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Comment by hcurtiss | Hacker News Reader

Who would pay that debt for past emissions, and what price should they pay?

Perhaps society as a whole should just try to solve these problems.

This is the tarpit of market-based solutions: debating endlessly about who bears costs, instead of just doing collective things collectively. And if you do have markets, every middleman and their dog will demand their slice of the pie.

The only way to get everyone to participate in a solution will be regulation. The last thing that I want is the government regulating this market. We will end up with another cartel like the oil industry.

So what do you suggest then? We do nothing and slowly walk towards our demise?

Probably this, yet. When the problem is real, people will find real solutions. Or not, but it's not happening now anyway. Are you driving less? Have you stopped eating beef?

When the problem is "real", it will be too late for solutions. We need to do something right now. Besides, I'd argue the problem is starting to be "real" right now. California, Australia, Siberia and Greece were on fire this year, Germany had historic floods and the East Coast keeps getting devastated by hurricanes.

I also disagree with the tactic of shifting responsibility to the individual to avoid doing anything where it actually matters. My individual contributions to climate change are negligible, this is a collective issue. We need to get industry and corporations in check and the only way we can do that is with heavy regulation.

We are on fire every year. Gross mismanagement has made it worse.

You're not wrong, but I'm being realistic about human nature. People are not going support heavy regulations that make their lives more difficult and expensive, if they are working 5 or 6 days a week to pay bills and support a family. Some theoretical problem 20 years from now is not high on their list of concerns.

Might this be an indicator that democracy is no longer fit for our times and we need an authoritarian technocracy to save ourselves? Maybe the Chinese are onto something there? Their system obviously has flaws, but they do get to make unpopular changes for the common good while Congress does nothing of the sort...

Are wildfires a result of climate change? I though they just happened naturally and since we stopped doing controlled burns have gotten worse. I’m not disagreeing with your general point, there are plenty of signs we should be acting now. I’m just always surprised when wildfires get linked to climate change.

I think the point is the regions that already had them get them worse, and some regions that didn’t have them now get them.

What global warming does is destabilise the equilibrium we had in the global climate system, and one of the outcomes of that is more extreme weather. That means for example longer and drier droughts which obviously contributes to wildfire risk.

I will not be part of your collective.

Nothing, forward is the only direction to move if we want to have any hope of survival. If we mire ourselves in economic finger pointing we will end up doing nothing about the actual problem

I'm not sure, but there is little more terrifying short of a nuclear accident than the idea of faceless people in an office somewhere deciding who gets a pass and who gets crushed for sins uncommitted by them.

In short: you hint at tryanny.

Let's tax at 50% every private property of a few million. That would do it.

Boomers. Everything they own.

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