Anger found to be the primary driver of climate activism | Hacker News Reader

Anger found to be the primary driver of climate activism

phys.org

27 pointsPaulHoule48 comments

Comments here are wild. There is a very serious problem; the solutions to the problem are known; powerful people are preventing those solutions from being implemented; people are angry about that; anger motivates those people to do progressively more socially unacceptable things to make the people in power change.

We can and should argue about specific remedies, exactly who is responsible, what tactics are most effective, and so forth. We should not be arguing about whether or not it's reasonable to be angry!

I'd say that anger, or rather intense emotions motivate nearly all political activism.

It's sorta just how orgs get people to care. Donations to third world countries have some sorta happy or sob story attached for good reason.

I could misremember but I think I read that Florence Nightingale was motivated by pure rage.

Humans are mammals and and mammals tend to be motivated by emotions.

And now we understand why propaganda is often designed to invoke anger. When someone is trying to make you angry it should make you suspicious instead. People only try to invoke emotional responses from you when an explanation would out their fraud, or when they don't understand what they're talking about.

Anger can be justified, and its good to change things that are harmful.

So sure, challenge and question the messages you receive. But people shouldn't close their eyes and cover their for fear of being influenced.

Absolutely, but emotion should come from a place of deep understanding. If something is extremely harmful, studying it and deeply understanding it will lead you to an intense desire to stop it, a very emotional response. A message trying to shortcut that process of deep understanding should always he viewed as suspicious, and upon learning you find that the anger is warranted, at the very least the tactic should be viewed with disdain. I personally resent being treated like a stupid child who must be managed.

Yes, anger can lead to climate change fixes. It's the easy way to get an army of activists.

But what world does that leave us afterwards?

There's a user on /r/austin, serpentarian (https://www.reddit.com/r/Austin/comments/wn71rn/farewell_to_...), who personifies another approach. Serpentarian shows up occasionally, identifying snake species and throwing out facts and trivia.

They're advocating for nature through education and inspiration, and it works. They're loved on the subreddit

I do agree, but it's slightly different I think. All people acknowledge that snakes exist, some think it's not so clear-cut in this other topic.

Norwegians with their hydrocarbon sourced funds should have a countrywide requirement to mitigate all the CO2 emissions produced by their hydrocarbon productions through carbon capture before they use that fund for their own purpose. Of course if you ask these enlightened Norwegians, they’ll come up with some reason why they shouldn’t. They’ve already converted their hydrocarbons into wealth, and now want to prevent other countries from doing the same.

What powers the carbon capture? Hydrocarbons? Solar which also requires hydrocarbons, creates toxic waste and has lower availabilities in northern regions like...Norway? Hack your brain, study actual economics, study how energy is actually produced and the facts on what each source of energy entails.

The energy cost of direct air capture is about overcoming the entropy of CO2 being dispersed in the air and not about breaking the C=O bonds so if you had a good enough DAC system and the ratio of CO2 captured/produced is favorable you could fuel DAC from carbon fuels, it is even more favorable if you capture pure CO2 right at the point of combustion.

As for solar the real problem is that it is not available everywhere, battery storage doesn’t seem impossible to run the grid but it is not a bird in the hand just yet. The folks at terraform have looked at the problem of cost-optimizing e-Fuel production from DAC and electrolysis and if you are solar powered you delete all the storage and decide to trade off energy efficiency for capital efficiency, in particular the least-cost electrolyzer is less efficient that is possible but cheaper to build than a least-cost electrolyzer that runs 24 hours.

DAC? Trees? Which sequester CO2 underground? Hey, by all means, I think eventually its inevitable that carbon outputs become a commodity that people want to buy for industrial uses. As it stands, there are natural processes that do a good job of this already, there is a lot of reforestation in areas everyone was worried about not long ago. To your point on fuel production, even if you are powering this with solar, you again have an issue with areas that work with solar, and those solar panels are only marginally better than fossil fuels over their lifetime, its not some magic bullet. Its nuclear or bust, I'd buy it for 10c on the $ if you said it was backed up by nuclear because at least we are having a serious conversation; solar is only useful as a hedge against environmentalist policy causing an unstable grid -> me.

> those solar panels are only marginally better than fossil fuels over their lifetime

Source?

