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by pydry
982 days ago
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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. |
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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