Hacker News Reader

Comment by andrei_says_ | Hacker News Reader

Maybe it’s time to signal political leaders that climate collapse is an urgent issue.

I think about 40% of the country has been 'signaling' pretty hard. 30% are actively pushing for more emissions/denial. And the rest are sick of the infighting.

Take the bipartisan infrastructure 'agreement' (not final). Republicans refused to do anything but support more cars...

Economic empowerment is the single greatest strategy to improve the climate and that is the entirety of the Republican platform.

How so?

It's easy to blame political leaders, but they are (mostly) elected by the general population. Here in the US ~50% of the people vote for climate change deniers, so they are the ones you need to convince.

Unless things have changed recently, 41% of USA inhabitants (58% of white evangelicals) believe the second coming of jesus will happen by 2050 [1] [2]. Such a belief would also seem to cancel voter motivation to combat climate change.

[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2010/07/14/jesus-chris...

[2] https://www.huffpost.com/entry/climate-change-study_n_320405...

US voters didn't become climate change deniers by chance

How do US voters go about changing climate policy in China and India?

By voting for politicians who contribute and participate in international regulation, like the Paris Agreement, instead of just quitting them.

Taking serious steps to make changes in your own country before requesting changes in others.

India emits less than half the CO2 that the US does, and almost an order of magnitude less per capita. The US has a long way to go toward getting its own climate policy in order before it should be telling India to make changes.

International agreements is one of the solutions which climate advocates are calling for. USA voters probably have more power then anyone in calling for such agreements and that they would be enforced.

I'd say voting in officials who are willing to pressure these nations

They generate co2 in mostly to produce goods that are consumed in western countries... pollution was just outsourced

How about we do something about what we can control rather than drag each other down like crabs in a bucket?

Import tariffs and immigration quota reduction for countries not doing their part.

Yes, the solution to climate change has been obvious for a while - hit fossil fuels with increasing taxes until emissions come down to acceptable levels.

Of course, that involves giving up one’s pickup trucks/SUV, international vacations, and 3k sq ft detached single family homes on quarter acre lots.

So…not going to happen. Blaming politicians is a waste of time, it is the people as a collective that have chosen the path.

Any citation on the portion of American voters who vote for federal politicians who deny climate change? I suspect it’s nowhere near 50%, even if 50% of elected officials deny climate change. Representation is ludicrously disproportionate in the United States federal government.

This is a good point. According to this

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1035521/popular-votes-re...

The Republicans have won the larger percentage of the popular vote once in the last seven elections. Most Americans prefer the non-denialist party but they are denied equal representation at the state and federal levels of government.

Yeah, when they had only two choices it could’ve been any number of issues influencing their vote, not only climate change.

Two-party system sucks.

I hate to rain on your parade, but any solution that doesnt lean heavily on nuclear is not a solution.

50% of the population may be climate deniers (need a reference though), but there is a large group of progressives that loved the green new deal also, which did not include nuclear energy, so there is blame on both sides.

Yes, we should pour money into nuclear power, not so much because it's efficient or necessary, but because unless we give the denialists this sop they won't play ball. It's the price of cooperation.

I'm serious. If wasting money on nuclear is the price we have to pay, we should pay that price. The key word there is "if". In reality if the people treating the issue seriously get behind nuclear the goalposts will move again. Al Gore's shoe size or entrees or thermostat will prove it's all a liberal hoax and we'll roll on just as before but considerably warmer and with a few energy companies a bit richer.

I hear this kind of rhetoric all the time. 15 years ago it was “any solution to world hunger that doesn’t lean heavily on GMO is not a solution.”. The lack of food security was/is not a problem of production but of distribution. GMO may produce more nutrient rich food, but has failed to do so at scale (also so does better soil management and more crop variety).

Today, people are instead advocating nuclear power as the unproven solution to a real crisis. The problem is not of technology, but of policy and political will. Renewable energy has been a real option since the 80s. Lithium Ion batteries were invented in the 90s, and proliferated less then 15 years later (and are arguably the wrong solution for large scale energy storage). If we would have gotten behind renewables in the 70s—like we should have—the technology would be even more favorable. However in the 70s we went all in on nuclear and it failed. Nuclear has failed to scale to be the dominant power generation method in the past despite political will and ample funding, and we have no reason to believe it will be different this time around.

