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Comment by KingOfCoders | Hacker News Reader

That's because the voters don't want to change their live styles. There are many things (rich country) people can do (buy used clothes/things, eat less meat, smaller/no car, smaller house, green energy, less flying on holidays ...) but they don't -- grandparents buying new SUVs to shuttle around their grandchildren, oh the irony -- and the IPCC will announce on Monday that reality has progressed worse than assumed.

Politicians don't make the climate, consumers are - consume driven climate crisis.

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And that's why politicians can and should enact laws that tax these externalities at the industry level. Cars might appear to cost more once the manufacturers pass on the tax to consumers, but that's just because you aren't accounting for the real cost of it destroying the environment when you buy one.

Need to also add in wage and environmental parity tariffs. There is no point having higher standards here if it means China will use the higher costs as a competitive advantage while still polluting the same amount.

Companies motivated purely by capital are the only ones truly responsible for all this, and are subsequently the ones who can make the biggest changes to undo what they've done.

Consumers have much less control over all of this than you seem to think.

[Edit] Voting me down gives me so much pleasure, it proves my world view. Thanks to all the downvoters, you've made my day. And don't we all just want to feel validated.

Consumers have all of the control.

  Don't eat meat.
  Switch to a green energy provider.
  Buy small car.
  Move to a smaller house.
  Buy used clothes.
  Use your phone longer.
  Consume less!

With all of this there is no climate crisis.

Growing up in Germany, I understand your opinion. No one wants to take personal responsibility. After WW2 no one in Germany was responsible for anything. WW2 just happened. The others did it. I followed orders. This opinion changed when people grew up who were born after WW2 which lead to a cultural revolution. The same will happen with the climate crisis. Children born now will hold current consumers responsible in the future - and they will be angry with their parents and grandparents.

No really, corporations consume way more than individuals. I work for one and their consumption per employee is easily higher than my individual consumption.

If you want to change the world, change the incentives. Tax CO2 released from fossil fuels appropriately (enough to offset the effects completely) and everything will adjust thanks to the magic of the market.

"No really, corporations consume way more than individuals"

Which ones? What corporations consume more energy that do not produce things consumers buy? If you buy a car, the corporation is using up energy, but for you, to build your car. They don't consume the energy for themselves.

Facebook uses energy? Yes so you can consume Facebook.

I suspect the point is that consumers have very little control over how corporations consume energy. In the case of the production of cars, consumers can only decide to buy a car or to not buy a car. They do not have the power to modify the design or manufacturing process. (It is also worth noting that this is true regardless of the mode of transportation the consumer chooses.) A similar thing can be said for the web. A consumer can choose to use Facebook or not to use Facebook. They do not have the power to modify Facebook's operations to reduce its environmental impact.

It's also worth noting that consumers rarely have the data necessary to compare the environmental impact of products or services being offered. For example: are ebooks or print books more environmentally friendly? It's easy to pretend the former since it looks cleaner. No trees are being chopped down to make pulp. No diesel belching trucks to deliver physical goods. On the other hand, there was a time when the semiconductor industry was seen as clean since it lacked the belching smokestacks of traditional industries. (The mining of rare materials was unseen. The dumping of hazardous chemicals was unseen. Ewaste wasn't even acknowledge until the mid to late 90's.)

> It's also worth noting that consumers rarely have the data necessary to compare the environmental impact of products or services being offered.

Exactly, and this is the kind of problem that's solved by taxing externalities appropriately. Then the impact shows up in the price, and the common consumer behavior of preferring cheaper products naturally leads to preferring lower environmental impact products.

Every consumer can choose a green energy provider.

A minority does.

Every consumer can buy a smaller car that uses half the the steel and consumes half the gas.

A minority does.

Every consumer can eat less meat.

A minority does.

Consumerism trumps everything. Consumerism is ten thousands years old when people started to produce for other - and the strongest force to predict people behaviour. Consumerism killed East Germany and it brought down the Soviet Union and it will consume capitalism.

> In the case of the production of cars, consumers can only decide to buy a car or to not buy a car. They do not have the power to modify the design or manufacturing process.

Not overnight, but in a free market, people buying SUVs over smaller cars makes producers make more and larger SUVs. That trend can be reversed if consumers start buying fewer SUVs and more smaller cars. I think that would work in reality too, even though the real market isn’t a perfectly free one.

No, if you do all of those you're still quite far from carbon neutral. For example I live in a small flat, I don't own a car, I only eat meat when invited somewhere, I pay for "green" electricity and I wear my clothes until they fall apart. Yet my apartment is still heated with oil, the food I buy is farmed with machines burning Diesel and the steel in my bicycle is still made with coke. The "green" electricity I buy is still mostly lignite in reality.

Consumers can only slow down climate change. It is impossible for consumers to implement the systemic changes needed to reach carbon neutrality.

"No, if you do all of those you're still quite far from carbon neutral."

The climate crisis is not because we're not carbon neutral, but because produce so much CO2/methane/[..].

Carbon neutral is the wrong concept. Raising cows and eating them can be done carbon neutral, but converting CO2 into methane still leads to a climate crisis.

