Mapping out the tribes of climate

Mapping out the tribes of climate(nadia.xyz)

26 points by rossvor 3 years ago | 11 comments

Not a horrible framing of things, although the dominant (and likely best) movement is simple technologism, where emerging battery / ev / solar / wind / geothermal / nuclear / vertical farming / artificial meat / etc disrupt mass swathes of traditional / politically entrenched industries.

That's spread across "max energy" (not really), "climate tech" (kind of dismissive of the results/payout).

What it really shows is that almost all of the cited "tribes" have aspects that are needed. Regulation, incentives, urbanization, centralization, technology, resource use reduction, cultural values, even a bit of neopastoralism (home gardens, crafts, reuse/recycling things for other purposes) is significant.

Doomerism is actually a very useful marketing component, because in the process of people discussion "prepping" and analyzing doom prep scenarios, people are forced to deal with problems in a more concrete and detailed way. It also works on an instinctual fear in all people, in some constructive ways. Doomer prep leads to off-grid products that converge with solar, battery, local food production and sourcing environmental tech.

dkarl 3 years ago | |

Many people who are optimistic about what technology can achieve are eco-globalists, because they believe that the technology will only be developed in response to carefully targeted state-enforced incentives. I think the purest form of "climate tech" is people who believe that the technology will appear regardless of policy. There's even a hard core of libertarian technologists who believe that fossil fuel technology would have naturally been superseded by a superior futuristic technology by now if not for government meddling on behalf of oil companies, though I would guess that is a very small and extreme minority of the "climate tech" tribe.

AtlasBarfed 3 years ago | | |

The LCOE for wind and solar certainly make it inevitable at this point.

I just wonder if there wasn't heavy subsidies for fossil fuel, direct or otherwise (and I mean things like the military budget which exists, above all for oil resource control and securing oil shipping) what battery, solar, and of course wind could be at if they started in the 1950s with aggressive research.

Wind blades are just fiberglass (invented 1932), silicon based solar panels might not be economical without the CPU fab industry, but perovskites and all the other kinds? Could the salt water battery coming online next year been done in 1950s or 1960s tech? Who knows.

Of course some of that is "perfect hindsight". But the notion that oil companies haven't gotten substantial subsidies and meddled in energy policy is not an extreme idea.

alfor 3 years ago | |

Climate change is an arm of the modern leftist religion.

I would like to see more a analysis of all the problems we have, how they rank in urgency and rank solutions with how effective they are.

From what I see we will rapidly transition to solar/wind/battery/ev way before climate become a real problem.

tuatoru 3 years ago | | |

Rank and urgency depend on your value system.

For example, hundreds of thousands die from HIV/AIDS every year, Likewise with the flu. Road accidents kill about 1.3 million annually worldwide. Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease kills more than all of them but heart disease is the top killer.[1]

Are any of these urgent? It seems not.

How about oppression of women and children? Food and water insecurity? They don't appear urgent either, based on the resources allocated to fixing them.

1. 2019 figures: https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/the-top-10-...

AtlasBarfed 3 years ago | | |

And you're a climate expert? You have all the nonlinear dynamics figured out and a good planet wide model?

You know the exact amount of species extinctions that the ecosystem can sustain?

You know the geopolitical dynamics that can help with a billion climate refugees?

You know how to keep phytoplankton generating oxygen in the seas when they acidify, or the temperate rises above where their proteins properly function?

So you got it all figured out?

moloch-hai 3 years ago |

An axis not apparently explored is reality vs. fantasy.

Looking up press about Energy Vault, a fraudulent energy-storage company whose public shares peaked at $2.4B and trade now at $4-600M, it is very hard to find anything published that equates them properly with Theranos. "Analysts" consider them undervalued, and want them to be worth $1B even though they have no product anybody not insane would buy. Apparently "institutional investors" own a big chunk of their shares. (Curiously, everybody seems to agree they have no long-term value.) FWIW, it appears they still have $100M in cash. In principle, they could still buy out a company with a product that actually works.

Similarly for fusion startups. Only one of them (Helion) has any possibility of ever achieving anything practical, and their odds are not encouraging. (One company, Kyoto Fusioneering, builds fake demo equipment for fusion startups, and provides a conduit for abundant fusion venture money into its founders' and maybe investors' pockets.) None of the others can ever produce so much as one erg of commercial energy.

Schroedingersat 3 years ago | |

> FWIW, it appears they still have $100M in cash. In principle, they could still buy out a company with a product that actually works.

They seem to have used the scam money to pivot into deploying chemical batteries. So at least something semi-positive happened with some of the cash.

counters 3 years ago |

This is an interesting read, but isn't particularly novel. Most of these "tribes" seem to just be re-branded from core literature on environmental discourse, e.g. Dryzek's "The Politics of the Earth" [1]. But I find the traditional branding a more useful framework since it's more closely related to mainstream, core philosophical discourses.

[1]: https://www.amazon.com/Politics-Earth-Environmental-Discours...

ulnarkressty 3 years ago |

I'm curious how many people have colleagues that got a job in climate tech out of principle. There appear to be a good number of websites specifically made to advertise such positions (just google "climate jobs") that have sprung up this year alone.