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Comment by naiveprogrammer | Hacker News Reader

The world is not going to end due to climate change in 2100 or 2200. Humans are capable of adapting to developing climates. The Earth is not going to burn to ashes, the most likely scenario are a few degrees higher which will absolutely have an impact but I don't buy the doomsday scenario. Deaths due to catastrophic events have been going down each decade. Population displacement due to flooding is overstated as we are capable of adapting to incremental flooding due to climate change. My point is, let's take gas now as an improvement and work on solutions over time. We can reasonably expect that by 2100 most cars will be electric or some other clean energy fuel. Climate change will not be solved due to international cooperation, this is an intractable cooperation problem. We are beating climate change with human ingenuity but it takes time...

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"Humans" can adapt as a general abstraction, but we're all too happy to let individual humans die, particularly if they're poor or in developing countries.

Even if you write off those deaths as irrelevant, it still costs money to adapt, as infrastructure has to be built or abandoned and rebuilt, and human capital has to be moved along with it.

It is not clear to me that poor countries are to experience human loss due to climate change since there is a trade off in place here. If developed and developing countries curb emissions to near net zero levels the world economy will suffer. For instance, people in developing countries are still dying from malnutrition. Preventing enhanced economic global prosperity may affect human lives more than the counterfactual scenario of current emission levels. I am not saying this is true, but I think this question is valid. Of course, it would be ideal if we could stop CO2 emissions without foregoing economic growth but such scenario is not possible as of today. That's why I think the solution will come via technological advances instead of global cooperation to reduce CO2 emissions. Even though I do live in a developed country, I came from a developing country and many of you with the same background as me knows that climate change is the least of their worries when some don't even know what they are going to eat for dinner. My point is, in the absence of a global governance structure that makes prohibitively costly to implement a drastic reduction in CO2 emissions worldwide, there is no way that people in the developing world will choose less economic development. I know climate change is dear and near to many people's hearts here but as far as the consequences are not dramatic and sudden, people in the developing world will not really care except for the rich and upper middle class in developing countries which includes some of the biggest emitters such as China.

These same countries never installed land line telephone networks and yet most people in the developing world have phones now because cell phone technology came down in cost enough to outcompete any attempt at building out landline infrastructure.

As solar and wind and storage prices are are coming down fast there is good reason to expect the developing world to be able to largely be able to leapfrog fossil fuels and electrify without the expensive cost of building centralized power plants with sprawling networks of transmission lines, substations and local power lines stretching for thousands and thousands of miles zigzagging through the country side.

Same with electric cars. We are getting close to a day when electric cars will be on sale with 200+ miles of range for 22,000 that has 1/10th the cost to operate as a equivalent internal combustion engine.

The idea that fossil fuel consumption is neccessary for economic growth and standard of living is outdated. Many nations economies have already decoupled growth from fossil fuel consumption. Reducing co2 emissions while simultaneously growing their economies. Including the US.

My argument would be that some kind of coordinated global price on carbon would be an economically cheaper way to prevent and mitigate climate change than arbitrary and unbounded externalization of the costs of it on individuals.

I agree with you that there's a deep and fundamental coordination problem, which is why de facto I think technological solutions will be what have to save us. Which is basically putting many millions of lives at stake with a hope and a prayer, but that's the best we have.

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