Just to levy a single criticism among several: I find Haidt’s rebuttal of the climate change hypothesis unconvincing: fears around climate change are not “energizing” in the way that prior crises are, in a significant part because public sentiment around climate change is that we’re already doomed in a way that isn’t really possible with social crises. Similarly: I don’t think most teenage girls were voraciously reading Al Gore in the 1990s; extensive public awareness of climate change doesn’t imply a disproportionate impact on youth, especially when we consider that more extreme weather events (and their reporting) began in the mid-late 2000s.
I think Haidt could probably make his argument stronger if he discussed social media as an accelerant, rather than a cause in and of itself. I can’t think of any real reason why he doesn’t (it makes his argument strictly stronger, and results in the same conclusions) other than ideological ones: he’s too baked into his incestuous “heterodox” world to weaken his claims.
> climate change (in the popular conception) feels fundamentally unresolvable.
For context, I have a graduate degree in physics. I am 31 and I have spent my entire adult life studying climate change and its management at a hobbyist level. I regularly get lost in academic papers about the phenomena or the technologies that may be used to address them.
So try not to write me off as incurious when I tell you it is obviously silly to blame a false perception — that climate change is unresolvable — on the real facts about climate change. Reality does not cause people to believe falsehoods. A far better explanation for this belief would in fact be social media itself, which has a miserable track record of amplifying both climate change denialism and doomerism. Someone who has absorbed misleading claims about impending collapse from social media could certainly believe that the cause of their anxiety is climate change itself and not the people who helped them down that road. Look at the graphs:
>I can’t think of any real reason why he doesn’t (it makes his argument strictly stronger, and results in the same conclusions)
Reducing social media and smartphones to the status of an "accelerant" rather than a primary cause weakens the case for urgent government intervention, which is Haidt's major focus. It is also jargon creep, since "accelerant" is harder to interpret than "cause".
Although personally I am very concerned about AGW, I think the dismissals that talking about climate change is causing some "existential crisis" among young people are BS.
Whenever I hear that theory, it's always an armchair hypothesis. But you could actually go and ask young girls what they are anxious about and how they deal with it. I think proponents of that theory, if they want to dismiss social media effects on personal self-esteem, should do exactly that - it's on them to prove that is the actual concern of girls committing suicide. I highly doubt they will find more significant evidence.
This is a personal anecdote: I have family members, mostly younger ones (and I’m in my mid-20s), who are extremely anxious about climate change. They’ve sought mental health services because of their worries. I don’t think that’s particularly unique.
I agree that it is absolutely not the only factor, which is the point I was attempting to make with a “weaker” version of Haidt’s argument.
I wonder if all the doom and gloom with everything is because people don't really understand statistics nor history. Sure, living through the climate catastrophe won't be comfortable, but given most of human history, living in that future is still a far better hand than all of your ancestors. Say you were born cesarean, are diabetic, broke your arm, had your wisdom teeth removed, got your colorectal cancer cleared up with the immune checkpoint inhibitor, got a covid vaccine then caught it and shrugged it off. Any other point of history you'd be dead 6x over at least with that medical history. That's something to celebrate.
Plus I think there is a bias over maintaining the status quo of the earth. Sure, pollution isn't great, but that's from a squandered opportunity of destroying natural resources before coming up with a sustainable way to use them indefinitely. Species go extinct, but for better or worse, that's how previously occupied niches are now exposed for rapid adaptive evolution of what is left over, and how we evolved to be who we are today. We are adding energy into the atmosphere, so if anything the life system will work even faster than before. Will we adjust? Who knows, but if you are on team planet earth it really doesn't matter. Life will find a way. Whether humans make it or not should be irrelevant, considering you have distant relatives who weren't human and only became human due to selective pressures from the environment at the time. We should expect to change when the environment does, dramatically even, as fighting that change amounts to fighting a march to a thermodynamic equilibrium. Consider we also have the head and shoulders advantage of any other species driving a climate change on earth previously (there were many, great oxygenation event, azolla event, and others), of actually being globally aware of climate change.
Isn't this a social media problem as well? Climate change is a hot topic on social media. When we are frequently exposed to doom-porn, we tend to develop a bleak outlook.
I have seen posters on this very website claim that they will not be having children as a direct result of the information they have received about climate change.
of course, it's difficult to determine how much of that is ex post facto reasoning as justification for a decision that was already made for completely different reasons…
Even in just the last few months there have been stories posted here about specific people who killed themselves stating it was because of worry about climate change.
