Most people don't realize how much progress we've made on climate change | Hacker News Reader

Most people don't realize how much progress we've made on climate change

yaleclimateconnections.org

60 pointslamontcg69 comments

When you talk to regular people (not activists and not politicians), their general attitude around climate change tends to be that nothing is really being done and that the Earth is doomed. I don't think that mindset actually encourages more activism and more action - rather, it encourages people to throw up their hands and ignore the issue (to avoid getting depressed).

So I've never really understood the concerted effort to downplay or silence good news about climate change. You can't keep telling people that everything they're doing is futile yet expect them to stay motivated to keep doing it.

People, in aggregate, are uneducated, uninformed, and unsophisticated (I mean this entirely as an observation and no way passing judgement or a sleight; "I ain't mad, it is what it is"). Pay attention to the stats and ignore the masses. As long as long policy levers are pulled hard and trajectories are locked in (electric mobility, renewables, fossil fuel consumption destruction [1]), that is what is material to the outcome.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38507695 (citations)

You sound like a fucking tyrant, my guy.

Because I have to live in a rapidly changing world where the climate might be unlivable for billions of people (heat, crop failures, sea level rise, more powerful storm events) [1]? Yeah, certainly to people who have gotten their way for 100 years dumping their externalities on the planet [2], making changes might sound like tyranny when you're used to "freedom" to do whatever you want without consequences. Freedom has limits, and boundaries where one's rights end and the other's rights begin. Can't take the lizard brain out of the human I suppose. It's silly really, as besides having to switch to renewables, EVs, a bit less meat consumption and air travel [3] [4] [5] [6], not much hardship is being asked for (the most impactful thing one can do is have less or no kids, and lots of folks are opting for that already [7] [8] [9]).

I have kids, and handing them a world they can survive in for the next 100 years is important to me. We might have different objectives, mental models, beliefs in climate change and the potential risk outcomes, etc. I believe in climate change and that extraordinary effort is required to mitigate it, and that is the position I operate and argue from.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38072491 (citations)

[2] https://ourworldindata.org/contributed-most-global-co2 ("Our World in Data: Who has contributed most to global CO2 emissions?")

[3] https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aa7541 ("The climate mitigation gap: education and government recommendations miss the most effective individual actions")

[4] https://www.science.org/do/10.1126/science.aan7083/full/gree... (emissions savings graphic by action)

[5] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37502924 (citations)

[6] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/oct/20/beef-usd... ("High steaks society: who are the 12% of people consuming half of all beef in the US?")

[7] https://www.vox.com/23971366/declining-birth-rate-fertility-... ("You can’t even pay people to have more kids")

[8] https://ourworldindata.org/fertility-rates/ ("Our World in Data: Fertility Rates")

[9] https://ourworldindata.org/images/published/World-population... ("Our World In Data: World population by level of fertility over time 1950-2010")

("In God We Trust, All Others Must Bring Data")

I don’t have children, nor do I want them, and handing yours a world they can survive in for the next 100 years is important to me.

I don’t understand what is so difficult about this.

Onward, and thank you. If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.

Thank you for all the resources.

As someone who's never wanted children, I'm always surprised by the apparent unconcern about the planet from those who do. I suppose I accept that we may destroy the Earth once I've finished with it (As Jim Morrison so elegantly stated, "I'm just trying to get my kicks in before the whole shithouse goes up in flames"), but I don't like it, and as a kid I had always imagined that the adults would figure it out. Having become something approximating an adult myself now, I'm beginning to doubt that we'll come up with enough solutions in time, so I suppose any good news on that front is welcome.

Please don't break the site guidelines like this, no matter how wrong someone is or you feel they are. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

This is a known tactic by the well funded propaganda campaign waged by oil companies.

If it’s too late we can’t do anything about it, so might as well do nothing.

I live in a very different world. In my world, 99%+ of people are in denial about climate change and what it means for the future of humanity. It's uncomfortable and there is no quick solution, so you just stop thinking about it. It's a very well documented psychological reaction for events out of your (immediate) control.

Big oil doesn't have to do anything here, just sit back and cash in.

There are also multiple comments on HN stating the opposite is true, scientists are lying about how bad the situation is for fear of people just giving up or worse, panicking. No facts around this, just wanted to mention we are far from a consensus here.

