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America’s top environmental groups have lost the plot on climate change

70 points by jseliger 3y ago

ars 3y ago
[flagged]
- astrange 3y ago
  Not to make people as miserable as possible, it's to stop people (other than them) from having children, because they read The Population Bomb and Urban Growth Engines in the 70s and believed it. However that book is also what caused China to adopt its one-child policy, so they ended up much worse off from it than the US did. Thanos, who thinks the universe is overpopulated and needs to be saved by killing half of it, is a parody of these people's politics.
  - systemvoltage 3y ago
    The people that promote climate doom want their genes to propagate with abundance of resources, and are trying to convince the rest of the world to stop having kids.
    - astrange 3y ago
      I don't think that's their motivation, but either way they're wrong, as resources aren't used per-person and reducing the population will not give them more resources. Rather less, as there will be less people to invent new more productive ways to use them. Lot of places on Earth deforested themselves with much smaller populations than they have now, because they cut down all the trees to make firewood.
      - systemvoltage 3y ago
        Yes, it’s ironic. There is no explicit direct motivation but through indirect effects of current zeitgeist: I personally know many people in Bay Area that drive multiple 600hp+ gasoline cars with child seats, no less, but are frothing with climate doom and gloom. Interestingly and again ironically, the people that actually care about climate are the country folk. Ask them and talk to them. They love their neighborhoods. They love the mountains. They don’t waste. They don’t spill. The absolute moronic population in places like Berkeley and SF want to propel the rot they’ve created in the name of whatever idiotic ideology they have going on. Irresponsible and relentless recycling like a goddamn religion without understanding the net effect of recycling. Don’t ever question, you’ll get spit on. God, I despise the laptop class people myself being part of it.
  - astrange 3y ago
    Here's 70s environmentalist-type Jane Goodall proposing to kill 95% of people on Earth. https://twitter.com/wideawake_media/status/1690305655532302336 https://twitter.com/wideawake_media/status/16903056555323023... It's from a right wing conspiracy account, but I think the best way to avoid people claiming you're in a conspiracy to advocate for killing 95% people on Earth is to not go on stage and say it.
    - jay_kyburz 3y ago
      Perhaps you should watch the video a bit closer, she didn't mention killing anybody. She said we would have less environment problems if there were less people, and she is 100% correct.
      - astrange 3y ago
        Those are the same thing. That's how you get there. And she isn't correct, the US uses less water, emits less carbon[0], and has more trees than it did with a much smaller population because we invented productivity-enhancing technology. Conversely, if the population declines you'd be in a deflationary economy, where people will consume all the resources they can now and won't hold off or invest in the future since they expect it to be worse. [0] you're going to say we outsourced it to China. We didn't!
        joker_minmax 3y ago
        How exactly can we verify that we haven't outsourced it to China when almost all our consumer goods are manufactured there? Do consumer goods not count in our consumption?
        jay_kyburz 3y ago
        Killing a living person, and not having a children are not the same thing. Your second statement is just as bonkers as the first. The US uses less water and has more trees than it did before because we care about those things now, not because there are more people.
- jay_kyburz 3y ago
  I figure you're just trolling, and probably wasting my time, but I can assure you that environmental groups are not trying to make people miserable. In fact, many don't care about people at all. They care about the environment. They expect people to adjust their lives to preserve it. If people choose to be miserable because they can't have everything, or have to make do with less, well then, that their problem.
david2ndaccount 3y ago
The endangered desert tortoise needs land. Paving it over for solar panels is not the solution. Just because city-dwellers see these areas as “empty” doesn’t mean they don’t have sensitive ecosystems that are already becoming rarer and rarer.
- viknesh 3y ago
  I suppose the flip side is that we choose not to build solar, wind, or invest in nuclear and all tortoises die.
  - solardev 3y ago
    What if there were solar sites with no endangered animals? Acres of rangeland, abandoned malls, warehouse rooftops, aqueducts, lakes... I dunno if it's really an either or. Endangered species are often endangered because of extreme habitat loss, which means by definition there's not a lot of land left for them to live on, which means most projects won't intersect them. Of course the connection isn't that basic (desert is good for both tortoises and solar farms) but it does suggest one has more flexibility than the other. What percentage of utility scale renewables projects are blocked by endangered species? One recent study suggests environmental impacts are a source of opposition in half of the studied projects: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0301421522001471#fig3 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030142152... That's a lot, but doesn't necessarily mean it was the only (or primary) source of opposition. A lot of these bigger projects have to undergo environmental review via federal (NEPA) and state (CEQA) processes, which are expensive and slow (by design, to ensure their validity) and many projects stall when developers move on to locales with laxer rules and neighbors -- essentially giving up before the environmental impacts could be fully analyzed. My underlying point is that these things are rarely black and white, and there may be valid reasons to consider each project on a case by case basis. However, there might also be a valid reason to overhaul these laws to allow weighting climate priorities against individual protected species. If so, though, that should be very carefully and rarely done... once we lose those, they're never coming back. We can always find alternate energy sources/sites if we're willing to pay more. No amount of money will bring back extinct species (yet).
