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Comment by aalleavitch | Hacker News Reader

How much money do you think is in the "university industry" as opposed to the oil industry? Hint hint: one lives on charitable donations from the other.

Seriously, the idea that environmental activists and professors could ever hold a candle to the resources of an $4.6 trillion industry is laughable.

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I know a thing or two about reef research. I don't know much about oil or university money but I do know reef research and destruction being linked to climate change has seen significant investment by the sugarcane industry. We know that nitrogen fertilizers are killing the reefs by leaching needed chemicals from them. There is certainly money in the other direction, how much is unknown but deflecting environmental damage onto climate change is certainly big business for some industries damaging the environment.

Even if this is the case, addressing the issues caused by CO2 emissions would reveal that there were other sources of environmental damage at work. I just cannot see any incentive in not directly addressing CO2 emissions except to protect the profits of fossil fuel companies. I can't imagine a world where we're more worried about protecting fossil fuel companies because they're being bullied by the big mean sugarcane companies. We should be rooting out all actors looking to benefit from actions with negative externalities.

So for the record I am all for renewable, I run solar down here in the Keys and think everyone who can should. That being said my issue is that, there are real environmental disasters that are getting co-oped that won't be fixed by cap and trade and reduced emissions. Some of these like the reefs are dire and will cause an ecosystem collapse, they need to be addressed properly and not co-opted for an agenda. They literally cannot wait and are not some future prediction, they are rapidly collapsing as we type. The other problem is you get band-wagoner jumping on intentional misinformation to co-opt the catastrophe as a here and now prediction of how dire climate change is when it has negligible to any relation to the environmental damage happening. I am not saying climate change is not real, I am not saying we should not do something about it. I am saying there are agendas on both sides and that needs to be considered as it can have dire consequences in the other direction as is the case with the destruction of reefs around industrialized nations. Which just so happen the be the worlds two largest reefs.

Exactly this. Climate change is used to allow people to pretend they're doing good for the environment, but it's really just green washing our actually environmentally destructive practices, like as mentioned nutrient runoff from agriculture, or the insect apocalypse (and subsequent bird and other animal life / diversity collapsing).

Some people hate to hear it, but it's debatable whether the whole conversation around climate change is beneficial or in fact detrimental to real environmental causes.

Pretty sure tuition and tax payer funds are not in the "charitable donation" category

The university industry is starved for cash, that's why they're such easy prey. So many professors bought and paid for. It's like how Huawei is subsidized because the Chinese government gets the real benefits from backdoors into other countries infrastructure.

So yeah, it makes sense that cash-starved professors sell their soul for money. All the incentives are there.

Who stands to profit from what amounts to a global mandate for austerity? We've got a handful of budding "green" industries, and they've barely gotten off of the ground. They certainly haven't had billions of dollars to splash around for the last 40 years.

When ExxonMobil's internal scientists discovered the potential impact of their industry, though, they covered that shit right up -- and they've got the billions to maintain their posture and pay off as many sympathetic/flexible academics as they can find.

You say all the incentives are there, but where's the actual money coming from?

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