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Comment by thebooktocome | Hacker News Reader

> Looking at individual country impacts on dangerous heat levels, researchers found that current emissions from 1.2 average US citizens condemn a future human to live in extreme heat.

This is a terrible sentence that encrypts their intended point.

“Current emissions” do not have the agency implied by “condemn”. One might get the impression that the “1.2 average US citizens” are doing the condemning, but the average US citizen does not have enough agency to move the needle one way or the other.

The government (supposedly, a sovereign power concerned with its own continued existence) ought to regulate the corporations (supposedly, rational agents concerned with their own continued existence) that are contributing almost all US emissions. Those two are the ones doing the condemning.

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The percapitafication of emissions is one of the biggest misdirects of the climate change issue. There is no plausible mechanism for individuals to steer this based on their own consumption. You can want it to happen but it won’t ever happen in a the numbers required. Changes have to happen at the corporate and industrial levels.

The theory is that you have to get the individuals motivated to make decisions that make those corporations make changes. When the numbers of individuals becomes a large enough number to effect the bottom line of corporations, then they can maybe have a chance of actually influencing those corporations.

s/corporations/elected-officials/

either individuals stop using corporations or individuals influence gov't members to enact changes to force corporations, the corporations are not going to do anything that might negatively impact their bottom lines

There's a lot of waste based on pure nonsense and most of the public indulge in them. Individuals that actually care and make well-informed decisions form a minority.

I think that's unfair to people, one person's nonsense is another person's joy. I'm not saying that there isn't obvious lavish excess but unless you're 99th percentile in wealth (not income) nothing you do even wiggles the needle.

Right, but that's like trying to steer a river one bucket at a time. Alternatively we could get together and build a dam. The mechanism we invented for top-down collective decision making is government; we should use it.

s/corporations/elected-officials/

key part of my comment

> The mechanism we invented for top-down collective decision making is government; we should use it.

How does that make sense if there are just as many opposed to using it?

In most countries this 'mechanism' is only relevant if a sizable majority of the electorate wants it, and there are no sufficiently motivated blocking interests.

>There is no plausible mechanism for individuals to steer this based on their own consumption.

Pigouvian taxes do just this. All you have to do is price carbon at the cost of removing it from the atmosphere and watch substitution effects take effect.

Isn't that the point? That the government needs to act.

How do you know that making necessities (energy, food, transportation) more expensive will not cause more harm than the effects of climate change, especially to poor people who do not have a choice anyway?

I don’t.

I do know that letting government solve the problem through regulation will be massively more expensive than solving it via the market.

This is a false dichotomy.

Regulation is what needs to be done in order to shape the market in such a way it can solve the problem.

"The market" does not incorporate socialized costs when left to its own devices, quite the contrary. That's what got us here in the first place.

Isn't that their point? Or how do you do that tax at an individual level vs a governmental one?

Taxes are literally not something individuals can do.

“I'm not emitting, it's the entities I pay to give me stuff and services"

I'm not saying you can't blame individuals. I'm just saying you're not going to actually solve the problem by blaming individuals.

If your local utility burns coal or natural gas, there's not really any amount of shaming of the consumers that will change the carbon output of those utilities. If concrete and steel manufacturers are emitting carbon at hugely high rates, there's no amount of individual shaming of occupants of buildings made with that concrete and steel that will change that.

But regulations at the governmental level to direct those industries into emitting less carbon, that has a realistic path to actually making a different.

> There is no plausible mechanism for individuals to steer this based on their own consumption.

Wrong. This is what we NEED to do. People need to change their actions. Young people are doing this already.

We can't just have people driving everywhere.

It would be great. But last I checked the youngsters are just about the biggest consumers I've ever seen. Anecdotal, sure, but nevertheless buying Tesla and things like that still doesn't make anyone an environmentalist. But doing real changes like buying mostly used goods (and trying to avoid buying things in the first place) makes you social outcast so I try not to be too hard on people, especially youngsters. Going with the masses is the easiest way to handle life. Thus, the changes really must be forced upon us by regulation, so that there is no shame choosing the "poor people thing".

It is of utmost importance that whatever those regulations would be, you shouldn't be able to buy your way out of them. Things like a personal consuming limit for "bad thing" X that is absolute and there is no way around to buy yourself more. Dystopian, sure, and in general I'm not even a fan of big government.

It would be amazing if everyone decided they would make their lives intentionally harder by biking and walking and using buses in places that have been designed to be completely antagonistic to all of those activities. I've never seen that happen anywhere though. People almost always follow the default.

What could happen is governments could invest in making cities walkable, bikable, transit-able by default and people would naturally follow. Even that is a big ask at this point due to extreme sprawl, but it's the only way it's going to happen.

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