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Comment by curiousgal | Hacker News Reader

I think one of the reasons governments are reluctant to act is because most of the models used to calculate the social cost of carbons are based on Integrated Assessment Models [0] which are very limited. The effects of climate change are not fully understood and we need our brightest minds to be working on that instead of how to sell us more ads. Just my 2c.

0.https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_assessment_modell...

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I think you're overcomplicating things.

The reason governments are reluctant to act is because most tax payers don't support higher taxes or prices to respond to the problem. There were protests that lasted months in France over higher gas prices [0]. In the US, only 57 percent of Americans are willing to pay a $1 monthly fee, 23 percent are willing to pay a monthly fee of $40. [1]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_vests_movement

[1] https://mleverything.substack.com/p/americans-arent-willing-...

And I don't think the Degrowther movement is helping anything. Hair shirt decarbonization is a non-starter.

Stop trying to make it about scarcity. Make it about abundance. People understand that fossil fuels are limited. So make it about solar, wind, nuclear energy abundance and energy independence.

Gas taxes are unpopular. EPA fuel efficiency mandates are popular. Why? One costs you money and the other saves you money, from the consumer's perspective. They BOTH have the effect of reducing emissions and increasing efficiency.

> The effects of climate change are not fully understood and we need our brightest minds to be working on that instead..

The implication here, and maybe I’m reading it wrong, is that _before_ action is taken on what we do know to the best of our knowledge, we should learn more?

I don’t know the exact fracture pattern on a skull from a high speed spinning projectile but am still going to take action to avoid getting shot in the head..

Climate change can't be avoided in the same way as a gunshot. Even if we started doing everything right tomorrow, we'd still face significant climate change, so we need people to research what the likely effects are and how we might mitigate them.

I read the last sentence as "Just my 2°C". I blame it on the over use of 2°C in all these reports.

I mean if we all just stopped using advertising based products then they couldn’t afford to pay our best and brightest.

That does not follow..

If no one uses Facebook, they can’t afford to pay the brightest engineers. Same for Google, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.

Obviously not going to happen. I just don’t think it’s fair to put the onus on the workers instead of the consumers who enable the business model.

Facebook/google/etc. don't have to be add funded.

Microsoft employs great people too, they charge money for their products instead of duping people into sharing data, a much fairer business practice in my mind.

Put it another way: the fastest money you can make is by drug dealing, if there are no drug addicts we can't pay our brightest!

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