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Comment by awongh | Hacker News Reader

> The love for diesel engines in many European countries was always confusing to me.

And turns out the whole thing was a lie. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diesel_emissions_scandal

It's unfortunate that so much rhetoric around environmentalism is based on faulty claims. It's starting to make me sceptical of environmental claims in general.

The latest one is AI data center water use- the extreme numbers like 5 liters of water per ChatGPT image just makes me feel sad that we can't have a civil discussion based on the facts. Everything is so polarized.

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I'm confused by your comment.

You link an article that talks about how manufacturers lied on their emission figures.

But later you seem to imply that the actual lie was about how bad emissions are for humans/environment?

My point was that misinformation makes it impossible or nearly impossible to evaluate "is this environmental or not".

Best effort is not enough to guarantee a good outcome- for example, this car is diesel and has lower emissions, therefore I will buy it and I will be reducing my own emissions turns out to not be true all the time.

Just like congestion pricing might or might not actually affect pollution in the way that it's claimed. The obvious point being that the city loves the new revenue, no matter what the level of impact it actually has.

I'm actually in favor of congestion pricing in principle (whether or not pm2.5 is reduced or not). I'm just sad that often times it's impossible to figure out what's true.

>It's starting to make me sceptical of environmental claims in general.

What does that even mean?

Honestly whatever it means it sounds like you would be the kind of person that would fall for the firehose of falsehood rather than look for the truth behind the actual claims.

For 99.9% of issues, we rely on trust to make up our minds. We assume people are mostly not lying. If a group of people are found to lie, then yes, maybe “look for the truth behind the actual claims” is worth it, but more likely shooting them out of the discourse and into the metaphorical sun is the right response. If you walk around lying, you don’t get to complain that people aren’t doing research on your claims.

Sure, but how does that relate to environmentalists? The people lying were the car industry, but somehow the OP questions environmentalism. Why are they not questioning the car industry?

This is something I see a lot in science skepticism.

Someone incorrectly conveys a simple science concept, and people blame the scientist, not the communicator.

Like, News says "New revolutionary battery" and people roll their eyes and say "Oh but this will never make it to prod" and decide that scientists are liars and conveniently ignore that lithium battery density has like doubled over the past 20 years or so.

The person who was wrong was the unaware journalist taking a PR person's claims at face value, and having no context to smell test such a claim, and having no time or interest to treat the claim with skepticism anyway because "Batteries slightly improve" never sold newspapers.

But they blame science!

>We assume people are mostly not lying

Why? There are massive incentives for people to lie in a great many cases, especially where profits exist. Car manufactures, as we know, gladly lie and fake evidence. Even when there are massive fines involved, the fines are generally less than what they make in profit from the lies.

What's even better is you can play both sides to confuse the issue. Create 3rd party groups on the other side of your claims and have them make up the stupidest claims "Just looking at a car will give you cancer". Flood the zone with false information, bullshit asymmetry. Lobby the shit out of politicians so they don't care about the issues, only the money it brings in.

The confused regulars in the middle are so propagandized to they no longer know up from down and billionaires laugh all the way to the bank.

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