It might be worth considering other crises and their impact on teen mental health. I grew up in the UK in the 80s during two crises. First, it was the Cold War and there was a very real risk of nuclear Armageddon; we were all aware of it because it was all over the media. Second, it was the height of IRA bombing campaign in the UK and we heard of children our age being blown to bits while out shopping with their parents, etc. But in spite of those risks, which did impact adolescents, there was no massive uptick in mental illness.
I think these examples reinforce my point: both the Troubles and the Cold War felt (and ultimately were) resolvable, while climate change (in the popular conception) feels fundamentally unresolvable. The former were also fundamentally social concerns, with avenues for social activism; the latter contains social concerns but is fundamentally a global coordination problem that’s roughly equivalent to achieving world peace (given that it requires nations to compromise any individual interests or ambitions in favor of the global good). Most people don’t think world peace is achievable, so it’s understandable why that sentiment would carry forwards to global warming.
The Cold War absolutely did not feel resolvable at the time. The popular conception was that of present day North Korea cranked up to 100; there were crazy people in Moscow, they had thousands of nukes pointed at the rest of the world, and they’d successfully set up a system to prevent sanity from being restored. (In Russia, my understanding is that they generally saw it as a story of capitalists who could not stand to let a worker’s movement survive; in the rest of the Warsaw Pact, they saw it as a permanent system where the country must remain communist because the Red Army will invade otherwise.)
* At least in the US, the fear of nuclear annihilation was partially offset by the belief (which was never officially substantiated) that the government would adhere to a policy of rational deterrence, i.e. MAD. It’s hard to find polls on belief in MAD, but friends and family I’ve talked to have stated that it was a source of reassurance during all but the most stressful moments of the Cold War.
* The stress of the Cold War also coincides with the longest period of peace and greatest increase in quality of life in the Western world. An intuitive explanation of why suicides didn’t increase under the stress of the Cold War is that life was otherwise improving for most Westerners in tangible ways. The relative stagnancy of the last 30 years is a significant departure from that.
They aren't the same. Climate change activism states that you - yes you - are a bad person for not radically changing your lifestyle. Those changes may not even be achievable, but that doesn't change your moral culpability. Through your wanton lust for warm homes and nice red meat you destroy the world leaving nothing for the children. It's an incredibly moralized story.
The other examples you name are different. IRA terrorism? Not caused by you, not influenceable by you, nobody claims it is. MAD? Likewise, it's all decisions by politicians you never met who live far away.
Also, IRA terrorism probably wasn't going to affect you or your children and
with MAD there was always a chance that it wouldn't happen. This was never in doubt.
The climate change narrative is uniquely calibrated to destroy people's mental health, and especially the mental health of over-socialized teenage girls, because it directly blames them for the worst possible things (literally the end of the world) and demands they change, whilst simultaneously telling them they actually can't change and the world is inevitably doomed no matter what. It also rather uniquely expects you to reject the evidence of your own eyes. The world is clearly not burning or on fire, the Pacific islands are clearly not sinking and politicians clearly do not believe there's any actual crisis, yet nobody is allowed to point those things out without social exile of the type that's especially dramatic for teenage girls.
Many religions make a far stronger moral argument about our failures as individuals, and yet arguably have far less influence over young minds than they have in the past. I can't say I've seen any evidence that teenagers (including my own) are especially burdened with any personal sense of guilt over their lifestyle and its contributions towards ecological damage. Whereas I'd certainly accept there is a sense of pessimism about the future health of our planet and what it might mean for what sort of existence they might have in 40 or 50 years time - and absolutely a sense of helplessness to do anything about it, given the fact very little positive change in behaviour has been seen by those in the best position to do so.
They explicitly don't! Christianity is very clear that whilst everyone is born into sin, Jesus died to cleanse us of that sin and God is forgiving of sinners who repent. In the Christological religions at least, there is always a way back to the good path. You may have to pray for forgiveness, or do a confession. But you can do it.
In climatological religion, there is no way to the good path no matter what you do.
You can't ignore the reality that even many streams of Christianity regularly insisted on certain perfectly natural behaviours being "sinful" and worthy of eternal punishment in hell. That surely must have had some effect on the mental health of believers, but there's no real evidence our collective mental health has improved now that the majority of us no longer buy into any sort of doctrine of being born as sinful and needing to plead to supernatural beings for forgiveness etc.
