The thing is, we don’t need to ask how history will view these people. Many people (including me) view them with utter contempt right now.
The OP is correct that many of the denialists know what they are saying is wrong. Vox did a video recently mashing together clips of how the climate change discussion has changed over the last 12 years. It’s interesting to notice some of the figures that are now saying that “the science is not clear” previously accepting the science.
For all the other people, who just watch clips that “prove” climate change is a hoax and are not even aware of the other side and the evidence…I can’t hate those people, because they aren’t necessarily bad people, just ignorant, including being ignorant of critical thinking. But I hate the culture and circumstances that mean that whole swathes of the public (oh, and the president), can spend their lives immersed in bullshit.
The electorate that voted for the likes of Trump will continue to believe that they did every thing right, and wonder why someone didn’t save them.
They voted for Trump. Think about that.
To point a finger at their support for this moron and administration, is pointing a finger at the mirror. They’ll never denounce the decisions that they are making, or made in the past.
The entire republican platform is now based on blaming someone else while robbing the cookie jar.
Yucca mountain is not nuclear power, and it was poorly thought out from the beginning, starting from the idea that the stuff that comes out of a nuclear reactor is waste, and not extremely valuable material.
I agree that Bernie is against nuclear power, and that was one of my biggest things that I held against him. Clinton was “agnostic” because she didn’t want to upset the fringe left and Bernie followers in a very close election where she stood to lose far more votes by being for nuclear than being “agnostic.”
Yes, the crazy environmental groups tend to be towards the left, as the right has no interest whatsoever on the environment, and many environmental groups are fueled more by FUDD than by science when it comes to nuclear.
As far as national liberal politicians for nuclear power, here’s some links:
As you can tell by the tone of that passage, Wasserman is not a big fan of nuclear, and is calling out the democrats who are. The article is full of poor science and outdated concerns.
Yes, the Green party is completely against nuclear, but I’m pretty sure that, in the end, they are dubious on the benefits of civilization itself. And, yes, the Green party does tend to align with the left, but that is because at least the left wants to do some level of protection of the environment, while the right seems to want to exploit it to maximize profits. I would not count them as part of the democratic party for the purpose of this discussion.
Now, the way I see it is that it was Nixon who caused the most damage to nuclear, when he canceled Oak Ridge’s MSR project in favor of the Fast Breeder, not because of any science or technical reason, but for political reasons, and in 1983, the fast breeder was then cancelled by a republican majority senate.
These ideas about nuclear power are a generation or more old, and based on the the very real concerns that the public had about the state of the nuclear industry in the 70’s. Carter was the last Democratic president who was strongly against nuclear, and in fact, new nuclear power plants broke ground for the first time in decades under Obama.
The problem is, is that we are using 60 year old technology that was designed for one purpose, to propel submarines, and that is not the best method of producing electricity for the grid. We have not developed the newer generations of reactors that should bring down the cost and risk substantially.
So, I ask again, with the republicans completely controlling the federal government, what is their plan for expanding our nuclear power generation capacity?
I think they’ll be seen as irrelevant. They largely exist in countries whose emissions have already peaked and the problem has largely passed Western governments by. If the EU and the US were to completely cut admissions to zero. We’d still be admitting worldwide at 2000 levels. The growth is largely in developing countries and you’re never going to convince them to let their people starve just to avoid cheap coal. I assume at some point renewables will get cheaper than fossil fuels and that will be what caps emissions, but until that happens, the position of first worlders is of secondary importance.
But, the first worlders can assist the developing nations in rasingin their standard of living without ballooning their carbon footprint.
We are less wasteful now, due to technologies that we developed, which were helped by our wastefulness.
Rather than having all the developing nations go through all the stages we did, we can bootstrap them to a higher level. LED lighting, rather than incandescents or gas. electric vehicles, rather than ICE vehicles. If we step up our nuclear development, we can provide that technology, rather than relying on fossil fuels.