I was a nuclear operator for 6 years and I've been managing 140MWs since, I've spent almost a decade looking at the cost/benefit of solar, EVs, battery tech, I've looked at where the minerals are mined and how, I've looked at where and how they are processed, how the real cost stacks up against what the consumer sees. I'm not going to go digging for sources because I've seen enough of it for my own purposes. They give a marginal benefit, if they are operated in the long term they are in the green, if they are operated in the short you are in the red. The government should not be providing incentives but I'll happily capitalize on them, I've had 4 EVs and I'm waiting on permits for my solar; these techs could compete at some level with ICE today without the incentives, but they wouldn't won outright, they will likely never compete with nuclear.

Reforestation and aforrestation are fraught. See

https://arstechnica.com/science/2023/08/study-carbon-offsets...

and

https://knowablemagazine.org/article/society/2023/abandon-id...

The basic problem is that if take a flight that last 12 hours, somebody has to maintain an area in forest for 10,000 years and there is no amount of money that is fair compensation for that. There was the case of a nature preserve in Pennsylvania that got carbon credits although they already had a conservation easement and that is in an honest part of the world, go South and you will face tropical gangsters: on the web site mongabay the most common story seems to be some people in Indonesia cut a forest that they weren't supposed to cut down and the government did nothing about it.

On top of that there are places where forests aren't really the climax ecosystem and planting trees could do more harm than good.

Protecting the Amazon rainforest, for instance, is a goal that is worthy in an d of itself and it has a complex relationship with the ecosystem that is to the southwest of itself as the line between those areas seems likely to shift north because of nonlocal effects.

A carbon offset based on DAC is entirely different, here you take a 12 hour flight and over the course of 12 hours they can measure a certain amount of CO2 going into the ground the same way the gas company can measure gas going into you house -- there still are questions of whether or not the CO2 will really stay underground for 10,000 but it is not like "nature based" solutions where the answer is just plain "no".

I am all for nuclear, if you look at what I post you can see I am a fan. At best it is the thin edge of a long wedge as the only country that can build nuclear reactors on an n-th of a kind basis is Russia and they are doing the best they can with the war in Ukraine to kill off that business. You can't blame the failed project in South Carolina or the late project in Georgia on anti-nuclear actvists but rather in difficulties building the first AP1000 reactors. Somehow we have to get to the place where we promise to build one in three years and maybe build it three and half and not nine.

I'm not referring to reforestation projects, I'm referring to natural growth of forests, that out of they way...

Yes, for nuclear I will buy the argument, on the cheap though, because ultimately someone has to pay for it. I return to my point, there will someday be a market for carbon emissions as a commodity, today it is fictitious.

I don’t care what technology power the carbon capture. My point is that Norwegians should identify that the entire reason for their current financial situation is due to their hydrocarbon extractions. They have a massive wealth fund, which they could use to kickstart the carbon capture economy, and yet they don’t. They would rather point to other countries as the problem, as opposed to admit that they’re a major cause, and should be channeling their wealth to solve it. If they simply held a contest each year for new carbon capture technologies, and invested 10% of the wealth fund’s yearly earnings into whatever the best of breed technology is, they’d make an enormous dent in the problem.

One could argue, albeit controversially, two notable points:

1. There exists a proposition that the majority of endeavors labeled as 'activism' actually function as mechanisms for societal control. The intent may not be to incite real change but rather to channel collective frustrations into avenues that appear productive but are, in essence, ineffectual. This offers a kind of placebo effect, allowing for minimal 'successes' to be highlighted as a means to continue the cycle, drawing more individuals into expending energy on ultimately fruitless pursuits. To summarize succinctly, one might say that the goal of such activism could be to maintain existing conditions rather than change them.

2. Additionally, and more contentiously, one could assert that the global focus on climate change might be less about environmental impact and more about psychological manipulation. This movement might be orchestrated to offer a controlled narrative that not only distracts from impending, uncontrollable cataclysms but also provides a facade under which various organizations can operate in secrecy. In short, the discourse around climate change may serve to obfuscate other existential threats and, in doing so, preserve the ignorance of the general populace while covert actions are taken to prepare for such threats.