There is also more to the climate disaster then just polluting power generation. There is a genuine lack in green infrastructure. Highways and airports are the favorable transportation infrastructures, even though they are the most polluting. Buildings keep being made out of polluting cement, water is wasted on inefficient agricultural practices to grow unessisary crops in arid places, etc. It is as if there is a genuine lack of interest from the political class in tackling the climate crisis. As if the climate crisis is not a problem of technology but something else, like say policy.

Indeed, it's classic mindset problem of wanting to solve a social and policy problem by your pet tech silver bullet idea.

Amazingly, the GOP just last week formed a Conservative Climate Caucus with something around 60 members. They even explicitly admit climate change is man made

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2021/06/25/utah...

The problem is that we have elected leaders that only care about being in power. They will happily watch the world burn unless a majority of the voters want them to move.

Sadly I don't think most people are ready to make the necessary sacrifices to stop climate change. At least not yet. And I think we will pass the point of no return before people are ready to make those sacrifices.

The problem is not technology or scientific, the problem is human nature.

Eh, here's the thing: politicians will use whatever crisis is available to them to cynically further their own agendas.

I'm sure plenty of them are tweeting away about how this heatwave is a clear sign of climate change (because that's what their constituents want to hear), and yet any meteorologist worth their salt would be hesitant to make that connection - weather is not climate. Climate is a meta-phenomenon.

When they use climate as cover for whatever policy agenda they intended to pursue anyway, it cheapens the discourse - political opposition that agrees on the facts likely disagrees about the solution set, particularly if it is ideologically-driven, and lumping people into childish categories like "climate deniers" only serves to harden positions.

And yet - a lot of these so-called "climate deniers" will happily buy an electric F-150 because Ford has made an attractive product that makes good choices easier. No need for a rancher in rural Montana to downgrade to a Prius to signal that he cares about the climate.

In the end, politicians are not even the right vehicles for this type of change - there's no good evidence that nation-states can achieve a game-theoretically stable set of climate policies given the harsh economic consequences of taxing the crap out of your country's industrial output. Far better results can be obtained through good old-fashioned free market capitalism.

When good choices are easy to make, those choices will be made. The market will abide.

Why? They're often part of the same ownership class that stands to make a lot of money from the status quo. Even if the world goes to shit, they're wealthy enough to insulate themselves from the fallout, and probably wouldn't mind being lords of the ashes.

Nah, it snowed that one time [1].

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2015/02/26/ji...

Haha. They do something like this every time it snows.

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/fox-news-buries-al-gore-s...

I would first want to see the study confirming this current heat dome is a result of climate change.

And what would you accept as proof? Meteorological models showing the jet stream gets "wavier" with increased temperature?

I would accept as proof whatever evidence/studies climatologists suggest prove that this heat wave is a result of climate change.

Earth science should not be treated as religion.

Perhaps in the same way the civil engineers signal to south Florida condo boards that their buildings are about to collapse? It's the same problem, really. Collective action by a political body controlled by older people who are trying to just hold on to their wealth until they die is impossible. We need new political structures to write down the capital loss on all the junk we built in the 20th century that has no purpose in the 21st, and the political will to tell a handful of people that yes your underground mineral rights are being expropriated.

Environmentalists fought against nuclear power for 70 years. The result? We burned coal.

So I’m not interested. You wanted the world to burn. So let it burn.

How much of that has actually been environmentalists and not a result of intentional deceptive tactics and undermining of public education by fossil fuel companies?

Most of the effective opposition has come not from environmentalists per se, but rather from NIMBYs who don't want to live near a nuclear plant. After the incidents at Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima it's difficult to convince local residents that newer designs are inherently very safe. Even if they support nuclear power in principle they want it built somewhere else.

Most of it has been environmentalists.

Can you provide some evidence of that?

Not evidence of relative magnitude, but here's a high profile green org that is explicitly anti-nuclear:

https://www.greenpeace.org/usa/nuclear-power-is-a-losing-pro...

This! You nailed it.

Actually, the best practical example is environmentalists-crawled Germany vs. energy-exporting France.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com