No, most people are coming to realize that there is no "existential threat" from climate change (Something that has happened naturally over the history of the Earth), and that it's more about control of people than anything else.

Yep, jumping from one catastrophe to the next - keeping people in fear and coming up with the solutions where we gradually lose freedoms .

Those very same people are surprised about an increase in migration towards colder nations and want to close off borders

>Something that has happened naturally over the history of the Earth

This is a meaningless statement. The earth existed in the past, therefore it is ok if something unprecedented happens.

The word activism itself makes regular people cringe and leave, particularly after activists blocking major roads, throwing stuff at paintings, etc...

That aside, I think one way regular people could be swayed back into caring about climate change is by showing them hard facts about the progress that has already been done, akin to what this article is doing.

I sometimes wonder if pieces like this are really just an insight into the writer’s coping strategies. For better or worse, they need good news to keep going. I don’t know if it applies to everyone.

What else can one do? South Texas, where I live, seems to be going through desertification. Giving up on the future doesn't seem like an option for many.

It isn’t the worst thing in the world to occasionally take a moment to be like “okay… we made some progress. Cool.”

As long as people know we have a whole lot more to do shrug is it coping or just stress management?

It can be fatiguing to perpetually feel screwed.

more than that

I think coping strategy implies some sort of cognitive dissonance or falsehood.

Meanwhile, US CO2 emissions peaked in 2007 and are down 20%, which is Franky astounding. Global CO2 emissions is predicted to peak this year or next, although a retrospective analysis may show that it already peaked earlier in 2016 or 2018. [1]

If net zero is the goal, of course we are a long way from that, but it is crazy to think that there hasnt been progress.

https://gml.noaa.gov/ccgg/trends/gr.html

the curve about CO2 concentration in the atmosphere available at your link is very linear maybe slightly accelerating. If anything it's showing that not much is changing...

I selected trends in co2, global.

you have to look at growth rate. you dont have guess the linearity and slope of the line. The growth rate is measured directly, reported per year, and graphed.

The largest global CO2 increases (slope)on record were in 2015, then 2016, and the trend is downward since then.

Annual CO2 increase in 2022 was 26% less than the peak 2015. (2.17 ppm vs 2.95 ppm).

https://gml.noaa.gov/ccgg/trends/gl_gr.html

Look at the graph. Downward trend of a couple of years have been common, it is much too early to assume anything based on this. Example: in 1998, the last record was 1987.

I'm not holding my breath (no pun intended).

Who is making any assumptions? I simply said:

>Meanwhile, US CO2 emissions peaked in 2007 and are down 20%, which is Franky astounding. Global CO2 emissions is predicted to peak this year or next, although a retrospective analysis may show that it already peaked earlier in 2016 or 2018.

The historic data is fact. The trend may or may not continue. Slope may increase again, hold static, or keep decreasing.

Im not saying everything is sunshine and puppies. for example, it seems that the slope of methane is still increasing.

oh I agree on the facts, I disagree on the significance you give them. It is not astounding, it is something which happened multiple times already. Secondly, I disagree on the prediction you mention.l (I would nonetheless new interested in a link on the latter, I am genuinely in search of good news, even if I'm aware I do not necessarily sound like it...)

https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-global-co2-emissions-co...

On track for a new record this year though...

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/dec/05/global-c...

There is some good progress, but there is so much still to do, especially when you consider the other impacts to the eco-systems around the world (pollution, species extinction etc).

We know that there will more energy in the weather systems as a result of the high levels of CO2, leading to more frequent severe weather.

A real concern is climate tipping points, where the weather patterns shift and stick in new patterns. Living in Scotland, the Gulf Stream weakening further or stopping would be a real change to a much colder climate. It’s already cold enough.

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

Progress in which direction?

Article subtitle: The rapid rise of renewables and EVs has already put us on a safer path.

Very few people on Earth have a Tesla. I can't begin to imagine the fuckening of the planet that has to happen in order to get the rest of the world up to our level of consumption & gridlock.

Electric Cars aren't the answer, active and public transport through making our towns and city's more distributed and decentralized

The more decentralized a place is the harder it is to offer good transit service. Some of the most famous and used american systems like chicago or nyc are hub and spoke centralized systems.

