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Comment by jimmar | Hacker News Reader

I'm convinced that global warming is a threat. But I'd rather watch the world burn than listen to people who fly around in private jets or own mega mansions tell a regular person like me what steps I need to take to cut my carbon emissions. It may be irrational, but I just don't care.

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Worse is hearing rich first world people imply that we can’t let the billions of poor in Asia or Africa have what we have. “Yeah we know we colonized you and all, but can you stay poor to save the world?”

Of course this won’t happen. Their answer will be “fuck you.”

There is only one conceivable way to stop this: we must have sources of energy that don’t emit carbon that are objectively cheaper and more practical than those that do. Then we must make them abundant and frictionless to adopt. They have to be the easy path, not burning fossil fuels.

If we can’t do that we need to prepare for the effects of 800ppm or more CO2 concentrations. India and Africa are about to do what China did and if it’s powered by coal that’s where we are going.

Those are the two options. Anything else is a fantasy.

Individual actions of sacrifice never solve these things anyway.

We'll stop burning fossil fuels when it's good for us personally. Whether by cheap clean new tech or taxes/regulations.

I don't know if Kathryn Cawdrey has a private jet or not, but even if she does I'd still welcome any work she does that helps the world.

Oh, that sounds like a coded critique of Al Gore, amiright?

You know, the guy that was warning us all and was mocked by people like you as being crazy. Now that there's irrefutable evidence he was right it's down to ad hominem attacks, because that's all you've got.

How very snowflakey of you.

Well since my kids will die with that attitude, I have to say you are a horrible person.

I promise that my carbon footprint is less than the virtue signalers in the media talking about climate action. I walk to work. I don’t air condition my home. I paid to have my home made energy efficient. But because I’m honest about my attitudes, I’m “a horrible person.”

They and everyone else will die no matter what we do. The whole personal responsibility thing is complete horseshit. Even if everyone made a real effort to "do the right thing", cutting down on meat and getting rid of cars if possible etc, we'd still be completely fucked.

And just to be clear, this is a fictional scenario, it will not happen. The only thing that might make a real difference is if everyone on the planet gets together and collectively make huge changes to modern society. Obviously this also won't happen but I'd stand behind it if it did.

Go right ahead and outlaw beef, I love it but I can live without it if I have to. Go ahead and tax the biggest emitters, we'll have to pay more for things but I can live with that. Go ahead and do anything that can help improve our situation on a national or international scale and I'll support it.

But as long as we can buy beef in the store with no limits, buy cars with unnecessarily large combustion engines, fly around the world at our whim - people will. And it's not just these few popularized things we need to change. Everything needs to change. Where we produce things, how we produce them, the materials we produce them from. It's an enormous problem that I honestly don't expect us to be able to solve.

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