000ooo000 3y ago
>The reason? Affection for the plot of land, which also shelters endangered tortoises. Phrasing here is pretty revealing. "ThEy JuSt LiKe ThE lAnD lOl, oh also there's endangered animals there."
- astrange 3y ago
  Bringing up endangered animals that may or may not actually be in danger is 70s NIMBYism; in the Bay Area this is eg why Google has been blocked from building housing in Mountain View since 2010, because there might be burrowing owls there. It's the whole article that started YIMBYism in fact: https://techcrunch.com/2014/04/14/sf-housing/ https://techcrunch.com/2014/04/14/sf-housing/
- fastball 3y ago
  Forest for the trees. How many species will be rendered entirely extinct every year until we get a handle on climate change?
- bcrosby95 3y ago
  Don't forget the endangered freeway tree.
- bpodgursky 3y ago
  Do you know how many species are going to go extinct from climate change? What do you think the point of transitioning to solar is?
  - 000ooo000 3y ago
    Missed my point. I'm not commenting on that; I'm commenting on how the quoted part leads with some bizarre reference to 'affection for the land' over the real reason which is the endangered species.
zer8k 3y ago
> Now, though, the problems facing the environment are wildly different–and require more development not less. This is an article filled with unhinged scare words. The author even tries, albeit implicitly, to suggest that we should build a 14 square mile solar farm on the same land endangered tortoises live. When you start making these arguments you run into the same exact problem the author speaks of later: people were opposed to expanding urban sprawl because it destroyed the land they use for recreation. No one wants to take a visit to the solar farm and camp out next to the windmills. So, whats the solution? As one commenter suggested the answer is nuclear power. We are so happy to pollute our land further with eyesores like solar farms and wind farms and not a single person is willing to consider nuclear power. Even ignoring the negative aesthetic of this so-called clean technology there's another aspect that isn't discuss and that's the damage to wildlife. People like the author, who has spent several pages justifying this, seem to be completely content with destroying the local fauna if it saves us from the alleged "climate apocalypse" just around the corner. I've been around long enough to remember several supposed "raptures" that were going to happen. It's getting harder to differentiate the two groups. The same "uninhabited" land they want to build these on can be use to safely place a nuclear power plant that, should anything go wrong, damage mitigation would be trivial. I am repeatedly impressed at the mental gymnastics used to avoid discussing nuclear power.
- astrange 3y ago
  The problem with nuclear power in the US is that it's unbelievably expensive to construct and you will not get the NRC to approve it. Renewables are cheap; he has a consistent theme of supporting them because of this. Also, solar and wind farms don't destroy the environment under them or anything; solar can make land more habitable by adding shade. What it does do is make the land harder to sell, which is a problem if you're a land banker pretending to be a farmer, a common situation in the US. And the Sierra Club is anti-nuclear; they just got Illinois to block it again: https://twitter.com/SierraClubIL/status/1690054514772975624 https://twitter.com/SierraClubIL/status/1690054514772975624
  - nvm0n2 3y ago
    Yes, they block nuclear even though it has minimal / no impact on the landscape compared to the alternatives. This is inconsistent with Smith's explanation. Noah Smith publicly advertises himself as being on the left, so of course in these groups he sees the spectre of conservatism. They refuse to build solar farms because they just can't stop conserving things! But there's an alternative hypothesis that also explains the nuclear problem: these are people whose personalities cannot abide tradeoffs of any kind. They are utopian progressives who believe that if a proposal has any downsides at all, then they should protest and block under the assumption that faced with resistance the smart set will come up with a better proposal. Claims that there are no alternatives are rejected on the grounds that capital-P Progress is automatic and easy, so if anyone is stating that you have to choose between birds/tortoises and climate, then they just need to try harder to find a solution that makes everyone happy.
solardev 3y ago
