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Comment by jokoon | Hacker News Reader

It's odd how everytime somebody mentions slashing oil production by 50 or 75%, people are immediately up in arms. Same for red meat or cheap air travel.

Western rich countries have too many really spoiled consumers.

It's weird to say, but we should crash the economy if it can slow down climate change. I mean there are plenty people in other parts of the world who don't have such a high standard of living, and it's not that big of a problem.

And yes, I don't believe it's only rich people, it's also middle class people who generate a lot of emissions, and I'm a leftist.

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I'm going to guess you've never spent much time outside the bubble of the first world.

After living extensively overseas in Latin America & South-east Asia and seeing how its part of everyday life for most people in the rest of the world to openly burn trash, plastics, car tyres.. litter everywhere, cutting the cat converters off their trucks, dumping construction waste straight into rivers.. it's been eye opening. Nobody in Asia is dropping plastic bags or single use plastic straws unless its a cafe for hippy white tourists.

Meanwhile, educated people in western countries are incredibly eco-conscious, have excellent modern waste management, have amazing huge national parks and conservation areas, clean waterways or have nets to prevent plastics entering the oceans.. are 'banning' gasoline cars by 2030.. and the air quality! Amazing.

The truth is 85% of the worlds population just doesn't care enough at all about the environment and no amount of western policy making will fix the problem. And only an ignorant college educated person from the first would assume that their 'solutions' will be exported globally. sorry to break it to you but the rest of the world doesn’t have any interest in that.

The middle/upper class whites you seem to deride so much are actually participating in one of the most eco friendly societies on earth

Personal responsibility for environmental issues is a fiction peddled by the biggest polluters.

The moment you think an individual is going to make any sort of a difference through minor changes in behavior, you have already lost the plot.

"But it's you reduce the economy, think of what it will do to the poor!" it's incredible how ritch people will happily push the poor in front of them when it's beneficial.

The fact is "emmisions per capita" is heavily correlated with "gdp per capita": https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co2-emissions-vs-gdp

The "educated people in western countries [who] are incredibly eco-conscious" emit way more co2 than "85% of the worlds population".

What does “per capita” emissions have to do with the physics of climate change?

It's related to the comment I was replying to:

> Meanwhile, educated people in western countries are incredibly eco-conscious, have excellent modern waste management, have amazing huge national parks and conservation areas, clean waterways or have nets to prevent plastics entering the oceans.. are 'banning' gasoline cars by 2030.. and the air quality! Amazing.

The commenter appears to say that people in western countries are already doing a good job on climate. Even though those people emit way more than people from other countries.

The Chinese emit more per capita than the Europeans.

Yes, if you count the emissions for the stuff manufactured in China for (not only) european customers.

If you look at consumption-based emissions[0], China is at 7 t per capita, which is 8 t less than the US, 2 t less than Germany and about par with Denmark, Slovakia, and England.

0: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/consumption-co2-per-capit...

This is per capita data again, which makes the argument circular. In absolute terms, China emits more than twice as much CO2 as the next producer, and only a small fraction of that is exported.

Per capita data makes sense. CO2 emissions don’t change if we cut giants countries into many smaller ones. If China was 25 different countries you wouldn’t be pointing the finger to them.

Why shouldn’t the highest emitters not be the ones to reduce most?

Because we're not having a moral argument but rather a practical one. The fact is that China emits much more CO2 than other countries, even after you account for exports (ie, CO2 emissions "offshored" from Europe and North America). Moreover: while emissions in the west are falling, the are rising in China and India and the developing world, as they must, because they track rising standards of living.

I don't understand the "25 smaller Chinas" argument. China sets statewide emissions policies. That's a reason we pay attention to country borders here, rather than considering an undifferentiated mass of humanity as a map scatterplot.

Ultimately, the reason to point out the gap between China and Europe or North America is that if you concentrate climate mitigation strategies on the west, you won't actually do much to solve the crisis. Fair's got nothing to do with it.

There's no reason to argue about this. Everyone agrees that

1) China needs to cut more emissions in total.

2) The US/West needs to cut more emissions per capita.

Only in the most abstract sense, because the real debate is over prioritization; if you suggest that equal effort be put into both of these projects, reasonable people will argue that you're misallocating effort.

Different people have to do (1) and (2), so it's not really a prioritization question.

But if both groups argue that the other group has to do their part first, or they won't act, then nothing will get done.

I think the world would benefit if western nations had a carbon levy on imports as well as a carbon tax on domestically-produced goods. Or, with the added costs, market forces would encourage people to find more efficient lifestyles. If someone wanted a more environmentally-taxing lifestyle, they could play the fair cost.

The calculations are infeasible expensive for most goods, you'd almost shut down trade.

Either that or its a flat rate per good which just becomes yet another import tax.

That import tax is worthwhile if it reduces emissions in the right areas. We should probably be eating less beef shipped out of Austrlia and producing less plastic packaging.

Some trade does need to be shut down, as the externalities aren't being properly handled at the moment.

According to this next page, in 2021 the "EU27" emitted 2774.93 megatons of co2 whereas China emitted 12466.32. Also, European emissions are falling whereas China's is rising.

https://edgar.jrc.ec.europa.eu/report_2022#emissions_table

Per capita, EU27 is at 6.25 whereas China is at 8.73 whereas the US is at 14.24:

https://edgar.jrc.ec.europa.eu/report_2022?vis=pop#emissions...

Nothing.

But it doesn’t matter. What matters is that nobody is prepared to willingly let go of their conveniences. They may say they are but they haven’t seen the real cost to their lifestyle.

The transition is politically impossible. You’ll see some kind of populist revolution happen in Germany, which on paper seems to be the leader in green policies.

Why is the physics of climate the sole criterion for discussing an economic issue?

Thank you. Climate change is a diplomacy issue, nothing the west is going to do in the next 50 years will make a difference with what’s going on in china and elsewhere.

So either you are a realist about this problem, and you admit that either it’s war with many countries to solve this issue, or it won’t be solved (because they won’t stop economic growth for carbon emissions). Possible alternatives are technology.

But guilt tripping the west and stopping people eating steak will. Not. Make. A. Difference.

USA emits almost 8 times more C02 when compared to India per capita. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita

In that sense India would need to be 10B+ people to poluate as much as US / west does.

Again these studies don't take into account things like burning, air pollution, waterways pollution, nor trees per capita in India vs North America.

If you've got enough trees per person to offset their carbon use, then it doesn't matter how much co2 they emit.

Except per capita co2 emissions AND total emissions have been falling in the USA.

China now emits more co2 than europe and USA combined. And this is NOT because of exports to the west, those are now also falling yet co2 emissions are still climbing.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-co2-emissions-per-...

This is what I mean. Just these two countries like india and china are emitting so much CO2, that any reduction in emissions by the west by not eating steak just won't matter. Either you stop china doing this (good luck!) or think of another solution.

You can wax poetic all you want about anecdotal values differences between the first and third worlds, but speaking in terms of actual practical impact: what you are saying is simply not true. Greenhouse gas emissions scale super-linearly with income: https://www.iea.org/commentaries/the-world-s-top-1-of-emitte...

There are dozens and dozens of studies all reaching this same conclusion, if the International Energy Agency isn't good enough for you: https://www.google.com/search?q=greenhouse+gas+emissions+by+...

OP's point was that the global rich (most US citizens included) have lifestyles and patterns of consumption which produce an outsized amount of greenhouse gasses, and any attempts to alter those behaviors are routinely met with anger and political backlash

Yeah and my point is that these studies look at energy consumption they don’t take into account things like burning yard waste or plastic garbage into their co2 consumption which is often done daily to keep mosquitoes away and from laziness. Nor does it look at air pollution nor waterways pollution. So it’s a useless metric that doesn’t even have accurate data or tell the real story.

What will we do when these societies who give no fucks about the environment (compared to the west) get wealthier?

White guilt is not going to save anyone

I don't think proposing cutting CO2 emissions is "white guilt" -- I probably missed something, I'm not sure how race entered it. (and I don't mean that snarky! I probably missed it :) )

I'm also unsure if "White guilt" is a good descriptor for the West enforcing emission cuts by force on not-West: that sounds like aggression as opposed to an expression of guilt.

The fun/exciting part: a total mind-bender on this is not-West countries are installing renewables at scale without incentives or "[any color] guilt", solar is cheaper than any other supply you can think of.

Then we can start talking about "solar isn't enough because unreliable", true.

Then maybe we start talking about how it's racist to prevent people from having unreliable electricity, true, but rest-assured, the idea of enforcing cuts on other nations isn't on the table.

To avoid the tarpit of moralizing, I try to stay focused on saying "they're installing solar panels and it's cool if they gotta do coal/tires/etc. while we 10x batteries again like we did last decade" --- this also has the benefit of matching the uncoordinated reality as it stands

This doesn't take into account that countries like the US have already cut emissions and emissions have been declining for years. Meanwhile, China has much greater total emissions than the US does and emissions in China are increasing per year continuously as they are in India. Total global emissions are what matters for the climate. Although reducing waste and being more efficient are always helpful, fixating on lifestyles of people like US citizens is not particularly useful.

Source? (AFAIK it does, and it'd be very unexpected for it not to. The rest of the comment is unclear to me. I may be reading it as a strawman instead of a steelman -- would a reply like: 'just because our derivative is negative doesn't mean on a per-capita basis we're less' be accurate? I'm sure I missed something)

Source for what? That emissions are declining in the US?

