Hacker News Reader

Comment by tschellenbach | Hacker News Reader

There is just no democratic support for fixing global warming since it's too expensive. See the riots in France when they tried to tax gas more heavily. I like Bill Gate's book on the topic. We need technological progress in several areas -> lower the premium on solving climate change -> enable political solutions.

(Don't get me wrong, I wish a political solution was possible. Climate change is a major threat. But in a democracy leaders can't do deeply unpopular things. Lots of people want to fix climate change. The challenge is it currently requires increasing the price of construction, electricity, food, and gas)

View on HN

It'd be great to see how democratic support might be different were it not for the concerted, expensive effort to deny and downplay the problem by multiple enormous industries that have repeatedly captured governmental institutions in this effort, as well as changing public perception considerably

Concentration of power underlies a staggering amount of the problems of the current age, and if our species is to survive, insane propositions like "limited liability" need to die

I was initially partial to this explanation, but I no longer think that ‘in the absence of interference’ people would vote for the price increases needed.

The price increases would have been much more moderate if we had acted decisively forty years ago when the science was basically settled.

I don’t see how that follows. Solar panels and batteries have become massively cheaper in the past few decades and that has all relied on new materials science. I guess you could argue that windmills could have been made cheaper at scale with the right efforts 40 years ago.

Seventy years ago, when AGW climate change was recognised internationally at the UN in 1970s, during an oil crisis, the largest per capita users of fossil feuls and emmitters of CO2 were the North Americans.

They were open to change in behaviour at the time, it's a matter of public record that Koch Industries started to heavily fund a number of think tanks devoted to changing American perceptions; individual freedom is expressed by wanton consumption, bigger gas guzzlers are better, public transport is bad.

They, and their partners in the petro businesses, sank very nearly every grassroots movement for small, midle, and large city public transport launching, expansion, or improvement. They backed every move for more and more freeways.

What could have been a time that saw greater emphasis on resource efficiency and less fossil fuel consumption was not. What could have been a signal to all the then developing economies about the direction a world leader was taking remained so - and the message was consume, and consume more.

Developing better renewable energy sources was (and still is) only part of a bigger picture of changing behaviour.

Nuclear was around. But the real potential for savings was in reducing consumption by altering infrastructure investments. For example by favoring public transport and walkable cities over cars and sprawl, or requiring better insulation for new buildings. Today we don’t have the time to wait until simple tax incentives nudge people towards better behavior.

Indeed, it may be the case that now is far cheaper than any time in the past, even taking into account co2 release in the past 40 years.

People would vote for these price increases once they see that the increases are paltry compared to the opportunity cost, or to the externalities.

I think you deeply overestimate people's ability to make painful near-term decisions to avoid long-term pain that they can't see, have never personally experienced and also nobody they know or have even heard of has personally experienced.

It's human nature; we're extremely bad at making decisions related to seemingly abstract long-term problems.

People can make long term plans and execute them, but the systems that control the levers related to climate change are operated by people who don't habitually operate based on long term planning. Calling it "human nature" is a cop-out.

For themsleves? Some people can, sometimes. For the commons? If humans were so naturally inclined we wouldn't be having this conversation.

Blaming the problem on "people who don't habitually operate based on long term planning" is a likewise a cop-out while also kinda arguing my point.

I think there's a certain cultural movement that has been propagated violently across the world that rewards and requires such behavior. there are many enduring cultural traditions that teach patience and long term planning. "human nature" is complex, we naturally can do both honestly.

How about you be the beacon of change and show us by taking the near term pain e.g. cutting down consumption (eat one meal a day of vegetables, stop traveling, stop taking vacations far away, live in a one room apt, no kids, etc.

Winyarn small minded thinking there.

Makes more sense to recover energy from moving almost a billion tonnes per annum from plateau to sea level.

https://reneweconomy.com.au/fortescue-says-regenerative-infi...

.. but keep up those tiny thoughts, one day they might grow.

I disagree. Lots of people are perfectly happy to ignore externalities that happen to others. Just try to get a bike lane put in and you'll see it for yourself.

Or as a lovely neighbor put it: "if you die, why is that my problem?"

I agree. However the key point in climate change messaging is informing people that this affects themselves, their kids, and their grandkids.

Which is often a lie, or at least situational simplification . The costs of climat change and mitigation are not evenly distributed.

In my view, this is largely a lie in terms of the impact on themselves.

If the costs are paltry, and you have a government who even remotely cares about this topic, then why wouldn't they simply pay for the costs? We're $34 trillion in debt, and rapidly growing. We spend hundreds of billions of dollars on ever more inane ventures which are frequently unpopular, and probably making the world a worse place. But the only solution, to pay a "paltry" sum to solve climate change, is to raise taxes?

