> What I don't understand is if HN mods see this going on and can tell if the person is a shill or an actual climate denier. Statistically, replies in these threads should skew heavily towards pro-fighting-climate-change, but even in this post, it seems like every other reply is denier talking points. It is really starting to make me think that HN doesn't care about stopping shills.
People on HN are rational and thus see through most of the “pro-fighting-climate-change” posts, which address easy non-solutions.
To keep the temperature increase to 2C, we have to immediately cut CO2 emissions by 19GT. That takes the world back to 1990. And if you don’t want India and China to be mired in extreme poverty like they were in 1990, you really have to take the developed world to zero. Under other models, we have to go to zero carbon emissions tomorrow world wide. You cannot “fight climate change” while buying vegetables shipped across state lines and coffee shipped from overseas. You can’t go on international vacations and post pictures on Facebook. You can’t live in trendy places like Austin that require year-around heating and cooling. You can’t participate in the mass consumer economy at all—25% of your carbon footprint is non-food stuff you buy. (Just the consumer stuff your average American buys amounts to 5-10x the total carbon output of your average Bangladeshi.) You can’t work in advertising—in a zero carbon output economy the consumerism that feeds advertising companies can’t exist.
There is also the major problem of "climate change angles" on things that don't actually help avoid climate change. Take high-speed rail, for example. To offset the carbon realized by building California's HSR, the system would have to have over 10 million riders per year, more than the entire Amtrak northeast corridor: https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2011/11/how-green-hig.... (It is ludicrous to expect that a rail link between two enormously car-dependent metro areas, that goes through extremely low-density areas in-between, would somehow have the ridership of the densest corridor in the country, connecting some of the cities with the most well-developed intra-city and commuter rail systems.)
Then there is stuff like LEED construction: https://www.imt.org/should-i-stay-or-should-i-go-the-embodie.... Companies are patting themselves on the back, tearing down old buildings and putting up new, LEED-certified buildings. Except that it will take 25-75 years to offset the upfront carbon footprint of new construction versus reusing existing construction, for longer than current climate-change timelines allow.
Unless you’re espousing these solutions, and present credible ways of achieving them, you’re not “fighting climate change.”