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Yet more bad news on the climate change front.

Based on previous discussions on HN, I'm sure there will be plenty of people proposing ambitious and creative technological solutions.

I fear that there's an anthropic bias[0] at work where humans are convinced we will solve this problem because we've always solved other problems before. But we forget that if we hadn't solved those previous issues, we wouldn't be here to talk about it (and it has been very touch-and-go[1] before). That leads us to overestimate our chances of eventually sorting this out, too.

But maybe this is start of the great filter? [2]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_bias

[1] https://io9.gizmodo.com/close-calls-three-times-when-the-hum...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter

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We already have solved the issue. We know how to produce massive amount of energy, all day long. We just don't want to implement it, because of local incident risk. And because of this we are in the middle of a global incident. Technology available in 5 years are already too late.

>We just don't want to implement it, because of local incident risk.

More likely due to capital. It's always capital. We're going to kill all life for capital.

> We already have solved the issue. We know how to produce massive amount of energy, all day long. We just don't want to implement it

That means we haven't solved the issue. The solution might require as much of a change in human psychology as a change in technology.

> We know how to produce massive amount of energy, all day long.

Are you hinting at nuclear power? If so, I (somewhat) agree with you.

The environmentalists that I used to hang out with believed with a burning passion that nuclear power was an absolute evil. I understand that perspective, though I disagree with it.

If one takes the position that The Main Future Threat is related to and rooted in human released greenhouse gases, then nuclear power is right back on the table, front and center, even given its challenges, risks and long-term side effects.

About those, though: my understanding is that it has been possible, for some time now, to produce nuclear power plants that are exceptionally safe and cost effective. And with substantial research dollars, the plethora of possible 'next gen' fission reactor technologies would yield all kinds of fruit to, for example, mitigate or remove the long term side effects.

Given all of that, I think solar+battery (along with hydro, wind and their up and coming friends) is now the way to go, given how much costs have come down.

Going all into nuclear power probably made sense a couple of decades ago.

The endless growth of runaway Capitalism with no plans to put a halt to is potentially our great filter.

We'll need to send another Sagan vinyl up to warn about the dangers of Capitalism among societies.

IPCC claims we need to expand beyond capitalism to solve this [1].

[1] https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/10/18/the-hope-at-the-heart-o...

China produces nearly twice the carbon dioxide emissions as the second largest carbon dioxide producer, USA. China is a communist state.

https://www.ucsusa.org/global-warming/science-and-impacts/sc...

> China is a communist state.

Yet its market operates more like a capitalistic one.

It's also not entirely fair to point the finger wholly at China on CO2 output when Europe and the US have effectively outsourced their manufacturing and most polluting processes to companies over there.

Do the workers own the means of production?

No, therefore China is not a communist state. It is one in name only. Its economy is extremely capitalistic.

how would that statistic look like if it attributed the carbon where the end product was consumed? At least China isn't calling global warming a hoax...

I've never thought about it like that... Your completely right, and i'm sure it would show the US is doing alot more harm than previously thought.

> China is a communist state.

China is, actually, the living proof capitalism works a lot better without a democracy holding it back.

For the majority, perhaps. Try telling that to the Uighurs of Xinjiang.

There is nothing in a democracy either that prevents minorities from being oppressed. Examples of democratic countries with oppressed minorities are plenty.

I agree.

I think you're misinterpreting the tone of the parent's comment as an endorsement, when it is likely in fact a critique.

Marx's commentary on so-called democratic states: "The executive of the modern state is nothing but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie" rings quite true today. In China they've perfected this by getting the pesky petty grumbles of the population out of the way.

It's really a capitalist state managed by an authoritarian government. Despite that the ruling party used "Communist" as it's name.

China is a capitalist state run by converted former Marxists using the language of Marxist-Leninism to administrate an authoritarian market economy.

They've in a sense found a way to use Marx's critique of capitalism towards its opposite intent. Marx saw the authoritarianism inherent in the market and how it was tied to wage labour exploitation? The Chinese Communist party has harnessed that authoritarianism to increase exploitation to its maximum.

The Communist Party in China are as "communist" as the later Roman emperors were "Christian."

It's not capitalism because authoritarian states aren't cutting emissions either. Capitalism gives the people with money what they want, autocracies give the people with power what they want, and so on, and not one single distribution of getting-what-they-want is going vegan and cutting emissions to zero. The only remaining conclusion is that nobody wants to go vegan and stop emissions.

If you want a government that does that, you would have to give all power to a small group of people like you. That would never happen because there are so many groups with other immense interests that if you are going to let one "win" and control everything the odds of you winning are almost nil. The only option is to somehow get more people to want to change everything.

>It's not capitalism because authoritarian states aren't cutting emissions either.

Are they capitalistic or economies though? Right wing systems that value privitization? Countries that are cutting emissions in extremely significant manners (relative to their countries, they can't control the world), and putting out well reachable net-zero emissions goals, are the furthest left wing countries in the world at the moment that have checks on Capitalism.

You could have a right-wing communist state, just imagine what would happen if you made a commune out of poor US rural republicans. The "left-wing" countries aren't cutting emissions due to their system of government, they are cutting emissions because of the attitude of their people.

The government they have is a direct representation of the people, who collectively have put checks on capitalism to be able to favor their own lives and the lives of their fellow citizens over capital.

Capitalism is fully compatible with authoritarianism and often even welcomes it. Authoritarian states are more willing to help reduce costs incurred by things like human rights and labor laws.

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