What climate activists won't tell you about protecting the planet

23 点作者 barry-cotter8 个月前

9 条评论

I don't like this article because it is basically a strawman argument.The writer tries to argue a point that nobody is making. Climate activists aren't suggesting we should stop 'growth and development'. Climate activists want governments to pass effective climate regulations.There will always be dumb/uninformed/ignorant people out there. some of them will call themselves climate activists and ask you a dumb question at a lecture, but this doesn't say anything about the group of climate activists as a whole.Second of all, I hope you realise that climate activism isn't some sort of subculture or something. It's not a homogeneous blob of people who all think and feel alike. The only common denominator is that they are active about campaigning for climate regulation.

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ZeroGravitas8 个月前

She's confusingly positive about the future for someone that doesn't believe in renewables.In another post she scolds the press for not celebrating an IEA document that says we could still meet 1.5C climate goals. Then she says the 90% of electricity it projects renewables generating in 2050 is a "fantasy".

a-french-anon8 个月前

That opening comics is such an intellectual turn-off... let's reword the position of those endorsing this to show its absurdity: protracted decline can't be real, the present is always roughly the same or better than the past.

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ericjmorey8 个月前

This author is writing about their frustration with their own inability to communicate effectively. They'd rather be verbose than concise to their own detriment. They have presented very sloppy logic throughout their tome of lamentation of being misunderstood. A commenter on the article does a much better job of getting to the point:> Prosperity follows energy – more energy more prosperity > > <a href="https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/energy-use-per-capita-vs-gdp-per-capita?yScale=log">https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/energy-use-per-capita-vs-...</a> > > 1. First people want more energy > > 2. Initially, dirty energy (wood, coal) is cheap and does promote prosperity > > 3. Then prosperity allows transition to clean energy: Nuclear, Hydro, GeothermalOddly the commenter stops short of mentioning solar PV.

jmclnx8 个月前

>In the US, thanks to the 1963 Clean Air Act, which was further updated in 1970, atmospheric levels of sulphur dioxide dropped to levels that had previously not been seen since the first years of the twentieth centuryOne thing to remember. The US wanted CO2 to be included in this Act, but the Fossil Fuel Industry bribed (lobbied) Congress to get CO2 excluded. Dropping levels of sulfur dioxide, though was a great health benefit, made CO2 emission impacts even worse.To me, some of the article was confusing and made no point, or did I miss something ?

wpietri8 个月前

I think there are some points of substance here, and agree that it's very important to continue breaking the link between economic growth and resource consumption. For better or worse, caring about the environment is a luxury good, and we want people to be able to afford it.However, some of this also strikes me as wildly uncharitable. For example: "For too long we have been sold the myth that we should be concerned about so-called ‘overpopulation’, but this has been proven to be nonsensical fearmongering."It is for the moment not our biggest concern, but it absolutely wasn't a myth or nonsensical fearmongering. The overpopulation-and-crash cycle happens for a lot of species. This only changed for humans very recently, with the invention of birth control and women getting enough power to use it. That's not universal and is under political threat right now, and even if we keep it, resource usage is still proportional to the number of people. A population crash would be a bad thing, but absent radical technological changes, "protecting the planet" will require at least keeping the population stable, and a couple of centuries of very modest population decline would help.

thunfischtoast8 个月前

TLDR: Technology will magically solve all of our problems.It also oddly mixes social justice and enviromentalism?Also: take the example of the Ozone layer that the author mentions. It did not magically repair itself, but because the global nations got its stuff together and actually did something about it. Imagine HCFCs would have been handled like we handle CO2 today: not with legislation banning it with a definitive end date, but by putting some kind of low tax on it that might rise in the future, but maybe not.I don't know, I understand the point that the autor tries to make, but it all feels not thought through to the end.

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young_breezy8 个月前

> The Horse Association of America calculated that 54 million acres of US farmland was spared by the automobileIf only there was some kind of extra large horse more than one person could ride around town

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Sporktacular8 个月前

So much wrong with this rant. To be so dismissively anti-activist is bizarre. If we listened to them decades ago we could have developed all these improvements earlier - and with fewer mouths to feed. But apparently then, as now, they are just naive do-gooders.Imagine writing: "Some people argue that humans have caused climate change and environmental damage, and therefore humans are the problem. This is a very black-and-white, misleading way of looking at the world. Humans are also able to solve these problems and have done so in many cases"... and concluding that because we mitigate some of the large complex problems we create, but not all, somehow we are a net good and there should be more of us.Every time people overfish, overharvest, over intensify farming, drive a species to extinction etc. we get the same response - people have the right to a livelihood, people need to eat. And it would be unethical to deny them that. But no mention of biodiversity as an environmental and ethical problem either. It's all about climate because all that matters is humans.We don't know how to sustainably feed the human population we have now and pro-market capitalism contrarians give the same "actually more people is a good thing because... brain trust" or some nebulous nonsense.