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Comment by czechdeveloper | Hacker News Reader

You can get easily insulted for proper choices. Homophobic comments on cycling and veganism are common. I rather believe that we are doomed - that we will destroy nature sufficiently for it to stop producing enough food to sustain us as species - than that we will change.

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Humans tend to make changes when there are no other options... and often, after significant damage has been done. Presumably if we "stop producing enough food to sustain us", a lot of humans would die off, but some would survive on the reduced food supply, and make changes to prevent further loss of food. Bear in mind, it's incredibly unlikely that all possible human food sources die off simultaneously.

A good example of change in behavior to ensure survival, is that major powers used to go much more openly to war for territory and resources right up until those powers got the ability to utterly destroy humanity. While there are still countries who are enemies of each other, and who fight small proxy wars and the like, nobody in their right mind would stage an invasion of another major power, likely ever again.

> nobody in their right mind

...until you have a world leader who wonders why we can't use them if we have them.

Today's environmental causes suffer from a credibility problem imposed by the mountains of failed breathless malthusian doomsday predictions from yesterday's environmental causes. I've seen the science and believe it, but the boy who cried wolf was also correct, in the end.

Please don't be a credibility problem for tomorrow's environmental causes.

A few decades ago there were hoards of people breathlessly demanding that something be done about the hole in the ozone layer or else we're all doomed. Then we banned CFCs and now the ozone hole is starting to heal itself.

But if we hadn't banned CFCs we would have been doomed. The ozone layer actually is really important.

Now the danger is climate change and what we need is to stop burning carbon. The lesson from past experience is not that everything will be fine if we don't do anything, it's that everything will be fine if we do what is necessary. Everything will not be fine if we don't do what is necessary.

Except for your extrapolation, that's an excellent example, and it needs to be brandied about a hell of a lot more than it is because doing so builds credibility!

My high school science teacher telling me that we were running out of oil and that gas would be $10 a gallon by the time I entered the workforce did not build credibility.

This is an iterated game. The takeaway is that it's important to be right, important to not be wrong, and important to make sure people know it, not that it's important to lie your ass off (sorry, overstate your cause) in a misguided attempt to help.

It's not helping that politicians give lip service to an existential crisis and then bury it in the bottom half of a huge agenda. At this point I'm pretty sure I'm more worried than they are.

Often what gets overlooked is the sad state of public transit even in Tier 1 global metropolises. There are far too many annoyances and outright hazards in using public transit, for individuals much less whole families with kids to boot, to list here.

So families even in Europe are opting more and more for SUVs and larger vehicles in general -- which was a total surprise to me and caught me unawares, I have to admit.

Hygiene, safety - from both the riff naff & new developing security threats, peace of mind, convenience, dependability [1][2][3] and more rider options are all major pain points.

Unless cities opt for a class-tiered approach to public transit -- the likes of first class carriages and premium waiting rooms at transit terminals, of yore -- and make public transit safe and even enjoyable to regular people I don't see this trend reversing.

[1]

BART announces what caused massive morning power outage last weekend

https://abc7news.com/traffic/bart-announces-what-caused-mass...

[2]

Single Computer Switch Failure Triggered Saturday’s BART Shut Down

https://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2019/03/11/computer-switch...

[3]

BART still unclear on cause of service outage, waiting to hear from tech support

http://www.sfexaminer.com/bart-still-unclear-cause-service-o...

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