I’m sorry, but some of the themes in your list are not at all like the others;
For the points related to modern medicine, it’s true that people should be a lot more informed about its benefits, and the current attitude of mistrust many have toward it is certainly doing a lot of damage.
I could also agree on the agricolture, since people are being systematically misinformed into thinking that some practices, that actually consume more resources, are better for their health and beneficial to the planet.
But for the other subjects, some people, which seem to be pretty few, wanting to tear down civilisation is nowhere near as much of a problem as a lot of people not knowing or caring enough about the harmful side effects of the industrial system.
No nation is even near the point of starting to discuss proposals like banning plastic for every possible usage, forbidding household appliances or outlawing cars for everyone, and people aren’t really adopting these politics for themselves, save for the occasional environmentalist.
What instead it’s happening is that people living in the first world are consuming a ridiculous pro-capita amount of resources, producing a terrifying amount of wastes and pollution, and that these processes are 1) actively killing a huge number of people in the present 2) making our society rush face first against a point where it’s collapse is becoming a real possibility.
These extra resources and pollutions aren’t even doing much to grant us our modern standard of living, since Usa citizens have a pro-capita carbon footprint that’s 3-4 times higher than European citizens, and both countries could keep their living standard with footprints a lot lower.
What people living in an industrial civilisation should know, are the detailed side effects of their standard of living, since it’s an issue that’s a lot more urgent, and currently people are not nearly scared enough.
I’d love to believe that reasoned debates would be enough to tackle this problem, but if millions of people protesting all over the world weren’t enough to even starting to make enough progresses, well, now it’s probably the time that average people should start feeling real, urgent alarm, because, even leaving aside the current cost in human deaths, unless we don’t hit technological near-omnipotence in the next thirty years things are going to get really ugly for everyone, and I’d really rather not take that bet.
Also: the current debate over climate change has the climate denial side using massive amount of misinformation to stall any action. People tried to face that with scientific knowledge and correct information for nearly forty years now. It didn’t worked.
When things started to move toward the environmentalist proposals, climate deniers instead did massive scare tactics to link environmental regulations to themes like socialism, the environmentalist friendly politicians wanting to sink the economy, tax the average citizens, wanting to control private industry and so on.
All the proposals I’ve seen from the main environmentalist factions all the recent proposals I saw from the groups behind the recent massive mobilisations of last year were instead based on the Ipcc’s reports, which the climate denial side promptly called misinformation. I realised I don’t usually follow environmentalists groups that are misguided in their objectives or ineffective, so I likely missed several misguided proposals, but the main, complessive effort still seems to be in guiding the political action on just following the IPCC guidelines.
So it seems to me that people not knowing about the benefit of industrialisation have nothing to do with the state of the climate change debate.
I’d agree instead with the assessment that having people knowing more about the benefits of medicine would improve that debate, and I am genuinely worried about “fake” environmentalists causes, like anti-GMO crusades and biological agricolture, getting mixed up with real urgent ones, since they steal attention and resources.
I’d also agree that it’s extremely important that regulators and politicians would be informed about all the main benefits and issues of a subject they’re legiferating on, and of course I’m not saying that we would live better without industrialisation.
But my point is that, at the current moment, people need a lot more correct information about industrialisation’s harms than benefits, and that the current processes for media debates and urgency don’t allow to do both.
Note: everything I wrote is based on my work for my master’s thesis on the causes of climate change, its consequences and the influences that shaped the political and media debate on climate change and environmental regulation.
If anyone would like to see my sources or is interested in these themes, I’ll be happy to share my sources.
Amusingly enough, I had started with a hypothesis that I was aware sounded pretty extreme, so I was extra careful into using only the most reliable sources I could for every step of my work, and I still ended up with a thesis even more extreme than what I expected.
All the proposals I’ve seen from the main environmentalist factions were instead based on the Ipcc’s reports, which the climate denial side promptly called misinformation.
That’s not really true. Most of the public who’s interested in the topic ignores the involved in the claims that the IPCC makes.
The enviromentalist factions also worked to increase carbon emissions by shutting down nuclear power plants that are currently the only technology that can provide 24/7-all-year electricity for an economical price (relying completely on solar and wind means outages).
