Hacker News Reader

Comment by dathinab | Hacker News Reader

no, that proposed project wasn't done with any environmental considerations at all and likely would have pretty devastating environmental effects through various effects.

We need a huge collaboration of countries.

We don't need a mega project which creation will cause tons of CO2 (building stuff produces CO2 equivalent emissions) have devastating environmental damage, and massive security risks.

Assuming we can fix climate change by mega project is just the wrong approach.

We need a very (very very) high number on mostly smaller changes (and probably some larger law changes).

So that even if some of them fail it doesn't matter in the grater picture, and so that there is actually a realistic chance to pull it of (which for such a hypothetical mega construction is very small for various reasons).

View on HN

> We need a huge collaboration of countries.

Go ahead we are listening. Who would you go about coordinating and enforcing 'huge collaboration of countries'?

All i remember is world leaders coming together, year after year - shake hands, thump their chest expressing how sorrowful they feel, give great speeches how everything will change - and then nothing changes.

There being a need for something and it happening are two fundamental different thinks.

Just because it doesn't happen doesn't mean there is not need for it.

The Bering Strait Dam btw. would have required a higher degree of collaboration then is needed to limit climate change. Sure a few less countries would be involved be the involved countries still would need a much deeper level of collaboration which given that it's effect would have been rather negative for many of the cost countries it would have been rather hard to archive any agreement.

Except that isn't how it has gone - we had 4 years where the US did not sit down and agree, and actually went backwards on climate agreements. This year, the world leadership has come back together for the first time in years.

I don't want to go down a political rabbit hole here, but we should at least get the facts straight.

To both points, how would the political risk that looms on the horizon every 4 years be mitigated? It’s tough to see a long term solution that isn’t constantly at risk of being reversed when a new camp rides into town. Maybe some govt orgs like NASA who’ve been dealing with this for decades can shed some light

Constitutional amendments come to mind, but I feel like that would be difficult to pull off at this point

In the US at least, a fully ratified international treaty would be a fairly effective mitigation. Those have force of law second only to the Constitution. Any single President could somewhat obstruct implementing such a treaty but wouldn't be able to stop it completely.

> huge collaboration of countries

So what you're saying is we need a committee of countries.

I suspect the days of doing major engineering work are mostly behind us. For better or worse.

Maybe we just need a new Logo, ours looks dated.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com