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Comment by jcroll | Hacker News Reader

Judging by covid I wonder if climate change will have to begin to affect every state, not just the coastal ones, before the U.S. has the political capital to take true action.

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Not just the US. There's currently only a single country that seems serious about reducing climate change, which is China (based purely on what they're saying). And looking at history, we always tend to only react when things impact all of us, or at least many of us. Some examples:

- Vehicle safety

- Smoking

- Asbestos

- Lead

All of this stuff only got limited when it killed many people and even then a lot of proof was necessary to convince countries to do something.

A counterexample would be the ozone layer depletion, that should give us some hope, but it's true that the problem was orders of magnitude easier to solve.

The fact that ozone depletion was orders of magnitude easier to solve than climate change is precisely why it doesn't give me much hope. It's not a counterexample; it's a whole different level of problem.

CFCs are a hopeful counterexample

also pretty much the only... and it was relatively easy as viable replacements were available

Sulphur dioxide emissions have improved a lot too. Acid rain is no longer an issue afaik.

That's true.

I am however very pessimistic about our (as a species) ability to deal with something that's even more long-term than i.e. CFCs or SO2.

* CFCs are used in relatively few products. Greenhouse gasses are integral to how we get food, build, make gadgets, move around, and keep the lights on. * There is considerable cheating on CFCs in China (source: widely reported)

> source: widely reported

> The findings suggest that China, which was thought to be the source of most of the rogue emissions of the chemical, CFC-11, has made strides in clamping down on illegal production of the gas. CFC-11 is used to make insulating foams.

-- https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/04/climate/china-cfcs.html

CFC concentration in the atmosphere has only gone down since the Montreal treaty so it's still a success so far. (edit: I should have said "since 2000", the treaty was a phase-out to zero emissions by 1996)

What happened was that the rate of decline of CFC concentration slowed down[1] after 2012. This was an indication that there were new emitters. China then found the emitters and shut them down. [2]

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-018-0106-2.epdf

[2] https://nationalpost.com/news/world/china-makes-arrests-shut...

I would argue that lead and asbestos were regulated well before the general public was pushing for the regulation. (And lead’s effects are generally not fatal effects.) Ethanol in auto fuel is another example where the general public definitely didn’t want that outcome (and it’s not even clear to me today the balance between farm subsidy and climate aid on ethanol.)

China is reducing now because it had lots of low hanging fruit, but it is still problematic

The US has more low hanging fruit, but instead decided to grow more low-hanging fruit trees.

Can't disagree with that unfortunately

This website tracks the compatibility of climate policy with climate goals: https://climateactiontracker.org/ China doesn't appear very serious in this dataset.

Note that the actual implementation often lags behind the policy goals by quite a bit.

> https://climateactiontracker.org/

EU is on track (past 10 years and future 10 years) of reducing emissions by about 10% per decade. India is on track of increasing emissions by about 50% per decade. Yes EU is classified as "insufficient" and India as "2 degrees compatible". I guess that has to do with India's emissions being smaller in absolute terms at the moment, even though they are on an increasing track.

https://climateactiontracker.org/countries/eu/ https://climateactiontracker.org/countries/india/

>(based purely on what they're saying)

Compare that to what they've been doing since 2000.

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

Yes, if history is any indicator, this seems quite likely. Unfortunately, by that point, it will be too late.

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