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Comment by acidburnNSA | Hacker News Reader

I had an argument with my SO about how very few people truly believes in climate change enough to change their lifestyle. It's mostly virtue signalling. This was while planning a flight to London with about 4000 lbs CO2 for the two of us.

In Seattle, you can sit on a chilly day on the porch of a popular restaurant and overhear people lamenting climate change while they sit under a row of 8 large blasting fracked gas heaters.

People don't want to go out of their way to think and change. It's a difficult PR problem due to human nature.

I'm trying to build advanced nuclear fission reactors to fight climate change but unfortunately burning oil is more popular in the polls.

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I'm sorry, but this is such an irritating argument. In the absence of any coordinated action, why should I make my lifestyle worse just so you can use up my portion of our shared CO2 budget?

This is the exact same argument as "well if you advocate for higher taxes, why don't you voluntarily donate more money to the government?" It's a dumb argument in that context and still a dumb argument in this one.

The key part of shared sacrifice is that it's shared.

This is precisely the problem - no government can enact "coordinated action" globally - especially not governments of countries bringing millions of citizens out of poverty, who want basic things that require energy like refrigeration.

People pretend there's some magic bullet here, but there just isn't. No coordinated action on climate change is possible, no one wants to move on this to the detriment of themselves or their own citizens. The only realistic fix is a technological one, we need cheap, clean power, carbon capture or some combination thereof. Anything short of that and we're still burning this thing to the ground, no matter what any one individual or even collective country does.

I think you're misunderstanding my lament. As always, "a lot of people helping a little accomplishes a little." We need people to be better educated about energy systems so they can push or clean energy collectively. When a people has very limited understanding of their daily energy systems and impacts of their personal choices, how can they be expected to push the politicians to fight for the right things collectively?

Seeing strong environmentalist people choose natural gas kitchens and heating in a region that's 98% carbon-free from hydro, wind, and nuclear is a shame. They then also fail to push politicians on pricing the externalities of natural gas because they are personally invested in it being "clean burning" (which it is, but it's still super high carbon).

Collective action begins with personal understanding. If you skip this step, you get lots of large efforts to ban straws and plastic bags or to sue energy service companies while failing to pass carbon legislation. How is it the fossil energy service company's fault that people use fossil fuel all day to commute across town?

Let me restate your point, because it’s a good one. The gist of your point is, if there is no collective action, then nothing will change, and “why should I make my lifestyle worse” if nothing will change?

The next step to realize is that, in the US, our “shared CO2 budget” is zero, possibly negative, in light of continued development in China, India, and Africa. Imagine how much CO2 emissions could be reduced if everyone in the US became vegan tomorrow. Now, realize that Chinese development in last year alone went up by enough to offset the entirety of that hypothetical savings.

Why “should I make my lifestyle worse” when development in India, China, and Africa is going to increase global CO2 output by multiples of the entire output of the US and EU combined?

My personal opinion is that citizens of democracies need to demand urgent action from their government, and that action will include wealth transfer to developing nations to help them decarbonize and trade sanctions and theoretically even war (or at least the threat of war) against authoritarian countries that refuse to meet their global obligations.

This is a global problem, and it requires global action to have any hope.

For what it's worth, I think the risk of Chinese and Indian pollution is overstated. At least the Chinese government accepts that climate change is a real threat (unlike the current US administration) and is moving (too slowly, but still) in the right policy direction.

Aren't Chinese moving faster than pretty much everyone? Last I checked, they were pretty into reducing use of coal, and deploying a lot of nuclear power plants instead.

Agree about wealth transfer to developing nations, and honestly I'd also love to see IP transfer. Developing nations have the right to the same life-saving and life-improving technologies the West enjoys, but they also have the opportunity to leap-frog and skip the high-carbon-footprint parts, the way they did with phones (skipping landlines and going straight to cellular). We should at least strongly encourage them to do that leapfrogging - though preferably by subsidizing it instead of threatening war.

> Aren't Chinese moving faster than pretty much everyone? Last I checked, they were pretty into reducing use of coal, and deploying a lot of nuclear power plants instead.

China currently has so many coal plants under construction that their output exceed’s the US coal industry’s entire output. China’s goal is to have 20% EVs in the consumer vehicles market by 2025. That means China will put 100 million new ICE vehicles on the road over the next 5 years, and will continue to put tens of millions of additional ICE vehicles on the road each year after that. China is building whole new cities. Construction releases enormous amounts of CO2. Construction releases so much CO2 that a fancy new LEED building takes decades to pay off its construction footprint with energy savings. From 2000 to 2015, China added over 6 gigatons of CO2 output. That’s more than the entire US. In 2017, China added 120 megatons of CO2 output while the US cut 40 megatons.

The Chinese are moving pretty fast, but the sad truth is that it's all too slow: https://www.rifters.com/crawl/?p=8433

The next couple generations are in for a rough, rough ride.

Your point about IP transfer is a good one.

> Why “should I make my lifestyle worse” when development in India, China, and Africa is going to increase global CO2 output by multiples of the entire output of the US and EU combined?

Because you are already producing 10x [1] the amount of CO2 that a person in India is.

[1] https://www.ucsusa.org/global-warming/science-and-impacts/sc...

> In Seattle, you can sit on a chilly day on the porch of a popular restaurant and overhear people lamenting climate change while they sit under a row of 8 large blasting fracked gas heaters.

Not to mention that they're paying other human beings to prepare meals for them. The thinking around environmentalism is really fucked sometimes.

Privileged as that may be, how does it contribute to climate change? If anything I would expect a restaurant meal to be more efficient due to economies of scale.

People generate a lot of carbon emissions. You're adding part of another person's carbon emissions to what is required to prepare your meal.

Well, I mean, that person serving the food would still exist and respirate and consumer even if they had a different job. The slippery slope of "humans cause carbon emissions" quickly descends to some Malthusian debates which basically end up as "Thanos did nothing wrong".

It's true though - saying the person serving food would still exist if you didn't order the meal is like saying that someone else will burn that gasoline if you don't. It's true, but it doesn't absolve you from responsibility. You're still creating demand and contributing in some fractional way to the problem.

The logical endpoint of "humans inevitably cause catastrophic destruction" doesn't have to be "kill all humans" though. It could be, "make sure we're worth it". Can we build a society so amazing, so transcendent, that it was worth the destruction of our ancestral ecosystems? If so, then let's get cracking. If not, well then yes, maybe then we really ought to be thinking about suicide.

Well, by that argument, all economic activity of any description is bad for the environment. Paying anyone to do anything ever is bad. In fact, just being alive is bad. Anyone who talks a big talk about the environment without immediately reducing their carbon footprint by committing suicide is a hypocrite.

Which may well be true! But then it seems unfair to single out eating in a restaurant - given that the other humans already exist whether you buy the meal or not, it doesn't seem especially bad in the scheme of things you could be paying someone to do.

You're putting words in my mouth. The key fact about eating at restaurants is that you don't need other people to prepare food for you in order to eat. You can make food for yourself. That is not true of most other consumption.

But speaking of consumption, the best thing most people can do for the environment is to reduce consumption. And the easiest way to know whether you've achieved that is to just spend less money on everything you buy. Buy a used car instead of new. Take a road trip instead of traveling via plane. Make more food yourself. Eat more grains and less leafy greens. Eat more chicken and less beef. Etc.

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