As someone working in the environment sector, posts like that from Scott drive me up the fucking wall.

He chooses to study 6 global environmental topics that were simplified to be explained to American school students and proclaims that they were hugely exaggerated and people were alarmists! 

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The environment is the one of the areas where free market consistently fails to provide solutions and regulations have proved successful in protecting and improving it. We’ve made huge steps trying to safeguard and improve surface and groundwater quality, air quality, pesticides and nitrates concentration in soil, wetlands and forests, waste and wastewater disposal methods through regulations. It is a constant struggle fro environmentalists all over the world and Scott Galaxy-brained claims that the real problem is that some of the environmental issues might be exaggerated and not be really significant after all!

Really Scott?

Yes maybe we should do nothing about global warming because people might be exaggerating.

Also, there are many environmental journals out there but Scott chooses to cite in his post about environmental issues, a global warming denier meteorologist blogger and an econ blogger.

Also also there are so many articles about the increased extinction rates that you can find online with a simple Google search but Scott cannot find anything apparently. Also he doesn’t understand habitat biodiversity so he doesn’t care if we lose like 1000 insects, who cares?

Wow, Scott sure did a good job debunking those fifth grade posters. I guess no one has to worry about overconsumption of resources or plastic waste anymore.

What happened? People discovered fracking and other paradigm-shifting techniques to extract oil from shale, which opened up vast new previously-inaccessible oil fields. The peak oil predictors might call this unfair – they calculated correctly given the technology they knew about – but the whole argument of the people who say we don’t have to worry about peak resource (sometimes called “cornucopians”) is that technology will advance fast enough to satisfy our resource needs. In this case they were right.

Ha, those silly evnironmentalists, worried about peak oil, when it turns out companies will just keep finding dirtier and dirtier extractive technologies to drag the last dregs of oil out while the world burns to a crisp. I bet they have egg on their face!

I grew up in the 90s, which meant watching movies about plucky children fighting Pollution Demons. Sometimes teachers would show them to us in class. None of us found that strange.

You were that prude?

But it turns out capitalism works: if there’s a shortage of landfills, that incentivizes people to create new landfills.

If you’re going to give capitalism credit for solving the landfill problem, you should probably mention how capitalism has effected every other problem on your list.

What happened to that? I don’t mean the Pollution Demons: they’re still around, I think one of them runs Trump’s EPA now. What happened to everything else?

So, the fact that what you consider an actual Pollution Demon runs EPA isn’t a concern?

If you went back in time, turned off our Pollution Demon movie, and asked us to predict what would come of the environment twenty-five years, later, in 2018, I think we would imagine one of two scenarios. In the first, the world had become a renewable ecotopia where every child was taught to live in harmony with nature. In the second, we had failed in our struggle, the skies were grey, the rivers were brown, wild animals were a distant memory – but at least a few plucky children would still be telling us it wasn’t too late, that we could start the tough job of cleaning up after ourselves and changing paths to that other option.

I mean, correct me if I’m wrong, but aren’t we pretty much in that second scenario???

Just to prove I’m not imagining all this:

This is the volume of Google searches for “rainforests” over time. It goes up each year when school starts, and crashes again for summer vacation. But on average, there are only about 18% as many rainforest-related searches today as in 2004.

I do not think that image proves as much as he thinks it does.

Maybe the most typical image of 90s environmentalism is men in bulldozers clear-cutting a rainforest, while tapirs and tree sloths gently weep. Or maybe it was the declining-rainforest-coverage-over-time-maps. I feel like about one in every three posters I saw as a child looked something like this: I thought surely nothing could be easier than digging up a few of them and seeing whether their 2020 predictions were right. But I can’t find them anywhere. According to the Internet, there is no such thing as 90s-era maps showing declining rainforest coverage over time. Can anyone else locate these?

I dunno man, maybe the famed unreliability of human memory applies to your foundational political beliefs.

Also, with apologies to all the undiscovered species, if they’re so tiny and uncommon as to never get discovered, it doesn’t seem like their extinction is going to change very much. Five known species going extinct per year may sound like a lot if you’re thinking it’s something like “rhinos, pandas, whales, spotted owls, and leopards”. But realistically there are 385 species of shrews. We could spend our entire yearly extinction budget on shrews for the next sixty years and still have more than enough kinds of shrews left to satisfy basically anybody.

Take that you alarmist ecologists, fuck shrews

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I don’t think there was any large-scale attempt to conserve or recycle chromium/tungsten/whatever that led to its current abundance. I think this was just a victory for resource extraction technology.

https://www.lamprecycling.com/articles/california-fluorescent-lamp-recycling-regulations.aspx

As of 2006, lightbulbs are considered hazardous waste by the State of California. There are companies such as TerraCycle and SteriCycle that handle recycling of batteries and lightbulbs. It’s hard to keep consumers from disposing of light bulbs. However, big retailers can be fined if they don’t dispose of bulbs properly.

Traditional incandescent light bulbs use tungsten for filament. They have to. Tungsten has a high melting point (~6000 F) and incandescent light bulbs work by getting really stinking hot. But that also means they’re bad at generating light. Heat is energy loss.

https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/opinion/the-conversation/sd-california-phases-out-incandescent-light-bulb-starting-jan-1-2018-20171221-htmlstory.html

I can’t find figures (so I might be wrong), but I’d wager that disposable bulbs being thrown away accounted for a significant amount of tungsten use. High volume of them being bought and if we’re being honest, hardly anyone disposes of bulbs properly.

I can’t speak for chromeium (I’m sure there’s other uses for it aside from shiny motorcycles and browsing the internet), but for tungsten I’d say it was due to less consumption through better alternatives than from increased extraction.

when I was a kid, I was misled to believe environmental issues were predicated on individual consumption choices. now the discussion has moved on to seeing them as primarily systemic consequences of the capitalist mode of production, with all this talk of 100 companies responsible for 70% of emissions. it’s like the environmentalism I grew up with is now as outdated as two-hundred-year old border disputes. what happened?

If you could convert stupid into power, we’d solve the energy crisis with this post alone.

In what universe is environmentalism more alarmist than, say, AI risk?

edit: meant more, wrote less

What is that comment section:

That is, if global warming/climate change is as bad as those sounding the alarm bells now say it is, there should be no way the average person can consider it “uninteresting,” because the results should be obvious and catastrophic. As it is, the weather seems no different, on average, now, than it was when I was a kid, nor, reportedly, when my parents were children, meaning that, even if it is a problem, it can’t be as serious as commonly claimed, because everyone in my generation, much less my parents’ generation, should be saying “holy shit, the weather’s so different now from when I was a child,” which they are not (rather, they point to a recent bad hurricane and I point them to a bad hurricane from 100 years ago).

I thought it was advertised that the blog’s comments were better than the subreddit’s comments?

I like how the proof of the decline of environmentalism by percentage of internet searches for “rainforest,” is actually an artifact of the rise in-home internet access among adults.

As all of the predictions and models have been shown to be vastly overstated (hence the name change from Global Warming to Climate Change), most folks have generally lost interest in this “crisis”.

Wow, they really haven’t talked to any environmentalists since the 90’s.

people still talk about environmentalism all the time. it’s like, the the big overriding issue that subsumes all others and is lurking at the back of every conversation. i want to know what universe this guy is living in where you basically never hear about the environment any more

i guess all his mates spend all their time talking about the very real problem of AI risk, which obviously has to take precedence over some fucking hippie bullshit like global warming