I was referring to the proposals put forward by organised movements and such, I’m aware that the average member of the public or environmentalist supporter isn’t very informed on the IPCC reports. (unless you meant something else and I misunderstood the first part of your reply)
Most of the opposition toward nuclear power plants came way more than ten years ago, I think? I really haven’t seen many environmentalists go out of their way to attack energy sources that aren’t fossile related in the recent years. Also, most of the opposition toward nuclear seemed to come from the general populace (at least in Italy, where I live. Here nuclear was banned after Chernobyl, for the general emotive reaction).
I do agree that no member of an environmentalist movement could really propose nuclear energy as a provisory replacement to fossil fuels, and that this is because of how people, especially environmentally friendly people, feel about nuclear energy rather than for a cost/benefit analysis, and that this is actually a notable hindrance in containing climate change.
But I also think that this unfortunate situation is mostly caused to the terrifying, striking nature of the occasional accidents, than to any process that could be changed by knowing more about the technology’s benefits.
Thinking about your example, though, made me realise that I were narrow in what I considered as the main environmentalist groups and factions, since I only really followed the proposals of the groups that were behind the massive mobilisations of last year and I didn’t really paid attention to groups that seemed ineffective or misguided in their objectives. I should change that part of my reply.
I do think that they are the groups with most influence at the moment, and still feel that the lack of awareness about the side effects of industrialisation is the bigger problem.
To give some numbers, the IPCC report of 2014 estimates an increased cost of 7%, for the necessary transitions to mitigate climate change, if no new nuclear power plants are built to increase the number of the current ones or to replace them. Waiting to start the transitions until 2030 rather than 2015 increases costs by 44%.
Note: For avoiding the climatic catastrophe it isn’t necessary to hit 100% renewables in the near future, I fear it’s a common misunderstanding since I had already this exchange with other people.
We only need to limit our emissions to what the ecosystem can actually absorb. We are still far from the point where relying more on renewable energy sources would start to cause problems, everything past that point is achieved by reducing a lot our energy consumption and cutting down the emissions produced by other sectors.
They exist and relying on them increases fragility of the energy system as they can be used for storing energy that’s produced at one point of the day and returning that point at another point of the day while at the same time they are too expensive to store energy in reserve for periods of multiple days/weeks/months.
Batteries essentially do the opposite of Netflix chaos monkey when it comes to system resilience.
Not at the scale that would be required to power the entire grid that way. At least, not yet. This is of course just one study (h/t Vox via Robert Wiblin) but provides at least a rough picture of the scale of the problem.
This is disingenuous, I think. Of course they don’t exist at the necessary scale yet, because the market is small. If the market grew, and was profitable, scaling would be possible. Rare earths aren’t rare enough to be a real constraint, we’d just need to mine more of them. The only thing needed would be to make more of things we know how to make. (And no, that wouldn’t happen, because the new tech being developed would get developed far faster, and used instead.)
Sorry, I didn’t mean to imply that there isn’t a current practical problem with solar / wind; my reason for my previous post is that I read Christian’s statement as implying that it is fundamentally physically impossible to rely on solar without being chronically exposed to outages, which simply isn’t true, but it is true that we still need to develop our technology and infrastructure to accommodate the dynamics that exist with solar power
To be clear, I am in favour of using nuclear power for precisely this reason, although it also seems that the problems with renewables will be taken care of by the free market fairly quickly as renewables make up a larger proportion of our energy consumption
We really don’t need to rely completely on solar and wind to avoid the climate change. The estimates of Ipcc includes solutions that also have nuclear phase out, it marginally increases the cost, a two years delay in the energy conversion costs us more.
I’m sorry for repeating this, but I feel that my point before was missed; the issues from 100% renewable energy sources are a fake problem.
They really have no consequences on these decisions, since it’s not what we are required to do in the short term.
My initial comment did speak about current technology.
they will more or less be quickly solved by the free market as renewable energy becomes a larger proportion of energy consumption
Free markets don’t to be good at producing the kind of batteries you need to have reserve capacity for your once-in-ten years weather event that has two weeks of less sun/wind then you would usually expect.
