The left denies science as much as anyone, just different science, but it denies enough to avoid facing that it promotes unsustainability.
The left denies “the science” as much as anyone. It attacks the right, calling them “climate deniers” and says “compassionate capitalism” is an oxymoron. But it promotes what it calls “clean,” “green,” and “renewable” energy and “energy transitions” and claims to protect BIPOC and indigenous.
The science and technology are clear, though, that creating electric power from solar, wind, nuclear, or (if it were ever to work) fusion is not clean, green, or renewable. Humans have not yet had an energy transition, if transition means it stopped using an old form. When we start using new ones, we use them and the old ones, not instead of. The left doesn’t want its initiatives to destroy indigenous communities but they do.
It claims individual action doesn’t matter, that personal carbon footprints are a trick concocted by BP and the fossil fuel industry to divert our attention from them to ourselves. They want an enemy so much that they don’t see that they fund the fossil fuel industry and its lobbyists, advertisers, politicians, etc.
It believes we need more energy for life. We don’t. We only need it for a lifestyle of comfort, convenience, and ability extended by pollution and depletion. The left is living that lifestyle but confuses it with life as much as those it props up as its enemies, claiming they are acting out of greed, as if the people it attacks were different types of human.
Through its behavior, the left teaches that we need energy sources and therefore pollution and depletion as much as the people it opposes. It therefore funds the lobbyists, advertisers, politicians, fossil fuel executives, etc that it claims are the problem.
Living sustainably isn’t worse. It’s not a sacrifice. People in the left may think it is since, as far as I know, no major voice of any type on sustainability has tried living sustainably. As long as the left acts as if it is, it is stepping on the gas as much as anyone. As long as it calls polluting, depleting technologies “clean,” “green,” or “renewable,” which include solar, wind, nuclear, fusion, hydro, and others, it is denying science as much as anyone.
The problem isn’t capitalism or free market. It’s that nearly all parts of global culture benefit from polluting and depleting so even people who also suffer from it contribute to it. It’s the lack of an APPLE PIE amendment, which I present in my book Sustainability Simplified.
The people the left says are motivated by greed are no less motivated to alleviate suffering than people in it are. Not one bit.
Why I wrote this post
I wrote this post after Naomi Klein described how someone from the Heartland Institute saw where accepting that humans were causing the climate to change would lead him to see the flaws in his world view so he didn’t accept the science. But Klein does what she accuses him of. She refuses to accept that technologies she calls “clean,” “green,” or “renewable” pollute, deplete, and harm the people she claims to help. She clings to her world view as much as he does.
Ayana Elizabeth Johnson does the same thing. Both promote what will pollute and deplete more, denying otherwise. Klein sees problems with nuclear and geoengineering but understands people acting out of desperation but doesn’t see she is doing it too with the technologies she promotes as 100 percent renewable. Mark Jacobson’s claims are wrong. What she calls a “just transition” isn’t “just” because it will keep hurting people it pollutes and depletes nor a “transition” because it accelerates what it claims to stop.
Humans have never bridged or transitioned from one fuel to another. We have only added using new ones to using old ones. Only stopping using a source is stopping using a source. Using more of another one is not using less of them.
The alternative I believe requires hands-on practical experience to believe, but it’s, second, to stop polluting and depleting, and first to realize that every stop toward stopping polluting and depleting will act by your values and help all find solutions currently invisible because we’ve placed our hopes on technologies whose problems we deny.
A future without any energy sources that pollute or deplete is wonderful, no matter how much the left and right deny it and push the opposite.
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