cafeamericainmag.com
There has been a lot of CW discussion on climate change. This is an article written by someone that used to strongly believe in anthropogenic global warming and then looked at all the evidence before arriving at a different conclusion. The articles goes through what they did.
I thought a top-level submission would be more interesting as climate change is such a hot button topic and it would be good to have a top-level spot to discuss it for now. I have informed the author of this submission; they said they will drop by and engage with the comments here!
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Notes -
Is this true? Many of the proposals you identify with left wing now-more-than-everism emerged as reactions to climate change and other environmental problems. Others are of questionable popularity even on the far left (anti-natalism and mandatory vegetarianism are distinctly marginal position). Beyond that, you have boring centrist proposals like carbon taxes and emissions regulations (in fact, these are prone to being vilified by far left activists for being insufficiently radical, probably because they're more likely to be implemented).
In any event, it seems of little surprise that most proposed solutions for climate change are left-coded when the standard right-wing position is that climate change either isn't real or isn't a problem. The argument takes place almost entirely between the center and the left because the right refuses to participate.
Vegetarianism/Veganism has already been extremely popular on the left due to animal sympathy, and they can be quite pushy about proselytising. Mandatory Veganism is imo a weakman. Anti-natalism is the same; Having less kids has been quite popular on the left (arguably in general) because it means less obligations, more money you can spend on hedonistic pleasures, more time to do whatever you want. In both cases, climate justifications have come long, long after people argued for & adopted the change in the first place.
Also disagree on the second point. If you're actually seriously trying to tackle a problem, you'll usually end up with some technical, politically agnostic solution. If I notice that a certain widely used statistical measure is biased by, say, base rates, then I'll just recalculate it with a correction term, write a proof that the correction term indeed does what it should and maybe write a paper about it. I don't advocate that more BIPOC representation will somehow solve it (well, maybe I'll advocate for more statisticians, but that's not considered political yet). If engineers notice a turbine having a rare but potentially dangerous unexpected failure mode, they'll add a component to compensate or re-design it.
The bare minimum requirement to even begin considering the statement "vegetarianism/veganism has already been extremely popular on the left" truthful would be a majority of leftists being vegetarian or vegan, which isn't even true here, where these things probably have a stronger hold on left consciousness than most other countries, and hasn't been remotely true in any of the other countries I've visited and where I've encountered leftists.
FWIW, a large part, possibly majority but at least close to 50%, of our college-educated left-leaning friends (and it's not even unpopular among our non-college-educated friends) is some kind of vegetarian. Among those who aren't, the majority is constantly stressing how little meat they're eating. The line between them is pretty fuzzy, since there's a decent number of people who claim to not eat meat at home, but sometimes outside when there's no other option, and these people will sometimes consider themselves vegetarian anyway, sometimes not. Almost nobody is an unabashed meat eater. As justifications go, animal sympathy is at the top for the stricter vegetarians, health benefits for the less strict (this actually includes myself), climate considerations are generally second line ("and btw it's also good for the climate I've heard").
Surprisingly, this did not greatly change when we became parents; Yes there's very few super-militant vegetarian parents, but we know multiple families where only the children eat meat, not the parents, and eating relatively little meat is actually the norm.
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As a counterpoint, one of the biggest, most effective climate change activism groups (Citizens Climate Lobby) focuses almost exclusively on practical policy to cut emissions, mainly a revenue-neutral carbon tax.
Going back to the root though, with things like geoengineering -- I'm not 100% against it, but I'm much more in favor of addressing the root cause, rather than trying to put a band-aid on it. First issue, and maybe the biggest, is the moral hazard -- if you start geoengineering, that means countries won't try as hard to reduce emissions, immediately negating some of the benefit of geoengineering. Second, specifically for putting sulfur into the atmosphere to reduce solar irradiance, you don't get to control where that goes. It wanders all over the place, changing weather patterns, possibly causing storms or droughts. Third, cooling the earth but leaving CO2 levels higher doesn't solve ocean acidification.
I suspect that we'll need to do it at some point, but I think it is best to push hard on reducing emissions first and foremost. And maybe I partly believe this because I think that practically speaking, we can do it without a substantial reduction in living standards, if we start using carbon taxes effectively, and streamline nuclear regulations to the point where it's actually viable again.
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