The Great Forgetting
nautil.us
nautil.us
Preventing climate change is going to take massive changes that no companies or goverments actually want to do, its all half-assed political virtue showing.
The change your life (to the worse most of the time) to appear as climate conscious as possible, rather than actually focusing on things that matter crowd certainly arent helping either.
IMO individual actions don't matter at all here.
In the most polluting (directly and indirectly) wealthy democracies, the blame can mostly be placed on us as individuals. The politicians and businesses are mostly catering to what individuals want, a systemic problem that we seem to struggle to solve. A country’s pollution is approximately proportional to its wealth. To fix the problem requires huge changes to our individual wealth.
Few individuals want to make the required changes: individually we buy into cheap denial narratives, green-washing. No democracy can act as a benevolent dictator to force us to make the radical changes required to our priorities, our wants and needs. The majority of us are sold on deception, because we want to buy into the deception.
Edit: a few simple assumptions means for a me to capture my carbon with trees, I need to plant ≈1 Hectare (4 acres) of trees, and never harvest the trees. I do intend to do it (it will mean some belt tightening), but it doesn’t address the problem of removing my past CO2 emissions, and would use up 20% of New Zealand’s land to do it if all 5 million of us wanted to. “New Zealand has a total of 10.1 million hectares of forests, covering 38% of the land. 2.1 million hectares are plantation forest.”. “The yearly carbon dioxide balancing rate varies between 21.77 and 31.5 kilogram carbon dioxide for each tree. To offset one ton of Carbon dioxide, between 31 and 46 trees are required. One should use a ratio of 24 kilograms of carbon dioxide per tree and an estimate of five hundred trees per hectare to get the values.”. “New Zealand's gross carbon dioxide emissions in 2018 were 7.5 tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent, (CO 2-e) per capita.”. Edit 2: Belt tightening because it isn’t cheap to buy one hectare - far far cheaper if I can find another few tens of people that want to do the same thing).
It's a philosophical argument but I reckon if negative externalities were fairly priced into the choices available to us, we'd make much different decisions, even with the same wants and needs and values.
Let’s use a mental model that externalities should double the price. Existing NZ petrol taxes per litre double the price (about 50% at pump is excise and GST [1]). Using that model we can see that the existing pricing in of externalities doesn’t actually fix anything for petrol.
See comment edit above for direct action you can do to marginally fix the problem for yourself (obviously it doesn’t fix the problem, but it is one of the few direct actions you could do that is difficult to be cheated).
Edit: alternatively, global oil risks (rather than raw costs) act similarly to externalities in driving adoption of greener technologies: https://energypost.eu/russias-war-is-accelerating-the-clean-... Presumably because those risks are causing political costs to politicians?
[1] https://www.aa.co.nz/cars/owning-a-car/fuel-prices-and-types...
It is well known indisputable fact that fossil fuel companies, along with certain characters in the political sphere, waged, and continue to wage, climate change denial war against us.
Rather than provide direct links to any particular source, here's every particular source:
https://www.google.com/search?q=big%20oil%20climate%20change...
> The politicians and businesses are mostly catering to what individuals want
What you need to realise here is that evolution hasn't created a species of perfectly rational actors with equitable access to information to make purely rational decisions at all times.
We are not perfectly fit in an evolutionary sense, merely fit enough to have made it this far.
There are gaping flaws in our psychological that contribute to making us susceptible to all sorts ideas and actions that are diametrically opposed to our own self interest, and the collective interests of our communities at all scales.
How advertising works: https://www.google.com/search?q=how%20advertising%20works
You should also be made aware of: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_cat_strategy
Here in Australia, the political class, both major parties, but especially the political right, since at least as long as I've been paying attention, so 1996, 27 years, have actively been working to dismantle education, healthcare, public housing, and deny climate change, that it has become glaringly obvious certain individuals within state and federal politics have been working for the interests of industry and ideology over the interests of the people they've been elected to serve to a level that far exceeds lazy garden variety corruption and rises to the level of active hostility.
You have been deceived in to believing that your individual choices matter. They really don't. It doesn't matter if you, individually, change your behaviour to become a net positive effector on the environment. You don't matter one iota.
If fossil fuel companies, and their political champions, hadn't been actively hostile for the past few decades, we could have deployed a mixture of low / no carbon energy sources, and worked to change our cultural, economic, and societal structures, to avoid the very large scale climate catastrophe we're now enduring.
Frankly, come back when you've made at least some effort to make yourself aware of the history of, and continuance of, the psychological manipulation you yourself have been the subject of, as evidenced by that fact you'd write and espouse such an opinion.
I am not saying that government and business are not culpable as well. I am saying they are not the only groups to blame. Collectively we all are also to blame. Collectively we have agency; whether we can organise ourselves to recognise our weaknesses and use our strength is another matter.
Also note, I am fairly sure flagging is completely inappropriate for disagreement on HN. Guideline: “Have curious conversation”. Certainly commenting about flagging is inappropriate “If you flag, please don't also comment that you did.”. Maybe read the https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and try to follow their spirit. You even mention I should be censored, which I find astonishing. Personally I feel like you are bringing politics here, which is usually discouraged, and doubly unnecessary since I strongly suspect we are on the same “side” (I have enough unfortunate friends to know the need for a compassionate society, and enough engineer friends to know the value of building value, and enough greenie friends to know about evil corporations). I feel that you have tagged me as a selfish capitalist individualist child. Perhaps instead read my comment again as though it was written by a friend, and assume good faith, respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what I said, and converse with me as a peer might. I am not dang. I do try to be a good member of this community. Edit: I also think you are assuming all countries are the same. We are a little bit better off in New Zealand, so perhaps that explains why I am a litlle more hopeful.
