Comment by DFHippie | Hacker News Reader

Comment by DFHippie | Hacker News Reader

The kicker is at the bottom:

> The expansion of the ‘Green New Deal’ and the rise of ‘renewable’ industrial technologies may be the death knell for these archaic and peaceful people. Make no mistake, these green initiatives – electric vehicles, wind turbines, solar batteries – these are actively destroying the last remaining strongholds of biodiversity on the planet.

This reads like so much contrarian trollery since time immemorial. Jonas Salk is exploiting children! The abolitionists are actually harming slaves! The vaccines are actually a nefarious controlling plot and the pandemic is a sham!

Basically, the trick is to say people who claim to care about the problem are actually the source of the problem. This isn't to say that cobalt extraction is harmless or that this harm is disconnected from the global desire to use low-carbon mechanisms to power the economy, but I sincerely doubt this citation-free article portrays the situation accurately. For one thing, the Green New Deal is a purely US thing, and it isn't a particular piece of legislation that has stood any chance of being enacted under that name since the Democratic primaries (and not even then, though at least then it had proponents who stood some chance of gaining significant political power), so singling this out as the demon to fear is to single our environmental action in general. Insulating your home!? What about the pigmies! Buying milk in returnable glass bottles!? Oppressor! Going vegetarian to reduce your carbon footprint!? You cannibalistic monster!

I sincerely doubt the WWF is the sole funder of park rangers, or that a desire they might have expressed to remove people from areas of biological diversity is targeted at pigmies rather than, say, illegal logging or mining operations. I cannot believe that "addressing climate change and working to preserve the rain forest are the chief threats to pigmies" is an argument offered in good faith. I'm pretty sure the pigmies would suffer more and faster if the loggers, miners, bushmeat trade, and climate change are allowed to roll along unstopped.

The point of the article is that the philosophy underpinning eco-conscious modernity, specificially the fundemental separation between "humanity" and "nature," leaves no place for humans who live as a part of nature. In the modern world this concept is almost entirely taken for granted, as most of us spend the vast majority of their lives in artificially constructed environments designed specifically to insulate us to the greatest extent possible from the pulse of nature. This is baked in to both our interpretation of the challenges we face and our proposed solution to these challenges, sometimes with unintended consequences.

This article is an invitation to more closely consider this underpinning philosophy. The tone of your response indicates this maybe isn't so easy and also why it is so important.

I'm fine with pointing out the negative consequences of environmental actions. It's absurd to think any sincere, and representative, member of the environmental movement is unfamiliar with this (are there nuts and poseurs? sure, but you don't choose the outliers to characterize a group). They fret about this stuff all the time. But it's a completely mundane observation that an action may have undesirable consequences and that not all people will feel the same costs and benefits. This goes under the heading of "externalized costs", which environmentalists talk about All. The. Time.

But this isn't the issue. The issue is this:

> The expansion of the ‘Green New Deal’ and the rise of ‘renewable’ industrial technologies may be the death knell for these archaic and peaceful people.

This is pinning all the woes of a particular marginalized group on the environmental movement. In fact, I think this is inverting responsibility. It's the environmentalists, or the same people under a different label, who are fighting for the Mbuti and the Yanomami and so forth and the anti-environmentalists, or the same people under a different label, who are machine gunning them and stealing their land and resources.

ETA "archaic and peaceful" sounds a bit off if you're writing in 2021 and you actually have the interests of these people at heart. "Archaic" sounds like you're a white savior from 1890 and "peaceful" makes it sound like you're writing for the postcard vendor at a Carnival Cruise port of call. "Look at their quaint grass skirts! Maybe they'll show some of their colorful folkways."

> It's absurd to think any sincere, and representative, member of the environmental movement

This is a powerful no-true-scotsman here. In my experience, the vast majority of people espousing technical solutions to climate change are barely aware of trade-offs if they've considered them at all. Externalized costs are primarily talked about as those imposed by fossil fuels etc. The costs imposed by environmental action itself are not so commonly considered.

> This is pinning all the woes of a particular marginalized group on the environmental movement...

The article simply pointing out that environmentalists aren't really helping here. Increased demand for cobalt and coltan is extremely harmful to certain groups of people who don't have a particularly loud voice in any segment of the environmental movement or the renewable energy industry. No one kills over rocks that have no value. By driving the demand for these minerals, unrest is increased in this region.

It's kinda silly to assume ~all~ environmentalists are fighting for these groups of people when the interests of many segments of the environmental movement are directly opposed to them and the article itself provides examples of environmental groups attacking them. The world is not black-and-white. People with good intentions can harm others.

I don't particularly like language criticisms, but word for word I think there is a lot more meat in your original comment than in this article.

> This is a powerful no-true-scotsman here.

The no-true-scotsman fallacy only applies when an existence proof is sufficient to falsify a statement, not when the question is the central tendency of some group. If you claim "no X is Y", it is sufficient to find an X which is Y, and special pleading when you say the X isn't a true X, implicitly acknowledging your interlocutor has found a counterexample. But when you are make a statement regarding a central tendency -- within Z standard deviations of the mean or some other definition of outlier there are no X which are Y -- then you can't claim the existence of a counterexample is proof of the falsity of the claim. Simply pulling the phrase "no true scotsman" out of your hat isn't a magical incantation that will win the day for you. And adding "powerful" to it doesn't improve its mojo.

As for the rest of it, I'm done.

Yeah, completely bizarre conclusion with no substantiation. What is the agenda there?

The Right, playing at going green.

Honestly, I sort of appreciate it. I wish they would.

But it looks disingenuous. A narrow partisan attack on the Green New Deal.

Which is a shame, because green traditionalism could absolutely work, and the whole spectrum needs to go green -- left, right, and center.

The "kicker": your "doubts" don't get any more credible when you say "I sincerely doubt" and "I cannot believe."

So you don't like his conclusion that "green" technologies may be harmful? Thus you "doubt" the whole piece. Smart! Also you get to compare it to other things you don't like. Motte-bailey much?

You think my doubts aren't credible? What does that mean? You think I'm lying about my own doubts?

I'm not at all troubled by the thought that green technologies might be harmful (well, I'd rather they weren't, but it seems obvious that they are, though also obviously good in other ways). I'm "troubled" by his pinning all the troubles of the Mbuti and so forth on green technology.

No, sorry, I meant that your "doubts" about his article don't gain any power from the "sincerely" modifier.

I reread this, and I did not, at all, get the impression that he was "pinning all the troubles of the Mbuti and so forth on green technology." That is your misreading of it. He says that the pygmies have been horribly persecuted, and that the Green movement will make it much worse. Are you doubting that?

Secondly, your statement about how the WWF is not solely responsible for various evils is pretty disingenuous. Who cares if it's "solely"? They're a huge charitable organization that covers itself in virtue, and here they are committing an evil.

Lastly, the Web has given people, including you apparently, the impression that everything has to have a "source." How many publications do you think there are about the pygmy tribes deep in the Congo?

There's a legitimate question about whether this guy is credible, and we'd resolve that by looking at this publication and its reputation for probity, as well as the author's. Saying it's "unsourced" is something the Wikipedia pedants would do.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com