So I'm struggling to see how the possibility that a percentage of modern-day young adults may have occasional feelings of guilt about their lifestyle knowing it's making some small contribution toward long term ecological deterioration could be significantly impacting mental health. What's arguably more concerning is those (both individuals and businesses) who make token gestures towards behaviour changes that claim to be for the sake of the planet etc. as though it gives them some sort of moral superiority, especially given there's little genuine analysis done as to whether the changes really are of any net benefit. It may give some artificial boost in sense of self-worth and short term improvement in mental health to the gesture-makers but is at best a distraction from what's really needed.
I'm not a Christian anymore, so I might be misrepresenting the religion here, but I think they would say that you only go to hell if you don't repent your sins. And the whole Hell/Satan thing was never a major part of my own Christian upbringing from what I recall, that's a much bigger thing in medieval religion.
As for having a bad effect on mental health, well, the inquisitions and holy wars were pretty mad in retrospect.
Nobody is claiming that climate change is significantly impacting mental health, at least not yet. Even Haidt's data shows an increase over a very small baseline, whether that's significant or not boils down to whether you're talking in relative or absolute terms. But you seem to be talking from the perspective of a mentally healthy person. Obviously, a mentally healthy person doesn't get so upset about climate change they kill themselves, but we risk being circular. A small number of highly susceptible people will fall prey to the narrative of un-cleansable guilt and un-solvable doom, and lose their stability. It's already appearing in news and anecdotal reports.
>> there's little genuine analysis done as to whether the changes really are of any net benefit.
No, of course not. Anyone who tries to do such analysis rigorously has to dive into the data, and if you do that you immediately becomes a skeptic of both claimed solutions and claimed problems, so your views are now unspeakable in polite society. Given that it's inevitable that you're only going to "see" people who aren't doing genuine analysis as a result.
>> It may give some artificial boost in sense of self-worth and short term improvement in mental health but is at best a distraction from what's really needed
Which is what, exactly? Notice how you spend time attacking those who refuse to do what's "really needed" without spelling out what that is, thus engaging in the token gesture of cheap online activism. If you're about to give some absurd policy that boils down to most of the population dying off or living in absolute poverty, and which could only be implemented by a dystopian global dictatorship, then great, you're just proving why most people prefer to engage in what you call token gestures.
The whole activism thing doesent do a lot anymore, since the social plaza belongs to cooperate and the state, and activism was shown to be easy exhaustable compared to the endurance of lobbyism aka cooperate activism.
Future frustrated voices will turn straight to violence and skip this unproducitve state of affairs.
> the social plaza belongs to cooperate and the state
I think it's too easy to just blame corporations and governments for this. They are definitely part in this, but a large part of lack of activism around climate change is also the people themselves who don't want to change. The Netherlands is a great example where, in recent elections, nearly half of votes went to political parties that want to reduce response to climate change and other environmental issues.
For many people its easy to be activist when the problem is clear and present and the solution has little to no impact on daily life. With climate change neither are true. Except for the occasional headline of extreme weather, daily life continues, so the problem isn't obvious to everyone. Also, actually doing something about it takes effort/investment from everyone, not just government and corporations. It requires us to travel less, consume less, be more aware of what we consume and so on. It requires us to drive smaller cars, live in smaller and better insulated homes and become less individually oriented and pay more for our clothing. Most people don't want this, they want to continue buying cheap clothing from Primark and fly to NYC for the weekend.
I'm personally in the 'given up hope' boat. Even the most environmentally aware people around me pretty much just eat less meat, but they haven't actually changed their ways. So I don't expect the average F150 driving steak eater to suddenly start changing their ways. Maybe generational change is possible, but even that would have to be a coordinated effort and I don't see that happening either.
>Also, actually doing something about it takes effort/investment from everyone, not just government and corporations.
This is pretty much the standard line corporations throw out to try and shirk responsibility. This is why they've always been so keen on recycling relative to other, more effective methods, for instance.
The implicit message is that rather than the company being forced to change by fiat, "people" just need to take more personal responsibility.
The latter is a pipe dream and the former (e.g. carbon taxes) is the only way of dealing with climate change but they don't care, of course - their profits are at stake.
Hence they always prescribe more personal responsibility.
> This is pretty much the standard line corporations throw out to try and shirk responsibility. This is why they've always been so keen on recycling relative to other, more effective methods, for instance.
