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Comment by tomp | Hacker News Reader

This right here is the biggest issue with "anti-climate-change agenda".

Mainstream climate change activists employ a "motte-and-bailey" technique where the motte is "saving the planet" and bailey is "regression of human civilisation".

The fact is, our civilisation depends on energy and will depend on even more energy if we want to progress further. I don't want to live in smaller places, travel less, eat less (and worse) food and overall enjoy life less. Progress is Africa becoming more like Europe, regression is Europe becoming more like Africa. I want progress.

I don't disagree with the existence or seriousness of (anthropogenic) climate change. I simply disagree with most proposed "solutions". Build nuclear!

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I don't see the rhetoric you are talking about used by mainstream climate change activists; I see reasonable changes:

1) Power most things with electricity instead of fossil fuels.

2) Generate electricity with sustainable technologies like solar, wind, geothermal. (There is division on nuclear power, but many still support that, too).

3) Reduce the amount of power wasted overall. Most people don't need huge trucks. Fewer people don't even need personal vehicles. Very few people are saying "Take away your choice", most people are saying, "stop subsidizing the bad choice, and make the public transport option at least an actual option by fixing the way we build cities".

This also extends to "stop subsidizing rural lifestyles" where people waste energy on driving 20 miles to the grocery store and back and every trip they make, and deliveries, and all of their infrastructure which has a much higher per-capita cost, while cities subsidize them. If people want to live there fine, but make them pay for it, or at least make those costs more transparent.

In other words, subsidize for the public good (environmentally sustainable things) instead of the externalized costs (environmentally disastrous things), and let the market drive consumer choice.

In most cases, really, it comes down to: STOP subsidizing bad behavior and things will probably get a lot better. That is what I think most experts expect.

It's not an extreme position; there are various activists extolling the benefits of an Intermittency Economy that would spring up in society once power companies introduced load-shedding and brownouts when renewable power sources become unavailable unexpectedly.

"For a while, let’s eat a cold dinner here and there. Continuity costs too much. Climate change kills, and it kills vulnerable people first. Intermittency saves lives, and it saves vulnerable people first. Let the pause take its place in continuous climate activism."

https://bostonreview.net/articles/david-mcdermott-hughes-bat... https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2012/may/29/intermit...

It's not really a big deal in the bigger scheme of things; it's just asking people to adjust their lifestyles and habits to take into account the available resources at a given moment against the background of a deadly threat to humanity. It's certainly nothing that a billion or more people in countries like Pakistan, Bangladesh and Lebanon don't already have to deal with on a day-to-day basis.

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