Climate change: Six young people take 32 countries to court | Hacker News Reader

Climate change: Six young people take 32 countries to court

bbc.com

57 pointsBrajeshwar44 comments

This is absolutely the right direction to take. Ambitious programs are hollowed out since voters get angry and shift to conspiracy theories and populist parties to maintain their lavish lifestyle.

CO2 emissions worldwide are still growing every year. This is painful to watch as western countries have started programs for reduction a long time ago - but they are vaporized by the strongly growing emissions by Asian countries [1].

China has a very ambitious program and will likely peak in the coming years - not being bound by short-sighted election cycles. But India is another story.

We must all realize that within our lifetimes, we need a proscription on _extraction_ of fossil fuels. Otherwise it would be a laughable attempt to collect the damage after it has occurred. And most likely, this needs to be done through the court system.

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/276629/global-co2-emissi...

Having unelected judges dictate important economic policy instead of elected politicians is the “right direction to take?” Do you see how attitudes like that might be contributing to the rise of “populist parties?”

Unfortunately our democracies have a blind eye when it comes to internalizing external costs and executing on policies that might take 20, 30 years to get implemented. It is a process with many setbacks every other election cycle. This is one place where a king or queen actually makes sense - their interest is to leave a heritage for their firstborn. But even monarchs need to fear the wrath of the people when they do it, and besides, they might be too stupid.

Judges can only interpret the laws as they are written. If people don't like the results, they need to get their legislators to write different laws.

If only that were true.

In my experience, many judges make things up while not caring about the laws.

Cumulative emissions by country: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cumulative-co-emissions

Modern civilization simply isn't possible without fossil fuels. There are finite reserves of oil, gas and coal, and it is inevitable that these will continue to be exploited until it is no longer viable. Without oil it wouldn't be possible to grow or distribute enough food to feed the current human population.

Climate change is a very real threat to human civilization, but mainly because of the size and distribution of the population, and lately expectation of people. The earth has been hotter in the past, and so the CO2 locked up in fossil fuels was originally in the atmosphere.

The "earth has been hotter" take seems a bit silly. Sure it's true. But do you want to live somewhere with an average summer temperature of 100F instead of 80F or 90F? Or more extreme.

Sure, the earth and life in general will survive global warming. But humans have a good chance of not.

I've come to believe/agree that it is not possible for humanity to give up fossil fuels, but the physics of adding ever more carbon into the atmosphere is also calamitous. Taken together it seems we are on a path to certain doom.

>Otherwise it would be a laughable attempt to collect the damage after it has occurred

Why do you think that? The number of extreme climate events is higher today than in previous centuries, but the number of people killed by these events - controlled for population - is much smaller. We are WAY better at mitigating climate problems after they happen than we are at stopping them from happening

I want to see young people take countries to court for their Covid response. The mass quarantine of healthy people is unprecedented. We've quarantined the sick for hundreds if not thousands of years like Typhoid Mary. Quarantining healthy young people who are not at risk in response to a pandemic has never been done before.

Um, mass quarantines of healthy people is not unprecedented. It was, in fact quite common through history when outbreaks seemed to be getting out of control. First they'd quarantine families. Then neighborhoods. Then entire cities. In fact, during the pre-industrial times, entire cities would be quarantined and sometimes, if anyone tried to escape, they would be executed. While a reasonable arguments can be made about whether the various flavors of Covid quarantines were necessary or effective, to say they are unprecedented is simply wrong.

Quarantine means 40 days. We had kids out of classrooms for 2+ years.

Young people are two years behind because schools were unnecessarily closed. That should be a lawsuit right there.

This does not square with my experience. I have school-age children (currently 5th and 7th grade) and they are not behind. The year everyone came back to on-premise school was rough, certainly, but most normal kids seem to have bounced back just fine. There's a huge amount of repetition in primary and secondary school curriculum anyway.

>but most normal kids seem to have bounced back just fine

There are millions of non-normal kids.

They would lose because the response was appropriate with the given information at the time. (and the lower risk we enjoy today is thanks to vaccination and natutal immunity of the survivors).

It totally wasn't, and countries that had less heavy-handed responses such as Japan and most African countries didn't have a significantly worse outcome than the one that took dictatorship-like measures.

On the other hand the negative effects of those policies are very strong, and for some ery visible. For instance France's debt skyrocketed from 100% to about 120% of GDP in a single year. Then there is impact on mental health, education, lowered public trust in the institutions etc. It's an absolute disaster with nothing to show for it.

From my understanding, Japan didn’t have as big of a response because it’s already normal in their culture to wear a mask when sick.

And African countries may have a younger less overweight population along with a climate that requires less gathering inside.

In Spain we were forced to stay at home and the order was later ruled unconstitutional and absolutely nothing happened.

Can Germans take their country to court for not taking national defense seriously?

Can the Ukrainian government be sued for not adequately defending the Crimea in 2014?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com