Comment by virmundi | Hacker News Reader

Comment by virmundi | Hacker News Reader

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We need the state to take over all aspects of our life. We need to create mega cities like Judge Dredd. Each of us gets an 11 by 11 square cell. Children should be raise by the State as per the Republic. All meals should be provided in communal settings derived from bugs. We cannot continue down the line of personal freedoms. We have shown ourselves to be poor stewards.

Edit: As I age, this seems to be the only course. I've been told that we shouldn't eat meat. Inhalers are just as bad (https://news.sky.com/story/asthma-inhalers-as-bad-for-the-en...). I've been told that the government should regulate what vehicles we're allowed to drive. I've been told the government should be allowed to mandate all buildings must be upgraded to be maximally efficient (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_New_Deal). This is just a short list of "musts". There are more. As a result, the only logical end possible to meet all these requirements is the dissolution of freedoms to be replaced by living in megacities where the State can control everything (house, food, etc.).

Or we invest heavily in renewables and/or nuclear, insulate our homes and replace ICE vehicles with public transport, bikes, and electric cars and get 80% of the way to carbon neutrality with negligible changes to our lifestyle.

You forgot: stop producing meat as a daily commodity.

While I have personally found not eating meat to be an easy lifestyle change, I'm sure many people will disagree.

Easier: stop eating meat that you do not actually want. I ate cold cut or sausages for breakfast or dinner not because I actually wanted to but because it was there and I was used to eating it. Easiest way to change is to shop differently. Buy less meat-products to have less of them in the fridge, buy other tasty things instead to have them easily available.

By the way - this also means that you can eat all the meat you actually want. Cutting back on the meat you eat on auto-pilot will go a long way already.

Edit: inspired by a reply, I think that a rule like

Don't eat meat, except if you really want to

might be even more promising. It takes away the cognitive load of the decisions whether to eat meat or not while being an unfailable method because it includes exceptions to the rule by itself. You're not out just because you really wanted that burger or a steak at the barbecue.

I agree somewhat, but as someone who stopped eating meat two months ago: The reduction of cognitive overhead is definitively a huge plus: "Has it meat in it? Don't buy" – this is a way simpler rule than trying to figure out the question "is this meat on auto-pilot or is it not?"

The reduction of choices in restaurants, malls and grocery stores is actually liberating in a way. You should try going meat-free for a month, just for seeing how it makes things a lot easier.

The next step would be to go vegan, because the dairy industry is no better than the meat industry, but I haven't done this yet. This actually increases the mental load somewhat again, because you then have to pay a lot more attention on whether something has dairy in it or not (or is made with the help of animal products such as juice).

Your approach sounds a lot easier in that regard. Let me explain the reasoning behind mine:

The important idea was to have the 'failure' case being somewhat acceptable. It's not an either-or situation where you either are a vegetarian or not.

It's meant to be a method to deal with weakness. Consuming a fraction of the meat than before is better than being a vegetarian for maybe five weeks before everything falls apart.

Combining both approaches might even be the best way: Don't eat meat, except if you really want to sounds simple enough.

100% this, not to mention people waste so much food.

Let’s say %50 of the world populace find it easy and stop eating meat.

This is a good reduction, keep up the good work!

No way. Renewable energy still need a lot of maintenance/resources which are still heavily carbonated. Same for electric cars.

Changing the way we move is good, but there is still the model of consumption that needs to be changed : eating bananas that crossed oceans by boat, plane traffic and so on.

Yeah bikes are good, but we still need to consume less. Much less.

What you call 80% carbon neutrality is from a perspective of someone living in an desindustrialized country. But you still expect to have smartphones or computers produced at the other end of the world.

How are you going to insulate the farms?

How do you get from "we should regulate production of fossil fuels" to "the state is trying to take away our personal freedom"?

Lots of harmful industries are heavily regulated already (tobacco comes to mind). Those regulations did not take us down a slippery slope, nor did they result in a fascist/dystopian society. Quite the opposite: lots of people are alive today because of those regulations.

You can smugly enjoy the freedom to watch ecosystems disappear, or you can be constructive about the changes needed.

