What climate activists won't tell you about protecting the planet | Hacker News Reader

What climate activists won't tell you about protecting the planet

zionlights.substack.com

23 pointsbarry-cotter18 comments

I don't like this article because it is basically a strawman argument.

The writer tries to argue a point that nobody is making. Climate activists aren't suggesting we should stop 'growth and development'. Climate activists want governments to pass effective climate regulations.

There will always be dumb/uninformed/ignorant people out there. some of them will call themselves climate activists and ask you a dumb question at a lecture, but this doesn't say anything about the group of climate activists as a whole.

Second of all, I hope you realise that climate activism isn't some sort of subculture or something. It's not a homogeneous blob of people who all think and feel alike. The only common denominator is that they are active about campaigning for climate regulation.

This may have been a valid response ten years ago, but these days it's absolutely not.

The phrase "degrowth" is thrown around ALL the time in environmentalist circles these days, I've seen it printed on posters atleast three times in the last few months alone.

And climate activism has ABSOLUTELY grown into a subculture, that's why so many people now are uncomfortable openly associating with it, because it's been hijacked by radicals that demand you agree with them on ALL their socio-cultural ideas.

I see the word "degrowth" a couple times a week now - I don't think it's a strawman argument.

The "degrowth" phrase annoys me too, but if you read what they actually say it's usually along the lines of "GDP is a crappy measure of societal progress we need to realign society along different lines to ensure we're making more people happier not just enabling "line go up"".

She's confusingly positive about the future for someone that doesn't believe in renewables.

In another post she scolds the press for not celebrating an IEA document that says we could still meet 1.5C climate goals. Then she says the 90% of electricity it projects renewables generating in 2050 is a "fantasy".

That opening comics is such an intellectual turn-off... let's reword the position of those endorsing this to show its absurdity: protracted decline can't be real, the present is always roughly the same or better than the past.

there's so many things about this article and the context in which it exists that are a big turn-off.

the general sentiment is a vague gesture towards "things are better, actually" that seem very shallowly thought out. two examples jump out to me (I could not endure reading this whole thing, it was Not That Interesting, Insightful, Or Good.)

one is the observation that "cars are getting better, actually" to illustrate that things aren't as bad as they seem. sure, a car in 2024 undoubtedly pollutes less than a car in 1970. that said, it seems to just start with the assumption that "cars are part of society" and assumes that if the fleet just continues to get greener, then there's no problem. the issue is that cars and car-centricity create myriad knock-on effects that further contribute to climate change or damage the environment. the vague hand-waving about "electric cars solving environmental issues" completely disregards the environmental cost of lithium mining, which may not contribute to air quality as profoundly but has other environmentally significant impacts. it disregards the damage to ecosystems created by extensive vehicle infrastructure, the inherent waste of vast parking lots in the suburbs. if you just say "cars are probably going to continue to get cleaner," you ignore the opportunity to explore better options. this seems like a particularly silly oversight given this person starts with the position that "growth of a society should be unrestrained," which really doesn't feel compatible with the idea of "everyone's driving around in their own little vehicle" simply from an efficiency standpoint.

another weird and telling half-thought that's brought up is the idea that cell phones are some sort of environmental win because nobody's buying a GPS device anymore. "In the recent past, a single person would have owned a GPS device, a calculator, a camera, a landline telephone, an alarm clock, and so on." sure, once again, in a vacuum and with no additional thought this sounds great - but you have to have observed the world around you, right? you couldn't be missing the obvious point that the "product to waste" cycle for phones is substantially shorter than it was for any of these devices, right? i owned one alarm clock my entire childhood up until I left for college - i owned one GPS device i updated with new maps until i got my first smartphone with google maps. i owned two digital cameras in my entire life before i entered the endless cycle of phone upgrades. i owned one landline phone my entire life up until i got my first cell phone. i owned one, maybe two calculators (i had to buy a TI-83 for school, after all.) my relationship with cell phones is different - i genuinely have no idea how many I've had. it's been a lot. i've upgraded at least every couple years my entire life, and lately, i'll fully admit that i've just fallen into a yearly upgrade cycle, as the way my phone payments are structured incentivizes that - there's no cost to getting a new, unscratched device with a new battery yearly, so why not do it? i'd estimate i've likely relegated 25 or so devices to e-waste over the course of my life. not proud, that's just reality. the thing is, i don't think I'm alone in that.

the author seems, at best, to be a hardcore ideologue of another type - i find their self-description as "pro-human, pro-progress" and proud broadcasting of being recognized as "Britain's Greenest Mother" (a totally meaningless accolade) pretty telling. they look at everything through the lens of two beliefs:

- unlimited growth of both the human population and industry is Unquestionably Good and people who oppose it are bad.

- nuclear power is a panacea that will bring an end to our climate problem and should be strongly promoted.

i'm not anti-nuclear by any stretch, but when your bias towards these two points is so intense that you have to frame all discussions as a defense of them, you're really missing obvious points to discuss and you wind up twisting yourself in silly little knots and saying things that are neither interesting nor insightful.