There is historical precedence for this. History will see the climate change denialists like the cigarette smoking denialists. There were experiments that pretty conclusively showed that cigarette smoking was dangerous in 1950. Not just a little dangerous, but “immediately causes substantial tumors in rats”. It took about 40 years for anything really substantive to be done about it, and now, almost 70 years later, cigarettes are still legal. I understand that quitting this addictive drug is extremely difficult, but at a minimum, we could make illegal the manufacture and open sale of cigarettes themselves. Chewing tobacco has about half the death rate, we could probably make a gum that was full strength with about 1-10% of the death rate, the evidence says that vaping probably is about 5% or less as harmful, and so on.
People talking about how much they love their trucks and massive inefficient houses and low prices for gasoline remind me of this a little. (none of this would be affordable with a reasonable surcharge on carbon emissions)
That is not accurate. Carter was mostly in favor of nuclear power, but 3MI was a wrench in the works.
The biggest problem seemed to be the LMBRs. They tend to be much, much safer than BWRs or PWRs, with their hands-off passive safety design. I suspect people would become more confident having them down the road as long as they were well explained. But the LMBR program was canceled in the late '70s.
Why was it canceled? From what I can tell, we still had a robust Cold War at the time. Safe LMBRs are not good in a Cold War because they do not produce explody stuff. In other words, the nuclear power program is highly dependent on the MIC. Nuclear power is difficult and expensive, with negative RoI, so it cannot be done strictly by for-profit business. It is scary to people, and fossil industries have very good, fast profit, which they can funnel into reinforcing the fear.
Reality is that we are a pig in shit, fat, happy and a real pain in the ass to drag out of the shit. Our great-grandchildren will have it pretty hard comparatively, because we are taking the stuff they need and crapping in their salad bar. That we could cut back and act with due restraint for their sake seems a bit improbable at this point.
Personally, sure, but policy wise, he did slow the development of nuclear power. But, agreed, he wasn’t actively hostile to it. I was responding to Deeg’s assertion that democrats are against nuclear power, and was giving him as much benefit of the doubt as I could on that one.
We don’t really have to cut back, we just need to be smarter. Cars get far better gas millage than they did in the 70’s, and they are getting even better. We don’t need to drive fewer miles if we can produce less CO[sub]2[/sub] per mile.
Development of nuclear is probably the only realistic way of accommodating our desire to consume more and more energy intensive goods and services, while not ruining our planet. Very few are going to listen to greenpeace and cut back on their carbon footprint voluntarily, not enough to do any good. But even fewer will care much if the energy that produces and powers their Iphone comes from solar, wind, nuclear, or coal.
There are some promising developments in the world of fusion that may make most of this irrelevant anyway. If someone develops a practical electricity producing fusion plant, then pretty much all our problems are solved. Short of that holy grail (which may be slightly more attainable than the actual holy grail), fission is really the best bet for our future.
They are? In such a world, yes, electricity would be very cheap.
But the machinery costs to run an industrial plant that uses cheap energy to collect CO2 from the atmosphere and produce synthetic methane or methanol might end up being more expensive than the current method. Synthetic oil is pricey today, both the kind for your car engine and so is synthetic crude oil.
The cost difference might be small - $100 a barrel for pure synthetic oil vesus the $60 or so the natural stuff costs - but in a world where it’s politically impossible to assess any kind of tax or fee for destroying the environment, it wouldn’t matter.
(the way it would work, buying a barrel of synthetic oil gets a carbon credit, since it was made by extracting CO2 from the air, that exactly equals the carbon tax that would otherwise be assessed on it. While oil taken from the ground would be hit with the tax but not the credit)
As a side note, solar panels made with an automated production chain (where not just the panel production is automated, but the robots that gathered the materials are automated, and the robots that made the robots are also automated - all becoming rapidly more feasible with advances in machine learning) might end up producing electricity so cheap that you end up with almost the same benefits you would get with fusion.
Yes, there’s no power at night, but you could store excess power in the day as methane or methanol.
I didn’t say anything at all about synthetic fuels, but, since you brought it up…
You remember just 10 years ago when oil was well over $100 a barrel, peaking at $160? So, if you are saying $100 for synthetic, then that’s a great deal.