You can find some details here https://www.epa.gov/climate-indicators/climate-change-indica... I am surprised you didn't know this already.

Here is China https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EN.ATM.CO2E.KT?location...

It doesn't take into account trends that already exist. In the next decade small reductions to emissions in US transportation per year will be meaningless. Also reducing agricultural emissions which are only 10% of CO2 emissions in the US will have little affect on total global emissions. I'm not sure why there is so much hand waving about the CO2 emissions of China alone.

> Source for what?

"This doesn't take into account that countries like the US have already cut emissions and emissions have been declining for years."

> You can find some details here https://www.epa.gov/climate-indicators/climate-change-indica... I am surprised you didn't know this already.

This being US / 1st world emissions are decreasing? Thank you for looking that up etc., I appreciate it -- I did know that, and seriously, thank you for taking the time to source it: I'm only saying I knew so you can rest assured at least one other person is up on data. These are strange times and it's hard to get a read on if facts are common knowledge or not, and our estimate of that can cause intense feelings.

Putting my comment more simply and extending it so it doesn't feel like I'm passive-aggressively quoting my comment back at you:

I'm curious why we think the per-capita emissions data "isn't accounting for it decreasing"

What I am taking issue with is the assertion from the other poster that "Greenhouse gasses scales super-linearly with income" which links to a page. That page looks at one year, 2021, and makes assertions that don't account for annual trends like the decrease in emissions the US has been experiencing for years and will continue to experience. The US _IS_ reducing emissions. It also doesn't take into account the large expected increases over just say the next decade in countries like China.

Total global emissions are an important factor to consider for the global climate and focusing only on reducing emissions of the US will be meaningless because total global emissions will still continue to go up.

edit: thanks for clarifying btw and here is trends in total global emissions found on the page https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/global-greenhouse-gas-emiss...

Your link has the Chinese top decile with higher emissions than the EU top decile, so your "what you are saying is simply not true" seems incorrect, their central point of value differences and higher pollution in third world countries seems to stand up well.

I think it's actually more complicated, because a lot of the construction, etc. is caused by demand from the western countries. Also, western countries consume proportionately more flights, cars, electronics... pretty much all the actual major industry-sized consumption is disproportionately consumed by the west, even if a portion of individual westerners (certainly not all) are eco-conscious, no-waste, plastic-free vegans.

the point is that if it's that vs. the oceans consuming continents, it's probably not that big a deal BY COMPARISON. stop virtue signaling.

What's incredible is missing the fact that CO2 emissions and most kinds of pollution in general are verifiably multiples higher per individual in the West compared to elsewhere. We're just better at keeping them out of sight and apparently out of mind, too.

> there are plenty people in other parts of the world who don't have such a high standard of living, and it's not that big of a problem.

Go live like that for 6 months and get back to us: food insecurity, inadequate healthcare, and few civil services or safety net.

Those other countries are not net zero pollution either. You wanna crash the economy? How then will we develop the innovations to fix this problem?

Can't believe this comment is top rated.

I upvoted you, but IMO:

- private cars and their usage are too cheap

- air travel is too cheap

- producing garbage is to cheap

- politics is top centered around providing infinte fuel for "growth" instead of distributing resources rationally

Yes, this is a political opinion.

The stunt many people do is pretending that climate denialism and politics centered on fueling growth are not a political opinion but "rational" and sustainable.

Agreed, both on the whole and in the details. But if I'm forced into the "either/or" mindset of the OP of a hypothetical choice to shrink GDP by 1% by stopping all vacation car travel or deficit spend 1% GDP as a "Manhattan Project" to get lab grown beef commercially viable, I'm voting for the latter.

The latter sounds like fantasy though, and it's not the lab-grown meat per se I'm talking about.

Also I wasn't talking about car usage exclusively during vacations, I was explicitly talking about private car usage.

People literally get governmental subsidies for building homes in the suburbs, then commute by car and pollute the planet in order to avoid car traffic.

Anyone who fails to see the absurdity of this has drank too much Kool-aid for my taste.

If your issue is global warming you should be campaigning for electric cars rather than against private cars. But I suspect you actually dislike cars in and of themselves, even if they could be grown on trees and powered by banana skins.

I like driving cars or being a passenger in them. I also acknowledge their importance for society as a whole.

But since you ask:

Cars are not a subject but an object, a tool to me.

"Suspecting" that I "dislike" this tool does not sound like a coherent argument to me.

Yes, I hate cars when being outside them, because they are a major obstruction and source of pollution, noise and overshooting environmental damage.

I hate their artifical abundance, for which I am forced to pay.

I'm not sure what you are talking about with the hypothetical banana car and why you care about my feelings.

Seems like an ideological argument to me.

Do EVs grow on trees?

I agree that global warming is only the tip of the iceberg of the damage we do.

And yes, EVs are marginally better for the nearby environment compared to CEVs. They don't solve the larger problem though and they still impose huge resource costs.

Subsidizing EVs (again) is putting more fuel into the fire.

In my country, there are and were already so many subsidies and benefits for buying a new car, it isn't funny anymore.

It's always being justified by the newer cars ostensively being better for the environment.

Even before there were affordable EVs, the government paid people bonuses to buy a new car and trash/sell the previous one with this justification.

As a person with a license, but without a car: this is disgusting and reminds me of 1984. One of the many subsidies for buying cars in Germany was called "Umweltprämie" (environment bonus). As early as 2009.

It was basically a tax-funded bonus for trashing and buying cars to fund the industry.

That being said, cars of course are only one particularly obvious example of insane policies.

Europe doesn't have food insecurity. Health is pretty good and there's a safety net. Even China scores pretty well on those points. Yet their per capita emissions are much lower than the US.

Europe has tons of cars and air travel that is cheaper and more plentiful than that of US.

Europe may have many cars, but they are smaller and drive shorter distance.

Perhaps air travel is cheaper. But wages are lower meaning people need to work more hours before they can take a flight.

Yes, that was golden when US mandated larger, more powerful cars with the cover up of green regulations. Do not disagree here.

What? Europe has tons of mass transit and walkable cities.

Despite this, they also have a huge length of high speed highways with cars going back and forth. The topology is not much different than in the US. Difference is there, but it's quantitative and will not in any way prevent climate change, especially as it also relies on infrastructure that US does not have and will take a huge carbon footprint to build.

They also have huge lengths of high speed and regional rail. The difference shows up in the energy per capita numbers.

Nothing prevents climate change unless we get more intentional and scaled investments in renewable energy and circular green economies.

That rail would be nice to have, but it will not yield a decisive difference on the global warming time frame (~20 years).

You could go the Soviet route (had 30 cars per 1,000 people, a lot of train, bus and subway), but do you really want that? Of course, you would want to improve it because Soviet economy was hugely wasteful despite all this. Plus, all the apartment blocks are not going to build themselves, and certainly not without carbon emissions.

This is just a misleading thought framework of discounting any single item as a “decisive” silver bullet. Of course none of them are being talked about as being a silver bullet.

We need a 1000s of bullets fired at changes to avoid even higher costs of climate change on our current path.

There is much poverty in China outside of major cities and near nonexistent safety net in all regards. This is a country where a sizable chunk of population lives on less than 6 USD per day (not enough to bribe the doctor to get "universal" healthcare in case of something serious) and where the gov has recently made posting videos of poor people on social media punishable as "against national interest".

You also should be aware about the amount of coal power plants it runs and keeps building (https://www.wsj.com/articles/china-takes-the-brakes-off-coal...).

It is a good time to ask ourselves which country contributes the most to emissions and crucial to avoid any mental gymnastics while at that. But unfortunately yes if you dramatically reduce coal usage in China people will die.

In China, the life expectancy already exceeded that of the US. They don't need to spend more on healthcare!

First, why are you bringing up US? Many would agree that US healthcare is shit.

But I suspect it's still probably better than China where many people are simply not counted in stats (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2990197/ etc). These are also people with least or no access to healthcare and education btw, so we can only guess if life expectancy on paper is better than in reality...

> Can't believe this comment is top rated.

Same. I think it's just helplessness, they feel something bad is coming, and they can't do anything about it, so they try to propose radical solutions that will not fix anything but just make things worse.

More like they don't understand the true cost of their "solution"

Before we can talk about food insecurity, (we have that too in the USA), we need to talk about the insane amount of food waste here. You can downshift the economy and IMPROVE food security if we take that as a priority. It's all about political capital.

It also completely ignores the fact that developing countries move exactly to what the Western world does.

Why do so many people eat insects or are pure vegetarian in India? Because many are simply too poor to afford meat. You know what's one of the first major things Indians change when their wealth increases? Adding more meat to their diets.

Look around. Everyone on earth wants to maintain a standard of living. Governments are toppled over this.

And yet it is the largest economy that is objectively slowing its share of contributed emissions. And it’s the largest exhibit that is helping to drive the innovation needed to solve this problem, alongside incredible people from all parts of the globe.

I wish we weren’t dealing with this. I wish there had been a better, more cost effective way to grow. Maybe if you or I hadn’t been born, our emissions might lower enough to make the difference.

But I’d suggest now isn’t the time to count scores. We need to stay focused and continue the work. Despite our flaws we are all worth saving.