Skepticism is a healthy response to such bold claims. Instead of asking for immediate proof, one might want to employ their own critical thinking skills to assess the validity of these ideas.

Dismissal of these thoughts may be the safest course of action, lest one finds themselves either burdened or enlightened by further contemplation on the subjects at hand.

> Dismissal of these thoughts may be the safest course of action, lest one finds themselves either burdened or enlightened by further contemplation on the subjects at hand.

Setting yourself up to reject any criticism as a symptom of the phenomenon you're arguing for is a rather disingenuous rhetorical move.

In particular, while there's a conversation to be had about "slacktivism" being an outlet for emotions that might better motivate real activism, your suggestion that climate change is "uncontrollable" is doomerism, pure and simple.

If we emit less greenhouse gasses, things will not get as bad. It is, of course, more complex than that, but that's a pretty damn good first approximation. So let's do something!

Slightly off-topic, but I have a brief question: I often see the argument that western emissions matter relatively little because Chinese emissions are much bigger. But China is essentially the worlds factory right? So its emission is obviously linked to western consumption. Or am I misunderstanding the argument?

You're understanding but missing a big part: China isn't a factory, it's a country full of people. So there's a lot, for one, the western customers of their production don't decide what they as a sovereign nation regulate as far as emissions, and two, removing those emissions is equatable to starving them to death.

We are all someone's customer and someone's producer. So it only makes sense to simplify the analysis and ascribe emissions to where they are emitted. Shuffling blame around doesn't get you anywhere, imagine a man who blamed his farts on his wife's cooking. Emissions from China come from China and emissions from Norway come from Norway, we don't blame the energy customers who buy Norwegian energy for Norwegian emissions, we blame Norway.

I don't find this convincing at all. If the producer takes all the responsibility and the consumer none everyone is just incentivized to move their production abroad instead of doing anything constructive. We just need to find a country willing to take all the factories and all the blame, and the rest of the world can call themselves innocent while worldwide emissions stay the same.

That would never happen, because if you don't produce something for other people you don't have the resources to pay someone to produce things for you. But supposing it did...

> We just need to find a country willing to take all the factories and all the blame

A country that does this for economic benefit isn't to blame for it's own sovereign decision to do this???

Do we absolve the US as the largest energy producer because they sell to customers elsewhere? Norway? Russia? Why is it that China uniquely gets absolved of it's emissions? It has 1.3 billion people, surely the vast majority of their emissions are for it's own domestic economy?

First, the United States contributes more than its "fair share" of carbon emissions. We have more cars per capita than anyone else, and cars are a major factor contributing to greenhouse gasses (arguably the single biggest factor).

Second the lifestyle of individual Americans is, on average, much more energy intensive than other individuals in the world. There's our cars, like I already mentioned, but also the meat-heavy diet we have uses more resources (think of how much land is needed to sustain a cow vs how much grains, beans, or veggies the same land plot of land could produce), and the relatively large and single family homes many of us have take more energy to heat and cool. The very wealthiest Americans go much further and are huge contributers to climate change (privates jets, multiple large houses, yachts, private golf land, etc).

Third, your point that western nations shift pollution to other countries is correct. If a state or nation enacts strict rules about industrial pollution, and a company decides to move their factories to another country with less regulation to save money, then there has been no reduction in emissions! But a country gets to claim they are clean, while their corporations continue to make profits and their consumers continue enjoy their gadgets that depend on dirty production. I think if we actually prioritized climate change over company profits, laws would be stricter about where a company could construct foreign factories.

One other point I'd like to make is that shifting production around like this means that there is more shipping required in order to get raw materials to factories and finished goods to consumers. That also is energy intensive, which mostly means burning fossil fuels.

Because everything about these arguments lacks a grounded foundation in how the world works. Everyone wants to jump in with zero understanding of economics, behavior, energy, industry, incentives etc.

China is the worlds factory, so fun couple facts here: -As the worlds reserve currency with no commodity backing, we sabatoge domestic manufacturing to give other countries like China something to sell us, if we didn't then the world wouldn't have the dollar and we would lose our hegemony as they look for a different trading currency. The world was in balance under the gold standard, because the supply of gold was not limited to any single country. -American industry, like in any wealthy country, would self regulate emmisions (all pollutants actually, not just carbon), provide a better standard of living, and make better use of byproducts (see how advanced hydrocarbon refining actually is, where every possible output is extracted rather than wasting them by burning crude). No one wants to live in a toxic waste dump and historically industries clean themselves up even without government regulation.

