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Of course.

The only reason to doubt climate change is if you've been a victim of the concerted misinformation campaign. The campaign that was launched by the same spin doctors that launched tobacco companies' disinformation campaigns.

They were very clear on how they did this, and it's been amply documented in the media, just not super well known still, somehow.

They tied climate change denial to a political identity, because politics is how we turn off the rational part of our brain and activate the tribal defense mechanisms. Get your tribe to attack media vehemently anytime climate change is in the media. It makes news editors very nervous about covering the topic, because of the extremely virulent attacks. Even to this day, the media avoids bringing up climate change on relevant topics because they are scared of political blowback. This is the sort of "political correctness" that ends up harming society greatly.

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Media is complicit in this, not the victim. By presenting "both sides" equally in many contexts, they give the false impression that the case of the denialists is equally strong.

Just because there are two sides does not mean there are two equally valid sides. And presenting them as such is a form of bias. Quite a pernicious one.

This is common practice in all sorts of stories. Journalists are trained to solicit / include some counterpoint or naysaying voice, no matter the topic. Even if the story is otherwise uncontroversial.

>By presenting "both sides" equally in many contexts

This was the mantra of the new atheist/skeptic movement of the early 2010s - that it wasn't worth to present the other side because the other side is just wrong. Given how this mantra is applied today where 'the other side' should not be heard from or platformed or is just plain evil, I'd rather hear both sides, even if that means I get to hear about creationism or climate change denial.

I don't want the media or tech companies to be the arbiter on what is and isn't reasonable to discuss. Having Jack Dorsey or some intern at some fact check org decide for me what is and isn't reasonable is much worse than merely hearing from a creationist why creationism should be taught in science class.

I mean, do you propose equal time be given to evolution & creationism then or what? I would rather students spend 99.9% of the time on evolution and yeah I guess you can spend the 0.1% time as footnote of what crazy people believe in if you really want.

>I mean, do you propose equal time be given to evolution & creationism then or what?

I support journalists making an effort to present both sides even if one side is unreasonable, because the alternative is they just decide for me what I should and should not be exposed to. That, to me, is much much worse.

Is there any place you draw the line? Should 9/11 truthers be given equal time? Holocaust deniers? QAnon / Pizzagate conspiracists? Obama birthers?

>Should we give them equal time? Why not?

The standard I advocate for is for journalists to make an effort to present both sides. There will always be a level of editorializing and they will get it wrong from time to time, but at least they are committed to the principle and there is underlying respect for the audience to make up their own mind.

Not like what you seem to advocating for - where you want the media to make the decisions for you to what you're exposed to .. because god forbid the media 'platforms' someone that may actually change your mind.

So let me ask you because I am curious: What is your limiting principle? At what point do YOU stop delegating to some doofus anchor what you should and shouldn't be exposed to?

It's never "both sides" unless someone's actively trying to push a wedge issue for political gain. It's almost always "lots of varied ways to be wrong, and one way we're pretty sure is right" and if you try to present them all, the one that's right gets drowned out in the volume of dross. Journalism must be curation or there's no point.

Do you have some cycles to spare on...

Time cube Chemtrails Flat earth Lizard people Heavens Gate Time wave theory Etc.

Should we give them equal time? Why not?

Don't be ridiculous. My preferred political party does not have a vested financial interest in those theories, so of course they shouldn't get equal airtime.

>Should we give them equal time? Why not?

Not like what OP and you are advocating for - where you want the media to make decisions for you what you may or may no hear because god forbid the media 'platforms' someone that may actually change your mind.

So let me ask you because I am curious: What is your limiting principle? At what point do YOU stop delegating to some doofus anchor what you should and shouldn't be exposed to?

Well, when the overwhelming majority of experts in the field agree, I think it’s best to not waste brain space on crackpot contrarian positions, especially if they are incredibly well funded from obviously motivated actors.

Seems pretty simple to me.

>Well, when the overwhelming majority of experts in the field agree

You're conflating some issues here. Experts inform policy, not set policy. Democratically elected representatives should use experts but not delegate decision making to experts. Take climate change, even if 100% of scientist believe in climate change and certain outcomes of climate change, because any climate mitigations are going to drastically impact my life and the lives of all my fellow-citizens, I sure as heck want to hear alternatives and understand the full implications. I don't want climate scientists deciding climate policy (only informing it), because the cost for stemming climate change may be too high and when balancing all the other factors, we may instead decide instead to focus on mitigating the effects of climate change.