I'm not disagreeing with your conclusions...

>And yet it is the largest economy that is objectively slowing its share of contributed emissions.

These largest economy's also contributed the most over their history, which seems reasonable grounds for contributing more and helping other economies come up to that standard of living w/o making the same contributions

As a US citizen, I’d be happy for us to stand up (ie fully fund) a “solarcorps,” where we send folks to help build out renewable infra in developing countries subsidized or free. Your country provides the local labor who will be paid fair wages, we’ll provide hardware and know how. Conversely, if that help is not accepted and they keep building coal plants (or similar “business as usual”), punitive economic policies are enacted. The carrot is welcome, but sometimes the stick is needed. People are tricky, but physical systems don’t give AF.

Simultaneously, the developed world should partner with China to stoke uptake of EVs globally, and rapidly destroy the market for fossil powered mobility (although there is strong evidence we're rapidly approaching a tipping point wrt EV sales [1]).

TLDR War time effort without the war.

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-08-28/electric-... | https://archive.ph/jakiU

I'm unsure to what extent the people of today should be paying for the benefits their ancestors reaped. Yes, some wealth trickled down the generations buts its definitely not a 1 to 1 ratio.

> largest economy's also contributed the most over their history

While exporting most of that technological development and scientific research to every country too...

Or maybe someone can believe China can make 7nm chips at a fraction of the historical emissions of other countries at 5nm, with no knowledge transfer

You realize that would cause countless death _today_ if you don’t replace the oil with something else? People will starve, become homeless, and maybe anarchy will reign. Not just in the developed world but globally.

Sounds like what will actually happen _tomorrow_ if we don't act radically _now_.

Nothing of that sort will happen "tomorrow", and even if true it would not justify genocidal policies today.

The true genocidal policy is to continue dumping CO2 into the atmosphere in increasing amounts. Personally, I feel it is more honest for us to deal with the outcomes of what "we" are doing now, rather than just leaving it for our children to deal with.

The future is fundamentally uncertain. Climate change will be addressed but not by corporate welfare programs like net zero nor by impoverishing rich populations.

The idea that the simplistic socio-economic models/pathways are in any way right or predictive was just a fantasy.

> The future is fundamentally uncertain. Climate change will be addressed but not by corporate welfare programs like net zero nor by impoverishing rich populations.

This is very wishful thinking. It's like a doc telling you your body is collapsing due to lung cancer, you need to stop smoking, and you answering "the future is fundemantally uncertain, I'm sure something will come along and figure out this cancer for me, got a light?"

If you take the physics as given, all we can say that is if nothing different from the model is happening, things will be bad. The nature of "different" is, however, extremely broad.

Wishful thinking is that expensive sacrifices for the far future will be politically feasible while at the same time people need to already mitigate the effects of climate change. There need to be way better policy and technological packages than now.

I think he implying nature will solve the problem regardless. I tend to agree and it’s probably not going to be pleasant for all of us.

Yeah, the narrative needs to be changed from saving the planet to saving civilization, but sadly a return to say the climate of the 70's (where the winters were snowy and summers weren't weeks of deadly 120 F weather) is even less realistic as people wanting to have a "America Great Again" (with current tech, wahey let's keep waiting for that deus ex machina!).

But we aren't even close to lung collapse level predictions.

AFAIK worst case predictions for climate change death aren't above a billion life years.

Not even our children. We will deal with it in 5 years. We're past the fucking around phase, now it's time to find out in increasingly large amounts every year.

Just to be sure, are you proposing killing people today so that they don't die tomorrow?

Because eating less meat, stop taking the plane, reducing our consumption level, replacing cars with bikes and trains and other stuff like that seems radical to you ?

The OP you replied to implied that we need to completely tank the economy to do anything. It just “stop taking the plane” and “eating less meat”.

Reducing massively our meat consumption might have some effects on some part of our economy indeed, same if we choose two divide by 2, 3, 4 the number of cars we're producing.

No more air travel is very radical!

this is a big one. there is a surgery i'll need within 10 years that i can't access in north america. i could definitely give up flight for play, probably for work, not for health

What if it was replaced by boat travel?

You could take a boat. It takes longer but you said it's not an emergency.

yeah i'd love if ocean liners were a thing again. afaik there's only one, and it's a ritzy and touristy affair

Ships are worse than planes.

https://theicct.org/marine-cruising-flying-may22/

in this theoretical world without commodity air travel, we'd have ocean liners fit for purpose. right now the only one i know of is effectively a cruise ship payload stuffed into an ocean liner hull. based on the numbers for cargo favoring sea over air, it seems reasonable that liners _could_ be more efficient than flight

The huge amount of time saved with plane vs boat makes the former the superior option. There's no way a ton of CO2 is worth the comparative QALY loss you get from five days in a boat compared to the other things you could be doing with that time (if you're on a properly efficient liner rather than a super inefficient modern luxury cruise liner). Even the extreme upper end of CO2 externalities don't go above $1000/ton with most reasonable estimates below $100/ton.

I took my first plane at 28 or so. Before it was just too expensive.

I survived, and traveled to many, many countries without it. ( car, buses )

Now, I live between two continents. Take plane at least once a year or every other one.

I would still be in favor of plane restriction.

It will happen anyway: but by prices purely and the most affluent of us will be the less impacted.

There is no need for it to happen. This weird idea that getting poorer will ensure the long-term survival of humans is in error.

Don’t you think oil will keep getting more expensive?

That what I had in mind. It seems more and more costly to extract it.

Oil will eventually be very cheap because demand will be a lot less than it is now.

I never heard that projection before. Because demands will plumet?

Then It might just be not cost effective at all to go dig deeper or use more complex process to get it.

How does that works with current recent trends? Globally we consumed more oil in 2023 than 2022 for instance.

If demand plumet somehow … can we still support a extraction industry ? Recently ( pre 2019 ) shale gaz was worth it because of high prices… then it switched again to lower price and extracting it made little sense ( till next time )

Once oil is used only marginally for fuel and heating, the demand will be a lot less (minus 80% or thereabouts) and going after difficult to extract sources might indeed not be economical but also not needed to satisfy demand (unless this happens very very late).

During the transition there could be cost spikes at demand levels that are awkward to fill without expensive resources, though.

Motor véhicule is 50% and aviation 5%, idk about heating.

So we assume that we replace all explosion engine by EV. Correct?

Mostly replace, yes, there is also electricity generation via oil to be replaced.

And we talking about individual cars & trucks. Correct ? Not mass transportation. Can we build that much batteries, lithium wise ?

> replacing cars with bikes and trains

1. What if you are disabled and have no train connectivity?

2. What about workers who need to travel by car to build trains? What about support workers who help those workers? And so on?

See what happens if we stop virtue signaling and think for a few more seconds?

Please stop with this zero-order thinking and spend a few seconds thinking of first-order and second-order effects when what you suggest can impact billions of lives.

E.g, Mao and his moronic campaign against birds

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0306422018800259

Your rebuttal scenarios are weak, of course in this fantasy scenario some cars will still be allowed. But yes I do agree about butterfly effects, like in this scenario: https://www.bbc.com/future/bespoke/made-on-earth/how-the-cov... or https://archive.is/0inYa

Pandemic happened -> Europe went to lockdown -> Restaurants, hotels closed, weddings cancelled -> a drop of flower sales -> Kenyan flower growers suddenly find themselves out of work and out of income (plane-loads of flowers get flown everyday from Africa, M. East and S. America to Europe)

Yeah it was probably okay sailing for rich countries that can conjure up debt and give their citizens some relief, but how about for the poorer countries? India had a lockdown and day-wagers had to walk thousands of kilometers home, and the PM's response seemed to be "Not my problem!"

> Your rebuttal scenarios are weak, of course in this fantasy scenario some cars will still be allowed.

Then

> But yes I do agree about butterfly effects, like in this scenario: https://www.bbc.com/future/bespoke/made-on-earth/how-the-cov... or https://archive.is/0inYa

> Is the cure really worse than the disease? The health impacts of lockdowns during COVID-19

https://gh.bmj.com/content/6/8/e006653

Rich countries suffered too.

https://edpolicyinca.org/newsroom/california-test-scores-sho...

>What if you are disabled and have no train connectivity?

Ok, then you can have a car. Everyone else still can't.

>What about workers who need to travel by car to build trains? What about support workers who help those workers? And so on?

Company provided shuttle buses.

See what happens if we stop virtue signaling and think for a few more seconds?

> , then you can have a car

See how silly that sounds? These are just two things I thought of quickly. You will end up with ten thousand rules and caveats if we think a bit more. Why wasn't this included in the original comment? If you propose rules, make them at least 50% complete!

> Company provided shuttle buses.

TIL buses are equal to trains and cycles. Also shuttles will pollute more if they are sparsely occupied which is common.

You should read about Mao's idiocy. We shouldn't repeat similar idiocy in 2023.

Mate, nobody's writing comprehensive laws in the hacker news comment section. Stop engaging in bad faith.

The rest of your comment is also wrong, and I'm sure you know why if you stop to think about it for 30 seconds.

> What if you are disabled and have no train connectivity?

You likely already have an electric wheelchair or could buy one of the many e-trike or LSV options, and at least the former will benefit greatly from first-class bike infrastructure.

