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Comment by boplicity | Hacker News Reader

It's time to stop calling this "climate change."

It's like, say, someone keeps shooting people in the head, and you keep describing the problem as "sudden death syndrome."

Umm....no. It's not sudden death. It's either guns. Or murderers. Or both.

We don't have a climate change problem.

We have a fossil fuel problem.

We're living in the fossil fuel catastrophe.

And sure, we all benefit from fossil fuels. But it's also a bit having a gun pointed at our heads.

And no matter if you think guns are the problem, or people are the problem....

The symptom (climate change) is not where the solution lies.

Let's put the focus on the actual problem -- fossil fuel.

Fossil fuel is killing us. Not climate change. Fossil fuel.

Edit: replaced the word "oil" with "fossil fuels."

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Coal is responsible for more emissions than oil, and natgas isn't far behind. So if we just got rid of oil and kept natgas and coal, we'd be ok according to your logic?

That's really an unhelpful bit of pedantry.

Edit: Maybe my sentiment is unpopular. I read the comment and thought that "oil" clearly was a standing for fossil fuels in general. I don't see how it could be read to be saying "oil is bad but coal and gas are OK" and thought the reply suggesting this was the case wasn't really in good faith. But I may have been mistaken!

Given the topic of conversation, it is a necessary bit of pedantry. If we are going to abandon "climate change" because it does not fully convey the issue, replacing it with "oil catastrophe", which also does not fully convey the issue, is not particularly useful. The latter is going to leave people thinking that all we need to do is stop using oil, which may be a good start, but not a complete solution.

Coal and gas are used massively by countries such as Germany that actively try to sabotage carbon-free nuclear energy.

Abstaining isn't sabotaging. Vegetarians aren't actively sabotaging meat production. Electricity exports from dirty plants in Germany were vital in propping up France's nuclear power grid when it was in trouble in the past year. There's plenty of sabotage potential there if there were any intention which there is not.

Their "green hydrogen" nonsense counts as sabotage.

It's harmful nonsense but I don't see how it sabotages nuclear energy. If anything, proponents of nuclear energy should be thrilled. Free energy, now available for legacy heating technology.

The party that keeps insisting on adding these laughable electricity-to-fuel regulations is amenable to nuclear power plants and would undoubtedly have kept them running in a different coalition.

It's really not pedantry, if anything oil is more 'valuable' than (especially) coal and natgas in terms of the energy transition - it is much much harder to replace oil based products (aviation fuels, diesel for heavy industrial use for example) than it is to switch off coal power plants.

Oil (fossil fuel) is going to fix itself, but not fast enough to keep climate change within reasonable bounds.

But you can go a step further, the problem isn't oil, but growth. Should we have an infinite supply of "clean" energy, we'd use it to destroy the environment faster (destroy forest, marine life, produce more plastic and so on...).

These types of scenarii are well-explained in the "limits to growth" book.

I think it’s possible that the endless renaming treadmill isn’t actually helpful. If you’re already onboard, sure it keeps things spicy, but if you’re not it’s alienating and frankly it’s anti-accessible.

It’s bikeshedding.

It's 2 fold, it is both a demand issue and a supply issue.

Yes, we need to find a way to move away from oil. But, we also need to move away from decisions that lead to a stark increase in demand. Avoiding things like Car culture, building cities in deserts/tundra, beef consumption are just as important. This is especially true in the developing world. If per-capita energy demands in Africa / India / China gets anywhere close to Canada/USA/ Norway, then no amount of 'clean energy pivot' will be able to save us. But that change has to begin from USA/Canada/Scandinavia as global thought leaders.

This pans out in statistics [1] too. There is clear clustering around car centric, sprawling & snow-clad regions. Japan, France, & Spain stand out as medium-consumption developed nations simply due to better urban planning & moderate climate. Taiwan and SK are the two headscratchers for me. I would have expected both to have similar consumption to Japan, no clue why they use so much energy per capita. Is it all air-conditioning ?

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/per-capita-energy-use?tab...