This author is writing about their frustration with their own inability to communicate effectively. They'd rather be verbose than concise to their own detriment. They have presented very sloppy logic throughout their tome of lamentation of being misunderstood. A commenter on the article does a much better job of getting to the point:

> Prosperity follows energy – more energy more prosperity > > https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/energy-use-per-capita-vs-... > > 1. First people want more energy > > 2. Initially, dirty energy (wood, coal) is cheap and does promote prosperity > > 3. Then prosperity allows transition to clean energy: Nuclear, Hydro, Geothermal

Oddly the commenter stops short of mentioning solar PV.

>In the US, thanks to the 1963 Clean Air Act, which was further updated in 1970, atmospheric levels of sulphur dioxide dropped to levels that had previously not been seen since the first years of the twentieth century

One thing to remember. The US wanted CO2 to be included in this Act, but the Fossil Fuel Industry bribed (lobbied) Congress to get CO2 excluded. Dropping levels of sulfur dioxide, though was a great health benefit, made CO2 emission impacts even worse.

To me, some of the article was confusing and made no point, or did I miss something ?

I think there are some points of substance here, and agree that it's very important to continue breaking the link between economic growth and resource consumption. For better or worse, caring about the environment is a luxury good, and we want people to be able to afford it.

However, some of this also strikes me as wildly uncharitable. For example: "For too long we have been sold the myth that we should be concerned about so-called ‘overpopulation’, but this has been proven to be nonsensical fearmongering."

It is for the moment not our biggest concern, but it absolutely wasn't a myth or nonsensical fearmongering. The overpopulation-and-crash cycle happens for a lot of species. This only changed for humans very recently, with the invention of birth control and women getting enough power to use it. That's not universal and is under political threat right now, and even if we keep it, resource usage is still proportional to the number of people. A population crash would be a bad thing, but absent radical technological changes, "protecting the planet" will require at least keeping the population stable, and a couple of centuries of very modest population decline would help.

TLDR: Technology will magically solve all of our problems.

It also oddly mixes social justice and enviromentalism?

Also: take the example of the Ozone layer that the author mentions. It did not magically repair itself, but because the global nations got its stuff together and actually did something about it. Imagine HCFCs would have been handled like we handle CO2 today: not with legislation banning it with a definitive end date, but by putting some kind of low tax on it that might rise in the future, but maybe not.

I don't know, I understand the point that the autor tries to make, but it all feels not thought through to the end.

I remember Bjørn Lomborg telling us not to worry about climate change back around the millennium. The main reason was that we’d invent tech in the coming 20-30 years which would completely take care of the problem. I guess he still has a decade but so far things aren’t looking great.

I don’t necessarily disagree that we can’t combine growth with a focus on sustainable energy. The green energy sector has made a lot of money the past 20 years and will continue to do so. Not enough to make sure the planet remains friendly to humans by any means, but we’re not going to do that are we?

I don't think that is what Bjørn Lomborg said at all. IIRC he said money would be better spent on mitigating effects of climate change. Since you say things aren't looking great you actually seem to agree with him.

Not mitigation but adapting to an inevitable rise in mean surface temperature, because mitigation would require too much investment with too little ROI.

> The Horse Association of America calculated that 54 million acres of US farmland was spared by the automobile

If only there was some kind of extra large horse more than one person could ride around town

The article is full of these false dichotomies, and relies on the bias of its audience to replace reason with hope. Most of its assumptions would be reasonable to make if we had the carbon dioxide levels of the 1980s, but that's four decades ago. The hope for technological progress without sacrifice is understandable, but wishful thinking nonetheless.

https://xkcd.com/1732/

Not to mention cherry-picking facts (at best). Case in point, cars today are more environmentally friendly than the 1980s, we are told. So much so that a car driving down the motorway today is greener than a parked car in the 80s.

Even over the past two decades the global annual car production has increased by over 50%, increasing embedded (production), direct (tailpipe) and indirect (electric) emissions because few countries are free from fossil fuels. Cars create noise pollution, air pollution through tyre particulates and poor land use practices that lead to urban sprawl and further car dependence.

Fortunately there is a lot of work being done in this space on many fronts, most notably around making public transport fast, efficient, comfortable and convenient, which reduces the need for cars. In the IT space there is tons of waste in short lived, locked down devices that people regularly replace because it's too hard; government action is needed (and in some cases has been implemented, like forcing Apple to support USB C cables).

I'm neither here nor there on nuclear power plants, but are actually insanely expensive. Just look at France which will spend over $US10b per replacement power plant, in a country with well established nuclear capabilities.

The idea that "climate activists" are wrong and pro-nuclear optimists are right is just a real weird take.

So much wrong with this rant. To be so dismissively anti-activist is bizarre. If we listened to them decades ago we could have developed all these improvements earlier - and with fewer mouths to feed. But apparently then, as now, they are just naive do-gooders.

Imagine writing: "Some people argue that humans have caused climate change and environmental damage, and therefore humans are the problem. This is a very black-and-white, misleading way of looking at the world. Humans are also able to solve these problems and have done so in many cases"... and concluding that because we mitigate some of the large complex problems we create, but not all, somehow we are a net good and there should be more of us.

Every time people overfish, overharvest, over intensify farming, drive a species to extinction etc. we get the same response - people have the right to a livelihood, people need to eat. And it would be unethical to deny them that. But no mention of biodiversity as an environmental and ethical problem either. It's all about climate because all that matters is humans.

We don't know how to sustainably feed the human population we have now and pro-market capitalism contrarians give the same "actually more people is a good thing because... brain trust" or some nebulous nonsense.

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