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Comment by tjansen | Hacker News Reader

"over-reliance on technical solutions"

This drives me crazy. While closing down the oil industry should be a goal, all solutions that the public would accept (and aren't worse than climate change itself) will be technical solutions, not sacrifice. The lockdown gave us a good glimpse at how effective sacrifice it. It's not enough.

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Not only is sacrifice an insufficient toll but it’s an unfair one. Who’s getting sacrificed for whom. Are we just going to tell thousands at a danish scale and millions at a global scale tough luck but at least you’ll have a shot at eeking out a subsistence level livelihood for your family. The smallest minority on earth is the individual and a civilisation that exists on the basis of overt human sacrifice isn’t one I and many others will abide by. This sounds a bit melodramatic but I’ve seen the toll it’s taken on family members this year who’ve lost a year of turnover in their small business. If the powers that be continue to throw these people under the bus they will have a fight on their hands and then we won’t even fix climate change probably the other way around.

This dismisses the successes eg Fridays for Future had. Making high-CO2 lifestyle choices (frequent international flights, SUVs, fast fashion, ...) socially less acceptable and “uncool” is absolutely part of the solution

> frequent international flights

You probably mean frequent national flights for small Europeans countries? People are just flying less internationally because of COVID, not because of Friday for Futures thinking that's not cool.

Are these actually successes? I don't know how you can become carbon neutral by avoiding flights, SUVs and fast fashion. You can reduce CO2 emissions a bit, but won't come even close to 0. I think they are distractions.

If you look at your individual emissions then an SUV, frequent flights and fast fashion will dominate everything else. The only reason flying isn't a huge percentage of global emissions is because few people fly. Even in the US less than half the population fly in any one year.

It's true, but why would you put your focus on reducing your individual emission by (rough estimate) 30%, instead of demanding solutions that can get your emissions down by 100%? There's this urge to self-sacrifice and then look down on other people who don't, and it's really counter-productive in every way.

Because technology alone won't solve the problem. There is no green alternative to flying across the Atlantic and there probably won't ever be.

Applying the same thinking that got us into this situation won't get us out of it.

then look down on other people who don't

That's in your mind, not mine.

Technology eventually solved every problem by making the solutions cheap enough to be acceptable.

Back when every river in Europe was full of human shit, the air was full of smog and pretty much the entire continent was devoid of timber people were saying the exact same sort of "technology will never solve this, we need to make sacrifices" crap.

I could go on but "making sacrifices" does not work at scale because when you apply that one approach to more than one problem you wind up sacrificing so many things that the standard of living is driven back by hundreds of years.

Technology eventually solved every problem by making the solutions cheap enough to be acceptable.

Technology created this problem, applying the same thinking that got us into this situation won't get us out of it. All this wishful thinking crap won't get us anywhere.

You don't need to drive your standard of living back hundreds of years although if we don't get a handle on climate change that will happen.

"Because technology alone won't solve the problem."

Technology is more likely to solve the problem than reducing emissions by a certain percentage, which is guaranteed to be insufficient. Transatlantic flights are certainly a hard problem, but why should it be impossible? Either using hydrogen, synthetic fuels and/or by offsetting emissions with carbon capturing.

If all that comes along then great, take advantage of it. But right now there are no hydrogen planes rolling off the production line in Seattle. Carbon capture has been hyped for a long time now but we aren't seeing anything substantial happening.

Which leaves us in the situation that if you get on a plane to cross the Atlantic today you will add another ton of CO2 to the atmosphere.

Carrying on as we are right now is like spending next years pay rise before you have got the promotion, it will bankrupt us.

Isn't this SUV x CO2 a post-fact thing?

Or to put in another way, is a new SUV worse than an Opel Corsa 1999 regarding CO2 emission?

Yes, because that new SUV will probably remain on the market for another 20 years. The 1999 Opel Corsa has at most 5 years of useful life left. So "new SUV" vs "old car" is a false dichotomy, and the real comparison should be between "20 years of fuel-guzzling SUV" or "20 years of fuel-efficient minicar" (mildly exaggerating, but you get the point).

So destroy anything that could be useful and reliable (which in turn decreases emissions as well because less things are being produced) and buy new shiny cars? Have you ever looked at how reliable modern cars are (especially with downsized engines which don’t do much about fuel economy but do a lot in reliability, not in a good way? you can’t expect most of them to last 20 years on the first engine and gearbox. While over 300k miles on the odometer was totally doable with 20 year old cars which are often rust free(not like 70s cars) and similarly efficient as modern cars, I don’t see why buying a new, more unreliable with almost the same fuel efficiency car would be better for emissions than keeping an old car running.

Maybe not, but that's probably not a fair comparison. Given same age, length and width, an SUV will be a bit heavier and have more air resistance than a vehicle with less height, so the energy use (and emissions) will be maybe 20% higher than a comparable station wagon.

Assuming that we are not talking about an hybrid/electronic SUV, right? I think the SUV theme is more a class struggle, trying to fit all SUV drivers into a stereotype (conservative/ suburb/family) than really a CO2 emission Per se.

It's also a thing for Europeans to criticize Americans about because most average people in Europe can't afford to have an SUV, whether due to money, lack of parking, roads not made for SUVs, etc.

There are enough SUVs on European roads to prove it's possible. There are also countries like Switzerland or Luxemburg that have higher average incomes than the US, and still prefer Porsches or Mercedes to SUVs. Looking at the countries with slightly lower GDP per capita like Spain or France, you can restrict statistics to just the upper classes, and any group income-matched to the US population will have just as many garages but still far fewer SUVs.

so true. I'm one that, even if I wanted (and I don't), it would be hard to park and drive through our narrow streets.. add to that the risk to get the car trashed just because It's a SUV.

Not everything is a technical solution foremost: new laws prohibiting the import and sale of certain polluting equipment and/or incentivising people to buy lower-carbon equivalent are primarily political/economic/social solutions. If they are well-designed (which isnt easy, I give you that) reasonable people can accept them.

Your point about sacrifice probably stands

Yeah, there's something liberating about knowing we have to get to carbon zero or even carbon negative.

It quickly & significantly narrows the solution space. No amount of carpooling or bicycling will ever be enough by themselves to get us to carbon zero. (Speaking as an avid cyclist)

I understand what you are saying, but you can make the same argument for why littering should be allowed. Banning littering is also sacrifice. Very likely technical solutions alone won't cut it.

My issue with sacrifices is that they often punish the wrong people. For example, let's say there is a carbon tax on flights (very likely to happen soonish). People who travel for work and for other necessities should not incur the same penalty as tourists who travel purely for pleasure.

The tourists traveling purely for pleasure are also helping the people who work in the tourist, service and entertainment industries at those destinations. For some smaller countries, that's a considerable part of their economy.

There seems to be a random distribution of what's acceptable and what not. Driving an SUV? Sinner. Owning a dog? Acceptable, despite higher CO2 emissions. Getting a daily newspaper on paper? Perfectly acceptable. Eating takeout? Irresponsible waste of resources, despite a family of 4 eating at a (European) McDonalds needing less paper than needed for a newspaper.

No I agree with you on that but I think my definition of what is a luxury is quite well defined.

All these fake greenies flying to India to find themselves are still going to burn in hell though.

Sacrifice so that elites can travel to Davos in their private jets and gaslight you for not sacrificing enough.

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