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Comment by gonzo41 | Hacker News Reader

For the cost though, you should probably fund a lot of other science. Climate change mitigation perhaps?

That 100B hasn’t been poured into climate change mitigation has absolutely nothing to do with a plan to build a 100B hadron collider. Plus this is 100B over decades.

$100B would go a long way experimenting with new Concrete or Desalination processes that would have immediate benefits with even moderate success.

Elon Musk was willing to put up upwards of $40bn to buy out Twitter. If a private individual can leverage that kind of money, $100bn seems like peanuts for an international scientific endeavour.

Heck, Germany just greenlit a €100bn special budget for expanding its military capabilities.

It's not that world governments don't have that kind of money to spend on the Climate crisis, it's that they aren't interested and motivated to do it. Germany's special budget was justified with Russia being an existential threat but the Climate crisis has been recognized as an existential threat for decades, yet almost all countries have been dragging their feet.

NATO recommends member nations put 2% of their annual budget into defense. Imagine its members (let alone most countries) would have done the same for combatting Climate change.

Doesn’t need to be either or. Money printers seem to work just fine

Current levels of inflation seem to suggest otherwise.

The claim that we need to "invest into science" is outright bullshit. We don't need more investment into climate change science - we already know what to do to mitigate climate change and we have known it for decades (hell there is an article from over a hundred years ago that warns of the dangers of CO2 emissions [2]): ban ICE vehicles and coal power plants, promote public transit, massively restrict other uses of fossil material, get rid of mass animal farming, prevent profiteers from burning down the Amazon rainforest.

The problem is, politicians won't do anything because they are either bought out by the fossil fuel industry that is at the top of the CO2 emitter list [1] or because they are afraid of telling their voters that the only way to stay on track regarding climate change will be a drastic cut in their quality of life.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top_contributors_to_greenhouse...

[2]: https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2021/08/13/fact...

Could the money be used to offset quality-of-life to make fossil fuel alternatives less problematic?

Ban ICE vehicles, coal power plants and get rid of mass animal farming? And then we do what, go back to the caves?

There are good alternatives to all these things.

Use electric cars, green energy, and sustainable farming practices?

The gross old shit only still exists because the entrenched industries have the ability to lobby for government subsidies. Imagine if people in the US had to actually pay full price for gas, or for their meat.

I never owned a car (only use trains + bicycles), I’m on a renewable electricity plan, and I’m vegetarian (and being selective with the farms I buy my eggs and milk from).

It’s not “living in caves”, in fact, it’s not any different from the life of anyone else. It’s only a handful of tiny changes and suddenly your climate impact is massively reduced.

or we go forward out of the cave we are living in now, believing we are so advanced that we are at the peak of civilization, while we still pray a non existent being for health and create energy by making giant holes in the ground that give us goo that then we set on fire.

Doesn't sound so advanced to me...

Isn't this a reason to understand more about the climate though? How big cuts are needed, and how fast? What is the consequence of leaving those cuts an extra 10 years? What if we put our energy into cutting methane now and leave CO2 for later? Does black carbon matter in the long term? What amount of warming is acceptable?

These are the kind of questions we need answers to. Just saying 'we need to stop all emissions today' is not good enough. There is always a trade-off and we need to work out where this lies.

That newspaper article is a syndicated reprint of a Popular Mechanics piece.

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