What climate activists won't tell you about protecting the planet

The writer tries to argue a point that nobody is making. Climate activists aren't suggesting we should stop 'growth and development'. Climate activists want governments to pass effective climate regulations.

There will always be dumb/uninformed/ignorant people out there. some of them will call themselves climate activists and ask you a dumb question at a lecture, but this doesn't say anything about the group of climate activists as a whole.

Second of all, I hope you realise that climate activism isn't some sort of subculture or something. It's not a homogeneous blob of people who all think and feel alike. The only common denominator is that they are active about campaigning for climate regulation.

the general sentiment is a vague gesture towards "things are better, actually" that seem very shallowly thought out. two examples jump out to me (I could not endure reading this whole thing, it was Not That Interesting, Insightful, Or Good.)

one is the observation that "cars are getting better, actually" to illustrate that things aren't as bad as they seem. sure, a car in 2024 undoubtedly pollutes less than a car in 1970. that said, it seems to just start with the assumption that "cars are part of society" and assumes that if the fleet just continues to get greener, then there's no problem. the issue is that cars and car-centricity create myriad knock-on effects that further contribute to climate change or damage the environment. the vague hand-waving about "electric cars solving environmental issues" completely disregards the environmental cost of lithium mining, which may not contribute to air quality as profoundly but has other environmentally significant impacts. it disregards the damage to ecosystems created by extensive vehicle infrastructure, the inherent waste of vast parking lots in the suburbs. if you just say "cars are probably going to continue to get cleaner," you ignore the opportunity to explore better options. this seems like a particularly silly oversight given this person starts with the position that "growth of a society should be unrestrained," which really doesn't feel compatible with the idea of "everyone's driving around in their own little vehicle" simply from an efficiency standpoint.

another weird and telling half-thought that's brought up is the idea that cell phones are some sort of environmental win because nobody's buying a GPS device anymore. "In the recent past, a single person would have owned a GPS device, a calculator, a camera, a landline telephone, an alarm clock, and so on." sure, once again, in a vacuum and with no additional thought this sounds great - but you have to have observed the world around you, right? you couldn't be missing the obvious point that the "product to waste" cycle for phones is substantially shorter than it was for any of these devices, right? i owned one alarm clock my entire childhood up until I left for college - i owned one GPS device i updated with new maps until i got my first smartphone with google maps. i owned two digital cameras in my entire life before i entered the endless cycle of phone upgrades. i owned one landline phone my entire life up until i got my first cell phone. i owned one, maybe two calculators (i had to buy a TI-83 for school, after all.) my relationship with cell phones is different - i genuinely have no idea how many I've had. it's been a lot. i've upgraded at least every couple years my entire life, and lately, i'll fully admit that i've just fallen into a yearly upgrade cycle, as the way my phone payments are structured incentivizes that - there's no cost to getting a new, unscratched device with a new battery yearly, so why not do it? i'd estimate i've likely relegated 25 or so devices to e-waste over the course of my life. not proud, that's just reality. the thing is, i don't think I'm alone in that.

the author seems, at best, to be a hardcore ideologue of another type - i find their self-description as "pro-human, pro-progress" and proud broadcasting of being recognized as "Britain's Greenest Mother" (a totally meaningless accolade) pretty telling. they look at everything through the lens of two beliefs:

- unlimited growth of both the human population and industry is Unquestionably Good and people who oppose it are bad.

- nuclear power is a panacea that will bring an end to our climate problem and should be strongly promoted.

i'm not anti-nuclear by any stretch, but when your bias towards these two points is so intense that you have to frame all discussions as a defense of them, you're really missing obvious points to discuss and you wind up twisting yourself in silly little knots and saying things that are neither interesting nor insightful.

I don’t necessarily disagree that we can’t combine growth with a focus on sustainable energy. The green energy sector has made a lot of money the past 20 years and will continue to do so. Not enough to make sure the planet remains friendly to humans by any means, but we’re not going to do that are we?

Imagine writing: "Some people argue that humans have caused climate change and environmental damage, and therefore humans are the problem. This is a very black-and-white, misleading way of looking at the world. Humans are also able to solve these problems and have done so in many cases"... and concluding that because we mitigate some of the large complex problems we create, but not all, somehow we are a net good and there should be more of us.

Every time people overfish, overharvest, over intensify farming, drive a species to extinction etc. we get the same response - people have the right to a livelihood, people need to eat. And it would be unethical to deny them that. But no mention of biodiversity as an environmental and ethical problem either. It's all about climate because all that matters is humans.

We don't know how to sustainably feed the human population we have now and pro-market capitalism contrarians give the same "actually more people is a good thing because... brain trust" or some nebulous nonsense.