We see this with Coronavirus policy as well. Certain public health officials only focus on stemming the pandemic (a noble goal in a vacuum), but ignore the cost associated with some of the drastic measures to stem the pandemic (like lockdowns). Put another way, even if every single epidemiologist argues that lockdown is the best way to 'flatten the curve', we may decide to do something else because we need to balance all kinds of other factors in addition to 'flattening the curve'. The Great Barrington Declaration [1], for example, which presents an alterative coronavirus policy by all kinds of public health officials makes this case and has been censored by Twitter, and others, for it. Don't you think their point of view is a worthy topic for discussion? Or is this one of those things where you are afraid of 'platforming' an alternative lest it convinces some people?

[1] https://gbdeclaration.org/

"Equal time" derives from the days of media broadcast over radio waves, where every broadcast came at the expense of some other one because there was a finite amount of broadcast radio spectrum.

It's irrelevant to on-demand content delivery methods like the internet, where you can carry everything at once.

Having Jack Dorsey or some intern at some fact check org decide for me what is and isn't reasonable is much worse[…]

No one's saying that he should, so this is a strawman. Also let's not conflate social media (dumb-pipes for following anyone) with newspapers and cable "news" (editorial, selective).

>No one's saying that he should, so this is a strawman.

What are you talking about? Where have you been since 2016? Democrats and media is pushing Twitter, YouTube and Facebook to increase censorship of right-wing viewpoints.

>Also let's not conflate social media (dumb-pipes for following anyone) with newspapers and cable "news" (editorial, selective).

Social media is exerting more and more editorial control and acting more like a publisher and not a platform. I get that there will always be some of standards that not every person will like (since those companies do not want their networks to be used for crime or spam, for example), but the way Twitter and Facebook shut down the Hunter Biden is insane and I don't understand why nobody is not bothered by it.

I don’t think “both sides” is the only issue...

Another is also the politization of issues... if you first argue against climate change, and then you argue against meat because of climate change, then I know you’re just using it to push your preferred ideology. How can I be sure you’re also not pushing climate change itself just as ideology?

Note: I agree that less meat is a solution (or part of a solution), but unacceptable to push it as the solution, instead of e.g. general carbon taxation...

They also give the false impression that the number of sides is equal to two.

This is very different than the tobacco companies.

It was known anecdotally for a hundred years that smoking was unhealthy, despite a very widespread cultural acceptance of it. The evidence was overwhelming to anyone with ears and eyes who knew lifetime smokers. The tobacco companies went so far as paying cardiologists to invent the so called 'Type A' personality to explain excess heart attacks among smokers.

Climate change on the other hand is much more subtle. The greenhouse effect is not an obvious on its face, one typically needs to be taught about it in school. Additionally, the natural variation both in weather and climate obscure effects. And the difficulty in measuring global historic temperature series and modelling climate needed to be invented over the past couple of decades.

It may seem obvious to many people today, but that's more than likely because they grew up in an environment of scientific consensus.

What's funny in the original article, is the the first paper cited, was GM sponsored research to indicate that the particulate pollution (aerosols) couldn't be causing the growth in polar ice caps because aerosols would have a warming effect. The true irony here is that this wasn't a warning about warming, it was sponsored research showing that GM wasn't responsible for cooling which had been observed. (Please note -- I am not claiming that there was ever a consensus about a 'global cooling threat', there wasn't. There was a limited concern that aerosols could have this effect, and luckily GM research was able to step in and show them how those fears were misguided.)

The same goons that peddled the pseudoscience that tobacco was safe are the ones that tried to convince the world that climate change wasn't real.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/tobacco-and-oil-i...

I can see how it would be comforting to have a villain, but I don't think that is true. Companies deeply linked to the petroleum industry argued against action (as, of course, would be expected). But the basic pitch of the environmentalists has never been acceptable. The idea that we should curtail the comfort of the present population in a speculative attempt to do something in 50 years is unpopular. And in total seriousness, it is rare I've heard an articulation of what that something is vs the alternative. The options I heard were we scale back our lifestyle so our children can scale back theirs, with the alternative of we don't scale back our lifestyle and then our children scale back theirs.

The environmentalist movement has avoided:

* Pushing overpopulation into the political conversation (we've roughly doubled the global population since 50 years ago. The new arrivals are largely people in dire need of better energy access). We have a lot more talks about banning coal than pushing for a 1 child policy in Africa.

* Nuclear energy. Pointing out the obvious, the most successful climate change initiative in the past 50 years has been the energy grid in France. Pro-climate-action has generally correlated with anti-nuclear.

