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Comment by astahlx | Hacker News Reader

It is good to see this here on HN. We, the hackers and painters, would have the power to build world wide communities for addressing the climate collapse (the climate that provided good conditions for humanity to thrive). We have the wealth to work on solutions, we are the ones also contributing to burn the world, maybe because we have given up or because it is just too comfortable. We sit in our offices, home offices, letting everything collapse as long as the pizza and the next gadget reaches our desk. We control how information is distributed, we are responsible. We would be advised to take action; will we?

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The allure of lucre and status convinced us we were better off making more addictive dopamine machines than bettering the human condition.

Not all of us. I refuse to work for corporations fueled by advertisements and so should you.

There are companies doing genuinely good out there. Maybe the pay is less(though I’m well compensated), at least you’ll work towards a better future.

Absolutely, I was speaking in generalities.

I actually think the bigger problem is artificial scarcity. Say you and someone else are bidding on a house. Your job is a net good to society and pays x, and someone else has a job which is a net harm and pays 2x. Now you need to decide whether you want a home or want to do something good.

This is only possible because homes (which are not hard to build) have an artificially constrained supply.

I think you know the answer to this.

It's chilling to think that collective action is just something we do after we have been punched in the face. Unfortunately, we are also so rational, so this will not count as a punch in the face. It should, but it won't.

We always think that technical approaches will eventually fix things that should be dealt by administrative means. You will be busy, but the core problem is still unaddressed.

> We always think that technical approaches will eventually fix things that should be dealt by administrative means.

Administrative means created the problem. Nuclear was on a path to lower cost until the administrative state came and helped. Now we haven't built a nuclear plant in decades.

nothing will advise people like the effects that are inevitable in the polar ice(all ice) collapse picking up speed this summers low will be "last call" Russia will very likely take a chunk of trade from both the suez and panama canals, through what is there EEZ exclusive ecomonic zone, coridore in the artic carbon and methane release from formerly frozen deposits will continue to feed the green house effect sea level rise will start to cause regular disruptions, and collapse of coastal land values where insurance premium costs are already rendering high end luxury homes from assets to liabilitys in some coastal areas, now fisheries will,??, are moving north, but there is less fish certain farming is moving north human technology is on the rise, and solar plus desailination will allow for agriculture(and other things) in desert regions around the mid lattitudes...ie: shifts in resources and habitability for landlocked and or arid countrys the advantage goes to countrys that have no electrical grids, or distribution and transport systems, as they can leapfrog over the western model, that requires centraly controlled/powered, wired conections everywhere vs, development at the scales supporting local imfrastructure requirements, that due to the nature of renewable solar, battery technology, can be scaled up, bit by bit as needs and capital coinside, rather than the masssive investments needed for traditional industrial infrastructure it's a heady, complex mix, where entrenched societies with fixed positions could be overwhelmed quickly

This is not a homogenous group that believes some core cannon and lives the same lives. Most devs don't have "wealth" even. I think you watched too many movies.

It's interesting also that usually nobody says a "why" that makes sense. You clearly don't think our current lives are that valuable if all we're doing is eating pizza in our offices waiting for a gadget to arrive. So what's the point, to make it so in 3 or 4 generations those guys can eat the pizza and feel like we "solved climate" for them so they can relax?

Living such lives divorces people from what most of humanity are experiencing. i.e. people with power and money and the ability to live virtually are isolated from what's happening. We all have money - just to have a job in software is to be in the top X% of the world's population. I suggest that X is probably smaller than most of us think.

If I earn say $15k / yr (just as an example, I have friends making less producing software), in a regular Western country, half goes to a landlord, a quarter to general expenses, and the other quarter for emergency savings. Illustrate how those €3750 per year of disposable income can be used to help climate change and not live "divorced from what most of humanity is experiencing"?

For what it's worth some calculators say those €15k/yr would put one above 92% of people in the world. There's so much extreme poverty in Sub-Saharan Africa that it's very easy to be in top single digit % and still be getting fucked by the system every day.

And then after you make the case of "what" you still need a "why". Almost nobody cares about those starving people we have at the moment in said Sub-Saharan Africa, so why would they care about future people?

You're mixing euros and dollars which is a bit confusing. That is a very low salary IMO - I'm in the UK and after big efforts to hire people I cannot imagine being able to hire anyone who could write a for-loop for that little!

Nevertheless, lets assume that's a typical salary: you get to choose your energy provider here and you get to choose what food you eat and how you get your transport. You can put insulation in your loft and use less gas by reducing the heat in your by 1 degree. You can use your surplus to choose slightly more expensive green options. That's before you decide to do anything direct such as investing in companies that are doing innovative green things.