For instance they could easily print money, in the normal way, by issue special 'climate bonds' with a promise that all revenue from said bonds would be spent on whatever you see as this affordable solution. Those bonds would certainly sell well, people could get their virtue signaling on on social media showing them off, and - best of all - absolutely 0 divisiveness. Even somebody like me who thinks our debt's become catastrophic would just shrug, since we're probably already way past the point of no return.

There are a lot of people who can't afford these price increases _today_.

Being able to worry about the years to come is actually a privilege.

Having tried to advocate for better societal support for those people who "can't afford those price increases", I've honestly lost a lot of sympathy. I've had people explicitly tell me they want to see welfare benefits for people poorer than them cut so that they face less competition (and therefore less inflation and lower prices) for purchasing food. As if starving the poor to make your grocery bill better is a justifiable option. "why should you be entitled to food and shelter just because you were born as a human and not some ape? if you are useless and die, it's not my problem"

If you have no empathy for anyone poorer than you, sorry, why should I be caring about your misfortune again?

If I understood you correctly (maybe I didn't), you have decreased empathy for the poorer-than-you because of their lack of empathy for their poorer-than-them?

The thing is, it is only human that when you are poor, your prority shifts more towards todays and one's own problems rather than tomorrow's and other people's problems. In other words, we should feel the privilege of being able to prioritize our future and that of our children.

Nobody in the US has to starve with the current social system.

A bizarre claim given that so many are, in practice, starving. Maybe they're just holding it wrong

Please provide evidence that "so many people are starving in the US."

Here's what 10 seconds on a search engine provided from a fairly official source

https://www.ers.usda.gov/webdocs/publications/107703/err-325...

Roughly 10% of households being food insecure, defined as having inconsistent or inadequate access to food. That amounts to roughly 30 million people

Social programs existing is great, but they are in their present form inadequate to make the claim that was made

It's also worth pointing out that most likely "households" excludes all homeless people, which is not an insignificant portion of the population (as many people on HN - especially those living in SF - are quite aware)

That is not what I asked for. I asked for stats specifically on "starvation" -- the claim you made.

Statisticians really like using dry descriptions that often border on euphemistic in their work, not unlike psychologists. I think this reads to them as more objective or serious.

That said, figures I can find about how many starve to death in a year seem to hover around 10-15k, which would make up about half to a third of a percent of deaths per year (though with the COVID-19 pandemic recent numbers of total deaths are still somewhat higher than before it started)

This is a pretty conservative estimator for what we might colloquially consider "starvation", because there are a lot of deaths in which severe malnutrition is a significant factor, but are not attributed to starvation as a cause of death. But even if we treat it as a perfect proxy, it's a lot more than zero. 10k people per year are just holding the perfectly adequate socialist machine we apparently already have fully operational and available to anyone who doesn't simply desire to starve, wrong

The notion that 10k people are starving to death a year in the US is ridiculous. You need to stop living in ideologically driven fantasy land.

Are all people in the US perfectly food secure? No. Is starvation frequent? Absolutely not. The notion that 10k people die every year from “malnutrition” is also bogus. I’m not sure where you got that number from, but it is utterly made up.

I grew up in a place with very intense poverty. I know what social programs are available. Food is much, much less a problem than shelter.

So the figure I got from some simple googling came from an estimate that was claimed to be based on food insecurity statistics. 10K in a country with a population of 330M is pretty low compared to much of the world. But we can probably do better

https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/starvatio...

This source cites a figure of .89 PEM deaths, which for that population stacks out to more like 3K. Still low compared to the world, but high compared to many other rich nations.

Either way, not even gonna break the top ten causes of death, but the claim made was "no one has to starve" to which I am simply asking "then why is anyone starving?"

Personally, I'm just looking for this information on the internet, and don't have a vested interest in a particular outcome. You, on the other hand, are arguing from incredulity and just kinda flailing at me with derisive ad-hominem invective, which doesn't fill me with confidence about your command of the facts, but does make me think you must be quite a hit at parties

You haven't even provided a source for the 10k number, so I'm not sure how I'm supposed to argue against it.

> 10K in a country with a population of 330M is pretty low compared to much of the world. But we can probably do better

I agree that would be a mostly low rate, but we aren't even close to that. There are not even 10k people dying of starvation in the US.

> "no one has to starve" to which I am simply asking "then why is anyone starving?"

Most of the PEM number in the US is due to people who have some sort of wasting disease in the hospital. There are also some rare cases of people starving who are elderly and suffering from severe dementia (other rare cases: people with ED who do not receive intervention soon enough). If you want to count those as starvation, sure - but even then it doesn't cover 10k.

> just kinda flailing at me with derisive ad-hominem invective

I called you ideologically driven after your initial content-free mocking reply. You've called my claims bizarre and said I suck at parties. I don't think that this is a case of a one-sided derisive attack.

