Goodbye climate deniers, hello climate bullshitters

A guy from the village I grew up in became a millionaire with a business processing old EUR-pallets into wood chips.<p>Now he&#x27;s getting into &quot;sustainable&quot; energy based on burning those woodchips. Note that this isn&#x27;t about electricity, it&#x27;s about delivering <i>heat</i> or <i>steam</i> from a &quot;sustainable&quot; source. From what I gather (through village gossip, admittedly) is that the whole process is, and I know this will piss off some people here when I say this but hear me out, heavily underregulated: nobody checks for whether the wood being burned might have been chemically treated, no need for air filters on the small furnaces being built shockingly close to villages, no problem if the hot steam from the furnace crosses half a km of open field without insulating the pipes, and so on.<p>And he gets millions in government subsidies of course, because &quot;green&quot; energy.

&quot;The impacts of the climate emergency are now so obvious, only the truly deluded still deny them. Instead, we are at the point where everyone agrees something must be done&quot;<p>I guess The Guardian reporters don&#x27;t venture far from their flock.

Title seems to be &quot;How to spot the difference between a real climate policy and greenwashing guff&quot;

The bullshit is double dipped as well. You can push bullshit policy and then you can push FUD againts good policy by claiming its just greenwashing. It happens in every corner of politics but its pretty frustrating none the less.

I never understood why we don’t create hydrogen plants and dump spare electrical generation into splitting water. It might be less efficient than other storage technologies but burning it will produce only water again. Just keep it away from dense population so if it blows it does not take out to much.

I enjoyed hearing electric cars called &quot;external combustion engines&quot; given that in most countries (at least mine) the electricity used to charge the car still mostly comes from fossil fuel. In such cases all we&#x27;re doing is adding an extra lossy conversion between chemical and kinetic energy, potentially making it worse. Yet people buy such cars and feel great about themselves. I am reminded of the South Park episode where a cloud of smog across the town is replaced by a cloud of smug.<p>Why are we incentivising electric cars at purchase rather than incentivising the use of green energy to charge them?<p>(Edited to add &quot;potentially&quot; before &quot;making it worse&quot; given a comment below)

There are a lot of websites promoting studies of renewables against nuclear.<p>I saw a lot of people linking articles on them on Reddit.<p>Even read somebody on hacker news saying baseload is a misleading term.