* Talking seriously about the costs or implementation strategy. As I recall, people were saying solar was a cheap option when Germany launched their Energiewende. They now have the most expensive power in Europe.

The best argument historically for ignoring climate change has been that its supporters don't seem to be taking it seriously; they ignored a bunch of contributing factors or picked solutions based on political beliefs rather than trying to support cheap clean energy for everyone. GM and Ford are not responsible for that.

To start, implement a carbon tax and more appropriately cost current goods.

let people prioritize what things they find important

Ok, but do you think there needed to be a misinformation campaign led by devious ne'er-do-wells to make raising taxes unpopular?

That is a mechanism to achieve the goals of the environmental movement. Not a reason to achieve the goals of the environmentalists, or an argument that it is the best path.

> Ok, but do you think there needed to be a misinformation campaign led by devious ne'er-do-wells to make raising taxes unpopular?

The only sensible implementation of a carbon tax is the one in which all of the money is refunded to the population.

A program that causes everybody to get ~$1000 while only paying ~$500 in taxes because large corporations are responsible for the majority of carbon emissions would seem to be very popular, absent a misinformation campaign, since the average person would net ~$500 (out of the pockets of Exxon et al).

Squint and Canada's carbon tax dividend looks like UBI. Win / win.

A bunch of environmentalists are idiots. But that doesn’t mean there’s no sensible plan or that it’s all speculative. In economics carbon’s costs have a name: they impose an externality on others.

The standard remedy for an externality is a tax. So, to address climate change you would:

1. Institute a tax on carbon

2. Work through an international framework like the UN or WTO to have other countries also institute this tax, and to levy tariffs on any countries that don’t.

3. Since carbon is taxed, you can lower other, less efficient taxes such as the income tax, which is a drag on productivity.

4. You can also redistribute some of the money to compensate the poor for the effective tax increase. For instance this is how canada deals with its sales tax.

There are other coherent plans but that’s a big one. Had we implemented thus tax 50 years ago, the effects would have been:

* energy efficiency is encouraged in production as there is a higher cost

* other forms of energy such as nuclear and hydro gain an advantage

* There would have been more capital available for researching other alternatives such as solar

* The economy would have remained good due to the benefits of a sharply lower income tax

Environmentalists tend to be rather bad at math and not good at thinking through economics or evaluating tradeoffs. Because everyone else abandoned the field, they produced the most prominent (and wrong headed) solutions.

But with gradual economically sensible action 50 years ago, we could have been in for a very soft landing. We could have still used fossil fuels too! They were pretty necessary, but the system I outlined would have nudged us towards a different energy base.

This sounds like a very good plan. The best part of it is that a single country can institute it on it’s own - just start taxing products and imports by carbon! A big enough country could move the needle, and encourage others to take action.

Instead, the only actual ideas that actual people actually propose are 100% braindead.

Ban meat (lol), ban nuclear (lol lol), ban plastic straws (lol lol lol), ...

This style of argumentation is chilling the discussion. Please stop with the ad hominems.

There are many overlapping problems, not only climate change. It's complex. Partial solutions are still solutions. They are just incomplete

I disagree. I think that partial solutions (or, in cases I listed above, anti-solutions) steal the enthusiasm from real solutions. Giving people the ego-boost and emotional satisfaction of solving the problem, but actually making it worse.

Perhaps we can agree to disagree without being derogatory to each other.

You will continue to see things in black and white "the problem", "real solutions".

I will continue to see a mosaic of overlapping issues.

Sorry, no disrespect meant to you personally. I just ridicule and disrespect bad ideas.

Alright. But please be aware that it is possible to chill discussion through stridency. I don't believe this applies only to me.

the ideas aren't bad though, you just don't agree with them. Banning meat isn't something I would get on board with but it would probably be effective. There's been a lot of discussion lately on HN about nuclear and I can actually see both sides of the debate. Plastic straws I think you have actually just strawmanned environmentalists here as I've never seen plastic straws mentioned as a solution or contributor to global warming.

While I agree in principle with what you're putting forward, I think there are a couple of huge obstacles. One, good luck convincing politicians to sacrifice their projects to make room for #3. I understand the carbon tax would be more efficient, but in the short term there would a be a revenue loss, and most politicians would only care about that. Two, Without #3, the whole thing is a non-starter. It's a lofty academic idea that fits well into a forum like this; but without #3 happening, it boils down to "give me more of your money and I promise we'll fix it!", which is an unacceptable argument for lots of Americans (myself included, to be frank).