> Personally, I'm just looking for this information on the internet

A few comments ago you were certain that 'so many' in the US were starving.

bye

Having repeatedly moved the goalposts in your favor (People who are food insecure will frequently describe themselves as "starving", but this was apparently unsatisfying), I produced multiple sources, where you have produced none, and merely argued your incredulity and derision. All you've really expressed is that you're hopping mad about some kind of "ideology" that you've attributed to me. But yes, I used a pretty mild ad-hominem attack in the sentence discussing how you were relying on ad-hominem invective, that was indeed the joke, well done

The truth is, you made a pithy statement that you believed was undeniably true, which omitted significant complexity inherent in the claim. For example, social programs in the United States are seldom if ever implemented on a federal level, the verb "to starve" is not a technical and precise description of a particular phenomenon, etc. When I made an equally pithy and oversimplifying (but I would still argue more true) statement, you and others started making demands for statistical rigor, something which I don't claim to have done here to the standards of a scientific study or a court of law, but at least did any of at all. The pattern of isolated demands for rigor and what appears to be the product of some kind of emotional escalation - vagaries about how you've lived in poorer countries before and thus can speak to the conditions of 330M people simultaneously without sources while demanding sources from others, and the assertion that merely arguing with you about this is indicative of delusion. I guess that you're elevated here specifically because you claim that I must be motivated by "ideology". This statement is on its face tautological: any argument either of us makes is going to be somewhat shaped by our respective worldviews of course. But a common usage of "ideology" as a criticism by political pundits is designed to evoke conspiracies out of cold war spy stories, a rhetorical tactic designed to evoke the visceral reaction that someone following an "ideology" must be part of some sort of well-organized enemy faction, rather than merely an individual who has come to some conclusion on their own

I felt the need to edit this post to spell this out because I find the ease with which people slip into this way of thinking, especially on the internet, pretty disturbing. I would like for you to take a step back from this kind of brinksmanship here, because even if I'm wrong, I don't think that means that we are enemies, and I would like to think that if you thought about it, you would agree with at least that

Hope so! From my lifetime of observing humans though, I don't agree.

Your framing is designed to make that outcome inevitable. Of course if the proposal is keeping everything else the same but raising prices people would vote against it. Mitigating the catastrophic biome collapse we are already experiencing requires infrastructural changes, not just tweaking the economy a little

In the absence of interference in the media by rich people. Not the absence of interference in climate change.

> requires infrastructural changes, not just tweaking the economy a little

'Infrastructural changes' -> Seems like it can be subsumed in 'tweaking the economy', did you mean 'structural changes'? And if so, do you think people who are unwilling to pay $10/mo to avert climate change are going to support structural changes to the economy to do so?

what do you mean by infrastructural changes?

An often-cited example is the considerable investment we've made into spread-out living spaces that require that people are doing long, daily car-based commutes. This kind of planning creates a situation where an increase in the price of gas is devastating to people's livelihoods and ability to move through the world, which is a lot of why gas prices going up can be a make-or-break political issue for so many people. The flight to suburbs is a relatively recent phenomenon that could be reversed with different infrastructure choices. We could invest into mass-transit and, probably more importantly, better colocation of the resources people need to live, especially in an era where a lot of job functions can be done remotely (and a considerable segment of the economy clearly want to work remotely if they're allowed to)

Obviously this isn't going to just naturally occur, but we are already pretty artificially supporting the situation as it is: Part of the reason gas prices can stay low is that we already dump considerable subsidies into the already-profitable oil and gas industry

Your solution would involve massively raising the cost of suburban and rural living. If it doesn't involve that, then people won't move.

I'm generally in favor of that - but the people who won't even support $10/mo in electrical bills are not going to support tearing up suburbia.

Restructuring our infrastructure/society is not an easier ask than higher gas prices.

If you scroll down to the bottom of this thread you’ll see a ton of flagged and dead posts from people who question this stuff. There are plenty of normal people who doubt the scientific conclusions of climate scientists. It doesn’t help that the solutions to the problem almost always seem to be taking away freedoms and raising taxes.

See: farmers in the Netherlands getting their farms taken away by the government, French folks rioting over increased taxes, ULEZ cameras in London fining people for driving in the wrong neighborhood, etc.

It seems that the solutions are all sticks and there are no carrots.

The majority of people want to fix the problem, myself included. But I also deeply care about the growing authoritarianism that we are seeing across the world.

I want to decouple fixing the climate from authoritarian governance.

This is exactly right. Let's engineer solutions that are technologically based and better than what we currently have, not increase government control over people. Freedom is at least as important as the climate. A solution that is mandated is not the same as a solution that emerges organically as better both for the user AND the environment.

> Freedom is at least as important as the climate.