Yes, but this is only part of it and once again is an easy way to blame corporations. It's not just easy for them to tell people to recycle. It's also really easy for people to recycle and feel good about themselves while not doing much.
To really impact climate change, we need societal change and that has to come from everyone. People, companies, government all need to change, we can't keep pointing fingers at each other, but that's what we're all doing.
It really isn't. The 100 companies responsible for 71% of global emissions have a massively outsized impact on the climate. They have got exceptional PR and have done a spectacular job of diffusing their responsibilities and protecting their bottom lines at the expense of the planet.
I'm completely in the 'given up hope boat' with you. It's clear that almost nobody is willing to truly change their lifestyle to practice what they preach.
I live in a UK city and despite having a pretty good bus network, so many people come to work along the same routes as the buses in their own personal 4x4 vehicle.
We'd require a literal environmentally friendly autocracy to pry people's cars out of their garages or to even encourage the notion of walking / cycling / taking public transport.
Not to speak about the amount of complete and utter garbage for sale everywhere, people flying around the world at a whim to see a few landmarks or to get a tan.
> Even the most environmentally aware people around me pretty much just eat less meat, but they haven't actually changed their ways. So I don't expect the average F150 driving steak eater to suddenly start changing their ways.
What do you expect people in general to do? Granted, driving an F150 is not an environmentally friendly activity, but suppose they all cut their "carbon footprint" [0] by 50%. How much would that help?
The answer is actually "not much." It turns out that 70% of greenhouse emissions have come from ~100 corporations. [1] Until we, collectively, do something about their practices, there's precious little that individuals can do to get us to net zero.
Individuals have no power to influence corporations in this way, either. It needs to come from things like carbon taxes -- and not just from one country, but worldwide.
There's far more that can be said here, but I think I've successfully conveyed the point: feeling hopeless in the face of all this is actually pretty logical. At this point, we really are basically doomed to suffer the effects of 1.5 degrees of warming, and possibly much more, no matter what we do right now.
I don't want to oversell this to the point of saying we should all just roll over and die; by all means, we should all work on reducing our consumption, because at this point, the choices that are going to provide us a better future in the next couple of decades are essentially those that reduce consumption. The other alternatives are reducing the number of people on Earth, or drastically increasing energy efficiency across the board. A couple decades' worth of energy efficiency increases isn't going to do it, and if we choose not to reduce consumption, the effects of climate change will ensure that the number of people on Earth decreases, whether we like it or not.
So, we're essentially left at reducing consumption. But, as you've mentioned, people don't seem to want to do that. I don't know how to deal with that at a personal level, myself. Do you? Is it any wonder teenagers don't?
---
[0]: Make no mistake, this is just a propaganda term intended to blame you and not the actual (mostly corporate) actors responsible for making most of the emissions.
The 100 corporations thing is silly. They aren't out there polluting for the fun of it, they're making stuff for people and organizations.
If people and governments and companies stop buying gas, the pollution on Chevron's ledger for oil extraction and refining will plummet as they get stuck with smaller markets like plastic manufacturing.
Those dastardly 100 corporations are emitting to make stuff for you.
Thanks for writing this, people in general seems to completely be missing this point. Oil companies pollute to provide us with:
Fuel for our cars. Fuel for shipping all the goods we want cheaply made in Asia. Fuel for planes to business meetings that could be done online. Fuel for planes we take to mass consume alcohol in the Caribbean. Plastics for packaging all that stuff we're buying. Plastics for producing the stuff we're buying. Plastics for producing the cheap clothing we wear twice and throw out.
Oil companies are just one example. And alternatives for most of this this are all more expensive, which is why most people don't want to switch to better alternatives, like:
Buy locally sourced produce. Don't buy imported avocados, bananas, coconuts. Buy locally sourced meat. Get whole chickens and eat everything. Make a stock from the leftovers. Buy organic cotton clothing. Or figure out what clothing you can get that's locally produced. Buy furniture from a local furniture craftsman. Don't replace things that aren't broken. Don't go to McDonald's, go to a local burger restaurant that doesn't import 'Irish grass fed beef'. Take a train to a vacation destination nearby.
For some of us, all of this may be obvious, but for the majority of people it isn't. And as long as we keep blaming companies and then sit back, nothing will ever change.
The fact that Nestle still exists should be proof enough for anyone that it literally doesn't matter how horrible a large corporation is. There is no activism route to correcting these companies behavior. Only legislation with teeth will work. That we'll all collectively decide to stop doing business with bad companies is nothing but a libertarian fantasy.
