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Comment by edhelas | Hacker News Reader

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

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.

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.

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