Comment by technobabbler | Hacker News Reader

Comment by technobabbler | Hacker News Reader

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Sorry, I was editing my post while you replied, so you didn't see the bottom update.

For what it's worth, I grew up in a polluted city, studied climate science in school, and work in renewables. It's not that I don't think air pollution is a big deal, it's that I don't think the idle car secret police are a good way to deal with air pollution.

CAFE standards? Great. Point-source air pollution tracking and fines, from factories and such? Cool. Renewables-backed electric cars? Great. Cleaner, low-carbon grid mixes? Yes. Divestment from fossil fuels? Cool. All of these are actually hugely beneficial actions, but they don't require the state to turn citizens into informers against each other for petty everyday actions.

Air pollution is your typical tragedy of the commons situation, borne of the collective actions of millions of people living in an industrialized society and just trying to live their lives. It's not the sort of thing worth putting a bounty on, IMO, at least not at the individual level. At the corporate level it's a different story, cuz that's a cost of doing business and accounting for externalities and such.

All of those are better solutions than criminalizing trivial behavior and fostering a culture of distrust, all for little to no measurable improvement in air quality, just to satiate the political agenda of a politician. It's the difference between cheap political points for low-hanging fruit, vs doing the actual useful and hard work of setting sustainable climate policies that don't regressively hurt the working class while also turning citizens against each other. It's that sort of blindness to the needs of the average person that makes this sort of thing elitist.

I don’t necessarily quibble with your concerns about the right way to achieve the outcomes we all seek. But please don’t paint real concerns about health as “elitist.”

If anything, people who don’t have to worry about these things — who get the privilege to live in suburbs with wide-open spaces, blue skies, and clean air — are the true elites. Being able to live this way is the dream of billions of our underprivileged fellow human beings who grow up in filth and overcrowding.

Sorry, but I have to disagree. It IS elitist, the sort of law that a detached lawmaker would make, with no concern about its impacts on regular people. Again, do we outlaw beef consumption, road trips, flying, older cars, leaving the lights on when nobody's home, more than 2 kids...? All these things contribute to air pollution, but we don't want them to be illegal. Yes, even if it means worsening climate change.

If idling is such a big problem, legislating adaptive technology (auto on/off) is a better solution.

If it is really about the billions of underprivileged humans and animals suffering from climate change, we need mass mobilization on the scale of the Manhattan Project or bigger, across multiple coordinated nations... not hunting down people who idle their cars more than 2 minutes. It's just the sort of thing that's neither necessary nor sufficient for addressing climate change, yet with a big social cost (distrust), which makes the working class hate environmentalists even more. It is the exact kind of elitist regulation popular in the 90s and early 2000s that caused a huge cultural backlash and created the climate divide we see now. It's not just regressive but counterproductive.

Unfortunately I think you are laboring under a false premise, namely, that folks in the U.S. are "regular people." With our (relatively) clean air and water, room to spread out, big houses, big vehicles, etc., we are all elites compared to the majority of people in the rest of the world. Compare against most of the world who get by on far less than we do: they don't have huge vehicles and homes; they don't eat much beef; etc.

So it's not about elites vs. "regular people" here, it's about middle-class elites vs. other middle-class elites fighting over whether Johnny gets to buy and use the toys his middle-class income gives him the privilege to play with, and what kind of sacrifices we will make for the greater good. It's not regulation that is causing a cultural backlash: it's intentional and insidious cultural warmongering by a largely silent but even-more-insidious class of elites (the uber-wealthy) who fund think tanks, hire armies of lobbyists to press Congress, and discover and fund media personalities such as Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity to pit Americans against one another and keep them distracted away from the even bigger issues we face. Democratic and existential crises are just collateral damage to the interests of these people.

This war of the narratives traces its roots to the 1960s, where the country was beginning to come to grips with racism (Civil Rights Act) and the Vietnam War. White middle-class and Greatest-Generation fear of hippies, Blacks, homosexuals, atheists, and others was easy for politicians and monied interests to leverage. Soon, think tanks and lobbyists started pressing Congress (along with the backing of Reagan, who was propelled to victory by the Moral Majority who brought politics into church) to deregulate the airwaves, leading to even more divisiveness in the media. Communication consultants like Frank Luntz (author of the so-called "death tax") were hired to sharpen the divide.

And Americans are sadly and unwittingly falling for this manipulation, hook, line, and sinker. Now it's the freaking Baby Boomers (who were part of the '60s counterculture and became the very thing they fought against) who are ensnared in it, and I fear my fellow Gen-Xers are being also being led into this trap.

I, for one, refuse to accept that any way other than massive world coordination is a pointless exercise. Major change is often the aggregate of small changes anyway. And being willing to make sacrifices in the name of health before others do (especially others who can less afford to make such changes) is what admirable and moral leaders do.

An observation: Given the choice between two leaders, one who calls people evil and selfish, and another who (however cynically) defends their behavior and shares in their denialism, the latter is going to have way more followers. It's an unfortunate aspect of our primate psychology and individualistic culture.

Yes, it's true that many of the flames of our culture wars are fanned by the elites on purpose. Divide and conquer. But every accusation has some seed of truth in it, and the recent environmental movement was all too good at providing easy fodder for criticism.

I think the moral purity route is a failure of both strategy and empathy. Demonizing your opponents doesn't get them to listen to you at all, it just puts them on the defensive and they'll look for any excuse to dismiss you. That's exactly how it's played out over the last twenty years, and despite all the yelling, despite Greta. We're no closer to climate solutions, but half the country is a lot less persuadable now and more hardened and inoculated against environmental messaging. They might've listened if we asked gently instead.

If your argument is that all Americans are elites, great, you've convinced the environmentalists and the bleeding heart humanitarians. Everyone else just writes you off and goes on their way. It doesn't change anything, it just satisfied some urge for moral self righteousness, and I bet that doesn't last either.

We're all pretty selfish, especially cultures of the European tradition of conquest, hierarchy, and individual power. The sad truth is that you can't really get people to care about the billions of strangers suffering from their lifestyle choices. We're just not built that way. We got here, living in middle class comfort, through violence and exploitation. It's completely immoral and completely human.

Asking for individual behavior change on that scale is a political dead end that does nothing but create enemies. It's tactically unsound and ultimately counterproductive, even if it gives you an illusory moral high ground.

Greta came and went and the world is no better now, and half the country is dismisses her as an angry young woman and never bothers to listen to her message. Meanwhile solar adoption keeps skyrocketing and cars are getting more miles to the gallon. Sometimes softer broad approaches are more successful than demanding individual behavior change. Most humans just aren't moral creatures. They're not evil, they just don't focus their lives on the pursuit of ethics. It's how we evolved; either we can acknowledge that and work with it to make gradual gains, or keep up a self righteous facade and keep making enemies instead of progress. Shrug.

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