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Comment by codingbot3000 | Hacker News Reader

Impressive how actionable that report back in 1983 was. But unfortunately the political climate is probably harder to change than the real climate, otherwise there would have been more progress in the past 40 years.

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The political climate is mostly about what people want.

Dealing with this issue will require major changes in the economy (even now fossil fuel based), and national security/foreign policy (fossil fuel based now and for the foreseeable future).

Both of these no one has any plans yet which wouldn’t require major changes in the way people live and the way the US interacts with the world which would put them at a major disadvantage with everyone else, and take a hit in creature comforts, prestige, and power. At least based on the options currently available to us.

And this isn’t a problem caused just by the US. So even if the US did this, the rest of the world would keep on trucking and making the issue worse. Unless the US went to war or something? Which would definitely cause massive burning of fossil fuels (and nukes) which would definitely make everything worse, and kill a whole lot of people rather directly. And seems rather evil too.

Until the problem is causing real, unavoidable, unambiguous issues for everyone, of course it’s going to be denied. And even then….

If you’re ever tried to take the booze from an alcoholic, it’s obvious what’s going to happen. And we’re all drunk on cheap energy in the form of fossil fuels, and have been for a very, very long time.

Don’t look up!

We posted almost the same comment. I do disagree with one point. The US is the country with the most global power and is instrumental in driving global change so I really disagree that they do not hold a huge responsibility.

I mean, Germany is trying to lead by example, but their attempt is pathetic. Nobody is going to care what Germany does and they do not have the economic and political power to enforce global change. But the US does.

I am not saying the US can do it alone, but it has to show both initiative and willingness.

Not only that, but people see Germany as being fundamentally unserious about climate change when they retire nuclear and keep burning insane amounts of destructive brown coal. I don’t think the electricity mix is even significantly cleaner than the US’s

EDIT: confirmed, the US had 365grams of CO2 per kWh (805lbs per MWh) but Germany had 385g per kWh in 2022.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1290224/carbon-intensity...

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1247991/annual-power-sec...

People see Germany as a foolish naive nation which is currently hurting itself economically and making a clown of itself. It is having the opposite of the desired effect. Other countries will be more hesitant to transition to green technologies when they see Germany suffering.

Really? Which countries would those be? All the European countries that have far higher renewable use than Germany?

No one considers Germany a leader in renewables. It's just a straw man for the nuclear fanboys.

Germany sees itself as a leader in the green transition even if this is not factually correct.

Oh, well you don't have to worry about other countries being put off by Germany's decisions, because no one else does. Good news, eh!

It's not like Nord Stream 2s destruction was the single largest act of industrial sabotage in human history, alongside the single largest carbon emission in human history. Being complicit in one pipeline being bombed could undermine decades of progress in a single moment.

Good question, I just checked. The numbers I can find for 2022:

Renewables: US: 21.5% Germany: 44%

Nuclear: US: 18.2% Germany: 6%

Fossil: US: 60.2% Germany: 45.9%, 20.1% from lignite (brown coal)

So pretty clear win on the renewables for Germany. Adding Nuclear for "clean energy" it's still pretty ahead. However, Fossil in the US is mainly gas, which is cleaner than lignite. Hard to quantify.

Sources: US: https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=427&t=3 Germany: https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/germanys-energy-c...

It’s not actually that hard to quantify. Per kWh, the US got 365g of CO2 per kWh (804lb/MWh) in 2022 compared to 385g/kWh for Germany.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1247991/annual-power-sec...

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1290224/carbon-intensity...

That's just electricity generation, which is only a portion of total energy usage. Both countries use about 15% renewables overall. The exact number is hard to measure, complicated by importation and exportation of energy and other factors.

German electricity mix is ~50% renewable (https://energy-charts.info/charts/renewable_share/chart.htm?...).

US renewables + nuclear ist at ~40% (https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2023/03/us-electricity-energy...).

Also note the growth rate: German renewable electricity fraction went from 26% to 50% while the US went from 12% to 23% (since 2012). So they appear significantly more serious about climate change than the US.

Total CO2/capita/year is also significantly higher for the US (15 tons vs 9 tons, approx.)

Yeah, but total CO2/capita/year is like <4 for France.... That's where nuclear power really shines. Of course these calculations do not really capture all CO2 required for nuclear power.

Electricity mix is a fairly useless number on it's own. Especially for an industrial powerhouse like Germany. Renewable's share of total energy consumption in Germany is about 15%, and has been decreasing.

The number is the US is similar, and has been rising.

