> Consider: all of environment protection legislation that we take for granted now was once "hippie bullshit".
In part; I think environmental policies and technologies are very strongly influenced by economics and capitalism. I mean they managed to monetize CO2 emissions via emission rights. It's making money out of vapor. There's probably a few people getting very rich off of the emission rights market.
The other one is alternative energy sources. Solar panels are a good example; they're expensive, have a limited lifespan (10-15 years), and yet provide a huge amount of goodwill and feel-good. There's a lot of people getting very rich off of a product that, in the end, is not actually sustainable and does little to nothing to alleviate the emissions problem - not when the production of a solar panel costs more energy than it'll generate during its lifetime.
I'd argue the only environmental protection stuff that is still primarily motivated by hippie bullshit is things like the ban on whaling and the conservation of nature areas. Neither of which has much of an impact on the environment, unless it's on a huge scale (like idk, spanning all of the Amazon plus all of the deforested areas of the past fifty years).
In part; I think environmental policies and technologies are very strongly influenced by economics and capitalism. I mean they managed to monetize CO2 emissions via emission rights. It's making money out of vapor. There's probably a few people getting very rich off of the emission rights market.
The other one is alternative energy sources. Solar panels are a good example; they're expensive, have a limited lifespan (10-15 years), and yet provide a huge amount of goodwill and feel-good. There's a lot of people getting very rich off of a product that, in the end, is not actually sustainable and does little to nothing to alleviate the emissions problem - not when the production of a solar panel costs more energy than it'll generate during its lifetime.
I'd argue the only environmental protection stuff that is still primarily motivated by hippie bullshit is things like the ban on whaling and the conservation of nature areas. Neither of which has much of an impact on the environment, unless it's on a huge scale (like idk, spanning all of the Amazon plus all of the deforested areas of the past fifty years).