Hacker News Reader

Comment by haizhung | Hacker News Reader

What if having a comfortable life is not the best way to live a life? What about a life with purpose and accomplishment?

If you frame it like that, climate change could be even seen as some sort of salvation : Soon, it’ll be the uniting “enemy” that humanity has to face and beat if it wants to continue to exist. We have to cooperate, and we have to become better beings to overcome this tremendous challenge.

And if you overcome it, and leave a better world to your children, is that not purposeful?

View on HN

It way be the freshest take on the subject I have seen, but it runs into the same problem that all climate activism has: Okay, you have now raised my awareness sufficiently. What do you want me to do that can credibly solve this problem?

It's the credible part that I have never heard any good results for. Clearly almost anything I can do as an individual (other than science or politics) is not going to have any kind of influence and large scale inter-national agreements haven't exactly led to much.

So if you want to join this up as a fight, at first we must know how to fight and we must know that it has a reasonable chance of success.

> What do you want me to do that can credibly solve this problem?

Educate yourself, and educate others. Fight ignorance and consumerism. Fight those who're making it worse.

> Clearly almost anything I can do as an individual is not going to have any kind of influence

Those in a position of power would like you to believe that. Because this viewpoint preserves the status quo.

All social justice movements in history started with a few individuals loudly demanding changes while being ridiculed by the masses, whose own lives they were trying to improve.

A tsunami is made up of many drops together. Be the change you want to see in the world, and all of that.

> we must know that it has a reasonable chance of success

We now know that nobody will solve it for us, certainly not the politicians or the corporations, until we loudly start demanding change. Meanwhile, we should prepare for the worst while simultaneously trying to prevent the worst from happening.

It may not work out in the end, as shown in the movie 'Don't Look Up.' The protagonists are sitting after the lost fight, having dinner while the extinction event is happening. Their last words (if I remember correctly) are: "I'm glad we tried.".

It is definitely within society's capability to (more or less) unite behind common purpose, based on ideals and values that are not consumption driven.

In fact the modern materialistic lifestyle is probably an exception rather than historical rule. For most of history religious beliefs were uniting people and creating solace despite the more arduous existence.

The uniqueness of our condition is the scale of required change (global, spanning both avid consumer populations and deprived ones), the speed of required change (a few decades), the complex interplay with technological solutions and the rigidity/monoculture of economic systems.

Not clear how all this will play out.

I would like that to come true. Likely, climate change will cause 1-2B people to flee tropical areas causing government instability and strife. I can’t see how that will be collaborative.

> Likely, climate change will cause 1-2B people to flee to temperate areas

Rationally, that is the thing to do.

All predictive models agree that temperatures are not going to decrease during the following decades. We should be organizing the largest human migration in history, and instead we are wasting time on comfort solutions that give people the illusion to do something while accomplishing exactly nothing.

Flee tropical areas or flee to tropical areas? I can tell you that living in a tropical area (closer to the equator) i haven’t noticed any perceptible effects of climate change.

Yeah the subtropics are hotter then the tropics are during their summers. And I do expect these areas to suffer the worst.

What If We Create A Better World For Nothing?

https://solar-power-now.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/bette...

But this is in conflict with the dogmatic religion of "progress" and technological accomplishment and is a highly taboo point of view to take. Especially when there are techno capitalists in the room.

Soon, someone will beat you over the head wih arguments like "you're a hypocrite for using computer to make a post on HN" and that you should be grateful for your air conditioner (which I don't use) and that if you lived 70 years ago your head would've fallen off by now, etc etc...

You're optimistic. The denial you see today isn't going to wane over time. People's minds are being poisoned and once poisoned, they're essentially gone. The most optimistic thing you can hope for is our grandkids and great grandkids, who will suffer the full blunt of climate change, will wonder why we did so little to stave off what we knew was going to happen.

But I've also lost hope on that. After all I would have thought the rise of Nazism in Germany would have provided us a historical lesson. Less than 100 years later and that lesson appears to be lost on many people.

Is a “better” world a world where their lives are less comfortable than they are now?

Seems over the course of human history humans have firmly marched in the direction of making life more comfortable. You are going to have a hard time convincing humanity to go against their nature.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com