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Comment by user3939382 | Hacker News Reader

We are too politically polarized to solve problems in this class, which requires political unity because of the scale, cost, and speed requirements.

All of our major political forces play games, constantly make moves in bad faith, talk out of both sides of their mouths publicly vs privately, so we are screwed.

The reality is that IF climate change science were a big hoax (sadly, it's not) there WOULD be a team using it for political games, so there will always be a large class of people who believe that's what's going on.

Maybe if we didn't spend decades politicizing every microscopic issue including in science, technology, and medicine, we could have policy makers advocate for positions based on science and everyone would trust it. That's not the world we live in and unfortunately, it looks like we never will.

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I think you're editorializing it in a way that is making it far more politically neutral or "pox on both your houses" than it actually is. It's not about warring world views. It's just about money.

The simple reality is: almost all wealth on the planet is tied up with fossil fuels.

This being the case, the more wealthy you are, the more "polarized" in a certain direction you will be.

Might makes right. Or at least attempts to make right. And right now, "might" = "money" = "capital" = "energy"

There's a lot of not wealthy people who are polarized in that direction as well though. It's not simply a matter of sending a few oligarchs to the gillotine. In the short run, basically everyone in North America and Europe benefit from out destruction of the climate, and most people in other countries too.

To put it another way, the people who control the oil supply aren't simply wealthy because they pillaged and stole a bunch of people's stuff. The product they supply is extremely convenient and popular. You'd probably have an easier time fixing a world where everyone's a methhead than fixing the current problem.

I don't disagree with your central point. Though I think there is room to quibble about the definition of "pillage and stole" given that the cornerstone of this whole structure is control over physical lands, physical lands to which troops and violence have definitely been deployed.

Almost all of us are tied into this circuit in some way and "most of us" (in the west) short-term benefit from the continuance of the status quo energy economy and its growth. But what I would say is this: at the end the rich and powerful will continue to be able to buy fresh water and air and arable land and stable neighbourhoods with armed guards and fences. The rest of us will not be so lucky.

It's much more simple than that - vast majority of the world has become rich or richer by using more energy (almost a tautology), and vast majority of energy is produced from fossil fuels. Fossil fuels are still for the most part the simplest, technologically, energy source with the fastest payoff.

To get the world even to European per-capita energy usage levels, current energy production would have to be expanded 3x [1] You just have to convince a few billion and their leaders that they should remain in relative poverty for a few more decades, waiting for solar/wind/nuclear to ramp up to several times the entire current energy production. Heck, the energy production needs to expand just to bring everyone to Chinese levels, and then you would not only need to set a forever-ceiling for the above billions, but also convince a billion or so Americans/Europeans/... to become poor.

If you can't convince people to stay or become poor voluntarily, they are going to need energy. Surprise, some people are eager to sell them this energy. But it's the demand that drives the supply.

[1] https://rootsofprogress.org/devanney-on-the-nuclear-flop

> Maybe if we didn't spend decades politicizing every microscopic issue including in science, technology, and medicine, we could have policy makers advocate for positions based on science and everyone would trust it.

`we` isn't the common people. It's a very concerted effort to keep the status quo [1].

[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/02/us/a-call-for-softer-gree...

I think one solution that could plausibly work is an initiative to improve people's thinking abilities in general.

However, this tends to be unpopular as while people are very interested in the flaws in the thinking of their outgroup members, they tend to be very uninterested in their own or their ingroup members.

It's a tough problem, but not even trying to do anything about it doesn't seem like a recipe for success.

I don't think it's fair to blame "we". It's fair to blame very powerful interests that control media and politics. "We" are a product of the information that we receive, and so many people receive bad information that is paid and influenced by people who value money over preserving life on this planet.

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