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Comment by harwoodleon | Hacker News Reader

It's not hard to change. If everyone changed what they do day to day (stop flying, stop eating beef, stop driving everywhere), we would not be talking about the future in such a bleak way. But everyone thinks they are the exception, it's OK if they do it. That's why governments introduce taxes to discourage bad behaviour, because people are ultimately stupid.

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It's hard to change unilaterally. For instance, it's easy to say "stop driving everywhere", but the majority of locales do not cater well to non-drivers. It's easy to say "stop flying", but in practice that's almost equivalent to "don't travel any significant distance from home, ever".

People aren't stupid just because they don't drop everything and make one specific goal their highest priority above all else. Many people haven't even thought about that goal, and even for those who have, it may not even objectively be the highest priority goal.

People could for example elect governments that want to build transit or dis-incentivize carbon heavy activities and incentivize their replacements, but they don't.

We're actually quite lucky to have a decent Green Party and a proportional government system here (NZ), where the Green Party can get up to ~15% of the vote. I wish it was more though.

In a world where no party is proposing reforms that will actually do enough, I feel like I basically have a responsibility to vote for the most environmentally conscious not-totally-insane option.

Indeeed. In the UK, no party has an environmental platform worth mentioning. There isn't even an environment position in the cabinet any more - just industry.

Conservatives promise to dig up the country.

Lib dead promise to dig up the country, slowly.

Labour promise to dig up the country, for the people.

And the greens promise not to dig up the country, but will make us all live in grass huts.

>>That's why governments introduce taxes to discourage bad behaviour, because people are ultimately stupid.

They aren't stupid, they are selfish. At the end of the day it comes down to what's called Tragedy of the Commons: individuals keep doing things they know are bad for the environment because our economic system prioritizes the exploitation of natural resources (which is a zero-sum game by definition) and if they don't exploit it, someone else will. Therefore, everyone continues to do it. That is why we need top-down (read: government) regulation.

Oh stop. I haven't driven to work more than a handful of times in my entire life. I've recycled my recyclables my whole life. I only fly once or twice a year, and I can even cut that out if necessary. I eat meat once a day or less by now (red meat is only a part of that), and not in very large quantities or expensive cuts either. I walk or bike everywhere and take public transit when I can't.

I'm happy to pay higher prices for meat, higher prices for airline flights. I'm happy in general to ration out personal luxuries more thinly than I already do. I really do want to avoid the end of the world.

But at the same time, I want some damned personal security in exchange, and right now I'm not getting any of it. We don't have much personal security if something bad happens in life, and the world is ending anyway.

Carbon tax or bust.

> If everyone changed what they do day to day (stop flying, stop eating beef, stop driving everywhere), we would not be talking about the future in such a bleak way.

And what would replace these things? Would they not create another catastrophic problem in another area?

What is the magic bullet that fixes all the world's problems??

Stop pumping carbon into the sky?

Have you seen a volcano erupt in real-time via satellite? I have and I've tracked the plume for days and sometimes weeks. Sometimes, there are 5 or 6 of these events a day. A very rare day to not have at least one of earth's visible volcanoes erupt.

Now lets talk about all the volcanoes that are underwater... then we can talk about solar weather and more...

Nobody is impressed by your stupid stories of having been a weatherman in the air-army. Annual average volcano emissions are three orders of magnitude smaller (that's 1/1000, for the innumerate in the audience) than human CO2 emissions from fossil fuel combustion. And you can't fucking _see_ CO2 anyway. It's fucking invisible. Whatever you saw from that volcano was water or dust or ash or whatever, the things that volcanoes spew into the upper atmosphere that counteract the warming effect of their CO2 emissions.

Your tone greatly diminishes the value of your arguments (on which I agree, by the way). Could yo try being less personally aggressive, next time?

No. This is the tone I intend to take with all dimwitted or disingenuous climate change deniers on this site.

Transit that uses renewable energy, or zero fossil fuels. Such as walking & cycling. Obviously one can cut beef out of their diet, or go full vegetarian. Stop flying is a bit trickier for people who need to travel around, but high speed trains that run on electricity are a good consideration.

And a lot of travelling can be replaced with video meetings. (Seriously, what is a good term? I was about to write Skype-meetings, but want a general term (in particularly since Skype predictably sucks more and more since MS bought them).)

Video calls, remote meetings, typically how we call it at work. Use it with clients even in the city

Even cutting down on beef while still eating other meat would be a significant help, I believe. That's achievable though I imagine the beef industry would lobby against any push.

I used to think this way. Then I realized how many truly greedy and completely selfish people are living among us, and it's more than half. At that point, I gave up and joined the masses. The only way to fix it is to incentivize technology improvements and create government policy structure to assault climate change from the top down. And that won't get major until the problems become so evident that almost nobody can deny it. The future is bleak and it's hard to see where the good real estate of the future will be.

I was thinking about more extreme change than that to be honest, a really noticeable change in quality of life. I already try not to fly or drive too much.

But even with what you list, external factors based on other people still happen, like your work wants you to fly somewhere, or public transport sucks because everyone else is still driving.

I disagree that we feel like the exception when we're acting like everyone else. We feel like the exception when we're trying to be better and others aren't.

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