I work in solar and support renewables projects, but I found this article really one-sided. What were the reasons these groups opposed the projects? What did the national groups have to say about their local chapters' priorities? Were any of them aware of the climate impacts, and if so, what was their counterarguments? Surely it's not as simple as "tortoise good, solar bad". NIMBYism is everywhere, but only rarely does it intersect with protected species habitat. Solar is not particularly land constrained, and much of California etc. already has more than its grid can store. Wind is much more susceptible to land use conflict because it's harder to site, but its bird impacts are minimal and can mitigated. Meanwhile, plain ol "it's ugly and noisy and causes EM pollution and gives me headaches" NIMBYism happens even without endangered animals. Is it the case that these groups support renewables except in exceptionally sensitive areas? Do they make a case by case judgment call? Do they fight climate policy and renewables development across the board? Did they consider more than just the tree impacts of high density urban development? None of this was really explored or discussed in the blog. I've been to several public meetings discussing these sorts of land use conflicts, along with chapter meetings of both pro and anti development groups. They usually are complicated and backed by numerous stakeholders of both sides, each with studies presentations and lots and lots of public comments and controversies. They were never as one sided and simple as this article paints them to be. YMMV, but I have a hard time believing that without details...
protastus 3y ago
Attacking or blaming environmental groups in a time of environmental crisis seems like an absurdly misguided strategy. The author should re-evaluate their priorities. Oil and gasoline are some of the most subsidized products in history. Too many Americans demand cheap gas, like it's a human right. If solar had been similarly subsidized over the last 20 years, we'd see solar panels on every other business and house in every state except Alaska. This is the situation, and environmental groups did not cause it. And they did not pivot towards undermining their own mission at scale, like they're being accused of.
- systemvoltage 3y ago
  Greta said the world has 5 years left if we don’t do anything in 2018: https://twitter.com/jackposobiec/status/1634644472553168896 https://twitter.com/jackposobiec/status/1634644472553168896
  - protastus 3y ago
    https://climatereanalyzer.org/clim/sst_daily/ https://climatereanalyzer.org/clim/sst_daily/ Imagine you're 15 and look at the graph above. What deadline do you set for humanity to fix the issue?
    - systemvoltage 3y ago
      I don’t trust the Science that censors dissent. It’s not science. The people that propel climate doom are also ok with depopulation of millions. The incoherence is absolutely staggering. The entire climate agenda reeks of malaise, dishonesty and authoritarianism. You will live in a pod. You will eat bugs. You will euthanize people on a mass scale. You will be happy. We have limitless resource - Nuclear energy both in the form of Uranium/Plutonium and the sun itself. Climate doomers are Marxists who don’t want solutions. They just want state power expansion and erosion of rights through the bullshit excuse of climate. It’s year 2050 and there are climate activists for space to keep space pristine. Mark my words. The roots are in place at cities like Berkeley.
renewiltord 3y ago
Ultimately, the only things that matter are outcomes. So Burning Man is primarily an anti-geothermal meeting, most environmentalists are primarily pro-climate-change, and the NRC is an anti-nuclear-power organization. I model people by what they accomplish and I have found that this is an accurate way to see how they'll behave, and this is what I have found. Revealed preferences manifest through action alone. One can always construct reasons couched in any language to support / prevent anything.
zerbinxx 3y ago
I think the phrasing of the title is incongruous to the material presented. It’s a bit anecdotal- not that I don’t think this thing isn’t real so much as I’m not sure what the real impact is. My guess is that NIMBYs, while frequently annoying and hyper-focused on selfish interests at the expense of their professed beliefs, are probably way less impactful than major business or local government groups when it comes to blocking alternative energy development. I fully believe that disorganized/decentralized organizations (conservative, liberal, socialist, whatever) inherently have this problem (local chapters hijacking the brand) and it’s a direct tradeoff with their ability to produce results quickly (without national bureaucracy) and in a way that maps onto local interests more closely than the national/centralized option does.
danans 3y ago
It makes sense why some of these organizations operate in this way when you consider they were individually established to serve particular environmental interests. The Sierra Club was established specifically to preserve the wildlands of the US, with little concern for how society was burning fossil fuels. In fact, the availability of cheap fossil fuels is what allowed average Americans to to visit the preserved wildlands in the post war period. That continues to this day, at least until we're all driving electric. Audubon was created to protect the interests of recreational bird hunters against the demand for feathers for fashion. The challenges facing the world with climate change subsume all of these narrow environmental challenges. The climate problem and its solutions are planetary and civilizational in scale, not limited to a particular narrow environmental concern, no matter how valid that concern is.
- solardev 3y ago
  Despite this, both groups do support renewables, at least nationally, with caveats: https://www.sierraclub.org/ready-for-100 https://www.sierraclub.org/ready-for-100 https://www.audubon.org/news/wind-power-and-birds https://www.audubon.org/news/wind-power-and-birds
  - acdha 3y ago
    This is true-ish but as someone who gets donation requests from both of them I’ve literally never once heard either group mention it. I think OP’s point is correct: these groups originated from relatively affluent communities and nobody wants to say “if you really treasure the sierras, don’t drive there - even in an EV”.
    - solardev 3y ago