I personally hold that the best and most realistic solution is a headfirst, committed dive into nuclear energy.

Not obvious why #3 is impossible. You can forecast revenue changes from a carbon tax and revenue losses from an income tax, set rates accordingly, and adjust as you go. This is especially feasible if you have a 50 year timeframe.

Should be quite feasible to make it revenue neutral and this rob no politician of their project.

Nuclear would have been great 50 years ago! My argument is that the project I outlined above would have given market based incentive to make nuclear competitive.

If level headed people of all stripes had focussed on the problem it would have been solveable.

(Since I can’t edit my comment above, I should add for posterity: obviously not all environmentalists are bad at math or systems thinking, and some of them had sensible solutions. But we would have had better solutions if others joined too)

Why push 1 child policy in Africa? Start with USA, where the pollution per person ratio is much higher.

Probably because the US is already on the trajectory towards 1. The birthrate today is at an all time low of 1.73 in the US. In Africa it is currently 4.6.

Fully industrialized countries already have declining birth rates and modest populations. Having more kids in places with fewer resources isn't a sustainable proposition. If you have a stable rather than exploding population, it's much easier for that population to raise its standards of living in a sustainable way.

First off, simply because you don't like the people that support a position doesn't mean that position is incorrect.

And overpopulation? Um... because draconian population control tactics and policies are evil? China's one child policy was unconscionable.

German energy is costly not due to production costs, but instead due to taxes on energy utilization in general to subsidize a more rapid transition to environmentally sound energy. Other countries, i.e. France, have chosen to lower costs substantially. (France is unwise, IMHO. Lower costs increases utilization which offsets carbon gains, see rebound effects [0]. Germany is doing the right thing) [1]

Nuclear: Has always been on the table. Environmentalists are not a unified block. The Gates foundation is substantially funding nuclear.

Most of what you think of as "environmental support" is actually funding from petroleum based business. The whole personal recycling movement? paid for by the petroleum industry. [2]

Finally, the petroleum industry hired the exact same goons that the tobacco industry did to peddle pseudoscientific nonsense. [3]

There are coherent, comprehensive, effective plans for fighting climate change. You are just unlikely to hear about in the news because they are deeply wonky. There are paths out, they are neither easy (there will be losers) nor simple (it's a complex system).

However, most of what we hear are the voices of very, very, very rich and powerful oil industries trying to muddy the waters. And lets be clear: they will be the losers, if the rest of us have any hope of not either having to bear terrible austerity or the horrors of climate change.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebound_effect_(conservation)

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2019/02/05...

[2] https://www.npr.org/2020/09/11/897692090/how-big-oil-misled-...

[3] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/tobacco-and-oil-i...

"However, most of what we hear are the voices of very, very, very rich and powerful oil industries trying to muddy the waters."

I'm shocked, shocked by your suggestion that bad actors would conduct disinformation campaigns to discredit and neutralize inconvenient truths.

What is shocking is that they play both sides.

It’s a well known phenomenon that if you give people a small, concrete thing that they have agency over, i.e. recycling their cans, even though that thing is next to useless in terms of systemic change, they will be less likely to support broad based, effective system legislation.

The bad actors pretend to be “environmental” in order to muddy the waters, sap support for actual change, and paint the entirety of the movement as ridiculous by funding outspoken lunatics.

It’s straight out of Putin’s playbook. [0] Putin funds “anti-Putin” organizations, but only ones that are absurd and implausibly idealistic. Those likely to offend other Russians.

[0] https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2012/05/31/putins-propaganda-m...

Ya, frankly, the effectiveness of propaganda scares me, deeply. How do I know what I know, with any certainty, if I'm so easily manipulated.

The exploitation of our cognitive "loopholes" is the best case against Freedom Speeches™. Paraphrasing: We're not rationale, so countering falsehoods with truthiness simply cannot work.

The only legal mitigation I can think of is authenticate (optionally) speech. Just like the authenticity facets of the replication crisis. Meaning show your data, cite your sources, sign your works. And then maybe over time our culture learns to discount anything unsourced and unsigned.

>scale back our lifestyle

Low-carbon-footprint urban lifestyle doesn't feel "scaled back." If anything it feels scaled up, intense, high maintenance, premium. Something for wild and rambunctious twenty-somethings. It leaves people yearning to settle down in "the simple life" with a big lawn, a big SUV, and a big steak on the grill.

It feels pretty much the same, except there's no second car.

