Hacker News Reader

Comment by bulatb | Hacker News Reader

The very best thing you can do on climate change, right now, for free, is stop suggesting people "do their part" by flying less or eating less or making any other kind of individual sacrifice. Erase that proposition from your brain and never mention it again.

Climate change is a collective action problem. It can't be solved by voluntary sacrifice or any other kind of uncoordinated action. Suggesting that it can is harmful in two ways:

1. It puts the focus on solutions that don't work and won't even help.

2. Framing it in terms of sacrifice—which, again, won't even work—makes people less inclined to help in ways that might work, like lobbying for more effective policy.

"Eat your vegetables" is not the answer. People won't—no matter what. You might, your friends might, but people won't, and that's what matters.

Deny this fact at everyone's peril.

View on HN

I strongly disagree.

You get nowhere when you let people push blame from their own actions to the actions of others (or conglomerates). The people who feel most responsible for the future of the Earth are those most likely to take action: both individual action and political action.

Eating your vegetables is the answer. (Well, part of it.) It simply isn't possible for us to fix the climate unless people start eating a whole lot more vegetables, fruit, nuts, and legumes. If we were in a society with a benevolent dictator, maybe we could force people to eat more vegetables. But how, in our democracy, are you going to get our corporate-owned politicians to pass very heavy taxes on meat? It's simply not going to happen until you have a massive number of people pushing for change. Imagine trying to legalize gay marriage in a country where 95% of people oppose it. It's a nearly hopeless endeavor.

If you are one of the people who eats steak and drives SUVs because you don't feel personally responsible for your contribution to climate change, then you're the problem. Personal responsibility is not opposed to political change, it's a prerequisite for it. The people who get the government to pass meat taxes will almost certainly be people who don't eat a lot of meat.

I think you make a good point, but the one caveat is that 'eating your vegetables' might create a false sense of comfort that you've done your part.

It's a bit like how supermarkets will put the veggies at the entrance, so people will buy more unhealthy food (as a reward for buying those vegetables!).

I'm inclined to agree with you mostly because I think the situation is so dire that those who do their part will not just leave it at that, but the above mentioned does concern me a bit.

Counterpoint:

Switching from an omnivorous to vegetarian diet could reduce a person's carbon footprint by about 30 percent, says Martin Heller, an engineer at the Center for Sustainable Systems at the University of Michigan.

https://www.popsci.com/vegetarian-environment-health (I've picked this as the first hit on google, but if you want to find other sources go for it).

The point about vegetarianism is that eating meat is SOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO inefficient that climate change won't be solved until we ALL stop eating meat (or at least the majority of the planet).

Yes, there are corporate plutocrats that are destroying the planet. No, that does not let you off the hook. If you see a collective action problem and decide that, since it's hard, and other people suck, you don't have to participate, then you're just as much a part of the problem as the sucky people.

You are completely missing the point.

Meat is already expensive, indicating people would eat more of it if they could afford it. If conscientious people reduce meat consumption, that supply will mostly just be consumed (at a lower price) by people that don't care.

The goal here should be to make things like meat, car fuel, etc. more expensive (via taxes, or otherwise properly pricing in the costs). It might very well be the case that some people that can afford these increased prices continue to consume exactly as much meat and fuel as they do now. So fucking what? The overall consumption will go down, which is what we need. Overall consumption will not go down significantly if you just convince some fraction of people to voluntarily reduce their consumption.

Imagine your neighbor's house is on fire. You run outside and see him throwing dirt on his porch with his kid's plastic shovel. You gawk at this decision for a second, then run back inside and call the fire department.

When you come back out and shout the fire truck is coming, he yells at you for wasting time inside instead of picking up his other tiny shovel and throwing some dirt.

Except... the problem clearly won't be solved with twice the tiny-shovelfuls of dirt. It needs a qualitatively different type of action.

On climate change, you have two choices:

1. You can moralize about the sucky people who won't grab a shovel, essentially complaining that the problem isn't of the form you'd like; or

2. You can do the thing that's most effective.

You can also help your neighbor shovel dirt until the fire truck arrives. That's fine, it doesn't hurt. Just understand it doesn't make a difference.

Except there is no fire truck that’s coming. We still need to convince our governments to take action. And how can we do that if we individually are still throwing kindling on the flames.

> The point about vegetarianism is that eating meat is SOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO inefficient that climate change won't be solved until we ALL stop eating meat (or at least the majority of the planet).