This is such a common concern troll talking point but it ignores the fact that many people have disabilities which prevent them from driving (e.g. blindness or epilepsy) or prevent them from having the kind of income needed to own a car, especially if it needs customization for them to use it. Those people are all better off with reduced car infrastructure: access services don’t get stuck in traffic, transit helps everyone, and all kinds of mobility devices benefit from safe car-free spaces.

> You likely already have an electric wheelchair or could buy one of the many e-trike or LSV options, and at least the former will benefit greatly from first-class bike infrastructure.

Not very useful during winter. There're places with lots of snow (meters) and temp dropping down to -30F and below. Simply can't bike when snow falls heavily. People live in such places. And their almost exclusive options (except air) are:

- cars (unreliable: engine fail or no fuel/battery with hundreds km from the nearest town means death too often when it's -30F)

- and railway (very reliable and cheap).

Yes, some people in certain very remote/extreme locations might need an enclosed vehicle. We weren’t focused on that because most of the human population doesn’t live in those conditions, especially in urban areas, but if you want that tangent buses, trains, and enclosed LSVs are all good choices depending on circumstances. If you live in Yakutsk, your needs are already different from 99% of the people in the world in many ways.

Remember, nobody is saying that 100% of trips should be on bicycle. We’re saying that we should break the previous century’s default assumption of using a multi-ton vehicle per person for every trip, especially in urban areas where cars make everything worse for everyone including the drivers.

So we can save the world by all becoming Dutch (biking) or Singaporean (public transport) vegans who never travel further than a few 100 km?

Boom, all problems suddenly solved?

You might want to run the numbers on that one some more.

They may never explicitly admit this, but proponents of "just stop using oil" do intend the mass death outcome. Of course, they have nothing but Good Intentions, these people believe that a steep drop-off in population is inevitable, and they'd rather effect it sooner than later.

It’s extremely depressing that you can’t have more than a couple paragraphs’ discussion without extremism kicking in. No, thinking people shouldn’t drive a 2-ton vehicle for 40km to buy 200g of Wagyu every other day is not the same as planning mass murder. Your comment is inflammatory and delusional.

>people shouldn’t drive a 2-ton vehicle for 40km to buy 200g of Wagyu every other day

Your example describes a fantasy.

The vast majority of people do not travel anywhere close to 40km to buy groceries. Even in a car-centric country like America, the average driver travels just 4km.

If someone has to travel 40km or more to get to a grocery store, it's because they live rural. People who travel that far for groceries do not buy 200g of wagyu at a time. They typically only go once or a few times per month and they stock up.

The population of people who live rural is very small. People who live rural are also quite poor.

The carbon emissions, environmental impact, and fuel consumption of this population of people is so unbelievably small, it's irrelevant.

But, you are targeting this small population of poor people. No wonder you get so much pushback, or "extremism". I guess poor people defending their way of life is extreme.

Here in the UK, if I had to travel 'just 4km' then I wouldn't take a car. In any case it's the other 50% of journeys that are 4km+ (20% of journeys are 10+ miles) that are the problem:

https://www.energy.gov/eere/vehicles/articles/fotw-1230-marc...

The USA is a young country, built from the ground up around the automobile. Undoing that both physically and psychologically is just not possible in my opinion.

The UK is smaller than Oregon. It's really not an ideal comparison.

Doesn't matter how big it is, nobody lives in "Oregon" the same way nobody lives in "The UK".

People live in communities, cities, towns. You can build a human scale town in Oregon just as well as you can in the UK.

Dude, work on your reading comprehension. Hyperbole is a literary device.

That was hyperbole.

But also not entirely unrealistic or uncommon, and I live in an european city with good public transport. If I want to buy something special like a good cut of beef, go to an asian market, I’ll be doing a 30km roundtrip by car.

From what I’ve seen a roundtrip to Walmart in the US for weekly groceries can be in the same ballpark - even in the city, since the larger stores are always on the outskirts.

You can keep raising strawmen, but the extremism is going from a suggestion of reduced car traffic and reduced meat consumption, to accusations of not caring about lives and mass murder.

>That was hyperbole.

>But also not entirely unrealistic

Well which is it? Hyperbole or not, the intent behind it is the same, which seems to focus the climate change problem on some of the weakest sources of fuel consumption who also happen to be some of the poorest, most vulnerable people.

I think it's a kind of subconscious projection, that the example you've brought to the fore is those poor people driving to buy their groceries, not the industrial behemoths doing the real dirty work.

> some of the poorest, most vulnerable people

That is a strawman you introduced into the conversation. Most cities in the west are planned around cars. I’ve been to a few of the largest cities in the US and don’t think those 6-lane highways were clogged with “the poorest most vulnerable people”. You see the same patterns in south america.

This is really about the average car-centric culture, consumption patterns, the system of centralized food distribution through massive supermarket chains. It’s about urban planning, incentives, regulations and public policies, not lords vs servants. Note that I didn’t suggest individuals should stop driving to fight climate change, these changes can only start happening at a much higher level.

The EPA says emissions from transportation are responsible for 29% of all pollution [1]. This is a bigger slice than industrial pollution, and 58% of it coming from light vehicles, 28% from trucks (including the ones that supply these supermarkets, and not accounting for the diesel used to bring our bananas, garlic and olive oil by sea from across the world).

[1] https://www.epa.gov/transportation-air-pollution-and-climate...

No, poor people getting disproportionately harmed by many climate change proposals is not a strawman, it's a very real consequence that needs to be addressed.

I don't think the op said stop using oil for productive uses. I assume they'd be against any large electric car too. People in rich/not poor nations use too many resources and I'd say even the vast majority aren't actually for building homes or producing food or contributing to making those things efficient/safe/redundant.

What do you think will happen if the temperatures keep rising, the oceans keep rising, and currently livable areas of land that hold billions of people become inhabitable?

Thanos is that you?

Wanting to kill people now, to hopefully save the environment in the future.

You have to consider how many people will die in the future from climate change

This sort of extremist desperation plants the seeds for justifying horrific, subhuman destruction. There are no limits. This is beyond dangerous, it’s foolish and cancerous.

Indeed, we need real order of magnitude numbers here of deaths from energy scarcity vs deaths from future climate change. Otherwise we're just blowing hot air around.

The environment will be fine. They want to kill people now in order to hopefully save people from dying in the future.

How this is not a parody is beyond me.

> They want to kill people now

this is drastically wrong and dangerous rhetoric

Why do you think people have to die? Keep the strictly necessary things, get rid of the superfluous. Doesn't seem too difficult to me.

Strong “dropbox could be done in a weekend with rsync” vibes.

Also “If You Can Keep Your Head When Everybody Round You Is Losing His, Then It Is Very Probable That You Don’t Understand the Situation”

I guess I meant that what needs to be done is simple, but it can be hard to do.

Dropbox wasn't built in a weekend, but it was built.

Good luck figuring out which is which from the legislative armchair.

I recommend the book Seeing Like A State.

Ok, but you still have to try because we all agree the alternative is worse right?

I didn't mean to say that it's easy, just that it's simple. Simple things can still be hard to accomplish.

The same thing that's continued to happen: We adapt and create solutions.

People have been screaming "everyone will die!!!" via religious based prophecies for... all of human history. The Cult Of Climate Change is no different: a little bit of truth and a lot of faith in Revelations and the unavoidable apocalypse.

Prophecies like "all the icecaps will be gone by 2020" and "billions will die from starvation" (hint: those forecasts failed)

https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/18-spectacularly-wrong-apocal...

This is no different than the people who follow the pastor that's wrong about the date of Jesus' second coming. every year he looks at the numbers and says "next year, on x date". That date comes. and goes. and the faithful see the failed prophecy and he goes "oh look... I was wrong... it's really next year on y date". The faithful see this each year and their faith grows stronger as each failed prophecy means the next one MUST be true.

What do we think will happen? More failed prophecies. The Church of Climate Doom faithful becomes more convinced that theirs is the One True Faith as each prediction continues to prove them right.

The problem with your argument is comparing climate science to religion. There -is- actual science to support the climate doomers. You can cherry pick headlines all you want, but the models have actually been pretty decent so far. Even a little too conservative.

But it's a political problem in the end, anyway, not a science one.

"there is actual science"

There is SOME truth. but not all of it.

Just like there is truth in religions - be nice to your neighbors. Do unto others. Truth. surrounded by bullshit (religion, dogma, etc).

There is truth and "actual science"... but there's also half truths, lies, bad prophecies, etc.

"you can cherry pick" likewise, you can cherry pick some facts about carbon... and then ignore stuff like the destruction required to make batteries, the inability to recycle a MASSIVE fuckton of "green" (wind mill blades, batteries, solar panels, etc - all ending up in land fills).

"models" yeah... except that models are limited, have increasing error rates and you end up with the spaghetti modeling with the simple stuff like weather for next week - much less the weather for next year.

Speaking of cherry picking... you'll cherry pick one or two models from a decade ago and ignore the 100+ others that are wrong.

"political not science" it's both. and religious. It's faith in models that have been cherry picked while ignoring inconvenient truths about "green" solutions that are based on bad models that can't be proven and that don't cover all the possibilities.

the problem with your response is your apparent faith in science and, like a Catholic who will downplay problems with priests, you'll ignore the parts you are uncomfortable with.

climate change is real (little c, little c). Has been happening for... all of history.

Climate Change is not (big C, big C). It is a religion.