The first problem is that housing stock takes a lot of modification to get to modern energy usage (essentially, 0 joules after construction). We haven't started down that road in any serious way as a society, even though the technology is commercial and past early-adopter pricing. But living in that house, it's no different to living in any other nice house -- a McMansion has a big reception hall, my passive solar house has a airlock/mudroom -- that's not a difference in lifestyle, just in detail.

The second problem is transport. At a personal level this might mean EVs, except that they are so very expensive. You might afford to replace one of the family's cars, but not all of them. Public transport would appear to be an alternative, but if you don't have access to that already, then the build time for that is over a decade. So there's going to be an uncomfortable interim of, say, twenty years. Which I suspect will be filled with bikes and e-bikes, as adding bike lanes and bikeways are minor projects. There are times when your description of personal transport as "scaled up" is very true.

There are many small annoyances from being slightly ahead of the bulk of the population. But one of the things Covid-19 has done has been to make local government is far more open to change: they've flipped from sending me letters about my vegetable garden in my front yard, to asking me if I'd be happy for their staff to tour it and collect ideas.

> The only reason to doubt climate change is if you've been a victim of the concerted misinformation campaign. The campaign that was launched by the same spin doctors that launched tobacco companies' disinformation campaigns.

It's also incredibly distressing to think about what the future will look like, why wouldn't people want to put their head in the sand?

When I hear the average person deny climate change, I feel it's more to do with being afraid. At this point people look for something to validate their doubt, which is why misinformation works so well, it's convenient to believe in nonsense.

If you told people that climate change was actually beneficial to them, they'd be more likely to want to believe it. In fact this what some political figure heads are doing.

I think most people are in shock at this point that it's become real. Especially people who have been deniers for the last 20-30 years.

I think this lack of awareness or straight up apathy is just another example of the dearth of "attention energy" available to the average person today. When there's so much vying for peoples' attention on a daily basis, stimulating a concerted response (e.g. political will) is much more difficult. I'm not sure how we solve this at this point, because I don't see it naturally getting better.

It's unfortunate that there are no meaningful visual effects to climate change.

As an example, California took action to clean up tailpipe emissions because people could SEE smog.

And you can say something meaningful like "1 gallon of gasoline creates 20 pounds of CO2" but since CO2 is colorless and odorless nobody really gets it.

Most climate change activists also have tied being for climate change to a political identity. Their solutions to fixing the problem of green house gasses in the atmosphere call for wholesale changes to the current political and cultural system used in the West. If the only goal of the climate change activists was to get CO2 ppm in the atmosphere back to 300, then they should be just advocating for a carbon tax that ratchets down greenhouse gas emissions fairly quickly. Instead many of them are advocating the elimination of capitalism, free markets, and the patriarchy.

So? Just work with them on a carbon tax instead of denying the problem. A lot of these "activists" would happily take a revenue-neutral carbon tax that returns money to people via UBI. They don't have a snowball's chance of achieving all that other stuff so who cares?

Denying climate change is also tied to a political identity.

Why a carbon text, why UBI? Why do these same activists also campaign against nuclear power?

I'm assuming you meant "carbon tax"? Why? Because it's the most elegant way of putting a price on emissions.

Why UBI? It redistributes the tax collected from high emitters (likely to be higher income) to low-emitters (likely to be lower income) so progressives like it. It keeps the tax revenue neutral and doesn't allow the government to expand so conservatives like it.

> Why do these same activists also campaign against nuclear power?

Because of the long history of cost overruns, waste disposal and management issues, and the fear of a minuscule chance of catastrophic failure (not saying this last one is a rational fear).

Why fixate on nuclear power whenever climate change comes up? Why not institute a carbon tax and leave the rest to the market? Some countries (France, India, the UK) love nuclear power, and others (US, Japan, Germany) are not so hot on it. If they all have carbon taxes, each country can figure out for itself what it wants to do, and collectively embargo/tariff countries that don't have a carbon tax.

It's weird that a lot of people's default position is "I won't do anything for climate change unless we get nuclear power." Almost like they know there's very little chance of the national opinion about nuclear power changing very soon, so that gives them an "out" on taking any other action.

> Why? Because it's the most elegant way of putting a price on emissions.

I used to agree with this, and now I don't.

A carbon tax has to be an approximation, and there are significant judgement calls on what the total carbon burden of a given product or service might be. This is a recipe for paperwork, loopholes, and a raft of unintended consequences.

