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Comment by m12k | Hacker News Reader

There is a relatively small group of companies/people who know better, but would lose billions if this problem is addressed, they have an army of lobbyists and media companies to push the hoax/not-our-problem-narrative, and finally you have a huge undereducated part of the population who are already skeptical of 'elitist' scientists even before the manipulation begins. This problem also seems to be more extreme in the US compared to other western countries due to e.g. the prevalence of Fox News and decades of creationism leading the anti-science crusade. All in all, you can't really count on having a shared definition of 'reality' any more, as this has now been politisized.

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Blaming the “companies” and “lobbyists” is such a cop-out. The companies are just giving people what they want. If people demanded a shift to a climate friendly lifestyle tomorrow, Exxon would have no choice but to follow suit.

Looking at the major trends of the last several decades. People moving to brand new sunbelt suburbs where they drive everywhere in SUVs. Buying disposable clothes, electronics, etc., made in China and shipped over the ocean. Even the token attempts at being environmentally conscious are ridiculous. I go to Whole Foods here in Maryland and everything is grown in f—king California. It’s a joke.

Nobody is willing to make the lifestyle changes it would take to have a real impact on climate change. And it’s not unique to the US. Canada and Australia have similar carbon footprints per capita, suggesting it’s more a combination of material wealth and low density. Blaming corporations instead of the people for all that is asinine.

And what are our best and brightest from Stanford, etc., doing? Figuring out carbon recapture? No, working at Google figuring out how to more effectively advertise disposable consumer goods that are shipped over from China, used a few times, and shipped back to China for disposal.

Howdy rayiner, our paths have crossed several times on HN regarding mass surveillance and privacy, and I always mostly respected your points of view, even if different from my own. However, I'm really worried about this reply on climate change. So many of your arguments can be easily refuted or aren't relevant. I'm worried you've fallen prey to climate denier FUD traps (or worse your profile is being used by shills).

Could we have a conversation offline? I'd like to learn more about your situation and what has brought you to this reply. Feel free to send me an email and we can schedule a time to talk.

If you disagree with one of my points, please reply here so people can have the benefit of the public debate. I’m certainly no climate change denier (I worked at Northwestern’s environmental law clinic, though my focus there was water pollution).

Okie dokie, replies below. However, I still would like to learn more about from where your views originated, so I hope you don't mind if I email you.

> Blaming the “companies” and “lobbyists” is such a cop-out. The companies are just giving people what they want. If people demanded a shift to a climate friendly lifestyle tomorrow, Exxon would have no choice but to follow suit.

As we've seen with Russian propaganda efforts, the firehose of falsehoods can be extremely effective at keeping people in the dark or convincing them of something not in their best interest. People demanding a shift requires education around the topic, and Exxon literally prevented research on the topic from coming out for decades.

> Looking at the major trends of the last several decades. People moving to brand new sunbelt suburbs where they drive everywhere in SUVs. Buying disposable clothes, electronics, etc., made in China and shipped over the ocean. Even the token attempts at being environmentally conscious are ridiculous. I go to Whole Foods here in Maryland and everything is grown in f—king California. It’s a joke.

I'm very confused what point you're trying to make here. That systems or not optimizing for environmental impact? Of course they aren't. They are optimizing based on the incentives they are following. People move to suburbs and drive SUVs to feel safer and more wealthy. People move to the sunbelt because the winter sucks. People buy disposable clothes and stuff is shipped from China because it's cheaper to do so. It's really expensive to grow produce in Maryland, so you ship it from California.

> Nobody is willing to make the lifestyle changes it would take to have a real impact on climate change. And it’s not unique to the US. Canada and Australia have similar carbon footprints per capita, suggesting it’s more a combination of material wealth and low density. Blaming corporations instead of the people for all that is asinine.

You're right, asking someone to give up their lifestyle sucks. However, you're equating changing lifestyle with fighting climate change. That's where we disagree. The goal of fighting climate change isn't to get people to change their lifestyles, it's to stop sequestered carbon from entering the carbon cycle. One way to do that is to ask people to stop being so excessive (e.g. changing lifestyle), but nowadays we have so many more options.

Most climate change solutions nowadays start with the assumption that we shouldn't ask people to change lifestyles, and just deploy carbon-free infrastructure that is a drop-in replacement for existing carbon-intense infrastructure. Solar, Wind, EVs, batteries, biofuels, etc. all never ask you to stop buying disposable shirts from China. All they do is replace the power that powers the factory and the fuel that is used to ship it to you with sources that don't add carbon the carbon cycle. So that when you are living your life in your disposable shirt and eating your California avocados, you're not contributing to climate change anymore.

> And what are our best and brightest from Stanford, etc., doing? Figuring out carbon recapture? No, working at Google figuring out how to more effectively advertise disposable consumer goods that are shipped over from China, used a few times, and shipped back to China for disposal.