One is based on facts and science. the other is based on faith.

> What do you think will happen if the temperatures keep rising, the oceans keep rising, and currently livable areas of land that hold billions of people become inhabitable?

It’s really not so bad. Not compared to killing millions of people today by increasing the price of energy. Estimates are of a rise of [2-4 degrees centigrade by 2100.](https://dnr.wisconsin.gov/climatechange/science#:~:text=Glob....) This will likely result in an [increase](https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/6/1/014....) of arable land. [As the number of storms are estimated to decrease, the threat vector is slightly increasing storm intensity.](https://climate.nasa.gov/news/3184/a-force-of-nature-hurrica....) Humans can handle storms. We can rebuild homes, change where we settle and live, build with better materials and practises, and improve storm infrastructure and protections.

[Approximately 600,000 people die each year from extreme heat, while 4.5 million die from extreme cold.](https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanplh/article/PIIS2542-5...) Let's ignore the ratio for now, because there are second and third order consequences beyond extreme heat like famine to account for. 4.5 million people die each year because of inadequate access to cheaper energy. This is of course linear. Every time energy prices go up, so too do the number of people dying. That is the direct cost of the war on oil, coal, and natural gas, and there are many indirect costs (and lives) which go far beyond this. The intention of climate activists is to make fossil fuels much more expensive, meaning many more deaths.

Of course, maybe the goal here is worth killing 4.5+++ million people per year. There are no perfect solutions; only compromises. Maybe many more will die if we don't act. [The IPCC estimates that an additional 250,000 people per year, between 2030 and 2050, will die from the effects of climate change.](https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/climate-cha...) That covers all modes of death, such as famine. For those in the room doing the math, many times more people will die today by making energy more expensive. Activists are asking us to sacrifice millions of lives per year today to save an estimated 250,000 lives per year decades from now.

For this reason, I no longer support making energy more expensive. I support environmental efforts to reduce pollution, but I can no longer justify the high cost of human life associated with taxes on energy. Instead, I really think activists should focus on making energy cheaper. This means working on solutions to make renewable energy and nuclear cheaper per unit of energy than fossil fuels. That's a path to saving lives which I think most people can get on board with.

>This will likely result in an [increase](https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/6/1/014....) of arable land.

This is my point. We already have major immigration/refugee issues all over the world. Even if we are 100% certain climate change will result in more farm land for humanity, the issue is where are the people now and where will that farm land be then? Do you think Russia (or any other country) will be happy to take in a billion people from South-East Asia? Legal immigration is an issue now. This will be a humanitarian catastrophe larger than any war humanity has ever faced by orders of magnitude.

Famine in Africa is an existential risk with or without global warming. Currently 822 million people are estimated to be malnourished. As per the citations above, global warming will provide only a slightly elevated risk of famine relative to present day.

Overpopulation in Africa is a problem to be solved either way. Ameliorating global warming won’t make any meaningful improvement to that.

I genuinely don't understand how your comment is a response to mine. Where are we going to move the billions of people living in coastal South East Asia when oceans rise and their land becomes un-farmable due to climate change?

Rising oceans aren’t going to make coastal areas in Asia uninhabitable for any appreciable proportion of people for centuries. Asia has huge tracts of unused land. Over the centuries, people will migrate.

I tried to explain to you that overpopulation has almost nothing to do with global warming, and conflating the two diminishes our ability to solve each.

Rare to see an effortful post so full of citations! Bravo for raising the standard of debate, even if your conclusion is disagreeable!

You scenario seems to only correlate increasing price with lower consumption.

I think there should also be viable paths where increased prices for some energy forms translates to increased demand for cleaner forms instead

A carbon tax matched by a matching carbon dividend could transfer funds to poor people.

A fuel consumption tax can be matched by a matching tax cut on miles driven. Transferring demand from fossil fuel to other transportation means.

There may be loads of pitfalls in those two example of course, they are mostly meant to illustrate the point.

The goal is to make energy cheaper. I would much prefer it to be clean energy, but this is secondary. If we could devise a way to make clean energy cheaper than untaxed fossil fuels, I’m all in. It just hasn’t worked that way so far, and activists are almost entirely focused on making fossil fuels more expensive, rather than clean energy cheaper.

> People will starve, become homeless, and maybe anarchy will reign. Not just in the developed world but globally.

The irony of this comment.

This is only true if you literally crash the economy and do nothing else. What we can do is instead shift priorities, like food and housing security, while reducing the economy by not doing useless, pointless things. Do we really need all these things we buy at the store now?

We cannot build windmills, solar farms, and nuclear energy plants overnight. We cannot stand up new buildings and create local food supply chains overnight. I was responding to the proposal to cut oil production by 50%-75%, which would be great, but must be done gradually so that our current economic systems have time to respond, i.e. not crash.

Maybe we can announce a ban on pork, beef, plastics, TVs, consumption, etc but it should not be done overnight for the same reasons.

What you have to do is make it worthwhile for people. Steve Keen's idea of a dual price is imo a great idea. How it works is everything has both a dollar price and a carbon price. Everyone in society gets the same amount of carbon credits. You can sell these credits for dollars and vice versa. Those who use a LOT of carbon have to buy them from those that have the credits. What this does is create a wealth distribution down while at the same time capping carbon usage. Those who use very little carbon benefit because they can buy things they previously couldn't, while those that use a lot are punished. Since the vast majority of people are at the lower end of carbon usage, I believe this would be a very popular program.

That’s at risk of happening either way.

"Crashing the economy" is literally the worst thing you could do to fix climate change.

Even in a stagnant economy, people are still commuting to and from work in their gas-guzzling cars, and heating their homes in the winter. CO2 emissions aren't going to change a ton.

But what a stagnant economy does is prevent any kind of investment in renewable energy and electrification, because there's no excess money to use for investment. A stagnant economy is not installing solar panels, replacing ICE cars with electric and installing new charging stations nationwide, or replacing boilers with heat pumps.

And if we want to hasten the changes to renewable energy and electrification, that's what government policy is for -- via subsidies for desired technologies, heavier taxation for undesired ones, and regulation.

"Crashing the economy" to slow down climate change is like cutting university faculty by half in order to combat grade inflation. It doesn't make any sense.

You don't need private investment to do electrification and renewable energy. That can be done by the government. Which doesn't have funding problems, ever.

The government isn't inventing electric cars or improving heat pumps or improving batteries or making solar panels more efficient to produce.

You absolutely still need private investment in a growing economy to produce and invent these technologies.

What the government incentives then can do is speed up their rates of adoption and installation. But you need both sides -- public and private.

The government is literally doing that by funding research. The government can fund literally anything it wants to. Private investment is literally never necessary.

What you're describing is a command economy of the type the Soviet Union had -- no private investment.

The whole history the twentieth century is the evidence that such a system doesn't work. And it especially doesn't work as technology has become increasingly complex.

Markets are vastly better-informed investors than governments can ever be. Which is why it's generally vastly better for governments to skew incentives for private investment to favor a particular area, rather than make investments directly.

No, that's not what I'm describing. Stop putting your ideological spin on my words.

The government doesn't need the private sector, it allows the private sector to exist where it's deemed beneficial.

The rise of the FIRE sector (finance, insurance, and real estate) to become the largest sector in the US economy (22+%) coincides with an increase in proportion of private R&D expenditure compared to government expenditure. In 2010 businesses spend $248 billion on R&D while the government spent $126 billion. In 2021 that number was $587 billion compared to $153 billion. In other words, the share of Business R&D went from 66% of R&D spend to about 80%.

The reason this is not a good trend is that the KIND of R&D businesses do vs government are very different. Government invests in basic research and invention while business invests in innovation.

Less money is going into science and more into squeezing money out of people via innovation. I would argue this is because the sector that makes all the important decisions is now the FIRE sector, which only thinks about the next quarter.

source: https://ncses.nsf.gov/data-collections/national-patterns/202...

Late USSR had funding problems. Crashed due to having them. So governments have funding problems too.

You may also ask Argentine.

Where do you think the government gets its funding from? And no, you can't just print your way out of this.

> It's weird to say, but we should crash the economy if it can slow down climate change.

That's a direct path to armed conflict. Those aren't great in the reduce CO2 emissions and cut down on resource consumption departments.

Slashing oil production only works if we make serious investments in other energy infrastructure. It’s only tangentially about “standard of living” - it’s about how you even supply food and other basics of living if you cut off current energy systems.

And while we have made renewable energy investments to some degree - it’s at a dilettante level for show instead of being serious about it. Renewable infrastructure investments should be made highly favored financial investments to accelerate its manufacture and installation. Even with large government financing it would save money and lives.

And energy production is only a part of it, investments also need to be favored for restructuring our economy to alter high energy habits like individual commutes in cars vs bikes buses and trains.

Have you done the cost:benefit analysis? Curious what makes you so confident that "crashing the economy" (you're aware of all the excess death and despair this would cause?) is the best move here.

I mean it's pretty obvious that our current situation is already causing death and despair (droughts, wildfires, hurricanes) and this will only increase on our current trajectory.

right, now imagine the hysteria that would come from doing that actively and intentionally to everyone on an accelerated schedule. thwarting cancer by downing a bottle of cyanide

I'd say it's more like thwarting cancer with chemotherapy: an unpleasant experience necessary for survival.

the analogy doesn't hold for me. my mom just finished chemo the other week, and it definitely wasn't close in effect to what she'd've dealt with otherwise. she went on living her life as usual, minus some household chores

I am not sure crashing the economy is a viable solution.