This is a value judgment, not an absolute statement, and should be addressed as such.

Should you have the absolute freedom to pollute as much as you want if it harms your neighbors? What if a solution exists that is better for you and the environment, should you have the freedom to not take it if you don't care about the harms to those around you? Do you view having to have emissions controls installed on your car as an unjustifiable infringement on your freedom?

People just vote with there feet against this life of monks and hermits offered. And the usual rat catchers take advantage. Which make those insisting on those non working policies of reduction, instead of boosting science, accomplices feeding democracy to the rats.

>There is just no democratic support for fixing global warming since it's too expensive. See the riots in France when they tried to tax gas more heavily.

It's not that simple. Gas is used primarily to work. People can't afford to live close to their jobs, so they pay money and take their time to get to their work, making them pay even more for gas with the absolute shitfest the housing market is means kicking someone while they are down.

Not to mention, if anyone is actually serious about reducing carbon emissions from commute? Penalize every single work that can be done remotely if it's not done so. It's an evident solution and there are A LOT of office workers, but some people don't like that idea, so instead of that poor people get screwed. Again.

The idea that it's about democratic support itself is something corporations have lobbied for, it's really not, the most evident example was covid, where consumption dropped like a rock, what was the first thing any government did to bounce back? Promote consumerism as much as possible, essentially throwing money at people. Our economic system is not equipped to deal with climate change, it's that simple. Not only are we on a train with no brakes, we are in that train, rocky terrain made us slow down and we shoved as much coal into the engine as possible to get back to speed because we can't have it any other way.

For Christ's sake, democratic support is the only reason there is any consideration for the environment at all. No corporation would ever give one single solitary shit about climate if it wasn't for "democratic support".

> For Christ's sake, democratic support is the only reason there is any consideration for the environment at all. No corporation would ever give one single solitary shit about climate if it wasn't for "democratic support".

Let's give this little gem the highlight it deserves.

The good news: the renewables explosion is going to make a big difference. Thanks to the plummeting cost (and rapid deployment, particularly in China) of solar and wind, we are almost certainly going to see better emissions pathways than the bad ones we're currently projecting. None of this happened by accident: it was engineered.

The bad news is that we seem to be much closer to some really bad climate outcomes than scientists realized. Sensitivity may be higher, warming seems to be further advanced than we thought, and there are many scary tipping points that we could easily trigger. My guess is that we're going to need some sort of (relatively near-term) geoengineering solution to keep things from spiraling, which means we really have no room left for climate denial. (And to be clear, this isn't going to be an alternative to decarbonizing, it's going to be in addition.)

> we are almost certainly going to see better emissions pathways than the bad ones we're currently projecting

I hope you are right. But when I am looking at ourworldindata chart about energy sources I still do not see this picture. While renewables are increasing, fossil fuels are not decreasing. It just seams that renewables are starting to cover ever increasing demand - not replacing all demand.

the good news is that

1. in most of the world energy usage is steady or decreasing

2. renewable energy production is accelerating

3. while renewable energy hasn't killed fossil fuel use, it has shifted it dramatically. coal is basically dead in most of the world because it has been priced out by renewables.

The lithium bubble burst is an indicator that the renewables push is losing strength.

The pandemic and later the yemen-gaza-ukraine combo shifted priorities.

Meanwhile Europe is no longer inching but running towards an ecological disaster with the ever increasing drought-deluge cycles.

I don't think so. Right now the renewables push is 90% about China: they're the biggest global emitter and also (previously) had the biggest rate of emissions growth. They're now expected to plateau this year and enter a structural decline. And China is still deploying renewables at an unbelievable rate [1] as of last month.

[1] https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/chinas-wind-solar-ca...

We are lucky that the real estate bubble finally burst in China, that was one of the key drivers of pollution there.

> The good news: the renewables explosion is going to make a big difference

Sorry but I've been hearing this for 15 years now. It's only resulted in widespread greenwashing and misplaced climate optimism. Now, even if everyone went carbon neutral overnight with renewables the situation is so dire that we may still be in a very bad spot (as you mention in the rest of your post). And, while I'm at it, let me mention that part briefly:

> The bad news is that we seem to be much closer to some really bad climate outcomes than scientists realized.

They realized it for a long, long time. No one listened, and people/media latched on to the most absurdly optimistic models as a sign that everything was fine and we could continue to procrastinate on this problem. Any "pessimistic" models were thrown out as bunk science. stuff like this is even now still referred to as "doomerism."

> Sorry but I've been hearing this for 15 years now.

Really? Care to share the cost per KWh of batteries numbers from 15 years ago? What about $/Watt for PV modules?

Or maybe just deployment numbers of solar/wind?

I mean maybe, just maybe, we can have progress on the renewables front without people crying about "greenwashing"?