We'll I'm just the best and brightest from UT-Austin, so not Stanford, but I did make the career switch from traditional tech to cleantech. And every time one of these threads come up I try to post that you, too, can make the switch from Google to cleantech. However, every time that happens, there are pessimists like yourself who shit all over my call for help. That's okay though, the capitalist in me kind of sees this as an opportunity. The fewer competitors I have in my particular niche, the more money I make. So I guess I should be partially thanking you for slowing down the climate change tech enlightenment :)

The US per-capita power consumption is 10kw. That's 10kw of continuous draw every minute, every day. And that's not household use, that's per capital.. so a household of 4 is using about 1 megawatt-hours /day.

Where do you plan to find that in your non-lifestyle change world? Solar? That's 8000sqft of installed solar with the highest efficiency panels. That needs to be coupled with hundreds of kwh storage. Total cost : hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Good luck on that.

The numbers cited here seemed high to me, so I checked them. Primary energy consumption in the US[1] ~1 * 10 ^ 20 Joules. Divided by population and number of seconds in a year[2] is about 10000 Joules per person-second, so about 10kW per person. A kilowatt of peak solar power requires about 8 square meters of panels[3]. Since the sun doesn't shine all the time and you don't get peak output all the time 750 square meters per person doesn't seem terribly unrealistic.

That being said, there is a lot of space where nobody lives in the US. There are some 28000 square meters per person in the US. Dedicating about 3% of that to solar panels doesn't seem impossible.

Some energy saving is also possible without changing the average lifestyle too much. Insulating homes helps quite a bit. Electric cars are more efficient that gas cars.

[1] https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/?page=us_energy_home

[2] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=10%5E20+joules+%2F+(3....

[3] https://www.quora.com/How-much-solar-energy-can-be-tapped-in...

>Since the sun doesn't shine all the time and you don't get peak output all the time 750 square meters per person doesn't seem terribly unrealistic.

At current prices, that much PV capacity would cost around 25 trillion dollars. That price doesn't include any storage capacity.

The climate is changing far too rapidly for us to hope for science fiction solutions. We need a major reduction in emissions now, which means both a vast increase in renewable production and a vast reduction in overall consumption.

You only need a third of that to get the same amount of electricity out of them as by burning 10 kW of fossil fuels. Spread over 20 to 30 years that's suddenly not so much anymore. How much does the US spend on energy each year now? How much to secure the imports?

You forgot that this is primary energy consumption you two are writing about. 10 kW of primary energy consumption if replaced with solar requires only about a third of that to yield the same results since about two thirds are heat losses when converting fossil fuels to useable energy.

Jesus, that's incredible. If we regard modern automation as effectively replacing slave labor, that's the equivalent of having 100 human slaves doing hard physical graft on behalf of each and every person 24 hours a day.

> Where do you plan to find that in your non-lifestyle change world?

Nuclear.

You mean that nucular radioactive stuff emitted by my microwave? Not in my backyard.

> As we've seen with Russian propaganda efforts, the firehose of falsehoods can be extremely effective at keeping people in the dark or convincing them of something not in their best interest. People demanding a shift requires education around the topic, and Exxon literally prevented research on the topic from coming out for decades.

We have the research now, but people aren't changing their behavior.

> I'm very confused what point you're trying to make here. That systems or not optimizing for environmental impact? Of course they aren't. They are optimizing based on the incentives they are following. People move to suburbs and drive SUVs to feel safer and more wealthy. People move to the sunbelt because the winter sucks. People buy disposable clothes and stuff is shipped from China because it's cheaper to do so. It's really expensive to grow produce in Maryland, so you ship it from California.

And that is what causes climate change. Exxon is just giving people what they want. The blame rests with people who want a lifestyle that's incompatible with avoiding climate change, not the companies that simply are feeding consumer demand.

> All they do is replace the power that powers the factory and the fuel that is used to ship it to you with sources that don't add carbon the carbon cycle. So that when you are living your life in your disposable shirt and eating your California avocados, you're not contributing to climate change anymore.

We don't have time to develop all that technology: https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-why-the-ipcc-1-5c-repor.... According to new, revised estimates, having a 50/50 chance of limiting tempeature increaes to 1.5C leaves us with 14 years of carbon emissions at current levels. After which point the world economy has to hit zero carbon emissions. Meanwhile, carbon emissions are still going up: https://www.climatechangenews.com/files/2017/03/238eb46742db.... From 2000-2015, China added an amount of CO2 output that exceeds the entire US output. China continues to grow, while India is approaching where China was before 2000 and may have a similarly explosive growth in CO2 emissions in the next two decades.

Not only is there no solution that allows us to keep living the way we are living while averting climate change. There never was. Even if we had listened to the hippies and cut U.S. emissions by half starting in the 1960s, China's growth alone would have completely wiped out that savings multiple times over.

> We have the research now, but people aren't changing their behavior.

They are. Clean energy mandates are being passed in many states; climate change and the Green New Deal is a front and center topic in the Democratic presidential primary race; the Paris Climate Agreement passed on a global scale; China is electrifying transportation and building as much solar, wind, and nuclear as fast a possible; India is phasing out coal as fast a possible; and on and on.

A person as an individual isn't changing their behavior to a large extent, but people in aggregate are.

