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Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

> That strikes me as close-to-impossible for industrialized nations to achieve. A round-trip flight from NYC to SF emits 1.5 metric tons per passenger. In order to reach 1.61 metric tons an individual would not be able to own a gas-powered car, could not regularly consume meat, could not live in remote areas only visitable by plane etc.

So?

> Many things people don't even consider "luxuries" (like visiting family overseas) would be a non-starter.

That is a luxury, whether you consider it one or not is irrelevant. When you emigrate there are certain consequences.

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> So?

You have made peace with these things which is commendable.

That said, you must still understand how big of a change this would be for other people who have not. For example, I suspect the Canadian government would have a hard time telling indigenous populations in Nunavut that they have banned flights to their communities. Same would go for island nations like Iceland or even the state of Hawaii.

You and I can probably both agree that others will be reluctant to give up eating meat, fresh fruits/vegetables that have been flown in from warmer climates. We can probably also agree that most people would not vote for a party that promised to shut down global international tourism.

I cannot see any political solution to this problem.

It doesn't matter.

If prices rise gradually, people will adapt. Remote villages might become ghost towns (hardly the first time in Canada, incidentally), or become more isolated. And the world isn't going to turn into some utopian egalitarian place either, so the hard reality is that many people won't lose anything by losing air travel, because they already do none, and thus those that have that luxurious habit now will not need to suddenly lose it; there's time to adapt. Most of the US certainly doesn't need air travel either, and train or even road travel can be quite emissions poor; it just means travel will take more time (and willingness to build infrastructure).

A more realistic scenario is one in which inequality does not change significantly - and then the reductions are less severe.

But seriously: losing most air travel (or just cheap air travel): if that's it, count yourself lucky!

> If prices rise gradually, people will adapt.

I think this is where you and I disagree. I would contend that the average citizen will resist this. I am basing this off what we saw in France when they introduced a very modest fuel tax.

I think this is an issue that would actually unite both the left and the right. I suspect that if we made air travel, meat and fresh (flown-in) produce only available to the wealthiest 0.X% of our population we would see widespread outrage. It would be seen as just another example of inequality.

So first of all - France is known for it's remarkable protest culture. That's not typical. Secondly, the fuel tax in question, while reasonable and necessary, is also a somewhat special case even in France because it represents taking away peoples everyday mobility. As cars electrify, that will be less so, and other measures - such as those targeting luxury travel like air travel - would surely not see quite the same levels of protest. And at this point, because the protests were widespread, and because they succeeded, there is going to be vigilance against sneaky plans by the government to pass it while nobody is watching - but that too is a fairly local issue.

I expect that even in France those tax hikes will eventually pass, even if it takes longer than elsewhere and much longer than other measures. It may need some other compromise, like a comparable tax-reduction for median incomes; and some level of political maneuvering to placate the particularly hard hit. Or perhaps they'll try to achieve similar reductions via other measures such as speed limits and regulations on cars. But I don't think it's representative of social upheaval vs. climate-change cost in general, anyhow.

> France is known for it's remarkable protest culture.

It's also known for its remarkably high tax rate on fiul:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_tax#/media/File%3AFuel_...

Reality doesn't care what humans want.

The options are make some voluntary changes now, or make very chaotic and much bigger forced changes later.

If we make the wrong choice our culture becomes extinct. We may or may not survive as an animal species, but that's almost a secondary issue.

That's it. That's what's on the table. Short of surprise alien intervention or unobtanium Magical Carbon Capture Technology™ there are no other choices.

The political problem is that we've managed to isolate ourselves from both physical and emotional challenges to the extent that we'd rather believe in a variety of fantasy game tokens than deal with reality.

But if that's the best we're capable of as a species, that's where we are. No one is going to give us a special pass. We'll just be one more failed species in a very long list, and that will be that.

Precisely. This coin does not want to drop because people's addictions depend strongly on it continuing not to drop. It doesn't even enter consideration that there is a possible end to this bonanza because 'we wish it to be so'.

I strongly disagree with your comment. Your definition of luxury is narrow and proscriptive. If you're trying to evaluate whether people would accept certain changes in their lifestyle, their definition of luxury is the one that matters.