You need to be careful with these statistics because Germany is a (large) net importer of electricity. How are imports counted is not always obvious (nor should it be, Netherlands exports electricity to Germany, sometimes it's mostly solar powered, sometimes purely gas)

That certainly complicates the situation, as Germany imports and exports energy. But Germany is a net exporter, not importer, at least in 2022, but I believe it's so for most years.

https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/even-crisis-germany-...

Huge responsibility - sure.

Has to do anything - that statement is doing a lot of heavy lifting.

Ethically/morally? Probably.

But that isn’t how international (or national!) politics tends to work!

Practically, why/when should the most powerful nation in the world, with the worlds most powerful military (fossil fuel based, no less), worlds reserve currency (due to the world using it for fossil fuel purchases, and because of the stable US economic system which is currently based on fossil fuels), etc. undermine itself exactly?

If it’s the breadwinner of the family doing the heaviest drinking, but literally everyone is also drinking, it’s going to be even harder to take the booze from the alcoholic - because no one is going to actually try, because they’re all alcoholics.

Realistically, the US will ‘have to do something’ when the current situation becomes actually nonfunctional in some real way, or it becomes so patently obvious that it will shortly become so that a sufficient majority starts being willing to make sacrifices to start the change.

Or someone figures out a way to make “everyone rich” if we switch.

Here’s hoping!

This is a question of perceived cost and benefit. I do not actually think that the US would be undermining itself if it nudged the world's economy to transition to green technologies. I think it would protect itself and even benefit economically.

Not that I used the word "perceived" in my original comment.

The issue here is that ‘nudged’ doesn’t make the actual changes necessary.

‘Nudged’ isn’t transitioning anyone’s military off fossil fuels. Or international shipping. Or major capex outlays in things like home heating when existing (fossil fuel) options are cheaper and more effective, etc. Things that require double digit percent of GDP expenditures, which are often required.

Germany tried (guilt perhaps?) and made a dent - but far from solved the problem, and is still consuming massive amounts of fossil fuels and is now burdened with debt and very high energy bills.

They cut back from a case a day to half a case a day, and are clearly unhappy about it and far from sober.

What do you mean US is the country with the most global power? India and China are polluting more than the US Annual CO₂ emissions by world region shows that China and India are responsible for a majority of carbon emissions since the year 2000, while the US and European rates have dropped in the last 23 years. India and China need to be hugely responsible as they are the ones building new coal plants https://energyandcleanair.org/publication/china-permits-two-...

> Both of these no one has any plans yet which wouldn’t require major changes in the way people live

Eh... I mean, nearly every country in the EU has seen reducing greenhouse gas emissions for years (even _with_ replacement of some gas generation with higher-intensity coal generation due to the invasion of Ukraine), on the foot of building retrofitting, increased renewable generation, etc. The US and China have also been investing significantly in renewable generation (though, I believe, at least in the US's case, building retrofitting has yet to start on a large scale). US emissions are broadly declining and have been for a while, Chinese emissions have almost flatlined, though are still inching up. People are doing stuff.

> the way the US interacts with the world which would put them at a major disadvantage with everyone else

Huh? I would think that the US is actually in a rather good position here, certainly relative to Europe and probably to China. The US is very physically big, so lots of space for renewables, and is more self-sufficient on lower-carbon-intensity fossil fuel (ie gas, likely realistically essential as a transition fuel) than the others. It would also likely find lower-intensity agriculture easier to cope with, if it comes to that.

> And this isn’t a problem caused just by the US. So even if the US did this, the rest of the world would keep on trucking and making the issue worse.

China is if anything currently outpacing the US on renewable and other low-intensity (nuclear) generation capacity.

This feels like a comment written 30 years ago, back when no-one was doing anything much. Today, the big three are doing some stuff, with plans for more.

> Until the problem is causing real, unavoidable, unambiguous issues for everyone, of course it’s going to be denied.

The denial is interesting. In the developed world, it's only a significant factor in the US, Canada, and Australia, all of which have large fossil fuel industries, and in all of which it has been highly politicised. (Similar pattern in the developing world; the big denial cheerleader there being Indonesia). In most countries, it is fairly broadly accepted to be happening, and to be at least largely humanity's fault. Even in countries where denial is a significant political issue, it is generally on the decline (as you'd expect; the percentage of the electorate who'll die off anyway before we see really major impact is declining).

Ho man. To stop major, major climate impacts we long ago passed the point where reductions or caps would even make a dent.

To even have a hope of not seeing major disruptive climate change we would have had to be at the point of net-negative fossil carbon releases years ago. And we’re nowhere near that.