I say this because what I learned so far is that is people will start being cold and hungry then they will focus on immediate needs and that will make sure that no money will be spent on solving climate change. This is a natural instinct: you cannot think about the future if your current situation is suffering.

I feel like maybe some Western leaders have done a bit of this, and their conclusion has been "Let's let the poorer few billion of the world die rather than fuck up our own electorates' lives.". Obviously with a bit of twist and turns like "My hands are tied, I don't want to crash my economy by being super radical (so I'll adjust things a little here and there like asking car manufacturers to promise to be neutral by 2035), but external effects like death and destruction in poorer countries? Well... that's their own shit to deal with."

> It's weird to say, but we should crash the economy if it can slow down climate change. I mean there are plenty people in other parts of the world who don't have such a high standard of living, and it's not that big of a problem.

The thing is, we have no reason to believe halting climate will do anything other than boost the economy. The reason for inaction despite the fact that it’ll make tons of new jobs, and remove major consumer costs and widespread reductions to health & quality of life caused by cars, is that certain specific sectors of the economy will shrink. The fossil fuel industry has spent half a century funding science deniers and consolidating their political power to prevent action on climate change or their pollution. They’re not acting on behalf of the entire economy, just their shareholders.

A simple example: beef is a solid order of magnitude worse than other common protein sources (with the possible exception of lamb in some countries). We could see huge reductions in our food-related emissions simply by eating pork or chicken instead, and almost nobody would say that’s an intolerable lifestyle hit but the beef industry isn’t going to let that happen easily because it’s bad for their revenue even if it’d mean most people save money.

> We could see huge reductions in our food-related emissions simply by eating pork or chicken

that would be great, if only more than 2.5 billion people did not eat pork for various religious or cultural restrictions.

food restrictions are among some of the most difficult habits to overcome, proven by the fact that they resisted for thousands of years.

we could also eat insects or worms, but we don't it, what makes you think that 1.8 billion Muslims would suddenly start eating pork like it's not a big deal?

In my opinion Paracelsus said it right: it's the dose that makes the poisons.

Americans who eat the most red meat per capita (a lot more than anyone else), could eat less meat in general.

How?

Simple: by making it a lot more expensive.

Between 2020 to 2022, Europeans consumed 32.4 kilos of pork, while the per capita consumption of beef was significantly lower, at 10.3 kilos in total.

How Much Beef Does the Average American Eat? The average U.S. consumer eats 25.9 kilograms (57.1 pounds) of beef per year.

For the last 60 years, U.S. meat consumption has risen steadily. In 1961, the average was 93.7 kilograms (206.5 pounds) of meat per year. By 2020, that number had risen to 126.73 kilograms (279.4 pounds) per year.

The most notable period bucking this trend of growth is from 2008 to 2013, a decrease that likely resulted from the 2008 recession.

proving that the economic angle is effective in reducing the consumption of meat in the US.

> that would be great, if only more than 2.5 billion people did not eat pork for various religious or cultural restrictions.

I used “other common protein sources” to avoid having to list every single alternative from fish to nuts, and I’d note that the populations for whom that’s true traditionally ate proteins which were not beef because it’s comparatively expensive: chicken, fish, legumes, nuts, cheese (still way less CO2), etc.

That’s the key thing here: we’re not asking people to eat Soylent green or extruded nutrient pellets, or to never eat beef, but simply to restore the range of foods from their own cultural tradition prior to the mid-20th century western promotion of beef as the highest status protein. My grandfather grew up eating beef twice a year (when his cousins dairy culled the herd) and it was fine - I’m sure he’s do it again if it meant his great grandchildren had a better world.

> because it’s comparatively expensive

that's my point exactlt.

switching beef with pork wouldn't make a big impact, because

- it's already not the preferred source of protein anywhere

- Americans eat too much meat anyway, regardless of where it comes from.

Reduce is the most important of the 3 Rs (reduce, reuse, recycle) but the western World settled on the least important, recycle, because it can be turned into a profitable business, while reduce promotes moderation, which is like swearing in a church for many Americans.

I am Italian and still eat nuts, legumes and eggs for proteins much more than meat, especially beef.

It's the culprit of the Mediterranean diet and it's shared among many other cultures that built their culinary traditions around the same ingredients. Chinese traditional food is much more similar to my own family's traditional food in center Italy than the typical US diet will ever be.

So maybe Americans should simply embrace other, better diets, instead of replacing some type of meat with some other type of meat. intensive farming of pigs it's not much better than beef

The environmental impact of pig farming is mainly driven by the spread of feces and waste to surrounding neighborhoods, polluting air and water with toxic waste particles. Waste from pig farms can carry pathogens, bacteria (often antibiotic resistant), and heavy metals that can be toxic when ingested.

Slashing oil production by 50% in western economies is not a reduction in lifestyle it’s a full collapse with a huge number of collateral death.

But still you have a partial point: health/life expectancy and happiness have already started to decorrelate with the economy in the US, and US people consume more resources than other western economies with obviously better material outcome but no better quality of life outcome. This point to solutions were conversely it should then be possible to maintain standard of living with a decrease in the energy consumption. Red meat and leisure only air travel are indeed good candidates because you can live a very happy, healthy and fulfilled life without them. Same with cars weighting 1000 pounds less, putting a sweater in winter at home, having denser city centers with public transportation, etc…

This is not about left or right, this is about having an open look at some ideologies with data. It’s always hard to accept when people make economical theories a part of their identity and values, this a religious crisis for them not a simple discussion.

Let's walk through this hypothetical scenario with a modicum of realism

First and foremost, there's no way to transition our complex society through such an energy bottleneck of this nature without massive unrest. You will literally be killing people and causing mass starvation, so the very first thing that happens is everyone who loses someone or otherwise is hurt by the new regime instantly rebels and you have the largest energy war in history.

Seven billion people? That's just an abstract number to you, I suppose, and of course you will be one of the people who figures things out, why you're a "leftist!" as you told us so being on the right side of history will save you :) but in Reallandistan, the amount of human suffering you just released, the amount of ancient ills which we have finally, as a species , put to bed which you casually reawakened instantly flare up. But what are several billion dead people? We're saving the planet here! Do you honestly, really, in the deep quiet parts of your mind, think that it would be better to kill billions than to solve environmental and other problems, as we have been, better and better with technology? I fundamentally disagree with this inhumane approach and want nothing to do with those who might advocate it.

„It's weird to say, but we should crash the economy if it can slow down climate change.“

You can do this exactly once. Afterwards the cause will be severely discredited and no candidate doing even moderate climate change policies will be able to be elected.

In short this is stupid.

And what about all the countries that won’t do anything regardless? So we should just tank our own economy while being unable to do anything about our neighbors? It won’t take tanking the economy, it would take world war 3.

“I won’t stop because they won’t stop” is going to destroy the planet

It is a collective effort. If you don’t realize that, you will not get anywhere in your goals of reducing climate change.

Isn't it funny that the only option is going to be greater government, that forces its citizens to act against their own interests?

The real winner in this situation is government! (Exclamation mark, but I'm not actually surprised.)

You have to wonder whether this is a self-serving agenda for those who run it.

and who are the World Meteorological Organization?

> The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) is a specialized agency of the United Nations responsible for promoting international cooperation on atmospheric science, climatology, hydrology and geophysics.

from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Meteorological_Organizat...

Ok - so its the UN. The UN is an UNelected body that presents itself as the face of world government.

> The United Nations (UN) is an intergovernmental organization whose stated purposes are to maintain international peace and security, develop friendly relations among nations, achieve international cooperation, and serve as a centre for harmonizing the actions of nations.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations

The unprecedented disaster is the increase in global governance!

collective efforts don’t always start simultaneously!

> So we should just tank our own economy while being unable to do anything about our neighbors?

Yes.

You seem smart.

I'm glad you agree, it did seem the dumber choice to continue driving at full speed into a brick wall just because the driver next to me won't brake first.

I think the right metaphor to demonstrate the argument being made is you are coupled to the other car and it doesn't matter if you turn off your engine, you're both hitting the wall anyway if the other car doesn't decide to stop too.

So you better turn off the engine and then hope the other drivers turns theirs off too.

In what world is doing nothing the right choice?

I don't know if hope is enough. I don't think people are willing to be miserable for hope- especially when there is no reasonable expectation that others would stop.

I disagree that you need to be miserable. Humans are very good at getting used to their circumstances, and some of the changes would be net positives on the personal level. I know I'm way happier now that I ride my bicycle as my main method of transportation.

But also, climate change is already making us miserable. I went on vacation and it was impossible to be outside between 12-3, so we had to plan our days around that. It's not a choice between happy and miserable, it's a tradeoff between less than ideal situations.

What works for you doesn't work for everyone. There are many, many places in the world where using a bicycle as a main method of transportation would be impractical and miserable. Short of force, this isn't going to happen.

Yes, the entire idea is to refactor our cities and societies so that most people can and do use the low carbon option.

It's not commuting 40Km by bicycle, it's raising the price of gas to the point that people choose to live at a distance where they can bicycle to work. At the same time you need to build housing and bike infrastructure to make sure everyone can have access to it.