Humanity hasn't been carbon neutral for at least 5000 years, not being carbon neutral is not the problem.

No, you're wrong. Not being carbon neutral is the problem. Global warming is proportional to the amount of GHG is the atmosphere. A good fraction of the CO2 once emitted (and Methane once oxidized back to CO2) stays in the atmosphere for thousands of years and traps heat until geological processes sequester it. We probably could go back to 17-th century amounts of coal burning and still run into a climate crisis eventually. It would just take much longer than at current rates of emission.

No you are wrong, humanity hasn't been carbon neutral for 5000 years at least.

I don't claim that humanity has been carbon neutral. I claim that we have to become carbon neutral to stop heating up the planet.

We may have to do a lot better than that for a while to stop the clock, there are some nice positive feedback loops in there.

CO2 and temperature have been in the same stable envelope since past 10 000 years and rise of civilization, until around 1980's.

Yes, and from around 3000BC to 1980 humanity has not been carbon neutral.

And atmospheric carbon dioxide has been creeping up very slowly for the last few thousand years until the industrial revolution where the chart really took off as both carbon-per-capita and population started growing quickly: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/96/CO2_40k....

> The climate crisis is not because we're not carbon neutral, but because produce so much CO2/methane/[..].

Precisely. And who pumps out the majority of those gasses? The companies incentivised by capital to continue doing so!

I think people need to eat less meat. So I agree with you there. In fact I agree with pretty much everything you listed in your other comment.

But.. Doing all of that will not stop the companies that are actually destroying the environment. They will continue to do so unaffected by our personal choices, as long as they're being paid to turn our lights on.

Putting the burden on the individual to change their life is ridiculous when there are things out of people's control.

You seem to live in Germany, why are you not with Greenpeace Energy if you care? Any reasons I should think about?

Lot of truth in there. We need to consider not only the supply-side of CO2 reduction but the demand-side of it as well[1]. The latter unfortunately gets dwarfed for various reasons. At the end of it all, we as individuals have to make tough choices in the coming decades (years in even). How much of it is forced up on us by nature vs our collective initiative remains an open question.

[1]https://climate.leeds.ac.uk/news/demand-side-potential-needs...

This. I agree about the changes individuals should take (and I do it myself: almost no meat, never owned a car, only used planes a couple times when I had no choice (for work), etc. though I know there are still things I could do better), but a lot of over-consumption comes from greedy companies that force new "needs" onto consumers. Nobody needs an SUV, nobody needs a new iPhone every time a new model comes out, etc. But companies make them think they do.

You’re being a useful idiot for companies: put all blame and responsibility on individuals and you can easily shift away all blame from companies. But do you know what really works? Banning F-gases. Banning non-electric cars. Mandating new houses to be energy-neutral. Regulations at national or continental level are infinitely more effective than shaming individuals for not buying solar panels or whatever.

Don’t let companies follow demand from consumers, let consumer only buy stuff that won’t destroy our only world.

While the SUV-driving crowd is stomach churning, it is also small in the big picture. The huge elephant in the room is global population size, moving apace toward 10 billions and possibly beyond. Industrializing 10 billion people turns out to be a very dirty business.

If US were to ban ICE cars and truck and switch go horse-and-buggy tomorrow, it will save 29% of US emissions. US accounts for 15% of global emissions. Thus the overall global savings will be 4.35%, or about 1.44 GT CO2/year. Fantastic. Yet 95.65% of emissions will still be going out every year. In 20 years, emissions have grown from 25 GT CO2/year to 36 GT CO2/year, or about .5 GT CO2 / year. The whole 4.35% savings would turn out to be a minor blip, overtaken in about 3 years by new emissions elsewhere in the developing world.

We are already 40+% above Paris agreement 1.5C emissions levels of 25 GT CO2/year. We need deep cuts on massive scale. If the world were even remotely serious about tackling CO2 emissions for a rough but perhaps survivable crash landing, we'd see:

* World wide moratorium on building new coal/gas/oil power plants and ICE vehicles.

* World wide moratorium on economic growth. Good bye lifting the third world out of poverty. Good bye western retirement.

* Gradual phasing out of industry in developed countries. Good bye middle class lifestyle.

* Ban of immigration from low emission countries into high emission countries.

https://www.c2es.org/content/u-s-emissions

https://ourworldindata.org/co2-and-other-greenhouse-gas-emis...

Even if all of the citizens of the US did what you said tomorrow, would it really make a difference with China producing (as of 2015) 29.4% of all CO2 emissions? Even if the US (at 14.3%) somehow cut emissions to zero, there are still the not-so-rich countries that comprise the “Other” group that is responsible for 31.5%. Your feelings are valid, you may just be directing them at the wrong culprits IMHO.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_...

Those figures are hard to attribute correctly because they don’t account for export manufacturing. Consumption in the USA is fueling Chinese exports and is responsible for a large chunk of their CO2 emissions.

Politicians make all kinds of laws that the voters don't really want. Usually when the lobbyists want them.

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