> No one listened, and people/media latched on to the most absurdly optimistic models as a sign that everything was fine and we could continue to procrastinate on this problem.

Many areas in the US will be fine. Rich people ignore it because they have the money to move away from affected areas, and poor people don't really have a media voice. But that's typical USA for you, so nothing surprising there.

I don't really know how you can square this supposed "tremendous success" of renewables when statistics like this are out there:

https://statista.com/statistics/282716/oil-consumption-in-th...

Oil consumption is still increasing year over year. People like you have been saying the same things about renewables for a long, long time. I suppose it'll come any day now!

Renewables affect electricity production, not oil consumption. The renewable share is up to 41% in 2022.

Oil consumption in 2022 is below 2005. It is increasing since the dip for the pandemic but it is below 2019. The population has grown since 2005 so the per capita usage has dropped significantly since 2005.

There are more sources of carbon than oil.

Now do coal. Consumption is down 50% from peak, and back to 1970's levels.

https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=44155

Why beat around the bush when we can just look at actual US CO2 emissions which are down 20% since 2005 (see figure 5).

https://www.eia.gov/environment/emissions/carbon/

Edit: I always find it fascinating how negatively people respond to any mention of progress.

It isn’t a political problem, it’s a messaging problem. The fact we allow a large group of folks to outright lie about the problem on public airwaves results in the “division”. I’m all for freedom of speech, but when public figures are knowingly telling lies, whoever is broadcasting it should be FORCED to follow it up with the facts of the situation.

In other words, at least in the US, the fairness doctrine needs to be re-instated. The number of things this country has killed off “because it worked so well we don’t need it any more” is mind numbing.

Many of the countries we are discussing have much less significant influence of money on media and still - raising prices is very unpopular.

The left needs to come to terms with the fact that sometimes the things they are proposing are unpopular independent of some “dark money influence scheme.”

> Many of the countries we are discussing have much less significant influence of money on media

In absolute terms you are correct, but in relative? Is there really a country where the media isn't strongly influenced by the rich and powerful of said country and the world?

This is a theory of the world that seems pretty non-falsifiable. "The real, uninfluenced people agree with my policy priorities and the only reason they don't is due to money at play." Any example of people disagreeing just proves that there is monetary influence that we haven't yet identified.

But I actually think it is somewhat falsifiable. Most people, when polled, are in favor of solving climate change - especially in nordic countries. But when you poll people with imposed costs, ie. $10/mo extra to completely solve climate change - the vast majority are opposed. [0]

This seems like people organically responding negatively to costs, not being brainwashed by media - otherwise they wouldn't support solving it in the first place.

[0]: https://www.cato.org/blog/68-americans-wouldnt-pay-10-month-...

I didn't state a theory, I wrote a simple counter-argument to your position. If you're correct, you should be able to produce evidence that proves your position correct. I don't think you are correct, but I'm happy to be proven wrong.

the original commentator indicated that the reason people are against it is due to the influence of money in politics.

i feel like i provided evidence against that theory, ball is not in my court

What happened in France was not just "because they tried to tax gas more heavily".

What the government did was textbook "let them eat cake". They suddenly decided to significantly increase taxes on diesel "for the environment" when people, especially trades people and people outside big cities, had no choice.

Therefore, predictably, the people rebelled.

As long as governments refuse to understand that, we won't get anywhere, indeed.

As long as people refuse to understand that reducing carbon emissions will mean substantial reductions in their standard of living then we wont get anywhere either.

Are you volunteering to lose your livelihood?

Just watch how expensive not fixing it will be.

I feel like this take is dismissive and unhelpful. Expecting people to sacrifice their current wellbeing for the sake of a nebulous, far off reckoning is simply unrealistic and a bit of a dead end in terms of climate progress. We would be better served finding lower impact solutions that are more easily adopted than high impact ones that are never going to be accepted.

Australia is already having a bit of reckoning due to climate change in the way of mega fires and multiple "hundred year" floods per year in populated areas. At the last federal election, a newish political movement of independents took a large number of seats in parliament. This was possible due to preferential voting (like stacked voting in USA). The left party won power and has done very little on addressing climate change.

I'm now convinced that political will just isn't there even if the people are there (Large emitters donate to politicians). So I see an inevitable path where geoengineering will be seriously on the agenda inside 15 years.

We’ve been talking about this problem since the 90’s. If there were lower impact solutions they are either long past the moment they needed to be implemented (back when denial was still the norm) or they just don’t exist and aren’t coming soon. Magical thinking isn’t helpful, we have to fix this problem with the solutions that exist, not the solutions we wish existed.

Go to war with the army you have, no?

Or not, and just decide that future generations are going to have to suck it up, which is the default choice anyway.