Those changes are something of course. and we’d be in a (marginally) worse situation without them. But they’re overall just minor impacts.

The changes required to actually address the issue have barely been contemplated, and will be massively disruptive.

I agree. Zero emissions is only the first step. It's like removing the foot from the gas pedal. But the car is still moving very fast and we need negative emissions to prevent crashing into a wall.

Unfortunately even zero emissions seems like a miracle at this point.

"Zero Emissions are just the first step". A lot of people's critique of environmentalism is that they are anti growth. Comments like this just seem to feed that skepticism

Perhaps, in about the same way that chemotherapy on a stage 4 cancer patient is anti-growth.

And the patient is still chain-smoking.

It seems as a society we have chosen palliative care; we would like to forgo the treatment and just be made as comfortable as possible before the damage is totally overwhelming and we reach organ failure and death

Do you know how much of a settlement patients get for experiencing Chemotherapy when their cancer diagnosis was false and they went through the harrowing experience because an expert misdiagnosed the source of their problem? High 6 figures. low 7 figures.

Again, the current stage of climate change we are in is analogous to stage 4 cancer.

Don't pretend climate change isn't real. It is already impacting humanity today.

What I'm arguing is that we need aggressive negative emissions. In case it's not obvious this means not only stop putting carbon in the atmosphere but also removing what's already there.

I'm all for growth as long as we don't deplete the Earth and don't cook ourselves to death.

Reaching net-negative, or even net-zero, won't be happening anytime soon, obviously, but it's far from true to think that no-one's doing anything.

> To stop major, major climate impacts

Yeah, no, that ship has sailed.

I never said no one was doing anything. I said no one is doing enough to make any significant difference in the outcome. Maybe it is enough to shift things around a couple years! That isn’t nothing.

But even if 100% of the population stopped driving cars and ordering on Amazon or whatever, that isn’t going to stop it either.

Well yeah because cars are at the most like 10% of global emissions.

And because of climate lag, we're still only experiencing the effect of emissions from a couple of decades ago. Plus there are climatic feedbacks to take into consideration which nobody really knows with certainty how these will react in the coming decades.

> The denial is interesting. In the developed world, it's only a significant factor in the US, Canada, and Australia

It depends on where the denial is hitting. E.g. plastic straw bans are made fun of, probably legitimately. Anything that is something an individual can do and feel good about is often not something that will be effective compared to the massive amount of pollution and waste being generated through the general uplift of people out of poverty.

In terms of the US: they're leading the way with Tesla on electrification of vehicles, which is a great, large-scale solution to a big source of pollution (or if not a solution, a key element in the larger solution). Canada and Australia I know less about.

Plastic straw bans are nothing much to do with global warming; they're a general hand wave-y "good for the environment" thing (and, like, they are, but not in a particularly impactful way).

> they're leading the way with Tesla on electrification of vehicles

... Eh? I'm not sure that's really particularly clear; Tesla is in global terms a fairly small part of the market, and the EU and China are both significantly outdoing the US on actual adoption of electric cars. That said, as above, the US is generally doing fairly well on emissions reduction, better than people often give it credit for (albeit partially accidentally due to cheap gas).

However, my point was that the US (and the other two) are unusual in that significant numbers of people there, with a significant political voice, believe that anthropogenic climate change is _not a thing_ (or in extreme cases that climate change period is not a thing). This is unusual.

> Plastic straw bans are nothing much to do with global warming

What I was saying was the "climate denialists", being a label applied by people who disagree with them, including on things like straws, is an extremely broad church, and not very useful for actually describing what people think.

> Tesla is in global terms a fairly small part of the market

Can you cite?

> . . . mostly about what people want.

Which is all marketing. Marketing is designed to influence and to make us want. We can't blame people because marketing to them works.

> If you’re ever tried to take the booze from an alcoholic, it’s obvious what’s going to happen

I don't think it is obvious what happens when you take booze away from an alcoholic. Are you aware that the absence of alcohol can kill them? Were you trying to kill them?

Often they’ll attack you while denying there is a problem.

Occasionally they’ll be okay with it. At least until the DT’s.

It’s usually not pretty either way.

And doing it too fast can kill them, yes.

> The political climate is mostly about what people want.

Man someone should tell all the oil companies that are actively running campaigns to push propaganda on folks to change political opinions.

Yes, it is "what people want". You're missing the line of "How did we get to the point of people wanting this".

But instead of asking that question, you're jumping to blaming the victims and not the system that allowed a few people with money to completely change the thoughts and behaviors of millions of people.

