Never skip Aaronson's comments on his blog posts. They're often as good as the posts themselves. Here's a great example:<p>"Whenever I hear this style of argument, I’m reminded of Marcia Clark’s closing argument in the OJ Simpson trial: 'We have proved that OJ Simpson is a murderer. The defense has proved that Mark Fuhrman is a racist.'<p>"Likewise, in this case: 'We have proved that climate change is a grave threat to the survival of human civilization. You have proved that rich, do-gooder liberals can come off as annoying hypocrites.'<p>"Unfortunately, the human mind is wired in such a way that, just as 'Mark Fuhrman is a racist' actually worked to get OJ acquitted for murder, so 'Al Gore and Leonardo DiCaprio are smug elitists, flying around in their private jets' is considered by millions to be a strong argument for climate inaction."
The greatest irony is that a preponderance of oil actually made energy stocks go down. In that sense, Scott Aaronson gets the relationship between oil in the ground and long stock in energy companies completely backwards. Indeed, the S&P energy sector index, for example, has been strongly positively correlated with oil prices for at least the last two years that I've checked.<p>This is sort of a pedantic point: selling your shares in Shell substitutes, not reinforces, pumping more oil out of the ground. In that sense, divestment achieves its goal of keeping oil in the ground, for sure. But sometimes, if your company can pump more oil from the ground, and Saudi doesn't also pump more oil, you've made money and your stock rises. Sometimes, if you pump more oil from the ground, everyone's stock falls. It's complicated.<p>What's most persuasive? If you had listened to the divestment folks back in 2012, when many of these movements took off, you would be on a great big pile of cash right now.<p>So it actually makes a lot more sense to pitch big academic endowments: "You'll make a ton of money if you divest from energy stocks." There's just no way you could have known that would work in 2013, especially in the midst of an oil boom.<p>My recommendation: Make as much money as possible, and lobby for cap-and-trade pollution credits. Then you can buy all the credits you want, and simply not use them. It is a far more direct and economically predictable way to achieve environmental change.
As much as I admire many of the people working towards divestment from fossil fuel companies, I think the whole movement is defeatist. Great, you convince your university endowment fund, pension fund, etc to divest -- now what? Now those shares will be bought and controlled by an institution that is immune from popular pressure. Who wins here? Nobody.<p>On the other hand, if instead of agitating for divestment, the students/workers/activists were to ask for proxy votes, then we could put up a real fight at shareholder meetings. Sure, we might not have enough power to elect board members in the early stages, but nothing builds a movement more than meeting up with like-minded people and confronting the enemy face to face. It would provide a forum for activists to make connections with one another, grow the movement, and get excited about the possibility of fighting climate change by being an engaged citizen.<p>It's heart-breaking to me to see so much support given to this divestment movement -- I've never seen any of the major figures involved give a justification for why we should be divesting rather than fighting the corporations head on. Especially since proxy fights have a history of driving movement growth in the US. Divestment is a retreat. If climate change is really as much of a threat as most of us know it to be, then retreating should not be an option.
Three things seem true to me.<p>1) The debate around climate change is the worst piece of rhetorical garbage that has ever been foisted on mankind in the last couple of decades. Look at the terms in this essay, which is admittedly a more balanced judgment. We have environmentalists and <i>anti-environmentalists</i>. Who that breathes does not like breathing? Are there folks who wish to poison themselves? Please, spare me the "rich folks are out to destroy the planet on the backs of the poor" argument. Everybody is an environmentalist, at least when it comes to being a living human. Political groups which have no logical opponents do not add productively to the public discourse.<p>2) The more energy and freedom poor people have, the better we all are. Poor workers with cars can drive to find jobs. Poor people without water can use energy to extract water from deep in the ground, the air, or the ocean. Poor people with cheap energy can rebuild houses, move, go to school, live a better life. More freedom and cheaper power to as many poor people as possible.<p>3) Intelligent carbon-based creatures that exist in dry areas of the habitable zone of solar systems will evolve into their intelligence based on the backs of millions of years of built up hydrocarbons. These creatures will release this energy by burning -- this is as natural as a fish swimming in the ocean. Is such a release part of The Great Filter? Or is such a release part of the inevitable journey from the swamp to the sky? I don't think we have enough evidence to say one way or another. I am concerned by those who feel otherwise.<p>I think worst-case scenarios around climate change emphasize the need to productively develop all of mankind as quickly as possible. That probably means hundreds of new nuclear reactors being built. Worldwide. I see no effort anywhere for that to happen. Instead I see various proposals that always end up with expensive energy for poor people. This is only going to make the problem worse. We are going to take away the tools that poor people and nations need to grow capabilities to deal with things when they change. And while we're doing it, we're going to rob them and their children of a better future. It's a solution that's worse than the problem.
I have read similar perspectives before[1], and I am not sure how I feel about them. On the one hand, much of the industrial pollution /is/ in response to consumer demand and reducing personal consumption has some impact on that. But on the other hand, it seems very clear that by and large the public will never change consumption patterns to be more environmentally friendly ( sometimes because they cannot financially, and often because they do not care ). So it seems systematic changes are necessary.<p>[1] <a href="https://orionmagazine.org/article/forget-shorter-showers/" rel="nofollow">https://orionmagazine.org/article/forget-shorter-showers/</a>
97% environmentalist -- the same way he called himself 97% feminist: <a href="http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=2091#comment-326664" rel="nofollow">http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=2091#comment-326664</a>
I'm all for getting rid of carbon fuels due to inefficiency, lack of scalability, etc.<p>But, global warming? I would have expected better of educated people such as these.<p>eg: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wuj_tlRRQdQ" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wuj_tlRRQdQ</a>