According to Andrew Forrest we don't. His view is that there are 999 people in the world, plus himself, who are responsible for climate change and could fix it if they chose to.

https://www.smh.com.au/environment/climate-change/inside-and...

> We have the wealth to work on solutions

yeah, right. /s

Currently the mathematically most effective thing everybody could do is to prevent any billionaire or millionaire to get out of bed in the morning.

This could be done by overwhelming them with love so much that they do not want to go on with their destructive lifestyle.

After this is done you can start thinking about how to change our own life.

go, get yourself informed about psychopathy, and then come back to the drawing board.

No, the most mathematically effective thing would killing most humans immediately.

Blaming the rich is a scapegoat excuse that encourages most people to continue consuming beyond sustainability.

We need massive behavioral change that starts with everyday people, not the rich. Only then will the rich be held accountable.

Unfortunately, most people don't want to think about reducing their meat intake or not bagging their produce in plastic because that's too much work. This enables the rich and corporations to continue destroying the planet because we constantly have excuses.

1 million rich people with private jets, yachts and 7 houses, along with automated factories supporting that lifestyle would do far more damage than a few billion subsistence farmers.

Population reduction is not a viable solution. It is both ineffective and morally incomprehensible.

I don’t care about climate change. I’d rather the world have air conditioning and electricity than live in huts to prevent carbon emissions

There is no air conditioning and electricity if we don't stop destroying the environment.

Unfortunately, your stance seems to be the most common because it relinquishes you from the guilt of destroying what isnt yours so you can enjoy cheap stuff.

Because those are the only two options.

Every Western country that has actually felt the pain of increased prices to reduce their emissions has had their voters rebel. It’s a loser issue

That's again an oversimplification. It's not black or white, it's more complex. And that shouldn't be passed onto the general population, but to the companies that have been exploiting the resources as if they were infinite. They have become megamagnates and megacompanies, and now that we ask for solutions, it should not be "ha, ok, pay more".

Someone will have to pay more. No one wants to - no one.

I empathize with this and your earlier obviously inflammatory remarks, but we either pay for adaptation/mitigation now or pay billions if not trillions later for infrastructure repairs, more human lives lost, further extinctions of animal biodiversity, and reduced economic productivity from the loss of arable land.

Taxing large emitters does still past the cost down to the consumer. Someone certainly has to pay eventually. Perhaps youre too cynical to believe humans now are willing to do so. I don’t think youre right, but it’s certainly an opinion those less optimistic share :) and there is plenty of current evidence to bring hopes down.

Alas I’d like to die knowing I tried and cared instead of contributing to the apathy of the situation.

Every(?) western nation is going through a cost of living crisis.

And some people believe increasing the cost of energy is a solution to anything.

There's one obvious solution to everyone's cost of living crisis: tax the wealthy fairly.

We'll send modern civilization off a cliff before we do it, but it isn't like we don't know the solution.

I hear this often, but I'm struggling to understand how taxing the wealthy will build houses, or lower the price of energy?

Taxing the wealthy does one thing very well: transfer money from the hands of the wealthy, who are notoriously good at managing their wealth, in to the hands of politicians and bureaucrats who are notoriously bad at managing other peoples money.

The way the wealthy "manage their wealth" is by buying up assets (including housing, etc) driving up the price for everyone else causing exactly this sort of cost of living crisis you referenced.

Not really that difficult to understand. You should read up on the history of US taxation and how much stronger the middle class was when the wealthy got taxed fairly.

You could not have agreed with my point more clearly. You don’t want to pay more, you want to force everyone richer than you to pay more. That’s the problem.

I want them to pay the same amount I do as a percentage of their earnings. But they don't, they pay far less as a percentage of their earnings. THAT's the problem.

If you seized every billionaire’s money the government would be financed for less than a year. If you want sustainable taxation to finance your climate agenda you need to convince everyone to pay more. But people won’t do it unless you pitch it as a free lunch.

We either pay now to have this civilization last longer or we pay later in terms of the unsustainable systems not being sustained any more.

It isn't companies that use the world's resources, it is consumers.

Consumers can only buy that which has been manufactured. There is customer demand but nobody is forcing anyone to start a company. If you build a factory and release tons of co2 that is the concrete act destroying the planet. Blaming your clients for making you do it seems wrong. Also kicking the can down the road diffuses the responsibility and obfuscates what harm actually was done. Consumers have hard time tracking this stuff down and are amateurs vs. the manufacturers who are the experts in the process and actually can make decisions for the better.

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