[lbriner]

My guess is that it is 2 things.

Firstly, as stated by others, accepting these things requires us to accept that our lifestyles are not sustainable, even if we can afford them financially, so we make excuses.

Secondly, I think there probably is an amount of ego involved where the armchair experts honestly think that they have thought of something that "the politicians" or the "experts" have missed. You see people on forums/TV saying with no irony or doubt that "Electric cars are not environmentally friendly because of Lithium batteries", or whatever, without actually having any figures to back this up.

I agree that doing something, even if not perfect, is better than nothing but I did a Penn and Teller show where their logic was "do nothing now because it is expensive. Wait until we have better/cheaper technology and do it later". Again, seems illogical but people do believe that.

[newyankee]

The cheap and better technology only happens because people invest and buy the expensive and novel technology upfront. If Tesla Roadster and Model S didn't have a market, getting a model 3 out would've been quite difficult.

It is more like a side effect of equally treating all voices as important and not giving weight to peer review scientific literature or critically analyzing the talking points.

[pydry]

Those armchair experts are typically being fed by carbon lobby or pro nuclear propaganda.

The propaganda is motivated by profit (carbon lobby, nuclear lobby) and the demands of the military (the nuclear-military industrial complex needs a civilian nuclear-industrial ecosystem to keep a lid on costs).

The propaganda tries to tap into that innate ego you referenced though. "Well, actually, the sun doesn't shine at night", "what do we do when the sun isn't shining and the wind isn't blowing? Not use power?", "but geography for pumped storage is very rare isn't it?", "wind farms are very bad for birds!", "nuclear power may be expensive but it's very stable!", "enough batteries to cover solar/wind would be prohibitively expensive", "germany is trying to decarbonize completely the wrong way it's so stupid!" etc. All of these things are in line with the above money flows, are quite wrong, but plausible. They are carefully positioned as being the smart person's take on a complex issue.

There are 30-40 regular talking points, many of which appear regularly on hacker news. I think I've had to post the same academic study about how pumped storage geography is actually very common at least 15 times, for instance. You don't get such specific mass misconceptions on such a large scale without some level of money behind the message. It typically filters through from lobby group -> mass media -> average citizen -> hacker news comments.

[fsflover]

> pro nuclear propaganda

Here are a couple of good pieces of such propaganda for you:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26673987

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29278996

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26603464