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Comment by bmitc | Hacker News Reader

It's amazing but harrowing that we can study this stuff but somehow can't get it together enough to get along and stop destroying the planet.

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There are quite a few billion people looking forward to the convenience of their own vehicle and living in their own detached house and visiting tropical destinations and eating avocados all year. I do not think any leader is going to be able to placate the population by telling them to consume less to maybe help future generations.

Yeah, fortunately it looks like there may be things that can be done which reduce GHG emissions while also enabling economic development. It’s already been the case for a while that developed countries have continued to grow while their emissions have decreased (even when accounting for trade – ie ‘offshoring’ of emissions). Hopefully developing countries will be able to better take advantage of the cheaper energy[1] provided by solar to develop faster. They don’t need to go through the same GHG-heavy steps much like they don’t need to develop a pony express or telegraph network. Though my understanding of economic development is that there are no east recipes to make it happen so I don’t really know how it will go. Note that I’m only really talking about GHG emissions and not other kinds of pollution or environmental harm.

[1] obviously the advantage may not be so great (or even an advantage) if labour costs are different or if coal plants are cheaper. It still has a disadvantage of all costs being weighted towards installation time and the advantage of not requiring the whole thing to be installed at once.

If population control is part of the solution then maybe we can all get by with a lot less reduction in our consumption. It baffles me that this part of the solution is never mentioned in these discussions.

Tell a person “have as many as you want” and they’ll have none. Tell them they can’t have one and they’ll raise a rebellion.

And now it’s Godwin time. Some movements were actually pretty effective in „population control“ in the past.

If you want to „control population“ please start yourself and with your family.

I for example don’t want to see any human population „controlled“ by anyone.

Isn't that essentially saying "other people should die so I don't have to give up my luxuries"?

People won’t exist who might otherwise have existed.

There is strong evidence that when women have agency, as well as access to education and contraceptives, the fertility rate plummets. Lean into providing those mechanisms.

The problem with this logic is that it makes no sense with the current world population if what you want is to keep lavish western living standards for everyone. Because those living standards already require a completely unsustainable level of consumption just to sustain that level for the west alone. To get consumption to sustainable levels, slowing down growth isn't enough. You'd need to reduce the population drastically. And it's not like we have time to wait around several generations. Taken to its conclusion, the GP's idea can only work if genocide is perpetrated.

So yes, improving education and women's rights are very important, and do slow down population growth. But while this helps, it doesn't preclude the need for the level of consumption in industrialised societies to go down drastically.

> Taken to its conclusion, the GP's idea can only work if genocide is perpetrated.

Or we collectively do nothing when hundreds of millions or billions of people die from outlier wet bulb temp heat and other climate change effects. Which is very likely to be the default path (not that I agree with this btw, making an observation that everyone is operating bau). I suppose you could call this genocide by inaction.

Tax energy accordingly, that's it

Best of luck winning with that campaign slogan.

They have my vote

I'm not sure taxing things is the way to fundamentally alter the way of living in almost every society on the planet.

Markets & incentives are the only things that ever have.

And then what?

«We already have access to far more energy than we could possibly use on earth for any technology that's actually buildable. But we're not using it because we don't have the species IQ to make the right choices.»

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28232083

(One of the deepest comments I ever read on HN.)

This is not where the majority of emissions come from

Ultimately emissions are created to manufacture things humans want. The poster was just giving examples.

Here in the UK at least, the media has encouraged support for action against climate change by lying about exactly this. They've run talking points like "Just 100 companies responsible for 71% of global emissions" that only count where the fossil fuels are produced, not even where they're burned let alone the end consumers of the products. Of course, it's not possible to stop only production and not consumption so this misleads readers about the actual consequences of doing so and who's affected, but it worked to convince people that the only reason governments haven't shut down fossil fuel production because they're in the pockets of Big Oil.

At the same time, we've had a cost of living crisis caused by inadequate global fossil fuel production and all the same publications attacking big oil and the government for the fact that people can't afford to consume as much and telling people that drops in the amount they can buy with their income are caused by corporations and the goverment plotting to enrich themselves at the public's expense. In reality, of course, it's a consequence of the global economy not being able to produce as much of the things people want and further cuts to fossil fuel production would makes everyone even poorer.

In The Matrix we will have all these things for everyone, on demand, without the ecological debt.

