The Most Ambitious Environmental Lawsuit Ever

And what happens when a court sets a precedent that eg air pollution is not property damage? Even in a Libertarian system you're bound to such policy decisions, regardless of whether they are made explicitly or not.

There's a deeper and equally sincere and deep-seated belief behind said beliefs:

It's objectively true that increasing the cost of energy amounts to something like a regressive tax: it will harm the poor and the middle class considerably more than it will harm the wealthy. Among causes for our current middle class woes, some have cited the peaking of domestic conventional oil in the 1970s and the general end of extremely cheap energy around that era.

The very existence of a middle class and a diamond-shaped social order is probably in part an artifact of cheap and available energy. People do understand this. They understand that an end to cheap energy will return themselves and their children to serfdom. (Unless they happen to be members of the tiny What people don't believe is that renewable energy can provide cheap energy. They fear a world powered by renewable energy might be one resembling The Hunger Games: tiny stratospherically rich technological enclaves served vast impoverished precincts of serfs.

Meanwhile they're also either against nuclear outright, or are at the very least suspicious of it.

So if the choice is between fossil fuels and a return to abject poverty, people choose fossil fuels. I'm not sure they're really ignoring climate change-- rather they're making a cost/benefit analysis to the effect that climate change is better than a return to feudal serfdom.

They're probably right. It is demonstrably better to reign in hell than to serve in heaven. Poverty is worse than any natural disaster I'm aware of; I'll take a few million dollars and a hurricane every week over poverty and blue skies.

This also explains why the "developing" world has shown no interest in moving on carbon reduction. Cheap available energy is lifting billions out of poverty. Their response is pretty much "screw you, we're poor." For them to choose any different would be an act of huge-scale unilateral self-sacrifice.

The burden is on advocates of renewable energy to show that it can provide cheap, abundant energy sufficient to sustain a diamond-shaped social order. If it can't, it is politically dead and climate change is a foregone conclusion. The burden is also on nuclear advocates to show that they can engineer reactors that cannot fail like Fukushima or Chernobyl. (I mean cannot fail, not "low probability of failure," since anyone who understand entry-level stats knows that small probabilities become large when you scale things up. Think about what hard drive and RAM failures look like at data center scales for example.) Neither of these milestones has been reached.

Renewable energy remains a favorite political option among the inhabitants of uber-rich cities that resemble The Capital in The Hunger Games, like San Francisco. It's viewed as a luxury feel-good toy for rich people. Meanwhile the nuclear industry continues to iterate on the fundamentally flawed 1950s submarine reactor design instead of rethinking the problem from first principles and producing something truly engineered for civilian power production. IMHO the situation is worse in the nuclear domain... nobody is even trying, and the response to incidents like Fukushima is to double down on PR instead of doubling down on engineering.

Over time I've become more and more skeptical of the "people are stupid" answer to things like this. The reality is that people are not as stupid as you think they are. They just might be viewing things very differently or conceptualizing the problem from the perspective of different needs and goals.

In AI terminology they have a different goal function. Understand their goal function(s) and you understand their choices.

Another bugaboo in places like Louisiana is religious fundamentalism and opposition to evolution, etc. I've started to doubt "people are stupid" there as well. In that culture, the church is the center of social life. So you're basically asking people to choose between friendship, camaraderie, and the moral basis of cooperation and some esoteric scientific theory that does nothing to help them in their daily lives. Which would you choose? Insulting people and calling them idiots doesn't accomplish anything except to polarize them and reinforce the underlying social pathologies responsible for the problem. Poverty might also have some explanatory power here as well. Social cohesion -- here provided by the church -- is more of a necessity if you are poor than if you are rich. The poor do not have the luxury of choosing a certain amount of social alienation in order to be right about scientific precepts.

"People are stupid" is one of the great intellectually lazy answers of our times. Dig deeper.

Having been a class member in many class actions, I can say that I have never seen any real benefit. I think I got less than $20 from Microsoft once, for example, and the terms given were calculated to cause further harm (they'd "donate" the remainder to schools in such a way as to funnel the money back to Microsoft). I actually spent a considerable amount of time writing up some opposition to that, only to be advised by a lawyer friend that while I had a few good arguments, I could not expect to get very far in court.

A valid point, but a lot of complications and unanswered questions.

One major problem is that it weakens the rule of law (something that most libertarians prize highly) when you throw so much into the courts. Nobody knows where they stand or what their liabilities are, which leads to paralysis.

I identify with libertarians, but I think it would be much better to come up with clear laws inidicating the costs of negative externalities, and then force various behaviors to pay for those costs in various ways to various people. Also, certain practices should be outright criminal, in the same way that vandalism is a crime.

I think things like cap-and-trade are ridiculous, for instance. But a straight tax on air pollution or drawing from the water table might be reasonable.

Amen! Thank you for the powerful comment, humanizing and empathizing with these people who are in a tough place (and still collectively making poor long-term decisions but without any easy solution anyway).