site banner
PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   13835 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 25, 2026

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

3
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Every so often, I see a number that strikes me in a particular way. More than once, the way that it strikes me has been in comparison to climate change damage estimates. Yes, yes, there are many many different estimates out there, and they're even presented in different terms, too. Some are in percentage of GDP/GWP; others are dollar figures. One of the numbers that has stuck in my brain, thanks to David Friedman back at the old old old place, comes from one of the early world leaders in trying to produce such estimates, Nobel-winning William Nordhaus. It would take epsilon more effort to find one of his old old old comments at the old old old place, so I just found an example from his substack.

Nordhaus’s final and most important point was based on his own research.

My research shows that there are indeed substantial net benefits from acting now rather than waiting fifty years. A look at Table 5-1 in my study A Question of Balance (2008) shows that the cost of waiting fifty years to begin reducing CO2 emissions is $2.3 trillion in 2005 prices. If we bring that number to today’s economy and prices, the loss from waiting is $4.1 trillion. Wars have been started over smaller sums.

What he does not mention is that his $4.1 trillion is a cost spread over the entire globe and an extended period of time. I initially assumed his calculations of cost were for the rest of the century, making his $4.1 trillion total about $48 billion a year, but in A Question of Balance he appears to be summing over the next 250 years which reduces the annual cost to $16 billion.

It's a quote from Nordhaus' 2012 NYT opinion piece, citing his 2008 book, so yeah, the estimate is quite old. There are many many other estimates out there since then, but this one stuck in my brain. I think he was trying to get it to stick in your brain. "Wars have been started over smaller sums," is meant to do that. It worked.

This morning, Tyler Cowen posted How Much Has Shale Gas Saved U.S. Consumers? It's just quoting an NBER working paper. I'll just reproduce the whole quote, so there's no need to click through:

It may seem like a distant memory now, but as of the mid-2000s, U.S. natural gas production had been flat for a decade, and the U.S. was importing liquefied natural gas (LNG), with plans to import much more. Then shale gas happened. Advances in hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling caused U.S. natural gas production to increase significantly, and the U.S. went from being a net importer of natural gas to being the world’s largest exporter. This paper calculates how much shale gas has saved U.S. natural gas consumers. Using price differences between the United States, Europe and Japan, we calculate that U.S. natural gas consumers have saved $3.1-$4.3 trillion between 2007 and 2025, equivalent to $164-$227 billion annually. Access to low-price U.S. natural gas has been particularly valuable during major supply shocks such as the war in Ukraine, and the benefits of shale gas have been experienced broadly across sectors and states.

It's not a direct analog, but that number, though. It's in my brain. $4.1T is right in that range of $3.1-4.3T. That's a swing in one country over less than 20 years, not 250 years. The dynamics of economic systems can move fast, much faster than climate change. But how big of a swing does that 'feel like'? Sure, life would have been more awful in a variety of ways in the counterfactual without the shale revolution. But, like, cataclysmically bad?! End of the world bad? I kind of doubt it.

I don't really like to focus too much on any particular estimate. There are higher ones; there are lower ones. I actually think the entire endeavor of estimating economic impacts of climate change is probably impossible, but we're stuck in a world where we have the various estimates we have and they matter to people. But I never underestimate how difficult the scale of numbers is to folks, so I appreciate when I occasionally see numbers of roughly similar scale in different contexts.

Shale gas I have very high on my list of underrated achievements. I think its economy effects and geopolitical effects are much closer to IPhone and tech than people give it credit for. Geopolitically probably bigger.

It’s underrated for a few reasons

  1. Nobody made hundreds of billions. Which is a good thing. It mostly drove down the price of energy which benefited consumers. It made billionaires (and a lot of people last too) but no Gigarich. Technology that leads to higher consumer surplus versus some dude sits on a toll booth and gets rich is better.

  2. It’s not sitting in your hand all day. You kind of just forget that energy use to be expensive.

  3. It completely changed monetary policy. Back in the old days we could have supply side recessions. Where the amount of fuel was fixed in supply and printing more money doesn’t change the fact that you just don’t have more energy for the economy to grow. So if you printed money gas prices went up. The US is a well diversified economy so if one sector was in a slump something else could boom. But we were always energy limited before shale.

  4. Geopolitics. America needed to be friends or play nice with energy producing countries. Because if someone removed 5 million of barrels from the global economy a recession would occur. The Russia-Ukraine War, Iran, relationship with Saudis all changed when America had a shale spigot we could turn on.

Negative it’s probably slowed down the development of electric cars. Absent oil Tesla would have grown faster. We could have bit the bullet and built more nuclear.

I lived in an area that was part of the shale boom back in the late 2000s, and as a resident, it was pretty miserable.

