They’ll say that but it’s a rationalization, not a reason. They’re starting from “climate change is BS” and figuring out a reason for it. If it’s not this so-called hypocrisy then it’ll be something else.

People do need to understand that it’s not hypocritical to say there’s a need for a systemic change, and not live as if the change had already occurred. If the ship is headed for an iceberg, it’s not hypocritical of me to argue that the ship needs to be turned, while not also going out on the front and blowing to the side to add some insignificant turning force.

But if they understood that, they’d probably have enough systems-level thinking to realize that climate change is real and an actual problem.

If the only people we can find who are 'mad' are al gore and leo dicaprio, I'd suggest we have a selection problem. There are plenty of monks, ascetics, lawyers, product managers, entrepreneurs, bankers and trad wives who care and are doing quite a lot more than the average person.

Bad actors, uncommitted actors does not actually change the problem's existence. In an adjacent example consider here in LA. Before the fires, corruption in the homes for the homeless got some decent air. It does not actually change the need for homes for the homeless. Its been poorly implemented and allowed to be exploited. That doesn't mean the homeless should get shafted.

Here the question is quite literally about humanity. If one cannot connect with that, maybe they can connect with the need for a stable population that creates new workers and funds said person's retirement.

What is being preached about is that the way things are going will lead to larger, more unpredicted/out of cycle natural disasters. We are seeing that. Globally. We will all pay, whether its together and preventatively or independently one by one. History shows we do better when we're together.

True, but the relevance or importance of a message is orthogonal to the hypocrisy of the messenger.

Citing the hypocrisy of some messengers as a reason not to care or do anything just means someone really wants an excuse not to care or do anything anyway.

Everybody waiting for a critical mass of other people to tackle something is a good way to not tackle it.

Just talking generally here, not specifically about the climate.

> "Citing the hypocrisy of some messengers as a reason not to care or do anything just means someone really wants an excuse not to care or do anything anyway."

This is not quite the perspective. The issue is that if humans were to shift the climate in a targeted action, it would require an absolutely massive and concerted global effort - something's not only unlike anything else that's ever happened in history, but whose feasibility is strongly contradicted by just about everything in history, and present.

So when even the people that claim to care more than anything else about climate can't really be bothered to live these efforts, what are the chances of people who don't care, are antagonistic, and then let alone with geopolitics entering the picture - actually acting? The answer is, realistically, zero, which means it's necessary to look for different solutions. It's not an excuse to not care, but rather strongly suggestive that caring, in the ways proposed, is not going to be effective.

You know some weird analogy is that it's like teaching kids about sexual abstinence as opposed to teaching them how to use a condom. The first is what you want and it feels good and morally upstanding to go that route, but it's also just not realistic. The latter feels questionable and like it may even be encouraging undesired behavior, but it's also realistic about what's going to happen anyhow.

Ah, the millennia old argument of "you cannot successfully proselytize donating money to the poor unless you live like a monk yourself".

More like the decades old argument that if you keep getting caught fucking men in toilet stalls being gay can't be all that bad.

Is...that a decades old argument? Or is the argument: If you're fucking men in toilet stalls, stop arresting other men for doing the same and claiming no one should do that. AKA the rule of law.

I am very in favor of climate change mitigations through careful legislation and believe we are doing nowhere near enough. But I think a closer analogy is "proselytizing donating money without donating any money yourself" or in the extreme of making the problem worse -- "proselytizing donating money while robbing from the poor." That proselytizing while making the problem worse is more a problem with the proselytizer than the critic. But the worst of all is making it worse and actively fighting against remediation.

> I don't think environmental activists realize the damage they do to their case by not living by what they preach relentlessly about.

The ones who do that probably don’t care about their cause so much as having a cause.

It seems you have bought into the idea that climate change is caused by plastic straws and pickup trucks and not caused by corporations exploiting the planet and its people for shareholder value and profit.

If we really want to combat or even stop climate change, we need a total revolution of the economic and social order. Unfortunately at this point it would need to be authoritarian, as we obviously can’t count on billionaires to do anything in good faith.

We need to count on worldwide class consciousness, but starting in the West. I personally believe things are trending that way. The more climate related catastrophes, the more wars, the higher prices of groceries, rents increasing will cause massive civil unrest in the US and Europe.

The time of fancy cars, fancy houses, and unlimited wealth is coming to an end. The wealthy are the few, but the good news is the rest of us are many.

Eh, as someone who’s been vegan for a couple decades, ascetic for a solid chunk of that time, and active in various other ways to greater or lesser degrees, people will still shut down mentally when they don’t have the hypocrisy lever to pull.

People in the reactionary/denialist/antagonistic camp will just end with “okay yeah you’re right but I’m not changing/I don’t actually care/I accept that I do evil and shrug”.

People looking to inspire positive change being required to be perfect saints lest they and their movements be condemned seems like a hint that human psychology is not tuned to rise to this occasion.

That expectation of perfection is unrealistic. Humans are messy and bound to be hypocritical in countless ways.

The CEO of Phillip Morris may volunteer at the local children’s hospital and feed the homeless on weekends.

Yet his hypocrisy in doing good in his personal life while doing so much harm in his professional life doesn’t seem to interfere with his ability to do harm, in fact it likely helps.

The executive director of the nonprofit children’s hospital going out on weekends and beating stray dogs to death with a pipe, well his hypocrisy may very well end his ability to do good in his personal life.

It seems like we’re just destined to let people who do bad things without any pretense of doing good off the hook, while crucifying anyone who dares try to do a moral good who isn’t somehow perfectly aligned in their lifestyle, ideology, and entire life history. Despite the fact that the former may represent a large net negative to our world and the latter may represent a net positive.

TLDR: Even if the climate activists weren’t hypocrites, your friends would likely be no closer to embracing the terrible reality of climate change and the necessity of painful sacrifice to address it.

Historically, we do have examples of it working though :

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-rise-of-chr...

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-early-christian-strateg...

Though in our case it's a much harder issue :

How do you make and keep a powerful polity while staying militarily weak ? (Tanks / planes / nukes not being an option in a society that decided to de-industrialize.)

This also involves population : a post-industrial society, is likely to have its military strength based on population (like pre-industrial societies did, where agriculturalists overwhelmed hunter-gatherers) : how do you keep your population low without becoming weak ?

(Christian polities didn't exactly stay meek, more like the opposite (after a while)...)

At least values can be transmitted memetically, without genetical lineage, so keeping a stable national population is probably the least unworkable issue as long as immigration and assimilation are high enough...

Perfectly put. Personally I am quite amazed at people who think this way. This is not adult level reasoning. It’s not something that will change by setting an example.

I just fear that large swathes of society are completely oblivious to what it means to live in a liberal civil society and how changes gets affected. The expectation of perfection seems like a result of being unfamiliar/unrealistic.

I nitpick about little things like accuracy in scientific studies (hear: blatant bias, even admitted by the authors), and only one side of the opinion being funded for studies and not the others.

I myself used to be a staunch vegan, surrounded by friends who planned not to have kids. Well, they have kids now. That triggered my will to study the original documents and find a movement that is fundamentally dishonest.

The worst angst I have is, what if they were dishonest and still right. That would be terrible.