In a tight definition, indoor plumbing is a luxury. As a person whose family vacations used to include an outhouse, I most certainly do not consider that a luxury in my life.

The whole scenario is far fetched. We're imagining some egalitarian world (won't happen), in which with today's technology we need to make due with tomorrows resources, but without time to adapt and find alternatives.

More realistically, we need to start making at least some steps. If air travel becomes more expensive, we'll do less of it, and at least try to find alternatives, personally. Society might try to find workarounds, like negative emissions, or construct alternatives (like high-speed rail) that are "good enough", at least for many flights. We might have alternative, emissions free fuel, someday.

But the real point is: this is not going to be as extreme as is sketched simply because inequality isn't going away, and secondly - this is necessarily going to happen gradually, so the impact will be reduced as society will have time to adapt. Let's just hope gradually doesn't mean glacially, because then we'll pay the climate price.

> this is necessarily going to happen gradually

That depends on what you mean by "gradually". Climate is a non-linear system. It can change radically in a very small number of years. Within a single generation, for example, much of the world's current farmland could become desert. That is going to be very hard to adapt to.

> That is going to be very hard to adapt to.

If that comes to pass I hope I won't be alive to see it, but I think 'hard to adapt to' is putting it very mildly. You're talking about war and famine on a scale that the world has not seen before.

Yes. That's exactly right. I think even the people who worry about climate change don't fully appreciate how grim the situation is, and how fast things are going to get really, really bad, a small number of decades tops. If you haven't already, look up "blue ocean event."

No, my definition of luxury is to take anything that we didn't have in the last 100 years and consider it optional, because that's the kind of world you'll be living in regardless of your opinion on the matter.

And then you will realize that it is a luxury to be able to zoom around the planet on a moments notice, to have a multiple 100's of KW personal energy budget per month and so on. These things are not givens and once they're gone everything that depended on them will be gone as well, because you will prefer to survive.

100 years in an arbitrary period. Why not go back 10k years to define a luxury?

What people would accept or not it's speculation.

People in the west were not supposed to accept a lockdown, yet they did. They were not supposed to accept election fraud, corruption, high crime rate, yet they regularly do as well.

Acceptance is really not the hard part in this problem.

Being organized in such a way that the global long term interest of the majority is only a concern when it can be positively correlated to the short term interest of a minority, is.

So this would require martial law to implement. Basically no one in the US would accept those restrictions. Doesn't seem politically feasible without a ww3.

Massive climate change would implement it, with or without our acceptance.

That scenario isn't so far-fetched, sadly. WW3 is a real possibility if we can't solve this problem another way.

No one except loonies see "You can't own a car, consume meat live anywhere but NYC and can't visit your family 5 states over" and are okay with it.

It doesn't matter who's okay with it. We have a choice between that, or an even less pleasant future. "Everything is awesome forever and we don't have to pay for it" is simply not one of the options.

> We have a choice between that, or an even less pleasant future. "Everything is awesome forever and we don't have to pay for it" is simply not one of the options.

When I see these flat assertions stated as foregone conclusions IRL by friends, I am prompted to ask, “What mitigations did you already implement against this conclusion?”

Revealed preferences demonstrate that overwhelmingly their assertions are far stronger than their mitigations. This is worrisome, as it shows even “true believers” are not taking commensurate action. The dislocation when it arrives, if as large a magnitude as claimed by IPCC, will be large even for that cohort.

> That is a luxury, whether you consider it one or not is irrelevant. When you emigrate there are certain consequences.

Interesting. Why are you (or your political affiliates) the ones who get to decide what is a luxury and what is “essential”?

Were you ordained with some divine moral authority?

I can’t speak for the rest of the world, but that kind of authoritarian thinking will thankfully never be allowed to prevail in the United States.

It's not me who will decide, it will be your wallet.

> but that kind of authoritarian thinking will thankfully never be allowed to prevail in the United States.

That's a very funny statement.

It's even funnier when you consider that surveys show 26% of the U.S. population qualifies as highly right-wing authoritarian.

https://morningconsult.com/2021/06/28/global-right-wing-auth...

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