And when we're done transitioning and the problem of end of life batteries becomes more obvious we will live in a world with a battery problem (among many other unforeseen problems I am sure, that's just the blindingly obvious one right now). There's no free lunch, life is trade offs, fossil fuels have been an excellent trade off so far (just look at all the labor they freed up to pursue technological advancement in countries with institutions favorable to rewarding individual achievement).

Because of the trade off nature of this situation your argument is entirely wrong. The main problem is climate changes when we add heat to it faster than we can dissipate it into space. The solution to the main problem is some combination of things that increases our ability to dissipate heat, which will include some amount of fossil fuel consumption decrease. There are secondary problems with the different green house gases that will dictate the optimal decrease mix but that's not that relevant to the main problem with your thought process.

Fossil fuels were a glorious solution to the horror of the average man's existence, they continue to be a large benefit and could be a glorious solution again in the right circumstances so it serves no one to make a "fossil fuel bad!" religion out of it.

What's the problem with end of life batteries?

Seems to me that a big pile of no longer working batteries is actually just a very easy deposit of lithium to mine for material to make new batteries.

batteries are extremely toxic. You can't just bury them and call it a resource for future generations like you could with plastic.

You could pull the lithium out right now and skip the burying step

Schwarzenegger has a similar comment. And he's worth listening to because (some) Republicans listen to him. He says we should just use the word "pollution".

https://cleantechnica.com/2023/06/06/why-arnold-schwarzenegg...

It's gonna take a lot to convince people that the strategy is anything other than burn oil as fuel to reach the technological advancement to not need oil.

Other than cars (which is not insignificant but we're also headed that way) there's not a whole lot of places to cut unnecessary oil usage. Dropping our oil consumption by a factor of two would be fantastic but also likely not save us in isolation.

Not only would it not save us, drastically reducing oil consumption would directly lead to the deaths of people.

Agree that climate change is a bad term. Better term would be anthropogenic crisis (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropocene).

Because we have much more problems than just fossil fuels.

This is just a short (and incomplete) list of impacts of agriculture:

- Greenhouse gas emissions

- Deforestation (40% of pastures used to be forests)

- Land degradation

- Water pollution

- Water overconsumption

- Loss of biodiversity

- Antibiotic resistance

- Ocean dead zones

- Inefficient land and resource use

- Ethical concerns regarding animal welfare

- Contribution to zoonotic diseases

- Air pollution

- Eutrophication

- Soil erosion

- High energy consumption

- Chemical runoff from pesticides and fertilizers

- Destruction of habitats and ecosystems

- Inequality in global food distribution

- Public health risks from foodborne illnesses

- Nutrient pollution

- Strain on waste management systems

- Overfishing (40-70% of plankton gone, sharks 90% gone, fish almost gone)

Overshoot is the term used in systems ecology. Here is a good primer by Prof. William E. Rees

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4CVe8-eKSK8

The problem is that we dont have a net outflow of heat. Fossil fuels would not be a problem if we could dump that previously scurried away heat of ancient suns into space. The solution is to follow the modern greeks and paint every space facing surface in infrared window white. Barium Sulfate, brothers! And sisters! Even jungles are best grown under barium sulfate roofs. If barium is too rare, iridescent metasurfaces will do

I agree Id rather call it something else but Id rather get back to "global warming" or better yet "the greenhouse effect".

Don’t forget coal.

Let's agree on 'fossil fuel problem' and shake on it.

Yeah, by shutting down the last two fully functional and perfectly safe nuclear power plants, as the greens just did in Germany.

It is astounding how OPs generally decent point was completely derailed because he made the misstep of limiting the scope of his ire to oil. This is so common in online discussions that I wish there was a way to 'rewind' and restart a discussion after making a correction.

I think people are amused by the irony of the original post arguing semantics and then proposing an equally poor solution.

At least oil is part of the problem... While climate change is just a consequence of many problems.

Actually, I'm probably wrong.... Too many people might be the root of the problem.

And that might be wrong too... Maybe it's just one more cycle Earth has to go through.

In my experience, people only rally around a problem when faced with an immediate problem. It's probably irrelevant how you frame the issue because nothing will be done until it's juuuust about too late. The good news is humans are highly adaptable, the bad news is other species will suffer.

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