Now you're cooking with gas!

I’m pretty sure the people voting think it’s what they want - I’ve seen some get angry if you question it too.

The political climate is just an obfuscation. The electorate perceives the change to be too costly* and the climate risks to be too remote to justify this cost. The problem with reports such as these is that they always give you the big picture but do not directly relate it back to the individual. If people's home insurance suddenly jumped up 1000% due to recalculated natural disaster risks, that would suddenly make people rethink their positions.

* I am actually not convinced either way. Some people believe it is so expensive it will necessitate degrowth, while others think that so much economic change will almost certainly spur economic growth. Either way I think that people who push the degrowth narrative are further reinforcing the view that climate action is too costly. Nonetheless it could be that they are right.

> I am actually not convinced either way. Some people believe it is so expensive it will necessitate degrowth, while others think that so much economic change will almost certainly spur economic growth. Either way I think that people who push the degrowth narrative are further reinforcing the view that climate action is too costly. Nonetheless it could be that they are right.

Whatever your view on that is, it doesn't really matter because the costs if climate change goes unchecked are going to be catastrophically high - direct in terms of e.g. having to rebuild burned down/flooded/etc. areas, more electricity for AC, etc. or indirect such as having to accommodate mass migration from climate refugees.

The price of unchecked climate change is the destruction of civilisation. It might as well be infinity.

Or zero - it's sort of a weird thing to think about, but I think at this point it is the likely outcome.

>> The price of unchecked climate change is the destruction of civilisation.

> Or zero

According to insurance companies, it is already not-zero:

* https://www.munichre.com/en/risks/climate-change.html

* https://www.insuranceinstitute.ca/en/resources/insights-rese...

* https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/climate-change-is...

* https://vancouver.citynews.ca/2023/08/09/climate-change-cana...

And it's probably a fairly safe assumption that it's only going to get more expensive.

That is however one of the the two unknowns in the equation:

    Unknown one: how expensive is the green transition.
    Unknown two: how expensive is climate change.

The issue is further complicated by the fact that both of these costs are variable, depending on the individual, not easily predictable and time dependent. It is all very complicated, when you think about it. If you search the literature there are some people attempting to calculate such costs but the task is almost insurmountable.

I do not want to give the wrong impression. For whatever its worth, I am convinced that climate change will impact us people living today, negatively.

> The electorate perceives the change to be too costly […] I am actually not convinced either way.

The insurance companies are convinced:

* https://www.munichre.com/en/risks/climate-change.html

* https://www.insuranceinstitute.ca/en/resources/insights-rese...

* https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/climate-change-is...

* https://vancouver.citynews.ca/2023/08/09/climate-change-cana...

They regularly have to pay out for what happens, and they're not happy about the direction things are going and are passing the cost along. Just ask anyone living in Florida:

* https://www.newsweek.com/florida-insurance-crisis-explained-...

* https://www.pnj.com/story/money/2023/07/12/florida-insurance...

> If people's home insurance suddenly jumped up 1000% due to recalculated natural disaster risks, that would suddenly make people rethink their positions.

Insurance costs what it does due to the risk of paying out. Changing risks makes the price of the insurance change as well. If insurance companies aren't changing their prices, then the risk isn't changing either.

By asking to inflate the cost of insurance artificially, you're really only pointing out that natural disasters have not yet increased enough to notice.

> The political climate is just an obfuscation. The electorate perceives the change to be too costly* and the climate risks to be too remote to justify this cost

This is true but it’s really important to remember that’s not some historical accident but the result of decades of anti-science messaging and political campaigning by the fossil fuel industry after their internal scientists confirmed the problem was significant. In the absence of that huge amount of distortion most people would have an accurate understanding of the risks. We should remember those companies in the same light as the tobacco companies, Purdue Pharmaceuticals, etc.

Unfortunately as we can see even in a relatively educated community like HN there are a lot of people willing to parrot that propaganda because the alternative is not just making lifestyle changes but now also having to admit that they have been repeating falsehoods for a long time.

And that anti-climate-change narrative changed to blaming indviduals for climate change when they couldn't deny it any longer: the slogan “carbon footprint” is a British Petroleum invention.

Of course now people use that propaganda line and say that the anti-science crowd are the only mind-programmed group in this debate.

The only winning move (in the blame/distraction game) is not to play (the blame/distraction game).

I don't care who's fault it is. Let's fix it.

In order to fix something you need to know who holds the levers of power. Pretty elementary stuff.

We all do if we all agree that we do.

