I always find the anti-environmentalist position that pops up on HN interesting. For a technical audience, they are amazingly unaware of "Systems Thinking". Saying "MEH, there are other pollinators" is lazy thinking. Our ecosystem is a vast web of interconnections. You cannot predict how one HUGELY important species being destroyed will affect the rest of our ecosystem. Furthermore: People use honey bees for honey (…
Consider climate change. Let's take it as given that climate change is an existental threat to humanity, and that it is caused by carbon dumped into the atmosphere by mankind. If this is true, then we need to leverage the full arsenal of technology available to us to solve the problem.
Nuclear power is a solution we have in-hand, today, to atmospheric carbon.
Of course, it comes with trade-offs. Nuclear waste is a big downside, but nuclear waste is a tiny annoyance compared to a runaway greenhouse effect.
And yet, environmentalists have, for sixty years, fought tooth-and-nail against nuclear power.
This brings me to the point: the track record of environmentalists, and the of green movement, shows that they do not care about the environment, nor do they care about solving real problems with real solutions for real people.
What they do seem to care about is money. Especially taxpayer money, because once you're in, the gravy never stops. Actually solving problems doesn't matter, as long as you look busy and get interviewed on MSNBC and NPR a lot.
The image of the envrionmentalist is of someone who will chain themselves to trees to protest their university building a new parking lot, with lots of pictures for Instagram and the news, but only until the semester break. Instead of organizing transportation and/or walkable housing for other students, thereby eliminating the demand for additional parking.
The opposition by-and-large cares very deeply about the environment. You'd be hard-pressed to find more environmentally-conscious folks than in the hunting and homesteading communities.
But they also believe, from observed behavior, that environmentalists are mostly interested in prolonging the problem while making themselves rich.