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Comment by sunshinelackof | Hacker News Reader

> voting exclusively on how credible a politician is on tackling global warming

This is really the only important thing that we can do. Except maybe not flying in an airplane, there is little the average person can do in their daily life to inhibit climate change. Whether due to preventive policies or due to resource shortages our lives will change in the near future. Expecting individuals to shame themselves when the society at large encourages the opposite is counter-productive.

It is not to say that anyone is wrong to choose to live more frugally. More importantly, we need to recognize that any hope we have must come from the top down. We have more research and more solutions than we've ever had for any problem, but we don't have someone to pull the trigger.

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I agree. Your individual actions won't have much impact, except the aggregate effect on politics.

Politics is so short sighted that unless there's huge pressure from the masses nothing will be done, or just too little too late.

Even if the Science backing up Climate Change wasn't solid, which I think it is, what's the alternative? Take a gamble?

The Roman Civilization probably collapsed because, among other things, the climate optimum they experienced at their peak changed drastically and crops became less efficient. A joke compared to what we might be expecting in a few decades with such an overpopulated and hyper-efficient world, which is really fragile to climatic disruption.

I had never heard about the theory that climate change might have played a role of the Roman Civilization collapse.

Here's an interesting article about it: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/how-climate-ch...

The key factor, apparently, was "... an enormous spasm of volcanic activity in the 530s and 540s CE, unlike anything else in the past few thousand years. This violent sequence of eruptions triggered what is now called the ‘Late Antique Little Ice Age,’ when much colder temperatures endured for at least 150 years."

(New theories should always be taken with a grain of salt, but I found it interesting either way.)

We need to turn this amazing machine of capitalism we've created towards solving the problem.

That requires strong political leadership and buy in.

American needs to turn back into the country represented by Captain America. They need to be leaders again, instead of acting like they're being run by one of those infant English kings from the Middle Ages..

Hold your horses. Give me the numbers on short term ROI. Aha! Your business plan sucks as you cannot produce viable revenue numbers in a timely maner.

Brr... The problem is that making quick money on scale seems to me like some kind of condition. Some biological hoarding gene that made sense just a hundred years ago.

Evolution have not kept up with our success at building and automating stuff made from stars. It makes me sad.

Capitalism is for solving problems of scarcity, and for that it worked quite well. It's quite useless for dealing with problems of abundance. All our biggest problems today are problems of abundance.

More importantly, it rewards externalizing costs. Such as to climate, future and others.

Absolutely! It optimizes around the rules we place on it. That's why this idea of 'free' capitalism that is popular in some circles is terrible. We tried it and it worked worse than dictatorial communism.

What we need to do is to update the rules of Capitalism to internalize the externalities. Make carbon expensive. Make environmental destruction expensive. Make exploiting labor expensive.

Do that and you'll see extremely rapid changes for the good. Only it will never happen because the people and countries currently profiting from coal / oil will fight it with the enormous $$ they have (and they are; people like the Koch brothers are always babbling on about how the government is run by a shadow 'deep state' - that's clearly true, and they're clearly being greased by oil money).

I agree with this.

To the extent that we have lots of influential people browsing this forum, make it clear that unless to any politician that unless they aggressively tackle global warming, they won't get any donations/votes no matter how good they are in other areas / how much influence they have over the business you are running.

There are a few more things a person can do to fight global warming:

- most of all, speak out for reneweable energies and against coal

- if possible use some solar yourself

- try to buy an electric car or a real fuel efficient one, don't drive too much

- in general, try to use energy efficient devices

Ride a bike!

Or walk more and use public transport, being more efficient still than even a bicycle.

And finally, eat less, especially meat and highly processed foods. It's not free neither for you, not for the environment.

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