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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

> If you believe the USA should be involved at all on the international stage, this creation of new public knowledge is a big detriment to that end.

The belief that the U.S. needs to be involved in the international stage is based on the fallacious assumption that international cooperation can fix climate change. There is no scenario in which that happens.

Without fundamental technological leaps, we'd have to decrease the standard of living in the developed world to reduce emissions while accommodating increased standard of living in the developing world. The math doesn't add up.

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> The belief that the U.S. needs to be involved in the international stage

It's in the financial interests of the US to be involved on the international stage. I listened to Trump's speech today and heard nothing but "Boohoo, it's so hard to be America". The reality is that the US is the gorilla in every room - we have the largest economy, largest military, and American hegemony has been a massive benefit to the country. Countries bend over backwards to gain access to US markets and millions still aspire to move here looking for better opportunities.

The whole situation reminds me of a quote from Interstellar - "We used to look up at the sky and wonder at our place in the stars. Now we just look down and worry about our place in the dirt."

We've giving up our global leadership for the sake of a few extra dollars in our pocket now - never mind the cost of inaction or every bit of scientific evidence that tells us something must be done. Even the Department of Defense believes that climate change is real and will have significant consequences for the US.

When did American exceptionalism turn into "It's too hard so I'm going to do nothing"?

> When did American exceptionalism turn into "It's too hard so I'm going to do nothing"?

That's been a painfully common refrain in the current generation of political discourse (though the generational line is difficult to pinpoint; there seem to be as many young people talking about it as 60 year old lifetime senators).

Climate change? Hard to deal with, we should do nothing.

Gun control? They will take all our guns, or take none, and the second amendment said I could have guns. There is no middle ground.

But the root cause is polarization; rather than middle grounds, shades of gray, or compromises, everything in the current political climate seems to boil down to black or white, right or wrong, with no space between.

It's... Hard to watch, some days.

Your ignorance is breathtaking. The US and other developed countries have always taken the lead on environmental policy that has resulted in real change. The most famous is the Montreal Protocol which resulted in the banning of CFCs and saved the Ozone Layer[1]. The policy decision drove technological innovation and created entire new classes of appliances and chemicals which resulted in millions of new jobs.

After the Kyoto disaster, and now this, it is going to be hard to anyone to trust The United States. Past Republican and Democratic presidents may not have fully agreed with their predecessor's foreign policy decisions but they always aimed for consistent outward message. All this does it give China and Russia what they wanted, that the United States can't be trusted as a partner.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montreal_Protocol

The CFC problem was a narrow one, and the Montreal protocol was implemented a decade after development started on CFC alternatives. At the time Montreal was implemented, there was a clear picture of how to get from point A to point B. Climate change is in comparison a moon shot. We don't know what will work and how it'll work. There's not some single thing we can ban and fix the problem. It calls for structural change and changes in peoples' way of life and the political system can't achieve that.

Citation needed. Solar, wind, EV and now even electrical storage are being jump started with tax credits.

Solar, wind, EV and now even electrical storage are being jump started with tax credits.

Were. At least if Trump gets his way:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/20...

"climate change is in comparison a moon shot"

This couldn't be more apt. It took a nation-state level of engineering to make it work, but the science (broadly speaking) was pretty well known. I believe that a similar nation-state scale funded engineering project to address climate change.

Unfortunately - to torture the analogy even further, we don't currently have a moon base and we've not sent a human outside of LEO since then. Maybe a grand nation-state effort is doomed to fail? I hope not.

I respectfully disagree on this. The moon shot was a specific engineering challenge, with a clearly defined goal.

Decarbonizing our economy is vastly different in two ways: 1) a multitude of approaches and engineering solutions rather than a single path, 2) huge amounts of industry across the world (10s of millions of people) rather than a small (thousands) focused team. A nation-state effort like a moon shot is doomed to fail at something like this. We need lots of experimentation, lots of failures, and a few successes.

This is better solved through market approaches. This is what we've been implementing over the past years. We subsidize carbon neutral tech through tax credits (negative tax) rather than placing a positive tax on carbon emission. This is less than ideal, but at least it equalizes things.

Climate change isn't a moon shot. We know how to fix it. Tax carbon emissions and provide tax benefits and subsidies to convert energy infrastructure to solar, wind, and nuclear power, and to convert the automobile fleet to run on electricity.

None of the technology required for this is magical. It's all developed and proven and deployed. It's on the market right now. It just needs to be scaled and we need to get over the adoption hurdle. Once that happens it gets exponentially cheaper. Compare the price of a flat panel display today to one 20 years ago and now look at the price history curves for solar panels and batteries.

Once we get over the adoption curve this stuff will be cheaper than fossil fuels. That's how industrial scaling works.

You might have been able to make your argument 20 years ago. The situation with fossil fuels vs. alternatives today is a lot closer to the situation with CFCs at the time of the Montreal accord. Back then conservatives cried about how we were no longer going to have refrigeration or air conditioning and today they're crying about how doing something about climate change means going back to pre-industrial times. It's total nonsense. EVs are better than internal combustion cars.

> The U.S. doesn't need to be involved on the international stage.

I disagree in large part, though I do think the world would be stabler if the USA took much less military action and was a bit more respectful of zones of influence of other countries.

