Simply put, the unfortunate reality is that the goals of “Limit carbon emissions” and “Be nice to trees and don’t build anything” are mutually incompatible.
Sorry to come back to this so many months after it was published, but I've just realised something.
They aren't fundamentally incompatible; there is a third alternative: "become a lot …
Simply put, the unfortunate reality is that the goals of “Limit carbon emissions” and “Be nice to trees and don’t build anything” are mutually incompatible.
Sorry to come back to this so many months after it was published, but I've just realised something.
They aren't fundamentally incompatible; there is a third alternative: "become a lot poorer".
If we abolished cars and don't enhance public transport, then people just can't travel as much. If agriculture can't use tractors or fertiliser or pesticides, then it will need far more people, which is good because that will give all the people who can't commute to their jobs any more something to do - move to a village and start working on the farms.
If we get rid of fossil fuel power and we don't cover land with solar panels or wind farms, then we just have less electricity. Which means we are much poorer.
There are definitely a fraction of people within the Green movement (green haters tend to call them "crusties") who have very little carbon emissions but get there by just being poor and giving up many of the amenities of modern society and using a lot less energy.
I don't think we can understand how they come to believe what they believe without an appreciation of both the left-coded ("crusties") and right-coded (old-style conservationists; the sort of person with an AGA and no central heating) versions of this viewpoint.
Simply put, the unfortunate reality is that the goals of “Limit carbon emissions” and “Be nice to trees and don’t build anything” are mutually incompatible.
Sorry to come back to this so many months after it was published, but I've just realised something.
They aren't fundamentally incompatible; there is a third alternative: "become a lot poorer".
If we abolished cars and don't enhance public transport, then people just can't travel as much. If agriculture can't use tractors or fertiliser or pesticides, then it will need far more people, which is good because that will give all the people who can't commute to their jobs any more something to do - move to a village and start working on the farms.
If we get rid of fossil fuel power and we don't cover land with solar panels or wind farms, then we just have less electricity. Which means we are much poorer.
There are definitely a fraction of people within the Green movement (green haters tend to call them "crusties") who have very little carbon emissions but get there by just being poor and giving up many of the amenities of modern society and using a lot less energy.
I don't think we can understand how they come to believe what they believe without an appreciation of both the left-coded ("crusties") and right-coded (old-style conservationists; the sort of person with an AGA and no central heating) versions of this viewpoint.