Comment by mlang23 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mlang23 | Hacker News Reader

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This is nothing new, its just being dressed up fresh and pushed by media. Where I live, the hole in the ozone layer and the imminent end of fossile energy sources was taught in school already 30 to 40 years ago. Everyone and their dog knew how bad we were and are treating the environment. Heck, it took two decades to force the leather-maker in our village to stop completely polluting our river. Everyone knew. But the industry was busy making money, and making the common people dependant on the shiny and new offerings of the consumerism culture. People stopped to do small-scale farming because it was much cheaper to go to the grocery-store and buy stuff.

And now that the industry, mostly managers, have made a shitload of money, the common man is supposed to fix it all up.

Sorry. I know why you think it is important. However, I am too old to believe this system can be fixed. We are doomed, and its about time we start to accept that. We've trained people to consume and be dependant on supply chains. We are not going to unlearn this as a society. A few will deprive themselves of things they could consume. But these people are not going to be significant. The rest is going to go on like they learnt in childhood.

> Where I live, the hole in the ozone layer and the imminent end of fossile energy sources was taught in school already 30 to 40 years ago.

> Sorry. I know why you think it is important. However, I am too old to believe this system can be fixed. We are doomed, and its about time we start to accept that.

Well, good news! We passed legislation to limit ozone-depleting chemicals, and now the ozone hole has stopped getting worse and is now healing:

https://news.un.org/en/story/2019/09/1046452

So we are not doomed, and it's good to not accept that. We CAN make changes and fix things. And it doesn't require getting rid of refrigeration (or energy), it just requires different refrigerants (or sources of energy).

Climate change is not the hole in the ozone layer. That was a simple change. The legislation required did not severely impact our quality of life. We simply swapped one propellant for another.

Greenhouse gases are a product of our endeavour. Almost everything we do, unless it's "planting forests" has negative effect. Curbing that means consuming less, producing less. These are, by definition, going to dramatically affect quality of life.

Aside from the political and economic differences, the problems themselves are vastly different. Right now we're just starting to see climate change feedback loops kicking in. These are are catastrophically bad. While there is a near-zero % possibility that we will voluntarily reduce our annual co2 emissions (instead of merely slowing acceleration, or, as is the case most of the time, still actually increasing the rate year on year), feedback loops are out of our control.

Maybe we'll make changes to reduce our co2 emissions increases (unlikely). But I don't see how it's possible to actually stop emissions and begin taking greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere. Yet that's what we need to do .

It's simple: there's to much greenhouse gas in the atmosphere right now. We know this because there has been an increase in extreme weather, wildfires, melting of polar ice and killer heat waves. Ideally we should stop all emissions immediately and actually begin reversing what we've done. Yet day by day, year by year we are always adding more and taking about budgets, like the house is on fire and we taking about how much petrol we're "allowed to pour onto it". It's not a matter of if but when we lose the polar ice, we lose reflectivity. Much worse, when the artic soil thaws it will release methane in quantities that will be (and I think the word has lost its impact these days)... Catastrophic. There's no putting that the genie back in the bottle.

Edit: While I am absolutely pessimistic, I don't think we should throw our arms up and say, "screw it I'm driving a hummer and flying helicopters every weekend". People don't respond well to depressing fact, they switch off because they feel powerless. It is easier to effect a change by more uplifting means. But we must still be honest about the scale of the problem. Personally, I find it difficult to see a comparison between the ozone layer and this without getting a bee in my bonnet

Your entire post takes for given that we have to use fossil fuels for our main energy source. This simply isn’t true.

Swap the energy source, and we’re (for the most part) fine. That’s 80% of climate change. The rest is agricultural emissions from livestock (and rice?) and agricultural land use plus a bit for cement (although fully cured cement, which takes decades, actually reabsorbs the CO2 the limestone itself emitted in the calcining process).

This narrative that climate change is just due to general human activity is entirely the narrative I’m seeking to attack. It’s false. It’s mainly (80%) the CO2 and methane emitted from fossil fuel usage. Switch to wind, solar, nuclear, hydro, geothermal, and you’ve basically solved the problem like we did with the ozone hole. The climate will start to heal. It really IS just a swap out like with the ozone hole. And we basically have the tech to do this. It just sometimes costs slightly more upfront. The industrialized countries can do this just fine, barely breaking a sweat. Switch the grid aggressively to solar and nuclear, require all new cars and trucks to be at least plug in hybrid and then pure electric. Switch iron reduction to hydrogen (already happening), heat pumps for heating, cement produced electrically, and we’re basically there (besides some mop up of agricultural and land use emissions from farming). We’re just not doing it. At least, not the speed we should.

We have to use fossil fuels while there are no alternatives online. Germany is shutting down nuclear plants and building coal power stations. Britain is increasing coal usage this year because Russian natural gas prices are going up.

Also, if "all we have to do is stop burning fossil fuels and farming cattle" then isn't that an admission that climate change is the result of human activity? If it wasn't, then why would we need to change our behaviour?

And if it were really as simple as you make it sound to just switch off fossil fuel and use renewables, then why hasn't it happened?

Right now, a report says that in this century we could be looking at global temperature increases of 5°C+ above pre-industrial levels at current trends. How long does it take to build a nuclear plant? 30 years? How many are being built right now? How many active nuclear plants are being decommissioned? When are we going to ban all fossil fuel cars? 2050? When are we going to curb the number of methane producing livestock?

Yeah, once those feedback loops kick in fully there is nothing whatsoever we can do even if we finally get off our asses and try. That's all I'm saying.

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