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Comment by spodek | Hacker News Reader

I've been asking people to name the most effective leaders in the area of global warming.

When I say my answer, they look surprised, but then agree: the Koch Brothers and Donald Trump. They are leading people not to change their behavior and this is the result. No one is leading in the direction of reducing consumption with nearly the effectiveness as them. Instead of leading ourselves, the overwhelming majority of Americans are waiting for others to change first.

In the meantime, most Americans, which I suspect includes most people reading these words, contribute more to global warming than nearly every human who has ever lived -- needlessly so, and not making them any happier.

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The members of the creative class who live in the major cities and take mass transit or bike or walk to work have the right idea. Bonus points for working at home or going full Mr. Money Mustache.

Unfortunately that's not practical for most people. Also, we overinvest in our highways and cars because there seems to be almost no collective will to build a national transportation network beyond that.

And I don't want to completely rag on one side of the political spectrum because if we could build a whole bunch more nuclear reactors we could solve a lot of this very quickly in the short-term.

Finally we could all eat a whole lot less beef. But I don't see any of this happening even if the current crop of leaders is kicked out the next round of elections.

There are solutions to a lot of the problems we face here in America but many of them are going to annoy both sides of the political fence differently therefore they're not going to happen. I'd love to see that change but I'm not holding my breath.

It'd be great if the conversation were about how we can solve these problems, but currently the conversation is about whether the scientific reality of climate change is actually a hoax invented by the Chinese. So long as these yahoos keep getting elected, we've got a long ways to go before we start talking about cutting beef out of our diet.

Then don't take about global warming. Talk about conserving water, talk about providing cheaper forms of energy for cars / home, talk about enhancing federal / state parks, etc.

It sounds good on first thought as a strategy for those anti g.w. folks to move on to your second step. But tons of those yahoos act like cheaper energy in bad for people. It's bad for people selling oil, but good for everyone else.

Can I still eat lots of poultry and pork? If so, I'd be down with less beef. I'm down to about one hamburger and one steak a week.

Yes. Cutting beef from your diet and replacing it with other meats cuts about 80% of the difference in carbon emissions between the typical American diet and a vegetarian diet.

(Although the total difference in carbon emissions from diet are subsumed by the emissions of one cross-country plane flight [1] [2], so if you're concerned about optimizing the inner loop, that's what you, as a typical reader of this site, probably need to look at.)

[1]: http://shrinkthatfootprint.com/food-carbon-footprint-diet

[2]: http://calculator.carbonfootprint.com/calculator.aspx?tab=3

But to extend the metaphor, fixing your own code is kind of pointless if all the other code running on the box runs unchanged. Fixes need to be made to shared libraries to have any impact. This means promoting politicians who aren't taking advantage of the situation to earn kickbacks from corporations who feel they will be negatively affected by fixing the problem, and implementing things like carbon taxes so that every decision made in the economy bakes in the real costs of carbon.

Fortunately, this is not an either-or situation. :) I advocate all of the above, but it's important not to be in ignorance about where the real issue lies.

In reality, it is an either-or situation.

A small number of concerned and informed individuals trying to reduce their own carbon footprint is pointless. There's no way it pencils out to anything even vaguely worthwhile, even if they went to extremes. Even if they committed suicide and left their entire inheritance to carbon reductions it simply doesn't add up.

On the other hand, a carbon tax that introduces virtually imperceptible changes across the entire economy of the world, would actually fix the problem.

So yes we can do both, but one makes effectively no difference, even if it feels like a big deal to the person doing it.

Oddly enough, eating less beef did not impact my ability to agitate for environmentalism. So, no, not either or. Demonstrations of giving a shit by making personal sacrifices are powerful accompaniments to donations, voting, protests, etc.

We usually use farmed venison for burgers, I prefer it to beef. It's about $10/lb ground from the local butcher. More expensive than beef, but cheaper than eating out. That said, we only have burgers about once a month.

They (we, I should say, as a city slicker myself) have the right idea, provided we don't wipe out all our annual carbon savings in one go by flying to Thailand for holiday.