I’m sorry, but some of the themes in your list are not at all like the others;
For the points related to modern medicine, it’s true that people should be a lot more informed about its benefits, and the current attitude of mistrust many have toward it is certainly doing a lot of damage.
I could also agree on the agricolture, since people are being systematically misinformed into thinking that some practices, that actually consume more resources, are better for their health and beneficial to the planet.
But for the other subjects, some people, which seem to be pretty few, wanting to tear down civilisation is nowhere near as much of a problem as a lot of people not knowing or caring enough about the harmful side effects of the industrial system.
No nation is even near the point of starting to discuss proposals like banning plastic for every possible usage, forbidding household appliances or outlawing cars for everyone, and people aren’t really adopting these politics for themselves, save for the occasional environmentalist.
What instead it’s happening is that people living in the first world are consuming a ridiculous pro-capita amount of resources, producing a terrifying amount of wastes and pollution, and that these processes are 1) actively killing a huge number of people in the present 2) making our society rush face first against a point where it’s collapse is becoming a real possibility.
These extra resources and pollutions aren’t even doing much to grant us our modern standard of living, since Usa citizens have a pro-capita carbon footprint that’s 3-4 times higher than European citizens, and both countries could keep their living standard with footprints a lot lower.
What people living in an industrial civilisation should know, are the detailed side effects of their standard of living, since it’s an issue that’s a lot more urgent, and currently people are not nearly scared enough.
I’d love to believe that reasoned debates would be enough to tackle this problem, but if millions of people protesting all over the world weren’t enough to even starting to make enough progresses, well, now it’s probably the time that average people should start feeling real, urgent alarm, because, even leaving aside the current cost in human deaths, unless we don’t hit technological near-omnipotence in the next thirty years things are going to get really ugly for everyone, and I’d really rather not take that bet.
Also: the current debate over climate change has the climate denial side using massive amount of misinformation to stall any action. People tried to face that with scientific knowledge and correct information for nearly forty years now. It didn’t worked.
When things started to move toward the environmentalist proposals, climate deniers instead did massive scare tactics to link environmental regulations to themes like socialism, the environmentalist friendly politicians wanting to sink the economy, tax the average citizens, wanting to control private industry and so on.
All the proposals I’ve seen from the main environmentalist factionsall the recent proposals I saw from the groups behind the recent massive mobilisations of last year were instead based on the Ipcc’s reports, which the climate denial side promptly called misinformation. I realised I don’t usually follow environmentalists groups that are misguided in their objectives or ineffective, so I likely missed several misguided proposals, but the main, complessive effort still seems to be in guiding the political action on just following the IPCC guidelines.So it seems to me that people not knowing about the benefit of industrialisation have nothing to do with the state of the climate change debate.
I’d agree instead with the assessment that having people knowing more about the benefits of medicine would improve that debate, and I am genuinely worried about “fake” environmentalists causes, like anti-GMO crusades and biological agricolture, getting mixed up with real urgent ones, since they steal attention and resources.
I’d also agree that it’s extremely important that regulators and politicians would be informed about all the main benefits and issues of a subject they’re legiferating on, and of course I’m not saying that we would live better without industrialisation.
But my point is that, at the current moment, people need a lot more correct information about industrialisation’s harms than benefits, and that the current processes for media debates and urgency don’t allow to do both.
Note: everything I wrote is based on my work for my master’s thesis on the causes of climate change, its consequences and the influences that shaped the political and media debate on climate change and environmental regulation.
If anyone would like to see my sources or is interested in these themes, I’ll be happy to share my sources.
Amusingly enough, I had started with a hypothesis that I was aware sounded pretty extreme, so I was extra careful into using only the most reliable sources I could for every step of my work, and I still ended up with a thesis even more extreme than what I expected.
That’s not really true. Most of the public who’s interested in the topic ignores the involved in the claims that the IPCC makes.
The enviromentalist factions also worked to increase carbon emissions by shutting down nuclear power plants that are currently the only technology that can provide 24/7-all-year electricity for an economical price (relying completely on solar and wind means outages).
