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Comment by Hokusai | Hacker News Reader

> "Doing so will require systemic shifts in how we produce food, create energy, manage our oceans and use materials,"

This is a hard political problem. The owners of the current means to produce meat/oil/etc. want to keep their fortune and to move them to renewable/plant-base/new-tech solutions make them lose that edge and creates real competition.

The problem with economy/ecology is that many people are addicted to easy money. We have the tech and knowledge (or we are close in some fields) to replace the problematic industries.

The change for the better is a matter of time and pushing politicians and big investors to do the right thing.

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Very much indeed. It frustrates me to no end to look back 20 years in the past and see that Al Gore ran on an anti global warming platform in the 2000 presidential election, and lost to an oil baron. While in the 2020 presidential election the democratic candidate hardly mentions the climate disaster while the western parts of the country is literally on fire.

Over the years we have tried to solve the climate disaster with some (but very limited) success. Methods including carbon tax, international agreements and green infrastructure. However these efforts have always stopped short of being implemented on a necessary scale (international agreements especially). It is a hard problem only because modern politicians are unwilling to implement any of the necessary policy to tackle it (even though most voters generally want it; green infrastructure especially).

Yes but none of the imminent dangers he warned about came to pass did they? We're still waiting. So, perhaps the right choice was made.

20 years later, you should watch that film again and see the manipulative fear mongering that is in play.

And let's not forget that Al is heavily invested in 'green' tech.

If U may tell, which specific imminent 'dangers' did not come to pass?

I'd have to watch the film again (no thanks!) to provide more detail, but it was a tirade of fear. Eg:

No snow on Kilimanjaro? but: https://glacierhub.org/2018/04/04/greatest-snowfall-on-kilim...

20-foot rise in sea levels caused by melting ice caps?

shutting down of the ocean conveyor?

Hurricanes are getting stronger?

Pacific Islands drowning?

Hurricanes getting stronger:

https://www.livescience.com/climate-change-hurricanes-strong...

Islands drowning:

https://www.businessinsider.com/pacific-islands-stunning-pho...

Ice caps melting:

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/global-warmin...

Oceans rising:

https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/sealevel.html

Ocean conveyor slowdown:

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

(Courtesy of Google.)

I'm not going to get in to a link war. All I'd ask is: in your personal experience, what have you observed? Are the seas higher than when you were a child? Are you struggling to breathe for all the C02?!? Stripping away the news coverage, what real life effects have you experienced personally?

Unfortunately, I'm not prepared to trust what I think are politicised governance authorities. At least not if they go against or do not cohere with my personal experience.

You are missing the forest for the trees. This is 20 years ago, and Al Gore was (even then) not a leading climate activist nor a climate scientist. Our knowledge of both the nature and the scope of the climate disaster has change in the meantime. Heck, we used to call it the greenhouse effect or global warming back then. Since then we’ve gotten a better understanding and are able to make better predictions and construct better policy to tackle it. Saying: “Al Gore was wrong about prediction A and B”, reminds me of creationists saying: “Evolution is wrong because Charles Darwin said the origin of organism A was environmental condition B, when in fact it wasn’t”.

I really don’t even believe Al Gore would have saved us from the Climate Disaster. I’m guessing he would have had a similar success as Obama giving health care for all.

The point is that Al Gore could run on an anti-climate change platform with the Democratic party 20 years ago. Today even a train-loving Biden is hard against investing in the green infrastructure we needed 20 years ago, even though the majority of his voters desperately want it.

The crux of my frustration is that 20 years ago there was a political will to do something about this, while now—as the west coast is literally on fire, the gulf states are being bombarded with unprecedented hurricanes and the east coast just lived through horrible heat waves—solving the climate crisis is a hard problem because politicians are unwilling to take the necessary actions.

> we used to call it the greenhouse effect or global warming back then.

And before that we were going to have a mini ice age...

Also, can I say I find it odd when people talk using the pronoun 'we'. The Queen does that when she talks about her country. That's called the royal 'we'.

What global warming effect can you say you've witnessed? I don't think I can say I've noticed a single thing. Nothing. Some warm summers some cold winters - ie weather. As a cyclist it seems the quality of air has improved and I'm noticing more birds. So 20+ years of talk and fear, and there's nothing to see?

