A very important part of solving problems is choosing the right problems. It doesn't help to be optimistic about something that's not going to work.

Thinking a priori that it’s not going to work, here we have the true definition of a pessimist.

In general, for any action, there is already some means of judging whether it's a good one. Not a perfect means, but you can get some idea. And after trying things a bit, the evidence gets better. It's utterly vital to use negative information obtained in this exploration. Otherwise, you can go off into an institutional failure mode where resources are poured down a black hole just because that's what's been done before.

If someone insists that something would work even when the evidence is clear that's borderline stupid. But let's look at pessimism and optimism in relation to something unknown. An optimist would continue trying even if they fail multiple times, they continue trying until they either succeed or find enough evidence that it won't work. While a pessimist won't even try once, or give up pretty early.

Past tense is hindsight. Optimism/pessimism is a future tense attitude.

That's a really interesting way to slice and dice it. When I read your first few sentences that's not how I interpreted it at all.

I got fact, fact, optimist. Optimist, fact. Fact, optimist, optimist.

But I'm not convinced that's a better way to go about it. What is likely needed is each of those chunks to be taken into context and when I look it at that, it's really "here is a problem and a solution to move things forward." To me that's optimistic. If it were pessimistic, I'd expect it to be "here is a problem and there's nothing we can do about it."

These are spectra, and neither extreme is "correct" and rooted in objective reality. Pessimism/optimism can be decoupled from other axes like ignorance/knowledge, acceptance/denial, awareness/delusion, etc. Assuming "climate change is happening" as fact, someone might exhibit climate change denial for any number of reasons. These are just illustrative sketches, not an effort to build some taxonomy of beliefs:

Ignorance: someone may be unable to comprehend the complicated climate system concepts, statistical concepts, nor noisy data.

Cynical pessimism: someone may believe it is happening and unavoidable, but they want to minimize their own inconvenience or discomfort prior to the end game.

Blind optimism: someone may just harbor a profound faith that things will work out in the end; to them, the people trying to address climate change seem like toxic pessimists who harbor delusions of grandeur!

Optimism is believing that good electric cars exist and can be a lot of fun. Pessimism is saying that they'll never work and are terrible because our grid will collapse if too many people buy them.

Optimism is also believing that both problems are remarkably solvable.

Hard to take Gates seriously on climate change. Imagine everyone was living like this.

Even some of his climate stuff annoys me.

But, it's highly likely that if you ranked the whole human race on how much they'd done to reduce climate change, he may well be at the top.

So if it's about "doing his share" then he's probably doing okay.

But regardless, I don't want people to stop flying, I want them to stop releasing fossil C02 in the air because it's inefficient. Inefficiencies on an individual scale don't matter, inefficiencies on a civilization wide scale add up quickly.

I don't see how flying, or doing any other rich person thing, reduces his credibility. Unless you believe dealing with climate change is going to make us all poorer, which it isn't.

If you're really all about hating rich people, then there's lots of "climate justice" projects aiming to help poor people and carbon taxes that replace regressive taxes would be a good thing to champion.

And I don't buy that you can do your share by talking one way and doing the exact opposite privately. It's like being an animal rights advocate who (openly) tortures animals in their free time. Simply doesn't work that way, even if you save more animals than you torture.

He's not just talking about doing things, he's putting people to work doing things. To focus on his individual emissions is a premature optimization

Where is the line on how much pollution one is allowed to expel? 500sq ft per person apartment? 100sq ft? Prius or RAV4? Commercial flight to visit family, once per year or twice? How many kids?

I don’t have a problem with the dairy and egg products I use because I personally know the people that I get them from. I won’t purchase anything containing dairy and eggs. If someone prepares food for me containing them I may eat it to be polite but I wouldn’t eat meat. I also don’t have an issue with the honey I get from my friends hives. However, many of my activist friends and other people see all of these things as hypocrisy that perpetuate animal abuse. I still protest and we get along fine. Because to your point, there’s room for nuance.

Do as you preach, and others will follow. Flying your private jet to a conference, and tell Johnny Average that he shouldn't use his car to drive to his workplace is a shitty thing to do.

And he's far from being the only one doing that.

It is still logically consistent to play the game as everyone else, but still advocate for changes to rules that affect everyone. For example, flying in private jets while also supporting laws/regulations/taxes that would make that amount of pollution per person per unit time unaffordable.

For example, I want fossil fuels to be drastically costlier to force everyone to use smaller vehicles and live in denser communities enabling public transit.

But I do not want other individuals to have to do that while I do not. I am willing to make the sacrifices if everyone will, but if everyone is not going to, then I have a hard time seeing why I should.

Living on MV does not contribute to the climate problem, so his actions are not hypocritical.

If he was looking for a 100-year property investment, perhaps he should have chosen a different part of New England (elevation > X meters), the Pacific Northwest, or the Great Lakes region.

If he's looking for a nice, private, place to live for the next 30 years, MV has a lot going for it. He won't live there for 30 years of course, and maybe "leaving it to the kids" isn't high on his priority list, and maybe he even has a lingering hope that mitigation efforts will happen and succeed. He didn't get famous by being a pessimist (ObOnTopic).

And, sure is a good thing he didn't move to Florida or the desert West, where he'd be both more endangered and more contributive to the danger.

I really can't imagine any plausible explanation for how any person arrives at the "Obama says climate change is a problem, but buys house near beach, must be hypocrite and bad person" narrative, unless of course you started at the end and worked backwards.

(edit) ... which, I see from other comments, seems to be the case. You believe Obama is lying about climate change and that buying a house on MV is proof? OK. Amazing.

But then the upper middle class twats couldn't go on vacation to Bali and we can't have that no sirree!

