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I thought this was going to be a post about the NYT fretting about "backlash" to the Kill the Boer song.
On topic, the climate radicalization I see forming is turning me into a "climate change denier". I am agnostic on the impact of human emissions on the climate and tend to assume that the basic described effect of CO2 upregulating temperature is probably right, but I am increasingly seeing framing of "climate catastrophe" and "existential threat", to which I think just outright saying that this isn't happening is probably closer to the truth than some middle-ground. In the same way that "Covid is just a cold bro" would get closer to my preferred policies than "Covid is a very serious emergency", I think "climate change is not a big deal and has always happened" will be closer to my preferred policies than "climate change is literally going to end humanity" and I probably have to pick a side.
What makes me doubt the honesty of climate change activists is the way they bundle their politics. If you think we’re all going to fry, then that’s all that matters. Recruit nationalists and Marxists and monster truck enthusiasts. Be open to any policy. Try to figure out ways that people can keep as many as possible of the things they love.
But of course this isn’t what we get at all.
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Try not to do this.
To decide that you've had it up to here with the three or so well-funded idiots who make up Just Stop Oil and that you are going to hold your nose and sign up with the "I don't mind if the third world fries, it's hot out there I'm not surprised" crowd is a perfectly normal human response, and if at least some people do it it creates good incentives for activists not to be idiots. (Although I suspect that giving noisy idiots rent-free space in your head is bad for the soul). But that is a change in political tactics - changing your views on a factual question based on the noisy idiocy of a bunch of randos is irrational. If 550ppm CO2 is in fact as bad for humanity as the IPCC says it is, then this is the kind of fact that does not care about your feelings.
I don't want the world to fry, is the thing. I want good arguments, I want people to make a strong case, I want effective tactics and some kind of thought-out plan.
"Hey amn't I cool with my 'kill the rich' stupidity" is not that. Like Sandy from the Block turning up at the Met Gala with her Eat The Rich dress.
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That's only under the old 'business as usual' models. And only by 2050, even if we were on such a course. If we are worried about climate change in 2050 then that's a medium-good outcome, since we're here worrying at all.
Seeing as the IPCC never mentions 'existential' in its most recent report with the exception of low islands, climate change is something that can go on the backburner IMO.
Isn’t climate change being expensive and uncomfortable in the long run a good enough reason to think about it, though?
It's a lot less expensive and uncomfortable than many of the proposed solutions. A nuclear hellscape is expensive and uncomfortable, but I'd probably pick that over Full Communism Now.
Sure (though I think you underestimate nuclear hellscape), but we can just not listen to the batshit stuff and take the useful solutions as they are. Things like nuclear plants?
Though of course that runs into environmentalists blowing an aneurysm because they don’t understand it.
My point is that this issue in particular is worth thinking about for sensible people even if the loudest group talking about it are lunatics.
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I mean, there is an actual point there about "all the campaigns aimed at inducing guilt in you, Ordinary Person, about how it's your responsibility to stop living your life are meaningless because look at the outsized influence just one megacorporation has in this situation".
But they managed to bury that by their stupid stunt over "killing an oil exec" and now they've made this point worse than useless.
I think part of the problem is that climate activism in general and Sunrise and Just Stop Oil in particular are run by people who are good at talking money out of left-wing foundations, not by people who understand climate. (This is recent - Al Gore knew what he was talking about when he was the public face of climate activism). So they tend to think of the policy problem as a fundamental moral problem whose solution needs to be enforced by the State, not as a fundamentally technical problem whose solutions need state support to implement. And the preferred frame on the stupid left is something like "All major social problems are easy to solve and the only reason they haven't already been solved is that the people in charge are mean." So there is a lot of climate left effort going into allocating blame to a small number of rich people, rather than the general mass of middle-class people consooming carbon-intensive product.
The problem is that blame is not something you can measure with a thermometer. It doesn't matter whether the carbon emissions produced by commuting to a desk job in a F150 are morally the fault of Ford shareholders, Ford executives, Ford employees, Oil company executives, oil company shareholders, oil company employees, the banks that financed them, the politicians that set up the system they operate under, or the driver. Whatever the moral arguments, at a practical level the person who has to change their lifestyle to stop those emissions entering the atmosphere is the driver.
Voted down for sneering.