I'm at the point where I see that all that fear serves a purpose in its own right. I don't think the rhetoric matches the reality. But putting people in a state of fear that they are also powerless to address does serve a purpose. The purpose is that it supports government. It supports global governance too. Government plays up a problem that only it can solve, and it can only solve that problem by reducing the freedoms of the people it governs. So less freedom of travel, closer monitoring, etc. For me, it's one of the justifications given for what is shaping up to be a technocratic hell. And technologists are unwittingly building the infrastructure.

What I see with Al Gore is, on the one side - a self-serving politician, happy to talk up the importance of governance when he is a member of the governing class, and on the other - a salesman doing a sales job given he is invested in green energies.

Let me get this straight. Your saying there is a conspiracy to fear monger the population with prediction of climate disaster so that we will agree on mass surveillance and to losing other freedoms.

While at the same time we have already had mass surveillance and travel restrictions imposed on us from the global war on terror (started under George Bush a year after winning the election against Al Gore), while not having any enforced international carbon reduction treaty all the while global carbon emission keeps expanding out of control.

If this was a true conspiracy so far they’ve done a very poor job with it for the past 20 years, and I say you have nothing to worry about.

I'm saying it is a long running conspiracy. We lost freedoms with the global war on terror, we have lost freedoms since then, we are going to lose more freedoms in the very near future. I can see the direction we are heading. And no, I'm not cheering it on as you seem to be.

> If this was a true conspiracy so far they’ve done a very poor job with it for the past 20 years.

What's poor about their job? I think they have done an excellent job. Most people defer to experts over their own experience. Imagine, one's own experience not carrying any weight with one's own beliefs! So, they have done an excellent job.

>> the western parts of the country is literally on fire.

Currently under investigation as arson.

It's not just about the capital owners. The actual people chopping down rainforests for palm oil plantations are formerly impoverished farmers. You can stop corporations from buying from them, but you're hurting these poorer communities the most.

> The actual people chopping down rainforests for palm oil plantations are formerly impoverished farmers.

The people chopping down rainforest and planting oil palms are dispossessed, former farmers.

The people making them do it are wealthy and politically well connected who arrange to have their land confiscated.

Deforestation in Brazil was almost stopped when Bolsonaro came into office and has surged since then. For me this is one of the primary reasons why i worry about the future of our civilisation: every nature reserve, every protected animal, every small victory against ecological destruction can so easily be lost again.

Those who wish to protect must be on guard every day and win every fight.

Those who wish to destroy must only win once and can choose the best time.

As they say, the price of liberty is eternal vigilance.

It's worth it.

There are ways to construct constitutions such that no one person in a democracy has the power to do this much damage. E.g. only a multi-participatory and diverse parliament—and crucially not any government; especially not any president—has the power to enact laws which can cause such a damage.

In a successful democracy, the people don’t have the option to vote them self a dictator.

Switzerland is perhaps an example of this. There's no president — the head of the federal government is a 7-member Federal Council elected by the parliament, with representation proportional to parliament. This means that politics is generally more consensus-driven and less subject to extreme views.

Swiss politics also makes heavy use of referendums, and any aspect of federal/cantonal/local law can be decided in a referendum if there's enough support.

https://www.eda.admin.ch/aboutswitzerland/en/home/politik/ue...

Note: I am a recent transplant to Switzerland so I'm still learning the ways in which the Swiss system has advantages and, crucially, disadvantages (I'd guess stalemate/slow progress are some).

There are quite a few theoretical disadvantages to the Swiss system, including what you mentioned. The surprising thing is though, when I compare to all other systems, I don't see that much of stalemate or progress gap. So even without understanding why, it seems to me it gets somehow evened out.

One of the core beliefs I have for understanding the world is that equality is an unstable equilibrium.

Imagine an almost perfectly balanced democracy where everyone has nearly equal agency and power. At some point, maybe at the political level of brownian motion, someone will have a tiny edge. They will naturally use that bit of extra power to garner a little more power. Because the most useful thing to with a little extra power is always to capture some more.

Compound that over many iterations and your democracy is dead.

Thus, I believe that all systems of equality and democracy need active, constant recalibration to maintain fairness. There is no perfectly written constitution that you can set in motion like clockwork and have it run flawlessly forever. There is no static equilibrium, but you can have dynamic equilibrium. Constant vigilance.

> One of the core beliefs I have for understanding the world is that equality is an unstable equilibrium.