Most people live in cities. Even better, only a few countries vastly over consume per capita. The solution is straightforward technically, but not politically. Westerners (and especially Americans) will balk at public reducing consumption in line with the rest of the world.

Well people really seem to like the suburban model, in which case we need lower density mixed use commercial where we can have small grocers, cafes pubs, low rise offices intertwined with the suburbs, rather than the current euclidean zoning model

Honestly thats not all that different than what exists in euclidian suburbs. You just have the offices/pubs/grocers on the arterial while housing is on residential blocks just off the arterial. I’ve always been able to walk to this sort of stuff even in lower density suburbs. Maybe I haven’t lived in the worst cases of them though.

Preach.

Electric cars are not “the solution,” just a cleaner version of the old system. And this is a system that, even before climate became an awareness before it was a concern, was well on its way to creating the sixth mass extinction.

We need balance with nature and natural systems and not just reduction in global warming potential. Though obviously global warming will accelerate these trends, the fellow life that keeps us all alive on this planet like honeybees and plankton is in serious trouble.

So let’s keep that big picture in mind. We need higher density cities, massive changes to transportation systems to support them (beyond the personal car) in order to come back into balance with nature and the future of life on earth. Clean cars are a bridge technology to a future not an answer to what that future needs to look like.

Have you ever ridden a bus? You can't decentralize public transit.

Also, do you know the impact of tearing up old cement and putting new cement somewhere else?

People are cray, man... we have to make do with what we have 9 times out of 10 rather than tear it up and replace it. "Strong Towns" and the like are full of it.

What on earth do you mean full of it? Improving our communities? Places are not static and unchanging, they are living and breathing that can and must change to better reflect society and ecology

Do you think concrete is recyclable?

EVs are an important move but they seem to get too much airtime: Worldwide EVs can remove at most 1/6th of the CO2. EVs definitely change our manufacturing base to be more electricity friendly, and they seem to be making consumers more concientious towards reducing CO2 usage.

Worldwide in 2020 (Gt = billion ton of CO2:

  Electricity and heat 15.09Gt
  Transport 8.08Gt
  Manufacturing and construction 6.17Gt
  Agriculture 5.70Gt
  Fugitive emissions 3.25Gt
  Buildings 3.00Gt
  Industry 2.79Gt
  Waste 1.56Gt
  Land-use change and forestry 1.40Gt
  Aviation and shipping 1.24Gt
  Other fuel combustion 0.637Gt

It’s insane how much the air quality in Southern California has improved. There’s still bad days but you can see the mountains now and that should be celebrated.

Progress will be when the accumulated CO2 decreases. When the "ppm" stays stable for a year and starts to decrease.

At the very least, the private jet, mega-yacht, and cruise ship industries would be outlawed and eliminated. Decades ago.

Building a trillion EVs will make this situation worse, not help this. They do not remove CO2 out of the atmosphere. They do not spring into existence from no-where. The production, transportation, and maintenance of "green vehicles" create massive amounts of emissions.

We shouldn't be too quick to pat ourselves on the back.

While 30% of global electricity is produced by renewables and increasing quickly, net negative carbon balance is nowhere on the horizon. A solution to this includes considerable ($20 T globally over 10 years) investment in biological- and high-efficiency, industrial-scale CCS. Carbon neutrality cannot be the goal. It must go much farther, somewhere around 300 ppm.

Even though my cynical side mentally checks the positive stats, it’s nice to read something encouraging for a change.

Now where’s my affordable BeV?

It’s in China. Lately it feels like the real question is not “can we deploy these technologies scalably” but rather: “can the West possibly catch up with China.” It’s thrilling that things are moving so fast in China, but simultaneously really worrying that we in the US and Europe are so far behind on the deployment of renewables and battery tech. It also feels like our financialized system deploys capital on a ridiculously short time horizon, while China has correctly realized that it can make uncontested long-term bets in these critical areas and destroy the competition.

The reason why China is able to move so fast is ironically the reason why there's so much division between the West and the east.

China is centrally controlled. There's no debate about climate change in this context. In the US everything is a debate. Every single thing. So we spend more time debating then getting things done.

China is producing more CO2 in a week than many more countries in a year. Same with coal production. They also build many new coal plants (together with atomic ones). China should be first place to address emission.

> China is producing more CO2 in a week than many more countries in a year.

Well, yeah, China is more than 52 times the population of many other countries, so that's hardly surprising.

