Hacker News Reader

Comment by juanbyrge | Hacker News Reader

What the author misses is that government can play a huge role in combating climate change. There are simple policies the government can enact that would greatly improve the situation. Things like stopping fossil fuel subsidies, enacting carbon taxes, and incentivizing clean energy. There was a recent Ezra Klein podcast with Saul Griffith about this very topic. For instance , it is literally impossible in some places to put up rooftop solar due to archaic building codes. In a lot of cases the government is getting in the way. This is why protests can be effective, even if individuals may not always reduce their lifestyles.

View on HN

The problem with measures like that is that they would still not be enough. With everything that hass been pledged so far in terms of policy, we are still well on our way to >= 3°C in warming, which would have catastrophic consequences. But even getting those concessions was extremely difficult, and there is still no guarantee everything will even be implemented as promised.

But the changes we actually need run much deeper, and they would directly impact our lifestyle, because our current one is not sustainable. The problem with that is that if governments were to attempt to implement those changes, they will be voted out. For instance, the French government tried to do a carbon tax, but was met with weeks of violent protests.

It's also a game theory issue for governments: putting a carbon tax on your country's production will make your economy less competitive compared to those that won't. You can mitigate the consequences for that by carbon taxing imports, but that will not help you with your exports.

The bottom line is that we need to do much more, but it's politically not feasible at this point. It will only be when people's lives are being much more severely impacted, but by that time, it will be too late to avoid a catastrophic outcome. IMO the only realistic hope we have is the development of active carbon capture technologies that can be deployed on a global scale. Whether that is feasible in time remains to be seen.

I'm pretty sure 90% of the changes won't impact anyone's lifestyle. Moving to renewable energy and phasing out ICE cars allow for the exact same lifestyle. The only things that might have to change are things that require carbon emissions, like plane trips or meat production (although this one also might not require carbon emissions in 20 years). I guess you could argue that slightly more expensive manufactured goods impact a person's lifestyle, but that's a pretty minor change, and if you do a carbon tax and dividend, that's going to be moot for all but maybe 10% of the population.

> But the changes we actually need run much deeper, and they would directly impact our lifestyle, because our current one is not sustainable.

In exactly what sense is our current lifestyle not sustainable? The way you've stated the assumption it's analogous to arguing that we can't feed billions of humans. That's precisely the Malthusian argument, which was wrong. Agricultural productivity has increased by orders of magnitude in the last couple of centuries.

I'm not arguing against solving climate change. But the "we have to change everything" formulation is very limiting. In fact, I think it's pretty much a guarantee that we'll experience catastrophic effects.

My opinion is that government may 'enact' things, but they don't produce anything, and given the two sub-par candidates from the two-party system currently running to govern this country, I think the only way, at least here in the US, that change is going to happen is from the ground up; I'm not holding out on the US government, or any other government in the world to improve my life, our lives. You can't legislate intelligence.

I've always lived a very low-impact life in proportion to my rise up in economics until just this very year or so, although I am going on 6 years as a vegetarian. Not bad for 56 years I think. I even lived a year in Indonesia in a rice-farming village with predominantly dirt floors with electricity equal to one US apartment (not house) running the few bulbs, radios and TVs in a local population of 100 plus people. I was very happy, and maybe I will go back there, and wait out this disaster (Covid-19, modern life!). I am capable of doing high-tech work, or fix-anything work, so I don't need to be tethered to the internet or a computer to earn my living. I like to think of what Harlan Ellison would write about all of the smart phones, tablets, etc. in the same vein as he did in "The Glass Teat" about television and its sequel "Another Glass Teat". I like Scott Locklin's disparaging term for these and many other modern must-haves as "nerd dildos".

Change will happen by you and I making personal choices and changes and coming to the realization that all the things we think we need, we don't, or at least not in the quantities we believe we do. Eventually lack of outdoor life, sitting all day hunched over a screen, and avoiding reality will have its consequences with bad backs, hearts, minds and spirits, so government or no government, individual lifestyle changes or not, consequences will come a calling and give us feedback whether we like it or not. I am a believer in what the author attributes and quotes from Ghandi, but here's the actual quote:

“We but mirror the world. All the tendencies present in the outer world are to be found in the world of our body. If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the world would also change. As a man changes his own nature, so does the attitude of the world change towards him. This is the divine mystery supreme. A wonderful thing it is and the source of our happiness. We need not wait to see what others do.” – Mahatma Gandhi

>> Things like stopping fossil fuel subsidies

This would suffice. Let capitalism take care of the rest. It is simple insane that we are rolling with 1.3M year old technologies (burning shit) when new technologies already available because government intervention. Renewables, nuclear energy and few more alternatives already exist yet we are paying big money to oil companies to mine oil, do fracking (good bye clean water later) and burn coal. Absolutely insane, cave man level, literally.

It's weird for myself because so long ago the left was all about this alongside carbon taxes and now I'm hearing "carbon taxes don't work" and "the poorest will be hurt most by removing subsidies" from the same crowd - all of which were said by Republicans for years against climate change proposals - and to just directly target a handful of fossil fuel companies responsible for a majority. That's essentially using bonafide autocratic or fascist methods to approach climate change which opens the door IMO for the disintegration of the US completely literally into a cyberpunk dystopia. And furthermore, it misses the reality that climate change is a global problem that requires a concerted international response and that the US is less than half the world's emissions at the moment.

Who cares if US-centric emissions go to 0 if the rest of the world goes up 3x+ because developing economies go for the cheapest energy sources?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com