That's not a joke. We can't help ourselves to act sooner. Later eventually the answer will be a virtual existence. Like it or not it solves all the major problems we currently face. It's only a matter of time for working out the details.

As what we humans seek most is social reward, this is indeed the smallest path to achieve this goal.

In a way, people participating in massive games, deep involvement in social networks, but also MOOCs and Internet competitions for scholars with a leaderboard such as Kaggle are leading the way.

Maybe that's the bright future Musk sees for Twitter.

What they need to do is provide enough education and reliable sustenance that the birth rates fully drop below replacement and the future generations are smaller and put less exponential growth pressure on the planet's resources and systems.

And even if they all rode the bus and lived in the smallest apartment possible.. we would still be basically in the same problem.

Are you suggesting emissions due to human consumption are negligible factors in climate change?

Otherwise, I presume emissions = energy consumed = mass * distances the mass is moved.

No I'm suggesting that consumer vehicles and residential use are relatively minor and small shifts will indeed have small outcomes.

We basically need to massively downscale or change the industrial products, supply chains and industrial power solutions in play.

Arguing about sedans vs SUVs or bus riding is rearranging deck chairs on the titanic.

Where does all the demand for energy come from? Does it not come from people wanting to live on a quarter acre lot with their own car? Which then necessitates space for parking lots and huge roads? Which then necessitates transporting goods further and further?

Where does the demand for shipping cheap plastics and electronics across oceans come from?

“Industrial” energy use is a function of consumer demand. At the end of the day, more people wanting more things (including space) and wanting to go more places is going to be the root cause, and the solution has to start there, barring a miraculous discovery of a cheap energy source without the current problems.

> Where does all the demand for energy come from? Does it not come from people wanting to live on a quarter acre lot with their own car?

How much steel is used in your house and your car? How many KW does it take to run an industrial smelter?

How much more steel is used if your house is twice as big?

How much steel per sq ft of yard do you need? (I suppose your fencing needs nails...)

> Where does the demand for shipping cheap plastics and electronics across oceans come from?

And do you think a smaller house will reduce that? How small of a house do you need before that demand radically drops?

> Which then necessitates transporting goods further and further?

And it's not the "last mile" (to the consumer) part that requires the energy. It's the raw materials to the refinery, the processed meterials to the fabs, the chiplets to the assembler, the boards to the injection molding plant, the molded parts to the distribution warehouse, the distribution warehouse to the seller, the seller to the reseller, then finally the reseller to the consumer.

Even if you set up camp in the Amazon warehouse, how much energy savings is that? And that is ONLY transport.

Industrial use itself, excluding transport, is huge. Building homes (and much worse for building skyscrapers). Your 250T crane wasn't built in town. Neither was the fleet of trucks to level land. Neither are the several thousand feet of fire sprinkler tubing.

Those with the power to change things have the power to suffer no negative effects.

I'd suggest a slight edit to this: Those with the power to change things believe they have the power to suffer no negative effects.

Billionaires can already live in underground luxury bunkers that can withstand a nuclear Armageddon for decades.

With accelerating tech, their ability to opt out of global catastrophic risks also accelerates. Not so for the rest of us.

I think that's what they believe, but I buy Douglas Rushkoff's argument that this is a collective illusion on the part of the billionaire class. See https://rushkoff.com/books/survival-of-the-richest-escape-fa...

Don’t you think billionaires would also rather sip cocktails on a beautiful beach vs their concrete bunker? There’s only so much you can do to spruce up a bunker. They’re not rooting for global warming, as a class.

There’s a lot of Russian billionaires discovering that their freedoms aren’t as unlimited as they thought…

This is a ridiculous take. You realise Pakistan is collapsing right now because Europe bought all the LNG and it’s super expensive now? I.e if you start taxing energy more or making it less abundant you will collapse societies.

How about France? The Arab springs?

This is not about the elites. Forcing everyone into less consumption will basically lead to revolutions.

The only way out of this is technology. You can’t force people into more expensive food and living conditions. You have to fail forwards.

Unfortunately it seems like most environmentalists prefer complete collapse of society, and depopulation, to technological progress

Edit: and btw, how are you gonna stop China building coal plants? Diplomacy? Seems unlikely to work. Military prevention?

Planet isn't going to be destroyed. Some areas might become uninhabitable (like Sahara desert or Arabian peninsula), but some other areas might end up better suited for human life or more desirable.

"raising awareness" doesn't require personal sacrifice

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