In general this argument doesn’t make a lot of sense — the west can still be generating too much carbon to be sustainable even if China is generating more.

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10584-023-03518-z

Environmental knowledge is inversely associated with climate change anxiety

Kinda obvious, but interesting. I would love to see another study, that gauges how many young people feel depressed because of the "we're all going to die" climate activism.

But isn't anger usually a secondary emotion? A reaction to something a bit deeper?

In this case it would be secondary to the fear of what climate change will inflict upon the angry person. But I think the anger is the motivation of action, not the fear.

Alternatively, sadness and grief lead to very little action at all. It's something I see in myself and others close to me who are concerned about climate change. When we respond with righteous anger, we have an energy to try and do something (attend a city council meeting, change ingrained habits, go out to pick up a bunch trash, etc). When I feel grief instead, there's no energy or motivation. Just a feeling of hopelessness - that I have no agency or that nothing I can do makes a difference. Anger is better in this case, imo.

I would have thought it was the climate but what would I know.

Maybe they're angry over the climate?

These people just need a reason, any reason, to be angry at something so they can think they have a purpose.

https://poorlydrawnlines.com/comic/mad/

The people mad about climate are mad that other people won't accept any changes.

Maybe they are angry because of entirely other reasons and this is just an outlet they perceive as acceptable. The inability to save wealth, burdensome bureaucracy, a lack of meaning, unfair regulations, disparities in the prosecution of crime; I can think of a lot of things people are actually angry about, but somehow it always gets turned into anger about an entirely different set of things.

It’s a legitimate use of anger to be angry about something and use that emotion to motivate change.

You have missed my point, I'm not going to retread it, but I'll answer your post. No one is seriously angry about the environment, you might be angry about your environment, you are not angry about my environment which is a daily battle against nature to keep it from kicking my door down. Take a look at the US on google maps, notice the west half looks like a desert, yea, that's where all this activism seems to come from.

My wife teaches people to ride horses and when she isn't doing rides or taking care of the horses she is landscaping so she spends almost all day outside in the weather.

On top of that our business depends on pasture and hay and the availability of that has everything to with cycles of heat and moisture. A good hay crop depends on having enough rain for the grass to grow but having the rain stop for long enough for the hay to dry out. If it rains on the hay while it is drying we lose the whole crop. Some years the weather is perfect but other years we are waiting for a gap in the rain to cut the hay and biting our nails the whole time worrying that rain will spoil our crop.

In upstate NY the expectation is that climate change won't make a big difference in how much water we get a year but it will make a big difference in the timing of when we get the water, it will be more bunched up so we will have more droughts that damage our crops and then more floods that damage property.

If you aren't living in air conditioning all the time, climate change can very much give you something to be worried or angry about.

Okay, I respect the hustle. However, now you are talking about maintaining a climate specifically how you want it. The climate changes naturally, I understand you are worried about a sudden human induced climate change, but that's not really the issue at hand when you want to preserve specific conditions. So who do we preserve the climate for, why is this the "right" climate? Will we ever decide to release more CO2 to create more farmland and warm cold climates? Why are we worried about people dying of heat when people die from cold 10/1? Are we going to hold back, say, 70 year climate cycles in Africa because we like things a certain way? Who gets to decide?

One step thinking is the source of all wisdom. I got paid enough for going no further anyway.

Climate alarmism is a cult of mentally ill people.

You know what really makes me angry? Statements like this: >"In this new study, the researchers sought to better understand why so little is being done to save the planet"

Save the planet? Really? Is it going to explode in a ball of fire/lava destroying the moon in the process? No it will not.

Using hyper-alarmist language like this has an opposite effect to the one we want. What is it "we" want? An informed debate on the subject focused mostly on how to prepare for and mitigate climate change, not panic. This kind of language ("we're all going to die") has twofold negative consequences. One, it triggers many people making actual informed conversation impossible. Second, it makes people that do believe it will be exactly like that(usually young people) very depressed.

