Had a browse around and these look good, although very US focused (standard for Reddit though).

However, on every thread I checked, about 70% of comments are deleted. That means that the noise is still there, but the mods are having to work nonstop to fight it and no doubt introducing their own bias as they do so.

I wish them luck and I'll keep checking these places out but I can't help but feel that by the time you're deleting 70% of all comments (and who knows what percentage of threads), you're fighting a losing battle.

And why wouldn't you condemn grandparent post first?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47439266

> Closing Groningen didn't leave fossil in the ground. It took LNG from US and gas from Norway out of the ground instead.

That was getting out of the ground and burned by someone anyway.

The only direct thing we (the Netherlands) can do to prevent carastrophic climate change is to leave fossil fuels on our territory in the ground. Everything else is indirect.

That is because that money is allowed to be made by externalizing the cost to future generations.

People hate migrants enough as it is. Climate crisis migrations will make these "little" war migrations seem quaint.

> You’re willing to sacrifice the lives of at least some poor people who exist now, or are likely to exist in the near future, for a theory that is unfalsifiable.

What exactly do you mean with "unfalsifiable"? We actually measure atmospheric CO2, sea level and temperature; that's plenty falsifiability to me. And the greenhouse effect itself is not even in question.

Fossil emissions are sacrificing people not just from climate change in the future, but right now from air pollution, too (about 5M deaths per year actually, according to https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38030155/).

What exactly is your argument here? That organic chemistry is all wrong and oxidization is unfalsifiable, or that the fossil industry itself is fudging the numbers to make it look life we're oxidizing less organic matter than we think?

“Fossil fuel air pollution responsible for 1 in 5 deaths worldwide”: https://hsph.harvard.edu/climate-health-c-change/news/fossil...

It means having to make serious decisions on imperfect information, yes. But that's life.

No, everything can move to electricity, China is doing it, Europe can too. You are free to your opinion, but the facts and evidence are clear. If you would like an hour of time with an expert from Ember Energy to explain this, happy to pay for that hour of time for you to update your priors and mental model on the topic of Europe's energy transition trajectory.

> Note that drilling for oil in the North Sea is a completely different subject, because that's not used for electricity generation, nor is electricity a substitute. EV market share in Europe is still far too low for that to be a conversation for a long time.

Europe's EV uptake will speed based on the price of oil increasing and remaining high for the foreseeable future.

> But even if your best case scenario were somehow possible (and it really isn't) there's still money to be made exporting fossil fuels to the developing world. So your assertion "inefficient use of capital to support more fossil exploration" is just flat wrong.

The developing world is leapfrogging fossil fuels and going straight to solar, batteries, and EVs. What will expensive LNG do to this market? It will force them to renewables and electric mobility faster. Ethopia's uptake of EVs after they banned combustion vehicles is an example of this. Why did they ban combustion vehicles? Because they have no domestic fossil fuel supplies and the import cost was crushing them; their EVs are powered by domestic hydro electricity production.

Citations:

Surging Gas Prices Reignite EV Interest - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-03-14/iran-war-... | https://archive.today/BkAfR - March 14th, 2026

Global EV sales hit 1.1 million – Europe surges while the US slides - https://electrek.co/2026/03/12/global-ev-sales-hit-1-1-milli... | https://archive.today/nhIbF - March 12th, 2026

EVs Avoided the Use of 2.3M Barrels of Oil per Day in 2025 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47420092 - March 2026

Electric Vehicle Sales Boom as Ethiopia Bans Fossil-Fuel Car Imports - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47068567 - February 2026

How we made it: will China be the first electrostate? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44101275 - May 2025

Massive global growth of renewables to 2030 is set to match entire power capacity of major economies today, moving world closer to tripling goal - https://www.iea.org/news/massive-global-growth-of-renewables... - October 9th, 2024

The World Hit ‘Peak’ Gas-Powered Vehicle Sales — in 2017 - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-01-30/world-hit... - January 30th, 2024

How are you supposed to know which Democrat secretly supports trans rights?

Democrats were NOT talking about transgender issues. Conservatives were.

Democrats talking about jobs, economic disopportunity, and naked corruption gets no votes, because republican voters are not motivated by those. They are using those as talking point against democrats, but that is about it.

The propaganda machine is powerful, precisely because the ultra-wealthy who fund it want the people to fight a culture war instead of a class war. The wealthy have been successfully astroturfing right-wing anti-democratic movements for decades, to the point that fascism is making a comeback. Climate-change denial was one of their earlier experiments, and anti-trans psyop is their most recent. The result is the same, creating false divisions among the masses who have more in common than they realize.

The world is burning before our eyes. It is unconscionable to use the rights and the bodies of the marginalized to put out the fire. What would be the point of making a better society if it requires leaving the most vulnerable behind? How would that even be a better society? We must be cognizant of who the real enemy is and never do the oppressor's work for them. Billionaires have class solidarity; for our planet’s survival, we must build solidarity as well. Fight the class war, and you fight climate change, transphobia, and all threats to life and liberty.

> No. But a lot of people in the center will listen to academics again if they don't think they're being lectured on a new definition of bigotry every fifteen minutes.

I get annoyed by some performative language games too, but I just don't see any evidence that your broader claim here is true.

> Also, from what I can tell, the issue of trans rights caused issues in the centre when it lept to kids' sports.

