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Because the point of 'climate advocacy' isn't controlling the weather. It's demanding every left wing idea under the sun get enacted, and spending trillions to do it. See also: nuclear energy.
I think that you're mischaracterising the thought process of climate activists. They're not pretending to care about the climate. They do actually care about it. It's just that most of the loud ones also have a bunch of other causes and are unwilling to "sully" themselves by compromising any of their other causes in order to more effectively oppose global warming. You can't do nuclear, because radiation is bad. You can't subsidise corporations without DIE, because DIE is important. And on it goes.
They're absolutely guilty of refusing to accept "impure" solutions, and thus of refusing to think realistically, but it's not intended as a Trojan Horse.
Isn’t that just social signaling with extra steps? If I really truly believe that something is an existential threat to humans, I’m not going to let petty politics on other subjects get in the way of fixing it. If I believe that AGI is going to kill humanity, I’ll throw everything else aside to deal with that threat. Work with fascists and communists, give up on other goals for a time — or even be willing to have some progress rolled back, even democracy might be on the table. If the choice is an absolute nightmare government— no human rights, open racism, the environment gets destroyed— but we avoid extinction, then it might well be worth it. You can clean up those other problems if you survive, and if you don’t survive none of those other things actually matter.
That is the correct response, given that you are all of: rational, consequentialist, and not convinced that success will occur regardless.
However, most people are not consequentialists, and many people are not rational.
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I don't think you're completely wrong here, but I feel like pointing out that climate change is actually happening and taking place. It is a real and serious problem, and if you have lived in a coastal area long enough to see the changes they're not really deniable anymore. There really is something happening and it really is causing big problems for the environment and the future. The idea that we can simply make one intervention and "fix" the climate without any second-order consequences strikes me as a bit short-sighted to boot.
That doesn't mean there aren't an army of scammers and grifters out to use that problem for their own advantage - Goldman Sachs is not being selfless when they advocate for a complicated carbon credit scheme which would let them make millions of dollars for no work at all. Plenty of prominent climate "activists" have the carbon footprint of entire cities in the third world (private air travel being one of the biggest contributors) and do nothing except make the position they're advocating less credible. But the fact that people are using the situation to grift and profiteer doesn't mean the problem isn't real. A snake-oil salesman selling you a miracle cure isn't providing an actual treatment for your condition, but the fact that a snake oil salesman is trying to sell to you isn't an argument against your condition existing.
My point was less that 'climate change is not real' or 'climate change is not a problem' and more 'the number of climate activists who are aiming principally at counteracting or reducing the effects of climate change is quite literally zero. The number of them who are primarily concerned with some other agenda is 100% not due to rounding but in a totally literal sense. The watermelon meme is generally accurate-ish and environmentalists are usually just generic left wing activists greenwashing their agenda'.
If you disagree with me, name some counterexamples. Elon Musk is not really an activist for environmental issues, so don't start there.
I've never met a climate activist (or, just a person who sanctimoniously talks about climate change) that seems emotionally invested in the ecosystem the way I personally am. They find natural areas scary and gross and there might be rural white right-wingers there, ew.
I think environmentalism starts with picking up trash and keeping natural functional ecosystems intact. Every river, stream, creek, and brook in the Midwest has had its water sources fucked by roads.
Nah, say what you will there are a lot of stinky left hippie eco activists with dreadlocks who genuinely do spend a lot of time camping in nature, foraging for wild mushrooms, living in weird communes with other leftists in the middle of nowhere, tending to some patch of forest etc.
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I work in the energy sector. I have a number of colleagues whose primary motivation for their work is combatting climate change, and not other political goals
Are they activist that go to environment rallies and protests?
No, but some are known people within the industry so it's not just randoms
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Sure - me. I support some left wing policies but my stance on climate activism has little to do with those, and I'm not a communist (I'm open about my political ideology - distributism). Though in the interests of full disclosure, I think that many of the current sources of climate pollution are terrible for everyone involved and should be stopped, but for some of those cases concerns about the climate aren't the only factor. The Iraq War had a massive carbon footprint, but I'm not going to lie and claim that my opposition to it revolved around environmental concerns.