We aren't exactly asking people to sacrifice their wellbeing and convenience completely. That's why for example we aren't asking the population to ditch their cars and switch to trains and bikes, but we are offering them electric cars, which are exactly the kind of lower impact solutions you are speaking of.

An electric car isn't really a lower impact solution for a large amount of the US population. From what I'm able to find, the lowest priced EV (Chevy Bolt) starts around $27k currently[0], whereas the cheapest gas car (Nissan Versa) starts at $17k[1]. This is without even accounting for the larger difference in the used car market, cost of installing a level 2 EV charger (which is another $1k-$2.5k[2], which is necessary for anybody who does any significant amount of traveling in a single day), or the 25% higher insurance premiums for EVs[3]. All said the difference between the two options is a pretty significant difference for most of the population who are already struggling because of the significant inflation rates experienced in recent years[4].

[0] https://www.chevrolet.com/electric/bolt-ev

[1] https://www.nissanusa.com/vehicles/cars/versa-sedan.html

[2] https://www.jdpower.com/cars/shopping-guides/how-much-does-i...

[3] https://www.valuepenguin.com/how-having-electric-car-affects...

[4] https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/inflation/current-infl...

Electric cars help, but are not the solution. If everyone in Asia and Africa bought electric cars, it would be a disaster.

That's my point. We aren't looking for "the solution" we are looking for something that helps.

> We would be better served finding lower impact solutions

There aren’t any lower impact solutions that will cut carbon emissions by 40% in the next 5 years.

We know that, but it doesn't change a thing. Your or my opinion has little influence. Therefore baby steps should be taken which will reduce that cost.

Why baby steps vs radical technological innovation?

We waste our time with virtual signalling nonsense, that hurt the least affluent here, whilst China/India/Africa are going to be outputting vastly more CO2 to make any of our efforts net-irrelevant to climate change.

We need to fix it for the world. That'll require big-impact innovation.

As expensive as “not staying in our homes for two weeks turned out to be”. Mind you, I was in the camp demanding just that at the beginning of the pandemic.

Which is to say that the technocratic powers that be should tone it down a little when it comes to imposing their top-down decisions, after all they’re just a minority compared to us, the common people, we (the common people) can always bring to power some of our leaders in order to fight (ideologically and not only) said technocrats.

How is that relevant? The voting public will typically delay expensive cost-saving measures. Because the majority of individuals will do the same.

Also forced public expenditures are a huge money making opportunity for the capital class, so they will tend to encourage delay as well.

If you tell people they have to stop all travel and electricity use and plastics purchases, they won't do a thing.

There are no levers to pull besides technological ones.

The plastics one needs to be done through legislation and collaboration with industry… there are so many products where consumers don’t have a choice - the manufacturers need to take the responsibility for eliminating single-use packaging that doesn’t biodegrade or recycle. Yes it may be painful, but there’s no other way to do it

Prove that it actually a problem. In the 70's it was global cooling and a new ice age that we were to live on fear of. Do we really expect the climate to remain stable? Something that has never actually happened?

That was all your fault as well. "The Climate Change Saga unfolds as we visit 1978 and Leonard Nimoy explains how the human population is causing The Earth to Freeze".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0-ZDnSbNIYs

What's your plan for when the boy cries "Wolf!" and he's actually there?

Check that it is actually there. I have heard doom monger predictions for over 3 decades and none of them have come true to date. I live by the sea and the level hasn't risen by any perceivable amount. 30 years ago I was told that major cities would be underwater by now.

Sure, but isn't the argument that the current situation is akin to a frog in a pot?

There's no hard threshold under this line of thinking and, I imagine, if something terrible were to happen to a vulnerable population abroad, then the west would react in a way which would enable its population to treat the issue as if it were "far away".

Rising authoritarianism would just seem like something related to politics in this hypothetical future. From there, any attempts at top-down mitigation would just seem like "bad guys with power doing things bad guys do".

Expensive for folks in the future*

That is what is running through people's heads. And apparently they are not a part of this future either.

the reality is that the costs will mostly be borne by future generations.

the cost we need to confront climate change is likely larger than the cost in this generation if we let it rip.

How do you define "future generations" anyways? People that aren't born yet? Because that sounds way more optimistic than I am.

If the notion of future generations sounds way too optimistic, you are likely far too pessimistic (if this is about climate change).

There is no realistic scenario for lack of future gens due to climate change in the next 100 years even with absolutely terrible undiscovered positive feedbacks.

I'm not saying there won't be future generations. This is what I was replying to:

> the cost we need to confront climate change is likely larger than the cost in this generation if we let it rip.

I'm saying the cost to confront it will be less than the cost to "let it rip" before some current generations die off from old age.

I think that you are wrong, I am well versed in climate science. The costs to avert now are significant, even more significant than the changes needed for sea level adaptation in our lifetime.

