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It all just sounds like rich people in private jets flying around telling them to use less energy to save the planet.
There is of course too much inequality, but it's not because of EVs or phasing out gas stoves.
I know this is all based more on vibes than facts though.
They have been told explicitly in prime time TV that they are held in contempt. It’s not an issue of perception on this front.
Especially when it's other Christians who popularized "Happy Holidays" as they felt Christmas was being overly commercialized.
The contempt is real, not perceived.
The bizarrely irrational behavior from the red states doesn't even make sense in its own terms. If this doesn't merit contempt, nothing does.
The health argument is fair but seems like it shouldn’t be a mandatory requirement so much as a safety warning (based on my current understanding).
The fact that we are even talking about it I guess served the original goal which was to distract from other, larger problems and discussions.
I am half convinced that Greta Thunberg was given a lot of media attention because they finally found someone evangelizing for the cause (with enough political connections, etc) who was actually willing to lead by example.
The idealist in me believes that everyone do their part and lead by example. I’m not a vegetarian, so I’ve already failed that test (spouse is though, so I’m reducitarian by default). But I do walk a lot, and have only driven 65k miles in the last 19 years (same car—best environmental thing you can do is not even buy new cars). Pragmatically, my impact is minimal.
Celebrity X hopping around on a private jet speaking for and convincing people to make environmental decisions on a national or planetary scale probably has more impact than me, even if they themselves are worse. And I begrudgingly admit that.
People who are very visible, tend to:
- Have more impact about what they say, because they reach a big population group and some people identify with their reasoning. (lets call it the elon effect)
- Have a lot more money than average.
Following your reasoning, what these wealthy people say would be almost always be the wrong thing to do, since those people have more money and hence spend more, and hence consume directly or indirectly more energy. Hence they pollute a lot more than average, at least indirectly by buying expensive things that create pollution by their manufacturing.
If those people would say the right thing (e.g. poluting less is better), you wouldn't take them serious. And your conclusion would be polluting less is not better or at least we should not take that advice for granted, because of who said it.
Generally, you would expect people with more wealth and status to be focused on preserving that status. Part of that project is (ostensibly) preserving the world. If Bill Gates does not think that mitigating his own carbon footprint is important for the preservation of his fortune (including several seaside mansions, apparently), I doubt it's important for any of us in the preservation of our futures, despite what Bill Gates is saying about it. This is an example of the phenomenon of revealed preference (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revealed_preference) - you can learn a lot about what Bill Gates actually thinks by looking at what he does rather than what he says.
For the record though, I do think that what these wealthy people say is almost always the wrong thing to do in general. Wealthy people are known for giving bad advice on how to get wealthy, for example. Because some of them run their mouths a lot, they are also generally known for not being smarter than the average person outside of their area of expertise. Because I'm picking on Bill Gates, go ask anyone at the WHO or the CDC about their opinion of Gates' level of expertise on vaccines and disease prevention - it's not high.
Also, wealth and publicity are kind of correlated, but not that significantly. Bernard Arnault famously rarely says a word in public. Larry Ellison is very private. You probably haven't heard a word from Steve Ballmer, the Bettencourt family, or Larry/Sergei. The people who speak a lot about social causes are the ones who are trying to build a brand around those causes. You get a lot of famous actors worth single-digit millions (thanks to reckless spending habits) speaking about climate change, for example, while also not opting to adopt any green habits themselves. I'm picking on them too.
EDIT: I'm picking on rich people too much. You see the same behavior in politicians, too. They are completely unwilling to risk their political careers to make meaningful carbon impacts, and instead do inane things like banning plastic straws. That suggests to me that their level of concern is about at the level where someone would ban plastic straws: they want to do visible and silly things to placate the activists, but don't really think the issue is serious.
There is only so much time people have to create, debate, modify, and enforce policies. Every time you waste our collective time to change on something so irrelevant, you starve out real topics.
Incremental change is fine, but the increments need to be large enough to actually put us on the needed “increments per year” path to get somewhere.
Something like 6 years ago California banned water being given out by restaurants by default. It did nothing to move the needle on the drought and had people debating water usage in people’s day to day lives for months. It was the tiniest increment and California was only saved by a massive winter precipitation event this winter.
We won’t have a massive winter to stop climate change. Stop fucking around with incremental shit and tax all hydrocarbons heavily.
This specific incremental change is at best a distraction and at worst very harmful. We can do many things at once, question is why aren’t we tackling any of the actual problems?
Suppose you would say, from tomorrow on, it is totally forbidden to burn any fuel. Most activities would stall and as a result people would starve.
Honestly just think about it. You really think it’s fruitful to try to start solving this problem by convincing someone that they need to no longer use a gas stove when “insert billionaire” is flying around on a private jet? It’s a non-starter. It reeks of injustice even if it’s the right thing to do and the public will instead of cooperate will fight tooth and nail until perceived justice is accomplished.
For every rule, there will be people that break it, does that mean nobody should follow that rule?
Also, for every form or quantity of pollution, there are heavier forms. The jet owner will say that the old-aeroplane-collector or a war in a neighboring country pollutes more.
My point is, following that kind of reasoning, it will be almost impossible to take any action.
But what I’m saying is that when you walk up to someone and say “sorry turn off that gas stove” and then they go and read an article like this [1] you will not just get inaction you’ll get outright action against solving the problem.