To others: sorry, this has gone a long way off-topic. Merry Xmas!
Individuals themselves don't do the major damage to the environment, rather its business and oil companies doing this, and they are the most effective to target, yet its mostly political virtue signaling that we hear about.
Also this is not limited to the climate, people always wanted cheap stuff, thats why before regulations, car manufacturers often skimped on safety to just get the price as low as possible or more often, to get more profit.
Regulations stopped this, and they are going to stop climate change too.
Well let me make you feel a bit better. The 8C was often referred to as the "business as usual" model. Fortunately things have changed without substantial intervention[0]. I'm not saying things are solved but that it isn't the worst case scenario. We still have a long way to go, but this should show that there at least is some hope, even if just a little.
It may cost 100 trillion to reduce temperature in 2100 by 0.1F ....
Likely we'll slowly wean off usage as fusion/nuclear become more popular and we have a battery breakthrough or two. We have very little to fear from climate change, as far as I can tell. We need to rapidly advance, as there are far greater dangers.
Before you say blah blah catastrophic thing is going to happen: think about the last 20k years. There have probably been quite a few extremely crazy events that are much more devastating than 1 degree in average temperature change. (i.e. 12k years ago we had 100ft sea level rise ... uhh)
Sorry man huge hard disagree. 100 trillion to maybe reduce temperature by a tiny tiny amount is clearly not worth it.
"But but but, something might happen!"
There's plenty already happening. Increase supply of healthcare, for example ...
Clearly we can't just raise the temperate 50 degrees. Everyone dies then. But the no-climate-action idea will in fact end up there. It will just take centuries. So we have to put a line in the sand at some point. We literally can't go on pumping CO2 into the atmosphere and de-terraform Earth.
We know roughly what is safe, and we're shooting way past it.
nope...
> We should spend that to not raise the temperate indefinitely.
indefinitely ...?
> We know roughly what is safe
we're not in any danger from our climate
Yea. If we keep burning fossil fuels. I mean, they will run out, but it's not going to happen in a long time. Long enough for us to change the climate way past human survivability on most of Earth.
> we're not in any danger from our climate
What? Of course we are. That's the entire point. You lower the average temperature 6 (5 from pre-industrial levels) degrees and you've got an ice age. Half of Europe literally covered in several kilometers of ice!
We've already raised the temperature 1 degree above baseline. That's a LOT.
who said otherwise?
> What? Of course we are.
not really.
> You lower the average temperature 6
thank god we have lots of earth-greening CO2..
> We've already raised the temperature 1 degree above baseline. That's a LOT.
we're coming out of an ice age
Personal interest, mostly. In any case I've had a few concussions - car accident, soccer collision, and most recently a motorcycle accident.
I'm surrounded by people who are quite aware of traumatic brain injuries so I always had support and have mostly recovered.
The interesting thing are the impulses you get. The first one had me feeling quite suicidal in periods, and so I got rid of the things I would obsess over as tools to do that.
The last one resulted in complete memory loss over the incident. I simply cannot recall it. This is somewhat fascinating to me because I have (or had) an incredible memory. I can still recall things from before quite well - my VIN, 2^64, my friends' license plates - but my working memory appears to have deteriorated significantly from the period immediate pre-accident. Chase's 8 number 2FA code now causes me to reinspect 100% of the times rather than look at once and type, and sometimes I have to do that for 6 number 2FA.
But the loss of self in those bad periods is fairly wild. You can't act otherwise because your conscious evaluation of reality is wrong.
I find the suicide thing very interesting. I wonder if it has a similar metastructure to Programmed Cell Death in humans.
In any case, I find these mental health stories quite interesting because awareness of the condition does allow you some CBT-style self intervention.
And no, despite all the doom and gloom the author projects, this is not the first time in history that glaciers are melting en masse worldwide. They have done so multiple times in the past and will do so again multiple times in the future. Earth has a long storied history, we have been on it a brief fraction of that time.
Or have I misunderstood, and you're simply expressing sanguine resignation to the inevitability of extinction events, on planetary timescales?
Why do people repeat this platitude as if it is at all obviatory (or even relevant)?
> I wanted to believe in the limitlessness of resilience
That's irrelevant, as the other times we weren't 8 billion of us, in a highly fragile, interconnected, civilization, with thousands of cities and hundreds of megacities, for the impact to be the same. Nor is the mechanism for the current issue (or the speed of it), as explained by scientists within the current consensus, the same as those times...
She doesn't remotely seek to conflate her brother's mental illness to climate change. She is simply juxtaposing a personal experience with her brother to a professional observation she has(and sources).
Moreover, you clearly didn't read the whole thing because your entire last paragraph is filled with points she made and addressed in relation to her thesis regarding memory, both ecologically and humanistically.
And even less now these days when some of them might be AI-written.
Maybe both of them were interesting, but I couldn't follow either.
So for me it’s not a good style.