      I think the OP's point definitely stands -- don't disagree at all! Sorry, I was trying to illustrate that the chapters and national do have different priorities that sometimes conflict (or at least cause nuance). It's not a simple binary thing. Different chapters can disagree with each other. National can disagree with itself. I've volunteered with the Sierra Club both locally in different areas and on some national/regional climate programs. I've also sat in on local Audubon meetings when they've looked at and discussed the details of local wind projects to decide if they should support or oppose it, balancing local wildlife needs with national climate priorities. And often energy companies will hold environmental review meetings for the public, where these groups and others would send representatives. (Was an environmental science and journalism student in college, and our area had a looooot of meetings about land use conflicts, being both full of endangered species and ripe for renewables development). My underlying point is that these are inherently nuanced issues with local, regional, and national (and of course global) perspectives. The chapters and national groups understand that, and they are of course also concerned about climate change. They're not blind to these basic facts, but it's not as simple as simply developing over all our protected lands to build new energy projects if that means killing (too) many of the species they were trying to protect to begin with. It's also not as simple as simply rejecting renewables in favor of, say, using less energy. It's a hard problem all around, and balanced solutions require an understanding of all the costs and benefits involved, not unthinking adherence to any dogma. Even the elitism thing... yes, it's very true, especially historically. But there is a push in these groups (facing both internal and external pressures) to diversify both in ethnicity/culture and economic class so that conservation isn't just something for rich white hermits. Even Muir doesn't quite have the same worshipful status he once did. More diversity also means that environmental justice becomes a more significant factor -- where to site nuclear projects, for example, or whether rich NIMBYs displace poor NIMBYs because they are better able to put up legal hurdles and marketing campaigns. And as outdoor rec becomes more popular, accessibility vs preservation is an ongoing issue (but that's a while other can of worms). I think there will always be people who want to make nature an exclusive club for a small group of rich white hikers, and the only remedy to that is more diverse involvement in these groups (or other groups like Latino Outdoors). The chapter model actually makes that more possible because you're not directly tackling an old white board at the national level, but engaging with neighbors on shared issues.
gdubs 3y ago
Stewart Brand in his book "Whole Earth Discipline" — a book I've mentioned countless times here — talks about his role in the early environmentalist movement, and from that vantage point discusses how good intentions lead to a lot of unfortunate outcomes — coal power replacing nuclear in Europe being a good example. A lot of these people have their hearts in the right place but it's a good reminder that we often hang onto ideas despite information — and circumstance — evolving around us. Lobbying against wind farms to protect birds that will likely be wiped out eventually by fossil fuel emissions is a good example of this. I'm hoping at this point we can all put politics aside, as well as our preconceived notions of how we see the world, and actually start to make progress on this issue of climate that will define our generation. It's not an easy challenge at all — and it's likely we've gotten to a point where adaptation is our remaining hope; but it's not a lost cause and we have many tools in our belt to try and make a meaningful change in course.
- rayiner 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - gdubs 3y ago
    I mean, I make an earnest call for us to put politics aside and the response is a yahoo news story about AOC? C'mon, this is what I'm saying – let's make an honest attempt to focus on solutions we can agree on. Politicians are going to be politicians – but most of us are citizens. And there are a lot of possible solutions we can come together and support. + Massive reforestation efforts. While we're at it, I'd suggest whatever we're paying countries sitting on massive natural forests to not cut them down, we should up it by an order of magnitude. + Let's once-and-for-all modernize our electrical grid. We've been close before, and it's actually doable. And there's national security reasons to do it, and you don't even have to believe in Climate Change to know that downed power lines happen all the time from extreme weather events. Places like Arizona can't risk losing AC, etc. + Invest in a Manhattan style project to advance carbon sequestration technologies. Perhaps it'll never work. Maybe it's true that it just gives fossil fuel companies license to continue on as normal. But I think it's worth a shot, and might appeal to centrists and people further to the right. So I think people on the left and hardcore environmentalists should compromise here and accept that there might be a way to solve this problem that doesn't remake all of society. Last one is the most controversial, and probably politically impossible because nobody likes a tax, but I think a Carbon Tax is a no-brainer. Look: the tax payer is already paying for the negative externalities of fossil fuel emissions. But the fossil fuel companies are not. We solved the ozone issue this way in the 90s, it allows 'the market' to have a hand in the process, and could lead to both innovation and consumers adapting and choosing the aspects of their life they don't mind compromising on. It's better in my opinion than dictating that everyone ration x, y, or z. Let people decide with their wallets.
timeon 3y ago
Substack is maybe better than Medium but still hostile to reading.