> And that is what causes climate change.

No, it's not. Again, climate change is caused by injecting sequestered carbon into the carbon cycle. Previously, it just so happened that the act of driving your SUV around did exactly that. However, more and more that's not true. As we electrify transportation and clean the grid, the act of driving around becomes less and less what causes climate change.

> We don't have time to develop all that technology

We already have the technology, it's just a matter of deploying it. Every auto manufacturer is releasing major electric models by next year. Clean energy generation in the U.S. is set to surpass coal generation this year. China is electrifying transportation and switching to clean energy (including nuclear) as fast as possible. India is building more solar than ever and accelerating that deployment.

As I'm sure you've seen, my favorite climate change joke is, "They say we won't act until it's too late... Luckily, it's too late!"

Climate change is my generation's great challenge. If we lose, we die. So, many of us are fighting with everything we have. Some are trying to get people to change behavior, some are trying to make drop-in replacements. But none of us are giving up. It sounds like you've already given up.

FYI, HN is limiting reply depth, so I doubt I can reply more. Please email me back if you can.

> Exxon is just giving people what they want. The blame rests with people who want a lifestyle that's incompatible with avoiding climate change, not the companies that simply are feeding consumer demand.

Well, Purdue Pharma is also only giving people what they want. In and of itself, that doesn't mean much.

Exxon is doing significantly more than just giving people what they want [1], as do many (most?) of the big dinosaurs of the established industries that currently make the world go round. Do we need to go into the vast efforts at influencing the public that such entities expend in order to maintain their domination and wealth? You have vastly more expertise on this subject, so I wouldn't be able to tell you anything new.

The world does need to advance, but advance to where? Thermodynamically, it must slow down or it will overheat and crash into the ceiling.

> Not only is there no solution that allows us to keep living the way we are living while averting climate change. There never was. Even if we had listened to the hippies and cut U.S. emissions by half starting in the 1960s, China's growth alone would have completely wiped out that savings multiple times over.

You don't know that, and it's a false dilemma anyway. People change their lifestyles all the time in response to their economic environment and incentives, as they have been doing throughout history.

I tend to listen more to the experts when they say something is possible. When they tell me in no uncertain terms that a very important problem has no solution, I listen more to the kids.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/23/climate/exxon-global-warm...

If anyone here needs an intervention it’s graycat

Doerr and Khosla probably soured SV on cleantech

What a bizarre, patronising, and dishonest reply this is.

rayiner has simply correctly pointed out that the markets follow consumer preference and that those preferences place low value on renewable energy & sustainability.

No one is calling man-made climate change into question.

I agree with his post, more or less. It could probably have been delivered in a less confrontational manner. rayiner has often made posts with lawyer style arguments defending questionable behavior by governments and corporations. In this case he is deflecting blame from the companies that originate the carbon emissions saying that they're just fulfilling a free market demand, as if it's impossible for companies to behave ethically without government or consumer coercion.

Do not assume there are only two sides to this. There are those of us who are perfectly aware of the effects that humans have on climate change, while not really caring if the planet is destroyed or not.

I am not responsible for the planet and saving it. So please don't try to guilt me into taking responsibility for "saving" the planet. I've already done my part by not having children. It is up to parents and people who care enough about the species to save the planet and humanity. I'll be dead in a decade and not really bothered by this impending doom.

Planets, Nations and species die every day, given the vastness of the universe. It's admirable to try to save something, but the willingness to do so must come from within, free from external collective pressure mixed with shaming and guilt.

> Buying disposable ... electronics ... made in China and shipped over the ocean.

I don't think that LG markets it's Android phones as being disposable. I do think that they should, and I think that if they won't do it voluntarily that consumers should be made aware of the fact that these purchases are for disposable "products" through any other available means. If that requires regulation, so be it. No consumers stood up and demanded planned obsolescence from these corporations.

LG's easy for me to pick on, since their phones are essentially disposable pieces of junk, and I've been burned by them three times, but you could drop in most electronic manufacturers here. If they're selling disposable electronics then they should market them that way. The fact that we all accept that they're disposable is a separate problem from the demand, IMHO.

I also don't think that anyone ever thought that when they spend hundreds of dollars on a smartphone or a laptop or whatever that they wouldn't actually own it or have the right to service it on their terms. And yet, here we are.

It's a collective action problem and the characteristic of collective action problems is that individual incentives aren't aligned with group incentives.

You can't go from individual decisions and then infer group desires. The inferential step isn't sound. It's like saying fishermen must want to make fish extinct because they persistently overfish in the absence of fishing quotas.

IMO human society simply isn't mature enough to deal with this problem. I don't think there will be serious action until it's an emergency for enough wealthy people - and I don't think that's the system working, I think it's swerving at the last moment. There will continue to be a lot of collateral damage before the emergency is pressing enough.

>...individual incentives aren't aligned with group incentives... IMO human society simply isn't mature enough to deal with this problem.

I think it's an hypocrisy issue primarily. The people shouting for us to make a change won't make it first.