Is there a shortage of Nestle competitors ? The fact that people still buy Nestle tells you how much the masses actually care about Nestle's behavior, in dollar terms. ie, less than the savings that Nestle presents.
Using legislation "with teeth" to force something that the masses don't want is autocracy, not democracy.
Let's leave aside "not at all," because that's often not a viable option. Let's also remember, we're talking about reaching net zero emissions. For instance, where do I buy carbon neutral food?
You can't materialize those alternatives if they don't exist. And, when we're talking about making things in more sustainable ways by emitting less carbon, because carbon externalities aren't accounted for, the sustainable way is more expensive than the dirty way. So, capitalist corporations being the profit maximizing machines that they are, inevitably choose the dirty way.
But there are many ways to make all of this stuff. Many times there are better ways and less harmful ways, but those are basically always less profitable.
This is capitalism and the one and only objective is profit. It's never going to be working towards having a sustainable world, getting better stuff, getting less useless stuff, etc.
We don't need half the stupid stuff that's being sold to us and we keep buying it because that's how the system is setup.
So yes, they aren't polluting for the fun of it. They are doing so for the profit of a few.
This is a common but equally silly complaint- people were denuding their islands of trees and hunting animals to extinction long before anything approximating capitalism. Socialism's externality record isn't amazing either.
Disagreeing on what things are important is just the human condition.
Except with the current state of affairs, we know it's the wrong thing to do but still keep doing it in favor of profits.
It makes no sense to compare how things were ages ago (even quite recently, in fact) to where we are now. This kind of dismissal is low effort and deflects the real issue because nobody wants to admit just how bad it is.
For a very recent example, it became public Exxon knew the harm they would be doing to the planet through fossil fuels and they couldn't care less. Gotta increase that shareholder value.
>The answer is actually "not much." It turns out that 70% of greenhouse emissions have come from ~100 corporations
Read the source carefully. This is not what the BBC or the original paper [1] said. This is a meme that came from tabloids and Reddit. What it does say is that top 100 fossil fuel producers, produce fossil fuels that cause 70% of greenhouse gasses. Obviously, you aren't going to dig for and refine oil in your backyard, so a corporate entity is going to do it for you. Despite the anti-capitalist slant of this meme, the largest producers are all state-owned: "China Coal" (which isn't even a single entity), Gazprom, Aramco, etc. The implication that global warming is the fault of these "corporations" is especially nonsensical because it implies that all fossil fuel producers should conspire to limit their production. Basically, this is describing OPEC on steroids and would make even John Rockefeller blush.
Fossil fuel corporations will have to "conspire" to reduce production though, unless they can conspire to come up with some way of extracting said fuels and allowing them to be used without the release of carbon emissions into the atmosphere.
The massive amount of capital investment that currently goes into producing fossil fuels needs to start being directed towards producing energy in a manner compatible with maintaining a habitable planet, and it's hard to see that happening until we collectively agree that it's not reasonable to profit from fossil fuel extraction and combustion. And yes, the governments of countries like China, Saudi Arabia and Russia are absolutely critical to that effort - until there's a real sense such governments are prepared to prepared to make radical changes in how their economies function then there's little the rest of us can do to alter the trajectory of global emissions. On that basis as an individual I'm happy to make lifestyle changes that may happen to also reduce my overall ecological footprint but at least bring some other benefit (driving less being the obvious one - even if it somehow caused more carbon emissions, the upsides of spending less time sitting in traffic are way too numerable to dismiss).
> The Netherlands is a great example where, in recent elections, nearly half of votes went to political parties that want to reduce response to climate change and other environmental issues.
But is that an anti-environment stance or an anti-big-green stance? I can understand people being sick of the mishandling of the crisis that is being funded with their money.
I label the rightwing anti-migration parties as actually "anti"-climatechange-sideffects.
They are just more willing to invest ton of money in fighting symptoms, as the anti-neighbour tribal mindset is so hardwired.
Shame its never enough to really get to the roots of the problem. Would be fascinating to see the tea party turn on Big Oil because they caused this mess.
>The whole activism thing doesent do a lot anymore
This is because activism today has completely become synonymous with raising awareness. While raising awareness is important, it's also the easiest part of activism, since the rise of the internet, so it's what people gravitate towards the most. That's how we end up with so much doomposting and doomscrolling on social media.
