I have written mean things about the Sierra Club in the past and gotten yelled at by internet people for it.

The Sierra Club is good! They want to protect the environment! Do you hate the environment?

I don't. I love the environment. Which is why I want things like safe, clean nuclear reactors and controlled burns, both of which Sierra Club has used its resources, might, and "good guy" cudgel to fight over the years.

At this point, you've seen the fires in LA. They're devastating. You may have also seen Valar Atomics CEO Isaiah Taylor's tweet explaining that the "environmentalists" at the Sierra Club "successfully sued the Forest Service to prevent them from creating a Categorical Exclusion (CE) to NEPA for controlled burns (the technical term is "fuel reduction"). The CE would have allowed the forest service to conduct burns without having to perform a full EIS (the median time for which is 3.5 years)."

Controlled burning, essentially clearing out the brush under controlled conditions to prevent fires from spreading in uncontrolled ones, could have prevented the LA fires, or at least minimized their spread.

Both Sierra Club and California are prime examples of ruinous niceness: favoring saying the nice thing over actually doing the thing that is going to deliver the best results for the most people.

You can say you want to protect the environment, which sounds nice, but if the end result is the environment burning, it isn't. You're the bad guy.

You can say you want to make firefighting more diverse, which sounds nice...

.. but if the end result is thousands of homes owned by people of all races and genders burned to the ground, it isn't. You're the bad guy.

It's easier to say the nice thing than to do the hard thing that gets results. Most of the time, you get away with it. The counterfactual, the picture of the world in which you did the hard thing that gets results, is invisible. So you get the brownie points for being nice.

But there are trade-offs. Every minute and every dollar you spend on something that isn't in the best interests of the people, or, as in the case of the Sierra Club's lawsuit, is against their best interests, is a minute or dollar that you could have been spending fighting entropy and lifting all boats.

I am guilty of falling for nice words. They're nice. But I need to remind myself to look under them.

Because the world in which nice words win over right actions is a world that slowly and imperceptibly degrades, until it burns.