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Comment by mikeash | Hacker News Reader

The activities that resulted in climate change also resulted in a vast improvement in the lives of a huge number of people. If I were somehow thrown back in time and given control over the process, I'd do it all over again, albeit with a greater emphasis on efficiency, and on alternatives once they became practical.

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> greater emphasis on efficiency, and on alternatives once they became practical.

Sorry, that's weasel language and I hear it everyday. Electric cars existed before gas tech, the first Porsche was electric, Einstein described the photoelectric effect in 1905, got Nobel Prize in 1921. The greenhouse gas effect by carbon dioxide has been realized the century before and wind energy is in use for millennia. If we had not chosen that route, we'd be _all_ better off for sure, had probably a few wars less and wouldn't look at sea level rising for thousands of years to come.

Of course you'd do it again, the party was fun and the cleanup team pays someone else.

Electric cars need batteries, which in turn need to be manufactured and charged with electrical energy by nuclear, gas, coal, solar or wind farms, which all have their effects on the environment too (but centralized plants would be easier to keep clean). Batteries are nasty chemical contraptions that are hard to produce and dispose of cleanly. Yes sometimes in Corporatism (State and Capitalism), there are underhanded deals, but in Capitalism, things cost money, because they take time and labor. Instead of disparaging somebody with a pejorative term, why not use your smarts and labor to come up with a way of accomplishing your wishes to see something realized? Money is, in the general sense, man's way of placing some value on goods or services, his time and labor. It is not evil in and of itself, it is a thing that allows trade to take place; men act, and do either good or evil. The world is a whole lot better due to technology, markets, and Capitalism. Sure, it's not perfect, but more people have been lifted out of poverty through it, or by it. It does have its warts. You should aim for utopia (aim high, miss low), but not fail any policy that isn't 100% utopia. As an aside, sea-levels are not going to just rise like water in a glass analogy because of polar ice melting. They are going to fall in certain places and really increase in others due to many physical reasons - see [1].

[1] - http://nautil.us/issue/33/attraction/why-our-intuition-about...

I'm not anti-capitalism. I just say we've it thrown it at the wrong energy source and went us into dark ages. Just imagine for a second all that money, labor and ingenuity had been used to develop solar. Or the other way round, where will solar be in 100 years?

And please learn the difference between melting sea ice and land ice. It's measured in kilometers.

I am assuming you are not directing the last line at my comment, since I know the difference between melting sea ice and land ice; you should read the article I referenced as it addresses sea vs. land ice, salinity near an iceberg, and many other topics. The main point was to say it is not a universal rise in levels. A lot of people, even technically-minded people, do not grok these points. Like me: I didn't know the land rebounded back up, but that make sense once you hear it. The weight compresses the land, and when it diminishes, any recoil in it acts.

We wouldn't be better off if we had not used coal, oil, and natural gas for the last 200 years, we would be much, much poorer. There would not be as much pollution in the world, but we would have missed out on a massive amount of economic growth that was only possible through abundant, realiable energy.

There is nothing more reliable than solar. And do you really feel rich after taking money from your children?

Solar became practical and economical for mainstream usage about a decade ago. It wasn't an alternative.

> Of course you'd do it again, the party was fun and the cleanup team pays someone else.

Wow. I don't know how you expect that to contribute to the conversation. Maybe your goal is just to shut it down? Don't be a dick.

instead of assaulting the poster directly we should pick up where he left and think of ways to improve the situation. Bickering just breeds more negative thinking

I had half of such a reply written, but when I got to than massive insult I couldn't proceed.

I think it's worthwhile to inform people when they've gone way too far.

I often think about what the world would do if we all did have a chance to do it over again. I would hope that all the fossil fuels would stay in the ground and easy routes to electrical, wind, water and other energies would be discovered instead. As a race we took the easy way out when we discovered the huge stores of energy in the Earth, but now we are paying the price, and I'd rather we had worked harder in the beginning to find methods that would have prevented what's happened (my particular pet peeve is the awful air quality that is now accepted around the world). But also as a race, I know we would have been capable of pulling it off, but we didn't because humans more often than not take the easiest path.

So I must respectfully disagree with you. The alternatives should have been rigorously pursued from the beginning.

Of course, I too enjoy the benefits of the technologies fueled by everything that causes global climate change, and wouldn't want to do without. But the evidence for deleterious side-effects of progress have been around for a very long time, and time and again overlooked until it had reached an interim crisis point.

I don't have a solution for balancing technological improvement with due caution for untoward outcomes. That lies in the social/political domain, but it provokes the question of whether we humans have the courage or will to face up to the task or what it takes to get us there.

Or even the capacity.

a vast improvement in the lives of a huge number of people.

It sounds like you view utility of happiness as additive, in which case the only justifiable decision in your unlikely circumstance would be to do everything in your power to prevent the 19th/20th century population explosion that resulted in the need for the aforementioned activities that resulted in climate change. Additively, there's far more misery and suffering in the world now than there has ever been at any point in history.

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