What’s so interesting about it? That people can be wrong about an issue on many levels?
For a couple of years now I have observed those 4 levels of climate change denial in literally any discussion under a news article about climate change.
It’s safe to say the author is also a climate change denier:
The final, most extreme group (known as climate alarmists) accepts all five premises, believing that climate change is the #1 threat to the world, and must be stopped by any means necessary. These radical environmentalists are sometimes accused of being “watermelons” because they’re “green on the outside and red (communist) on the inside.”
What a pompous dickhead. But what can you expect of from a guy, when 69 of the 88 articles listed on his website have the word “misconception” in the title.
Speaking of misconceptions: When I was young and met my first libertarian, and listened to them going on about freedom. Freedom is nice, I thought, how about a 100% inheritance tax that is then redistributed equally to everyone? Because if you don’t do that, some people would obviously be more free than others. Boy, was I in for a surprise. That guy also was a pompous dickhead. Wait, maybe there’s a pattern here
“Left libertarianism” is only a thing because the US forgot that libertarianism was originally a socialist movement in opposition to Karl Marx, who they thought would lead people to a socialist dictatorship. This ultimately led to the Hague Congress and the expulsion of the anarchists from the First International. After that the libertarians were marginalised by the Marxists and capitalists as bomb-throwing anarchists (some were, but most were not), and when the classical liberals lost their name to the social liberals they decided to take libertarian for themselves as there were few of the original libertarian people left in the US to object.
Trying to track down the origins of the term “Classical Liberal”: who, when, and what did they mean by it, is a pain.
Wikipedia is no help. The article projects the term back on people who never called themselves that.
There are articles like this:
It sounds reasonable at the start, but George Mason University and Atlas Network are warning flags that this might be coming from the Koch Bro libertarian bubble.
Maybe, but the rest of the world never forgot. That’s why in many other countries the liberal party is a right wing one.
Britain is an oddity too, the Liberal party switched to social liberalism in the 1950s because they had been pushed into 3rd place by the Labour Party ever since the 1920s and universal suffrage. It seemed like social liberalism had completely won here, especially after Charles Kennedy led the Liberal Democrats (a merger of the Liberal Party and the Social Democratic Party) into a strong third place in 2005, but Nick Clegg has undone all that. The Lib-Dems are not classical liberals at the moment, but they are heading that way.
I think the original classical liberals just called themselves liberals. This wasn’t a problem for them until some liberals started focusing on social issues rather than economic ones.
An extreme anti-nuclear stance is what really makes me sour-faced about a vast swath of the environmentalist movement. We can’t save power. Literally billions of people are living in exceptionally miserable conditions. I would see them raised from those conditions—actually, I’d see the system restraining and exploiting them torn down and them lifting themselves out from those conditions with maybe a helping hand if they want it—and for that they need power. Lots of it. Lots more than can be saved by hair-shirting. Sure, we can do some things in more efficient ways, but ultimately a lot of things are about as efficient as they can be made and if we want everyone to be fed, clothed, healthy, educated and happy (and I don’t really give much of a toss about the opinions of people who don’t want that), then we need to expand humanity’s watt-budget, not reduce it.
I guess you could save by reducing everyone to the lifestyle of the bottom 50% but not only is this the ultimate vote-loser, if you are a dedicated champion of the environment you sort of need an industrialized society. We know the planet periodically gets hit with giant biosphere-killing disasters and a powerful, spacefaring species is the only thing that has a chance of averting them or geoengineering their worst effects away. The Earth is in no way safe in our absence.
So if we could spend less scientific genius on more efficient ways of killing each other and on ways to manipulate the financial market into making money for people with too much of it, and more on actually useful stuff that’d be lovely.
Unfortunately, the rich mostly want research that makes them more rich and public research funding is trapped between so many compromises and layers of red tape that I suspect the average scientist does maybe 10% science and 90% nonsense that is in no way science but is required if the meager funding is to continue.
Yes, I know “Google Murray Bookchin” is a heavily used meme, but he was opposed to the deep ecologists. It didn’t stop him from finding a different way for the green movement.
I know about him. I’m broadly in agreement (localized decentralization has moments where it doesn’t scale properly, but it’s not like I have an instant solution of my own, hence broadly), actually, and I thank you for the advocacy of this much-needed alternative. My complaint, however, isn’t that there isn’t an environmentalism that I’d like, but that the kinds that are prevalent are, by my count, exceptionally counter-productive both in the sense of losing people and in the sense that, if followed, would not result in good outcomes.
Nuclear power would not last us very long anyway, and it has certain unsolved problems, you know.
If only there were a giant fission fusion reactor we could all take almost limitless energy from.
Can you name a few of those things that are as efficient as they can be made, all in a market that still fails to price in the damage to the environment?