That's nonsense. We can all believe that doing the usual consumer nonsense like recycling will make a big enough difference, but believing is not sufficient.

Well, you don't agree. But when you change your mind you are welcome.

Thanks in advance.

I meant you are welcome to join everyone else, not as in you should be thanking me. Sorry if that came across as patronizing, it wasn't meant to be.

I don't deny the decades long anti-climate change lobbying and propaganda.

However, being honest with myself, if you asked me right now about my willingness to incur a cost to fund the green transition, I would be hesitant, because I cannot realistically make a cost/benefit analysis. Would I be willing to give up international travel? Would I be willing to eat almost no meat? Would I be willing to pay $10k extra to buy an EV? I don't know. I don't know what that will achieve. I don't know what happens if I don't and what happens if I do. I know neither my individual climate risk, nor how much my contribution would count if I chose to do my part. I am only living one life, so it is pretty hard for me to make life changing decisions without a good cost/benefit analysis.

Luckily, I am by nature quite anti-materialistic and not infected by the consumerist bug either, so my actual carbon footprint is still way below average.

What does this even matter? Seriously. Consumers aren't the architects of consumer capitalism. They aren't the ones who decided that economic growth must continue forever, in part by the middle class “consumers” who have to spend most of their money on commodities that ideally last so short that they will eventually have to buy the same thing again. Imagine if most people could buy all their appliances and get their needs met within a few years by things that are of good quality (which means more second-hand resale). Imagine if society was built for mass transit instead of (especially in America) urban sprawl, which would mean that far fewer families would need 1–2 cars. (And the US road network was designed top-down: you don't build a car-dependent society based on consumer actions.)

But that would be bad for the economy: less money in circulation, less growth.

If consumers (as citizens) got mad because “people's home insurance suddenly jumped up 1000%“. Then they would do protests... so what? Protests can change things but it's a very low form of power.

This matters because consumers are the ones that vote.

Sure, we could tax Co2 right now, but the main problem is that people don't want to sacrifice their vacation travel or pay a premium for non-regional goods/personal travel/energy, just to "save the climate".

This applies even more strongly to older voters.

If you implemented actually effective Co2 mitigation policies (i.e. policies aiming to reduce Co2/capita/year to under 4 tons within a decade) in pretty much ANY western industrialized democracy, you would get thrown out of office even before your term was over.

PS: This is not my position-- I believe that drastic action is very urgently required, but I don't think it is some "corporate interests" or "lobbyism conspiracy" that prevents it-- simply democracy in action.

> This matters because consumers are the ones that vote.

Show me evidence that this matters in the slightest.

The policy preferences of 90% of Americans are irrelevant, i.e have no correlation with implemented policy.[1][2]

Sure. Let's say that every green-eyed person gets to vote on what everyone has to eat: a pear or an apple. To the naive onlooker it looks like the green-eyed people have the ultimate power. But they neglect to notice that the two choices are filtered down from thousands of options by the brown-eyed people.

> PS: This is not my position-- I believe that drastic action is very urgently required, but I don't think it is some "corporate interests" or "lobbyism conspiracy" that prevents it-- simply democracy in action.

Of course. It's just a coincidence that implemented policy tracks better with “corporate interests”—dismissive quotation marks or not—than with the policy preferences of citizens.

[1] Media discussion: https://www.vox.com/2014/4/18/5624310/martin-gilens-testing-...

[2] Paper: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-poli...

> Show me evidence that this matters in the slightest.

Say Biden actually took drastic steps-- complete ICE vehicle ban within 2030, extensive green electricity investments/grid improvements, high taxes on jet fuel, etc.

That might get you below 5 tons Co2/capita/year within 2030 or so, which is still insufficient globally...

Do you honestly believe Democrats would win the next election after doing something like that?

I asked for evidence that what consumers (I mean citizens) vote for matter in practice. Not rhetorical honestly questions.

It's telling that this is all hypotheticals. This particular duopoly is not exactly leading by example on climate change. And if the Biden platform took these supposedly drastic steps then the Democrats might lose badly to the Republicans among the donors which is what actually keeps these parties alive (a party can't pay the bills with votes).

So far I have one study about the actual policy outcomes compared to policy preferences. You have a hypothetical.

To be fair, there were other things on the agenda as well. The time was the height of the cold war, and 1983 was the year of the Stanislav Petrov incident that could potentially have started nuclear war. (Not to mention dealing with the Iran-Iraq war and working to reduce emissions CFC gasses to protect the Ozone layer).

It is great that the world is now in a position to make serious progress on the green energy transition.

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