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Comment by rTX5CMRXIfFG | Hacker News Reader

Or we could go with the cheap option. If there’s anything that the global pandemic taught us, it is that nothing about human behavior is ever set in stone and there will always be a way to make even draconian policies like lockdowns and mandatory face masks politically viable. The billions we’d spend building the crazy ideas you suggested which also have no guarantee of success, could be channeled into whatever it takes to get people to care more about the planet.

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The pandemic also told us that people won't even do something as mildly inconvenient as wearing a mask. Forget about major life changes.

I believe it also showed us the limit of individual action on climate change. It's doubtful I could have gotten 100% work from home out of my employers sans pandemic. My partner stopped going to work because her industry was on government provided life support.

Despite that CO2 emissions in 2020 dropped by 6%. A change which would be wiped out in a few years by the natural growth.

Getting individuals to do anything meaningful about climate change is like those people telling millennials to stop buying Starbucks and cancel Netflix in order to buy a home.

There is that terrible idea that you know what should be best for others. Just forget it, it is not how society works. Totalitarian states trying that idea use over and over and fail with terrible costs.

> A change which would be wiped out in a few years by the natural growth.

That’s the elephant in the room.

Lockdowns were heavily resisted even with millions dying right now. It will be hard to lock people down in what they can do, politically, because of something that will kill people in the future. People that might not be “me” from the point of view of each individual.

I’ve burnt 12 cars after lockdowns to ensure that you don’t get the idea that climate lockdowns would be a nice solution after Covid lockdowns. My CO2 emissions now far outweigh (perhaps 10x) the base level, not to talk about the poor grandmas who can’t afford a new car.

Lockdowns are absolutely horrible. I don’t get why you don’t kill us directly, and pretend to do it for our health. Suicide, harm, family violence, just having a life with no leisure, no secret why solitary confinement is used as a means of torture in US prisons.

You just don’t have the stats yet, but the harm you have caused by choosing lockdowns is incommensurable. PLEASE build stats on well-being and how many hours-in-good-health were actually saved by lockdowns, and wait a few years for those studies to surface before concluding that lockdowns are a fine way to deal with a problem. Taking harm upon others may satisfy your feeling of dealing a problem, but the base problem, Covid, has not even been squashed, it spread in waves and became widespread and endemic anyway like doctors always said it would. Not - solved, but saddistic measures were taken against the weaker of us.

With global warming, I have no doubt you’ll crush our lives again without solving anything about global warming itself.

I sincerely hope that burning part was just a poor joke...

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