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Comment by coryrc | Hacker News Reader

35%+ of the US population won't even get vaccinated to save their own lives. The majority of people aren't willing to sacrifice their own standard of living at all to help. 97.8% of cars sold in the US are gasoline-powered even though people could afford to buy EVs. Nearly every house built today is not at passivhaus standard, and probably not a single apartment building.

And even if the US completely changed... there's oil and coal distributed fairly evenly across the whole world. Even if the USA used all its power, it couldn't stop the rest of the world from exploiting every last drop of oil and last chunk of coal. Tell me where I'm wrong, what could any group do to stop every drop of oil in the middle east and Nigeria from being pulled out?

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It would help to avoid thinking on the individual level and more so on the system level of what we could do to encourage certain behaviors?

For example, Netherlands was able to completely revolutionize their cities and optimize them for bike travel. Now biking is the main mode of transportation.

A lot of the changes we want to see individuals do, the system discourages it or makes it hard to do those changes.

Electric cars have dubious benefit for the environment as well, so I don't think using that as a solution is fair.

And yet, they're not on approach to get net-zero in time. All that change and it wasn't enough.

EVs are just the tiniest inconvenience to Americans over gas and still they won't embrace it. It's much cheaper than the other things we need to do.

EVs are just the tiniest bit better than gasoline engines for the environment, yet everyone pretends like the solve the problem because they don't want to be inconvenienced.

If you want to make a dent in the problem you need useful mass transit everywhere. Useful is more important than everywhere - useful will get people out of their cars, while everywhere gets people driving by and ignoring it because when they last looked it wasn't useful. (best to assume once every 5 years unless someone else finds it useful and raves about it)

They won't happen in the US. Seattle has 89% single-house zoning. We just invested $54 billion in a transit system which can never carry the majority of the metro-area commuters even when it finishes in thirty years. It's too late and a dollar short.

EVs are way better for the environment than gas cars while asking so little from the user. And we still won't make this tiny sacrifice.

EVs are not the solution for climate change.

No one thing is. The US doesn't have the infrastructure for effective mass transit. We've shown to be incapable of running large projects: it costs far more and takes longer for projects we do -- like Sound Transit 3 or second avenue subway -- and many are given up -- CA HSR.

If your plan is "US moves the population into apartments and builds mass transit for all" then you have no plan.

There are examples of countries getting their shit together and actually expanding mass transit.

If your plan is "Let's make everyone drive EVs" you also did nothing, and fucked over poor countries while doing that.

If we're going to do something, we need to do it right, which means:

1. Listen to climate scientists about what's the best way to mitigate as much as we can.

2. Mobilize every single branch of the government to respond to the realities of climate change.

3. Make the hard decisions and push companies and cities to follow them. We've done this before with the new deal. It's not hard to imagine that level of mobilization.

4. THE MOST IMPORTANT ONE: Plan how you're going to minimize damages that we can't prevent, and minimize damages that are going to be caused by this "move fast" approach. Keep people on your side while making these changes. These changes should come with a quality of life improvement for most Americans.

It's important to remember, climate change was NEVER an individual failing. It was systemic ignorance and failure. Which means the response to it needs to involve as many, or more gears that climate change denial did.

I agree with what you outlined.

The US is not capable of doing that. There's not the will. Literally 40%+ of voters are completely opposed.

> There's not the will. Literally 40%+ of voters are completely opposed.

If this is a reference to either party, people who identify with either party all actually are suffering under the status quo, and would be fine with making changes if the changes also take them into account and increase their QoL.

So no, I disagree, the divide is barely there and has been fabricated.

I'm an anarchist, I've had successful conversations with essentially everyone on every side you can imagine. The problems are the same. Just that US has allowed media to drive a "us vs them" mentality.

People will do what is economical for them personally. Effectively no one would pull carbon from the ground if they could get cheaper energy from somewhere else. The answer is to develop the technology to produce that energy and give it away if that is what it takes to undercut the fossil fuels.

Saudis can profitably pull oil out of the ground at ~$10/bbl. We have some oil "replacements" which could be cheaper than the current price of $70/bbl. We're not even close to $15/bbl equivalent.

> and give it away

But who would pay for this? At the end, the States can only take the money in the pocket of its citizens, present or future.

I agree we are likely spiraling toward our collective demise, but there are still some ways to try to attack the problem. One thing we can do is shift the economics of energy production by increasing research funding for alternatives. I would argue cost effectiveness of modern panels is the real reason solar installations are becoming more common. They are a solid investment for individual homeowners. We need better storage and transmission technologies to lower the remaining barriers to running a grid on renewables.

Once renewables become the most cost effective option, people will switch regardless of their politics or location.

I would argue the huge investments needed to conduct modern fossil fuel exploration and get the remaining (and least accessible) material from the ground may become unjustifiable if demand drops sufficiently.

> 35%+ of the US population won't even get vaccinated to save their own lives.

Only 26% of eligible Americans are unvaccinated, and that number is still shrinking every day. Yes, there is a depressing number of hardcore anti-vaxxers, but it's a much smaller minority than 35% of the population.

> there is a depressing number of hardcore anti-vaxxers

According to polls, one-third of the unvaccinated say they would get the shot if they were given time off work to deal with the symptoms. That suggests their "vaccine refusal" is related to their precarious economic circumstances and isn't a political stance. That brings the number of hardcore vaxxers down even further, to around 17%. This is probably still an overestimate, since some proportion of this population are minors and not making their own medical decisions, or may have other non-political reasons.

Don't think EV is going to help much. On the individual level anything you would do is miniscule. The change has to come from politicians, so its all about voting.

Nothing will change politically until the predictions contain the phrase "by the next election" and by then it's far too late.

I agree with you, but I think it shows the level of commitment from the population is so low that we aren't willing to prioritize the issue when voting. WA even shot down multiple carbon-tax-like initiatives.

If the stimulus checks had been tied to vaccination status we would be at 99%. The government asking the populace to "Please do the right thing" isn't an effective strategy. Who would have thought?

35%+ of the US population won't even get vaccinated to save their own lives

As far as I know those 35% are still around so it seems like they've successfully saved their own lives.

> won't even get vaccinated to save their own lives

See, that kind of hyperbole makes me question the whole climate change narrative. There's virtually 0 chance that Covid is going to kill me. I'm vaccinated because I don't like getting sick even if I don't die at the end of it, but Covid is actually very mild. When the same people who treat it like the bubonic plague are always the ones who are telling me that the world is going to end in 10 years unless I vote to pay higher taxes, I'm inclined to discount them.

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