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Comment by Qiu_Zhanxuan | Hacker News Reader

Fifteen years have passed since the Copenhagen Summit, yet the G7 nations, particularly the United States and Germany, have failed to eliminate coal usage. This is disheartening. This is a significant failure from the Western world to both present and future generations globally, especially to India, Latin, America, Africa and South East Asia and Islanders in the Indian and Pacific ocean who cumulatively had a minimal impact in all this but will bear the brunt of the consequences.

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Everytime I hear a local complain about third world emissions, and local small minded politicians mirror that, I start to feel that democracy is a failed experiment.

What really irks me is that, if China succeeds in decarbonization while Canada fails, I would suddenly need to ask oneself if I was on the wrong side of the international divide.

Democracy didn't fail. We are just holding it wrong.

Democracies have the issue of needing majority consent which can be tricky and very time consuming to get, as there will always be a sleezy opposition politicians who will be against something just to get overs on his side and veto it at every step of the way, even if he's against something that's for the common good.

My favorite example is how Austria was the last EU country to ban indoor smoking, all the way in 2019, because of a moron party that kept shooting it down posturing as if they're fighting for the small business owner on the basis of "think of the small business owners who will loose clientele and their business making them homeless, due to the smoking ban, vote for me so I can protect you and yur business".

The solution to "save democracy" would be have more of it. The problem with our model is that everything relies on representatives who don't actually do the representation part.

We should have more direct democracy. For all it's warts, propositions like in CA, FL, etc have really moved forward the actual will of the people.

Direct democracies also have their own issues of easily manipulating people to vote against their own best interest because get this, the Average Joe with voting rights is actually incredibly stupid. See Brexit, Austria's denuclearization, etc.

It only works when gen pop is well educated and highly inteligent and not influenceable with fake news off social media.

Do you really want direct democracy in the era of fake news and low trust society? It seems to be a recipe for disaster.

Say what you want about King Charles, he at least made the effort to try to talk sense to Trump without public posturing and posing for votes.

(I can't believe I am saying something positives about the Windsors, my ancestors on the Indian subcontinent are rolling in their graves)

-edit- to avoid bumping, yes I'm obviously aware the royalty has no real power in Canada or the UK, I was commenting on the lack of popular politics being a boon in attempting to communicate with someone of very different beliefs

I think CA propositions have been a boon. CA is a democratic machine state. So you can't get representation for ideas left or right of the centrist viewpoint of CA pols - except, you can with propositions.

The bad props that passed (prop 65, prop 13) are only exceptions that prove the rule.

I would definitely not want to live under royalty. btw, King Charles doesn't make policy. He's a figurehead, not a head of state.

> My favorite example is how Austria was the last EU country to ban indoor smoking

Regardless of their reasons, they were right to oppose it, because banning smoking in private establishments is tyranny. Petty tyranny, not the headline-news type of stuff, but tyranny nonetheless. Smoking bans are wrong. It is perfectly fine for private establishments to ban smoking, or permit it, as they wish, but it is categorically wrong for the State to force them to.

Why? Just because something is private does not give you the right to do whatever the fuck you wann do with it, since you're operating a business establishment.

An bar/club/establishment is not the same kind of private property as your own house where you can do what you want and let in whoever you want, it's a business that needs to comply with state laws. And state laws say non smokers shouldn't be forced to inhale tobacco smoke in establishments.

The US is no longer a democracy. It's effectively an oligarchy now.

It's been that way for decades, it's just a lot more obvious now.

Regarding China: China accounted for 95% of the world's new coal power construction activity in 2023, according to the latest annual report from Global Energy Monitor (GEM). Construction began on 70 gigawatts (GW) of new capacity in China, up four-fold since 2019, says GEM's annual report on the global coal power industry China started construction on 70.2 GW of new coal-power capacity last year, almost 20 times the rest of the world's 3.7 GW.

Yup, but they are also basically powering solar power everywhere. Hence the "if"; my hope is that their elite is not married to fossil fuels like the economic elites in the US and Canada.

We'll have to wait and see

I’m not sure how you hope for China to reduce their carbon emissions while simultaneously building 20 times more coal power than the rest of the world combined?

Are we the bad guys? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OpZ8EkK3eWY

The thing no one mentions about developed countries past emissions is that it also led to much of the world's scientific discovery and innovation that percolated down into the developing countries too. You can't really separate modern knowledge everywhere from past emissions somewhere.

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