Not everyone lives in a city. 'Refactoring' the planet is a pipe dream in the short term. It's not possible in the timeframe being discussed. People in the larger thread suggest that its better to get the dying over with now since it'll happen anyway. When food stops moving, it'll be the cities that fall first. A bicycle won't help.

Ok, you're a doomer and a prepper, no point in having a discussion you're not interested in

What are you talking about? You know nothing about me. You can't 'win' the discussion so you move what you think are personal insults. Do better.

Why does a green transformation have to "tank" the economy? Can't we have green economic revival ? Would it not create more jobs to transition faster ?

It doesn’t. Both sides need to work together towards a common goal. If only one side is doing it, nothing will change.

More jobs = more consumption = more resources. Their idea is for people to consume far less, therefore own less. If people own and consume less there's less incomes.

Don't own a house, only rent a small apartment in a dense urban setting. Don't own the means to your own transportation, only get by with walking and transit. Price meats so high most people can't afford them regularly.

Two out of the three things you mention are so 'undesirable' that the few dense walkable urban areas in the US are more expensive than living in the suburbs. There's a reason why left-wingers use the word "gentrification" a whole lot. In many cases suburban home and car ownership is actually cheaper than the traditional urban lifestyle, for various reasons including but not limited to:

1. Supply being limited because America outlawed dense urban construction decades ago. Dense cities cannot legally expand to meet demand and building up gets more expensive and unrealistic after a certain number of floors.

2. People in suburbs being further away from lucrative jobs - i.e. proximity to one's work is priced into the cost of the home.

3. Various government subsidies and tax credits that distort the market to produce more resource-intensive suburban housing.

"America" didn't outlaw the expansion, the cities did it to themselves. The cities are in charge of their zoning and planning, not the federal government. They could allow for more density, but the voters choose no. Just look at all the nimbys fighting apartment complexes; are they all goons from faceless corporations and the federal government or are they just the local people currently living there expressing their choice?

It's not like the government subsidies and tax credits exist even though nobody wants them. They exist because, once again, that's what voters have suggested they want when they go to the polls.

I do agree, cities should be able to expand their density. I think in an ideal world people should be able to choose to live in generally affordable forms of whatever housing they want. And that's the thing, I'd like to be able to choose the housing style I think is good for my family. Many here would argue I shouldn't be able to make that choice, or that some choices (like single family homes) should be made so expensive most people can't afford it.

It's all making sense now, only WW3 can save us.

It’s all making sense now, we kill half the population today by stopping all oil consumption so then maybe in the future they won’t die.

> It's weird to say, but we should crash the economy if it can slow down climate change.

It can't. I did the numbers some time ago [1], and they are bad. If you take electricity as a proxy, western countries consume something like 5 times as much as the global average per capita. So if we are willing to let the poorest to get to the global average while not cutting global consumption at all, the west should reduce their consumption by something like 80%. That's not crashing the economy. Thats... destroying the society most likely.

There are two solutions: 1. We force the global poor to stay poor. 2. We figure out how to make lots more stuff sustainably than we currently do.

Feel free to make your choise. Reducing consumption in the west is not going to make a dent anywhere and should be not on your list of worries if you choose 2.

Edit, add [1]: I don't habe the numbers now but you can replicate it pretty easly by taking population and electricity consumption data by country from wikipedia.

You're right that emissions-per-capita in Western countries are unsustainable, and that consumer demand is out of step with the true cost of fuel, meat, etc.

But how exactly would any country succeed in deliberately destroying their own economy? They would face revolts, civil unrest, and the economic vacuum left behind would simply open the door for any country that doesn't play along to gain a monopoly on forbidden economic growth, and potentially establish their own global hegemony.

No economic system has ever had "fair" or equal distributions of wealth, and no system will ever have a fair distribution of carbon emissions either.

It's weird to say, but we should crash the economy if it can slow down climate change.

If global warming is in fact a conspiracy made up by foreign actors to destabilize the west, man, have they got you.

Poor people don’t have the luxury of caring about the environment. Making people poorer is guaranteed to make things worse.

I don’t think we need to make everyone’s lives worse. It’s not politically viable. We don’t need to give up computers and well insulated homes and medicine. Technology will help us reduce pollution and emissions. It’s just going to take time.

> It's weird to say, but we should crash the economy if it can slow down climate change.

To save humanity we should destroy humanity.

No thanks.

> we should crash the economy if it can slow down climate change

This really shouldn’t be the top comment on this thread without some sort of reference to cost/benefit analysis to back it up.

Otherwise this appears to be an overly extreme solution to give climate deniers fuel to not listen to more reasonable solutions.

It's not like anyone on this message board has a little 'crash the economy' button on their keyboard.

I’m mostly arguing that this feels like an extremist view, and in the realm of “let’s look for real solutions to the problem”, this doesn’t feel like it should be the most upvoted one in this thread.

> Western rich countries have too many really spoiled consumers.

That's because I live in a market economy and I have no desire to live in your planned economy without any democratic process in place to represent me.

> but we should crash the economy if it can slow down climate change.

"We should make decisions that will kill people and shorten their life expectancy, because I believe there aren't any other compromises that can be made to impact pollution."

Yea.. it's is weird to say, it's also demented and inhumane.

> And yes, I don't believe it's only rich people, it's also middle class people who generate a lot of emissions, and I'm a leftist.

And the rest of the world that hasn't developed yet? We still just don't spare any thoughts for them at all.

Society would grind to an abrupt halt if you cut oil production by even 20%. Of course, if you did that red meat and cheap air fare would go away on their own.

That this is the most upvoted comment shows just how far most people wander from reality.

> I mean there are plenty people in other parts of the world who don't have such a high standard of living, and it's not that big of a problem.

As someone from Bangladesh—average CO2 emissions under 1 ton per person—I can confirm that it sucks and conservation is a stupid way of mitigating climate change.

The anti-development people are just evil. When my dad was a kid in Bangladesh, 1 out of 5 kids died before age 5. Capitalism and development brought us up to similar levels to where the US was in the 1970s in just one generation.

This sort of fanaticism is why there is no progress on this issue. Let's start by banning low hanging fruit like cryptocurrencies, private jets and superyachts. If it's insufficient we might have to do more, like build sufficient high speed rail and force the third world to contain their population boom, because if that isn't contained nothing will work. Only then would it be reasonable to go after ordinary people.

China releases more CO2 than the US, EU, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand combined.

The West has become really good at reducing emissions and environmental impact. Yes, a fair portion of that reduction is consuming CO2 intensive products made in China rather than locally, but even taking that into account the developed world is probably still less CO2 producing than the developing world.

You’re not being practical, hence you’re not adding any value to the conversation. How exactly would you slow the world down?

> and it's not that big of a problem.

it actually is and it's really big.

Not to say that we shouldn't reduce our consumerism, but not by lowering our living standards. It would immediately harm if not kill the weakest/poorer segments of every Country's population.

I'm fairly sure that living standards will be lowered by floods, fires and other climate catastrophes. Not doing enough to stop CO2 production will result in a lot of lowered living standards, including making some areas of the world uninhabitable without air conditioning etc.

> I'm fairly sure that living standards will be lowered by floods

No, it won't as badly.

Doomerism is not a valid rational point of view.

Most of all, floods would happen anyway, so you'll have floods + lower standards of living, including much worse emergency services.

we are not at the brink of extinction and people lived and prospered in almost unhabitable lands long before we had the technology to regulate the temperature.

like for example Northern United Kingdom.

But are also living today in the middle of deserts, with no AC.

Of course we should cut on emissions werever it is possible, worst offenders being fossil fuels.

Edit: on a side note the reason why your proposal will never work is because cutting on emissions is actually easy. For example let's stop keeping pets at home. Pets that usually eat a lot of red meat. It is feasible, won't lower living standards and won't cost much to society. Now convince people that their cat eats more meat in a year than a Chinese average person and that's not sustainable.

> we are not at the brink of extinction and people lived and prospered in almost unhabitable lands long before we had the technology to regulate the temperature.

It's relatively simple (though not necessarily easy) to live in a cold area if you have access to furs and fuel. Trying to survive in an area where the wet bulb temperature is over 35 degrees will require reliable air conditioning and working outside will become virtually impossible for humans.

> Edit: on a side note the reason why your proposal will never work is because cutting o. emissions s it's actually easy. For example let's stop keeping let's at home. Pets that usually eat a lot of red meat. It is feasible, won't lower living standards and won't cost much to society. Now convince people that their cat eats more meat in a year than a Chinese average person and that's not sustainable.

That reads as gibberish.

> It's relatively simple (though not necessarily easy) to live in a cold area if you have access to furs and fuel.

there must be a reason why the coldest areas on the Planet are deserted...

> Trying to survive in an area where the wet bulb temperature is over 35 degrees

And yet ancient Egyptians did it 4 thousands years ago.

> That reads as gibberish

My phone has an Italian dictionary. Fixed it.

> And yet ancient Egyptians did it 4 thousands years ago.

Have you any evidence of Egypt having those kinds of wet bulb temperatures back then? It's physically impossible to survive high wet bulb temperatures even with an unlimited supply of water without some other form of cooling (i.e. not based on air movement such as fans) as water/sweat evaporation isn't effective.

