Why does it need to be either/or? Some youths might be inspired by watching non-astronauts in space, some may be inspired by this climate activism. Others may be inspired by watching re-runs of Futurama. The important thing is the inspiration, not what triggers it.

And some are inspired by that NPC trend on tiktok. There's definitely a difference in kind between sources of inspiration.

The important thing is what it inspires.

Law suits that bankrupt the state, put their parents out of jobs, and destroy their economic future that is already pretty poor are "inspiring to young people"

talk about working against your own self interest.

Given that their parents and grandparents probably are the same folk that ensured a worse quality of life for them I'm going to side with the kids on this one.

To be fair, until about 1990 the problem was virtually unknowable if you weren't a climate scientist working on cutting edge research yourself or were in the board room of the oil company that apparently had this investigated and then chose to make the most of their remaining time. I can't fault two entire generations for greenhouse gas emissions from before then, and after it became common knowledge, I can understand that society-wide transitions are genuinely hard.

However, I do fault most able-bodied rich people (almost everyone who's reading this is in the world's top 10%) for, after it became known, barely even trying beyond a direct financial benefit to themselves in the short term (like solar panels on an otherwise idle roof which will yield a net profit in a handful of years)

what you have personally done that was not "direct financial benefit to" yourself

That's a long list of things which I posted on this account before. Some of the things are taking the bus to work instead of a more convenient car, taking more expensive trains rather than flying, reducing meat consumption when the meat replacements, which should be much cheaper to produce, are often actually more expensive, taking part in protests, exclusively using refilled glass containers (Mehrwegglas) rather than the cheaper throwaway pudding containers which also contain tastier contents, and reducing room heating (by thermal clothing and directly heating myself with a trickle of electricity rather than heating my environment) to the point where the neighbors' heat (we're on the ground floor) is enough to stay warm most of the winter. I'm looking into financing a wind turbine, which I expect to cost a few years' salary. I could put that money to other use (including for personal luxuries) but the climate problem is getting rather time-sensitive and I want to at least be part of the solution rather than the problem, even if it's very hard to solve all my emissions at once (I live in a rented place with gas heating, for example, but as mentioned I mostly replaced that even if some heating is still needed against mould and for visitors).

Is that satisfactory for you?

Edit: saw your other comment calling into question whether climate change is an issue at all. Don't know why I wasted my time here

I don't know why I bothered

To clarify, I wasn't specifically talking about climate change. I was speaking broadly on regressive, rug/ladder pulling policies that put us into the situation we're in now and will likely be until climate change near extincts us.

Believe it or not, keeping the planet nice is in their own self interests.

Believe it or not, this lawsuit does nothing to "keep the planet nice"

If we're going to hold progress hostage to some poor person getting harmed in some poorly-quantified way, we never would have gotten runnning water, electricity, or the automobile.

My experience is young people are rarely inspired by news stories.

Of all news stories, the ones involving court cases are the least inspiring.

This isn’t about a disadvantaged person overcoming adversity. It’s a bunch of suits sitting on a room.

You might surprised how a good teacher could inspire hope in teenagers over this, contrary to all the other signals that indicate doom and gloom in their futures. Global warming was already weighing on me in my teens when I'm in my 30s now. It's a much more visible issue now.

A good teacher can make soup exciting. Catching interest is 90% of teaching.

I’m in my 40s, and for a good chunk of my childhood overpopulation and resource scarcity were big fears.

It took me a like time to accept the global warming consensus, because that’s what happens when experts cry wolf.

This looks like an interesting case, but also very specific to Montana.

Myexperience is the opposite. Both my memory and my observation

Why would future price increases for all your goods be inspiring for young people? That's what you're going to end up with when you increase costs. People don't choose fossil fuels just because, they're chosen largely for economic reasons.

Carbon externalities not being reflected in the price of a good is a bug, not a feature.

It’s a market failure that needs to be rectified.

Sure, and it will come at the expense of your economy. Eg would the ranch mentioned in the article be able to survive if it had to account for this?

What will people's reactions be when you double the price of their food or gasoline?

I'd wager one of the reasons why America's economy does so well compared to Europe's is the much cheaper access to energy. For example, Lithuania pays twice the price for gasoline and almost 3 times the price for electricity, meanwhile income in Lithuania is less than half of US incomes.

People take a good economy for granted and are willing to trade it for many things. But then when the trade actually happens they will blame everyone else for the misery that results from it (eg "living wage" people).

Why are you so eager to live at the cost of earth's future? Even if food prices were to double (I don't see why it would, unless you measure it only by specific high-impact products such as authentic lamb) to transition away from the destruction of the habitat we depend on (planet A), that seems like a better option than continuing on a path to reversal of what we've achieved in the last century (from 60% in extreme poverty to 10%, despite going from 2 to 8 billion inhabitants)

I understand change is scary, or maybe you've done a lot of environmental harm in the past and don't want to acknowledge that. Either way, I would suggest to look at the options for the future and see that we have good alternatives for most things already. Change doesn't have to be scary and I only care what people do after having had a chance to learn what impact their choices have

> maybe you've done a lot of environmental harm in the past and don't want to acknowledge that.

Very unhelpful

Personal attacks like this make things harder for everybody

We must be kind, to make things better

Because it’s extremely, EXTREMELY difficult to map Montana’s carbon emissions (mind you, one of the least populated states in the country) to actual real impact on climate change in the future.

Environmentalism used to be about direct impact - contaminating waterways and the like. Moving to these more esoteric issues makes measuring and showing impact near impossible, and also makes people care less.

Because I live in a country like Lithuania. I know what basic things being too expensive to afford is like. I also know that whatever Americans adopt they push it onto the rest of the world.

>Change doesn't have to be scary and I only care what people do after having had a chance to learn what impact their choices have

Change is scary when you're talking about increasing living costs by a large amount. Meanwhile Americans still don't have a substantial excise tax on gasoline to discourage its use.

> I also know that whatever Americans adopt they push it onto the rest of the world.

I don't know if that's supposed to be about me, but I'm not from "murica". You and I are nearly neighbors, only separated by Poland. But I'm not proud of my country either: I vote for what I think will help us get better, but about 70% votes for a "let it burn" party

> Meanwhile Americans still don't have a substantial excise tax on gasoline to discourage its use.

Although we at least have some tax on some of the fuels (kerosine being a notable omission), ours is also not about discouragement, as far as I know. Fuel prices are dominated by market effects, not by discouragement, and evidently the high market price is not sufficient to make the difference that would be needed.

Maybe it's similar to movie/software piracy: not a pricing problem but a service problem (as Gabe Newell said). Having realistic alternatives rather than prohibitive pricing

Because many of us understand human history, and understand that we human will resolve this by technological advancement often at the time the need arises.

Using government to artificially inflate prices on what you perceive to be a problem rarely results in good outcomes for anyone and even rarer does it actually resolve the problem it was claimed to solve

More often the new regulations will be abused to profit a few, and hold back actual technological progress for decades (see Ethanol as an example)

For my entire long long long life, people have been predicting the end of the world as we know it, it always 10 years off before we are all dead. having lives many decades now, hearing these 10 year predictions often, and seeing them never come well color me unamused, and unmoved by this latest call to action.

Instead i choose to believe we will over come the challenges in the future has we have the ones from the past. With technological advancement, and market economics. Not government

> Using government to artificially inflate prices on what you perceive to be a problem

Literally the opposite of what I said

> For my entire long long long life, people have been predicting the end of the world

I never claimed that either, but at least this time I didn't say the opposite. Some people seem to think it's an extinction threat, but personally I expect civilisation to continue, even if half of us starve and we reduce to a much smaller population while dealing with the fallout and having to rebuild. You may want to look into the consequences of global warming before judging whether it's similar to the end of the Mayan calendar or whatever end of the world events you're talking about

> what you perceive to be a problem

If you still think we aren't causing climate change, I'm not sure there's a point talking about it. Can't help people that don't do logic

>>If you still think we aren't causing climate change, I'm not sure there's a point talking about it.

literally not what I said... or even implied

>>similar to the end of the Mayan calendar or whatever end of the world events you're talking about

I am talking about world ending predictions in the realm of climate change... There have been many, and continue to be many that if we do not "act now" it will be "too late" these claims have been persistent since the 70's at least yet very few of those predictions have come true and then it is explained away with "well in the next decade we will be correct this time"... trust us we are "The Experts™©"

Climate activist are the living embodiment of the Boy who cried wolf parable

> world ending predictions in the realm of climate change... There have been many, and continue to be many that if we do not "act now" it will be "too late" these claims have been persistent since the 70's at least

Could you be any more specific?

“Won’t someone think of the costs!”

You know prices would be even lower if we let all our rivers and groundwater be polluted, right? Led piping was cheaper than alternatives too.

Perhaps lower prices is not the all-important end you assume it to be?

Much easier to ignore the externalities if you know you will be dead by the time the bill comes due. Until them, more widgets for me!

If including economic externalities in the price makes goods more expensive, so be it. It's how things should be done.

Lower prices themselves have a price.

You could steal everything for free, why don't you?

Like you I also believe that the only way to get companies to listen is through money, not idealism, so by making renewables cheaper than fossil fuels (which thankfully is currently happening), companies will naturally use them over fossil fuels.

This is true, but will those companies actually stay in a place like Montana or would they just go... elsewhere? Rural areas aren't the most attractive places for business.

If you can have such laws and judgements, why couldn't other places?

As more and more places outlaw bad practices, one could subsequently argue, it becomes increasingly lucrative to facilitate cheap fossil fuel usage. But look at how easy it is to do international trade with Russia before and after 2022: we can choose our partners and, while we can't force them, we can stop business from moving there, solving the problem for the vast majority of people's supplies and thus emissions.

Believing that a majority of others aren't as benevolent as oneself is the only bar to that being possible. Took me a bit to find it again, but I think the technical term for this is worst-motive fallacy: "participants significantly expected the [other] to pursue a worse course of action than they would prefer themselves" https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0956797620954492

>If you can have such laws and judgements, why couldn't other places?

Of course you can, but the playing field isn't level to begin with. Over the past century we've seen an increasing amount of urbanization happen. This causes issues such as constantly increasing housing prices, which make it into a good investment, which leads to more increases in housing prices. If you remove the reason for businesses to be in Montana, then they just won't be in Montana. They'll go where every other business is congregating to, because why wouldn't they?

Just look at the economic outcomes of "coal country" and what you'll see is poverty. Climate action is important, but I have serious doubts on whether the people involved understand the kind of economic impact these decisions can have on the future of their state/city. Maybe they're rich enough that it won't affect them, but it's going to affect many.

You could say that "Oh, people will account for this and make sure that the poor people aren't affected," but then you look at eastern and western Kentucky. When the coal mines shut down the towns started dying out. What's left behind now is poverty (by US standards).

I don't know the specifics of US coal mine history so I can't comment on most of this, but looking at the broader, long-term picture:

> What's left behind is poverty (by US standards).

I'm afraid that climate change, at least if we would all apply US levels of action, would result in non-US levels of poverty for all but the wealthiest few. Depending also on how heavy-handed/inhumane one wants to be towards displaced immigrants from places that become mostly inhospitable or below sea level (most people worldwide live in coastal regions)

Though if we keep extracting fossil fuels at the same rate, while electric cars lead to less demand for them, the price of fossil fuels will go down. Then people (corporations) will buy cheap fossil fuel for other stuff (now cruise tickets got even cheaper because electric cars lead to less demand for oil! When it gets really cheap you can heat your outdoor pool in January off a diesel generator.)

Of course, when the price of oil starts dropping, they'll have to extract at a faster rate to keep profits up.

Burn tomorrow for cake today

Priceless

There's a very old phrase to describe what you're espousing: penny-wise pound-foolish.