If even a majority of the people that say we should lower our carbon foot print bought only food and clothing produced without dirty electricity sources, didn't fly in private planes and only drove Prius/hybrid/electric cars, etc... (for starters)

Then maybe, just maybe they could convince everyone else it's even _possible_ to do what they expect everyone else to do to save the planet.

Hard disagree. That’s like not taking someone’s position against excessive government budget deficits seriously because they don’t voluntarily pay excess taxes to pay down the debt.

Climate change is a collective problem and will _only_ be resolved by collective regulations and incentives. This is not a problem we can all just “chip in” on and have it magically go away.

Hypocrisy is the root of many, many disparities in the world.

Consider how things would be if Hollywood lead the way with all the celebrities (percentage wise easily top percent polluters in the US) giving up their gas guzzling vehicles, private planes, excessive travel, etc... Much of the public would follow their example automatically, even many politicians.

It sounds like you are advocating for "I don't have to do it if everyone isn't".

It sounds like you literally do not understand what a collective action problem is.

If you say everyone should do something, but you are _unwilling_ to do it first, it's hypocrisy.

Hypocrisy from leadership (whoever they are) robs people of motivation and compassion towards both the subject and the message. (ie, climate change)

There are many examples in history where individuals stood up for a belief and lead the way to change.

> If you say everyone should do something, but you are _unwilling_ to do it first, it's hypocrisy.

Saying we should do something, meaning all of us collectively, and saying individuals should do something are two different assertions, though the verbiage is sometimes precisely the same. A person can very logically, and without hypocrisy, state that everyone should cut their CO2 output drastically to save the planet (which would be effective and help, and would also require major changes in infrastructure, law, and government) without taking drastic steps of their own (which would not be effective and would not help in any perceptible way).

Collective action problem.

> There are many examples in history where individuals stood up for a belief and lead the way to change.

This isn't a hypothetical. It's a worthwhile exercise to consider whether the hippies who have actually been taking drastic steps to lower their environmental footprint since the sixties have moved the needle at all, in terms of actual environmental degradation, public perception, or in terms of politics. Also consider whether they might have been more effective by working and spending money and effort engaging in mainstream politics and living like the rest of us.

> Hypocrisy from leadership (whoever they are) robs people of motivation and compassion towards both the subject and the message. (ie, climate change)

This might actually be true. An electorate that points at Al Gore and says "that guy uses a lot of CO2 so clearly this whole climate change thing is bullshit" is too stupid to live and will come to a bad end. I live in hope that at least a plurality of us will eventually be a lot smarter than that.

I think you misunderstood my point. Hypocrites are liars, deceivers, manipulators, immoral and unethical among other things.

If the people calling for changes in society related to climate change are of this ilk/type/caliber, then there is no way anything will ever change ethically.

Though, it could be done through propaganda, deceit and force. In other words, tyranny.

Or, end the hypocrisy and lead by example. Everything else is hand waving and rhetoric or worse.

> Hypocrites are liars, deceivers, manipulators, immoral and unethical among other things.

You've proven yourself incapable of identifying hypocrisy, in part because of your strange denial of the existence of collective action problems, but you're also flattering yourself if you think hypocrisy is anything other than a universal human trait.

This is all silly. If you're in a debate, debate the issues, don't attack the character of your opponent. If you're a citizen evaluating or advocating for or against a policy position, debate the pros and cons of the policy. What you are so fixated on is a weird non-issue.

My argument is about hypocrisy, why do you think I should change my argument simply because you think it's wrong? This seems almost silly.

Hypocrisy is a character issue and I think I have hypocrisy's definition correct. If you are honest/moral/ethical, can you be a hypocrite? I don't think so, hypocrisy at it's core is dishonest. Therefore if you practice hypocrisy, you are a liar. Seems like a logical conclusion.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypocrisy

https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/hypocrisy

> I think it's an hypocrisy issue primarily

It's not. It's game theory; it's simple mathematics. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_action_problem

The effect of any one person being "non-hypocritical" is minuscule. Effects will only significant en masse, and defectors must be punished, because it's profitable to defect. That means some mechanism to keep people in line must be used - and in our world that normally means the state. So agitation for political change is the correct approach.

Moral systems are another way of enforcing group will against individuals that would otherwise find it profitable/ to defect. Shaming works more efficiently in locally connected societies, though, and it's hard to scale it up to this kind of global problem.

In the late 70s early 80s we all started to not litter so much in the US. There was a general movement towards this.

Did celebrities back then continue to blatantly litter while telling everyone else to stop littering?

That is what they are doing with climate change. Do as I say, not as I do.

You describe a textbook case of the tragedy of the commons, which is exactly what is happening. If we really wan't to address the problem then there needs to be new legislation, customers changing their behavior adequately is probably never going to happen. Regulations which ban certain goods or make them extremely expensive (like gasoline taxes) are politically impossible (see yellow vest movement) due to their uneven impact on the population. So the only alternative is probably massive government subsidies for anything that reduces CO2 emissions.

I would happily drive electric cars and power my house and electronics off solar power if the infrastructure was readily available to support its usage and cost was affordable or highly subsidized.