Oil prices are very unstable, depending on political issues, wars, pipelines, transport. I watch gas prices fluctuate up to 3 a gallon, and back down to 2.35 a gallon on a weekly basis.
But, overall, it tends to trend up as a finite resource is used. As fossil fuels get more expensive, synthetic fuels will become more economical, until you get to the point where fossil fuels just don’t make any sense to use.
In any case, liquid fuels would not be used as much as they are now, as electric cars should replace ICE cars in relatively short order. You still need liquid fuels for some applications, unless we develop a battery that has anywhere near the energy density of gasoline, which I kind of doubt will happen.
A carbon tax may make development of such technology proceed more quickly, but I think that the natural rising cost of oil should make synthetic fuels economical all by itself.
Until your automated robots start gathering materials from your house… I do hear that fresh organics are useful in many recipes…
You still need them cited on land somewhere, land that someone may want to use for something. You still need to mine the materials somewhere. You still are going to need at least some humans in the loop to perform maintenance and make sure that they are not evolving into killer robots.
If it is cheap enough to do it that way, maybe, but you are not looking at very efficient use of your energy doing that.
What does this mean here? Is it supposed to be per MWh? In which case, we are talking $14 per KWh, probably about 100 times what most people are used to paying.
Also, Tesla’s pack can only produce full power, if fully charged, for a bit over an hour. Is that enough to get through the night?
The closest historical analogy I can think of is to those who refiused to believe that Hitler and the Naxis were a threat. Some didn’t seem to mind Hitler - the America Firsters, for instance. That is like the oil companies and coal companies. Some were too dumb to see the threat. Those were like the cotton farmer in Georgia whose fields were wiped out by the hurricane but still says it is just weather, not climate change.
I guess the historical perspective is how could they be so evil/stupid? I think the same will be true for the deniers.
I noticed now that it was not much at night where that setup is for, right now that is to deal with changes in the flow; however, in the front of saving money and providing energy at night, the efforts are more modest, but they are showing that they are viable too and growing in importance.
That’s a pretty good analogy that works on several levels. Many people didn’t properly assess the threat because they weren’t fully aware of all the evidence, and the nature of the threat was in many ways without precedent. There was therefore a tendency to regard those warning about it to be alarmists. In his book In the Garden of Beasts, Erik Larson recounts the experiences of William Dodd as US ambassador to Germany between 1933 and 1937 when the Nazis were consolidating their power and anti-Jewish sentiment was becoming extreme, and even then many American politicians were not only unaware of Hitler’s true intentions, but were in some cases outright sympathetic to him. The magnitude of what was happening only dawned on Dodd gradually despite being right in the center of it. His own daughter was fascinated by the pomp and circumstance of the Nazi regime, and it was even rumored that she had an affair with Rudolf Diels, then head of the Gestapo. Like climate change, it was hard to see Nazism for what it was because its impacts were gradual, and we often don’t see powerful gradual changes until they overwhelm us.
I find the question of the OP in need of definition. This is a complicated topic, and I don’t think it’s controversial to suggest that there are bad arguments being made on both sides, both as to what exactly is the extant of manmade clinate change and what is a reasonable reaction to it?
C02 absorbs infrared. This is a scientific fact. All other things being equal adding C02 reduces sunlight reflected to space. This has a warming effect. This is another fact. Burning fossil fuels does this. Another fact.
This actually says that long term debt and wildfires are consequences of global warming. This seems sketchier. Is one who disagrees with elements of this article a denier?
What if I disagree with the increasingly popular premise that the way to solve the problem is to end capitalism and find this to be a cheap communist tactic?
What if I think we will find a technological solution, or that mankind will adapt, or that change is a constant and global warming may make some things better or some things worse? What if I think that pavement and cities may be having an absorptive effect greater than C02 increases?
Not saying I believe any of these things or not, just curious how a denier is defined.
There’d be widespread agreement that refusal to accept a large role for human interventions causing climate change (i.e. long-term rising global temperatures) despite excellent evidence for such, constitutes climate change denial.
