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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   2364 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for December 15, 2024

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Why are the activists and politicians preoccupied with climate change when fighting pollution is more doable, easier to gather support for, actually fosters innovation and chances of reducing it - will meaningfully help with CO2 emissions anyway?

Have you read The Toxoplasma Of Rage? Things everyone agree on don't get much attention, it's just the way our societies are wired.

when fighting pollution is more doable, easier to gather support for, actually fosters innovation and chances of reducing it

Real pollution-fighting activists exist. But they are usually much less visible than the climate gasbags. And, gives as fighting pollution is pretty much normalized now, it doesn't gain more attention than any other case of malfeasance like fraud or theft. I mean, you need to do a real lot of it to be noticed, and usually it will be dealt with before it becomes big.

There also could be a possibility that having a big problem which is somebody else's fault but you can protest it and whine about it as much as you want, and blame literally everything on it - is actually much more attractive than solving small-scale, practical and solve-able problems? I mean, if you can just fix the emission of a local factory by upgrading its air filters and that's it - where's the moral superiority in that? Where's the damnation of soul-less capitalism? Where's the potential for annual lavish festivals where you can shmooze with Hollywood celebrities and vane billionaires? Most people want to be Warriors of Light, not utility inspectors.

Pollution gets plenty of attention. See the op-eds about how Trump is going to personally shit in your drinking water.

On the position page you linked the word "climate" appeared 9 times in 334 words, and the only reference to any other form of pollution was "quality of our air, water, and land." It begins and ends talking about climate change and trump not believing in climate change, and in the middle there's some stuff about climate change. That's the entire environment policy statement summary.

The interesting part is the backing down from the "Climate Crisis!" phasing that was so popular until recently. But they don't even mention any specific non-climate environmental issues. Nothing about fracking of course, but also nothing about sulphur, acid rain, lead, freon and the ozone layer, racist highway noise, deforestation, or endangered species (seriously, not a single spotted owl or polar bear in sight!). If you're young you have no idea how different this looks to the early 00s.

They've completely dropped the messaging on all of those things, and it seems like they only persist in the niches they do through bureaucratic inertia, and because they're still making money for some client group.

I agree that climate change gets the lion’s share of messaging, especially in outward-facing, soundbite-oriented places like that website. It has won the coveted position of shorthand for its whole cluster of related policy.

I don’t actually think that indicates loss of support for the old policies. More that their low-hanging fruit has been picked. Or, I guess, that the bureaucracy to do so has already been put in place.

when fighting pollution is more doable, easier to gather support for, actually fosters innovation and chances of reducing it - will meaningfully help with CO2

I don't think this is true. Can you elaborate on that?

The big CO2 producers in a modern economy (and even in a modern economy with significant heavy industry) are producing CO2 without adding much pollution otherwise. Gas turbines dump clean CO2 exhaust by design, and much of cement and chemical production also runs on natural gas. Coal plants have marched down the learning curve for 100 years, exhaust gas treatment is extensive and effective. The remaining steel mills still running blast furnaces instead of electric arc furnaces also already need to treat their exhaust.

The only semi-low hanging fruit I could think of is further cleaning up the diesels used in transport, construction and agriculture. But again, you can reduce pollution here a bit, but until batteries improve further, those processes will emit exactly as much CO2 as before you've reduced pollution.

And sure, we probably should flat-out ban two-strokes. But I doubt you'd even save 1% of global CO2, even if pollution in certain cities would improve noticeably. And objectively - both from a pollution an greenhouse gas perspective - we probably also should ban any and all large-scale livestock operations. But the effect on meat prices would be absurdly unpopular almost everywhere.

It will help. The more expensive you make bunker fuel/diesel/coal (and you make the companies producing them pay for storage of the mountains of sulfur for example) the more operators will look to other technologies or try to squeeze more productivity from the more expensive fuel. It will also put upward price pressure on lpg and natural gas where they can replace them. Look how li ion moved from exotic and expensive to disposable vapes in decade and a half. Free market is extremely capable of delivering solutions when someone puts the right problems.

Yeah, but those are all classic decarbonization measures, right? Yes, those work. But the premise was to use a pollution argument instead.

