There's a deeper and equally sincere and deep-seated belief behind said beliefs:
It's objectively true that increasing the cost of energy amounts to something like a regressive tax: it will harm the poor and the middle class considerably more than it will harm the wealthy. Among causes for our current middle class woes, some have cited the peaking of domestic conventional oil in the 1970s and the general end of extremely cheap energy around that era.
The very existence of a middle class and a diamond-shaped social order is probably in part an artifact of cheap and available energy. People do understand this. They understand that an end to cheap energy will return themselves and their children to serfdom. (Unless they happen to be members of the tiny <1% financial elite that would probably become the new nobility.)
What people don't believe is that renewable energy can provide cheap energy. They fear a world powered by renewable energy might be one resembling The Hunger Games: tiny stratospherically rich technological enclaves served vast impoverished precincts of serfs.
Meanwhile they're also either against nuclear outright, or are at the very least suspicious of it.
So if the choice is between fossil fuels and a return to abject poverty, people choose fossil fuels. I'm not sure they're really ignoring climate change-- rather they're making a cost/benefit analysis to the effect that climate change is better than a return to feudal serfdom.
They're probably right. It is demonstrably better to reign in hell than to serve in heaven. Poverty is worse than any natural disaster I'm aware of; I'll take a few million dollars and a hurricane every week over poverty and blue skies.
This also explains why the "developing" world has shown no interest in moving on carbon reduction. Cheap available energy is lifting billions out of poverty. Their response is pretty much "screw you, we're poor." For them to choose any different would be an act of huge-scale unilateral self-sacrifice.
The burden is on advocates of renewable energy to show that it can provide cheap, abundant energy sufficient to sustain a diamond-shaped social order. If it can't, it is politically dead and climate change is a foregone conclusion. The burden is also on nuclear advocates to show that they can engineer reactors that cannot fail like Fukushima or Chernobyl. (I mean cannot fail, not "low probability of failure," since anyone who understand entry-level stats knows that small probabilities become large when you scale things up. Think about what hard drive and RAM failures look like at data center scales for example.) Neither of these milestones has been reached.
Renewable energy remains a favorite political option among the inhabitants of uber-rich cities that resemble The Capital in The Hunger Games, like San Francisco. It's viewed as a luxury feel-good toy for rich people. Meanwhile the nuclear industry continues to iterate on the fundamentally flawed 1950s submarine reactor design instead of rethinking the problem from first principles and producing something truly engineered for civilian power production. IMHO the situation is worse in the nuclear domain... nobody is even trying, and the response to incidents like Fukushima is to double down on PR instead of doubling down on engineering.
Over time I've become more and more skeptical of the "people are stupid" answer to things like this. The reality is that people are not as stupid as you think they are. They just might be viewing things very differently or conceptualizing the problem from the perspective of different needs and goals.
In AI terminology they have a different goal function. Understand their goal function(s) and you understand their choices.
Another bugaboo in places like Louisiana is religious fundamentalism and opposition to evolution, etc. I've started to doubt "people are stupid" there as well. In that culture, the church is the center of social life. So you're basically asking people to choose between friendship, camaraderie, and the moral basis of cooperation and some esoteric scientific theory that does nothing to help them in their daily lives. Which would you choose? Insulting people and calling them idiots doesn't accomplish anything except to polarize them and reinforce the underlying social pathologies responsible for the problem. Poverty might also have some explanatory power here as well. Social cohesion -- here provided by the church -- is more of a necessity if you are poor than if you are rich. The poor do not have the luxury of choosing a certain amount of social alienation in order to be right about scientific precepts.
"People are stupid" is one of the great intellectually lazy answers of our times. Dig deeper.
Amen! Thank you for the powerful comment, humanizing and empathizing with these people who are in a tough place (and still collectively making poor long-term decisions but without any easy solution anyway).