If that's not good enough, there's a local political party which takes the climate seriously and isn't interested in simply applying left-wing policies (notably being against massive amounts of immigration) - the Sustainable Australia party. I'd throw John Michael Greer onto the list as a conservative, but he isn't really a climate change activist - he thinks that it is already baked into the cake and the only thing that people can really do is make better and more sustainable choices in their personal lives.
Would you accept a rollback on trans issues, gun control, immigration, and other right-wing issues in order to get allies against climate change? Because that's the problem. Climate change is urgent when it comes to "you have to give up something" but is suddenly not so urgent when it comes to "we have to give up something".
I said that I support some leftist policies, not that I actually am left-wing. The specific issues you listed are ones that I don't actually care about - trans issues are just not something I think are particularly relevant, but I support gun rights and I'm also against immigration (because it damages labour and the environment both). So you're essentially asking me to agree to a bunch of policies I actually support - in which case the answer is hell yes.
This is actually one of the main reasons that the climate change movement failed - people saw that a lot of the most prominent activists wanted to preserve their own carbon consumption habits while shoving the costs onto others (especially people in the wage class). I personally walk my talk and do my best to minimise my own carbon footprint, and there's no way I could look someone in the eyes and tell them it was important if I wasn't willing to make my own sacrifices.
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Can you name public figures? It seems like there's some mostly-not-environmentalist figures who have concern about climate change, but no environmentalists who support nuclear power, hydropower, other reasonable carbon solutions.
I'm going to have a tough time naming public figures because the forces (in the non-conspiratorial sense) that make figures public aren't actually big fans of people who are talking seriously about these issues - public cognitive bandwidth is reserved for more important figures like Baby Gronk, The Rizzler and the Hawk Tuah girl. I've seen a lot of environmentalists and green activists support things like hydro, geothermal and wind as well - but those power sources have limits which mean they can't be scaled up to the level required to support modern first world lifestyles. There's nothing wrong with hydropower per se, but there are only so many places you can actually build a dam and get a decent return on your investment. Geothermal, if appropriately developed, might even be able to supply 10% of our energy needs in the future - which is great, but not an actual answer to the dilemma we're facing.
But that said, you have several large obstacles in the way of convincing environmentalists to support nuclear. Nuclear power as it is currently available to us does not provide enough energy returned on energy invested for it to be a viable option even without the costs of dealing with waste. France's nuclear power system was only viable because they bought Uranium at a 97% discount due to their exploitation of Africa, and even their system has had to be nationalised due to going bankrupt. Hypothetical nuclear reactors which generate electricity too cheap to meter have been 20 years in the future since the 1960s, but are still yet to materialise. When they do appear and generate enough electricity to pay for their own creation without a galaxy of government subsidies, I will be extremely happy and advocate building them all over the globe as soon as possible - but they haven't appeared, despite people promising that they will for half a century.
Compared to what? As far as I know it easily beats under reasonable operating assumptions almost everything except for fossil fuels. Are you talking about energy return on investment or financial return on investment? The cost of uranium that France paid has nothing to do with EROI. But in any case, the cost of uranium is, at this time, a miniscule cost of nuclear plant operation. The current high cost of nuclear plant operation has much more to do with deliberate regulatory sabotage than the inherent cost of the technology. There are, as we speak, newer, safer, more efficient reactors that have been designed and even passed through the arduous DOE approval process such as the AP1000 - not hypothetical in the least - but the high cost of legal construction delays and regulatory uncertainty makes commitment to construction very difficult and until very recently the DOE has been extremely reluctant to approve almost any experimental or prototype reactors, often on the grounds that the technology was not proven and so the risks could not be quantified - an obviously self-fulfilling state of affairs. They are being deployed in other more pragmatic countries. That said, I personally thing the prevailing LWR uranium cycle is terribly inefficient and a technological dead end, but it still generates an incredible amount of power.