Instead, I support an across-the-board carbon sales tax on everything. Use some of this to subsidize carbon-reducing technology at the point of sale. Put the rest of it toward everything else we use taxes for, and make sure that renewable research, nuclear energy, and so on, are adequately funded. UBI? sure, why not; but let's not attach it directly to a climate tax, that only confuses both issues.

There are some exceptions: it's practical to calculate the carbon burden of electricity, and handle the taxation-and-subsidy market directly in that field.

> A carbon tax has to be an approximation, and there are significant judgement calls on what the total carbon burden of a given product or service might be.

Sorry, could you explain more? I always assumed a carbon tax meant an extraction tax on any fossil fuel. For example, taxing companies per barrel of crude, per ton of natgas or coal they take out of the ground. Since practically all carbon emissions involve the use of a fossil fuel somewhere in the chain, wouldn't this capture the carbon output of any product or service?

Sure, that would be one way to do it: if there were a one world government, which could impose such a tax.

But in the world we have, it's not going to work: that tax would be imposed on only the developed world, which already has issues competing in manufacturing, due to paying reasonable amounts of money for labor, and at least some attention to workplace safety and environmentally-responsible behavior.

So you'd have to apply tariffs of some sort on imported goods, and base it on some guesswork as to the carbon footprint of the items. At which point, just giving up and charging a sales tax is better, for the reasons I described.

Couldn't countries with carbon extraction taxes impose blanket 25% (or 50%, whatever it takes to get immediate compliance) tariffs on all imports from countries that don't have the same carbon taxes? Or impose economic sanctions, freeze assets and so on? Sorry, I'm just spitballing here. Have I fallen prey to "it's easy, just do X"?

I agree this would still require a fair amount of coordination between the countries that do the tariffs. But less so than deciding tariffs on individual products based on their pollution.

> Have I fallen prey to "it's easy, just do X"?

A little bit? A carbon tax is workable, I've just come to favor a sales tax as simpler.

They're both consumption taxes, the latter says "ok, this is what we have to take out of the economy to pay for mitigation, lets do it as a sales tax and then pay some of it back for products that reduce carbon burden, either directly or as substitute goods for especially polluting technologies".

The more moving parts something like this has, the more opportunities there are to take advantage of that. Sales tax already exists, it's well understood, this would be fire-and-forget, and it wouldn't create a bunch of new jobs for accountants (nothing against them, but we don't want that).

> it wouldn't create a bunch of new jobs for accountants

That's the part I'm not convinced about. A flat sales tax rate for carbon will inevitably under-tax or over-tax something. Making it fairer will require armies of accountants poring over the carbon intensity of product categories. And of course companies will say "our factories/trucks/warehouses/stores run on wind power, give us a rebate". I understand the appeal of tacking a carbon tax on to an existing tax regime, but would it really be so easy or fair?

PS I've upvoted all your comments in this discussion and I appreciate you engaging with me so far. It's given me a lot to think about.

> Sure, that would be one way to do it: if there were a one world government, which could impose such a tax.

You can just impose such a tax domestically, and tariff all imports from countries that don't have that tax.

The low-carbon industries in those countries will very quickly force their governments to implement a carbon tax, because such a tariff punishes them unfairly.

To be fair, this is because they have to tie their side since the others are tied as well. When one side has the support of the ruling party, you need some sort of way to rally people and, sadly, politicizing issues is the quickest way out. Many of their calls, which you summarized in an unflattering way, are also about making sure that CO2 emissions aren't encouraged and basically not allowed. Having a tax isn't going to stop them so people are calling for radical solutions. Is that a good thing? I'd say no but it's better than denying it or saying the problem is overblown, like many seem to. I'd rather people worry too much than not at all.

Can you explain what makes you think that having a tax wouldn't stop them?

If driving an electric car becomes less expensive relative to driving a gasoline car, people buy electric cars. If heating with electric heat pumps becomes less expensive relative to heating with oil, people install heat pumps. If generating electricity from wind or nuclear becomes less expensive than generating electricity from coal, people build new power plants accordingly.

Which part of the problem doesn't this solve?

I suppose this is indicative of the kind of thinking that leads someone to concern themselves with problems we are causing for future generations and millions of Bangladeshis.

> The only reason to doubt climate change is if you've been a victim of the concerted misinformation campaign.

Nobody doubts climate change because the climate has and always will be changing.

They made a term to satisfy pedants like yourself. Just replace "climate change" with "anthropogenic climate change" when you see it in the news, and you'll be right as rain.

They adopted this term for the same reason all authoritarians play Orwellian games with language.

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