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Comment by jmclnx | Hacker News Reader

The real question is not "what does it mean", but "what will be done ?".

The answer is nothing and at this point without a massive change of life style, it is probably too late.

50 years ago, Pres. Carter wanted to get Climate Change on the radar, but Reagan stopped that and doubled down on Fossil Fuels.

We are probably 50 years from massive coastal flooding, time to start working on mitigations for the flooding. But of course nothing will be done with that until it is too late.

Look at insurance companies, they know what will happen and that is reflected in them pulling out of some parts of the country. 50 years from now, insurance will probably cost 25% to maybe 50% of the house value per year. Similar to Auto Insurance in high risk urban environments.

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It's never too late. Better yesterday than today, better today than tomorrow, better tomorrow than the day after tomorrow.

When you have a leak in the plumbing in your home and you only notice when your whole house is already soaked, do you just learn to live with it, continuously cleaning up, installing pumps, ... ? Or will you fix the leak (and deal with all the water until things are dry again)?

The house is gigantic, housing billions of people. Very few people know how the plumbing works, not one person can "fix" it. Most people don't even consider the dripping water to be an issue at all, indoor plants are thriving. Others say the water has always leaked and it will stop leaking on its own. We for sure have to learn to live with it until it is bad enough for collective action to speed up. Unless we keep moving a way from being a shared-reality, knowledge based species.

> The answer is nothing and at this point without a massive change of life style, it is probably too late.

Just this morning I looked out the window where I live and saw several cars idling with no one inside, presumably to warm them up because it's cold out. Most people still have not made a connection between their actions and their actions' consequences and how it relates to our environment. My point is we're not even cutting out the most obviously wasteful behaviors because they're contributing to what's most precious to us: convenience.

Climate change will have to become much worse before people pay attention and change their behavior.

> it is probably too late.

It is definitely too late to avoid breaching 1.5 degrees. It is probably too late to avoid breaching 2.5 degrees. It is not too late to avoid breaching 4 degrees, or 6 or 8.

We cannot give up.

Can't give up if you never try!

[insert head pointing meme here]

We've literally spent trillions of dollars already to combat and mitigate change. We spend $500B annually just on solar panels. Add in the amounts we've spend on wind turbines, EV's, methane capture, etc, and we're spending over $1T per year combatting climate change.

It's not enough, but this meme that we're not trying is silly.

Graph of CO2 level in the atmosphere doesn't show even a tiny sign of those efforts. Sure, they are all good and commendable, but here we get zero points for the effort. If we reduce emissions a lot, really reduce them across he globe, this will simply mean that we will slow heating speed, not the target temperature. Like turning oven regulator from 3 to 2.5 - oven will still reach maximum temperature. CO2 level is the regulator.

For some reason no one wants the obvious solution, a global price/tax on carbon. So what you get is some countries spend billions on solar while others crank up almost untaxed fossil fuel use.

Even in one country like the UK were I live we have stupid expensive electricity combined with basically no tax on heating gas/oil.

I'm honestly puzzled why it's like that. Why do others not think a carbon price is a good idea and instead say let ban plastic straws while having zero tax on carbon for heating - that'll fix it? I don't get it.

We would never agree on a global tax system in the first place. We could tax wars for example, and those kill humans directly, unlike climate change. But we don't do it, because many humans benefit from wars. Same with carbon tax, too many countries benefit from not paying it and so they won't.

Second problem is that carbon tax won't help. It doesn't reduce emissions much (because realistically countries would rather pay than de-industrialize in short term), and it doesn't remove CO2 from the atmosphere at all. As I wrote above - a slow down of emissions won't really change the final outcome, it will only prolong the heating process.

The graph of CO2 emissions per year shows a noticeable impact.

That's the problem I was talking about. We humans can't measure emissions, we can only cleverly estimate them. Especially if the number we want is a global one, a sum of every tiny source plus every big source in every country, from democracies to a closed dictatorships. So when institutions show that badly estimated rate of gas inflow is decreasing, but the actual amount of gas is increasing, then the only logical answer is that inflow measurement is broken. Emissions estimates are broken, because total amount of gas in the atmosphere is only ever increasing and the rate of increase is accelerating.

Mauna Koa direct measurements and the estimates are not significantly different.

Well, yes, they both show almost no impact from our green initiatives on the actual data. Emissions graph is increasing, and very slightly slowing rate of increase in the past few years. But the CO2 graph is a direct measurement of total CO2, so it is effectively a cumulative graph. And it is lowly curving up, accelerating, over past decades including last few years. Even if we magically flat line emissions graph, meaning no more increases of emissions, we will still see CO2 graph increasing and likely accelerating due to compounding of factors and existing CO2 levels already in the atmosphere.

https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions

https://keelingcurve.ucsd.edu/

The thing here, one "regular" person trying will have little impact. For example, I have bicycled to work for almost 40 years, depending upon weather. But at times that was impossible due to traffic design and public transportation in the US being close to useless.

We still have large countries pushing fossil fuel and opening up new oil wells. Coal is just being replaced by Natural Gas only because it is much cheaper.

Want to make things better ? Stop all Fossil Fuel subsidizes and at least triple the price of Auto Fuel. Then you will see real impacts. But the very second Gas Prices raise, the Gov does all it can to lower the cost of fuel. It does not matter what party is in office.

So yes, it is close to too late because no real action has taken place. We are seeing adoption of green, but that is being eaten up by AI and *coins and other factors.

The youth of the world will suffer because of our inaction.

End result, people voted in an admin that will increase Fossil Fuel use because of raising prices.

> no real action has taken place

No real action, except for the approximately 1 trillion dollars a year the world spends on solar panels, wind turbines, electric cars, etc.

There are some variables to consider, but even using grid energy mix most EVs -including cars- have a smaller co2 emission per mile than bikes, due to agriculture having quite a big eco footprint.

https://archive.ph/YgEe8

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/ghg-kcal-poore

I'd dispute some of the reasoning with those - the first one is assuming the cyclist is fueling themselves with fruit, something quite expensive with limited calories rather than the real stuff people fuel up on like bread or potatoes.

The math is indeed off in the tweet, as fruitarian should be 2.5x worse instead of 1.5.

I don't think the 5g/kcal is expensive according to the chart, it is a good average for omnivores, consider the biker being fueled by cheeseburgers on the other end of the spectrum. If you have a more efficient EV (smaller car, even scooter for commute), put in whole family instead of riding alone in a car, or have more efficient means to charge the EV like surplus renewables you can't store/use at home the difference is getting quite staggering. One could argue the manufacturing of the EV emits more co2 than manufacturing a bike and we should control for miles drive/rode during their lifecycle but if both are available using the EV is most probably the environmentally friendlier option. That said, I won't give up my bike either because I enjoy the exercise, but it is a lot less green than one would imagine without looking at the numbers.

Bread/potatoes are about 0.6g/kcal which would put the cyclist at ~30g/mile vs 100g for the car. Not that people live on that alone but with exercise you often have more potatoes with the steak etc.

I've been using an ebike which is one of the lowest emission things, and fun.

Someone here ran some numbers with bikes better than cars/busses including the cost of making them https://www.bikeradar.com/features/long-reads/cycling-enviro...

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