70 points by jseliger 3y ago

ars 3y ago

[flagged]

astrange 3y ago
Not to make people as miserable as possible, it's to stop people (other than them) from having children, because they read The Population Bomb and Urban Growth Engines in the 70s and believed it. However that book is also what caused China to adopt its one-child policy, so they ended up much worse off from it than the US did. Thanos, who thinks the universe is overpopulated and needs to be saved by killing half of it, is a parody of these people's politics.
- systemvoltage 3y ago
  The people that promote climate doom want their genes to propagate with abundance of resources, and are trying to convince the rest of the world to stop having kids.
  - astrange 3y ago
    I don't think that's their motivation, but either way they're wrong, as resources aren't used per-person and reducing the population will not give them more resources. Rather less, as there will be less people to invent new more productive ways to use them. Lot of places on Earth deforested themselves with much smaller populations than they have now, because they cut down all the trees to make firewood.
    - systemvoltage 3y ago
      Yes, it’s ironic. There is no explicit direct motivation but through indirect effects of current zeitgeist: I personally know many people in Bay Area that drive multiple 600hp+ gasoline cars with child seats, no less, but are frothing with climate doom and gloom. Interestingly and again ironically, the people that actually care about climate are the country folk. Ask them and talk to them. They love their neighborhoods. They love the mountains. They don’t waste. They don’t spill. The absolute moronic population in places like Berkeley and SF want to propel the rot they’ve created in the name of whatever idiotic ideology they have going on. Irresponsible and relentless recycling like a goddamn religion without understanding the net effect of recycling. Don’t ever question, you’ll get spit on. God, I despise the laptop class people myself being part of it.
- astrange 3y ago
  Here's 70s environmentalist-type Jane Goodall proposing to kill 95% of people on Earth. https://twitter.com/wideawake_media/status/1690305655532302336 https://twitter.com/wideawake_media/status/16903056555323023... It's from a right wing conspiracy account, but I think the best way to avoid people claiming you're in a conspiracy to advocate for killing 95% people on Earth is to not go on stage and say it.
  - jay_kyburz 3y ago
    Perhaps you should watch the video a bit closer, she didn't mention killing anybody. She said we would have less environment problems if there were less people, and she is 100% correct.
    - astrange 3y ago
      Those are the same thing. That's how you get there. And she isn't correct, the US uses less water, emits less carbon[0], and has more trees than it did with a much smaller population because we invented productivity-enhancing technology. Conversely, if the population declines you'd be in a deflationary economy, where people will consume all the resources they can now and won't hold off or invest in the future since they expect it to be worse. [0] you're going to say we outsourced it to China. We didn't!
      - joker_minmax 3y ago
        How exactly can we verify that we haven't outsourced it to China when almost all our consumer goods are manufactured there? Do consumer goods not count in our consumption?
      - jay_kyburz 3y ago
        Killing a living person, and not having a children are not the same thing. Your second statement is just as bonkers as the first. The US uses less water and has more trees than it did before because we care about those things now, not because there are more people.
jay_kyburz 3y ago
I figure you're just trolling, and probably wasting my time, but I can assure you that environmental groups are not trying to make people miserable. In fact, many don't care about people at all. They care about the environment. They expect people to adjust their lives to preserve it. If people choose to be miserable because they can't have everything, or have to make do with less, well then, that their problem.

david2ndaccount 3y ago

The endangered desert tortoise needs land. Paving it over for solar panels is not the solution. Just because city-dwellers see these areas as “empty” doesn’t mean they don’t have sensitive ecosystems that are already becoming rarer and rarer.

viknesh 3y ago
I suppose the flip side is that we choose not to build solar, wind, or invest in nuclear and all tortoises die.
- solardev 3y ago
  What if there were solar sites with no endangered animals? Acres of rangeland, abandoned malls, warehouse rooftops, aqueducts, lakes... I dunno if it's really an either or. Endangered species are often endangered because of extreme habitat loss, which means by definition there's not a lot of land left for them to live on, which means most projects won't intersect them. Of course the connection isn't that basic (desert is good for both tortoises and solar farms) but it does suggest one has more flexibility than the other. What percentage of utility scale renewables projects are blocked by endangered species? One recent study suggests environmental impacts are a source of opposition in half of the studied projects: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0301421522001471#fig3 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030142152... That's a lot, but doesn't necessarily mean it was the only (or primary) source of opposition. A lot of these bigger projects have to undergo environmental review via federal (NEPA) and state (CEQA) processes, which are expensive and slow (by design, to ensure their validity) and many projects stall when developers move on to locales with laxer rules and neighbors -- essentially giving up before the environmental impacts could be fully analyzed. My underlying point is that these things are rarely black and white, and there may be valid reasons to consider each project on a case by case basis. However, there might also be a valid reason to overhaul these laws to allow weighting climate priorities against individual protected species. If so, though, that should be very carefully and rarely done... once we lose those, they're never coming back. We can always find alternate energy sources/sites if we're willing to pay more. No amount of money will bring back extinct species (yet).