> If people demanded a shift to a climate friendly lifestyle tomorrow, Exxon would have no choice but to follow suit.

This is a myth that is perpetuated by free-market libertarians and is completely disconnected from reality.

First of all, a very large number of people are demanding exactly that and large corporations have no interest in it. Consumers also cannot make the transition or demand a transition unless there are viable alternatives -- which requires research and if the private sector won't fund that research then viable alternatives won't show up. It's much easier, less risky, and cheaper for the private sector to try to kill a new industry (where they aren't entrenched) than it is for them to compete in it.

In addition, a lot of emissions are unrelated to the type of product being provided. Consumers might not have a green option (and thus cannot "vote with their wallet"), and even if they have a green option they might not care enough. According to the EPA[1] more than 75% of emissions are caused by transportation, industrial processes, and energy production. Reducing industrial emissions created during the manufacturing process of goods would have a much more significant impact than consumers changing what brand of soap they use.

We have laws to protect people from vendors selling tainted or poisoned food. By the logic of a free-market libertarian we should allow the sale of such food because consumers would choose not to purchase it and "market effects" would kill the business. But we all know that the reason those regulations were introduced is because before they were introduced people were dying because of unsafe food being sold.

> Nobody is willing to make the lifestyle changes it would take to have a real impact on climate change. Blaming corporations instead of the people for all that is asinine.

That's bullshit. See [1], individual consumers are one of the smallest contributors to climate change. The main contributors are industry. If emissions were taxed and there were tax breaks for operating in a green manner (such as the carbon tax which was repealed by our coal-loving Liberal government) then companies would have a financial incentive to do research into less polluting processes.

> And what are our best and brightest from Stanford, etc., doing? Figuring out carbon recapture?

Governments (in Australia at least) are cutting funding for climate change (at the behest of their political donors that, as above, have a vested interest against climate-change research). The intended effect of this is that there ends up being so much brain-drain away from public-sector research into climate change. Which is exactly what's happening. I agree that this is a very bad thing, but it makes no sense to blame PhD students (people with no money and no power) that couldn't get grants because the government is actively working against the public.

[1]: https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emis...

>Consumers also cannot make the transition or demand a transition unless there are viable alternatives

There are already viable alternatives. Buy less stuff, travel less, turn down your heating/AC, eat less meat and dairy. When people say "viable alternatives", they really mean "free lunch" - they want to maintain exactly the same lifestyle as they do now, just without the carbon emissions. That's completely untenable, no matter what technologies emerge over the next few decades. Even with the most optimistic forecasts of the pace of technological development, we'll have to make some radical changes to our lifestyle to prevent a climate disaster.

That's bullshit. See [1], individual consumers are one of the smallest contributors to climate change. The main contributors are industry.

Without consumers, there is no industry. Airline companies don't burn kerosene for the hell of it, they burn it because people keep buying plane tickets and keep shipping things by air freight. If we stop buying plane tickets and air freighted goods, they go out of business and so they stop burning kerosene.

The blame game over climate change is just blatant buck-passing. It's not my fault, it's the big corporations. It's not my fault, it's the government. It's not my fault, it's the people who vote for the other party. As long as there's someone else to point the finger at, you're absolved of responsibility. How many tons of carbon emissions does your lifestyle cause? What can you do right now to reduce that number? We'll only see meaningful change if a lot more people start asking those questions and acting upon the answers rather than waiting for someone else to act.

> Buy less stuff, travel less, turn down your heating/AC, eat less meat and dairy.

I'm going to repeat this again -- the vast majority of emissions are from industrial processes. Optimising the industrial processes to reduce emissions (as opposed to reduce costs) will result in emissions improvements.

Yes, in theory if the entire planet reduced its meat intake by 50% this would be a massive improvement -- but so would killing 50% of people. If your proposed solution to the problem is not viable from the outset you aren't proposing a solution, you're just deflecting blame.

Also -- contrary to popular belief, personal transport like cars (or commercial planes) are far from the largest emitters.

> Airline companies don't burn kerosene for the hell of it, they burn it because people keep buying plane tickets and keep shipping things by air freight. If we stop buying plane tickets and air freighted goods, they go out of business and so they stop burning kerosene.

Planes are actually more fuel-efficient than cars per-head. And planes are far from the largest polluters in "transportation" -- that would be trucks (especially older trucks that are under-maintained).

> The blame game over climate change is just blatant buck-passing.

You are buck-passing by arguing that it's the sole responsibility of the public to solve this crisis. Not corporations which knew about the effects of climate-change in the 60s and tried to hide it from the public and government. Not governments which are placating their donors by passing (or abolishing) milk-toast regulations to fix the problem.

I do my best to reduce my carbon emissions but that is not going to make any palpable difference.

If we wanted to go to war, then it would be the government's responsibility to organise the war effort. But if we want to stop humanity from going into war due to resource shortage all of a sudden it's about "personal responsibility".

Exxon and friends have been deliberately misleading people for decades about the problem. You can’t propagandize people for thirty years and then turn around and say, this is really your fault for believing me.