Food, and clothing are not among them, I’m afraid. Healthcare, education and happiness don’t take too much power.
Or you could find another lifestyle, e.g. one of private sufficiency and public luxury.
For that, you would need to eliminate the rich people (and the powerful). The gentlest way of doing that is taking away their money so they’re no longer rich (or powerful), and put all the money to use for everyone.
There once was a guy who had a similar idea, wrote a large book about all that, I forget his name…
I assume you meant “fusion” in that second sentence.
The idea that we would run out of nuclear fuel anytime soon is pretty absurd too. We could power the entire world with nuclear fission for tens of thousands of years with the available Uranium deposits that we know about today. Much longer if got serious about it and built breeder reactors for the waste. Speaking of waste, the disposal issues are pretty much entirely political at this point. The technology is well understood. The biggest issue is just that carbon based fuels are too cheap currently because they don’t account for the cleanup costs of removing the excess carbon from the atmosphere built in.
I think that’s a carefully constructed trap. I suspect that the current “Classical Liberals” are cherry-picking exactly which liberals and liberal ideas they use and ignoring all the ones off message. (Similar to how religious fundamentalists go back to the source material, scrape off all the assumptions and interpretations from over the centuries — and then load on a pile of their own assumptions and interpretations.)
Teller is the best mind in magic today. Period. The man is brilliant. And Penn Jillette is a consummate showman, and not so bad at magic himself. When they stay in their lanes as entertainers, they’re great. Most of Bullshit was enjoyable, especially when they got to tear apart someone like Frank Luntz. It’s just examples like the couple you mentioned that grated. I haven’t heard much of Teller’s Libertarian views; he seems to be the more reasonable one. But I listened to Penn’s podcast for a while, before a combination of weight-loss guru nigh-religiosity and constant Gary Johnson endorsement put me off completely.
Unsolved problems? Sure. Let’s get to solving them. Is there likely to be adverse consequences? Yes. But given the adverse consequences of continuing to burn coal include ‘inability to grow wheat and rice in precisely those places where we need wheat and rice,’ I think this is one of those risks we need to take.
Quantity of fuel? Decades to centuries, depending on the science. Breeder reactors are much more efficient, fuel extraction from seawater makes available nearly-inexhaustible supplies, and thorium-cycle reactors allow the whole thing to be further expanded since there’s a lot more thorium. Ultimately, it’s only buying time until fusion is finally conquered. It’s taking a bit, sure, but I would like to point out that the nations of the Earth have paid less for the multi-year massive ITER product than they have for movies, just in the year 2016. About half as much, in fact. I don’t dare compare it to the research conducted in efficient people-killing.
The Sun (the only truly giant reactor around: fusion, not fission) is nice, and I want as much of it as possible used, but as it stands, it is not producing abundance and this is precisely what we need. This is not counter to solar power: I want all available non-eco-collapse sources of power exploited maximally.
Heating. The Haber-Bosch process.
What on Earth is ‘public luxury?’ And how come it is that much more energy efficient than a normal human life today?
I don’t know about such a book. I’ve read a rather large book some old bearded guy wrote about seizing the means of production and some other books by another bearded chap about mutual aid and conquering bread. I’ve ever read some stuff by a non-bearded but otherwise excellent chap regarding the ecology of freedom but I’ve never read anything like you describe.
Sounds pretty convincing. How about the fact that we currently can’t extract Uranium from seawater, there’s no Thorium reactors, and there’s not a substantial amount of breeders out there.
I am curious, what is that well-understood technology for disposal of nuclear waste? I’m pretty sure you don’t mean breeders here, right?
It’s true that carbon based fuels are too cheap, however the same can be said about nuclear power. I heard that Uranium mining is not so great for the environment either, and both cost of disposal of nuclear waste and costs of nuclear disasters are currently not factored into the price of the power, but carried by the taxpayer.
Other than that, I’m sure nuclear power is pretty cool, after all it helped Belgium light their motorways at night.
I caught a few episodes of Penn’s podcast when Atlas Shrugged was still in development. Penn was among the Ayn Rand fanboys who were squeeing with delight at the prospect of a big-budget Hollywood adaptation that promised to feature an A-list cast like Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt.
I wonder what his reaction was to the actual movie that resulted.
I mean burying it in impermeable rock in sealed vessels in a seismically stable region. The issues with that approach are entirely political.
The issues with mining are the issues that you have with every type of mine. However with Nuclear you need orders of magnitude less material mined up to support the industry, so you’re already coming out way ahead compared to fossil fuel sources. It’s like people who complain that even electric cars need oil for the bearings, so we might as well just burn gas.
Currently the costs of disposal are being paid by the nuclear power companies, because it is being stored on site at the plants while congressmen endlessly argue over who loses a tiny bit of their backyard.