Energy cost is regressive. In theory, that can be fixed by allocating each household a budget of X units worth of energy at a low or no cost (or an equivalent in cash), and charging much more for excessive use by those who consume more
I'm skeptical given the direct physical link between energy and wealth.
But it's also true that this link decouples at a certain level of energy consumption. Thankfully so... But it hasn't been shown that this minimum level can be achieved economically and safely at scale without fossil fuels.
It's objectively true that increasing the cost of energy amounts to something like a regressive tax: it will harm the poor and the middle class considerably more than it will harm the wealthy. Among causes for our current middle class woes, some have cited the peaking of domestic conventional oil in the 1970s and the general end of extremely cheap energy around that era.
The very existence of a middle class and a diamond-shaped social order is probably in part an artifact of cheap and available energy. People do understand this. They understand that an end to cheap energy will return themselves and their children to serfdom. (Unless they happen to be members of the tiny <1% financial elite that would probably become the new nobility.)
What people don't believe is that renewable energy can provide cheap energy. They fear a world powered by renewable energy might be one resembling The Hunger Games: tiny stratospherically rich technological enclaves served vast impoverished precincts of serfs.
Meanwhile they're also either against nuclear outright, or are at the very least suspicious of it.
So if the choice is between fossil fuels and a return to abject poverty, people choose fossil fuels. I'm not sure they're really ignoring climate change-- rather they're making a cost/benefit analysis to the effect that climate change is better than a return to feudal serfdom.
They're probably right. It is demonstrably better to reign in hell than to serve in heaven. Poverty is worse than any natural disaster I'm aware of; I'll take a few million dollars and a hurricane every week over poverty and blue skies.
This also explains why the "developing" world has shown no interest in moving on carbon reduction. Cheap available energy is lifting billions out of poverty. Their response is pretty much "screw you, we're poor." For them to choose any different would be an act of huge-scale unilateral self-sacrifice.
The burden is on advocates of renewable energy to show that it can provide cheap, abundant energy sufficient to sustain a diamond-shaped social order. If it can't, it is politically dead and climate change is a foregone conclusion. The burden is also on nuclear advocates to show that they can engineer reactors that cannot fail like Fukushima or Chernobyl. (I mean cannot fail, not "low probability of failure," since anyone who understand entry-level stats knows that small probabilities become large when you scale things up. Think about what hard drive and RAM failures look like at data center scales for example.) Neither of these milestones has been reached.
Renewable energy remains a favorite political option among the inhabitants of uber-rich cities that resemble The Capital in The Hunger Games, like San Francisco. It's viewed as a luxury feel-good toy for rich people. Meanwhile the nuclear industry continues to iterate on the fundamentally flawed 1950s submarine reactor design instead of rethinking the problem from first principles and producing something truly engineered for civilian power production. IMHO the situation is worse in the nuclear domain... nobody is even trying, and the response to incidents like Fukushima is to double down on PR instead of doubling down on engineering.
Over time I've become more and more skeptical of the "people are stupid" answer to things like this. The reality is that people are not as stupid as you think they are. They just might be viewing things very differently or conceptualizing the problem from the perspective of different needs and goals.
In AI terminology they have a different goal function. Understand their goal function(s) and you understand their choices.
Another bugaboo in places like Louisiana is religious fundamentalism and opposition to evolution, etc. I've started to doubt "people are stupid" there as well. In that culture, the church is the center of social life. So you're basically asking people to choose between friendship, camaraderie, and the moral basis of cooperation and some esoteric scientific theory that does nothing to help them in their daily lives. Which would you choose? Insulting people and calling them idiots doesn't accomplish anything except to polarize them and reinforce the underlying social pathologies responsible for the problem. Poverty might also have some explanatory power here as well. Social cohesion -- here provided by the church -- is more of a necessity if you are poor than if you are rich. The poor do not have the luxury of choosing a certain amount of social alienation in order to be right about scientific precepts.
"People are stupid" is one of the great intellectually lazy answers of our times. Dig deeper.