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Comment by havelhovel | Hacker News Reader

I have been told on this forum that the men and women working in wildlife conservation are in it for vanity or for self gratification. Relatedly, I have been told on this forum that there is nothing that regular folks can do about climate change.

But then events like this happen, and no one reflects on how fatally pessimistic this community can be. Are we ourselves not capable of forecasting the effect of a burning state on migration patterns? Are we as a society not blessed with enough resources to intervene? If we could all agree to do something—no matter how trivial—to minimize the destruction, instead of doing nothing and attacking the ideas of those who do anything, maybe the aggregate effect would be that events like this are avoided.

If you’re in this fight, please let me know how else I can help. I’m going to check on my bird feeders in the meantime.

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The single most effective thing you can do for climate change, by far, is vote. The climate is one of those tragedy-of-the-commons problems that can only be solved when everybody consents to work on it together. It takes only a relatively small proportion to prevent any progress from being made.

We certainly to have enough resources to intervene, but doing "something -- no matter how trivial" fails to minimize the destruction. Trivial solutions produce trivial results. Or worse, since they often suffer from unexpected interactions from uncoordinated interventions, and delay actual progress.

We have to work together. Voting is the means by which we decide what action we will take collectively. If you live in the US, you're presented with a fairly straightforward choice on the environment. If that is your top priority, then vote that way, and encourage others to do so as well. If you're setting other priorities ahead of the environment, then that's your right, but the environment will be one of the (many) consequences.

I agree that voting (for the party that accepts climate change) is a helpful step that US citizens can take. But why prove my point by seeking to tear my idea apart? We need more action, not less. Isn't voting and picking up trash in a park better than just voting? Isn't voting, picking up trash in a park, and reducing meat consumption even better?

Yes. But picking up trash in a park, reducing meat consumption, and not voting, is much worse. And that's a point a lot of people appear to be missing, so I felt it was worth pointing out.

Voting is great, but it’s not enough to punch a ballot every few years. We need to be exerting a sustained pressure on our local and national representatives to support and pass legislation. We need to put public pressure on corporations to make changes. Look at how the BLM movement has gotten companies to commit to making changes. We need citizen leaders to provide vision and hope.

I don't know where you live, but on my ballot, "the environment" isn't listed.

Instead of goals or policies, what's listed are politicians.

An honest question: The west coast is represented by Democrats. Who am I supposed to vote for? We've known about climate change, and we've voted. We've had both Republican and Democratic regimes over the past half century, but what has changed for the better? Just recently, House Democrats voted to give 850,000 acres of a Nevada wildlife refuge to the airforce for bombing [0].

This makes me think you cannot vote your way out of climate disasters. Telling people to vote doesn't really solve the problem. What are concrete steps that can be done?

If voting is the only thing we can do, then I think we're in big trouble.

[0]: https://mobile.twitter.com/DROPTHEMIC2020/status/13062362926...

We are in big trouble. I'll be blunt that even the best conceivable case is very bad.

As you say, we've had both "regimes", but never for very long, especially given that it takes an overwhelming effort to accomplish anything legislatively. A party in favor of the status quo can stop all change if it runs either house of the legislative or the executive branch -- and it needs only a 41 vote minority in the Senate.

The only way for change to happen is to vote for it over and over, consistently. The party that comes closer to your view on the environment has won two elections in a row exactly once in my lifetime. Even after they get into power they have to actually govern a large, fractious country, including genuine differences of opinion within themselves.

So you can make a perfectly consistent case for giving the fuck up as impossible. Even if your party wins in November, I can practically guarantee that they'll lose two years from now. I stresssed voting in the gp post because you need to do it every goddamned time if you want anything to change. I do think it is the only thing we can do, and yeah, we're in big trouble.

So much this. The events from the past years have already been difficult to digest. But every time I come and read comments, I'm even more depressed, anxious. "no matter if you don't drive, or stop meat; it won't be enough". "nice that you're stopping commuting, but that won't suffice". "offsetting by planting trees is not good enough compared to net zero". Or worse, dismissive like "it only helps with your own self-guilt".

This usually leaves me so depressed.

Yes, I realize all those actions won't suffice, even if we all agree to apply them starting tomorrow. And yes, we need both local and global impact for things to move forward. But I also believe that if everyone starts doing their part : buying less, reducing meat, whatever, it will get discussed more and more and become a concrete part of society much faster.

Guessing OP and I will get downvoted though, which is fine. HN has a fair share of the brightest minds in Tech and related, sometimes I miss a bunch of less pragmatic positivity.

