131–140 of 189 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Similarly the vocal and rich advocates for climate change policy buying beachfront property on Martha's Vinyard. To say that these people are merely hypocrites is being too generous. They don't believe what they're saying at all.
Don't allow anyone to gaslight you about such an obvious observation, too.
Optimism and Pessimism are viewed very differently in different Countries (Germany vs USA) and even Regions (Silicon Valley vs idk Utah). Apart from that I think the article is mostly wrong. To make progress you need agency and self-confidence. The effects of Optimism and Pessimism are very context-dependent. Just one example: A very driven and confident pessimist might be much more motivated to find a solution for C…
This feels like a "terrorist/freedom-fighter" thing and so is effectively saying nothing. Like, Bill Gates accepts climate change is happening, that we should do something to avert the problems, and thinks that we can do that as a species. He thinks that renewables and EVs etc. will all help, but aren't enough and we should look for newer solutions. He has invested in multiple different solutions, presumably because…
https://twitter.com/GatesJets Hard to take Gates seriously on climate change. Imagine everyone was living like this.
Since then I still don't know which of his initiatives have shown a high probability of success.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
https://twitter.com/GatesJets Hard to take Gates seriously on climate change. Imagine everyone was living like this.
Yup... Do as you preach, and others will follow. Flying your private jet to a conference, and tell Johnny Average that he shouldn't use his car to drive to his workplace is a shitty thing to do. And he's far from being the only one doing that.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Do as you preach, and others will follow. It is still logically consistent to play the game as everyone else, but still advocate for changes to rules that affect everyone. For example, flying in private jets while also supporting laws/regulations/taxes that would make that amount of pollution per person per unit time unaffordable.
No, it's not. You're just excusing hypocritical behavior because of your own bias.
For example, I want fossil fuels to be drastically costlier to force everyone to use smaller vehicles and live in denser communities enabling public transit.
But I do not want other individuals to have to do that while I do not. I am willing to make the sacrifices if everyone will, but if everyone is not going to, then I have a hard time seeing why I should.
This feels like a "terrorist/freedom-fighter" thing and so is effectively saying nothing. Like, Bill Gates accepts climate change is happening, that we should do something to avert the problems, and thinks that we can do that as a species. He thinks that renewables and EVs etc. will all help, but aren't enough and we should look for newer solutions. He has invested in multiple different solutions, presumably because…
https://twitter.com/GatesJets Hard to take Gates seriously on climate change. Imagine everyone was living like this.
Even some of his climate stuff annoys me.
But, it's highly likely that if you ranked the whole human race on how much they'd done to reduce climate change, he may well be at the top.
So if it's about "doing his share" then he's probably doing okay.
But regardless, I don't want people to stop flying, I want them to stop releasing fossil C02 in the air because it's inefficient. Inefficiencies on an individual scale don't matter, inefficiencies on a civilization wide scale add up quickly.
I don't see how flying, or doing any other rich person thing, reduces his credibility. Unless you believe dealing with climate change is going to make us all poorer, which it isn't.
If you're really all about hating rich people, then there's lots of "climate justice" projects aiming to help poor people and carbon taxes that replace regressive taxes would be a good thing to champion.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
https://twitter.com/GatesJets Hard to take Gates seriously on climate change. Imagine everyone was living like this.
What you or I, or even Gates do in our personal lives has absolutely no effect on climate change. Solutions or failures happen in other contexts. Gates does some real work in those. The whole "I must recycle all my plastic bags or the planet will die" mentality is, to me, a weird form of delusion of grandeur. Seeing past that can be both freeing and depressing :)
I'm sure there is some kind of name for this.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yup... Do as you preach, and others will follow. Flying your private jet to a conference, and tell Johnny Average that he shouldn't use his car to drive to his workplace is a shitty thing to do. And he's far from being the only one doing that.
Does anyone know if he actually buys carbon offsets for his footprint? I mean that would be one way to negate the impact of flying around. I imagine he does.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What you or I, or even Gates do in our personal lives has absolutely no effect on climate change. Solutions or failures happen in other contexts. Gates does some real work in those. The whole "I must recycle all my plastic bags or the planet will die" mentality is, to me, a weird form of delusion of grandeur. Seeing past that can be both freeing and depressing :)
Why do you think plastics recycling was originally campaigned for by big oil? It’s a pacifying non-solution that gets people to focus on their neighbors behaviors instead of anyone with power
This feels like a "terrorist/freedom-fighter" thing and so is effectively saying nothing. Like, Bill Gates accepts climate change is happening, that we should do something to avert the problems, and thinks that we can do that as a species. He thinks that renewables and EVs etc. will all help, but aren't enough and we should look for newer solutions. He has invested in multiple different solutions, presumably because…
Pessimism can be quite useful. In particular, it helps prune off unhelpful branches of search trees, so you can focus on more promising ones. A very important part of solving problems is choosing the right problems. It doesn't help to be optimistic about something that's not going to work.
Thinking a priori that it’s not going to work, here we have the true definition of a pessimist.