I was referring to the proposals put forward by organised movements and such, I’m aware that the average member of the public or environmentalist supporter isn’t very informed on the IPCC reports. (unless you meant something else and I misunderstood the first part of your reply)
Most of the opposition toward nuclear power plants came way more than ten years ago, I think? I really haven’t seen many environmentalists go out of their way to attack energy sources that aren’t fossile related in the recent years. Also, most of the opposition toward nuclear seemed to come from the general populace (at least in Italy, where I live. Here nuclear was banned after Chernobyl, for the general emotive reaction).
I do agree that no member of an environmentalist movement could really propose nuclear energy as a provisory replacement to fossil fuels, and that this is because of how people, especially environmentally friendly people, feel about nuclear energy rather than for a cost/benefit analysis, and that this is actually a notable hindrance in containing climate change.
But I also think that this unfortunate situation is mostly caused to the terrifying, striking nature of the occasional accidents, than to any process that could be changed by knowing more about the technology’s benefits.
Thinking about your example, though, made me realise that I were narrow in what I considered as the main environmentalist groups and factions, since I only really followed the proposals of the groups that were behind the massive mobilisations of last year and I didn’t really paid attention to groups that seemed ineffective or misguided in their objectives. I should change that part of my reply.
I do think that they are the groups with most influence at the moment, and still feel that the lack of awareness about the side effects of industrialisation is the bigger problem.
To give some numbers, the IPCC report of 2014 estimates an increased cost of 7%, for the necessary transitions to mitigate climate change, if no new nuclear power plants are built to increase the number of the current ones or to replace them. Waiting to start the transitions until 2030 rather than 2015 increases costs by 44%.
Note: For avoiding the climatic catastrophe it isn’t necessary to hit 100% renewables in the near future, I fear it’s a common misunderstanding since I had already this exchange with other people.
We only need to limit our emissions to what the ecosystem can actually absorb. We are still far from the point where relying more on renewable energy sources would start to cause problems, everything past that point is achieved by reducing a lot our energy consumption and cutting down the emissions produced by other sectors.
Batteries are a thing that exist
They exist and relying on them increases fragility of the energy system as they can be used for storing energy that’s produced at one point of the day and returning that point at another point of the day while at the same time they are too expensive to store energy in reserve for periods of multiple days/weeks/months.
Batteries essentially do the opposite of Netflix chaos monkey when it comes to system resilience.
Not at the scale that would be required to power the entire grid that way. At least, not yet. This is of course just one study (h/t Vox via Robert Wiblin) but provides at least a rough picture of the scale of the problem.
This is disingenuous, I think. Of course they don’t exist at the necessary scale yet, because the market is small. If the market grew, and was profitable, scaling would be possible. Rare earths aren’t rare enough to be a real constraint, we’d just need to mine more of them. The only thing needed would be to make more of things we know how to make. (And no, that wouldn’t happen, because the new tech being developed would get developed far faster, and used instead.)
Sorry, I didn’t mean to imply that there isn’t a current practical problem with solar / wind; my reason for my previous post is that I read Christian’s statement as implying that it is fundamentally physically impossible to rely on solar without being chronically exposed to outages, which simply isn’t true, but it is true that we still need to develop our technology and infrastructure to accommodate the dynamics that exist with solar power
To be clear, I am in favour of using nuclear power for precisely this reason, although it also seems that the problems with renewables will be taken care of by the free market fairly quickly as renewables make up a larger proportion of our energy consumption
We really don’t need to rely completely on solar and wind to avoid the climate change. The estimates of Ipcc includes solutions that also have nuclear phase out, it marginally increases the cost, a two years delay in the energy conversion costs us more.
I’m sorry for repeating this, but I feel that my point before was missed; the issues from 100% renewable energy sources are a fake problem.
They really have no consequences on these decisions, since it’s not what we are required to do in the short term.
My initial comment did speak about current technology.
Free markets don’t to be good at producing the kind of batteries you need to have reserve capacity for your once-in-ten years weather event that has two weeks of less sun/wind then you would usually expect.