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Comment by fsloth | Hacker News Reader

We're fully dependent on hydrocarbons and no one has any idea how to replace those in any foreseeable future.

https://www.ft.com/content/73650984-135a-11e9-a168-d45595ad0...

"...renewables (including biofuels, waste and hydro) are responsible for almost the same share of energy today (14 per cent) as supplied in 1971 "

We can shave of percentages by stopping eating meat and so on but fossil fuels are still the major culprit in carbon emissions.

From economical point of view it's catastrophe today (just stopping using fossil fuels cold turkey will destroy the economic structure of our civilization) versus catastrophe tomorrow.

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The first official warning by an expert panel to the US President was 1965. We did pretty much nothing since then to reduce our dependency on fossil fuel. We could have for example switched all electricity generation to nuclear with 1965 technology and changed building standards to require proper insulation and electric or district heating. That would have bought a lot of time that we don't have now. We could also have instituted a carbon tax and slowly (over the course of the last fifty years or so!) pinned it to the cost of extracting carbon from the atmosphere.

Coulda, woulda, shoulda. We're here now, we can't change the past, and blaming previous generations is a waste of time when we need to act now. Most of us know what to do. We just need to start doing it.

What do we need to do? I don't see how we can reduce carbon emissions by 18% per year for the next ten years. Right now we don't even get the second derivative right, emission rates are still on the rise. It doesn't really look like our politicians worldwide will start an effort comparable to ramping up the WW2 war industry to decarbonize the economy in the next decade. On the contrary, conservative climate denialists are on the rise.

https://mobile.twitter.com/rahmstorf/status/1070717050430070...

What we can do is to skip unnecessary travel, use public transport whenever we can, stop buying fairly useless consumer products for our own leisure, and the most important ones: realise that reducing our collective carbon footprint will result in considerable reductions of one's individual standard of living.

We, as individual consumers, need to reduce the carbon emissions ourselves as much as possible no matter what the politicians say. Deniers are going to be a problem until shit hits the fan for real, and waiting until everyone is convinced will simply be a waste of time.

So, in other words, focus less on what others do, more on what you do, and make sure to prepare as much as you can for whatever the future holds. Not saying everyone should become a prepper (although it's a fun hobby!), but the fact that people blindly believe that the future is a straight line is scarier, regardless of where they believe that line is pointing.

Spitting in an empty swimming pool to try and fill it?

It's a governmental problem, not an individual one, only way it's going to change is if you start campaigning and voting differently.

I am. I doubt anything but direct action will have an effect though.

That's like a landslide were each pebble of dirt doesn't consider itself responsible for what's happening, on a bigger scale, even tho all the pebbles keep doing the same thing leading to bigger scale consequences in the first place.

Many a mickle makes a muckle, this applies to pretty much everything.

If everybody keeps acting like their individual contributions are completely meaningless, then nobody will change anything about their own ways and thus large scale change will remain a pipe-dream.

The vast majority of carbon emissions is out of individual control.

The longer you keep parroting this corporate propaganda, the more fucked we are. This needs strong government intervention, now.

Preferably paid for with massive, backdated windfall taxes on every company and shareholder that ever materially benefited from environmentally destructive companies.

Obviously not going to happen, but let's not pretend me or you are responsible for the industrial levels of pollution, and the last few decades of climate change denier lobbying, when those companies full well knew the damage they were doing.

> but let's not pretend me or you are responsible for the industrial levels of pollution

Let's instead pretend our chosen lifestyle of abundance and wastefulness doesn't factor into any of this at all?

Who do you think these companies are selling their products to? Thus financing their operations in the first place? Externalizing the blame for this solely on the industry, like consumers have zero responsibility or impact, might be convenient but imho it only serves to shift the blame from one party to the other and vice versa, so that ultimately nobody feels responsible and thus nobody starts acting.

To tackle this will require efforts on both ends. Because the industry will simply react by "There's demand for it, so we do it", while consumers go "The industry is doing it, somebody needs to force them to change, but don't you dare to inconvenience ME!".

Literally, nothing stops us from doing both: Being responsible consumers and properly regulating the industry.

> Spitting in an empty swimming pool to try and fill it?

With enough people spitting, that isn't a problem at all. Shame so many people are just standing back saying it can't be done instead of helping.

Individuals reducing their carbon footprint by reducing consumption is all good, but it is really a drop in the bucket in the big picture. I would be worried that focusing on that could be counter-productive with a higher chance of making people either feel that they have "done their part" (if they have personally done these minor reductions) or induce general apathy over the fact that the only way forward is to reduce your quality of living while knowing that it won't make any real difference anyway.