Just hit the downvote button, it is not necessary to make sure everyone knows you downvoted someone.
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My ordinary life is supported by the megacorporation. The reason that jets wind up emitting a bunch of CO2 is because a bunch of people like me like going cool places around the world; I'll even use credit card tricks to get the nice first-class seats, so I can enjoy a nap and a moderate priced wine on board. Manufacturing and construction companies profit off of Ordinary People like me buying houses, the oil companies get money when I go for a two-hour drive for no reason other than to watch a basketball game and hang out in a different town, and so on. I eat meat happily, order things on Amazon, and do all sorts of other things that use energy.
I say this not because I feel guilty - I don't feel even the slightest bit of guilt about the matter, but because I'm not mad at the executives either. They make their money running companies that make the incredible modern standard of living possible, and they do so by burning a shitload of fossil fuels. When someone wants an exec unalived for the crime of building a company that sells things that people want, the point is still that I actually should not be allowed to purchase those things.
Everything you say? Exactly. That's how the oil execs make the goddamn money in the first place - you, me and the people making the stupid graphic all use the benefits of modern industrial civilisation that runs off oil. "Kill the execs (in Minecraft)" does fuck-all for the problem, because we're all the problem.
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I've found that climate change activists universally want to restrict things they never wanted to do anyway. Like own pickup trucks and have (White American) babies. While either excusing or explicitly defending things they want to do or think others should be allowed to do like leisure air travel and third world fertility. It's not exactly fake, but it is always convenient.
I suspect an argument over whether ideology or cultural disdain is prior would end up in a similar place as the endless musical chairs games of "Do religious restrictions on sexuality focus primarily on controlling women?"
There are plenty of people in the UK who campaign against airport expansion on climate grounds but whose lifestyles rely on cheap flights - I don't think the climate movement is excusing leisure air travel.
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See also - people who were "ethical vegetarians" that got to tack on climate change as a reason later. Additionally, Covid lockdown enthusiasts who I wouldn't describe as the most social people beforehand. If I didn't know better, I'd have suggested that they might have kind of enjoyed the removal of social obligations.
As you suggest in the second paragraph, I don't think this is entirely cynical anymore than my defense of eating beef is entirely cynical. People tend to wind up with politics that align with what they kind of wanted to do anyway. It takes a fair bit of intellectual rigor to actually stop doing something that you want to do on the basis that your politics demand it.
Hey now, don't lump in ethical vegetarianism with climate change whackos. Factory farming (read: torturing billions of animals from birth to death) is evil, full stop. I have a lot of respect for people that stop eating meat on moral grounds.
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While you’re correct that first world environmental activists definitely tend to focus on things they aren’t big fans of doing themselves anyways- pickups, steaks, and babies being prominent examples- the idea that they generally support high third world fertility rates is not supported by available evidence. Population control campaigns in the third world have historically been driven by donor money that’s at least adjacent to the environmental movement in the US and Europe, as supporting evidence.
The idea that there isn’t a core of committed first world environmentalists willing to accept serious personal sacrifices is also false, although it is almost certainly true that there’s lots of them who are just after the pussy that doesn’t shower very often. Things like tree sitting and riding your bike everywhere have a long history in the US. They’re retarded personal sacrifices, but they definitely are personal sacrifices.
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With younger people especially, a lot of climate activists seem to lean towards an extreme, almost fatalistic view of the situation and consequently advocate things like mass deindustrialization and other civilization-suicide-adjacent solutions. As much as I appreciate the writings of Kaczynski, these solutions seem absurd without even getting into practicality.
The number of people with these views seems to be steadily growing at a rate I'm not sure I can fully credit to media coverage. Is it cyclical? Can anybody here that was around in the 70s provide some context? Maybe it's just edgy kids using twitter as an unprecedentedly powerful megaphone and we're still at the same base rate of this sort of thinking. Or maybe it's just a manifestation of greater general polarization.
See also: this stonetoss edit. Being nuclear-optimistic is now right-coded somehow.
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I have non-edgy barely online friends in their 30s who seem to think a local political party's throwaway idea of the government rationing car and plane travel is what we need. These friends do travel more than they would be allowed under that scheme and they do admit it, but they basically just say "it'd suck, but that's the kind of decisive action we would need" and excitedly talk up the idea to everyone.
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