Edit: the point that I'm driving at (if it wasn't clear) is that we seem to all want upward mobility to be a thing, but boy do we hate those that actually experience it. That seems almost like it's own kind of pessimism to me.

But for the record I don't give a shit just don't preach environmentalism. Hypocrisy is just one of those things that crawls up my butt.

Solutions or failures happen in other contexts. Gates does some real work in those.

The whole "I must recycle all my plastic bags or the planet will die" mentality is, to me, a weird form of delusion of grandeur. Seeing past that can be both freeing and depressing :)

I'm sure there is some kind of name for this.

Trying to shame people into using less never solves this problem. It just means there is more available for the shameless. The solution as are either to regulate the commons, or find a better way to meet our needs.

How does it happen that everyone, on average, recycles or uses less energy?

In general, by making non recycling or energy use more expensive. This can come from regulation, taxes, social pressure. Technical innovation can also sidestep whole issues by using less energy/materials and/or producing more. Maybe there are a few other paths.

Those things actually make a difference. Focus on them.

They have always pushed "blaming the consumer for trash", and disparaged "producer responsibility" and "plastic recycling" (except in blaming the consumer for not recycling, but that's just a variant of blaming them for trash).

It's weird to now see people pointing to the same organisations that opposed these things, and claiming they campaigned for them.

In countries/states with functional governments that aren't owned by fossil fuels, plastic recycling has happened as just one of a suite of measures and has always been successful. Every academic study of it has agreed it's the best thing for the economy and planet.

In others states, the ones that are in thrall to big oil, it didn't really happen, and then the people who don't want it to happen appear to have recently started claiming "hah, we (i.e. the big evil oil corps) wanted you to recycle, so now you shouldn't do it, that'll teach us".

This is the kind of reverse psychology that works really well on toddlers.

you’re sorely missing what my point could be if you think it’s nihilism / hah fine to be wasteful, another spin on the individualist solution making I attacked in my comment

> Despite this, three former top officials, who have never spoken publicly before, said the industry promoted recycling as a way to beat back a growing tide of antipathy toward plastic.

And in doing so they get to repeat their "plastic recycling doesn't work" rhetoric.

As soon as you force the producers to pay for disposal and let them figure out how best to do it, recycling suddenly, magically becomes the cheapest option.

https://www.wastedive.com/news/2021-state-extended-producer-...

> Recycling, the former officials told NPR and Frontline, became a way to preempt the bans and sell more plastic

> "The feeling was the plastics industry was under fire, we got to do what it takes to take the heat off, because we want to continue to make plastic products," Thomas says.

But this basic argument from hypocrisy is applied to a lot of people, and it's a weak case.

If someone is using an appreciable fraction of their fortune to decarbonize the grid, and otherwise make industrial civilization sustainable, they can fly private jets as much as they like. Ultimately, carbon in the atmosphere is a simple game of addition. If Gates Brand nuclear plants take 100GW of coal and natural gas offline, I don't care if the man lives on an airplane with a whole second fleet for in-flight refueling, because it doesn't matter.

The reason the hypocrisy argument sucks is that, by definition, you can only apply it to rich people who see a problem with climate change and are doing something about it.

The many wealthy private-jet owners who are invested in fuel extraction don't even get mentioned. They get wealthy when carbon emissions get worse, and then spend their wealth jetting around.

Can you link me to the page which tracks Mohamed bin Sultan's jet travel? No? I believe I've made my point.

Mohamed bin Sultan did not claim that polar bears might be dead by 2020 and that Florida will be under water by 2030, hence he can't be a hypocrite.

Yes, hypocrisy can only be be applied to someone who claims something, argues for a certain something. The fact that everyone does not beleive in apocalyptic global warming destroying mankind by 2020 still means that the people who do can be hypocrites.

But then the real question is why hypocrisy is so bad. All of us are hypocrites in different ways, on different things. Why is being a hypocrite on climate change worse than being wilfully ignorant?

Thought Experiment:

Say, Bill Gates (and other VIPs) is respected enough that he can convert 5 Skeptics out a 100 Climate Deniers. So, In order for the successful climate actions Bill Gates has to change the minds of say 10,000 leaders in various positions across the world. That means he effectively has to meet 200,000 people across the globe.

If Climate Change is important, and you want quick action, do you want Bill Gates (and others) to

a) jet around the globe and try to convince 200,000 people in 5 years

or

b) Bicycle around the globe and try to convince 200,000 people in 50 years

Only a moron would suggest (b). I expect TikTokers and Redditors to pick option (b) as they are easily swayed by "Hurr Durr, Bill Gates Jets" arguments.

He can jet around the world in economy class without much difference, just a bit of sacrifice.

I'll start believing Bill Gates believes in climate change when he starts behaving as if he does.

Since then I still don't know which of his initiatives have shown a high probability of success.

Who can you say this is not true about?

I think that pessimism and optimism are human traits, and have more to do with our own fallible irrational view of the world, which can easily be changed depending on the current cultural perception of our future. It's so easy to bias.

When it comes to predictions, it should revolve around the scientific method. Statistics derived from data, and that probability which itself does not know the concept of optimism or pessimism, is what should be a guide for further research or decisions.

The problem is that we ourselves also decide what to investigate to begin with. Thus our tools will only ever be as good as we are ourselves. Willingness to learn, change opinions, let go of ego and prejudice, the path forward really starts with giving everyone, children and adults, time to learn. But we are in such a society where our values are often placed differently and we are in such a rush.

So I think it really starts with, how do we cultivate a good environment now? And not whether the future is pessimistic or optimistic.

Exactly. The author is stapling all the good qualities onto optimism and all the bad ones onto pessimism so that he can declare one good and the other bad.

I'm optimistic we can have a more meaningful conversation about optimism and pessimism if we forget this article.

I don't see any of your example indicating a pessimism.

Pessimism != < the most optimistic