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Comment by possiblelion | Hacker News Reader

So - looking at this it seems Turkmenistan [a repressive, North Korea style dictatorship] is destroying our climate system at an order of magnitude faster than anyone else. I'm well aware of the legacy that Iraq/Afghanistan have left in terms of international interventions into other countries; but if it is our common future on the balance, shouldn't we do something? Something more than just politely asking to stop?

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It’s a little over 1/1,000th of human released methane, so on it’s own not that critical or that far above expectations for a country with a little over 1/2000th the global population.

The issue is mostly that it’s presumably cheap to fix unlike a billion cows all farting.

>The issue is mostly that it’s presumably cheap to fix unlike a billion cows all farting.

It's even cheaper to fix the farting cows: Just stop raising cows.

Of course, if you want to supplement beef and dairy products, it's not that easy. But if we would believe that global warming and methane were a problem, we could make a difference within weeks.

Even just killing all a billion would be quite expensive by comparison. You can’t exactly do it for 0.01$/ cow and fixing this would likely cost significantly less than 10 million.

You have forgotten that all of those cows will already be killed, with a profit.

Not everywhere and especially not anytime soon. India has more than 3,000 institutions called Gaushalas maintained by charitable trusts that care for old and infirm cows. It’s a whole religious thing.

Also, enforcing rules isn’t free. Trying to enforce a cow ban would get really expensive.

Like offering to pay to fix the leaks in their gas pipeline?

Prob way cheaper than invading the country

> Prob way cheaper than invading the country

But they have oil....

> Like offering to pay to fix the leaks in their gas pipeline?

It's a nice offer in theory but I could imagine that would lead others to intentionally break their pipelines in order to get "fix-it" money.

I'm reminded of the story of British Raj paying Indians for catching cobras.

I've often imagined a dystopian future, hotter world where bombs are dropped on unauthorized coal / cement plants to prevent more sea level rise / super hurricanes, rendering those with no other options into partisan stone-age tribes.

You might enjoy this book which features similar events: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ministry_for_the_Future

Tax their oil profits with a methane tax? Stop buying their oil, while they didn't fix leaks? How about this?

What's the carbon cost of yet another idiotic hostile intervention?

Bring them democracy!

Why don't we forget that since it's expensive. How about "fix the leaks or we'll bomb presidental palaces"

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