Hacker News Reader

Comment by jfrankamp | Hacker News Reader

The United States military could best be used to fight this by destroying (with warning) global fossil fuel infrastructure that wasn't voluntarily closed, bit by bit with a decade long schedule. The announcement alone would prompt a massive shift in energy production, use, investment etc. Our own legacy infrastructure would also have to be on the list. Call it a Paris accord with teeth.

It will never happen, because collectively we don't believe the cost of climate change is greater than the cost of leveling the landscape of incentives to reduce emissions + reducing emissions. The US could unilaterally leverage its remaining military lead to enact global change.

View on HN

Wow... So the military of the state that has contributed most to the global cumulative CO2 emissions (25%) can "solve" the problem with indiscriminate attacks and war crimes everywhere else now. Fascinating. Are people forgetting about this practice of thinking about their idea at least for 30 seconds before starting to type?

Targeting unoccupied fossil fuel infrastructure on an announced schedule is indiscriminate? War crimes for killing an oil derrick?

That is fascinating to me. We know the Paris accord cannot work without enforcement. It is economically disadvantageous to go first. As I said, it will never happen. We don't take the threat seriously, we don't believe it is an existential threat.

Well, it happens to be both things. I have no doubt that you will find international criminal law fascinating, you just have to google it.

That sounds like a good way to start World War III. The top oil producing countries after the US are:

Saudi Arabia, Russia, Canada, China, Iraq, United Arab Emirates, Brazil, Iran, Kuwait

https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=709&t=6

Nuclear winter would solve global warming though it still would count as climate change, so maybe it's a wash.

Well, Russia doesn't seem so happy about global warming. I gather that melting permafrost screws up gas production. So maybe they'd want to work with the US.

The US is well versed in "the lesser of two evils"

All signatories of the Paris accord. All are nominally thought to be rapidly transforming their economies in response to an existential crisis.

"including high polluters such as China, the US, India, Russia, Japan, Germany, South Korea, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Canada, Indonesia and Mexico, which generate more than half the world's greenhouse gas emissions, will somehow drive down their carbon pollution voluntarily and assiduously without any binding enforcement mechanism"

What is the binding enforcement mechanism?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_Agreement

Can militaries around the world even operate without fossil fuels? Some of the larger ships and submarines are nuclear, but pretty much everything else is fossil fuel dependent AFAIK.

The US military is a leading source of carbon emissions

Reply on news.ycombinator.com