[CompelTechnic]

One thing I find troubling about environmentalism is that the tendency to try to make everything more energy efficient/ optimized for the environment risks throwing the baby out with the bathwater in a few ways:

-More expensive energy directly leads to less energy-intensive activity, and a lot of this energy-intensive activity is the sort of activity that helps human flourishing.

-A tendency to regulate activity such that the most energy-optimized activity is the only allowable/ affordable activity.

-Regulating away the ability to do things, especially things that have questionable externalities and the regulators don't see the immediate value of. Is it really a good thing that the Netherlands is destroying the livelihoods of farmers to protect natural areas from Nitrogen emissions? Who quantified the harm associated with the nitrogen emissions? How does this harm food security in the Netherlands? How does this fare in relation to the fact that energy independence and food independence go hand-in-hand, at a time when there is a global fertilizer shortage and a European energy shortage? Seems short-sighted to me.

[Arn_Thor]

Regulation is short-sighted? You say this in a world that's burning up because no one imposed on emitters the cost of the externalities of those emissions... Now that is short-sighted.

[m463]

The saying I recall is: "You can't save yourself rich"