cafeamericainmag.com
There has been a lot of CW discussion on climate change. This is an article written by someone that used to strongly believe in anthropogenic global warming and then looked at all the evidence before arriving at a different conclusion. The articles goes through what they did.
I thought a top-level submission would be more interesting as climate change is such a hot button topic and it would be good to have a top-level spot to discuss it for now. I have informed the author of this submission; they said they will drop by and engage with the comments here!
Jump in the discussion.
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Notes -
Some years ago I would have considered tackling climate change my main political priority. Since then, having watched most developed nations do what looks like everything in their power to actively avoid investing in more nuclear power, I find it hard to care much anymore.
For me, the way nuclear power is handled is a dead give-away that the climate alarmists aren't actually interested in the climate. If CO2 emissions really as as catastrophically dangerous as they are made out to be, then nuclear is the obvious, guaranteed-to-work, 100% solution that would completely have already solved this problem by now.
As in the article: "This is highly relevant because it means our current climate scare is based not on irrefutable scientific evidence but rather on hysteria and alarmist fear-mongering that fifty years of “failed apocalyptic predictions” have failed to abate. This is crucial to understand as it makes it clear that rather than debating how humans should mitigate this alleged impending disaster, the proper focus should be to question why those in power are employing psychological fear tactics to promote taxation, restriction, and degrowth, and why so many intelligent people have uncritically bought into the hysteria when these proposed policies are clearly to their own detriment."
I see it more as a dead give-away of the usual incompetence of governements. Would you argue that governements are not interested in heatlhcare and education ? Yet they manage to do stupid things in both domains. the same is true for the environnement.
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They are interested in the climate, but they're interested not in terms of what concrete benefits or harms will it produce, but in whether we're doing a set of things that would be considered bad. Nuclear energy has disasters and waste, so therefore they think it's bad. They don't do a cost-benefit analysis, they just do a cost analysis (for things they don't like) and a benefit analysis (for things they do).
They do genuinely care about the climate, but usually in a scattered rather than coherent way, I suppose.
(Of course, not all climate activists, etc.)
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Many climate activists are very much in favor of nuclear power, myself included. Sometimes it's a matter of going with the flow and allocating your advocacy resources where you think the'll make the most difference. Nuclear is a hard sell for a lot of people, and getting new plants open will take a long time mainly due to regulatory barriers -- which have to change before you can even start constructing. Solar and wind are seeing a lot of growth right now, and while they don't solve the baseline load problem, will make a dent in the issue in the meantime.
I don't disagree that many people who label themselves "climate activists" are irrationally fearful of nuclear, but they are not as representative of the entire group as the article.
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If CO2 emissions really as as catastrophically dangerous as they are made out to be, then nuclear is the obvious, guaranteed-to-work, 100% solution that would completely have already solved this problem by now
Unless the same people also fear nuclear power to roughly the same extent. And unfortunately many people who drive environmental concerns grew up in an era where fear of nuclear power was rampant. The Cuban Missile crisis, Chernobyl, Three Mile Island. In other words if you think A will be a catastrophe and can be solved by B, which will also be a catastrophe then it becomes easy to see why people look for options C through F.
The real test is once those people die/retire/age out of leadership roles will the movement reorient itself.
Same as generals still fighting the last type of war instead of the next one.
Notably, they can of course be wrong about how catastrophic A or B might be, but from direct exposure to very many high level "climate alarmists" it is my opinion they are absolutely sincere in being worried about the climate. They are just also worried about nuclear catastrophes. And a whole bunch of other things. In fact I would say the thing that connects them (or most of them), is they worry way too much about a lot of things.
After all if this fear of climate change is driven by hysteria, what makes you think their other fears are going to be rationally evaluated against climate change in order to solve climate change?
Or perhaps more generally, what makes you think they're even capable of rationally evaluating fears in the first place?
Well, that's the good-faith answer. Yet, it concerns me that the things they appear to be genuinely afraid of also happen to be things that it is in their personal or class interest to be genuinely afraid of, and afraid in such a way that their opponents' good-faith efforts are never good enough for them.
If climate change sheds its master morality baggage and actually threatens to improve life for a change, maybe we'd start accomplishing those goals. Tesla did it, look how successful they are. (Of course, the most statistically worried about climate change also excuse themselves from buying a Tesla because they don't like what Elon says on the Internet- a good faith view of that is hyperconservative fear paralysis... which is why it's odd we consider progressives to be on the left when they're fundamentally an ultraconservative rightist movement specifically because fear dominates their reasoning.)
Some of the alarmists are explicit about their ideological tendencies, see: https://twitter.com/ClimateBen/status/1766859556313841773
"Does capitalism mean fully entering rapid mass extinction in either the 21st or 22nd century?
Yes.