Unless you want to simply rename "decarbonization" into "reducing pollution" (and people will resist that, a gas turbine just doesn't produce enough black smoke or yellow water), this won't work. It's too easy to reduce visible pollution while keeping carbon emissions exactly the same.

I'm normally supportive of the stance that capitalism+innovation converges to most efficient outcomes, but that is true only for local contexts. Bunker fuel is just burnt in international waters and the world collectively shrugs and says 'fuck the fish'. Economics is one thing but absolution of responsibility does exist. The only reason there isnt a floating migrant fleet of slave-labour factories is that efficient capital planning beats out deregulation.

In the West, pollution has been getting better not worse. So it can't be an apocalyptic threat.

Climate change also can't be an apocalyptic threat on any reasonable timescale either (as seen in the IPCC reports) but it's easier to pretend that it is because it's a 'bad, getting worse' situation.

I don't think most people look at climate change narratives from first principles either, we've had 30 years of increasingly intense media indoctrination and prestige-class opinion-forming. It's all but locked in. Many people see Bjorn Lomberg and immediately think 'debunked/denier/paid-off/Newscorp shill'... They don't want to change their minds and so they can find some reason not to. I don't like changing my mind either. The Aztecs didn't doubt that you had to sacrifice humans on the altars, that's just what you do.

The Aztecs didn't doubt that you had to sacrifice humans on the altars, that's just what you do.

I keep coming back to this [folk theorem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folk_theorem_(game_theory), which points to a fucked up equilibrium where many/most Aztecs don't believe in human sacrifice, but believe they will be punished by others if they don't do it or punish others.

Have you ever heard the expression 'watermelon'? Green(environmentalist) on the outside, red(communist) on the inside. No doubt a few of these people are true believers(Greta seems to be), but most of them like environmentalism because they've already decided environmental prescriptions are good for other reasons.

Greta seems to be

Until she started talking about how fighting global warming is really about Palestine. The omnicause.

Was reviewing my "saved" posts, and it looks like I saved this intending to reply to it asking you to clarify the relevance of your link, since it doesn't seem to mention Greta, climate, Palestine, or the word "omnicause".

Ah, I think the bit I was referencing was below the paywall. Here's what I was quoting:

  1. The Palestine protests

I recently wrote a post about the Palestine protests that sums up much of what I think here: Palestine is the end of the line for the New Left

Basically, I think that although Israel’s war in Gaza is unpopular, the Palestine protesters are earning few friends in the U.S., thanks to their support for even the most violent and savage armed resistance, their desire to forcibly and bloodily redraw national maps in the name of “decolonization”, their aggressive protest tactics, and the whiff of antisemitism around their movement.

But there’s another important effect of the Palestine protests besides boring and annoying the American populace. Leftists have attempted to subsume every progressive cause — climate change, racial justice, abortion rights, gender equality, trans rights, even affordable housing — into the Palestine issue. Many have started to call this the “omnicause”.

And because Palestinian revanchism is an unpopular cause, and because the protesters have generally acquitted themselves badly, Palestine threatens to drag down all the other progressive activist causes into an abyss of unpopularity. Climate activism, trans rights activism, etc. will now have a whiff of radicalism about them that they didn’t possess before — there will be a general understanding that folks like Greta Thunberg ultimately aim not at the redress of individual problems in the framework of our existing society, but at the violent overthrow of that society in the name of “decolonization”.

Most progressives are not leftists. Most thought Thunberg was cute when she was a kid shouting at old men about her stolen future, but will be less impressed by her keffiyeh-wearing incarnation. But leftist activists hurt the progressive cause, by giving a movement that should seem staid and responsible the whiff of 70s-style radicalism. Progressives are far more institutionally powerful than they were in the 70s — they command the majority of the professional and managerial classes, and they occupy positions of power in corporations, academia, and the government. But when leftist activists are out there setting the tone on national news night after night, it makes progressivism seems like a movement that will never stop, never be satisfied, and never settle down.

That perception will drive a lot of Americans in a conservative direction.

I believe because what many actually oppose is wealth (and differences in wealth) CO2 is just the best pretext that's far more popular.

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