Comment by erikpukinskis
1 year ago
There’s nothing fundamentally destructive about climate change. It’s the pace and scale of climate change which is potentially catastrophic.
Ecosystems experience “disturbances” all the time. Trees fall. Animals dig up plant beds. Extreme fire and ice kill flora and fauna. These “disturbances” aren’t truly often destructive though: they encourage succession and biodiversity. Seed banks and migration allow new life to be expressed and fill the disturbance.
The problem is when disturbances are coming so fast and on such a wide scale that migration can’t keep up or the seed bank is destroyed. In such a situation, biodiversity and overall living mass can nosedive. You end up with a desert which will take millions of years to come back to life.
In the power plant example, the heat “pollution” likely killed off or drove off some species within an area. But it was isolated enough that surrounding ecologies and latent genes could fill the hole, and in fact drive succession and biodiversity further forward than it had been. That’s fine and good, and not true “pollution” in my mind. Or at least not the bad kind.
“The planet is fine. The people are fucked.”
Environmentalism will only matter once it’s not so profitable to ignore.
Is it good that this plant is dumping a bunch of heat into the ocean? Probably not, but it made some people’s lives better for some number of years. Hopefully the long term consequences don’t make some large number of people’s lives much worse for a longer number of years.
Environmentalism is a very good business for a lot of high class people right now.
Oh, is "environmentalism" how the Rockefellers became rich?
Destruction of the environment is the core business of all the super rich, to counter your point. Obtaining "alpha" or maximizing profit by externalizing pollution costs was and still is essential to manufacturing and resource extraction.
If you statement were true, there would have always been a carbon tax and we would have had wind power 70 years ago, battery and solar technologies would have been developed 30-40 years sooner.
Climate change is a legit issue.
There are some people that will manage to profit from the addressing of it. Others will profit from ignoring the issue or even outright refusing to admit it's an issue at all.
I know which side I'd rather be on.
This feels very cynical.
Grifters taking advantage of a problem for personal gain doesn't mean that the problem doesn't need to be addressed, does it?