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wet-bulb_temperature:

> Even heat-adapted people cannot carry out normal outdoor activities past a wet-bulb temperature of 32 °C (90 °F), equivalent to a heat index of 55 °C (131 °F). A reading of 35 °C (95 °F) – equivalent to a heat index of 71 °C (160 °F) – is considered the theoretical human survivability limit for up to six hours of exposure.

> Have you any evidence of Egypt having those kinds of wet bulb temperatures back then?

Have you got evidence of climate change causing those kinds of wet bulb temperatures in large populated areas?

From https://www.theguardian.com/science/2022/jul/31/why-you-need...:

> One 2015 study concluded extremes are likely to approach and exceed 35C in the region around the Arabian Gulf towards the end of the century if greenhouse gas emissions are not reined in, posing questions for human habitability there.

> In 2020, research found that some coastal subtropical locations have already experienced WBTs of 35C, albeit only for a few hours.

> “Previous studies projected that this would happen several decades from now, but this shows it’s happening right now,” said lead author Colin Raymond, a climate scientist at Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “The times these events last will increase and the areas they affect will grow in direct correlation with global warming.”

> The study also found that globally, the number of times that a WBT of 30C was reached – still considered an extreme humidity and heat event – more than doubled between 1979 and 2017. There were about 1,000 occurrences of a 31C WBT, and about a dozen above 35C, in Pakistan, India, Saudi Arabia, Mexico and Australia.

There's some recent information and investigation here too https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/interacti...

not evidence of something that would kill hundred of millions of humans.

But, more importantly,

The oft-cited 35C value comes from a 2010 theoretical study.

Simply put: nobody knows the real threshold and nobody put it to test.

I'm no denier in any way, but doom prophecies are usually wrong, they are used to scare people into action, but are based on the idea that nothing changes.

For example, planting trees is effective against heat waves, it's cheap and it's being done extensively, everywhere you look

China will aim to plant and conserve 70 billion trees by 2030 as part of the global tree movement

The 35C value is suggested as an upper limit. Lower WBTs have already been shown to be deadly amongst the more vulnerable.

I agree about tree planting being a sensible precaution to take - preventing sun from reflecting off tarmac and concrete is going to help at least a bit as well as the other benefits.

What politician would you vote for?

Politician A) The one that promises you more economic comfort in the short term

Politician B) The one that promises you sustainability (i.e.: not necessarily growth)

Most people will vote for Politician A. Because most families in this culture want prosperity so they have more income to have a "better lifestyle" (consume more). The problem is that a better lifestyle means a higher environmental footprint.

That brings us to the realization that at some point in time we became an ecocidal invasive species, and having good historians and a good public relations team won't change that in the actually true and objective historic record: the geological and fossil record, which will be the only one that will remain after we starve ourselves to death. In that record we will see how after the arrival of the behaviorally modern human, especially after the industrial revolution, all species above certain weight started dying.

We look down at tribal peoples with dumb narratives such as "they are not making an efficient use of the land". Well, 200 years after the industrial revolution we are learning that the industrial mindset is collective suicide, and perhaps there was something that the tribal peoples were doing correctly, measured in terms of KPIs such as carbon emissions, topsoil, biodiversity, etc.

And the solution is a) reducing our environmental footprint (which is impossible with a growth-oriented industrial mindset) or b) resist growth or c) reduce our population. b) and c) will never be supported by the population.

We will have to rewrite history and rethink the way we educate people, accepting that the industrial revolution was progress in terms of consumption but it was a massive setback in terms of sustainability. i.e.: it is a progress trap, or in simpler terms, it doesn't fucking work.

We are just immature people playing with a credit card and thinking we can afford everything. But everything you spend you'll have to pay later, with interest, and that time is arriving at an increasingly faster rate. We are living lavish lifestyles at the expense of the future generations.

Political leadership doesn't have an answer, neither do corporations. The media serves those groups, so the solution won't come from them either.

I predict that once strong AI is here, elites will not have a reason to collaborate and share resources with the masses, and will have no incentive to share political representation. Plus, the agriculture supply chain is highly centralized and corporations can cause a famine any time they want.

"if it can"

you have proof that it can and will?

this is the same "it's worth anything" arguments where "maybe" is treated as "it will happen" while ignoring the negative aspects (IE: human suffering, facts that poor people are worse for the economy, green tech is made from worse than carbon and is creating megatons of unrecyclable stuff like windmill blades and solar panels, etc.

Nothing like putting the lives of people on the chopping block for an "if" in response to a religious belief that "carbon is evil".

Is there perhaps nothing at all we should refrain from i the name climate change? Reset humanity to zero.

.."and I'm a leftist."

No kidding.

> It's odd how everytime somebody mentions slashing oil production by 50 or 75%, people are immediately up in arms.

Maybe because they understand the immediate consequences of such an action and you don't. That's why 0 leaders around the world are proposing that kind of solutions because everyone that knows how world works, how supply chains work and what kind of environment is needed for people to elect leaders like Hitler. You want WWIII? The best way to do it is crashing the world economy.

> I mean there are plenty people in other parts of the world who don't have such a high standard of living, and it's not that big of a problem.

Good luck with that, people didn't work so hard in the west to now switching to 3rd world country standards. Climate change is a common knowledge, there are green parties in almost every country, if people really wanted to change their way of living they would vote for them but they don't. Clearly they are waiting for a technical miracle to happen or just don't care.

So what does it mean? It means that winter is coming and you should prepare for it. None of the newest models show that we can avoid first level of catastrophe even if we stop all the emissions. Millions or tens of millions of people will die, hundreds of millions will try to migrate. At this stage it's not a question of if but when. Life is not a Hollywood movie.

At this point we are in some sort of 'space station ecosystem collapse' situation and we need to start acting like it and completely change how capitalism works.

So... we're fucked.

You aren't that far off. Young people today can see the writing on the wall: for the first time in history, we have scientific evidence that continuing with capitalism will bring the end of the world. We'll have to choose between continuing with colonial subjugation of the working class by the owner class for another eon or revolution by spiritual enlightenment to take us to an egalitarian future like Star Trek.

Now I'm not anti-capitalist, because capitalism is social darwinism and is a description of how resources get distributed under contention due to scarcity. It doesn't need defending. It also can't be stopped. So it doesn't care if you believe in it or not.

But the rampant corruption and crony/late-stage capitalism we live under today has metastasized. And most people don't know it. I'm sure that 50% of the people reading this are just fine with the status quo. They have high incomes and can take care of their families and that's great.

What they probably aren't thinking about on a conscious level is that the median income for individuals globally is right at $10,000 annually. An American making $36,000 is already standing on 3 other people's backs. HN viewers making $100,000-$250,000 are standing on about 10-25 people. A billionaire making $100 million stands on 10,000 people. Our uber-rich stand on 1 million people or more.

So what we think of as buying a $30,000 automobile and spending that again on fuel and maintenance steals 6 years of someone's life, not to mention the life lost by the owner working to make payments. A $300,000 home ($600,000 with mortgage interest) steals 60 years of life. A house is someone else's lifetime. You can see where I'm going with this.

It's not so much that we can't imagine a life without fossil fuels. That's actually pretty easy: solar panels on our roofs and electric cars, home hydroponic robotic gardens, recycling of all things (even landfills), off-grid living. Solarpunk.

It's that we can't imagine ourselves at the bottom of the capitalist pyramid, toiling our lives away so that someone somewhere can be wealthy at our expense, forever separated from financial stability and self-actualization like the 7 billion people propping up the billion people in "developed" countries. So we project our generational trauma onto the people we depend on most.

That's what the Russia-Ukraine war is about. That's why the Middle East can't seem to get left alone. That's why the Global South struggles to eat. That's why we're seeing continuous decline in all things from economics to health to the environment. That's why we won't solve global climate change. And that's why the most likely future currently is a dystopian one.

We can't change the world, but we can change ourselves. As we each pull ourselves up by our bootstraps since the wealthy do nothing about any of this, we begin to manifest a viable future.

Personally I have stopped fantasizing about disruption and winning the internet lottery. Now I meditate on how to bring $10,000 of resources to every single person in the world through automation to free humanity from forced labor and enter the New Age.

>crony/late-state capitalism

Let's call it what it is: feudalism. The active income era of capitalism has largely subsided. When economic growth comes from active income all classes can see their wealth increase. When passive income dominates you get the opposite: certain sections of the owner class with the most powerful monopolies[0] cannibalize everyone else. And while "feudalism" is a historically complicated term, one common feature was economies dominated by passive income. In that era, wealth went to those who owned the land - a natural chokepoint to economic activity. Today the chokepoints are different but the effect is the same.

I would also disagree that half of HN is "just fine with the status quo" given that this community also likes to talk a lot about right to repair, abuse of copyright and patent ownership, DMCA 1201, platform capitalism, etc.

[0] e.g. copyright ownership over culturally relevant creative works, patent ownership over the most economically relevant inventions, etc

This line of thinking is why I never vote for leftists.

1. How do you know these people are from the West?

2. Crashing the economy may make things worse as people may move to cheaper more polluting options.

3. Also any crashing has to be global if implemented. If the West implements this, will China implement it too? Otherwise, it is useless.

4. We have to get out of the outdated/silly notion that the economy is inversely proportional to a clean planet. E.g., cleaner cars cost more than older polluting cars. So if more cleaner cars are bought, that implies economic growth as well as less pollution. Same for building mass transit. There will be a ton of upfront pollution.

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