"I'm not a big fan of capitalism myself, and I worry about nature being destroyed by humans," she said, driving at 50mph through a 7km tunnel connecting two isolated villages at the edge of the world. The car was warm and comfortable, the clothes on her back nice and made industrially and inexpensively by humans she doesn't know far, far away from here.
Not doxxing my friend here, or the very ignorant—and performatively contradictory—take she gives voice to here, I find it unbelievably common for regular people to adopt this sort of mindset. Pay lip service to some noisy/intellectually hygiene-type idea while ignoring it completely in practice.
To most people in the intelligentsia (#829287), this signals that we're "not doing enough" and we gotta "further force our obviously-correct ideas onto the public."
To me, it's the reverse: it just means the words don't really matter much slash mean as much as you think they do.
Roger Pielke Jr.'s iron law of climate policy holds: Whenever policies for economic growth run up against emissions reductions, economic growth will win out.
There's a Mises Institute article I wrote last year that I keep coming back to, in thought and passing moreso than directly quoting it "Climate Worries Are Non-Credible, Luxury Beliefs That Harm Civilization Itself."
I live in a small village at the edge of lands surrounded by very harsh nature. Those who occupied these valleys in ages past lived ruthlessly dangerous lives, where starvation was a constant worry, the sea just as often nurtured as it took away, and the winters were long and perilous. Nowadays, while I’m walking the desolate mountains or admiring the fierce storms from inside my nice, sheltered existence, echoing in my head is Thomas Hobbes’s descriptions of man’s precivilizational life: “Solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”
In the 2020s, we live fairly comfortable lives here, my fellow villagers and I. Our hearths are warm, our command over economic goods excellent. We live long, safe lives, where nobody starves and where almost nobody perishes in outbursts of nature’s wrath. We use machines—constructed far, far away using materials we don’t have, that run on fossil fuels that these lands don’t contain—to move away the snow that frequently and predictably lands on our doorsteps and otherwise would have made our roads impassable and our houses prisons. We use different machines—constructed far, far away using materials we don’t have, that run on fossil fuels that these lands don’t contain—to get ourselves out of our valley and transport goods and services back, including exotic fruits and vegetables that never grow here (certainly not in winter!).
I find actions much more important than words; having been schooled in Austrian economics, I find the reality of what a person does matter critically whereas the words that live on top of our conscious mind (Jonathan Haidt-style) be ephemeral and mostly irrelevant.
That's why I don't put much stock in the green revolutions and anti-fossil fuel/modern world crusades. They are—as the title of that Mises article suggests—not credible.
Look, you're driving a car nobody except under global capitalism could construct. You have, globally speaking, a top-10% income looking after some kids at a cushy ~7 hours a day. You can order, per John Maynard Keynes, absolutely anything you like from the comfort of your bed. You're not subject to starvation, ever; the elements can only harm you insofar as you voluntarily venture out in them—and the houses you can hunker down inside are built with materials and powered by energy (-ish) that don't stem from here.
All of this can only be assembled and organized under humanity's most ingenuous discovery ever: price system, profit motives, a global division of labor (#793537).
In short, the essence of that very capitalism you say you don't like.
So I don't worry much about what the weather does, or what people who say they really care about the weather say or do. Their beliefs and worries, anxiety and hysterics are not credible. Please go away.