Individual action served as the foundation of Civil Rights movement, such as the Montgomery bus boycotts. It may be difficult to reason why walking a hour to work every day in the hot, Alabama sun rather than taking this bus will expand their rights, but history taught us that it was important. Meanwhile, there isn't a similar coordinated effort to carpool and seek alternative means of commuting today. What was also important were donations that funded legal challenges to discriminating businesses and municipal governments. Again, you don't see grass-roots organization funding lawsuits against corporations that are illegally polluting. Most important of all is ironically lobbying. Without the lobbying efforts of the NAACP, the Civil Rights protection may not have made it through, and if they had, they would have been substantially weaker. Again, this isn't something that is ever suggested by climate activists, despite their awareness of its importance. As Haidt implies, unlike doomscrolling, these types of activism are actually empowering.
Climate change is now climate catastrophism. It's unfortunately many times more doomer today than ever. And while climate itself is not energizing, "doing something about it to save the world' is because it's simple even if it's in-effective.
A phenomena like Greta Thunberg wouldn't be possible if it wasn't for that.
And wind and solar and tesla and other avenue that doesn't really do anything other than let us waste a lot of money on ineffective things.
Sorry what? How do renewable energy sources not do anything? The problem is multifaceted abs requires advances in many areas. A thousand partial solutions. Absolutism and cynicism aren’t helpful.
OP probably means that we should focus on infrastructure like dams and nuclear power, to mitigate the at this point probably unavoidable damage.
There should be less emphasis on policing individual behaviour (turn the AC down etc.), which is arguably almost completely a distraction from quantitatively relevant issues and provides cover from political inaction.
Wind and solar the two darlings of climate catastrophists is less than 3% of the worlds energy consumption and they will not be able to help getting the 3 billion people who uses less energy than a US fridge per year into the modern era.
Fossile fuels is not going anywhere as it's used for the 4 pillars of modern society, steel, fertilizers, concrete and plastic for which there is no realistic alternative.
Wind and solar isn't advances, they are regressive technologies that themselves require fossile fuel to even become a reality and still keeps us with our intermittency issues.
Keep in mind that only 20% of a countrys energy consumption is electricity.
The only big breakthroughs that matter with energy and can work at scale would be things like fusion and molten salt generators.
Making our energy grid more and more fragile by pushing wind and solar is what isn't helpful.
> The only big breakthroughs that matter with energy and can work at scale would be things like fusion and molten salt generators.
You don't need to go that far. Fission and geothermal can work at scale today and largely solve the impending climate trainwreck today. We haven't adopted them in droves not because of some technological limitation, but rather because they're more expensive on balance sheets (which don't account for negative externalities) and because the fossil fuel industry has successfully manipulated the public into equating "renewable energy" with "things fundamentally incapable of providing base load".
The U.S by itself consumes and pollutes an excessive amount even proportionally compared to China, there's definite optimizations in consumption patterns that can be made to reduce total overall carbon footprint. Plastics are still everywhere and recycling is considered a scam here. It's done so by design by oil companies. Yes, every single Styrofoam takeout container accumulates waste, especially for a country so prone on eating out. I get bottles of Mexican coke that show clear signs of wear and multiple usage in Mexico...only to finally end up on American store shelves were they'll be dumped in the trash like everything else here because nobody bothers with glass recycling bottles. Recycling plants are zoned out because the only people even bothering to return plastic bottles for 5 cents in a handful of states are the homeless, and even for them it's barely worth the fucking effort.
The amount of car traffic in America is ludicrous and an endemic problem of poor, lobbied city design. This country had better public transit that was muscled out by automobile lobbyists, some of which actually privatized the transit and let the infrastructure die. Asphalt retains heat, and every new damn road built is a contributor to making the world just a little bit more warmer than it used to be. China is a leading adopter of rail commuting and freight transport. We're twiddling our thumbs and letting our rail networks deteriorate and become unusable, because its cheaper to move less material over trucks.
These are just two simple examples. There's no zero sum result of completely eliminating plastics, but we can definitely consume much less. But we don't. Because we are lazy. Instead we exploit pollution loopholes where we classify SUVs as light work trucks so they don't have to conform to strict emission standards. This is why Ford cut down most of its car production lines in the U.S and almost exclusively focuses on trucks for their consumer market, and why increasingly more cars on road today are arguably less safer SUVs
If there is no alternative for concrete, plastic, fertilizers, and steel, then don't you think we ought to quit burning them for cars and electricty Thom?
