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The whole environmental movement made a mistake framing things as a moralistic struggle to “save the Earth.” Like George Carlin famously said on this subject: “

• spacecadet 3y ago
  Ive used the same quote. This is an unpopular opinion, but true.
  • zokier 3y ago
    Unpopular?
• mylittlebrain 3y ago
  How should the environmental movement frame things?
  • api 3y ago
    Finding ways for humans to live well now without consuming their children’s ability to do the same in the future. A good framing would also draw a link to fiscal responsibility. A renewable sustainable civilization is paying its bills fully. Fossil fuels and other non renewable processes are putting it on a credit card, and one with an unknown interest rate. Eventually you can’t do that anymore and the interest comes due. Right now humanity is still putting something like 75% of its primary energy use on credit. The worst framing is the anti-human framing you see from radical greens or films like Avatar. If you really hate humans the logical thing would be to do nothing and let us crap where we eat until we render our environment inhospitable to us. If humans are the problem the activists should go home.
    • SV_BubbleTime 3y ago
      >A good framing would also draw a link to fiscal responsibility A good analogy with an under the table jab really. The worst of the ultra green policies are absolutely murder for financial responsibility. There is no winning with the current “debate”, and double so with current “solutions”.
  • rich_sasha 3y ago
    The moral failure of humanity is not really that we're harming the world, but that we are harming humans. Humans affected by climate change today, and the future humans elsewhere, who will also suffer. In some way, one animal causing the extinction of others extracting resources and changing the environment is as long as evolutionary biology itself. This is what all animals do. We're just doing it at a much bigger scale.
  • leni536 3y ago
    Save ourselves and our children.
• logicprog 3y ago
  I agree with this. It's very frustrating seeing environmentalists frame the struggle to reduce anthropogenic climate change and pollution and use sustainable renewable resources and so on as some kind of moralistic obligation to some sort of abstract concept of nature, which is due deference and submission as something morally "greater" than ourselves that demands service, and as some kind of struggle to project very weird and Christian notions of virginity and purity onto the environment. It makes the logic singularly unappealing to those who are not interested in subjecting themselves to sacred ideas and don't buy into the ideas of duty and obligation, much less to an abstract concept, and don't like the aesthetics of purity — and it is all the more infuriating because all that pseudoreligious stuff is built on a false premise anyway, as you point out. The "Earth mother" or whatever the fuck will be fine, we are doing all of this for ourselves and our own standards of living and aesthetic values and nothing more, so why pretend otherwise?
  • silverquiet 3y ago
    I guess that sort of response begs the question of if there is even anything greater to which humans owe some moral obligation; it sounds like you don't thing there is (though I apologize if this is reading more into your response than is actually there). But I suppose it really depends on what you mean by the Earth being "fine" in the end. Obviously, as a large chunk of iron, silicates, oxygen, carbon, et al, the Earth will continue its journey through space for a long time to come. Some forms of life will certainly persist for a few hundred million years until such time as it becomes uninhabitable due to stellar evolution. But if we humans are to wreak our own destruction, we will be far from the first species we remove from this Earth; we've already set about a mass extinction that will register in the geographic record.
    • logicprog 3y ago
      > I guess that sort of response begs the question of if there is even anything greater to which humans owe some moral obligation; it sounds like you don't thing there is (though I apologize if this is reading more into your response than is actually there). No worries, you did in fact read me correctly. I don't really think moral obligations exist at all, and I don't think anything has moral "authority" over anything else either. In my opinion we are all just acting on our own desires regarding ourselves and the state of the world in general, and any appeals to sacred ideas or abstract concepts or moral authorities or moral obligations is just an attempt to project our own desires out onto the world so we can pretend they are objective, to hide from ourselves the fact that everything we do and want is ultimately equally arbitrary and without justification or legitimation. E.g., I'm a moral nihilist, not even a moral relativist. So for me, it would be fine for environmentalists to say that they want to fight for environmental causes because they want to preserve humanity's standard of living and well-being, or because they want the environment to look and be treated a certain way because that's simply how they desire it and it makes them happy — and many environmentalists do phrase things in that way in which case I don't have a problem with them — but it annoys me when they try to project their desires outwards and pretend like they are objective. > But I suppose it really depends on what you mean by the Earth being "fine" in the end. Obviously, as a large chunk of iron, silicates, oxygen, carbon, et al, the Earth will continue its journey through space for a long time to come. Some forms of life will certainly persist for a few hundred million years until such time as it becomes uninhabitable due to stellar evolution. But if we humans are to wreak our own destruction, we will be far from the first species we remove from this Earth; we've already set about a mass extinction that will register in the geographic record. This is certainly a very fair point, and a good response to what I was saying! However, I think the thing we have to remember is that mass extinctions have happened before, so if humanity wipes itself out and takes a huge amount of species with it, that's still well within the range of things the Earth has experienced before, even if it is happening faster than it would usually have done. After all, the actions of humans themselves are actions that are part of nature, and so we can consider ourselves fucking up the environment and extincting ourselves and a bunch of other animals as part of a natural cycle of adaptation just like any other species over hunting and starving itself to extinction or something. We just weren't fit to survive, in that case. Furthermore, independent of how we define earth being fine, I do think my point about moral obligations still stands from my perspective. I don't want people to stop caring about the environment, and I'll support that care, and honestly if some people even really want to enforce their Christian ideas of purity and virginity onto the environment then very well — they can continue fighting for that, and I'll just simply ignore them, but at least be truthful!