So yea, we won’t see much in the way of serious action because the general public does not see the justice in making changes or sacrifices even though they should and will bear the worst of the consequences.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/may/01/private-jet-sa...
Isnt it fair that I get to choose what I spend my emissions on?
And you do not even have to fix second one completely to see positive results so it is not fixing everything at once.
99.99% is a figure of speech. The idea is to start with big items. Cooking using gas is far below other "offenders". Go for those first as even if partially it will still be way more effective.
Just 2 obvious ideas that noone is even trying.
Neither of these are 99.99%. Probably not even 80%.
Most of climate change is caused by fossil fuels. The rest are caused e.g. by factory farming (plant & animal - e.g. pesticide rundown), plastic pollution, etc.
If we had boundless nuclear energy, not only would fossil fuels become price inefficient, we could devote the extra energy we generate into synthetic fossil fuels, carbon capture, reducing pollution, etc. Almost all of these are energy bound right now.
https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emis...
Building a nuclear reactor isn't going to make steak go away. So even if you solved.for transportation and industrial uses and everything else you're still only at 90%, not 99.99%.
> If we had boundless nuclear energy,
More of this "nuclear energy will be too cheap to meter" talk. Nuclear energy is more expensive than other sources, not cheaper. It won't be cheaper to make synthetic fossil fuels, it'll be more expensive.
> Almost all of these are energy bound right now.
They're all price bound right now, because the cost of energy is so high in comparison to alternatives. So high most would probably just avoid using it entirely. Spending trillions building a bunch of reactors isn't making it cheaper you're just committing to spending more of it up front.
Either way, making the synthetic fuels isn't the same as just building the reactors. We can have synthetic fuels without nuclear, we can have nuclear without the synthetic fuels, they're independent. So neither one is 99.99% on its own, it's no longer "one thing" like what the person I originally replied to stated. They supposedly have one thing that will solve 99.99% of GHG emissions. I'm not looking for something that will even solve 80% or 90%, why waste time with that when there's one thing to solve it 99.99%.
So once again I ask, what is one thing that will solve 99.99% of GHG emissions?
As for agriculture, check the rest of the page. Besides CO2, there's also methane and NO2 emissions, both of which are part of a cycle, so they have no long-term impact. The entirety of long-term impact of agriculture is, again, fossil fuels, which is literally digging extra C from the ground and adding that extra CO2 into the atmosphere (technically, TBH, it's also part of a cycle, but instead of 114 years as with NO2, that cycle is millions of years long).
The point is if we invest much more in nuclear, it will become too cheap to meter (e.g. we start using modular reactors that benefit from economies of scale).
> The point is if we invest much more in nuclear, it will become too cheap to meter
So if we ignore the financial costs (invest today) it'll become too cheap to meter.
If nuclear plants can generate with costs <1¢/kWh, why don't they?
If nuclear is cheaper than all other energy sources (too cheap to even meter in costs) why is there any energy kind of energy usage and why would it need massive investment to make it happen? If your costs are practically zero, isn't your profit margin essentially 100%? Shouldn't all nuclear power plants be making money hand over fist competing against expensive nonrenewable resources?
And yet it's often one of the more expensive sources of electricity today.
Don't get me wrong I'm a fan of nuclear and wouldn't mind seeing more of it but not if my electricity bill is 30¢/kWh+. That's not moving towards too cheap to meter.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_cycle
CH4 -> CO2 -> grass -> cow -> CH4
|
\/
steak -> human -> CO2
> If nuclear plants can generate with costs <1¢/kWh, why don't they?
Because they're too expensive to build, because of regulation and lack of economies of scale. Similar to why rockets were expensive, before SpaceX. If we invested more, both in research and in building more of them, in factories, we could build plenty, much more cheaply. The technology for modular reactors obviously exists (e.g. nuclear submarines), it just needs to be commercialized.
> If your costs are practically zero, isn't your profit margin essentially 100%?
You're mixing up or conflating total cost vs marginal cost. The marginal cost of making computer chips is almost 0, but the upfront investment is huge. Same with reactors and nuclear power. If we make more of them, streamline the construction, simplify regulation, etc. the marginal costs will drop massively (as will upfront costs, but they will still be non-zero).
So it's pretty disingenuous to act as if methane emissions are unrelated to CO2 emissions, isn't it? That methane released in agriculture eventually does turn in to CO2 emissions. You even drew a graph showing my point. Thanks!
> You're mixing up or conflating total cost vs marginal cost
I'm going by total cost, because ultimately that's what society will pay. We can't just act like building a nuclear power plant costs $0.
Who is saying this? This seems like a straw man.
Faceless “politicians” are an easy scapegoat, but most politicians aren’t flying on private jets. And the few that do generally are not environmentalists, or if they claim to be, aren’t representative of the entire environmental movement.
Those that are banning gas in new construction are universally politicians at the state and local level, who generally earn fairly modest salaries, and at their highest are at the level of the professional class of society.
The bans that may actually go into effect (e.g. NY) are bans on nat gas in new construction, not gas stoves. Gas stoves may be a drop in the bucket but nat gas heating is not. the reason we are talking about gas stoves is to distract from the actual issue of transforming our residential energy infrastructure.
You have to convince voters that they should support banning gas stoves and such. (Build things)
I don’t have to convince anyone that while the government is “taking away their stoves” so-called billionaires fly around in private jets and own dozens of cars. (Destroy things)
It’s just not effective. I want to see effective solutions, not ideological ones. Especially ideological ones that push people away from stated goals.