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by silvestrov 38 days ago
A lot of boomers thinks windmills are against the natural order and will end the world.

Also solar parks are just the most ugly thing in the world. They must be banned.

3 comments

My experience is that some people (of all generations) react really strongly against anything that involves birth and family.

IVF, gamete donation, surrogacy, gay families, various experiments with human embryos or artificial wombs, much or all of this is banned in many countries of the world mostly due to the "ick" factor. The smarter opponents tend to decorate their objections in the "we must be very, very careful" cloak, but if you dig deeper, you will find that it is indeed just a cloak in many cases and that the underlying root cause is "ick, this is against nature", and "really careful" means "erect impossibly high barriers by law".

This even isn't subject to polarization and seems to be shared across the political board.

Could it be all the conservative propaganda that gets people prejudiced against things they're ignorant about and aren't impacted by?
IDK, but I have read a lot of objections from feminists as well.

Where I live, the religious population is under 10 per cent, but complete atheists will argue like this as well.

I suspect the "ick" factor is simply inherent here. Kids provoke instinctive protective/emotional reactions in a way that other phenomena don't.

For example, it is quite obvious that Trump faces a lot more popular backlash due to his suspected connections with Epstein than over his actual threats to Denmark/Greenland and war with Iran.

Non-religious people are also susceptible to the FUD about supposedly or genuinely new things. Whatever innate ick there clearly is, it gets co-opted to demonize much wider ranges of things, and conversely can be suppressed like in the Epstein's circle's case. I don't find it convincing that the legislators passing reactionary prohibitions are just driven by a natural ick rather than particular agenda.
Windmills were invented more than a thousand years ago though
A lot of younger people think that building of solar power and wind power in the past years caused decrease of global CO2 emissions. In reality, global CO2 emissions have been increasing each year.

https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions

A lot of people think closing the blinds will keep their houses cooler in the summer. In reality, their houses get warmer in the summer.
The per region and per capita graphs do tell something you might want to consider.
Per region CO2 emissions don't matter, CO2 is a largely non-reactive gas, which is rapidly mixed throughout the entire troposphere in less than a year.

https://www.metlink.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/FAQ6_2.pd...

It's the total CO2 amount in atmosphere that determines radiative forcing.

The IPCC summarized the current scientific consensus about radiative forcing changes as follows: "Human-caused radiative forcing of 2.72 W/m2 in 2019 relative to 1750 has warmed the climate system. This warming is mainly due to increased GHG concentrations, partly reduced by cooling due to increased aerosol concentrations"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiative_forcing

Regional emissions do matter for the conclusions you draw.

All high-income countries already trend down in emissions.

Global emissions are rising because poorer countries that were basically almost "no emission"/capita in the past are still catching up (but that catch-up is less steep than in the past because green energy is available from the get-go).

Conclusions would be: Emission reductions in rich countries need to be aaccelerated, and helping poor countries peak at a lower level would probably be prudent (but good luck selling such policies to alt-right voters).

"Renewable are not helping" is not a sensible conclusion.

We can compare many metrics: CO₂ emissions per capita for different regions, cumulative CO₂ emissions, share of global cumulative CO₂ emissions.

https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions

Conclusions would be: it's not that renewables are not helping, it's renewables are not helping enough. We need global emissions tax. The European Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) is a step in the right direction, but still a very small step because it covers only production of few carbon-intensive goods imported to Europe.

Imagine how much more they would have increased if it weren’t for all the solar and wind capacity.
To be fair, a lot of younger people also think that human extinction by climate change is a significant threat (it is not), while a lot of older people believe that a nuclear war could eradicate our species (also no).