I think this has been statistically proven[1]. So I should probably add that in addition to a well crafted constitution that prevents any single party from enacting a damaging law, such a constitution needs to be revised or rewritten whenever a single party has been deemed to gain such power.

Revising and rewriting the constitution needs to be done with the utmost care off course and have ample democratic safeguards to prevent a dictator.

A true democracy has the power to revise its constitution when that constitution is no longer able to protect the democracy it defines from a dictator.

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1. Almost 10 years ago I learned D3 by building an interactive graph testing this in a game of capitalism. After a few rounds of completely fair zero-sum trades where all parties start with the same amount, the bulk of the wealth will always accumulate on few hands.

https://runarberg.github.io/paelingar/kapitalisk-audsofnun/

Do you have a source of this happening? This is from a report about Indonesia (http://www.fao.org/3/a-i7696e.pdf).

> Large plantations cultivate export crops on about 15 percent of the total agricultural area, but the majority of farmers (68 percent) are smallholders operating on less than one hectare.

Indonesia's population is still growing. If you're an uneducated farmer in a large family with a small farm, the only option you have to make a living may be to work in a palm oil plantation.

Are you sure the word is dispossessed here? Were those farmers working on their own land, and then had it taken away from them by force without payment?

Yes.

Armed thugs, rape, fired crops, ... everything.

How should those people living in the wild area get better life (education, medication, etc) for their next generation?

I saw the same thing in Latin America: farmers dispossessed by banana plantations.

> you're hurting these poorer communities the most.

My point is that redistributing wealth in a better way, we would get less opposition to upgrade our production means and people like that poor farmers and others will get a bigger piece of the cake in a more healthy environment and conserving their culture and land.

I agree with you, thou. The current mindset is that the super-rich are super-rich and their wealth cannot be touched. So, we are left with limited options on how to manage with the scraps. If we think out of the box and realize that we can redistribute wealth better, there will be still very rich people but also farmers would get a more fair price for their contribution.

This is key. It's this cultural blind spot where we gloss over the fact that these people are impoverished and so desperate that they would destroy the home around them, partly because we allow a tiny fraction of humanity to amass absurd wealth. Then we double down by making it socially acceptable for them to leverage that wealth into making it untouchable and ever-growing.

If we just took this situation as strictly unacceptable, then we are working with a much larger range of options.

The idea that big reward == all that innovation needed is pretty sick. It assumes all it takes is innovation to solve literal planet scale problems.

Well, innovation in agriculture has actually reduced the amount of land used for farming in more developed countries while increasing production.

Yes, becaused the developed countries simply import their goods from non-developed countries.

“... The owners of the current means to produce meat/oil/etc...”

Just as often as big operations contributing to this, it’s the mom or pop or children doing this in a subsistence manner. A contributing factor is encroachment due to local population growth.

Indeed. Madagascar is a slow-motion environmental catastrophe because every family has many children and each of those children eventually needs to slash-and-burn rainforest in order to plant enough rice to sustain themselves. Also a lot of tree-felling to make charcoal, because for whatever reason Malagasy villagers cannot afford e.g. kerosene to cook with. The result is the steady eradication of all those cool lemurs and other rainforest wildlife, but the perpetrators of this destruction are not millionaire industrial fatcats like people often imagine, they are dirt-poor subsistence farmers.

And without significant investment by those with resources, asking them to preserve the environment is a direct ask for them to go hungry or cold for the sake of the environment. This is an ask that 99.99% or more of the human population will absolutely ignore.

I guess a solution would be give them supplies so they aren't forced to destroy their own backyard in order to survive.

Or how about we invade Madagascar, ship all these poor folk to NYC, and declare the entire region a wildlife reserve?

Not cool. This kind of imperialist mindset has historically been at the head of some of the most awful actions in human history. Including forced relocations, imposed poverty, sustained resource theft, sustained vandalism and theft of local artifacts, slave labor, and even genocide.

If the rich world really cared about the wildlife in Madagascar we would fund green local infrastructure projects so that the local population could enjoy a sustainable lifestyle on their own.