But even if I strongly agreed, I'd think the USA should make an orderly retreat from its existing obligations. Instead it's creating vacuums of power and chaos based on fits of pique by a literal maniac.

> The fallacy here is assuming that international cooperation is going to solve climate change.

It's worked on other issues. And political environments drive technological change.

But, yes, I agree it's a particularly thorny issue, and I wouldn't say I'm too optimistic of its probability of success compared to other international collaborations. But that's something to bemoan, not something to celebrate.

> There is no political fix. Only technological ones.

Technological fixes will not be adopted unless climate-related externalities are internalized into transactions, because of the tragedy of the commons. A political fix is a necessary prerequisite to the adoption of any technological fix.

There are very real physical limits to technological fixes anyway: https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/02/the-alternative-energy-ma...

That site thinks that a source that could produce less than 25% of total foreseeable global demand is worthless. I find this to be a rather strange conclusion. Two sources, each producing 24% of foreseeable global demand, could cut emissions and fuel use by 48%, which would be huge.

This, very much this.

Another way to put this: the asteroid does not care if your financial markets have factored it in the models or not. It just hits you.

Energy consumption is one of the largest costs of every human activity, there is already incredible incentives for everyone to reduce consumption. Energy efficiency has increased for every country despite the lack of a common political framework. [1]

[1] http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php/...

But improving efficiency reduces cost, which can sometimes actually increase overall use.

If we're going to see reductions in emissions for economic reasons, we need emissions to cost something.

> A political fix is a necessary prerequisite to the adoption of any technological fix.

Political "fixes" are by nature temporary in the scheme of things. Regimes come and go, governments rise and fall, etc. They can possibly serve as useful incentives in the short term to drive certain changes, assuming there is sufficient faith in the longer term stability of the political "fix". Such faith has been shaken due to various reasons.

Technology, on the other hand, does not regress so easily IMHO. A technological advance that is sufficiently compelling - say fusion power for the sake of a dramatic illustration, can make previous "dirtier" technologies obsolete, and price them out even in the presence of improperly calculated externalities.

It is hard to implement a technological fix without political will.

Politcal can reserve funding, can align businesses and academics, can make that technological windfall we haven't yet invented a little mote likely.

What if there is no technological solution, or we fail to find it? Having political agreement and unity to fallback on is a good thing. Even if we do something terrible to the planet, we can mitigate that together, instead of ignoring it or making it worse.

What if there is no technological solution, or we fail to find it?

Then we're going to see a dramatic transformation of the planet due to significantly rising global temperatures. That is the grim reality.

Trump is the antithesis of unified political will. He's a symptom of a deeply divided society.

The focus on finding consensus and political will on climate change is putting the cart before the horse. There's no consensus or deal making to be had with this degree of division and anger.

I agree. Not being able to get it doesn't change the fact that we need it.

> The U.S. doesn't need to be involved on the international stage.

Yeah, it really does. The US might be a big economy, but not-US is an even bigger economy.

And the US is an ever-decreasing share of the global economy - it's shrinking in relative terms. China overtook the US in World GDP share at PPP in 2014.

> fallacious assumption that international cooperation can fix climate change

ITER for example is an international project which if it were successful would change the energy landscape and by extension the climate change issue dramatically.

This and projects like this requires international cooperation.

Also look at when the world united to outlaw HCFC refrigerant. That made a huge difference to the planet's outlook.

The cost of measures to respond to climate change's consequences dwarf the costs to prevent it. Look at the 5.5 billion euro flood barrier that was built in venice. That is just to protect one city. Now multiply that over all cities on all coastlines.

We can't afford to do nothing, it is simply too expensive.

Even controlling for the harm to the environment, you have to consider the harm to our foreign policy if we become unable to uphold any agreement for more than 4 years.

I'd hope our counterparts from other nations would be sophisticated enough about our Constitutional system to understand that what one President can agree to without enshrining it in law through Congress, a later President can just as easily disregard.

Irrelevant. I don't care why your country is not trustworthy.

Exactly. Other countries have working systems of government. The US needs to get their shit together.

I agree. And it's true that the Paris agreement should have gone through the treaty ratification process. But I'm not convinced our president understands that difference and I definitely do not believe that his behavior is motivated by a comprehension of those differences rather than the content of the agreement.

> Without fundamental technological leaps

Sounds like we'd better get working, then? Emissions controls to stimulate private innovation, plus public research grants to help longer-term innovation. We need to set up incentives wherein fundamental technological leaps are the goal.

Even if climate change is a figment of people's imagination, it's a shared figment, and leadership affects how the US is perceived.

China is rising, and China is In. That means China will be leading where the US is off on its own.

That's flat out untrue. The first set of targets from the Paris accords will probably be met without any action by Trump simply due to the fact that we are switching from Coal to Natural Gas and Wind/Solar power. The next set of targets would require either alot more Solar, or a commitment to replacing the rest of the coal plants with Nuclear. None of these are either a huge technological leap or a major reduction in our standard of living.

I agree that technology is our only hope now, but only because we cannot stop conservative's occasional grip on power and their love of oil money. If technology doesn't save us eventually war, famine and the collapse of the world order will stop carbon emissions but by then it will be too late.

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