Hacker News Reader

Comment by paulluuk | Hacker News Reader

First of all let me say that I do absolutely agree with you that the whole concept of taking "personal responsibility" for our CO2 footprints is insane and we should clearly be creating tougher regulations on an international level.

However, from the perspective of "okay, but what can I actually do?", it's still worthwhile to do things like going vegan, flying less, isolating your house, etc. And on top of that: vote for green parties (if you country has any). If there are no such parties in your country, then vote for whichever politicians are in favor of regulation of industrial pollution.

I'm not implying that you don't know this, just putting it to text in case anyone reads this and thinks "yeah indeed, why would I have to change anything if those companies don't?!".

View on HN

What about green parties that are against nuclear? They are green, but, IMO, in a retrograde way.

Not to mention these parties tend to attract some people with severe naturalistic fallacy biases that run _strongly_ counter to my techno-optimistic outlook. I feel getting greens in power would get them what they want but not what the world needs.

They are not really green then.

Well, nuclear has a much higher cost per kW than solar or wind, so it's not a very efficiënt alternative. The only real benefit of nuclear, as far as I can tell, is that it takes less physical space.

And mining for nuclear materials is quite bad for the environment of course, but so is mining for the materials needed for wind/solar.

The great thing about living in a democracy is that you can join these parties and change them from within or you can create your own party. There doesn't have to be single green party, if you believe that nuclear power should be considered green you have plenty of options to make it reality. Beyond direct involvement You can protest, you can campaign for it.

For some reason, in countries with strong democracies and pathways for impact the youth tends not to vote. It's beyond my why they think that they are powerless.

In many European countries, these green parties gained a significant boost during first hand experience of failing nuclear power during the explosion of the Chernobyl plant.

Chernobyl doesn't seem like a great example of failing nuclear power. It looks a lot more like crappy design and foolish incompetence.

You literally just described most operating nuclear power stations. The GE Mark I reactors had an OPTIONAL system to vent hydrogen from secondary containment, as but one example.

I don't know, a nuclear power plant exploding and raining fallout all over Europe sure does look like a failure of nuclear power, certainly for those who experienced it.

Dam failures have had orders of magnitude more impacts, are we calling hydro power a failure?

Let’s not move the goalpost: I am pretty sure we’re calling a dam failure a dam failure.

Yes, but if people hear about dams they don't even blink but they all lose their minds if they hear about nuclear. There is no goalpost moving here, just comparing risks and nuclear looks pretty good.

rootusrootus says we shouldn't call Chernobyl an example of nuclear failure, but I think we very much should because it was a nuclear power plant that exploded. Now you ask 'what about dams' and I'll happily call failing dams failing dams. We were not comparing risks, that's what you brought in - moving the goalposts quite significantly while doing so.

"Vote for the green party" in my country would, in many ridings, be the difference between the only climate-change-denying party winning a seat, and one of the three climate-change-believing-and-respond-to-it parties winning a seat. Which is less than helpful when it comes to addressing climate change.

I'm pretty sure you can do other things as well as Vote. It's not like voting is so all encompassing that you'd be unable to work/participate in other areas at the same time.

I wasn't suggesting that, I was just responding to the parent comment. Voting for the green party can actually cause anti-environmental outcomes (in my jurisdiction).

Hearing that this distribution of parties exists somewhere is great to hear. It's a proper baseplate for improvement.

To be honest, politicians are emperors without clothes.

Many Americans expected dems would fix the climate issue. Alas, it was all just talk. Joe Biden has allowed more oil drills than trump.

Seems like corporatism overshadows politics in countries like the USA which can make an impact in terms of Climate.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com