If the people on the right don’t like the remedies of the left, let them come up with an alternative climate change strategy that is not some form of head-in-sand policy.

People already came up with a solution: fast breeder nuclear reactors. Western activists are just not interested in considering the solution.

This ship has sailed, deal with it.

No matter how useful it might have been, we won't get nuclear back and especially not back in time. Maybe we can at least make it disappear later in some places than in others. France seem to be well-positioned to stick to nuclear for a while for example.

And what possible technology could completely de-carbonize the electric grid in time? Because last I check there are no scalable battery solutions which could feasibly be ramped up in ten years time.

I don't think complete de-carbonization of the electric grid is possible in this timeframe, we will need to achieve the results but with smaller savings across all industries.

Those are few and far between, so unlikely to reach full scale deployment in time.

OP's proposal is one of the right's solutions to climate change. They just described a form of ecofascism.

Why do you say it's one of the right's solutions? Seems like this is the logical conclusion of some of the directions proposed by the left.

> If the people on the right don’t like the remedies of the left, let them come up with an alternative climate change strategy that is not some form of head-in-sand policy.

Ironically, this sentence itself seems smug and non-constructive.

> Ironically, this sentence itself seems smug and non-constructive.

As does that one. So, I will add more clarification.

I propose that we here on HN (if not us, then who?) try to consider the idea that the problem with resolving the climate change issue is not primarily a technical one, but more of a political, societal, psychological, and spiritual one. Scientists and industrialists are already well-equipped with the knowledge and technology to solve the problem on a physical level. That piece of this complex puzzle is solved, at least well enough. It is now up to the rest of us to create the environment in which we can get our asses moving and deploy the necessary changes to production.

So, what shall we do about it? Might it be useful to treat this project like any other, and if there are hangups in getting things done, turn to traditional project management solutions? We need to get buy in from the key players, and this is where things are a bit non-traditional, because the key players are far more diverse, complex, and inconsistent than in traditional projects. So, might it be pragmatic to accept this reality, analyze this situation, and start coming up with new ideas (that take into consideration the unusual and unfortunate complexities) to overcome this blockage? It seems to me, the approach we are currently taking isn't working very well, and the clock is ticking.

Nuclear power and building dikes.

But like all solutions it should have been 20-30 years ago.

The only explanation I can find for this comment is that it's meant to be a hyperbolic satire, from someone whose views may be hyperbolically satirized as "all goverment and regulation is an affront to my inaliable right to dump toxic waste everywhere".

I know your comment is satirical, but unfortunately I know quite a few people, in wealthy countries, for whom an 11 by 11 square cell of their own would be a welcome upgrade to their current, smaller, precariously rented space.

Is it satirical? I dont think it is? If so, should have an /s tag...

Yeah I stayed in a 7 x 9 room in Brooklyn for a few months WITH my GF. That shit was carbon efficient, but damn it was depressing.

I think what the GP is trying to say is that there are a lot of people - like your past self - where an 11x11 room would be better than what they have now. It's a tangent to the point of the unaffordability of housing in large cities these days.

You are joking, but current organization of humans is very wasteful and limiting to development. Apart from the resource burning consumerism, growing complexity of knowledge and technology would probably end up requiring segregation and specialization either way, so that some people would raise children and other people would devote their lifetimes to complex fields of knowledge, which of course implies an authority would have to provide for people. None of this have to be more limiting to almost everyone's personal freedoms than they are already limited today though.

Have you thought of a career in Murdoch journalism? The totally disconnected from reality, non-ironic yet feeble attempt to cast shade on Green New Deal that could come straight from the Daily Mail or one of his titles. Or write fantasy BoJo opinion columns for the Telegraph.

Instead of going for a mega city comic book dystopia, would it not make a lot more sense to go somewhere that can be achieved in some measure in reality? How about some common-sense constraints of capitalism? I imagine we can get most of the way there with an appropriate revenue neutral carbon tax, with an end of profit as the sole arbiter of business, with the end of ignoring the inconvenient (externalities and globalisation) that allow limitless race to the bottom whilst completely ignoring labour, pollution and other related issues.

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