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Comment by coldtea | Hacker News Reader

>A set of troubling charts shows how little progress nations have made toward limiting greenhouse-gas emissions.

When countries have made real progress "toward limiting greenhouse-gas emission" one would not need charts to see it: it would be immediately evident in everyday lifestyles, consumer habits, and energy use...

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This is the number that shows if we are making progress or not: https://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/

Spoiler, we're not. It's getting worse and it's accelerating.

Interactive graph: https://www.co2levels.org/

During the day California runs on up to 40% solar energy on some days and I don't notice any difference. My stuff doesn't care where its electricity comes from. I drive an electric car too.

http://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/supply.aspx

There is a lot of low-hanging fruit.

Coal is the #1 cause of climate change and phasing it out is the most important thing we can do. Just swapping coal for gas cuts CO2 emissions per kWh by 50%. The problem is that coal is cheap. In most places in the world it is still the cheapest way to generate electricity.

After that other big things are: live closer to work, use public transit, drive electric vehicles, eat less meat (especially beef), and improve home insulation if you use a lot of HVAC. Those are relatively minor lifestyle changes.

A lot of environmentalists really let the perfect (and very impractical) be the enemy of the good on this. We can make a substantial dent with very little change. After we do all the easy stuff like phase out coal, then we can look at what's left. This is how you solve problems in the real world.

Not necessarily. For example just switching over coal-fired plants to gas-fired plants reduces carbon emissions by 50%. (This is a big reason why the US's emissions have decelerated since 2000.) Yet that would be almost entirely invisible at the consumer level.

Moreover, I would actually argue that the only way we're going to affect climate change is if we find at least one big slice of emissions that can be reduced without having to change habits or going against engrained values too much.

In order of what will probably work best:

* Something barely noticeable (eg: any improvement in electricity production that does not make the customer's price skyrocket.)

* Something noticeable but not fundamentally annoying (Pay people to get electric vehicles, Norway-style. Make a large part of your transportation public and electric.)

* Something noticeable, but fun . I don't have a big idea on this one, and it kinda sucks.

* Something noticeable, and that "gets you laid" (tm). Something along the lines of "I have a Tesla. You should have sex with me.", but scalable. If someone finds this, we're saved.

The last one would be even more powerful as it could reshape at least some people's identity into "I'm the kind of person who care about climate change", so all the other changes that actually require discomfort could get rationalized away (apparently, we're pretty good at this as a species.)

So maybe someone needs to organize Vegan Supermodel Orgies as well as marching in NY. Just saying.

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