If big oil companies had just pumped oil and responded to the market then I might agree with you. But that’s not at all what happened.

The book "Private Empire" by Steve Coll is excellent on this. Unbearably frustrating at points, because it seems that Exxon were well aware of the issue and there were some suggestions rolling around that would have made them trailblazers in renewables, but they were just too risk-averse.

Blaming the “companies” and “lobbyists” is such a cop-out. The companies are just giving people what they want.

It is the purpose of advertising and propaganda to tell people how to want. It's misleading at best to say "people want new cars" without considering the decades of advertising selling the dream of new cars as a form of success and high social status, as an aspirational desire, as a reward for hard work, as a kind of personal freedom and ability to go anywhere on your terms, and then sell that as desirable, etc. There's a reason Hollywood SciFi films have Audi cars as product placement, and it isn't because "people want to see a future with up-market German cars" and Hollywood is responding to that demand.

Blaming individuals is just as much a cop-out. Most people just follow the path of least resistance in their lives that was hewn into place for them. For instance cities where bicycling is the most comfortable way of traveling also have high rates of cycling. Companies and politics play a huge role in shaping most of our daily lives.

> The companies are just giving people what they want.

Propaganda is extremely effective.

People move where it is cheap to live comfortably. Every level of US government subsidizes the shit out of suburbs and car commuting. If the true costs of people’s lifestyle were factored into the price, behavior would change in a hurry.

Individual consumers don’t have the information or analysis time necessary to factor in systemic effects of every choice.

> And what are our best and brightest from Stanford, etc., doing? Figuring out carbon recapture?

Some of them are. But doing research takes funding. If we want the smartest to take careers as researchers instead of looking to sell out and retire young, we should (a) tax/regulate the financial industry down to near break-even and enforce laws against fraud and other financial crimes, (b) tax capital gains as income, add additional income tax brackets for those making millions per year, tax large inheritances into the ground, consider adding a wealth tax, and crack down on tax evasion, (c) enact sweeping campaign finance reform, (d) pump more public money into basic research, (e) stop subsidizing the fossil fuel industry and shift those subsidies toward renewable energy, (f) while we are at it, clean up the broken health insurance system.

> I go to Whole Foods here in Maryland and everything is grown in f—king California.

Well yeah. That's true for a lot of the world; California is the leading exporter - and sometimes the only significant exporter - of a rather absurd number of varieties of fruits and vegetables. California's Central Valley has the right intersection of climate (plenty of sunshine, and snow is rare to the point of statistical irrelevance), good soil, adequate water (occasional droughts notwithstanding), and size (enough room for a lot of farmland) to be an agricultural powerhouse.

So, buy clothes and electronics not from China. How, exactly?

Why have we ended up here? Do you think it’s because the general population demanded cheap crap?

It’s the other way around.

Cheap crap is more profitable, hence a lot of its manufacturing have been off-shored decades ago to those willing to do it cheaper.

This cheap often unneeded crap is marketed as a dream and sold to an irrational population incapable of escaping evolution.

I keep saying this “collection” of what we call money is like a hoarding disorder.

Why keep collecting when I have enough that it cannot spent during several lifetimes?

Add to that, all science point to it destroying this very earth.

Looks like no one is escaping evolution.

There's a great deal of spin coming from the people warning about climate change too. End of the world stuff.

Here's something to consider: during the Early Eocene period (roughly 50 million years ago) temperatures were 9C-14C higher than now and CO2 levels were 1000-2000 parts per million [1].

And yet according to science, Earth was covered in forests from pole to pole, mammals flourished, and the oceans were "teeming with fish and other sea life". [2]

That's something you won't hear much about, because it doesn't fit the agenda.

1: https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/global-warming/early-eocene-period

2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eocene

So overall you feel we don't need to take any measures to reduce our impact on the system?

Wouldn't the transition from life that thrives at 200 to 500 ppm to life that thrives at 1000 - 2000ppm suck though?

I thought the big deal was that we liked it how it was.

It is. But environmental narratives fed to people are confused; they're mixing up "protect the nature because it's cute" with "protect the nature because our food depends on it".

I don't know about you but I think 14C hotter sounds pretty unpleasant

that's on average, too. extremes would be, uh, extreme - 50-60C?

Sure, but those changes took millions of years and evolution had time to work. Making similar changes over decades does not give evolution time to adapt.

I think a major concern is that lots of us might be part of the mass extinction event that will happen during the transition period.

Most people warning about climate change don’t say it is the end of the world, they say climate is complex, we never did this before, nature will be fine, but if whether human civilisagion will be fine is not very sure.

It is a huge experiment on a planetary scale and staying on the safe side here is simple the rational approach.

The irrational approach is to hope it will somehow turn out great, despite the already grim looking damage predictions.

And the simply evil approach is working against scientific evidence and rational arguments for personal gain. People like these are like cancer, destroying civilization from within for personal growth.

You forgot those who you would call evil + rational. These people willingly rather take their chances in Max Max world than give something up now.

