Climate Change? Nahhh ...

That's an end result of this philosophy, right? People won't make the necessary sacrifices on their own, so governments — who are led by nothing but benevoltent leaders, always have the public's best interests at heart and use only the kindest methods to achieve their aims — will have to strongarm them into it.
And if people still won't go along, well, maybe the government can punish them until they do.

 

Might be. Climate change is not really a liberal or conservative issue; it is a purpose and meaning issue, and there are a lot of people who see climate change as their life's work, the defining event in their moral portfolio, and, what's more, a way to unite the world in ongoing peace.

 

Not sure the petroleum reporter for the Financial Times of London is one of those.

You mean like rural electrification or atomic energy or the interstate system?

Some things are big enough and expensive enough that only a government could undertake them. And yes, that means some people are going to be unhappy. Or moved off their land. Or insufficiently compensated for whatever inconvenience or sacrifice they're being asked to make.

And if voters don't like those gargantuan public works projects and all they entail, they'll vote against them.

Not every public project is bad. Not every private project is good.

How "benevolent" were the leaders at Enron or Hooker Chemical or Union Carbide?

 

Or making sure a kid living in a rural spot in Appalachia has good Internet service so they can get an education.

 

Same for kids in East New York or East St. Louis.

 

It’s cool. We’ve decided to just adapt to climate change. We are off the hook trying.

 

Absolutely, although there isn’t as much infrastructure needed to reach those neighborhoods vs. getting up mountains.

At this point, high-speed Internet should be regulated as a utility. Same for cellphones.

 

I think I've said this before, but it's becoming increasingly apparent to me that the modern environmentalist movement is inherently anti-human and disturbingly self-loathing. It views the human race as not just a problem, but THE problem. In their eyes, humans do nothing good for the planet. They pollute. They destroy. They uproot what would otherwise be a pristine and balanced world without them.
The environmentalist utopia would be a planet free of people (except for them, of course) so that the earth can heal itself from the centuries of destruction the human race has wrought upon it. Failing that, eliminating all traces of industrial progress from the last 200 years would be a good start. Humanity, in their eyes, has wrecked the planet and does not deserve it. It certainly cannot be entrusted to manage its resources into the future.

When you start going down that road, it only leads to one logical conclusion — that humanity must, at the very least, be made to suffer for its centuries of environmental sin. A lifetime of poverty is a small price to pay to atone for it.
Taken to an extreme, humanity must be destroyed to fully restore the balance.
It seems like a lot of environmental proposals are designed to do just that. Many of them would make life better, not worse, by crippling food and energy production. Millions will starve. Millions will freeze to death. But, as others around here like to say, maybe the cruelty is the point.

 

The scale of this - to do what some suggest we do - is unprecedented.

 

With due respect, what else is the problem? Ok natural climate cycle but not this fast.

We chop down forests like It’s going out of style.

Waterways are polluted.

We pave over habitats.

We’re throwing trash in there oceans. Over fishing. Putting animals at risk of being gone forever.

In the name of comfort and progress.

In the extreme, pulling a Thanos is an answer. But we’ve been down the genocide and eugenics road and it doesn’t end well.

The answer takes sacrifice and requires we help impoverished as well as wildly rethinking things. We don’t have to go wipe out half of humanity. But to go down the path we’re on unabated means we’re condemning hundreds of millions also.

But what else is doing this? Beavers?

 

We are constantly refining technologies and best practices to be more efficient and keep things sustainable. In the U.S., at least, nobody is clear-cutting old growth forests anymore. Modern forestry practices probably replace more trees than loggers cut down, and the use of fast-growing species makes it like any other seasonal crop.

The use of pesticides and fertilizer is painted as bad (the whole organic food movement), but those things increase crop yields that feed more people. Trying to cut down on eating meat by reducing livestock herds might reduce emissions, but it also means less food around the world.
And what happens to the cows and pigs, anyway? Do we just let them run wild?

If you want to talk about getting some of these other countries on board with better practices — Brazil, China and India, three of the world's worst offenders would be great places to start — then maybe we can talk. But one big problem with a lot of environmentalists is that they ignore both the progress Western nations have made and the level of IDGAF in other countries. They call on Western nations to sacrifice while giving some bizarre paternalistic pass to some of the world's worst polluters. It's one big reason why it's hard to take environmentalists seriously.

 

Kind of hard for us to declare everything is going to hell if we don’t behave like everything is going to hell.