I feel like they’ve lost my trust in the climate movement. I sincerely believe that it’s a small kernel of truth surrounded by lies and degrowth ideology. I want to live in a clean, beautiful planet; and share many things with climate activists. However, I can’t get behind the insane push for green washing, ESG, climate alarmicism, JustStopOil loonies, etc. This is not science, it’s ideological activism of the worst kind: to regress as a human species. The same group of people that keep drumming climate change have other opinions that are predictable: depopulation, degrowth, reducing quality of life, social justice fundamentalism (Tim Urban’e term), etc all stemming from one political axis point located at the top-left corner. I wouldn’t be so against it if it didn’t have an authoritarian aspect to it. Soon you’ll have California mandated carbon budget. Fuck that.
Here’s the problem you are going to run into: The vast majority of the climate change/save the planet movement is uninformed cult-think driven by a delusion fed by politicians who learned to earn votes with this from the unthinking masses.
The opposite side, the deniers, are just as delusional but for a different set of reasons.
In the end, you have two sides battling over bullshit and people on both ends of the scale making money and angling for power.
If you really want to help, take the time to truly understand and push for the truth to become the only conversation.
What is the truth?
We can’t do a thing about any of it. Period.
The delusion (well, one of them) is to actually believe we can change a planetary-scale problem one thousand times faster than nature has managed over millions of years. This is ridiculous. It’s lunacy. We are far more likely to kill everything on this planet than to save it.
The data is out there. Not opinions. Not my words. High quality scientific data. Start by studying the 800K year ice core atmospheric data we have and understand how the planet has dealt with this for millions of years. That’s the start of the journey who should make anyone honest enough to look for the truth become horrified at the nonsense we are pummeled with every day.
Warning. Opinion piece. Just give me my downvotes.
Climate Change is a religion first. Science second.
We are coming out of an ice age. People don't seem to understand that. The real concern is at what rate things are changing because of human. Not are things changing. Sea level rose 420 feet before people were doing much.
People like Al Gore have gotten rich peddling garbage for decades. By now we should all be dead. The famous hockey stick graph that never happened.
If someone is willing to talk nuclear power then are serious and worth listening to. Everyone else is either trying to get rich, or has no critical thinking skills.
The more I hear environmentalists talk, the more skeptical I get to be about climate change. The fact that they’ve been predicting doom and gloom since I was a kid in the 80’s makes me kind of doubt their predictive ability, but I figure that if they’re right and we don’t do anything, that would really suck, so I tune in just long enough to listen to what they say. After a few hours of “I’ll hate you forever and never forgive you if you don’t do what I say”, eventually they get around to actually saying what they want me to do: and it’s always the same. Vote liberal. Even if I bought into the climate change alarmism, I’d still doubt their sincerity when they tell me the only thing I can do is elect liberal politicians: the Democrats had a super majority in the U.S. government for years and used it to do exactly nothing about climate change. I see no confirmation in their actions that they really believe what they’re saying.
Just going to be the guy that says that not only is human caused climate change a massive threat to humanity's economic future, but also that even if it were not, it would be far cheaper to switch to carbon-free tech than continue on our current path. Carbon free electricity is cheaper than fossil fuel, and as we electrify things like home heating and transport, we typically see efficiency increases of 200%-600%, meaning we need far less primary power to begin with.
Any objection to the scientific basis of anthropogenic climate change is based on political ideology and false propaganda. We need to stop having allegiances to politicians and bad news sources, and maintain allegiance to truth and the unbiased pursuit of it. Far too many in our country are tools of fossil fuel interests. So while I agree that some environmentalists are tools of weird political ideologies, they are staying closer to the truth than those who oppose climate change. Unless most of your wealth is tied up directly in fossil fuel assets that you can't sell, you are also shortchanging your own economic future by not embracing newer and better technology.
I don’t trust the Science that censors dissent. It’s not science. The people that propel climate doom are also ok with depopulation of millions. The incoherence is absolutely staggering. The entire climate agenda reeks of malaise, dishonesty and authoritarianism. You will live in a pod. You will eat bugs. You will euthanize people on a mass scale. You will be happy.
We have limitless resource - Nuclear energy both in the form of Uranium/Plutonium and the sun itself. Climate doomers are Marxists who don’t want solutions. They just want state power expansion and erosion of rights through the bullshit excuse of climate.
It’s year 2050 and there are climate activists for space to keep space pristine. Mark my words. The roots are in place at cities like Berkeley.
I feel like it has become a degrowth cult, may be not on HN but your random Karen in Oakland wants to cut down on energy usage all-together, not realizing that China is polluting on a monumental scale without remorse. Climate cult makes no sense in America: They lobbied their tails off in 70's and 80's against nuclear power, robbed America's future from their kids. America could have been way cleaner if we stop listening to woke idiots from California about energy policy.
Climate alarm-ism has honestly set back the whole movement in my opinion. For decades, we've only been 10 years away from extinction and it gave conservatives all the ammo needed to write climate change off as fake. Heck, even The Simpsons mocked this:
That's a failure of the political class who are using it to score points at the expense of a lot of people's lives.
It's really quite gross.
Climate change is due to, and a threat to, the status quo, and those who have gained their societal positions on the back of this status quo will defend the righteousness of their status literally to the death.
And these folks typically have communication platforms that reach a long way and therefore muddy the waters, often with the sideline cheering of said politicians.
I've come to realize that most environmentalists don't really understand climate change. I guess it is similar to how PETA protests animal abuse but in a very dumb manner. Sure, there is a problem at the bottom of it, but these groups are very detached from reality.
Eh, they're failing on more issues than just climate change. I think many people realize the rampant hypocrisy and political games that both sides play. It seems the ruling class grant themselves more and more power and privilege while imposing ever increasing restrictions on the population at large.
My neighbor is convinced that climate change isn’t real and has been pushed by the left to make activists feel important. As there’s an economic slant to this, my cynical view is that there’s a chance that climate change agenda is being pushed by AstroTurfing groups to drive government handouts to the Green industry. I’m 99.9% convinced that climate change is happening and will follow the models.... but maybe I’m being scammed.
And the climate lobby eats itself with runaway propoganda. But more interesting, the polar opposites of the climate drama seem to agree on a lot of things.
Fascinating that the Doomers and Denialists both seem to agree that it is not technoligaly/economicly/politically possible to INFLUENCE climate in a meaningful way through policy in the real world.
Or how about Doomers and Denialists agreeing that Society is going to collapse? One through action (costly climate initiatives), the other through inaction (eco collapse leading to societal collapse)
I've been preaching this for years! Global warming makes as much sense as eternal damnation to non-believers. It redirects the environmental conversation away from tangible short term problems such as pollution to abstract long term problems like global warming. People can relate to problems affecting people (pollution and health, over-logging and soil erosion, over-fishing and lost jobs, oil and energy dependence, etc). Global warming is a lot harder to relate to. It's so abstract that it's easy for opponents to dismiss and spread FUD.
The shift in conversation towards Climate Change really hurt the environmental movement, IMO.
Climate activists always tell me “weather is not climate” from one side of their mouth while also screaming about extreme weather events as proof of climate doom from the other - I just started tuning it all out.
I'm not sure whether most of this climate activism is productive, or just produces more backlash in reaction.
It would be helpful if climate change could be taken away from the zealous environmentalists, as they have a long track record of advocating for policies that do more to inconvenience people than they do to solve problems. It's the modern day equivalent of wearing a hair shirt.
It certainly doesn't help to keep up the fire and brimstone, judgement day is coming, listen and repent rhetoric. They've played that card too many times to be taken seriously.
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