Will humans and the majority of species face mass death or annihilation by 2050- 2150?
Yes.
Are mass media journalists telling us scientists urge economic system change?
No."
And later in the thread: "Abrupt climate change is just one compounding factor in extinction catastrophe. Change this Extinction Economy now while it's still too late to protect species and everyone."
I suspect there's a large overlap between climate alarmism and anti-capitalism.
This is highly dangerous. As the image shows (source: https://ourworldindata.org/extreme-history-methods), the global poverty rate was over 80% in 1800. Today it's less than 20%. Capitalism and the industrial revolution it helped to fuel is the obvious cause of that. Note that modern-day class warriors rail against the inequality of capitalism -- but they leave out the fact that the vast majority of people on the planet are far better off today than 250 years ago.
The dangerous aspect is if they have their way, the systems that enabled this to happen will be reversed and thus we'll head back in the direction of extreme poverty for all.
/images/17133444819677088.webp
vast majority is underestimate, people worse off are tiny % of all population. And they are mostly in places like North Korea where it is caused by not enough capitalism. Or Ukrainian frontline where it can be blamed for many things but surely not capitalism.
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Or perhaps more generally, what makes you think they're even capable of rationally evaluating fears in the first place
Exactly. People aren't generally rational, especially about their fears. And especially not people who have been shown not to be rational about their fears. So condeming them for not rationally comparing fears and thus saying they are operating in bad faith is just double dipping.
Fighting climate change and nuclear catastrophe are not about improving lives. They are about stopping them getting worse (or ending entirely!). Teslas are nice..but they are still (in my view) inferior to a similary luxurious petrol car. If climate change is a real problem, then the deal may be tackling it at a cost. Lives may not get better. It entirely depends on how bad it will be and what the cost would be. Maybe we would have to spend 10% of world GDP on some huge geo-engineering project INSTEAD of making peoples lives better in the short term.
Now, are people hypocrites? Do they struggle to make the sacrifices their principles tell them they should? Do they fail to rationally compare their dislike of Musk to whether his cars help their ideals? Yes to all of those. So it goes.
Hence "just build nuclear plants; if you thought it was such a problem you would already have accepted the added risk".
So either climate change isn't actually the existential risk they claim because they're willing to let other hysteria take precedence, or they are correct about it being the most important existential risk... which means the environment is precious enough that we're willing to let a reactor mess up a city or two. Drop in the bucket compared to "the world will be destroyed".
I wholeheartedly agree, but the reason given for not buying one is not "Electric car inherently inferior", it's "Elon man bad". People who take steps in solving the problem should be honored among those with the grievance; that is historically how the people with the grievance pay for the solutions. That they refuse to pay now, and will do whatever they can not to pay (the person who has done more for Blue environmental goals in decades than anyone else... is also their biggest political target), is notable.
Hence "just build nuclear plants; if you thought it was such a problem you would already have accepted the added risk".
Unless you also feel nuclear catastophe has a similar cost. Remember we've already established the risks are not being evaluated rationally. So you can't then use the fact they are not evaluating the comparative nuclear risk rationally as evidence of anything other than irrationality, thats what I mean by double dipping.
Remember these are not utilitarians. Just like the answer as to why groups who feel like abortion is a Holocaust happening every year aren't concentrating solely on that. That is just how people are. Virtually nobody who claims to believe that X is the worst thing in the world are willing to trade off other bad things against it in a rational manner. It is just not how we operate by and large. We are not rational. They are not rational. Rationalists are not actually rational (although they try).
So people who try to use that against a group (whether that is claiming Christians don't really believe abortion is murder or that climate worriers don't really believe in climate change), are just missing the point. They do believe it. And yet they will not act as if they do. Because they also believe in many other things and are not evaluating the trade offs in a utilitarian way. So that isn't evidence of anything except that they are humanly flawed (or gifted, if you think utilitarianism is evil).
Maybe it is true that every anti-abortion advocate should quit their job and advocate full time for a federal ban given as they believe that hundreds of thousands of innocent children are being murdered annually. Maybe everyone who believes climate change is an existential threat should be crowd funding atomic reactors. But that just is not how most people work.
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It is quite ironic that one of the biggest contributes to CO2 emissions reductions is fossil fuel companies fracking so aggressively they drove the price of natural gas negative at some points. Ultimately substituting NG for coal is probably a net benefit, but I'm pretty sure environmental activists are not happy with the growth of NG as a energy source.
It's been more than 15 years since An Inconvenient Truth came out and the IPPC won their Nobel Peace Prize. In that time it would have been totally possible to replace essentially all electricity production in developed countries with GEN III+ nuclear plants and make substantial progress on Gen IV plants. Instead, without utility scale storage, the focus on growing interment renewables has only entrench NG peaking plants as the dominant on-demand electricity generation source.
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