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Comment by brohoolio | Hacker News Reader

We fixed the ozone layer and stopped acid rain. We can fix this. It just takes commitment.

"We fixed the ozone layer and stopped acid rain. We can fix this. It just takes commitment."

That's not a good comparison - ozone layer and acid rain were caused by very specific externalities that were relatively easily substituted with "better" ones that didn't cause (for instance) ozone holes and acid rain.

Carbon, on the other hand, is the least common denominator of human activity - so much so that even our breath produces it. I don't see any possible patterns of human existence on the earth that are ex-carbon.

Carbon output is a simple function of population in a way that ozone and sulfur are not.

acid rain: stop emitting sulfur, it'll wash out of the atmosphere within years, forests will recover in decades

ozone layer: stop emitting CFCs, they'll decompose over decades and ozone concentrations will rise again

climate change: just stop emitting carbon and...

no wait, we're still locked into centuries of rising ocean levels and temperatures even if we lowered everything to zero right now.

It would take actively extracting CO2 from the atmosphere at very very large scale to reverse the effects.

Extracting CO2 could very well be possible.

Not only is it possible, the cost to do so will continue to decline as renewables deployed scale up. The cheaper electricity/renewables get, the cheaper it gets to sequester that excess CO2 back into the ground.

We need more renewables faster :/

We didn't have to give up cars for the ozone layer, though. In fact, no one had to give up anything, because they invented new types of aerosol propellents.

We are never going to fix this.

We can invent ourselves out of fossil fuel reliance. It's more complicated but the work is underway.

Never is a long time.

We don't have to give up cars to fix global warming either. We've invented new types of automobiles and fuel for them (electric cars, solar/wind energy)

It's just going to take way longer to switch over, since those things are way larger parts of everyone's life and economics than hairspray was.

And that commitment is exactly the problem.

It's more that such a commitment goes against the incentives laid down by a means of production that is enforced almost globally by both treaty and military might.

Reality is simpler - it's in no one's (perceived, short-term) best interest to be the first to spend money, material and manpower on fixing this, because the moment they start, they'll get eaten alive by their competitors. This applies at the level of individuals, small businesses, large businesses and governments alike.

It's a garden variety coordination problem - but it seems that, with technology successfully solving most of our non-social problems, lack of coordination is what underlies all the important issues humanity faces these days.

See also http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/ for an in-depth discussion of coordination problems.

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