That would be really really hard to do, for sure. Honestly, I think these luxuries that we've come to rely on, we cannot seriously convince people to not use them. We've got to find a better option.

> provided we don't wipe out all our annual carbon savings in one go by flying to Thailand for holiday.

I fear this is the thing that'll prevent any real progress toward managing climate change. While everyone will accept using canvas bags instead of plastic, they also want to keep the luxuries they've become accustomed to.

If we as a world get serious about it and begin taxing carbon emissions from flights (and other sources), I'm confident that we'll be able to handle the problem. There is going to be some extreme global discomfort in 2100-2200, but we're not going to go extinct and things will be getting better by 2400-2500.

I'd only be comfortable with taxing carbon emissions from flights if all of the tax money was directly funneled into clean energy research and development. Otherwise, it's just going into the pockets of politicians and funding defense contractors.

No, it's still better for it to be taxed than not. I would be perfectly happy to see a revenue neutral carbon tax. What the tax is spent on is orthogonal.

No, what the tax is spent on is extremely important. For instance, if revenue from a carbon tax is funneled into subsidies for cattle ranchers, it's kind of counter-intuitive isn't it?

Money is fungible. Generally speaking, new taxes are not causally linked to spending on any particular issue.

Obviously, subsidies to cattle ranchers are bad. But whether they are funded from increased debt or a carbon tax does not affect their badness.

The other alternative is to use the tax income to offset other taxes, or even return it directly to citizens as a dividend.

Then what's the point of the tax? I can see how airlines may funnel some effort into R&D to reduce carbon emissions, but only to the point where it becomes profitable to them. Returning the tax as a dividend to the consumer is just as pointless as the consumer is in no way obligated to be climate conscious with their capital.

The point is to discourage carbon-profligate behavior by making that behavior more expensive. If you increased cigarette taxes and used it to lower other sales taxes that would still reduce cigarette use[1]. Maybe you'd get even faster reductions in smoking if the cigarette taxes were all earmarked for R&D on ways to end addiction, but making something more expensive tends to reduce consumption of it regardless of how the tax is later spent.

If you're wondering "why not use targeted legislative mandates instead of carbon taxes?", I'd say that taxes have an advantage in that they're harder to game and need fewer adjustments over time. For example, if you introduce a mandate to make cars more fuel efficient, manufacturers will tweak the vehicles they sell so they are no longer "cars" but some legislatively distinct class of vehicle, and people who like gas guzzlers will just drive those tweaked vehicles. But if instead there's just a carbon tax on fuel it's a lot harder to game your way around the legislative intent.

[1] Assuming that the balance between just paying the tax and evading the tax still favors paying it. You don't want to impose a $20/pack tax and find that you've just given organized crime a major boost.

That is indeed the point of the tax. For businesses all up and down the supply chain to figure out how to do what they do, but with less carbon production.

There's a whole lot of businesses where that's relatively easy, but since carbon is effectively free, they'll happily squander it for no real gain.

You'll have to pry the beef from my cold, dead fingers.

Hey, I'll take a synthetic meat burger. Just get some fat on it and I'm good.

"They are leading people not to change their behavior and this is the result."

Rising sea level is the _result_ of Mr.Trump swearing in 3 months back?, I understand this forum is echo chamber for anti trump discussions, but you are reaching so far here.

Most peoples behavior is mainly due to capitalism, all of them, multiple generations, were raised watching ads which gets them to buy new "stuff" all the time, so "stuff" gets made/sold to keep the cycle going.

Internet and TV ads are storefront's of this "stuff". Instead of using your personal dislike of few people and spreading the message to blame them for climate change, you could get politics/personal feelings out of it, and tell people not to buy so much "stuff".

Didn't see annyone saying it's a result of Trump mabey you are just looking for somethign that's not there? But one things for sure. When POTUS flat out says climate change is a hox and dsn't get called out, we are in trouble.

Not only that, but the state of Louisiana voted for Trump in the election. For them to be complaining about rising sea levels is the height of hypocrisy. They don't believe in climate change, so how can they complain about rising sea levels?

No one said it's trump's fault, but he's going to hurt things. He is supporting that whole view though, and his policies are going to lead to serious problems, if he is effective in getting them enacted.