Spin? Doesn't seem like spin, more the best prediction on available data. Few sciences are perfect. Do we talk of spin from gravity science because we haven't yet proved that?

For the Eocene, also according to science, we see fossil evidence of crocodiles at the poles. That likely makes most of the temperate to equatorial zones uninhabitable for humans, whilst being lovely for the "snakes found in the tropics that would require much higher average temperatures to sustain them".

I notice you don't mention that "All the members of the new mammal orders were small, under 10 kg", and "Eocene mammals were only 60% of the size of the primitive Palaeocene mammals that preceded them. They were also smaller than the mammals that followed them".

So whilst it was lovely for species evolved to those conditions, and life as a whole, for large species such as those of the size of say humanity, it seems to have been exceptionally hostile.

> All the members of the new mammal orders were small, under 10 kg.

I don't know if that statement is technically true but it's certainly misleading. Perhaps "all the members of the new mammal orders" were under 10kg, but not all mammals during the early Eocene were under 10kg.

Cambaytherium and Coryphodon, for example, lived during the early Eocene and were roughly pig sized and cow sized, respectively.[1,2]

In other words, that carefully phrased statement, if true, is a great example of the unscientific spin I was talking about.

> fossil evidence of crocodiles at the poles. That likely makes most of the temperate to equatorial zones uninhabitable for humans

We also see fossil evidence of large mammals in India. In the early Eocene temperatures differed less between the tropics and the poles and between winter and summer.

1: https://www.thoughtco.com/coryphodon-peaked-tooth-1093184

2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambaytherium

> In other words, you seem to be suggesting that all the mammals that lived during that era were under 10kg, which would be a great example of the unscientific spin I was talking about.

I'm suggesting nothing of the kind, but directly quoting from the wikipedia page you linked. Please stop putting words in my mouth.

I will note that the Wiki page on Coryphodon says: "These changes in size are thought to be linked to global climate change, with the size minimum in the Coryphodon lineage occurring shortly after Paleocene-Eocene boundary". Which appears to indicate clear evolutionary pressure to evolve smaller.

The pressure on mammals appears to have been consistently toward smaller size, seen in newly evolved species and the evolution of existing species. We already know that heat penalises larger mammals harder than the small, so that does not seem inconsistent.

> for large species such as those of the size of say humanity, it seems to have been exceptionally hostile.

That was your statement, not Wikipedia. What was that based on if not the incorrect implication about the size of mammals?

Nonetheless, I've already edited my post to make it clear that I was talking about the implications of the statement from Wikipedia.

> The pressure on mammals appears to have been consistently toward smaller size

If "the size minimum in the Coryphodon lineage occurr[ed] shortly after Paleocene-Eocene boundary" then the decrease occurred before the early Eocene, not during. The temperature actually continued to increase for several million years after the Paleocene-Eocene boundary.[1]

That pressure might have been due to the rapid changes at the Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum, not temperature itself, and after the thermal maximum, size increased again even with the higher temperatures.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleocene%E2%80%93Eocene_Therm...

If there's evolutionary pressure on existing species to become smaller, and newly evolved species are smaller than those of preceding and following eras, it seems entirely reasonable to conclude it was somehow hostile for larger land mammals, no? That is not a statement that every single one was under 10kg or perfectly fit the identified trend.

We should remember that even during the adjacent times (the Paleocene and Middle Eocene) temperatures were about 8C higher than they are now, and large mammals (some of the largest ever) evolved during those times.

The decrease in size probably had more to do with the chaos wrought by whatever unknown event caused the thermal maximum than with the temperature itself.

To make this all more relevant: I'm not saying that climate change won't be disruptive. It will. I'm just saying we can adapt and endure. And I think we should plan for that, because we clearly aren't going to stop it.

It is interesting that with climate change, the public debate is mostly about 'is it man-made?' as if it'd just become a non-issue if it was. It's debating a fundamental point while we need practical solutions or even just concepts to cope with all sorts of interconnected problems on the entire spectrum of what we as humans are able to address - from microorganisms to geopolitics. While at this point, nobody is sure what will happen, societies will get a clearer picture of the imminent consequences over the next decades. At the moment, everyone seems to be waiting.

You might have disproved the point that all mammals very less than 10 Kg, but Wikipedia states on the Coryphodon[0] that the size of the species also decreased, and that "these changes in size are thought to be linked to global climate change". So the general argument certainly seems to hold.

It also "had one of the smallest brain/body ratios of any mammal, living or extinct" so that may not be the best example of how this kind of environment might be fit for humans.

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

What about all the people living in coastal areas or close to major rivers? That’s like 50% of the population, in addition to much of our shared history (buildings). It will all be under water and cause large migrations, unsettling much of society. Is that not worth fighting for?