Most of the costs will be borne out by subsequent generations.

Those in power are counting on the cost having to be paid by future generations. I assume they either don't have children/grand-children, don't like their children/grand-children, or are so narcissistic that it never occurs to them to think about their children/grand-children.

Their children will have enough money to carve out their own missile silo. The poors need not apply.

You haven't been following the recent developments in renewable energy and the deployment of clean tech then. We don't need new technological advancements. We just need to continue to produce more solar, batteries, wind and keeping existing nuclear plants afloat.

We have all we need. It is just a matter of upgrading the grid and building enough to transition.

We don’t need to wait for technical solutions to make things cheaper. We need a revenue neutral carbon tax with dividend. For most people, especially the poor, they’d come out ahead, and it would allow the market price signals to gently steer everyone toward a lower carbon life.

How do you get people to vote for this given that it will increase prices/lower their standard of living today?

It's revenue-neutral, so all money collected gets redistributed out evenly, per-capita (the "dividend" part). The way that then works out is that if you're responsible for less carbon emission than average in your country, then you end up ahead, potentially well ahead. Since carbon emission maps pretty well to material consumption, and things like flying a lot, that means that most people will end up ahead, and this mainly costs more for people on the richer end of the spectrum. Likely the breakeven point is well above the median, given how wealth and income are distributed in a bit of a power law distribution. An extremely rich person gets the same amount back as anyone else, but his yacht and private jet become a hell of a lot more expensive to run.

This also has the benefit of making local manufacturing more competitive with overseas, since transportation becomes a larger part of the cost of goods. This would give blue collar workers back some of the leverage they've lost over the past decades.

So most people voting in just their short-term self-interest would do well to vote for this. And everyone gets the long-term benefit of civilization being less likely to collapse with massive resource shortages.

The challenge is explaining it well enough that people understand well that it's in their benefit. But I think "all the money from the tax goes into your bank accounts every month" would help a lot.

That was tried in Ontario (cap and trade), but there was enough misinformation going around that the general populace thought it was just a standard tax on individuals.

Washington State does cap and trade on industry. And yes, it has just become a 'standard tax' on individuals passed from industry to the pump to the tune of 40-50 cents/gal. While I agree that it is important to reduce consumption of fossil fuels, the infrastructure isn't there to enable people to commute from lower-cost areas of living to higher-cost areas of working.

This will likely be repealed by voters via initiative[0] this fall.

[0] https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/environment/initia...

More fun reading on our defacto gas tax:

https://www.king5.com/article/news/investigations/former-wsd...

Did the people there start getting money every month into their bank account (the “dividend” part)? If not, I imagine that that would’ve cleared that misinformation up rather quickly.

I’ve always thought a carbon tax where the revenue is distributed directly to citizens in the form of a monthly check or bank deposit could be popular, or at least accepted by the public. Especially if it starts small and then ramps up over time.

Yes, I wish more things were paired like that.

Another one: land/property tax increases paired with income tax decreases.

I've heard the talking point regarding innovation for awhile now. To me it sounds a bit like an alcoholic with a failing liver hoping that medicine will come up with some miracle cure so they can keep drinking as much as they want.

I think it's the opposite. The push for politics to do something is having an impact, we are making progress in lowering emissions. But it's not enough, and there are constraints on democratically elected leaders. Eventually, public sentiment will change, but not soon enough.

It is understandable if the riches and powerful people are flying around the world in private jets. Maybe they don't generate the most as a whole but a lot as individuals. It is very difficult to convince anyone to lower their standards of life (eating other food / shower less / drive a smaller car) which will make a big impact while the riches just do lip services.

I don't see a future for that. Humans only turn around when they hit a wall multiple times -- we are not the exceptions.

not a popular opinion, but I agree completely - if you are trying to sell a message of sacrifice to the common person, being preached to, by people who own and travel in private jets , while they return to one of their many 20 bedroom mansions located just feet above the sea that is supposed to have a devastating rise any day now - it is very, very easy to see why people just shrug it all off as scare tactics when they are asked to give up their tiny little gas lawn mover or gas stove.

May not be fair, and may not be scientific - but the message delivery matters - ignore it at your own peril.

I think if the deal presented to voters was warming is a big problem because of evidence... If you vote to spend an extra 3k a year we can fix it then people would maybe be ok.

The current deal we have in the UK say is we'll do stuff that costs thousands, is not very effective, will reduce CO2 output far less than the amount Russia, China and India will raise theirs. You will suffer while CO2 output keeps going up as always.

Which is sort of a hard sell. I mean we are doing that in the UK with hardship and no global results. Not sure it's the answer.

Personally I'd favour a global solution like a carbon tax and counties that don't play ball can have their trade sanctioned. Also money into research into solar etc which I think is the real answer.

