Unfortunately, having an ideological agenda against climate change and trying to effectively manage and mitigate climate change are completely orthogonal.
The problem with climate change isn't climate change. It's because it has become co-opted by politics. It's now impossible to discuss climate change without becoming political.
The politics don't even agree relative to the side. Climate change has left the spectrum of left-right wing.
That's not what I mean. Climate-change denial is a very specific issue, and empirical in nature.
When I say ideological difference, I mean people who have different fundamental values. Say socialism vs capitalism. People from both those camps can disagree with each other, but still respect the arguments others make and learn from those arguments.
Obviously, when I say arguments I mean academia level arguments, not party-rally-slogan level arguments.
Indeed. For most it's nor ideology, but a genuine difference of opinion regarding how bad CO2 climate change will be in the next 100 years and how easy it will be to mitigate.
That said, there's a fairly large degrowth faction who are very underrepresented in debate/discussion forums like this who would genuinely want to reduce energy consumption and fossil fuel consumption even if they didn't cause climate change. I encounter them a fair bit in the real world.
I would disagree. Most people believe in man-made climate change. It is a centrist belief. The ability to turn that topic into a fearful subject where you can rake in tax dollars is where it becomes an issue and a platform for the left. I work building software for climate research and lean to the right.
Consider these 2 possible opinions of folks who don't care too much about fighting climate change:
1. Climate change is an unsolvable problem, requiring coordination on a massive scale by billions of actors who have been shown to defect whenever given the chance. Any plan we are likely to implement is unlikely to succeed. Humans overall are adaptive, adrobust to change, and when the changes caused by climate change happen, we may suffer a bit, but it will not be immense suffering.
2. Climate change isn't real.
Often when I've tried to argue position 1, which I actually believe, my friends are extremely frustrated and essentially think I'm trying to argue for position 2. Left-leaning folks are too idealistic to understand that position 1 is an entirely internally-consistent position.
>climate change is going to end the world in twelve years
That a position that is supported by nearly all peer-reviewed evidence is not considered centrist, is another sign we've shifted the window towards an ideological rather than rational/observational politics.
Disclaimer: I'm apolitical because right/left is divide-and-conquer, divided-we-fall noise.
Climate change shouldn't be political or some far-off hypothetical.. no propaganda, rationalization or BS can deny the mountain of evidence that it's an immediate, existential threat that demands immediate, decisive action on the decatrillion-dollar moonshot scale (roughly the total, multi-decade cost of Iraq & Afghanistan).
What do you mean by "pretend ecological issues?" Climate control isn't an ideology it's a necessity created by failed policies. Climate change doesn't care about your political or economic ideology.
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.
The two major problems with the discussion on climate change:
1.) Right-leaning, free-market, anti-authoritarian types need to understand that climate change is a negative third party externality, and there isn't a free market economist that wouldn't agree that the state has a role to play in ameliorating that. Focus on the strategies you think are best suited for that role, such as carbon taxes.
2.) Left-leaning climate advocates need to realistically prioritize objectives according to their tenability and impact. Airplanes contribute 2% of greenhouse emissions, how about we don't start there. Energy production constitutes by far the largest impact, how about we focus energy there, and not to beat a dead horse, but also seriously advocate on behalf of nuclear. They also forget that the other half of the equation, carbon capture, is almost unilaterally popular. Focusing efforts on where the most leeway can be achieved is a much better solution, particularly since carbon capture is capable of handling carbon emissions of states unwilling to regulate their own outputs.
They also need to cool it with the catastrophizing. It is a bad strategy. All the opposition has to do is point out how incredibly off-base the predictions were in an An Inconvenient Truth, and they're done. Accurately identify where the feedback loops are that cause enormous leaps forward, and focus on those precise thresholds. Near linear progress in the way we've seen it creeping does not scare people, but that doesn't mean that we can just be wildly inaccurate with the predictions in order to scare people in to action.
Lastly, don't shoehorn in other political policies alongside climate propositions. Green New Deal, for example, is first and foremost a bundle of socialist policies using climate activism as a vehicle. If this is truly the greatest threat to humanity, decouple it from adjacent political policy.
Most movements seem to be ideological. See, for example, studies that find scientific literacy is equally appalling between climate change deniers and supporters[0].
In the case of climate change, and in everything else, the internal and private views of a politician and their inner circle are not necessarily the same as their public views. This explains why Obama claimed to be against gay marriage, why Gore made claims that he almost certainly knew were wrong about seeing a planetary catastrophe by 2016, and may explain Peter Thiel's cryptic comments on Trump and climate change from a little while ago[1]. The internal opinion may be that climate change is too expensive to fix, that the extent of the damage may be lower than predicted, that the billionaire Americans Trump hangs out with have no reason to care about poor Indians living in the Ganges delta, that climate change is too much of a talking point for the left for the right to backpedal on, or that doing anything more than we already are would not help/would not be cost effective.
Or, alternatively, the ship has an ignorant madman at the helm. Who really knows?
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