I understand people like to play semantic games around this topic, but you are beating up a straw-man.

That's not at all what he said.

Dont think this is a climate change issue.

How?

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The usual... by ignoring data and published science regarding it[0].

[0]https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/03/170314081553.h...

It never is.

Maybe they look surprised because the question is misleading. They hear "name the most effective leaders in the [fight to stop] global warming."

Abstinence is the answer that can not exist in a neo-liberal society.

And not in any other society that has other options.

So long as it is not a threat to profits in the forseeable future, the bourgeoisie will not care much about climate change. They will and indeed must continue to advertise and increase consumption, many requiring growing rates of profit due to loaning of capital with high interest rates.

Also, there is no ethical consumption under capitalism. Individual lifestyle choices will never have the impact needed to solve systemic problems.

http://www.siecus.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=Feature.showFeatu...

Key finding: In comparing abstinence-only programs with comprehensive sex education, comprehensive sex education was associated with a 50% lower risk of teen pregnancy.

I wonder if aggressive personal austerity could have even come close to the emissions reductions attributable to fracking.

And it's a finger in Putin's eye too!

What's wrong with losing coastline? There's no shortage of land in America or the world in general.

Entire cities will have to be moved as even a few meters of rise can flood an entire region.

It is not as if we just lose a bit of beach, if sea levels rise then everything at the new level that can be sought by water through rivers or otherwise will be under water. Not Atlantis style, but no longer habitable by cities as we currently build them.

What's more, the coastline going missing is but one symptom. Weather patterns are set to get more erratic and extreme which will cause significant damage and loss of life continuously for the forseeable future.

As we are being reactive rather than proactive in this matter, it will likely take significant disasters before anyone begins to make the changes even once weather begins to worsen and cities begin to sink.

More so, cities are disproportionately built near the coast line as water access is very valuable for trade and commerce, so relatively little land needs to be lost for a large amount of city real estate to be lost.

Climate change takes quite a long time. In that time there is tons of time to react to changing coastline. Normal market and political effect will move people or build defences again nature. Its not like the people in the netherlands are poor because the land is below sea level.

The argument about eratic weather is not very good. I have heard multible storm experts say that they can really not model the overall changes. There might be more and bigger storms in one area but less in another. I really think that if anybody is pretending he can predict storm frequence in 50 years is just confirming their bias.

> Climate change takes quite a long time

It really doesn't, when you have 7 billion people working hard to make the climate change as quickly as they can, and unfortunately we've already spent half a century knowing about the problem and doing nothing. The whole point is that we've changed major climatic change from a geological time frame to a human-scale time frame.

You'll see major upheaval as a result of climate change in your lifetime, and your children will see much worse.

The storm predictions, incidentally, are quite safe - no chance of them being wrong. Higher sea surface temperatures will absolutely lead to more frequent and violent storms; there's no chance at all of that not happening.

Its strange to say that we 'did nothing'. We did a hole lot, the replacement of coal in many places in favor of nuclear, gas, solar wind is decently something. It was mostly not done because of global warming, but it still happened.

One to two generations is a long time.

I have listen to interviews with storm experts and it seems that they are not quite so sure about is then you. That said, it seems that compared to the world economy and what some people suggest, the damage from storms seems quite low.

That's a very vague prediction. It might not be worth doing anything at all, other than planning where to move cities to gradually as the need requires. If we pull out all the stops to prevent it now, we might have wasted our resources - spending more than we saved by preventing it. Almost every building that exists today was build in the past 100 years. We can surely keep up some of that work in the next 100 years.

Are there any more concrete numbers about how much destruction is expected from global warming? It's not infinite and it must be less than some amount of money.

A few meters of rise will take a few centuries to materialise.

It is still our problem to solve, a few centuries is just a handful of generations.

Because everyone is entitled when it comes to housing. When people become obese we say that's not healthy, we should change that. When people knowingly live in disaster zones we say "but they grew up there".

What's wrong with smashing up other people's cars? We've got those all over!

People who buy low-lying land on the coast already know the risk and price that into their purchase. We don't need to protect them - they've already done it themselves.

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