There are a lot of factors at work here at the same time.

It's far off (or perceived that way) and people naturally seek relief of immediate pain. It's human nature. You tell somebody that they'll save $X over the next 10 years by spending a fraction of it now, most won't bother. On the other hand, if you're currently spending $X on something and you need to invest in something to get that cost down, they'll do it almost immediately.

Because it's far off, there's not a sense of urgency to it.

Additionally, there are some fairly strong factors that call a lot of climate change activism into question, like wide spread opposition to nuclear power by many of the same activists. Examples like Germany shuttering nuclear facilities only to turn around and turn to coal power certainly doesn't help.

Other factors such as the need for change across the entire world complicate matters when numerous businesses will just send their pollution to countries that don't impose the same requirements.

Separating hyperbole from practical application in pursuit of pre-existing goals is another huge factor. We've heard about methane emissions from cattle ranches for years. It seems like we have a great solution for this by adding an ingredient to the feed:

https://www.dcceew.gov.au/climate-change/publications/from-b...

But rather than pursuing this, activists are more interested in continuing to attack the industry and pushing vegan diets when a potential solution seems readily available.

Factor that in with alarmism over temperature increases as if every potential increase is man made while other factors are ignored by most outlets...

https://climate.nasa.gov/news/3204/tonga-eruption-blasted-un...

https://eos.org/articles/tonga-eruption-may-temporarily-push...

There's just a great deal of inconsistency and alarmism that undermines credibility when ignored.

All that is required to solve climate change is the elimination of the Military Industrial Complex, the largest polluter on earth by far and the most useless thing on earth by far.

Got any sources on that? I'd like to learn more.

>There is just no democratic support for fixing global warming since it's too expensive.

There's plenty of support, the US has lowered its carbon emissions quite a bit. There's one big problem though: what do we do about China and India? Are you prepared to get drafted and go to war to get China to stop burning coal?

2023 made it very clear that China knows the stakes and also sees an opportunity with owning the clean tech future. They built more renewable energy just last year than has been installed in all of the United States in its history. BYD just passed Tesla as the biggest producer of EVs. The opportunity is there and with China's faltering economy that was propped up by housing, I expect Xi to do all he can to be the provider of the world with renewables.

>2023 made it very clear that China knows the stakes

What happened in 2023?

https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/CHN/china/carbon-co2-e...

You have to burn carbon to build renewable energy components if you don't have enough energy from existing solar + wind; I don't know what you expect. But now they have ~500GW of energy to build next year's >>500GW [1]. It's an investment and every year it pays off.

China's emissions peak wasn't supposed to happen this decade but that has been revised [2]

1: https://www.reuters.com/world/china/chinas-solar-capacity-ex...

2: https://www.reuters.com/world/china/chinas-carbon-emissions-...

Which country should go convince China, the one that has twice the CO2 emissions per capita?

If 3 people are releasing chlorine gas in a large room and only one of them slows down, it doesn't make a huge difference what the per capita emissions rate is, does it?

There's strong popular support to fix climate change. We know this from polls.

We also know that there are well-organized foreign propaganda teams attacking democracies around the world. The fact that some ill-informed right-wing radicals in France rioted doesn't mean there is no popular support for having a habitable planet in twenty years.

You cannot poll on things without tradeoffs if you want a real answer.

Most Americans have been polled as unwilling to pay $10/mo more in electrical bills if it meant that climate change were completely averted.

I think comments about 20 years uninhabitibility are unproductive as most people see it for the lie that it is.

And yet every single proposed policy to fix climate change is deeply unpopular.

People support "fixing climate change", but when they are asked to deal with a rising gas tax, or traveling less, etc, suddenly climate change isn't worth fixing.

There is strong democratic support so long as someone else pays for it.

> The fact that some ill-informed right-wing radicals in France rioted doesn't mean there is no popular support for having a habitable planet in twenty years.

and alarmism does not help the cause.

What car do you have?

> I like Bill Gate's book on the topic.

So what's the book?

Perhaps we should have a referendum, so people can show their support in a democratic way...

Nobody is stopping people doing unpopular things to solve climate change. You just have no right to coerce others into that!

> There is just no democratic support for fixing global warming since it's too expensive.

There is no democratic support for fixing global warming in a capitalist system geared towards extracting value. If you ask people if they think global warming should be tackled in principle you will find many in support. The problem is that most people know that the way in which a fix for global warming would be implemented today would result in them bearing the costs while some shareholders somewhere get just a little richer.

If we want to stop humanity from extinction we have to step off the gas pedal and disincentivize those who keep wanting to step on it.

Why does it need to be fixed? What's wrong with it getting a little warmer?

> in a democracy leaders can't do deeply unpopular things.

Oh, you sweet summer child.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com