The problem is much more complex than people being "addicted to easy money". Wealthy nations have buffer to take on unnecessary expense in addressing their basic needs, like food and shelter. This is dramatically less true in non-wealthy nations. Creating ecological mandates can have actual human impact on food availability and on human standard of living. Not the marginal improvements experienced in developed nations, but life or death quality of life changes to the worlds poorest.

https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2019/08/13/746576239/is... Pastured farming is actually capable of being carbon negative

But also the owners of the means to produce soybean and grain are happy that they can cut out the middleman and sell their product direct to consumers rather than as animal feed. They will end up with more wealth.

We are addicted to high population density, making babies and helping get everyone to what we consider is the minimum level of consumption, which is exactly 2x higher than the Earth can provide sustainably.

At one point we’ll have to say “Earth can only feed X billion people if we want to have a medium pressure on our environment”.

Second reply: Impact = Population * Affluence * Technology.

The problem is not rising population, it's rising affluence and inert technology.

As people earn more, they consume more in general, and more of environmentally harmful products like meat, cars, and plane trips in particular.

Meanwhile we're not improving core technologies quickly enough.

We make buildings using Portland cement. Cement making is responsible for about 1/20 of total carbon emissions by itself. Planes are not electric yet; nor are cars. Cities are badly designed for pedestrians. Meat substitutes aren't good enough or cheap enough yet. We burn coal to make electricity, thanks to the coal industry's astroturfing campaign against nuclear in the 1960s and 1970s.

We also burn coal to make steel. We cut down forest to make biofuels, a bizarre and depraved practice.

> Cities are badly designed for pedestrians.

Eh every large city I've been to that isn't in US or Canada is extremely pedestrian friendly. To the point of being actively nicer and easier to navigate by foot than by car.

Even NYC and SF are way faster to navigate by foot/bike than by car. I've stopped using Uber in SF because it's faster (and cheaper) to get places with a rented bike.

Well there are thousands of small cities and towns which are not this way. Hell, if you leave San Francisco and go to any other bay area city it's not this way

Well the GP was saying that density is the problem but really it’s the solution. High density keeps our mess contained and reduces carbon output.

> As people earn more, they consume more in general, and more of environmentally harmful products like meat, cars, and plane trips in particular.

That is one part of the problem. But, as we have seen, there is alternatives. Because the pandemic, more people is working from home, playing video games instead of traveling or even learning new skills.

I love to travel, but also to play games or read books. A change of culture will help with that. Governments could also apply "sin taxes" to luxuries that harm the environment in favor of more social and cultural activities that hire more people but consume less natural resources.

I’m not sure the travel industry is the worst perpetrator here. But regardless, asking people to give up their traveling is simply too much. I would much rather look at commuting and the shipping industry. As well as family/friendly visits which could be done using green on-ground mass transports.

There's nothing wrong with population density. We'd do better to have people living in dense city centers instead of sprawled out into every corner of the wilderness.

COVID-19 begs to differ

Many countries with high population density have managed to deal with COVID-19 rather well, and vice-versa.

North Dakota has more than 10x the per-capita COVID-19 infection rate of New York City right now, despite having only about 0.03% of the population density.

You're comparing two cities that got hit by COVID-19 in totally different time periods. No other place in the US had a spike like NYC

Study: Urban Density Not Linked to Higher Coronavirus Infection Rates—and Is Linked to Lower COVID-19 Death Rates

https://www.jhsph.edu/news/news-releases/2020/urban-density-...

We are not addicted to making babies, or at least not endlessly. Take a look at Wikipedia's list of countries by total fertility rate, and then google for charts showing what's been happening to it over the last few decades.

Most countries, the significant exceptions being in Sub-Saharan Africa, have TFR below or near replacement (2.1).

When girls are allowed to learn to read, and when people move to cities women don't have all that many kids.

Most of the world's current population growth is due to increasing lifespan.

So don't worry about managing population. In a few decades the worry will be about keeping it up, not down. (With Sub-Saharan Africa, again, as the exception.)

It's kind of weird to see the people worried about over-population come crashing into the new worry about population stagnation or decline. Both problems are hard. The only fun stage is unconstrained growth unless we can somehow reach stability without continually killing people to stay there like we used to.

We unfortunately are more addicted to sprawl than population density. We'd be better off with _more_ density.

In pre-industrial times, the population was naturally limited by food shortages. People were chronically exceeding the carrying capacity and then being culled back. They've always been "addicted" to high population density. What's the alternative? Extinction? Every species does the same, but for most of them, nobody cares about the endless hardship of living at the limit of carrying capacity.

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