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Comment by vesak | Hacker News Reader

>Be constructive, be creative.

Ok, solution time. Let's immediately ban everyone who denies that climate change is human made from all positions of power. That implies stripping them of both titles and wealth.

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Why bother?

The IPCC, which is the official authority on climate change, says that over the next 200 years sea levels will rise by a meter or 2.

Damaging, for sure. Trillions of dollars in costs. But not exactly world ending.

Thats the scientific consensus. I look at the official statistics that the scientists provide, and I go "meh".

If I had the choice between magically stopping climate change forever, and stopping, I don't know, a single Iraq War (trillions in damages!), I'd have an awful hard time choosing between the 2.

Luckily, those aren't mutually exclusive choices. And climate change potentially causes wars as countries are strapped for resources, so acting to fix climate change is a twofer.

Also: you are understating the cost of climate change. These estimates are tricky to get right, but the IPCC estimates a ballpark figure of 1-4% of GDP for a 4 degrees C increase in global mean temperature. That puts the cost on the order of trillions per year, not in total.

4 degrees C is an absolute upper bound in the temperature predictions. The kind of thing you'd get if the world attempted to explicitly maximize CO2 output, instead of only pretending to minimize.

And then imagine if they did that for the next 80 years.

We are not going to climate change tomorrow, but I'd be awfully surprised if we haven't made some very good progress in the next 2 decades.

Solar prices have something like 10 to 100X decreased over the last 20 years, and there really isn't that much further (comparatively!) to go before they reach grid parity.

What I am saying is, that there are a whole lot of reasons to be optimistic about the future, and that panic seems a litter premature. We are currently easily on track to solving it, solely through normal capitalistic efforts that have created the amazing technology breakthroughs that we've seen over the last 2 decades.

Why wait for the free market fairies to magically fix climate change decades from now, when we can tax and mitigate the pollution that's destroying other people's lives and property right now? That's a well understood solution within the scope of already known science, and economics can easily predict what happens when you tax something: use of it goes down.

The free market fairies can, and already ARE fixing the problem.

It is thanks to them that we got our 30X decrease in solar prices, and made it even plausible to run the world on renewables.

But sure, do a carbon tax and externalize the externalities. I am all in favor of making people pay for the damage that they cause, directly proportional to the cost of the damage.

That is the most free market solution there is.

But my original comment was not responding to someone who made a reasonable proposal for 50$ a ton tax on carbon or something.

I was responding to someone making an outlandishly, crazy proposal.

Climate change is a problem. But it is not a world ending problem. It is a reasonably sized problem that can be solved with reasonable solutions and we do not need to kill of half of the surplus population or ban all cars or go back to living on the land or anything.

All we got to do is maybe make owning a car 20% more expensive, and then the market will figure it out, as it has been figuring it out and making a whole lot of progress for the last 20 years

I don't think you deserve the downvotes, and I agree with you that using taxes to price in the externalities of releasing carbon will help contribute to a solution. That said, I think you might be underestimating the problem. We've been trying for decades to get it under control, and as the article shows, the problem is rapidly accelerating, not improving, or even worsening at a steady rate.

We also don't know what the effect of a rapid multi-degree temperature increase will be. It's possible that it could set off positive feedback loops that will make the problem much worse. Maybe it won't, but it would be nice not to take the risk.

I agree that CO2 is very unlikely to end human civilization. But it could certainly make things much less pleasant than they need to be for a long time. In my opinion it's worth a significant amount of short-term pain to rein it in as much as possible.

Capitalistic efforts fueled and steered by taxes and subsidies. Do you really think there would have been anywhere near this progress if market forces would have left on their own?

Just for the sake of the argument: GW could be an financial and economic opportunity as well: The planet is inundated by liquidities since the 90' (30 years ago!) as states are in a never ending money war. This have been dramatically furthered with quantitative easing and negative interests. As inflation is something seen as dispectable as it lowers the values of shares, here is an opportunity to have money used for something useful, instead of being wasted. Indeed I would prefer a new spatial program, but war for renewables will do the business.

> The IPCC, which is the official authority on climate change, says that over the next 200 years sea levels will rise by a meter or 2. Damaging, for sure. Trillions of dollars in costs. But not exactly world ending.

Sea rise is only one of the expected consequences.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effects_of_global_warming

You should probably go look up the Anthropocene Mass Extinction and the concept of a food web. We're actually looking at the end of the world as we know it here.

You either do this via dictatorship, which is problematic (highly unlikely to remain committed to environmental agenda in long run), or via democracy, but if via democracy, then it's pointless. If people are willing to do this, they're willing to cut carbon. The problem with those denialists is that we keep electing them!

Doing this within democratic structures may be a hard problem, but that doesn't make it unsolvable.

(I'm not sure where you get the authority to ban people from authority from. That was a fun sentence!)

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