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Comment by drewm1980 | Hacker News Reader

drewm1980

Electric and hydrogen fueled airplanes are progressing. There are also futuristic ideas about powering the planes with ground or space based lasers powered by solar. Zeppelins still scale really well, and ships can use sails again. I believe a lot of this stuff would have already been resolved if we had stopped propping up the fossil fuel industry by funding wars to maintain supply and allowing the industry to externalize its costs.

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We need a president to declare transitioning of fossil fuels to be a national emergency and also a matter of national defense, and set the military industrial complex to work actually building a sustainable supply chain for energy and materials.

It’s really up to China and, increasingly, India at this point. The Western countries are not emitting much anymore so the impact here is limited.

We can stop buying things from China and India then.

A World War 3 is definitely one way to cut emissions and save the Earth. It seems more likely than the world working together on a reasonable plan.

Reducing emissions means inventing new technology; once you've invented it, you can export it to those other countries emitting more than you are.

(This is not how most people sell it, but it's true.)

Using such language is a guarantee that such an effort will not succeed.

Of course it's important and it's inevitable but calling it an "emergency" would by hyperbole and cause it to be taken less seriously.

This is the opposite of how politics work. The median voter is near retirement age; their #1 issue is they hate change and their #2 issue is they hate gas prices going up. Anything which looks like either one of these will fail.

So instead of hyping up things you're going to do, you need to hype them down. Ideally, you'd just go around saying you're doing absolutely nothing. (Also, don't raise gas prices.)

> We need a president

The US is a little under 15% of the world economy, and a little over 15% of the worlds energy use. It’s going to take a lot more than just the actions of one President to solve climate change.

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