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Comment by corodra | Hacker News Reader

"The house is burning! The house is burning!" A child laughs.

Parents take the child out of the house quickly in fear. After a moment a plane crashes into the house, obliterating it.

While yes, the child was full of shit. It still led to something marginally good. Maybe the parents should have left him in the house because he's a little shit. That might make the situation better. But that's an ethics question I don't feel like exploring.

Peak oil might have been a false flag scare, true. I'm not going to argue with you on that. Fuck it, I'm going to agree with you. It was a total bullshit scare! But it was a scare that led to a big push in getting away from fossil fuels. So still, it was a good thing. Ends justify the means.

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The problem with this is when a group cries wolf, are the people going to continue to listen? Eventually, Machiavellian tactics turn your credibility to mud. You end up in a place where folks don't believe anything a group says. Then you're stuck shaking your fist at "the stupid general" public when your organization's tactics are largely to blame. This is where both sides of the environmental discussion have ended up and why the issue is so polarized (in part).

Exactly. We've hit "the point of no return" in regards to climate change at least twice in the past 10 years and depending on who you ask, we're projected to hit another "point of no return" in 2024 if we don't change our ways. Look up the early climate change movements and there have been people predicting the imminent death of the earth for the last 70 years.

So, yeah, I don't blame people when they eat their plastic wrapped burger in their F150 while giving up any efforts to "save the world".

>Peak oil might have been a false flag scare

Oil is a limited resource, the value of its extraction is differentiable, it started at 0, and will finish at 0, following Rolle's theorem, it has a maximum, the peak oil.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolle%27s_theorem

> Oil is a limited resource

So oil is like every other resource, good to know.

> It was a total bullshit scare! But it was a scare that led to a big push in getting away from fossil fuels. So still, it was a good thing. Ends justify the means.

When this kind of thinking is common, though, you lose the ability to engage at all with people who might not believe that "getting away from fossil fuels" is valuable as an end in itself.[1]

Is it valuable for other reasons? Certainly not any reasons that might come out of your mouth.

[1] Which, frankly, should be everyone. What kind of terminal goal is that?

I'm not saying it's right.

I'm saying it's effective.

If you say the right thing but people still do the wrong thing... who cares?

If you say the wrong thing, but people do the right thing, is that bad?

Is it effective? I think there’s some confounding factors involved. For all we know the narrative made it worse and kept us on oil longer because companies tried to pump faster and drove prices down.

If you say the wrong thing, and people call you on it, and you demonize them and call up the mobs against them for it, then yes, it's bad.

The "ends justify the means" mentality has been the cause of many (most?) atrocities in history because it takes the assumption that one side just knows what's right without being able to recognize our own fallibility

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