You have gone so typically and boring boomer contrarian you aren't even making sense, as is normal.
If we weren't pulling oil out of the ground from the sea floor then my old fishing haunts would be available to me today and people wouldn't be worried about stepping into BP-branded tar balls that routinely roll up onto the beaches. There's more to climate change than wind, solar, and tesla.
It appears to me that fears over catastrophic climate change are yet another moral panic. Amplified by social media this time.
As with other moral panics (e.g. child abductions, pedophilia), the problem exists, but is blown way out of proportion by the media.
In reality, I believe there of course will be changes in the weather patterns due to a relatively small increase in temperature, but it's not going to be the end of the world and there certainly won't be any mass drought or famine from the change.
I kind of intuitively know this, and mostly disregard the opinions of those saying that there is impending doom. As I have likely seen this type of hysteria play out before in my life many times already.
It will be interesting to see if I'm right about it or not, over the coming decades...
I agree somewhat, in the sense that climate change will have happened slow enough and on a wide enough scale that its impact on human geographic dispersion, social organization, and reproductive patterns will be imperceptible to those feeling its effects.
It won’t be a catastrophe simply by nature of lacking the sudden violence necessary to qualify. Will it suck, will it transform things for the worse, and will our successors envy us, if not outright loathe and resent us? Definitely.
I'm not sure what the source of your doubt here is. There is piles and piles of evidence that we are in for a world of hurt in the coming several decades.
It's the same intuition that tells me something's wrong when I read things that end up being conspiracy theories or pseudoscience.
I trust it, because for me, it seems to have a track record of being correct in the end.
Well everyone has the right to their own opinions, and I might be completely wrong.
And I have every right to be a heretic, and not subscribe to things I think might be orthodoxies. That might be arising from bandwagon effects and social conformity. Which is what I suspect when it comes to climate change doomsaying.
And that's strictly my own opinion only, which can be simply disregarded by other people. But it still adds to the discussion. And such things can be proven wrong too, which might strengthen the case for catastrophic climate change actually happening?
> a significant part because public sentiment around climate change is that we’re already doomed in a way that isn’t really possible with social crises.
That sentiment is only valid for a specific world demographic, I’d say Western people under 40 years of age (which also greatly matches this forum’s users, I would say). But as Eastern European guy in my early 40s I certainly do not match that “doom” feeling, and looking around at people my age and older (like my parents) I would say that lack of trust in the coming climate Apocalypse is shared.
Your comment reminded me of the five general narratives we regularly tell ourselves about technology.
1) Technology is bad
2) Technology is good
3) Technology causes social change (tech determinism)
4) Social forces shape technology (social constructivism)
5) Technology is an accelerant
Essentially all stories of technology and society fall into one of these narratives. The most rare is #5, yet as you argue in this case, it is probably the most realistic. Haidt should be aware of these and I also don't understand why he is going with #3.
Yes, exactly. If I had to be florid, I’d say that Haidt is blaming the wind for the fire: he’s confusing the thing that accelerates underlying social ills and instabilities for things themselves. This resembles his own “map and territory” claims about those responding to him.
Most of the graphs he shows actually inflect earlier, around 2010 or so. This is around the time the media to start systematically hardening its line on all things climate, and the "great awokening" that started flooding the news with claims the world was dominated by systemic hate and -isms. The two are related, both being ideological in nature.
The huge spikes in terms like inclusion, racist, sexist, climate change, global warming, etc is clear, all starting around either 2010 or 2012 (except for global warming, which spiked a few years earlier and then was replaced almost overnight in 2010 by the vaguer term climate change, which shows massive growth in the last 10 years).
A clear trend of increasing prevalence of prejudice related terms is apparent with words such as racist or sexist increasing in usage between 2010 and 2019 by 638% and 403% in The New York Times or 514% and 141% respectively in The Washington Post.
>> "should I just listen to a fat white man screaming on talk radio"
I thought that would be considered racist fat shaming these days, but I guess it doesn't count if the person you're offending isn't on your team?
I think Haidt could probably make his argument stronger if he discussed social media as an accelerant, rather than a cause in and of itself. I can’t think of any real reason why he doesn’t (it makes his argument strictly stronger, and results in the same conclusions) other than ideological ones: he’s too baked into his incestuous “heterodox” world to weaken his claims.