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gregvp's avatar

I am amazed that paper got published, exposing as it does the dishonesty of the plurality of academics. (At UCL, but there is no reason to think that specific group differs significantly from those at any other institutions.)

I've said it before and I will no doubt say it again: no one actually cares about climate change. The smugly censorious care only about feeling superior, while their actions are worse than those of the people they censure. Academics have lost any kind of authority long ago; they are now fast losing their social license to exist.

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Thomas J. Pfaff's avatar

Well, some people care about climate change up until the point where they have to have less of something. Right now, the only way to reduce emissions is to reduce consumption. So, yeah, no one actually cares, or at least very few do.

I did an early post with data from the IEA that notes that the wealthy in the U.S. and the world disproportionally emit CO2 (the top 20% of earners emit more than 50% of the energy-related CO2.). https://briefedbydata.substack.com/p/co2-emissions-are-an-inequality-problem The wealthy, and a lot of people that are wealthy don't think they are, could reduce consumption without any real discomfort, but they won't.

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gregvp's avatar

Yes.

I self-studied some economics before and after the Great Financial Crisis of 2008, and I've adopted an economic perspective to some extent. In particular, I use the idea of revealed preference, a. k. a. "don't listen to what they say, look at what they do." It can be very useful for understanding events, but it doesn't make one any friends.

Academics make a great song and dance about integrity and allegiance to the truth, but (especially in the social sciences) parroting the party line is more important by far. The current hysteria around "misinformation" is a pure power play by academics, a device to maintain their ability to frame the discourse. It's failing and back-firing due to old-fashioned New England style skepticism; hence my comment about social licence to operate.

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