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Comment by fbrncci | Hacker News Reader

Do what, exactly?

It's December 7, 1941. The Japanese have just attacked Pearl Harbor. Suddenly, most people realize the status quo has changed. The economy needs to make a major transition. Things need to be built at an unprecedented rate. Sacrifices will need to be made at every level because survival is on the line. Victory is possible but it will be a long and difficult fight.

Do we throw up our collective hands and say "it's too hard, the job is too big, not enough people are willing, we surrender"?

Or do we shut up and get to work?

The transition away from a carbon-emitting economy can be done if we have the will, and we will come out of it stronger than ever. We just need to stop saying we can't, and start building.

I'm pretty sure working harder, when done haphazardly, will worsen things

Yes, plenty of alternative energy technologies will emit too much carbon during the transition to make them viable. Right now, whenever we build something, we have GHG byproducts all over the place, so we have to really do the math first. A lot of needles will have to be threaded in the coming years if our civilization as we know it is going to survive.

But that doesn't mean we should just give up. And half measures are no longer an option.

This is silly. How can you possibly make such a sweeping statement? How can you possibly believe 7 billion people would feverishly begin working towards something with no sense of plan or intentionally?

I'll bite. For start

- stop fossil fuels in transport & energy, minimize plastic production

- stop subsidizing meat & dairy, reform agriculture (pollution, eutrophication, soils)

- reforest / rewild pastures, stop overfishing (carbon capture, biodiversity)

- degrowth & basic income, remove financial drivers of exponential growth (prevent repetition)

ASAP everything, 2050 is too late.

so we go back to the caves then.

Just for the common people. They’re going to fly private jets to every meeting to talk about how best to do it, and meet on their 400 foot yachts afterwards to sign the agreements.

The tyrants always sell themselves as the answer to the apocalypse. Everyone you know is going to die. Society is always heading towards multiple kinds of total destruction. Anyone who uses that to try to take control of us is a tyrant. We shouldn’t sacrifice society at the feet of fear, especially to the very people in charge of the factories and industries causing the problems.

I don’t deny global warming. But I don’t believe the people claiming to have the answers and I’m not willing to follow Hitler logic to take people back to the Stone Age as the “solution” to the problem because I read books (and you shouldn’t either).

But I guarantee you others will put this forward as the “inevitable logic” or “nature will do it for us if we don’t sacrifice everything” as if technology has done nothing and we can’t possibly come back into balance with nature without utterly obliterating human civilization. It’s actually kind of batshit.

Nuclear anyone? No?

We have 2 choices now. Either we do it, or we let nature handle the problem.

One option is much better than the other.

Maybe we should stop subsidizing the fossil fuel industry, and start a schedule of steady tax increases on it so that remembers become gradually but overwhelming cheaper to use.

Increase the tempo of Starship launches. Head to Psyche 16, build more Starships.

Move China to Psyche 16.

Drop Tesla's and iPhones from space onto Earth, which is now a garden.

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