• gonzo41 3y ago
  If you submerge yourself in water, like elephants do in the hot of the day. you can survive really high wetbulb temps. It's the days of continuous hot nights that's the issue.
• tasty_freeze 3y ago
  Really, that is the worry, that "We are destroying the earth" as a metaphor? People are confused by this? If I said, "Be careful how you lift that heavy sack or you will destroy your back" would you complain that while you might suffer a debilitating injury, your back will not literally be destroyed? Of course what people mean when they warn about the destruction of the earth is that it is going to have profound and unpleasant effects on the climate system, which in turn affects which parts of the world are favorable to human and animal life. Those changes will cause large scale economic changes, population dislocations, and thus political stability.
  • macNchz 3y ago
    I do think a lot of people have a concept of “the environment” not so much as it being our singular shared home, but as some sort of vague notion of National Parks and sea turtles, that are nice to protect but not especially relevant to day-to-day life. Given the way many people treat their own private homes, however, I’m not entirely convinced that the distinction is relevant to behavior, though.
• Scarblac 3y ago
  > Environmental concerns are selfish. That's overstating it. Yes, life will go on. But it's not only us that will die - as you say, much of the marine ecosystem will die off, we're not the only animal that has problems with wet bulb temperature (most don't even sweat), and humanity isn't going to die of starvation before we make everything remotely edible out there extinct first. Life is going to look extremely different, it's not just us.
  • exoverito 3y ago
    [flagged]
    • silverquiet 3y ago
      I’d note that stellar output was significantly lower during the Carboniferous and there’s a lot of range between the Earth’s current climate and Venus that are still really bad. I don’t entirely disagree with the religious thing, but what always struck me as the most bizarre belief was denial of the basic science of climate change; did people really believe that humanity could dump unlimited amounts of carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas, into the atmosphere with no consequence?
    • arp242 3y ago
      > The apocalyptic climate change visions where we end up like Venus are unscientific It is. It's also a fringe belief that's not held by anyone serious speaking on the subject.
      • adastra22 3y ago
        Who do you listen to speaking on the subject? It is brought up constantly. You can have a documentary on TV about climate change without bringing up Venus as a cautionary tale, for example. People who concern themselves with climate change genuinely think it will lead to mass human die offs, in my experience.
        • api 3y ago
• bryanlarsen 3y ago
  "The Earth is fine": of course, it's a giant ball of rock. A few degrees isn't going to affect it. "~90% of species are fucked": it's not the magnitude of the change, it's the speed. The climate is changing on a decades-long time scale, and that's too fast for most species and ecosystems to adapt. The corollary there is that ~10% of species will be fine, and thrive. Like every mass extinction event the world will look a lot different pre and post-extinction but it will "survive". Humans aren't fucked. We had pre-industrial humans living in both the Arctic and the Sahara. We adapt the environment to us, and we migrate quickly. If we destroy the environment we can grow food in greenhouses. It'll be crazy expensive, but we'll survive. The speed at which India is currently adopting A/C shows how all but the bottom billion of humans are already adapting to climate change. The bottom billion is fucked, unless the top billion stops whining and starts doing something. The status quo is fucked. We're a bunch of spoiled brats that think 10% inflation and the end of the world are calamities of similar magnitude. If you want to get a good handle on what true hardship is like, talk to a refugee or a member of the greatest generation. (Do it quick, that means somebody ~100 years old). Is civilization fucked? It depends on how well it adapts, and what your definition of "fucked" is. (see above).