Right. It needs to be measured per capita.

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

From here it's easily seen that An individual in the US is on average one of the worst offenders while an individual from China is doing extremely well.

You're right. We should be glad it's centrally controlled. If business interests in china were able to insert their own democratic opinion into the debate the problem would be much worse.

It begs the question how good is democracy when huge powerful corporate entities with only business interests in mind are able to participate in a democracy? There's no clear answer here.

There is plenty of debate and compromise about climate change in China, it just happens behind closed doors. This includes basically all the same questions in the US: Is it real, how bad will it be, what is the acceptable cost for mitigation, how much mitigation is worth it. Stance and strategy on all of these things can and do change in China.

Furthermore, this is a public discussion about climate change in China. The Chinese public ranks climate change as higher priority than in the US. There are several reasons for this, not all of which are top down propaganda. For example, the Chinese population has more recent, immediate, and extreme experience with the negative impacts of environmental disruption.

Right, of course there is always compromise. But this compromise is made by a third party authority with NO business interest: The authoritarian government. This type of compromise is unbiased and that's why it's able to move faster and be more effective. And like you said, public opinion can be shifted via propaganda and manipulation towards more environmentally positive outcomes.

In the US compromise is different. Compromise is active corporate entities with zero interest in the environment trying to further their own self serving goals. When two people are debating with each other they use any means necessary to stop the other party which usually results in a a standstill outcome where nothing is changed. You can see why it's less effective. Additionally, because of freedom of the press propaganda, from both sides can influence public opinion which leads to division of opinion.

Teslas are affordable - just earn more.

Honestly I was surprised with how during the shutdowns we were still able to produce everything we needed. There were no food or power shortages. Wild animals started to return to cities. It demonstrated that most economic activity is really not necessary for our standard of living. We can do so much better. We have lots of wiggle room.

Consider that most people did not enjoy the shutdowns and they quickly became extremely unpopular politically.

People didn't enjoy the inability to socialize freely, go to the movies or the hairdresser. I know others who had the time of their lives hanging out with friends in the backyard, drinking beers and grilling.

Well there's shutdowns and there's shutdowns; "hanging out with friends in the backyard, drinking beers and grilling" was pretty much illegal during some of them.

Reducing economic activity to deal with climate change wouldn't be the type of shutdown to make socializing illegal. Quite the opposite actually.

Also I don't recall it ever being illegal to meet people outdoors with social distancing.

Okay, I’ll bite.

How much was economic activity reduced during the shutdowns?

By how much did did reduce emissions, was it 2 percent or 5 percent?

By how much would we need to reduce economic activity to reduce emissions by 100%( Which is the amount of reduction needed for dealing with climate change)?

What if we, instead of shutting down the economy, redirected it to build renewables and nuclear?

What if we did both

It would be less effective than just taxing co2.

If you’re not sure about the price you can do an auction of a limited contingency of emission certificates.

From skimming this article's abstract[1] emissions went down 8-17% in April 2020. It doesn't say how much the GDP went down by. Lots of people lost jobs in April. But only 6 months later we had the tightest labor market in decades, so swings and roundabouts.

It isn't a binary choice between stopping all economic activity and 100% renewables and nuclear. There is a range of choices and priorities.

For instance, what would we really lose by eliminating private jets, super yachts, and cruise ships tomorrow?

1. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10281825/

The only way to redirect an economy like you describe is with central planning which is absolutely not the American Way (tm).

No, you can just impose a tax on CO2. You can even lower other taxes to compensate.

It has a similar effect of redirecting resources, while actually working.

Taxes are usually just passed to the consumer and you can be sure a co2 tax will increase the cost of just about everything sold, EVs included.

We absolutely could live like the 1920s/50s but with a bit more high-tech and better healthcare sprinkled in. But our entire financial system (including having the ability to retire) is based on the fundamental assumption of economic growth (and population growth for that matter).

I mean... that seems like a reasonable price to pay if we can get rid of nature killing pollution and potentially species ending global warming. That's just me.

No Greenhouse Gas chart past 2015, so other metrics cited through 2023 mean little.

Considering that entire nations were supposed to be wiped off the face of the Earth if climate changed weren’t reversed by 2000, I think we’ve done lots of progress.

Where can I read about that claim being made?

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