Any source to back the claim that climate change cannot be stopped unless we convert to vegetarianism?

In the immortal words of Minor Threat:

At least I'm fucking trying, What the Hell have you done?

I understand your point to a degree, but how will not suggesting people do their part help? I understand why you feel this is not helpful, but the start of your comment seems to suggest you think it's counterproductive. Is this simply because it will potentially motivate people to take more productive actions?

Proposing uncoordinated action makes no sense unless you basically deny the nature of the problem, which means you can't solve it. Workable solutions will be sidelined for as long as possible in favor of appealing fantasies.

The effect of uncoordinated action on the problem may be fine, but treating it as part of the solution space on par with actual solutions is not.

e.g.:

Alice and Bob are on a team of 10 developers. Code quality is terrible. It's obvious to Meg, the manager, that something must be done before the product totally collapses.

The other 8 developers don't care. Not only that: they actively refuse to even contemplate why quality might matter, and also each of them has different, mutually exclusive, horrifyingly destructive preferences.

Carol only uses `switch`, not `if`. Dave removes "unnecessary" object allocations (all of them) because GC pressure. Eve's editor replaces every single space with tab on save.

So Bob takes Meg aside and says the team needs training. If everyone who militantly does not care and actively refuses to cooperate could just be shown the error of their ways, he says, we surely could accept a style guide everyone would follow. Training will cure obstinance and apathy with minimal investment.

Later, Alice goes to Meg and says we need a git hook that enforces linting and, actually, a CI pipeline wouldn't hurt.

I don't know, says Meg. That sounds like it would slow us down. And setting all that up could be a lot of work. Bob says we can solve it with a couple trainings and a lot less effort.

So they go with Bob's solution, with predictable results, because Meg likes it better. If everyone who cannot possibly agree would just agree, she reasons, there would be no need for major changes.

Why can't they just agree?

On the other hand, there’s a dangerous belief that emissions are something corporations do for their own greedy purposes; if they can be curtailed, ordinary people could go about their lives in peace. This is backwards. It is consumer preferences - to drive an SUV to a detached house in suburbia, to fly home for Thanksgiving, to eat meat, etc. which inherently require massive amounts of energy. Polluting corporations happen to be the mechanism for fulfilling these demands under capitalism. If we expressed our preferences by voting instead of spending, it could just as easily be the state doing the polluting.

To really address the issue requires disempowering and disenfranchising average people, denying us our customary and preferred lifestyles. This is a monumentally difficult thing to do in a system that requires the consent of the governed. Giving up your lifestyle vs. voting to give up your lifestyle (even if indirectly, by crippling the companies that provide its constituent parts) are not too different.

This thought process led me to consider buying a gas guzzler in the past. The sooner it hurts enough for everyone to “get it” the better. But I didn’t buy a gas guzzler. Instead, I bought a hybrid.

I think the point that the GP is making is that while you may indeed have bought a hybrid, objectively the population at large have not made that same switch, and if only you (and people like you) make the switch it has approximately no effect on the problem.

Sure, it's obviously better if people choose the hybrid over the guzzler, but if you're trying to do something to avoid catastrophic climate change, I think spending time persuading people not to buy the guzzler is not worth the opportunity cost. (By which I mean, at the margin, any time spent persuading people not to buy a gas guzzler would be better spent persuading people to support a carbon tax of some sort).

And the outlook of political action on climate change is at best questionable.

That's why old political approaches should be abandoned in favor of more dramatic ones. I'm so done being nice to 'skeptics' and ideological moderates, their intellectually lazy accessories.

Interesting. I'm done with lazy 'intellectuals' who think they can offer questionable evidence and demand everyone accept it. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. What is the natural climate variability and what is the standard deviation thereof? What is the climate sensitivity and how accurately do we know this value? Why do the simulations predict warming that doesn't show up in observation? What happened to "more frequent, stronger hurricanes?" Here's an idea! If you have better answers for skeptics, which is your responsibility, maybe more people would agree with your claims.

> What happened to "more frequent, stronger hurricanes?"

https://www.theguardian.com/weather/ng-interactive/2018/sep/...

http://wondermark.com/1k62/

If you have better answers for skeptics, which is your responsibility

No it isn't. Climate change 'skeptics' have such a long record of bad-faith participation that I no longer consider them worthy of response.

Agree. Third parties see arguments and assume both sides have credibility in their own right.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com