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My personal inclination makes me a natural devil's advocate and skeptic of political movements across the spectrum. To me, the average supporter of the green a
by csense 4y ago
My personal inclination makes me a natural devil's advocate and skeptic of political movements across the spectrum.
To me, the average supporter of the green agenda sounds like this: We Americans / Europeans are sinful and wasteful with our conspicuous energy consumption, air conditioning and air travel. The only path to redemption is to see the light and worship the planet. Importantly, this means we must practice austerity and poverty, to be humble and pure like the poorest black and brown people of Africa and Asia. The government will tell you, for the good of society of course, what temperature you're allowed to have in your buildings on your property, or whether you're allowed to let your car engine idle at a stoplight [1].
The green agenda is only partly based in science. It has dark corners and extremes of irrationality and hypocrisy. This article's author is trying to remind those who have gotten lost in the political theater that our goal should be improving lives and easing resource constraints. Perhaps we should examine whether we're overfunding solar and wind, why we fear fission and neglect fusion, and whether it's wise to regulate, control and limit rather than innovate, build and overcome.
[1] <politicalrant> Of course, prominent politicians and climate activists travel by air, in some cases private jets, to environmental conferences in the age of Internet videoconferencing. While they're eager enough to embrace using government force to remove freedoms of action from everybody, they balk at voluntarily following their stated principles in their personal lives when the result would be the slightest personal inconvenience. When the price of oil increases due to war, the President's staunch environmentalism disappears in the face of populist handouts to grease the midterms (a thing his party is famous about criticizing the other party for). A true statesman who actually believed the planet was in danger would urge us to seize this moment to let market forces do the hard work of weaning us off fossil fuels; it would mean sacrifices and hardship, but we should endure it to save the planet for our grandchildren. Instead, the President we've got does everything in his power to lower gas prices -- from releasing oil from strategic petroleum reserve, to fist bumping a slicer and dicer of journalists in a process of futile begging for oil. Actions speak louder than words, and in this case the PotUS's observed behavior is exactly what I would expect of a world leader who secretly believes the green agenda he publicly embraces is actually just a steaming pile of biomass. </politicalrant>
- hotpotamus 4y agoOh I think every political movement taps into what you might label a religious tendency that seems to be latent in most humans, especially with the mainstream religions on the retreat, creating a void that opportunists can fill. I think it's a mistake though if you're under the impression that this is only channeled into political causes. After spending some time in the tech world, I see it (unwittingly or otherwise) channeled by leaders into motivational reasoning for why their employees should work ceaselessly on achieving their companies' goals. You're not A/B testing a social media site to better addict peoples' attention to increase profit; you're changing the world for the better - that old tripe. What I see more often now is this tryhard meme that "work is it's own reward". Consider me a skeptic. I could believe work for one's self or one's community, but leaving those off just feels like some hopelessly out of touch plutocrat boss trying to gaslight me because he thinks anyone who's net worth doesn't involve three commas is a fool. I suppose that's my political rant. As for yours, I see certainly see it, and I understand how tuned we are to spot hypocrisy, but I don't see why someone or others' hypocrisy should affect how I judge an issue on its merits.
- Schroedingersat 4y agoWhat you perceive as some weird religious thing is merely the rejection of the completely unfounded axiom that all logistic curves are exponentials if you want them to be. From the point of view of someone who has rejected this axiom, then the slavish devotion to growth looks like a bizarre cult where the worshippers feed more and more of the very finite resources needed for humans to flourish into a machine that does nothing but bring suffering and enrich a few dozen sociopaths. Just because a few centre-right statesmen like Biden pay lip service to the idea of not bringing armageddon as quickly as possible while lining their pockets doesn't discredit the century of science, or the very basic mathematical fact that line do not in fact go up indefinitely.
- imtringued 4y agoWhat people don't seem to grasp is that the optimal growth path isn't the fastest one, it is the one that balances speed vs longevity. If you burn yourself out in the first 10 years of your career, your rate of growth might be impressive but your most productive years will barely even matter so your output will be low either way. What you want to do is reach the highest possible output and maintain it for as long as possible. Trading off speed for longevity can thereby increase total output instead of suddenly crashing. Valuing longevity too much and speed too little will mean lower total output because you were spending too much time with low output. This is an optimization problem where being an ergophile or ergophobe is actually suboptimal.