The scarier status quo

… It's not that electric vehicles can't catch on fire—they can, and we should of course be prepared to deal with it. But relative to the status quo it's a much smaller problem in every way. (Carbon Brief has a superb takedown of this and 20 other myths about EVs).

And relative to the status quo is how we should judge things, not relative to some standard of perfect safety. So, yes, windmills can kill birds. But a very small number compared to other things (cats, tall buildings, wires); in fact, new data from MIT shows that fossil fuel kills 27 times more birds per unit of energy produced than wind turbines. And the gravest danger to birds by far is the rapid heating of the planet (read Adam Welz' superb new book The End of Eden), which windmills will help forestall. So it makes no sense to oppose windmills on these grounds—you might suggest a few migration corridors where we should avoid siting them, but only in the context of building more somewhere else. Similarly, whales and offshore turbines: the data indicates no great threat, and other data makes abundantly clear that the use of fossil fuels, which windmills displace, is heating and acidifying the ocean in which whales must live. If nothing else, 40 percent of the world's ship traffic is just carrying coal and oil and gas back and forth; think of the cetacean paradise if we eliminated that.

Psychologists have done their best to explain why we're more scared of possible dangers from new things than obvious dangers from old ones ("this reaction may have to do with our amygdala, which research suggests plays a role in detecting novelty as well as processing fear"), and marketers have done their best to exploit it. But the rest of us have to do our best to fight it in ourselves and others.

A good and pertinent example: there's been a lot of fear and angst about the new mining for metals like lithium and cobalt required for the clean energy transition. In one sense this is useful: as we move into this new endeavor, we should take all the steps we can to make it clean and humane. But mining always comes with some damage, and so will this. The question is, relative to what? It takes orders of magnitude less mining (by one estimate 535 times less) to power the world with renewables than it does with fossil fuel. And breathing the smoke from fossil fuel combustion kills nine million people a year, one death in five—that's far more than will ever be affected by mining. And it helps short-circuit the rapid warming of earth, which is the deepest threat to the poorest and most vulnerable people on earth.
Social media in particular transmits shocking novelty far more effectively than common sense…

Bill McKibben
https://open.substack.com/pub/billmckibben/p/ignore-that-bomb-someone-lit-a-fire?r=35ogp&utm_medium=ios&utm_campaign=post