Most people are willing to acknowledge that the sports issue is a bit complicated, but it's also such an incredibly niche issue and so much lower stakes than everything else. People got off their couches for the sports thing because it's a "safe" environment in which to express hatred towards an out group. You can tell that it was never about sports by the actions taken by the loudest complainers on the issue (enshrining housing and employment discrimination, weird laws about forcing teachers to report violations of religious principles to parents, creepy nonsense like the bill to make lists of all trans people or mass cancel all of their drivers licenses etc.)

> What it needed was for strong left-wing people to stand up and denounce the distraction

Here's the reality: very few people actually believe climate change is an existential problem. As you say, this is abundantly signalled by very few folks being willing to compromise on other beliefs to advance it.

Want to build infrastructure? Cut taxes? Suddenly, people can put their differences aside. Want to do anything on the climate? Everyone has a policy bogeyman to attach, whether it be union requirements and gender issues or immigration and religious tests.

There's a Guante lyric I really like about this topic that I think highlights how I feel about your argument:

"Those who turn hoses on water protеctors

Are those who cage "Stop Cop City" protеstors

And enforce the brutality of the border

Same ones who enforce bans on drag performers

Same ones who enforce bans

On crossing state lines for abortions

Some of those that work forces

Are the same that burn crosses

Are the same that burn everything

For the bosses"

I don't think we totally disagree, but I come down differently on where to point the blame.

> What it needed was for strong left-wing people to stand up and denounce the distraction.

I mean, that did happen.

> To claim loud and proudly that transgender issues were not important when compared to climate change.

That was said, along with housing prices/inflation/corruption.

> Instead, we took to the street for BLM, when it wasn't an important issue

Here's where you're really, really losing me. You're:

1. Pivoting to a totally different issue

2. Ignoring the role of the media in promoting the most controversial takes and presentation of both issues. It sucks to blame people for having values when the real problem is for-profit engagement-based media.

3. Ick - it really rubs me the wrong way to see people say "BLM wasn't an important issue when compared to climate change". That seems really easy to say if you're not under routine threat of state violence, but BLM was a reaction to a very real epidemic of state violence against black people. To those people, that kind of immediate threat IS as big a deal as climate change. If anything, criticize the branding of "defund the police" (which was so bad I half wonder if it was a psyop).

Moreover, part of my original point was that climate change isn't a separate thing - it's a problem because the same systems that use wedge issues to divide us all benefit from the unsustainable status-quo.

The realpolitik take on this seems so short sighted - it takes for granted that some progress can be made on climate change by ignoring our values, while also ignoring that alienating the affected groups makes it harder to change our society enough to do anything about climate change.

I made my position clear in other comments, so I'll leave it at that. I do not find your arguments persuasive.

> when you're in an existential fight, is it really that important that you use the limited attention of the public to fight for the rights of a single person?

Yes. That's what rights are. If we don't support them for one person, we don't have them for any person.

> I think you're sort of proving the parent's point - when you're in an existential fight, is it really that important that you use the limited attention of the public to fight for the rights of a single person?

Literally conservatives did that. THEY made this focus of the debate. Democrats reaction do not even matter here. It is ultimately irrelevant, because people like you then obsess over imaginary democrats positions democratic party never really had.

> "It must be a crime if you don't treat me as a member of the opposite sex".

This is a thing that basically does not exist. This is, again, more right-wing culture war bullshit that was cooked up in a meth lab. It's not real.

Can you get fired if you purposefully antagonize your boss at work? Yes. That's always been the case. Guess what, if I call my boss a jackass I'm probably getting shown the door, and that's not even a pronoun.

Can you get in trouble for discriminating based on gender and sexual orientation? Yes, and that's been the case for a while.

Nobody is getting into legal trouble because they don't personally believe trans women aren't "real" women, whatever "real" might mean to them. Nobody, not a soul. It's just a non-issue.

What's going on is there is a set of people who are basically just doing nothing who are under constant new and innovative threats from the right. And, when they say, "hey, don't do that", we somehow have the gall to point at them and yell "Culture war! Culture war!"

It's not that people's goodwill is being burnt on trans people. It's that the right has been playing to the populist messaging they have in order to continue their crusade.

While the economy is burning down, and the climate is worsening, and we are entering wars, they are trying to convince you the problem is some set of people who are doing nothing. And, that the solution is simple: beat down this set of people.

This includes immigrants, trans people, gay people. Of course, it's just not true. But humans are stupid. We're already pre-wired to be uneasy around people we don't understand who are different from us, especially visibly different. And, humans understand and have high confidence in simple solutions.

I mean, God, look at the border wall. Will that work? Did that work? Of course not. But it's such a simple, almost child-like understanding of the problem that people had very high confidence in it.

I don't think you and I live in the same information universe, since I disagree with literally every thing you've said here. Unfortunately I don't have the energy to productively try to disabuse you of (what I believe are) delusions, misinformation and ignorance, so... have a nice day I guess.

> The right condemns nazis and racists, so you wont find any open racists and nazis in their ranks.

This is flagrantly inaccurate.

Dismissing all of this as some sort of right-wing moral panic avoids engaging with legitimate feminist objections.

It's not "insane" to question whether males should be allowed to access female-only spaces, or to resist the erosion of sex categories in law. Many women on the left have done exactly that, and have been vilified and harassed for it.

If it's anything like the situation in the UK's part of the North Sea then it'll be development of new wells in existing fields rather than entirely new exploration.

The majors have effectively abandoned new drilling, leaving a bunch of smaller or independent players - but even they are mostly doing limited appraisal & development operations rather than exploration in the traditional sense.

If the Iran situation drags on for more than a year then there'll likely be a temporary increase in activity, but the declining trend will almost certainly continue in the longer term even without further regulatory intervention.