I took an elective wildlife conservation class while earning my Master's. I had no right to be there, because I was surrounded by the brightest, most pragmatic minds I had ever met. The work that my classmates had done to stop destruction, or to sustain populations through novel solutions, was awe inspiring. We don't see it here, and there's an obvious reason for why that might be, but there are amazing people out there who are making the world a better place than it would otherwise be. The least I can do is not just give up. Thank you for doing your part. I really appreciate it.

My use of pragmatic was really not meant to be dismissive. My English is not always as good as I'd like it to be :).

Every time there is a discussion about climate change, there are comments in the lines of "we are in danger, Earth is not". That's entirely correct, but it doesn't help much :).

Thanks for the kind words, you are definitely right, many people are working in the right direction. We need to listen to them more.

Very curious about those brilliant ideas. Giving a few examples would be great.

I oftentimes see that parroted and I believe it is more slacktivism and politically motivated than anything- "Only my guy can fix everything! All I can do is like his political ads and keep on doing what I do"

For instance, how many times have you observed articles that call out cruise ships as "super polluters". Wouldn't not going on cruises be much more impactful than any sort of negotiated regulation? I believe the individual can absolutely do their part

Yes, reducing consumption as a sum of individuals is the most impactful thing we can do, next to voting.

Individual behavioral change is insufficient. A civilization-level crisis requires government intervention. Vote.

A dedicated individual can do quite a lot. Look at John Muir for example - should he have just voted and not do anything else with his life for the environment?

Just from the most immediate problems I could see a lot of profitable work in modeling wildfires, maybe using satellite pictures to identify the most vulnerable spots to light up etc. Also optimizing power usage over networks and things like that are exactly in the ballpark of tech. Is that whole problem space really just best left to the government to slowly add incremental improvements every 10 years? Yes vote but also maybe think about spending more than 1h every few years to think about the problem.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24494744

Most definitely agree about this. It's number 1 on my list. When I moved to the Netherlands I learnt that they actually have separate elections for the water management. Almost like a separate body of the government. I wish something like this for environment was implemented, simply because people tend to vote for things that are much closer to them, unemployment, security, ...

Given recent events, it seems clear we need to rethink the role of the executive branch, probably to strengthen gov't services (e.g. cabinet-level agencies) and make them more independent of political agendas and misdirection. A more independent EPA, NOAA, FDA, law enforcement, military, etc that are governed by strict codes of conduct and missions that proscribe their misuse by either a careless/malignant POTUS or legislature could save many lives, make US policy more stable and sustainable, and upgrade the standard of living for more than just Americans.

I think we need to do more than just vote.

I think we need to do more than just vote.

You're absolutely right: voting is a necessary, albeit insufficient, step towards fixing many of the challenges we face.

However, the vast majority of people who happen to read my comment on here will, at best, only vote. I don't want anyone to skip out on the very important and relatively easy step they can take just because voting isn't a silver bullet.

individual-scale action is not a substitute for collective action. You can plant trees and sort your recycling every day for the rest of your life and it won't make the tiniest fraction of the difference that raising fuel economy standards or implementing a carbon tax or whatever would do.

individual action is often presented as a sop precisely because industry wants to divert discussion from the forms of collective action that actually make a difference.

Entirely correct. And that's infuriating

Though it does not stop us from acting at local level. Let us all stop replacing our phones every year, and there will be a shift in consumption models. We collectively, as a sum of locals, have the power to make things change.

Not saying don't do those things, but we need society-level action to really make an impact. To plagiarize the saying about the internet and censorship, capitalism is a self-correcting system designed to route around any "errors" like individual ethics/behavior that produce non-optimal profits according to "the rules" of the system. If you reduce the demand for coal because everyone chooses to pay the extra for solar energy, someone is going to scoop up that cheap coal and find a way to use it. You have to "change the rules of the game" to make any impact, and that's society/collective level action.

That's an interesting point you're making (though scary). Didn't think about it that way. Thanks.

It's funny that this is also coming from the community that runs on building good-enough-for-now solutions rather than trying to raise $1B and build the perfect service from the ground up.

Which community are you talking about? HN?

There's always something you can do. There are market opportunities in addressing climate change. Find them, implement them, continually push for more economically and ecologically sustainable results. The more money there is in finding solutions, the more likely we are to fix the underlying problems.

Sounds like a bunch of science deniers. Weird to have those on a tech forum but I guess it takes all types.

There have been many pans proposed, such as the Green New deal, to combat climate change, create stable jobs, and in many other ways improve the nation. But when 1/3 of the voters don't want change and would rather descend back into the racism and xenophobia of the 50's (except for the taxes) then not much can be done.

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