If we really want to make a change we have to focus on big picture solutions. Instead of being against, we need to focus on what we want to move towards.

The only way to reduce our dependency on carbon fuels within a realistic timeframe is an aggressive rollout of renevable energy like wind and solar, _and_ nuclear. If we were really serious about this, we would do massive investments in nuclear, building lots of new plants and also stepping up the research in technologies like molten salt and thorium based reactors.

If we should take to the street and demonstrate, it should be _for_ actual solutions like that, rather than _against_ minor things that don't make much of a difference anyways.

Definitely! I'm not against big picture solutions -- I just don't see then need to postpone action on an individual level until a big picture solution has been put in place.

The changes we need to do will require a large cultural change in order for people to accept them. We need to accept collective AND individual responsibility for something that affects the entire biosphere. Increasing taxes on fuel won't change the way people think, any more than getting rid of plastic straws will. After all, most large changes can be summarized as a long sequence of smaller events (not sure if that last part sounds right -- English isn't my first language).

>realise that reducing our collective carbon footprint will result in considerable reductions of one's individual standard of living.

Given that there are significant disadvantages and the benefits are entirely collective, why would anybody agree to that?

We need to accept that climate change is a thing and deal with it, as a thing.

Suppose everybody did this and reduced their carbon footprint by 30-50%. They still have to eat and not freeze to death in winter, but we need to become completely carbon neutral. Individual action is definitely necessary, and can buy us valuable time, but there is only so much individuals can do.

And we won't, for the same reasons they didn't in the past: it is too inconvenient. If we are ever to solve problems like this we need to embed within our culture the desire to sacrifice convenience for a future we may never see, and that's more or less the antithesis of current cultural norms. We need to take responsibility for this ourselves on an individual level and stop just pointing fingers and making excuses why it can't be done.

> From economical point of view it's catastrophe today (just stopping using fossil fuels cold turkey will destroy the economic structure of our civilization) versus catastrophe tomorrow.

I think this is a false dichotomy, and so do many economists [1]. We can start phasing out out the non-essential use of fossils and come up with replacements for the remainign parts in the coming decades.

Painting it as this kind of desperate dichotomy is generally playing into the hands those who don't want us to address climate change.

Remember that the changes aren't only chilling on the economy - the energy overhaul is an enormous global public works project.

We are using energy and energy-intensive products in really wasteful ways because of their low cost in our everyday lives (consider oversized cars and low occupancy, available savings from turning heating & cooling to lower levels, going veggie in food, cutting air travel, not to mention all the wasted energy in commercial/industrial side due to low energy costs).

[1] See eg https://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/19/opinion/paul-krugman-coul...

Sure, you are quite right.

I think the biggest hurdle is that the incumbent investments in hydrocarbons have quite a lot of future profits to tied up to continued usage of said resources. The negative externalities of hydrocarbon eceonomy should be tied more forcefully directly to their usage. But even that would not discourage investors from doing all they can to keep up the demand for oil.

Catastrophe today vs. extinction tomorrow, I fear.

Extinction won't happen. 99.99% could die and that would leave seven million people.

7 000 000 000 * .01% = 700 000 Still, you make a very good point. Homo Sapiens will stick around. Advanced civilization might not.

That's the endgame I expect: climate refugees leading to (possibly nuclear) war. With a much smaller human population (and perhaps a bit of nuclear winter), atmospheric CO2 will return to pre-industrial levels, and things will return to normal in a couple millennia. The remaining humans will migrate down from Alaska and Siberia, and build new cities on top of the ruins.

Climate change is a "solved" problem, but the solution isn't something I would want to live through.

> Climate change is a "solved" problem, but the solution isn't something I would want to live through.

The good news is, unless you are part of the lucky 0.01%, you won't have to live through it!

It's still a wretched way to die.

Most of us posting here will die of old age before things really get ugly. It's our children or grandchildren who will suffer.

I can see advanced civilization taking a (possibly long) pause. But there will be so much space to expand into for the survivors, and caches of technology to discover. Someone will eventually discover and re-tool.

Switch to electric transportation as quickly as possible.

Change your mind about needing a personal automobile, and share it with as many people as possible. Use public transportation if you have it, and insist in your community investing in public transportation systems if you don't.

What of cities, like Houston, which are too spread out and flood too often for good mass transit?

It'll be up to the good citizens of Houston to work out how to solve this problem. I imagine electric transportation would still work there. But, I do also think that a lot of American cities are going to have to work out how they're going to stay inhabitable without requiring a massive refactoring of their landscapes.

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