000ooo000 3y ago

>The reason? Affection for the plot of land, which also shelters endangered tortoises. Phrasing here is pretty revealing. "ThEy JuSt LiKe ThE lAnD lOl, oh also there's endangered animals there."

astrange 3y ago
Bringing up endangered animals that may or may not actually be in danger is 70s NIMBYism; in the Bay Area this is eg why Google has been blocked from building housing in Mountain View since 2010, because there might be burrowing owls there. It's the whole article that started YIMBYism in fact: https://techcrunch.com/2014/04/14/sf-housing/ https://techcrunch.com/2014/04/14/sf-housing/
fastball 3y ago
Forest for the trees. How many species will be rendered entirely extinct every year until we get a handle on climate change?
bcrosby95 3y ago
Don't forget the endangered freeway tree.
bpodgursky 3y ago
Do you know how many species are going to go extinct from climate change? What do you think the point of transitioning to solar is?
- 000ooo000 3y ago
  Missed my point. I'm not commenting on that; I'm commenting on how the quoted part leads with some bizarre reference to 'affection for the land' over the real reason which is the endangered species.

zer8k 3y ago

> Now, though, the problems facing the environment are wildly different–and require more development not less. This is an article filled with unhinged scare words. The author even tries, albeit implicitly, to suggest that we should build a 14 square mile solar farm on the same land endangered tortoises live. When you start making these arguments you run into the same exact problem the author speaks of later: people were opposed to expanding urban sprawl because it destroyed the land they use for recreation. No one wants to take a visit to the solar farm and camp out next to the windmills. So, whats the solution? As one commenter suggested the answer is nuclear power. We are so happy to pollute our land further with eyesores like solar farms and wind farms and not a single person is willing to consider nuclear power. Even ignoring the negative aesthetic of this so-called clean technology there's another aspect that isn't discuss and that's the damage to wildlife. People like the author, who has spent several pages justifying this, seem to be completely content with destroying the local fauna if it saves us from the alleged "climate apocalypse" just around the corner. I've been around long enough to remember several supposed "raptures" that were going to happen. It's getting harder to differentiate the two groups. The same "uninhabited" land they want to build these on can be use to safely place a nuclear power plant that, should anything go wrong, damage mitigation would be trivial. I am repeatedly impressed at the mental gymnastics used to avoid discussing nuclear power.

astrange 3y ago
The problem with nuclear power in the US is that it's unbelievably expensive to construct and you will not get the NRC to approve it. Renewables are cheap; he has a consistent theme of supporting them because of this. Also, solar and wind farms don't destroy the environment under them or anything; solar can make land more habitable by adding shade. What it does do is make the land harder to sell, which is a problem if you're a land banker pretending to be a farmer, a common situation in the US. And the Sierra Club is anti-nuclear; they just got Illinois to block it again: https://twitter.com/SierraClubIL/status/1690054514772975624 https://twitter.com/SierraClubIL/status/1690054514772975624
- nvm0n2 3y ago
  Yes, they block nuclear even though it has minimal / no impact on the landscape compared to the alternatives. This is inconsistent with Smith's explanation. Noah Smith publicly advertises himself as being on the left, so of course in these groups he sees the spectre of conservatism. They refuse to build solar farms because they just can't stop conserving things! But there's an alternative hypothesis that also explains the nuclear problem: these are people whose personalities cannot abide tradeoffs of any kind. They are utopian progressives who believe that if a proposal has any downsides at all, then they should protest and block under the assumption that faced with resistance the smart set will come up with a better proposal. Claims that there are no alternatives are rejected on the grounds that capital-P Progress is automatic and easy, so if anyone is stating that you have to choose between birds/tortoises and climate, then they just need to try harder to find a solution that makes everyone happy.

