable electricity. We need to change our lifestyles, etc". So it's always back to scolding and blaming human behavior to overcome their lack of engineering competency.
But people don't like being taxed and blamed for turning the lights on when they come home, nor should they be. There is no reason why anyone needs to care what powers their home. It should all be reliable, cheap, and clean.
Getting there requires a very different kind of lobby than the current anti-CO2 lobby. It requires a lobby that has a sober-minded - rather than a utopian - understanding of different energy generating solutions, and finally abstains from blaming the public or trying to change end user behavior, but views this purely as a technical challenge to migrate from one reliable infrastructure to another, a migration that should be completely invisible to the end user, providing them with the same or better reliability, and the same or better cost.
If you can do that, then you will see the political opposition vanish. If you still just want to blame people and tell them they need to stop eating meat and suffer high prices to heat their home in the winter, then the political opposition will increase.
- dane-pgp 5y ago> getting there requires ... a migration that should be completely invisible to the end user, providing them with the same or better reliability, and the same or better cost. So you're saying we just need to remove all the excess CO2 from the air for free? And you think that people who value the environment are the "utopian" ones?
- rsj_hn 5y agoNo, I'm talking about migrating to energy sources that don't rely on fossil fuels. I don't see "removing excess CO2" as a reasonable goal. This again goes to "recognizing which solutions are viable and which are not" Now perhaps that will change, technologically, in the future, so I'd be willing to fund some R&D for that, but barring some breakthrough we are not going to be removing CO2 from the air.
- varelse 5y agoYou did notice I mentioned nuclear as part of the solution, and it was much more of the solution until the price of solar dropped precipitously over the past decade, but we still need it. I'm fed up with the politics too and I'm ready to move to problem solving phase here. Why are so few like that in my experience? Even without climate change, energy independence is strategic and further pursuit of coal is environmental cancer. This ought to be a lot easier than it is. Probably should eat less beef and fewer almonds though or at least we should remove the subsidies used to artificially keep their prices down and see how that plays out.
- tomjen3 5y agoThe wast majority of people care about their relative status and power, not solving the problem. The people in the environmental lobby are far more concerned with keeping the problem than solving it. Normally I would say the solution is to go forth and do it, then apologize later, but that’s not how the law works.
- varelse 5y agoExcept yes it does for coal and a myriad of other dirty tricks by corporate America. So I remain amazed that we don't channel that energy into doing good.