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Comment by crispinb | Hacker News Reader

> it's INSANE

And the death of our living planet isn't? So-called 'economic growth' was never much more than a global entropy increase, as high quality self-organising evolved systems were ripped out to feed crude technological ones requiring endless inputs.

This was always mere borrowing against the future. It was never 'growth' in any true sense. It ends because biology, chemistry & physics say it must, regardless of human pouting.

We could perhaps 3 or 4 decades ago have made a collective decision to gradually reduce consumption and allow our home to survive in decent enough shape to sustain us. Or maybe it was a biological fait accompli that any species evolving capacities to escape population limits and spread like a devastating weed across the world would eventually outstip the world's capacity to absorb the change. We'll probably never know which.

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> We could perhaps 3 or 4 decades ago have made a collective decision to gradually reduce consumption and allow our home to survive in decent enough shape to sustain us.

One thing we know about humans is that, as a species, we were never and are not currently capable of making such collective decisions or otherwise coordinating at this scale. This is probably the root of most problems we have, except death and diseases.

Collective action has worked in the past. We did it with CFCs.

Sort of, mostly. It's an interesting case you bring up, and I think it may be informative about the conditions under which global-scale coordination happens. Note here though, that "collective action" meant government regulating CFCs out of use, and not a bottom-up people movement.

I need to study the details of this case more; from the little knowledge I have on it, the cynic in me would conclude that it only worked as effectively as it did because by the time of the Montreal Protocol, DuPont had figured out and patented a replacement for CFCs.

We're talking many, many orders of magnitude difference in change.

Side note:

There is a quite recent amendment to the Montreal treaty, the Kigali amendment (2016), which phased out the CFC replacements with strong greenhouse effects in favour of replacements without them. This alone will save us ~0.3° warming until 2100 (if the projections are right).

This is about the only positive news I've ever seen for this topic.

https://ozone.unep.org/sites/default/files/Assessment_Panel/... (eg page ES.23 & ES.24)

(I really love those charts.)

For this reason there is no hope that collective action through government pave the way to the solutions we need. Governments will only be forced to act when things are so bad that it's too late. There is also no hope that individual action will make a meaningful difference. Not enough people will care until things are so bad it's too late. Public corporations will not lead the way to a solution because they are only driven by short term profit. Does anyone seriously believe any of the above will lead to solutions soon enough?

It seems to me that only the ultra rich have the resources, independence, and arguably intelligence to lead the way to solutions that could save humanity. They might devote their talents and resources to funding research into technologies we will need when when things get so bad that governments are forced to act. Also funding powerful lobbing groups to counteract the powerful lobbing efforts of corporations that benefit from delaying action on the climate.

> there is no hope that collective action through government pave the way to the solutions we need

I sort of disagree; the governments might be (as usual) the crucial element of the solution - they're the only actors on this planet capable of forcing a decision on masses, even if it goes against the wishes of the market. But getting the government to do the right thing sooner rather than later - that's the hard part. Especially that nations are market players themselves, and doing the right thing in case of climate change means handicapping the whole country on the international market.

I think both the ultra rich and governments can be useful in funding more R&D on clean technologies. The goal here should be developing technologies that ultimately let you go carbon-neutral while sacrificing as little as possible compared to the old methods. Doing the right thing is painful for people, and by extension the governments, so whatever can be done to ease that pain increases the chance that the right things will start being done.

I agree with you that eventually governments are the only entitles that could implement solutions on a big enough scale. However it will be too late if this only happens when they are forced to act by social upheaval, mass starvation and economic collapse.

I challenge the ultra rich to put a substantial portion of their assets to work in funding large scale R&D on clean technologies, and simultaneously funding powerful lobbying of governments to act on climate change.

Another thought is that for better or worse we now have the tools for "social engineering" and campaigns might be funded to sway public opinion to support governments that support clean technologies.

> even if it goes against the wishes of the market

I agree with your general point, but I'd add that the market is itself an artifact partly created by government.

I think it's about time we saw more change to the market itself, which requires cultural change among other things.

For example: Insulating homes was mentioned earlier. Yet, more and more people are renting homes and can't do much to improve home efficiency because that's controlled by the landlord, and "voting with your feet" is financially out of reach. Same with working much less, or not commuting: It's not a serious option to those at the less lucky end of the competitive market for essential life goods and services.

Both of those result from a certain style of capitalism, which is arguably in crisis already, and both of those can be greatly improved, even while retaining capital, when there is a widespread change of cultural pressures about basic expectations of owners and employers.

> One thing we know about humans is that, as a species, we were never and are not currently capable of making such collective decisions

I'm pretty sceptical re claims of knowledge about complex systems, and human ecology is about as complex as systems get. So I think your statement is way overconfident.

Having said that, if I had to make a bet on whether or not we'll make the necessary decisions given how late in the game we've left it, I'd put a decent whack of cash on the prospects of failure. Also that the proximate cause of the collapse of our civilisation won't be global environmental collapse, but war consequent on local collapses. Look at Europe following 2015, convulsions caused by trickles of refugees that were minuscule compared to what's coming. I'd bet on nukes (another can we've kicked down the road for decades) offering the coup de grace.

> I'm pretty sceptical re claims of knowledge about complex systems, and human ecology is about as complex as systems get. So I think your statement is way overconfident.

Complex behaviour of systems often arises out of simple rules. Game theory is not always well applicable, but here it provides some simple models that explain this problem very well: multiple people forgoing individual gains in order to cooperate at getting bigger gains is a very unstable state that can be quickly destroyed by free-riders, who defect in order to reap both individual and group gains. The very awareness of this dynamic, which is something we all have as intuition even if we can't put it in "mathy" words, is enough to severely curtail the ability to cooperate. Looking through this lens, you can discover that of cultural customs and social pressures around individual behavior are really mechanisms that deter and punish defection and strive to establish an environment in which cooperation is easier.

Scott Alexander explored this topic far better than I ever could: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/.

I wasn't disputing the plausibility, rather the knowledge. You can't intuit your way to rationally justifiable prediction of future global events by thinking through a few toy models. Even predictions far better founded on reams of real empirical evidence are notoriously shaky (see Philip Tetlock's work amongst others).

Your guesses happen to be guesses I share. But they're just guesses.

I wasn't predicting things in my response, just commenting on why something in the past didn't happen and couldn't have (though with a strong implication that this applies to the future). While this is "just a guess", I feel pretty much the entire history of humankind backs me up on this one. I don't see much reason to believe humans will suddenly get better at collective action than they were before - especially now that we've understood and enshrined as holy, in the form of profit-seeking mandate of the market economy, the mechanism of strip-mining any forms of spontaneous coordination and turning them into dollars.

I still hope we can get out of this one, but I don't see the solution coming from "the people". If anything, "the people" will have to be dragged kicking and screaming into that future, by governments mandating the right moves, by public and private R&D creating solutions which companies then use to enable the governments to make the right moves.

No matter what we do as a collective society, the planet will change. Yes, our actions now are speeding it up. But they might also be speeding up the solutions. Borrowing against the future might be our best bet for preserving the future, if it means we develop the technology needed to properly address climate change.

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