Starving to Death on a Full Stomach

You've taken this as a chance to farm karma and dunk on China and authoritarianism, but reading GP's comment in good faith, per the HN guidelines, suggests we need better transit, more walkable cities, and the ability to move people and their purchases without taking 3 tons of steel along for the ride. Think smaller vehicles like South-East Asia (Thailand, Veitnam), available and reliable transit (Hong Kong), and the ability to get someplace without dying, on foot (Japan)

East vs West doesn't need to always boil down to "China and Chinese allies bad". Sometimes it can be a chance for reflection, and to see where we could do better.

Tianducheng disagrees with you.

Shutting down discussions on what we should do here by saying that it’s bad over there is also disingenuous.

I'm writing from a friend's massive house heated to 21C/70F, and built to last what, thirty years at best? Of a lot of plastic materials, and stuffed with extra electronics and vehicles that also cost a considerable amount to make and dispose of. Most of this stuff is unnecessary junk.

Geoengineering, if we opt for it, absolutely must be coupled with toothy regulations governing resource harvesting and use. Don't pick the first berry you see, and don't pick the last.

We've kicked this can so far down the road that effecive reform on our habits will be worse than pulling teeth. It won't be easy, and will involve things like respecting a woman's right to govern her own body (I'm in the USA where this is increasingly a concern), respecting other animals' right to exist, treating meat as a rare luxury and maybe going so far as to stop farming meat and return to hunting, and getting our entertainment closer to the local seasonal patterns of life on Earth. Get my drift?

Another example: Electric cars are not a solution; using cars less is the way to go. It won't be an easy life, lesss reliant on technology, but it will be more meaningful.

The consequences are here already, we cannot wait for something that might be working or not eventually, in a century. We cannot depend on hypothetical future technology that will save us all. And none of the possible solutions he have now can scale to the extent needed, by multiple orders of magnitude. None of the flashy carbon capture demonstrations hold up to scrutiny because fundamentally the problem is to extract ppm out of humongous volumes.

By all means, let’s keep researching and developing solutions (that’s what’s paying my bills for now, so I am not going to complain). But don’t assume that there will be a magical “solve it” button. There won’t.

The term geoengineering may need to be dropped. It sounds scary. But that belies that we're already doing it, just unintentionally.

Cars use fossil fuels to run, and rare metals to be manufactured. These are inherently limited, thereby making our lifestyle unsustainable already (I say "our" because I am also an average-ish suburban american).

Phones, computers, tablets, etc. etc. use rare metals in production, and last a relatively short period (5 years if you're lucky, at least ime). Also unsustainable.

A lot of electricity is generated using fossil fuels.

Many foods (not just meat - a lot of fruits and vegetables too) are produced in an unsustainable way. This is not to say they cannot be produced sustainably, but commonly they are not. As an example, factory farms harvesting beef are terrible for the environment, the cows, and your health. Many vegetable farms use fertilizers that are bad for the environment, but arguably necessary to sustain enough food for the human population.

Luckily, you don't need to walk around naked and sleep in a cave. You can reduce your negative impact on the world and disconnect from a lot of the unsustainable practices and systems we have in modern society by buying your own property and living mostly off-grid (i.e., generating your own solar electricity, growing your own food, etc.). You don't even have to give up running water or the internet! The benefits snowball if you do this as a community, too.

While many aspects of this lifestyle are still unsustainable (for example, solar panels need rare metals), it is _much more_ sustainable than the de-facto standard of society we have today.

Now I'm not saying that you (or anyone) should feel morally obligated to do something like this - it's not a possibility for many people, for one reason or another. However, the more people who do it, the better!

But because that would increase costs the lobbyists forbid it. Plus you would probably need a tarrif system on top to prevent cheap dirty foreign goods from replacing all your domestic manufacture.

It will only change once people lose money and freedom. Once climate change impacts the economy negatively enough.

I'm pretty sure there is, if we're interested in any specific outcome. Below some threshold not only it wont get that outcome, but it wont even be statistically significant.

I'm not suggesting not minimizing your individual impact on the environment (and frankly, the elephant in the room that we can't talk about is the impact of producing children), but at the end of the day, if we keep on dumping carbon and greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, the destruction will continue.

Sorry - awareness? As in people will become more aware of something? Rather than it making an impact in and of itself?

You know, like the rest of the world does it.

(That is, unless you plan to shoot and kill and exterminate all bison, deer, etc, that would take over any land we leave fallow...)

I'm far from a vegan and can recognize the above. When it comes to cruelty, that's a different axis. I believe beef is actually lower on that one since the cows spend a lot of their lives wandering in fields and getting to do more or less what they want. The finishing process where they are put into feedlots seems pretty bad but is rather short, and the slaughter is about as humane as can be; they are rendered unconscious instantly with a blow to the head and then insanguinated. Chickens are sort of the opposite; they are marginal in the scheme of global warming but live lives of immense cruelty. It seems hard to win.