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Comment by vmchale | Hacker News Reader

The pro-blackout crowd lol.

Valid climate stance, greenest energy often is not used energy and not having it available is easiest way.

I see these comments here and there and am always stunned. There's a strong nihilistic streak in the modern environmental movement.

Is that surprising? The movement has largely failed and gets to watch all their predictions come true

There have been no shortage of failed predictions. In the scientific valence this is totally fine because the wildest predictions are usually stated with low confidence, but the ‘environmental movement’ knows no such moderation.

The problem for anti-environmentalists is that the broad predictions about the environment (climate change, warming) have been accurate. Everything else is noise.

And noise is the problem, on both sides of environment issues.

When you say "no shortage of failed predictions", you are able to cherrypick whatever you like, define failure however you like, and produce whatever resulting number you want. That is noise.

For environmentalists, straw bans? Stupid, spending valuable social "energy" on something irrelevant -- intentionally triggering the environmental equivalent of road rage in people whose cooperation you need. It's noise.

I was responding to a comment that said, "The movement has largely failed and gets to watch all their predictions come true." (emphasis added). Neither of those statements is true, and is also some of the worst noise produced by the movement because it simultaneously reduces trust and drives apathy, pretending that no successes have happened and that science is unrealistically certain. There are no shortage of failed predictions not because of cherry-picking or moving goal posts, but because this is a normal part of the truth seeking process, but the extreme manifestation of it is an unfortunate feature of our media and political cultures.

People with a bias towards alarmism on this topic imagine that alarmist messages and absolute statements will help to achieve the outcomes they seek, but the last 30 years make it clear that this doesn't work. A more realistic message, focusing on the most likely scenario from the IPCC rather than the worst-case scenario which the IPCC clearly states is to provide an upper bound and is highly unlikely. A straightforward presentation would be more nuanced and encourage the highest impact changes (a small tax that funded the replacement of coal plants with nuclear for instance) rather than proposing net-zero by 2050 which is almost certainly not going to happen based on the tradeoffs of doing so.

In the modern one? It's always been like that, environmentalists tend to be misanthropic, and their primary goal is making people miserable, not the environment.

And yes that's a strong claim, but I see so many environmentalists promote things that make zero difference to the environment (straw ban for example), but annoy people.

Or things like Italy banning plastic packaging from produce, which makes the environmental worse (much more food waste), but they don't care because it annoys people.

Or even the truly dreadful: Being against nuclear power, and being against burning plastic for energy. These two positions actively harm the environment.

I get most of your point, except the one about "being against burning plastic for energy" - looks to me that simply burying it somewhere would be best for the environment.

No - burn it for energy, and then you don't need to pump (and burn) additional oil. It's a one-for-one tradeoff, with the benefit of less trash. It's a 100% win with zero drawbacks (so of course environmentalists are against it).

Sure at some point we won't burn oil, and then we can do something different (recycle the plastic), but we are decades away from that, so doing that now is harmful.

Ok, if you look at individual actions, burning the plastic makes complete sense. But if you look at the economy as an evolving system, you'll discover that if you do nothing together with burning the plastic, society will just adapt to consume the extra oil, while if you bury it, people will probably not make an effort to recover that plastic any soon.

Of course, you can burn the plastic and make some change that makes people burn less oil. But if we are talking about government intervention, you will get much more return if you focus on reducing the fossil fuels usage alone and bury the plastic.

Spoken like a true environmentalist: Make things worse for people and for the environment, in the hope we can "someday" make things different.

It's exactly this attitude that is causing the trouble.

Hum... What?

Are you sure you are on the correct thread?

He is maybe a bit mean, but his point is at least consistent. His whole thesis is that we don't have to reduce energy consumption but just find solutions so that we consume without ruining the enviromnet, or at least find the most impact we can have for reducing the damage right now - at least that is how I read it. And I think that is possibly the only sustainable approach, since it is going to be _very_ hard to convince 7 billion people to give up convenience. It just won't happen.

Hum, ok, increasing the price of energy (because you are not burning the cheapest sources) does indeed push people a little bit into using less energy. I understand his point now.

Now I have to hardly disagree, because we won't solve that problem without some amount of discomfort. And increasing the price of energy so the non-fossil sources can compete better is how can give up the least of it.

Do you expect significant drop in oil price if plastic was getting burned? I'd think it would displace things like coal first...

Plastic comes mostly from natural gas, doesn't it? The "oil" there is just a generalization, as I understand it is on the GGP.

Anyway, the production of any of those is almost completely inelastic.

I do not know much about burning plastic, but is it really zero drawbacks to do so? Intuition tells me harmful chemicals would be released. Is it that the burning would be contained and the air filtered?

I think his point hinges on the assumption that the harmful chemicals are no worse than just burning oil/gas. Somehow I doubt this, but I do not know enough to confirm. I mean, is plastic the same as oil? Does it not have _worse_ additives in it?

> I mean, is plastic the same as oil? Does it not have _worse_ additives in it?

Correct. The atoms are the same, just in a different order. Although you may occasionally get chlorine which is not in oil, but it's not common in plastic (other than PVC).

>> Intuition tells me harmful chemicals would be released. Is it that the burning would be contained and the air filtered?

No need for much filtering, you just need proper incinerator that provides enough air. You will need to filter out chlorine, but that's so reactive it's very easy to filter.

The harmful chemicals from burning plastic are caused by incomplete combustion.

The vast vast majority of plastic is just carbon, oxygen, and hydrogen. Burn them fully and there's nothing harmful emitted.

Pumping oil, turning it into plastic, and then burning it, is really not significantly different from just pumping and burning oil from an atmospheric pollution standpoint. The benefit here is less trash. In terms of emissions, it is at best a slight loss due to reduced effiency and extra processing steps. It is a distraction.

I wouldn't use the word nihilism. I'm quite the deep-eco hardliner and in the brightest future I can realisticially dream of, power isn't reliably available to anyone anywhere they wish. Reducing energy consumption is key, not just how it's produced.

The least discussed, biggest elephant in the room, holiest of all cows in the environmental discourse are the lifestyle changes required. Everyone's all green, unless it personally impacts my daily life in any perceivable way whatsoever.

I prefer maximizing human prosperity. That is not necessarily contingent on energy consumption, but at least throughout recorded human history there is a very strong correlation. So long as it does not compromise human prosperity, including in terms of our relationship to the natural environment, I have no objection whatsoever to massive quantities of clean energy.

You could just go around committing genocide, that would be similarly green...

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