Hacker News Reader

Comment by atribecalledqst | Hacker News Reader

Are any HNers involved in environmental orgs?

There are a bunch active in my area, but the most organized seems to be Citizens Climate Lobby. (my metric for 'most organized' is that 'they actually reached out to me personally, as in a human emailed me when I registered') CCL's main platform is advocating for a carbon tax and their main activity is arranging meetings with Congresspeople (both Ds and Rs) to drum up support. It seems like a good organization, if a bit on the moderate side.

I haven't actually joined up with CCL or anybody else yet, so please don't view this as a stealth attempt at advertising haha. Just looking at what's out there and trying to overcome anxiety. I can find a million reasons to do nothing...

View on HN

I don't know about those orgs but as someone who has attended some rallies and plan to attend more, I'll tell you this, the minute you do something to help improve the situation, the better you will feel.

Whether it's planting trees, raising awareness, install ting your own solar, it will all make you feel better.

Currently I'm rebuilding a roof on my property, hopefully out of recycled lumber and plan to put a decent sized solar array on top.

I find pretty much all politically active environmentalists to be economically and sociologically illiterate. Proposals range from, "let's turn off the economy", to "let's reduce the standard of living" or "let's just increase the cost of living 10x as much". That is not to say that the economists are any better, because they are often sociologically and environmentally illiterate.

It seems that to be politically active you have to turn off part of your brain and accept whatever ideological bullshit your chosen tribe pushes fervently as their doctrine.

I do not think you can actually achieve much politically at this point in time, without angering and alienating a lot of the electorate. The environmentalists say, "fuck them, we will force them with laws" and the economists will say, "fuck the poor, we will create a pay to play system so that the rich can continue with their lifestyle and the poor will be priced out of it".

I think democracy only works because it averages over all these very different groups to get a solution that satisfies nobody but is somehow pointing in the right direction.

> without angering and alienating a lot of the electorate

This just means that this part of the electorate hasn't yet grasped how bad climate change is. The question is not "how do we find more moderate solutions", but really "how do we get those people to see that we are going towards wars, poverty and famine globally".

All that in a context where fossil energies are going down and we don't have solutions to replace them. So the world will become much more complicated because of climate change, and on top of that a lot more complicated because we will have less and less energy to face it.

Whoever is not alarmist, at this point, hasn't really grasped how bad the situation is (or they believe that their country will be able to survive alone, with big walls and a big army, I don't know).

A lot of the outrage is cultivated by right wing paid-for by billionaires media outlets that post extremely neoliberal to downright neofeudal takes, alongside the ragebait anti-woke stuff. The Daily Wire is probably one of the best examples. In Germany, the backlash against climate protests has been driven by an outlet - NIUS - that is copying them word for word, down to their video editing style.

when people are struggling to pay rent and afford food, telling them that they need to decrease their living standards because they will be poorer in some indeterminate amount of time, is not very convincing.

> when people are struggling to pay rent and afford food

Those ones don't have to change that much, we can start with those who can afford taking the plane to go on holiday and eating meat.

I guess those who struggle and can use a bike instead of a car already do (because the bike is cheaper).

So that's not really an excuse, IMO.

> in some indeterminate amount of time, is not very convincing.

Well it's getting clearer everyday that it's not so indeterminate (it will be really bad in our lifetime), and we're not talking about being poorer. Depending on where you live, you may just have to migrate, and see what it means when nobody wants you in their country ("you should just go fix the problem where you come from and leave us alone").

> and the economists will say, "fuck the poor, we will create a pay to play system so that the rich can continue with their lifestyle and the poor will be priced out of it".

This approach has practical limits though. At some point you can't realistically get people to work for you, or create a pseudo-insulated environment that's actually failing. On one hand side that's most still far away, on the other... see the SF and people complaining about the homelessness problem.

I don't know, if your working definition of democracy involves the rich making as many compromises as the median income person in a developed country or even someone in the global south, democracy is broken.

Did you research the Citizens Climate Lobby before replying to the comment about it? It is not at all like your characterizations.

> I do not think you can actually achieve much politically at this point in time, without angering and alienating a lot of the electorate.

Maybe if the self righteous pragmatists like yourself had spent as much energy reminding the electorate that, if we don’t solve this problem then our standard of living will be forced even lower whether we like it or not as you do attacking the only people trying to do something about the problem we’d actually be able to make some headway.

> I think democracy only works because it averages over all these very different groups to get a solution that satisfies nobody but is somehow pointing in the right direction.

Then you can only come to the conclusion that democracy has failed. Climate change has been a known problem for 40 years now and all that democracy has achieved is complete impotence. It’s not pointing in the right direction at all, it’s stuck to the status quo of the careening towards the edge of the cliff.

Any economist worth their salt will advocate for putting a price on carbon emissions (like cap and trade), and letting the market work it out.

If you’re concerned about regressive impacts (e.g. the price of gas increasing), you add a tax and pay it out as subsidies to the poor.

It’s not hard or complicated, there’s just no political will, so instead we end up with super inefficient subsidies for specific industries and technologies that might or might not allow us to hit the emissions goals we need to avoid cooking ourselves.

> It’s not hard or complicated, there’s just no political will

Or in other words: "it's not hard or complicated, except for the part where it's both hard and complicated".

The coalition in Germany contractually agreed to a CO2 dividend and it is being delayed as much as possible.

Citizens' Climate Lobby is a bipartisan group that includes former US congressional representatives. They advocate for a tariff on fossil fuels at point-of-entry into the US of $15 per ton of co2. The fees would be used to boost domestic clean energy production, making the US cleaner, more resilient, and more self-reliant while being revenue-neutral.

It took me about 60 seconds to do that research.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com