IPCC are projecting 26cm-98cm rise by 2100. So it's more tell the grandkids to build inland a bit.

it is a weird western media quirk that the first symptom people talk about is sea level rise. I think its an accidental product of all the news reports about melting ice caps and polar bears, so people have scoped the problem as ice melting and water rising in their heads.

this is basically, to a first order approximation, wrong. sea level rise, even in a nasty BAU/RCP8.5 scenario is really a next-century problem. we're talking tens of centimeters.

meanwhile, vast swaths of the euphrates, indo-gangetic, nile and yellow river deltas will suffer droughts and both successive and concurrent crop failures.

the flood of refugees from drought/famine/war into every city around the world will vastly exceed the flood of water at their shoreline (this century).

You're right, I didn't even mention the droughts and famines. I'm Dutch though so perhaps I'm slightly biased or preoccupied :/

I can assure you that you don't want to live in an atmosphere with 1000-2000 ppm CO2. Would you?

Don't forget that we are talking not only about climate change but also the rate of change. It's probably fine to have crocodiles at the poles if you have millions of years to adapt. If you only have a few decades it might not be so great.

But how long did the transition to those conditions take? We're changing the climate so fast that there is no chance for anything to evolve with the change.

I agree the panic seems a bit overdone sometimes. Also projecting current trends in renewable energy prices and storage we should be able to go zero net emissions in a couple of decades or so.

I really really wish that we are overdoing it. The data just looks that bad, and we are one the worst path.

We emitted 5/6th of what's ok to stay below 1.5°C, and 2°C is not that much more, and we're not stopping. (500 Gt vs 600 Gt)

At the current emission rate (12 Gt/yr) we have 10 years left to stop completely. A few decades won't cut it.

Almost all scenarious of the IPCC now include negative emissions to be able to reach the targets.

The technology does not exist, would need to be implemented on a massive scale (eg plant all the available area minus agriculture and a selected few sanctuaries with trees and make biochar out of them) and the investment in eg artificial photosynthesis is not there, probably because there is little money in it. (The process is different from that for biofuels.) We might not make it in time. Don't rely on this.

(The total available stored carbon seems to be on the order of 3000 Gt.)

https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar5/wg1/summary-for-policymakers/ (Figure SPM.10)

I am all for controlling CO2 and moving away from fossil fuels but I also agree with you.

Climate is complicated, there are many complicated feedback loops going on. As just one example warming temperatures promotes plant growth especially algae which captures CO2 interning back to the ocean floor. Of course some of that algae is not good for us (red tide).

I am not worried about life on earth, it will adapt and survive, it has seen worse, I doubt we would turn into Venus, but its a slight possibility.

The issue is what happens to human society, it will most likely adapt too, but at what cost? Rising sea levels, food supply having to adapt, these things could caused great suffering to many, then again maybe not. I don't want my kids to suffer or their kids.

The point is we don't exactly know how it will play out so why push it? Lets get off fossil fuels as fast as we can, we know its the right thing to do for many reasons, one of which is to stop returning so much CO2 back into the atmosphere.

True, but nowadays we can't afford geographically changing human-inhabitable areas driven by climate change.

If climate change causes the areas we currently inhabit to become unhospitable, we risk adding the danger of economic disasters and wars threatening our survival.

Human life was, amongst other things, possible because of one of the biggest climate disasters ever to occur on earth, the big oxygenation event [0], so we could even see climate change as something positive but clearly that doesn't buy us anything today.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxygenation_Event

At 1000 ppm of CO2 human cognition starts to decline. At 2000 ppm you're looking at severe cognitive decline, drowsiness, headaches. Letting it get that high is dangerous just on the basis of CO2 concentration alone.

> temperatures were 9C-14C higher

In such an environment, mankind might survive, but our current farming set-up won't. It might only kill 7 billion people our of 7.5, no big deal. (When looked at from a few million years in the future.)

> CO2 levels were 1000-2000

Indoor CO2 levels are usually double the outdoor levels. H Humans become dumb/sluggish at concentrations over 1500ppm, and nauseous at over 2000. Life will thrive, human life won't.

"Agenda"? Good grief.

Sure, life will find a way. But the high rate of change will be disruptive.

Here's something to consider: The transition won't be pleasant.

I'm pretty sure there was also no one around to complain when their coastal cities filled with millions of people went under water. Pretty terrible example if you ask me.

On the scale of millions of years, Earth's life will adapt to the new, extremely warm climate we are causing to occur.

On the scale of centuries, in this extremely rapid warming event we are making happen, a majority of life on Earth will die, including most humans. Evolution is slow, global warming is fast.

In the very long run, yes, palm trees (or their evolutionary successors) will flourish in Antarctica.

In the short run, meaning a length of time that exceeds human written history, we will live in an inhospitable ecological desert, and billions will die.

That's something YOU won't hear about, because it doesn't fit the agenda of the people that are lying to you for profit.

A reasonable person would call such a world and it's 500 trillion dollars hit to the economy 'unpalletable'

What’s your point, exactly? It’s ok to wreck human civilization because the planet will eventually be covered in forests?

There's also and even more educated group who knows humans only accelerated a natural and enevitable carbon cycle that humans didn't cause nor can stop.

Humans can't stop global warming. Then what can we do? What should we do?

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” ― Upton

That cuts both ways though, particularly in this context.

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