Blog Credo

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.

H.L. Mencken

Monday, August 28, 2023

This Feel Wrong

 The Post has a piece on how people are misguided in their approach to mitigating climate change. Recycling, for instance, has little impact on climate change and cutting out meat has a bigger impact, but people have that reversed.

OK, but I think that misses the point. Nothing YOU do will impact the climate. YOU are insignificant. It's what WE do that matters, and you aren't getting Americans to give up meat and dairy anytime soon. 

Workable climate solutions have to involve asking fewer sacrifices from a people that isn't especially interested in long or even short term sacrifices (see Covid mitigation). Workable climate solutions will create electricity abundance without creating carbon dioxide. Solar, nuclear, wind, geothermal...that's how you reduce carbon, because that's how you move people to EVs and get rid of things like home heating oil. That's how you create cheap, carbon free hydrogen for industrial processes. That's how you do atmospheric carbon capture and sequestration.

If you think you're getting Americans to give up meat to forestall a distant climate apocalypse, you haven't been paying attention.

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