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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

The government could eliminate poverty if everyone was willing to make significant sacrifices to do so. But it won't happen because the necessary changes would be politically untenable. Climate change is the same. No President is going to make the kind of significant investments necessary to have a meaningful impact on climate change. The Paris Accord is a merely symbolic bit of goal setting. It does not provide an infrastructure for how to achieve the goal, or commit any real resources to doing so.

In terms of national priorities, even among Democrats, climate change takes a back seat to (1) jobs; (2) pensions; (3) education; and (4) healthcare. At the same time, it'll require a bigger change to the economy than any of those things.

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I guess we need some research to back up how much it would cost. My understanding is that experts in the field widely believe we can afford to make a significant impact, and that the costs of climate change are far greater than the costs of preventing it.

I think the grandparent's point is that it doesn't matter whether it's technically possible for us to prevent climate change, it's politically impossible even with a Democrat as president. Which I hope is not true, but with Trump in office it seems all the more probable.

http://thesolutionsproject.org/

But the costs happen at different times. We are already paying some of the cost of climate change, but what we're currently paying is far less than the cost of prevention. It is a short-term vs. long-term problem, and unfortunately short-term thinking is ascendant.

There is a big gap between what we can afford and what we are willing to commit. We could probably have a modest impact with a couple of hundred billion a year in investment (equivalent to the home mortgage interest deduction). We could afford it. But I think it's unthinkable we'll get even a few tens of billions a year for climate change. At that point, there are much higher value ways to spend our limited environmental dollars.

Again, we need something to back up your numbers.

What you are saying is the cost of keeping human life on this planet is too high?

And that even simple steps like not subsidizing coal, when natural gas is cheaper and there for responsible for the decrease in coal mining, it too expensive of a step?

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