  • lebean 3y ago
    As long as the top billion lets the bottom billion develop like they have and use cheap energy, humans will continue to be fine. Good, even.
    • bryanlarsen 3y ago
      The bottom billion lives on $2 a day. It doesn't matter how cheap energy is, they can't afford it. OTOH your comment does apply to the second billion. There's no energy cheaper than solar power, and solar powered air conditioning is a great supply/demand match.
  • mp05 3y ago
    > unless the top billion stops whining and starts doing something. The most vocal whiners I know still drive a giant 4Runner and get new skis every year. > We're a bunch of spoiled brats that think 10% inflation and the end of the world are calamities of similar magnitude. What's the point of this statement? What solution are you suggesting that will directly lead to inflation? Reduced employment? Carbon taxes? > fucked. fucked. fucked? Lay off the John Oliver.
• insane_dreamer 3y ago
  > Environmental concerns are selfish. They’re about protecting our civilization and our quality of life. The Earth and its ecosystem will change and adapt as usual, but that doesn’t mean we will. This is stating the obvious. Of course we're concerned with our own survival and being able to live comfortably in it. I don't see much of a problem them. As far as the ecosystem adapting, yeah, eventually, but at the cost of thousands/millions of species, as in the previous extinction events.
• arp242 3y ago
  > Environmental concerns are selfish. I don't see how this comment connects with what you're writing in your own comment. How is it selfish to want to avoid needlessly suffering, as you're describing yourself ("heat waves where people without A/C die")? Obviously the earth as a habitable planet will be fine in the long run, and some people have said some exaggerated, even hysterical, things about this. But that doesn't mean the concerns aren't valid. And everything will be fine "in the long run", so it's also one of those discussion-stopper arguments you can apply to almost everything.
  • nostrademons 3y ago
    The point is that the environmental argument has been "Save the planet!", when the actual motive is "Save our civilization!" The planet will be fine, because as apex predators, humanity is going to be one of the first species to go extinct with a major environmental change, and then the rest of the biosphere will adapt to our disappearance. Hell, many individual humans will probably be fine, because the ability to run a complex environment-destroying civilization disappears well before all the individual humans do. However, that's cold comfort to people who depend on modern societal conveniences, or the many people who will die. GP's point is more about intellectual honesty, but there's also a pragmatic bent to it. Many of the people who most reject climate change interventionism might be swayed by a line of argumentation that goes "You care more about the economy than the environment? You won't have an economy if the environment is disturbed enough."
    • konschubert 3y ago
      > the ability to run a complex environment-destroying civilization disappears well before all the individual humans do There are self-reinforcing loops of climate change that can cause runaway warming.
      • nostrademons 3y ago
        Sure. The ones actually likely to happen on earth top out at about 5-10C warming above present. At that point negative feedback cycles (like the CO2 greening effect mentioned in the article) dominate positive feedback cycles (like release of methane from the arctic tundra, or lowered albedo from ice melting), and the Earth enters a new equilibrium. The IPCC maintains that a runaway greenhouse effect which turns the earth into say Venus has basically nil chance of being caused by humans: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Runaway_greenhouse_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Runaway_greenhouse_effect
• dkasper 3y ago
  It basically comes down to long term pain vs short term pain. I don’t think many people would have a problem with improving our civilization’s quality of life in the long run if it didn’t cause any lifestyle changes in the present. That’s a reason why Tesla’s marketing has worked; you can not only be “green” but also drive one of the fastest cars on the planet.
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• logtempo 3y ago
  > The whole environmental movement made a mistake framing things as a moralistic struggle to “save the Earth, pandas and pinguins.” Like George Carlin famously said on this subject: “the Earth will be fine. We’re fucked. I think the whole environmental movement have/had no power against the whole industry movement, and the "save the earth" call was the only accepted by the dominant class (aka industry and its leaders). Also Mr. Nobody don't wanted to give up his car, his investments, and his overall lifestyle for some pessimist hippies that love trees or scientist that don't know the real world. Things are changing because of a single reason: industry and economy is affected a little bit by the climate change.