Similarly, refusal to accept powerful evidence on behalf of other propositions that have overwhelming scientific consensus (evolution, HIV being the cause of AIDS, safety/usefulness of vaccines, fluoridated water, genetically modified crops etc.) makes one a denier. Bonus points for flogging the views of fringe figures lacking training and expertise on these subjects, and believing in widespread conspiracies to explain why one’s viewpoint is failing to gain traction.
As for climate change in particular, one can certainly dispute the accuracy of long-term projections and argue against policies proposed to deal with climate change, for which the term “denier” would not be accurate.
The position of what are called “climate change deniers” is actually much less nuanced and much more insidious than you imply. It doesn’t even matter if they’ve crossed the threshold of admitting that the climate is noticeably changing in the modern era; the essence of their argument is that we don’t know enough and with enough certainty to justify serious efforts at mitigation. This belief is manifestly false, and these people are therefore dangerous obstructionists to vitally necessary mitigation efforts. The comprehensive IPCC assessments lay out all the scientific data and address the risks and mitigation and adaptation policies. These folks believe they’re exaggerated or entirely wrong and are politically motivated. There is no subtlety here. To cite one recent example, Trump recently announced that he agreed that the climate has changed, but that it will change back again. So, nothing to worry about. These people are dangerous nuts, and one of them is running the executive branch of the federal government. Many others are in Congress.
Regarding your specific hypotheticals that I quoted, no one but a nut of a different kind would suggest that we need to “end capitalism” and I’ve never heard anyone seriously suggest that. On the “technological solution”, if you believe something other than mitigation – like geoengineering – will magically solve all our climate problems, you have a belief that is shared by few serious scientists and is essentially fantasy.
If you believe we will simply adapt, you are again indulging in a fantasy that is not scientifically supportable. Yes, adaptation is an important part of the way forward, but only in concert with serious mitigation efforts, because many of the damages of a rapidly changed climate, like severe weather and storm surges and potentially devastating impacts on crop yields in the world’s most vulnerable areas, and the effects on marine life of an acidifying and warming ocean, are simply not amenable to adaptation. Indeed the adaptation potential of the world’s entire ecosystem is severely limited compared to the pace of climate change, so that the entire ecosystem and the diversity of life on earth is threatened.
If you believe that climate change will simply make some things better and some things worse, you need to be apprised of the scientific consensus on impacts, because they are overwhelmingly negative and often severe, and even most of the positive ones – like improved yields of some cereal crops in some northerly latitudes – are expected to be temporary and will be more than offset anyway by devastating impacts to food crops in poorer, more southerly countries.
And finally, your last hypothetical is simply flat-out wrong. The effects of urban pavement, roofs, and other albedo effects are highly localized and so minor that they’re not even counted in itemizing major climate forcings. In fact, the total impact of all land use changes due to human activity is actually a small negative forcing, not a positive one, and the biggest component is due to the increased albedo of snow-covered agricultural areas compared with forests. But the impact is still small enough that the radiative forcing of greenhouse gases is overwhelmingly dominant.
In other words debt is happening along with climate change, but nowhere does it say long term debt is caused by climate change.
As for wildfires, in my town the police get called when people smell smike from fires 60 miles away. Climate change is indeed contributing to more and worse fires over more of the year.
I also didn’t see where that article involved anyone asking for communism. Unless you think carbon taxes and credits are communism. But please give us a model where a pure capitalist system would do anything about climate change. It sure didn’t do much about pollution until the government stepped in.
I get somewhat annoyed about the “how will history judge us” or “we need to be on the right side of history” comments, nothing personal to the OP.
We seem to be our own judge of history as of the year 2018 and project our own values to all future peoples. Who’s to say that in the year 2525 that people will look back and see how silly it was to worry about climate change, when the CO2 Exchanger was invented in 2050 and solved the problem. Plus, according to 2525 morals, segregation was shown to be absolutely the way to go.
Couldn’t people in Virginia in 1927 look at people in 1867 and say that their ideals about equality for the black race were wrong and our new enlightened sterilization and segregation laws have shown that society is better now?
I’m sort of joking about the last two, but it illustrates my point. Nobody in 1518 could predict how we would think in 2018 and we cannot either. What frame of history are we talking about?