solardev 3y ago

I work in solar and support renewables projects, but I found this article really one-sided. What were the reasons these groups opposed the projects? What did the national groups have to say about their local chapters' priorities? Were any of them aware of the climate impacts, and if so, what was their counterarguments? Surely it's not as simple as "tortoise good, solar bad". NIMBYism is everywhere, but only rarely does it intersect with protected species habitat. Solar is not particularly land constrained, and much of California etc. already has more than its grid can store. Wind is much more susceptible to land use conflict because it's harder to site, but its bird impacts are minimal and can mitigated. Meanwhile, plain ol "it's ugly and noisy and causes EM pollution and gives me headaches" NIMBYism happens even without endangered animals. Is it the case that these groups support renewables except in exceptionally sensitive areas? Do they make a case by case judgment call? Do they fight climate policy and renewables development across the board? Did they consider more than just the tree impacts of high density urban development? None of this was really explored or discussed in the blog. I've been to several public meetings discussing these sorts of land use conflicts, along with chapter meetings of both pro and anti development groups. They usually are complicated and backed by numerous stakeholders of both sides, each with studies presentations and lots and lots of public comments and controversies. They were never as one sided and simple as this article paints them to be. YMMV, but I have a hard time believing that without details...

protastus 3y ago

Attacking or blaming environmental groups in a time of environmental crisis seems like an absurdly misguided strategy. The author should re-evaluate their priorities. Oil and gasoline are some of the most subsidized products in history. Too many Americans demand cheap gas, like it's a human right. If solar had been similarly subsidized over the last 20 years, we'd see solar panels on every other business and house in every state except Alaska. This is the situation, and environmental groups did not cause it. And they did not pivot towards undermining their own mission at scale, like they're being accused of.

systemvoltage 3y ago
Greta said the world has 5 years left if we don’t do anything in 2018: https://twitter.com/jackposobiec/status/1634644472553168896 https://twitter.com/jackposobiec/status/1634644472553168896
- protastus 3y ago
  https://climatereanalyzer.org/clim/sst_daily/ https://climatereanalyzer.org/clim/sst_daily/ Imagine you're 15 and look at the graph above. What deadline do you set for humanity to fix the issue?
  - systemvoltage 3y ago
    I don’t trust the Science that censors dissent. It’s not science. The people that propel climate doom are also ok with depopulation of millions. The incoherence is absolutely staggering. The entire climate agenda reeks of malaise, dishonesty and authoritarianism. You will live in a pod. You will eat bugs. You will euthanize people on a mass scale. You will be happy. We have limitless resource - Nuclear energy both in the form of Uranium/Plutonium and the sun itself. Climate doomers are Marxists who don’t want solutions. They just want state power expansion and erosion of rights through the bullshit excuse of climate. It’s year 2050 and there are climate activists for space to keep space pristine. Mark my words. The roots are in place at cities like Berkeley.

renewiltord 3y ago

Ultimately, the only things that matter are outcomes. So Burning Man is primarily an anti-geothermal meeting, most environmentalists are primarily pro-climate-change, and the NRC is an anti-nuclear-power organization. I model people by what they accomplish and I have found that this is an accurate way to see how they'll behave, and this is what I have found. Revealed preferences manifest through action alone. One can always construct reasons couched in any language to support / prevent anything.

zerbinxx 3y ago

I think the phrasing of the title is incongruous to the material presented. It’s a bit anecdotal- not that I don’t think this thing isn’t real so much as I’m not sure what the real impact is. My guess is that NIMBYs, while frequently annoying and hyper-focused on selfish interests at the expense of their professed beliefs, are probably way less impactful than major business or local government groups when it comes to blocking alternative energy development. I fully believe that disorganized/decentralized organizations (conservative, liberal, socialist, whatever) inherently have this problem (local chapters hijacking the brand) and it’s a direct tradeoff with their ability to produce results quickly (without national bureaucracy) and in a way that maps onto local interests more closely than the national/centralized option does.

danans 3y ago

It makes sense why some of these organizations operate in this way when you consider they were individually established to serve particular environmental interests. The Sierra Club was established specifically to preserve the wildlands of the US, with little concern for how society was burning fossil fuels. In fact, the availability of cheap fossil fuels is what allowed average Americans to to visit the preserved wildlands in the post war period. That continues to this day, at least until we're all driving electric. Audubon was created to protect the interests of recreational bird hunters against the demand for feathers for fashion. The challenges facing the world with climate change subsume all of these narrow environmental challenges. The climate problem and its solutions are planetary and civilizational in scale, not limited to a particular narrow environmental concern, no matter how valid that concern is.