One of the damnedest things I've ever seen was a fellow town resident setting his tap water on fire. I've never witnessed anything like it before or since. Both the gas company and the town leadership argued that it was a coincidence, and that the fracking wasn't causing any issues with water quality at all.

At this point the story of my life involves me going deeper into the woods, only for loud and polluting industries to follow me.

At this point the story of my life involves me going deeper into the woods, only for loud and polluting industries to follow me.

Welcome back, uncle Ted?

I know it's a joke, but over the years I've begun to understand some of the rage.

The story happens over and over, and it never changes. Someone comes in to a small rural town pushing for a big project. The local leadership hides the project as much as possible and steamrolls any opposition that shows up to meetings. Simultaneously, boosters claim that the project will create a raft of new jobs and generate enormous tax revenue. Regardless of the sentiment of the residents, the project happens, because powerful people have decided that it will be so.

Once the work starts, the lie starts to be obvious. The "jobs" are handpicked contractors flown in from out of state. Nobody local is making money. The externalities start to pile up: roads are destroyed by heavy equipment, utility prices skyrocket, tap water starts to taste oily and bitter. All the while, corporate representatives and local leaders are telling you that none of this is happening. You should ignore the evidence of your own senses. The tax dollars that supposedly justified all of this misery never materialize - the company that owns the project engaged in such complex tax avoidance schemes that they might as well not pay taxes at all. The roads are still trashed, but now the residents are paying for it. The leadership who rammed the project through all "retire" to Florida.

As a private citizen, I don't know how to stop it. It feels like anyone who could stop it ends up on the take. It feels like my options are to go completely off the grid like Uncle Ted, or give up and move to one of the cities that are benefiting from this continuous colonial strip mining of the places I love.

The local leadership hides the project as much as possible and steamrolls any opposition that shows up to meetings.

A local jurisdiction had the mayor and majority of the city council run out of office in recall elections after doing that kind of thing to push a big project. It wasn't even a data center issue, which I think would've gotten the whole council booted. This was despite it being a very pro-Trump/Red/pro-extractive industry kind of area. This doesn't disprove your larger point, but it was interesting to see a rare example of your scenario not happening.

That warms my heart.

Did it actually kill the project?

Fracking won so hard that no one talks about it anymore. It still causes miniquakes when the wastewater is injected underground, and some people will randomly get methane in their water supply, but total US energy dominance outweighs such petty concerns.

The downsides of fracking are fake. I live in north Texas, where there was a spate of news stories a little over a decade back about how suddenly there's minor earthquakes because we're now exploiting fracking(as if non-fracking based natural gas was new here). But nobody checked- there'd always been earthquakes too small for anyone to care on, we're sitting on a fault line(the same one running through Austin). Likewise the 'contaminated water' stories always turn out to be flint-like mismanagement of completely separate water sources.

One notices the people pushing these stories tend to be anti-fossil-fuel watermelons.

but total US energy dominance outweighs such petty concerns.

https://en.macromicro.me/collections/26367/electricity/142474/us-vs-china-total-electricity-generation China is by 2026 roughly producing 2.5x the electricity that the US produces. EU + Norway + Switzerland + UK produces about 3300 TWh per year compared to the US which produces roughly 4050. The US onlu produces about 22.5% more electricity than Europe.

Total electricity production isn't a useful metric here. The US hasn't been power constrained (until recently) and prices are consistently lower, thanks to fracking. US electricity production leveled off in the 2000s as incandescents were replaced with fluorescents and LEDs (this change alone has saved countless QALYs).

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2026/04/27/opinion/electricity-power-grid-infrastructure.html

Sure, datacenters are putting pressure on the grid, but there's a reason they're being pumped out over here.

Was it here that there was an energy industry lawyer talking about how excited everyone was over fracking since natural gas is much better for the environment than coal, but then suddenly overnight the sentiment reversed and fracking was the devil?

Yup, that was me.

You get something greater than the effect of "miniquakes" (magnitude 1 or less) when a large truck drives by. And the stories about methane in water supply were fraudulent; the methane was there before the fracking.

And the stories about methane in water supply were fraudulent

https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.1100682108

In active gas-extraction areas (one or more gas wells within 1 km), average and maximum methane concentrations in drinking-water wells increased with proximity to the nearest gas well and were 19.2 and 64 mg CH4 L-1 (n = 26), a potential explosion hazard; in contrast, dissolved methane samples in neighboring nonextraction sites (no gas wells within 1 km) within similar geologic formations and hydrogeologic regimes averaged only 1.1 mg

This study seems to suggest that, at least in 2011, there was a real risk.

I expect the wells were placed where there was the most methane.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats