I have some inside knowledge here. When I was in college, I was very idealistic. I was in a special Greenpeace program where they took college students and trained them to become environmental activists. Picture a semester-long, hands-on training course.

You actually fully go out into the field to run campaigns and meet everyone from the President of Greenpeace to the front-end activist hanging banners and whatnot.

I actually liked the President and DC lobbyist folks more than the weridos out and about dropping banners and doing the extreme stuff.

I walked away being kind of turned off from the Organization and realized a lot of these folks were not pragmatic and more dogmatic than anything else. Don't get me wrong, I am very grateful and had a blast, but I dropped out of college and became a software engineer instead of an activist.

I had a similar experience with the US EPA while in undergrad. It was a shorter experience, but it really changed my view of the organization.

> I think Greenpeace did as much as anybody to turn the world against nuclear power

I think the nuclear industry didn't do itself any favors. And the oil companies didn't want it to succeed either and did its best to hobble it. The environmental groups are a convenient patsy to take the blame for the outcome. If Greenpeace is so powerful why hasn't it been able to end whaling or the oil industry?

This case is not important because of Greenpeace, it's important because of the implications for free speech in the US. They are not being bankrupted because they took the wrong stance on nuclear, they're being bankrupted for supposed defamation and incitement against a major energy corporation.

This is a precedent that will be used to attack all kinds of civil society organizations when they threaten the profits of major corporate interests. Including the civil society organizations which you do agree with.

I think our society would be better off if everybody did less incitement in their political dialogue. It's become all too common for political discourse to become unhinged. So in that sense, I think this precedent is also fine.

What does setting things on fire have to do with freedom of speech?

I think this is how it goes: The people who set things on fire weren't directly associated with Greenpeace. But the argument is that Greenpeace's rhetoric incited them to do so. So it becomes a freedom of speech issue. If you tell people something is evil and must be burned, are you responsible for that thing getting torched?

The Hutus that committed genocide in Rwanda were not directly associated with that radio host that called for murders, yet he's a criminal.

Isn't this just the often repeated "free speech does not mean freedom from consequences". So this is exactly what left wants. They are not prevented from saying things. They just lose money over them. As free speech only applies to state preventing from things being said.

It's already too late. We passed the point of no return. There was a blip where every outlet was saying that the point of no return was like 6 months away than nothing.. We shot right past it.

Strange take. What does that mean? Give up because we can’t do anything - “it’s already too late”? So burn all the oil because YOLO?

Or maybe those people drawing hard lines in the sand were exaggerating to drive urgency and get attention? Sometimes people whose stated goals you agree with say and do things which are wrong.

It’s too late. Look at the science.

Also I never mentioned just give up. I just said it’s already too late. That’s reality. What you do next is your choice. But don’t put words in my mouth.

It's never too late, that's not what "the science" says it's what the clickbait vulture news bullshit you're reading is saying. The real science on the matter is that every day things get just a little bit worse, and every improvement makes things just a little bit better. There's no magic cliff, no point of no return, just one day after another.

There are tipping points, when warming accelerates and becomes irreversible.

There’s some debate in “the science” about how quickly we’ll reach that point. Limiting warming to +2°C was not a scientific position; it was political, based on what people thought was achievable. Before the Paris Agreement, 2° was not considered “safe”.

Anyway, it turns out we’re going to zoom past 2° in the next couple of decades.

When I said it is too late, I did not mean tomorrow the oceans boil and the lights go out.

I meant something more precise. And more unforgiving.

You say there is no magic cliff. No point of no return. Just one day after another, each fractionally worse or better. That sounds reasonable. It sounds adult. It sounds scientific.

But it quietly assumes that all damage is reversible if we simply act hard enough and fast enough.

That assumption is already false.

We have warmed the planet by roughly 1.2 to 1.3 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels. That is not a projection. That is measured reality. The last time Earth was only 4 to 5 degrees cooler, mile thick ice sheets covered large parts of North America. A shift of a few degrees defines geological eras. We have moved a quarter of that distance in a century.

Atmospheric carbon dioxide now exceeds 420 parts per million. For hundreds of thousands of years before the industrial era it oscillated between about 180 and 280. We have pushed the system into a concentration not seen for millions of years. During the last time CO2 was this high, sea levels were dramatically higher than today. That future rise is not optional. It is delayed.

So what did I mean by too late.

I meant it is too late to preserve the climate of the Holocene, the stable envelope within which human civilization developed.

It is too late to save most tropical coral reefs. At around 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming, scientists project that 70 to 90 percent of coral reefs will disappear. At 2 degrees, more than 99 percent. We are already seeing global mass bleaching events at current warming. Entire reef systems are dying now. Not in some distant scenario. Those ecosystems evolved over millions of years. They will not regrow on any human timeline.

It is too late to avoid long term sea level rise measured in meters. Greenland is losing on the order of 280 billion tons of ice per year. Antarctica is losing over 150 billion tons per year. Even if we halted emissions tomorrow, thermal expansion of warming oceans and destabilized ice sheets would continue raising sea levels for centuries. Coastal cities built for twentieth century shorelines are living on borrowed time.

It is too late to prevent large scale permafrost thaw. Permafrost contains nearly twice as much carbon as the atmosphere. As it thaws, it releases carbon dioxide and methane, amplifying warming. Once thawed, it does not politely refreeze into its prior carbon locked state.

It is too late to prevent entire species from disappearing. Extinction is not a gradient. When a species is gone, it is gone.

You are correct that every tenth of a degree matters. That mitigation still matters. That 1.8 degrees is better than 2.4. That 2.4 is better than 3. That is absolutely true.

But that is not the same as saying we have not crossed tipping points.

Complex systems do not respond like thermostats. They contain thresholds. Ice sheets thin until their grounding lines retreat beyond stable positions. Forests lose resilience until drought and fire push them into new states. Reefs bleach repeatedly until recovery becomes impossible. These are not dramatic cinematic cliffs. They are physical thresholds beyond which return is no longer feasible on meaningful timescales.

When I say too late, I mean too late to keep the world we inherited.

Too late to avoid irreversible losses already locked in by accumulated greenhouse gases. Too late to spare entire ecosystems. Too late to guarantee that future generations inherit coastlines, fisheries, and seasonal stability anything like what we knew.

We are no longer in the phase of prevention. We are in the phase of damage control.

The remaining carbon budget for a fifty percent chance of staying below 1.5 degrees is on the order of a few hundred gigatons of carbon dioxide. At roughly 40 gigatons per year of global emissions, that budget is effectively consumed within this decade under current trajectories. That is not hysteria. That is arithmetic.

So no, there is no single theatrical moment when a siren sounds and the planet declares defeat.

Instead there is a ledger.

Energy added. Ice lost. Species erased. Feedbacks activated.

You can call that one day after another.

I call it a series of doors closing.

Not all of them. Not yet.

But enough that saying it is never too late feels less like science and more like comfort.

Too late does not mean hopeless.

It means the window to preserve the old equilibrium has closed.

What remains is how much more we are willing to lose.

Thanks for all the detail. I still wouldn't equate "it's going to get a lot worse" with "it's too late". The only way I can interpret the phrase "it's too late" is as giving up - which means stopping trying, and admitting defeat. We can acknowledge that things are unavoidably going to get a lot worse without giving up. Or even admitting defeat. Because if we do give up, the outcomes will be even worse. And I believe that while many bad outcomes are unavoidable at this point, we are still facing the possibility of truly horrendous outcomes which can be avoided.

> I think Greenpeace did as much as anybody to turn the world against nuclear power in the late 20th century. And this clearly set us in the wrong direction as far as reducing reliance on fossil fuels.

I don't have much time for Greenpeace. Much of their activism has never been science based, and usually involves criminal acts against property. History will not be kind to them.

Their only highlight is 'saving' the whales. For a while.

won't someone think of the property??!?

Yes I will think of the property because private property rights are critical and I 100% support private property owners using violence to defend their property from vandals and thieves.

prosperity comes from property, just add sí /s

  Also for the ND pipeline, I think it does relatively little to change the economics of fossil fuels.

This is ignoring the issue of tribal sovereignty and water rights which is where most of the issue lies imo. No one is trying to ruin the economy, they simply want untainted natural resources on their own property.

If this pipeline was going through disneyland, i don't think you'd hear popular arguments about disney trying to ruin the oil economy.

This is a complete load of shit. Oil is trucked back and forth over those roads all day and night, and that has a much higher leakage rate than a pipeline. NIMBYs never come out and say they just don't want something built. They always have some bullshit excuse like this.

I mean what you just said is the huge load of shit. There are interesting differences in risk and pollution between trucking and piping, but they’re not nearly as black and white as you claim and they don’t require acrimony. Calm the hell down?

I think that’s half right. We are absolutely horrendous to natives around here. But that’s not why Greenpeace got involved, nor why most of the left cares about this issue.

If the pipeline was going through Disneyland I think you’d still see the same people up in arms protesting. They’d just be searching for a different justification.

But restricting supply raises prices and naturally encourages sustainable energy. That kind of change is self reinforcing. Government incentives disappear at the change of every administration.

No, restricting supply when it exists just turns people paying the higher prices against you. When the supply restrictions are in fundamentals it can work for you. When supply restrictions are on something few people care about it can work for you. However the majority of people (particularly in ND) drive and feel the cost of gas - often they feel these costs even more than they really affect the budget because they are visible every time you buy it in ways the things that have a larger effect on their budget are not.

If you want to encourage sustainable energy you need to make that your focus. Make it cheaper. Ignore oil and fight laws that make it harder to build sustainable energy. ND has great wind potential (they get 40% of their electric from wind already), but it could be better (they have a small population - which means they can export wind energy to Minnesota or if we build transmission lines even farther).

When you focus on raising oil prices you ensure that your side gets voted out in the next election and your gains are undone. When you focus on building renewable energy you get something that can stay. (Just don't build only on the white house as that can be quickly removed - build everywhere so removal is expensive)

Oil is a global commodity. Its price is set across all supply sources. Restricting its movement from Canada to the US doesn’t actually change the price much at all. It just makes the supply more vulnerable to disruption. That dirty shale oil only comes out of the ground when prices are really high. Otherwise it’s not worth it. If prices are high it will come out of the ground and get burned. The only question is where and who has access to it.

I agree. In the long term we need to reduce fossil fuel usage but in the short term, restricting pipeline construction means that more petroleum products are transported by rail cars which is a lot dirtier and more dangerous. We have to take a pragmatic harm minimization approach rather than being idealistic.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Union_Pacific_oil_train_f...

You're probably right, but when I look around the Front Range at the landscape blighted by drought, the mountains naked of snow, the skyline hazed by smog and the smoke from forest fires, I feel like this is where pragmatism has gotten us.