solardev 3y ago
Despite this, both groups do support renewables, at least nationally, with caveats: https://www.sierraclub.org/ready-for-100 https://www.sierraclub.org/ready-for-100 https://www.audubon.org/news/wind-power-and-birds https://www.audubon.org/news/wind-power-and-birds
- acdha 3y ago
  This is true-ish but as someone who gets donation requests from both of them I’ve literally never once heard either group mention it. I think OP’s point is correct: these groups originated from relatively affluent communities and nobody wants to say “if you really treasure the sierras, don’t drive there - even in an EV”.
  - solardev 3y ago
    I think the OP's point definitely stands -- don't disagree at all! Sorry, I was trying to illustrate that the chapters and national do have different priorities that sometimes conflict (or at least cause nuance). It's not a simple binary thing. Different chapters can disagree with each other. National can disagree with itself. I've volunteered with the Sierra Club both locally in different areas and on some national/regional climate programs. I've also sat in on local Audubon meetings when they've looked at and discussed the details of local wind projects to decide if they should support or oppose it, balancing local wildlife needs with national climate priorities. And often energy companies will hold environmental review meetings for the public, where these groups and others would send representatives. (Was an environmental science and journalism student in college, and our area had a looooot of meetings about land use conflicts, being both full of endangered species and ripe for renewables development). My underlying point is that these are inherently nuanced issues with local, regional, and national (and of course global) perspectives. The chapters and national groups understand that, and they are of course also concerned about climate change. They're not blind to these basic facts, but it's not as simple as simply developing over all our protected lands to build new energy projects if that means killing (too) many of the species they were trying to protect to begin with. It's also not as simple as simply rejecting renewables in favor of, say, using less energy. It's a hard problem all around, and balanced solutions require an understanding of all the costs and benefits involved, not unthinking adherence to any dogma. Even the elitism thing... yes, it's very true, especially historically. But there is a push in these groups (facing both internal and external pressures) to diversify both in ethnicity/culture and economic class so that conservation isn't just something for rich white hermits. Even Muir doesn't quite have the same worshipful status he once did. More diversity also means that environmental justice becomes a more significant factor -- where to site nuclear projects, for example, or whether rich NIMBYs displace poor NIMBYs because they are better able to put up legal hurdles and marketing campaigns. And as outdoor rec becomes more popular, accessibility vs preservation is an ongoing issue (but that's a while other can of worms). I think there will always be people who want to make nature an exclusive club for a small group of rich white hikers, and the only remedy to that is more diverse involvement in these groups (or other groups like Latino Outdoors). The chapter model actually makes that more possible because you're not directly tackling an old white board at the national level, but engaging with neighbors on shared issues.

gdubs 3y ago

Stewart Brand in his book "Whole Earth Discipline" — a book I've mentioned countless times here — talks about his role in the early environmentalist movement, and from that vantage point discusses how good intentions lead to a lot of unfortunate outcomes — coal power replacing nuclear in Europe being a good example. A lot of these people have their hearts in the right place but it's a good reminder that we often hang onto ideas despite information — and circumstance — evolving around us. Lobbying against wind farms to protect birds that will likely be wiped out eventually by fossil fuel emissions is a good example of this. I'm hoping at this point we can all put politics aside, as well as our preconceived notions of how we see the world, and actually start to make progress on this issue of climate that will define our generation. It's not an easy challenge at all — and it's likely we've gotten to a point where adaptation is our remaining hope; but it's not a lost cause and we have many tools in our belt to try and make a meaningful change in course.

rayiner 3y ago
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- gdubs 3y ago
  I mean, I make an earnest call for us to put politics aside and the response is a yahoo news story about AOC? C'mon, this is what I'm saying – let's make an honest attempt to focus on solutions we can agree on. Politicians are going to be politicians – but most of us are citizens. And there are a lot of possible solutions we can come together and support. + Massive reforestation efforts. While we're at it, I'd suggest whatever we're paying countries sitting on massive natural forests to not cut them down, we should up it by an order of magnitude. + Let's once-and-for-all modernize our electrical grid. We've been close before, and it's actually doable. And there's national security reasons to do it, and you don't even have to believe in Climate Change to know that downed power lines happen all the time from extreme weather events. Places like Arizona can't risk losing AC, etc. + Invest in a Manhattan style project to advance carbon sequestration technologies. Perhaps it'll never work. Maybe it's true that it just gives fossil fuel companies license to continue on as normal. But I think it's worth a shot, and might appeal to centrists and people further to the right. So I think people on the left and hardcore environmentalists should compromise here and accept that there might be a way to solve this problem that doesn't remake all of society. Last one is the most controversial, and probably politically impossible because nobody likes a tax, but I think a Carbon Tax is a no-brainer. Look: the tax payer is already paying for the negative externalities of fossil fuel emissions. But the fossil fuel companies are not. We solved the ozone issue this way in the 90s, it allows 'the market' to have a hand in the process, and could lead to both innovation and consumers adapting and choosing the aspects of their life they don't mind compromising on. It's better in my opinion than dictating that everyone ration x, y, or z. Let people decide with their wallets.

timeon 3y ago

Substack is maybe better than Medium but still hostile to reading.