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Comment by culi | Hacker News Reader

> unthinkable to admit even a few months ago

not sure what social groups you spend time in but I'd have guessed the majority of Americans don't really care. While two thirds of Americans think the government should do more to address it. In Gallup polling asking Americans which issue is the most important to them, only 2% put climate change as their top issue. The peak in 2022 was 5%. Also in May:

- the govt/leadership, 19% - inflation, 18% - economy in general, 12% - immigration, 8% - unifying the country, 5%

As someone who's organized climate strikes and protests I am definitely not surprised by these results.

https://news.gallup.com/poll/1675/most-important-problem.asp...

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I've gone from caring about climate change to complete apathy. The reason for my change in mindset is that I don't want to live in a world envisioned by climate change activists.

A few examples:

1) I want to live in a world where people can fly. I want my children to see the world and experience different cultures.

2) I want to eat meat.

3) I want to enjoy the benefits of concrete.

There aren't any practical methods of achieving carbon-neutral air travel, meat, and concrete (among many, many other things). The changes often proposed by climate activists are to stop flying and eating meat (I don't often see it suggested to stop using concrete because most people realize it's impossible). I don't know what the world will be like if we continue on our path. Perhaps climate change will ruin everything, perhaps it won't be as bad as predicted, or maybe we'll find a solution (e.g. geoengineering) I do know that life without modern conveniences is worse than life today. So to me, the choice is between something that might not have a future vs. something that definitely doesn't have a future.

You could just fly less and eat less meat. Well, at least you're honest in your nihilism, hedonism, fatalism, whatever one would call it. The "this is fine" dog refusing to entertain a world where it's not drinking a cup of tea.

Or, you could fly and eat (and have children) to your hearts content and find out in a few years or decades that all the doomsday predictions turned out to be wrong (or, postponed another few decades again) and come out the winner.

Pretending like that's an option is certainly the most convenient way to go about it.

Could have been said about any prior crisis.

It seems empirically born out that continuing your life and alternating things slowly is the winning strategy, compared to changing everything on a dime because some thing is scaring you at the moment. Is seems that there's always the thing that is obviously going to kill us, that in retrospect, hasn't and just got replaced with the next anxiety.

> Could have been said about any prior crisis.

There is an element of survivorship bias here. The only people around are those who have survived past crisis. So you'll never meet people who didn't plan for a crisis and perished as a result of their lack of planning.

> 1) I want to live in a world where people can fly. I want my children to see the world and experience different cultures.

If you're worried about future generations you'd want to limit the effects of climate change, which means reducing carbon output. Sending more carbon into the atmosphere now means our descendants will experience more dramatic climate change impacts, and also need to reduce their output even more. Or to put it another way, the more flights avoided now the more flights can potentially be taken in the future.

This mindset always catches me off guard no matter how many times I come across it. I can’t think of hardly anything more boring to care about than airplanes and meat and concrete, three things that probably could not change the quality of my life in any quantity in any way but superficially, three things that millions of people currently go without happily. Like what kind of lifestyle do you lead that these 3 things weigh so heavily? I happily minimize my use of all three of those things for even a small chance of making future lives better. I’m always shocked when I read how narrow some peoples spectrum of desires are.

> I can’t think of hardly anything more boring to care about than airplanes and meat and concrete, three things that probably could not change the quality of my life in any quantity in any way but superficially, three things that millions of people currently go without happily.

Just curious, what do you care about?

> - the govt/leadership, 19% - inflation, 18% - economy in general, 12% - immigration, 8% - unifying the country, 5%

Seeing these bullet points listed out explains much of the reason we’re currently headed for some more war in the future.

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