There is precisely zero impact on "The planet" if for example humanity decides to blow itself to smithereens with 5k nuclear warheads. Few hundred thousand years later (a blink of an eye in geologic timescales) there will be no difference. Some species will go extinct. Perhaps overall diversity will take a nosedive for a bit, just like in a dozen prior "mass dying" events before. To quickly recover and exceed previous numbers.

It's like this with anthropogenic climate change, "the planet" doesn't care(if it could care for anything) that the climate during this recovery from the last ice age is warming up a bit faster thanks to our civilisation. The planet had periods before where average temperatures were 30C higher. No, it will not cause a chain reaction for the Earth to end up as Venus. We had huge amounts of co2 (and methane) in the atmosphere before and it didn't happen.

You know who it maters for though? People. Yes, changing climate will matter a lot for people. Especially people living in places like Bangladesh and many other places. You want to know how climate change will look like? Consider the fact there were lions, giraffes, hippos in huge numbers all over today's Sahara mere 15k years ago. It's actually a great example(despite the fact human emissions had nothing to do with it back them it is still a great case study) . A huge value got destroyed by desertification of this area, entire civilisations dissapeared and others came to be (Egyptians) but it didn't happen in one person's lifetime.

This climate change will be slow too. I very much doubt humanity can cooperate to stop or seriously curb greenhouse emissions. It(the climate change) will happen. On average everyone will loose on the climate change, but there will still be entire nations that will profit. If we can't even cooperate enough to stop atrocities like mass slavery/organ harvesting in places like China what makes anyone think they will not just continue to lie about the greenhouse gas emissions and they will just laugh at us as we continue destruction of our industries? In the short term (next 50 years) it is much more important for The West to recover its industrial advantage to not end up being ruled by the Chinese Communist Party. Is climate change an important problem to consider? Sure it is, but it's important to understand two things. First, it is very unlikely China will not just pick up all the emissions The West stops, second anything including climate change activism is likely being used as a weapon by enemies of democratic rule to make us weaker. OMG, we're all going to die. SHUT DOWN EVERYTHING! Is precisely the reaction They (China/Russia) want us to have.

If we really want to seriously slow down anthropogenic climate change, we(The West) have to be in position to enforce changes on countries like China. Making us dependent on them for 100% of our steel production for example accomplishes the opposite.

“Save the planet” is not the literal “save the giant space ball”. It is short hand for “save the environmental components that are conducive to life on land and in the seas”. It is a common statement used by environmentalists since at least the 60s.

Though I suspect you know this and are just acting daft on the internet to straw man the modern environmentalist movement as a bunch of idiots. It’s not a good look and you would be well advised to consider the underlying points being made rather than arguing pedantic wordplay.

>“Save the planet” is not the literal “save the giant space ball”. It is short hand for “save the environmental components that are conducive to life on land and in the seas

So you exchanged a huge hyperbole to a slightly smaller one missing my point entirely.

There is precisely zero chance for "environmental components conductive to life on land and in the seas" to dissappear due to few degrees of average temperature change. We had such things on this planet as huge meteorite impacts (for example the one that was instrumental in dinosaur extinction), we had mega volcanoes, we had average temperatures over 30C higher than now for millenia. Both caused extinctions of many species, and one could argue they indeed caused "-some- environmental components conductive to life on land and in the seas to change". But even these catastrophes (as well as other mass dyings in history) haven't made "environmental components conductive to life to dissappear". By making such hyperboles you make most people dismiss the entire thing as quackery. And those that do believe you instead of being motivated become depressed and prone to "spur of the moment" action which translates to the stupidest (environmentally) policy making one can imagine.

I find it funny that when arguing there's no impact on planet, you focus on its biosphere, which is a tiny negligible percentage of total mass. Your loose definition of "planet" excludes huge core and mantle, but you are for some reason angry that most people's definition of planet is "life as we know it". It's a petty attempt to derail the discussion.

Blaming China and "enforcing changes" on other countries is misguided. China's emissions are mostly caused by West's demand for consumer goods. Let's do some action and improve around ourselves before demanding others to do the same.

Norway's emissions are caused by external demand for it's energy, shall we just absolve them of their emissions too?

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