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Comment by Ninjak8051 | Hacker News Reader

Such pathways require global cooperation and will fail unless all major nations are on board. In particular, Russia is making no effort, and has no incentive or motivation to make any effort due to their vast tundra landscape. Step 1 is to get Russia on board by some means, without Russia any of these goals are senseless.

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> without Russia any of these goals are senseless

This is an absurd take... Russia emits 4.65% of world output and has been decreasing last year the most out of the top 10 [0]. Could you base your arguments? I'd like to understand where this is coming from.

[0] https://www.worldometers.info/co2-emissions/co2-emissions-by...

Here is what I am basing my arguments on:

https://climateactiontracker.org/countries/russian-federatio...

More generally, if Russia (or any party) has incentive, means, motivation to create climate change, do not be surprised if they actively work to make it happen. Russia can literally light things on fire and come out way ahead.

Ok, but what about the other 95% of emissions. We could just ignore what Russia does and still make a big impact.

We have a lot of experience in the global system of cajoling outlier countries into a common agreement, it's just stick and carrot. Diplomacy, negotiations over interests, trade deals, etc.

If your solution involves Russia getting on board then you've already failed. Russia is actually encouraging climate change because it opens up more shipping in the arctic circle. This is to illustrate that in the short term climate change leads to winners and losers. In the long term we probably all lose, but we're not known for our long term thinking.

Not sure why it is downvoted, but Russia is massively on the benefiting side of global warming. It reduces the amount of useless land, and massively increases crops yields throughout its territory.

Geopolitically, it benefits from additional pressure on Europe to accommodate the migrations caused by climate change, and all the instability it causes.

I'm sorry, but Russia, just like Canada, will not have increased crop yields from warming. It will (and does) have massive forest fires, drought, and erratic winters which swing from warm/hot to extreme cold within days.

You know what is even worse for farmers than a cold climate? An unpredictable one. It's damn hard to pull a profit farming if you can't rely on any kind of 'normal' growing conditions from year to year.

An increase in mean temperature isn't a neat and tidy "oh, we'll just move north"; it's on the whole an increase in variance.

I'm seeing it happen here in Canada, and I'm certain we'll see it in Siberia as well.

In the end, petro-regimes like Russia, Venezuela, Saudi Arabia, Alberta, whatever... they'll become more and more paranoid and erratic and dysfunctional as the broader crisis around 'energy' deepens. We're right now seeing our first war triggered by a cornered petro-regime on the cusp of climate catastrophe. I suspect we'll see more.

I quickly looked up the evidence and I think you are right.

I'm not convinced Russia would get much benefit from from warmer tundra.

It takes more than a change in temperature to make land useful. I don't think recently-defrosted tundra is going to suddenly be profitable farmland. You need the right soil type, weather, irrigation, transport links, workers, energy sources, etc.

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