That has started to change and in addition to the small modular reactors that are nearing market availability, serious followup to the molten salt reactor research that was done in the 1960's may finally be moving forward. However, I don't anticipate this will change many peoples' minds about whether they oppose nuclear power - it will just change the reasons. And sadly, the U.S. is playing from far behind other countries, especially China, in terms of building and testing experimental and prototype reactors. I don't doubt that many other countries will be deploying Chinese reactors, which we will of course refuse to do out of sheer pig-headedness and because we still have lots of fossil fuels to consume, and all the while people will be claiming that nuclear power just isn't practical enough.
Compared to the energy needs of continuing current western lifestyles and patterns of consumption into the future, which is the only comparison that actually matters. Current nuclear technology, even with rosy assumptions, isn't capable of doing it. I would love to be proven wrong, with an example of a profitable nuclear power system with an EROEI that can support a modern first world economy, but I don't think that can happen. The reason I bring up profitability and cost is that they are ultimately a reflection of viability, and probably our most accurate one (which is why France's cheap uranium is relevant). I'll also freely grant that nuclear power does have some use-cases - it is fantastic for submarines and aircraft carriers for one, but it has yet to be demonstrated that it can be a viable energy base for a modern first-world economy. I can believe that regulatory burdens contribute to making nuclear power less productive, but I think at least some of those regulatory burdens are actually good (your nuclear plant should not be dumping radioactive waste in the local primary school playground etc), and I don't believe they are enough of a burden that removing them would make nuclear that much better of an option.
I'll believe it when I see it. This is explicitly what I was talking about when I mentioned hypothetical reactors. They have been "nearing" market availability for several decades now, and I can remember being excited for those liquid molten salt reactors ten years ago myself. Maybe you're right and this time is different, but I'll need a bit more evidence than the same claims of imminent cheap and sustainable energy that have been made for longer than I have been alive. That said, if you're right and those future nuclear reactors actually do just solve all the energy problems we're facing then I'll be extremely happy and update my flair on here to reflect that I was wrong (and keep it that way forever).
Specifically regarding EROI, this makes it sounds like you're calling for continuing to use fossil fuels.
I disagree, the politics are too fucked and the regulatory environment too insane for cost to be a reliable predictor of viability. As I said, the price of uranium is practically a rounding error in plant operation, so France's uranium deal, whatever it was, is basically irrelevant. Actual fuel, including all the expensive processing and assembly which is unaffected by raw uranium prices, still only accounts for something like 20% of a plant's costs. Obviously I am not arguing for having no regulations, just that there might be a rational middle ground between "dumping radioactive waste in the local primary school playground" and the current status quo of "store all of it in the least efficient possible way." We actually created a facility specifically for this, and then just decided not to use for essentially no good reason.
However the recent regulations definitely strangled the industry. The lack of any clarity as to permitting, approvals, and timelines made capital investment impossible. It just isn't possible to underwrite a billion dollar project without some assurance that it won't be litigated for multiple decades, or ultimately rejected halfway into construction. As has been discussed in other contexts, allowing indefinite project blockers is usually sufficient to make it a soft rejection. There is no scientific or practical reason that the law needs to be so ambiguous and burdensome. As I said, it has recently improved and some of the first new reactors since the 1970's have finally started to come online.
However, it's unlikely new reactors will "solve all the energy problems we're facing"* because fossil fuels still exist and will still be cheaper.
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Whores have been around forever? Like being a sexy lady for money doesn't require much explanation. It's called 'the oldest profession' for a reason.
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You’ve been warned before for sweeping generalizations and for lazy sarcasm. This is both. If you can’t make a point without putting words in your subject’s mouths, don’t.
Free Palestine
Vegan
Abolish capitalism
Limit birth rates
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