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Comment by yupitsme123 | Hacker News Reader

Those are goals, not a plan. Is there a plan that scientists and activists agreed on that I should be supporting?

Any plan should have been made between government and industry. The scientists aren't there to plan, they look at the data and try to figure out how the world works. Scientists told us long ago there might be a climate problem, and have steadily built up more and more data and models and evidence.

Activists shouldn't have existed at all. Science informs government there's a problem, government informs the population and creates multiple policies to address the problem, industry works within those policies to adapt the economy. Actual people shouldn't have to feel guilty about their own carbon emissions or second guess the science with their own opinion, but should vote on the policies that they like the best, knowing fully what the consequences will be.

That would be nice anyway. Instead just about every part of that chain tries to fuck with the other parts for money and power.

Politicians don't come up with plans either. Even with the best intentions, they don't know enough to be able to come up with a plan. Experts need to do that.

You also don't need the government if you want to enact change. We have an AI revolution because science and money got together to make it happen, and then consumers jumped on it. Not because the government passed a law to make it happen.

So did the scientists and engineers with mountains of research ever figure out a solution for the rest of us to get behind?

Scientists aren't responsible for coming up with a plan. Not individually anyway. I think others have expressed that in this thread you've started. An actual plan would be hugely multifaceted and would require a government or large entity to fund it: think about the scope of what that would include, you'd need to bring together researchers and experts on pretty much every industry that exists. You're talking about planning across the entire global economy. We haven't exactly been that keen on planned economies.

Saying that, governments have made policy and it has had an effect. Emissions in Europe and the US are on a steady downward trend.

Blame for lack of a plan is not on the shoulders of scientists. They do science. They are not a government whose responsibility is policy and governing. And apparently our politicians ay best play lip service to, and at worst don't believe in, these problems. Consequently, there is no plan to reach those goals for anyone to rally around.

Coming up with a plan would be squarely in the hands of scientists and engineers and passionate individuals. Perhaps the government and the public would help in enacting that plan, but not in creating it.

I'm led to believe that the scientists and activists are all led by the same empirical research and share a broad consensus. So why then is there no plan or even a concept of a plan after 30 years of talking about all this?

Money. More is needed and no one wants to pay—even when proposals make sense.

How much? This is what I'm talking about. It's hard to get people to buy a narrative that says we need to spend infinite amounts of money on an as yet undetermined plan, or else life as we know it will end.

Once again, scientists do science. Governments do governance. A scientist can do research and come to conclusions like "dumping tons of CO2 into the atmosphere is bad mmmmkay" and tell you goals like "targeting x-degrees of warming will save us from the worst consequences". Politicians and governments should take those statements and goals and build plans around them and then we can vote for the ones who've got the best plan (or not). Expecting scientists to do the government's job is abdicating all responsibility and setting everyone up for failure.

Lawmakers aren't informed enough to figure out a plan. Experts are needed to do that.

Scientists and industry work together all the time to enact sea changes in the world around us. The AI revolution is a recent example. No legislation or government was needed.

Most of the biggest changes in our lifetimes have happened due to private actors, not government getting involved.

No, there is no masterplan.

Not enough of the population was properly educated on the risks, and therefore a solid plan was never even conceived.

We needed lots of people thinking about it in order to do that, while most people just discussed it superficially and were easily provoked, manipulated or distracted.

I never understood why the entire population needed to be involved. It's not a referendum.

A handful of smart people just needed to get together and come up with a solution. Then the governments of the world implement it. I understand that the second part is difficult. But did the first part ever happen?

> A handful of smart people just needed to get together

Things don't work this way, unfortunatelly. This kind of thinking just pushes the problem to someone else do deal with, which only serves to shift up blame. Small groups are vulnerable to corruption, or distractions, or silly power plays.

We needed _lots_ of people with good education and reasonable awareness of the risks, it was the only way to have a chance to develop a more solid plan.

However, you got your way. There are small groups of smart people working on these issues. But many, many of us know that their chances are slim (due to the shortcomings mentioned earlier). Unfortunatelly, not that many to form a critical mass.

Things do in fact work that way. Here's a list of things that a small number of people changed without the consent of the public, all before we got a single workable plan for climate change:

The internet, cell phones, social media, fracking, AI, the fall of the Soviet Union, war in Iraq, changes in attitudes towards family, sexuality. Just to name a few.

All of these things just kind of happened without the public having asking for them. Why then has a slight, gradual reduction in greenhouse gases been so hard?

Because climate change is more similar to erradicating polio than selling cellphones or toppling leaders.

In the whole human history, only one disease was erradicated: smallpox. It took centuries, countless smart people, reasonable awareness of many counter-intuitive ideas, and we almost failed. Going to the moon was easier.

What small number of people influenced societal shifts in views towards family and sexuality?

Lots of smart people came together in different solutions. The missing piece is that there is opposition. The opposition won.

Who were these people and what were the solutions? Who was the opposition and when was the battle decided?

If you're going to tell me it was the Democrats vs the Republicans, then please explain why countries outside the US haven't made it happen yet. China is a country full of scientists and engineers and the opposition there is non existent.

Most of the opposition is the industries that renewable energy threatens and those who have vested interests in it.

"Just" does so much work in these comments.

I mean... Why do the smart people not "just" develop a perfect economic plan? Or "just" end world hunger? Or "just" stop global conflicts?

Anyway, there have been multitudes of plans and strategies and actions to chip away at the problem. All of them require sacrificing political capital, raising taxes and the costs of products, and effort. And you get nothing substantial in return.

So while the entire scientific community tried pushing education and solutions galore, the political and corporate establishment fought tooth and nail against any aspect that did not immediately profit them. To the point that now an entire party in the richest country on Earth that holds all three branches of government uses opposition to solving the problem as one of the core tenants of their platform.

Smart people are doing those things. Just in a way that benefits them and not necessarily you or I.

Anyway, what is the solution that the scientific community proposed and that was killed by the political and corporate establishment?

What is the plan that the non-US countries have implemented to eliminate the problem?

Solution: reduce CO2 emissions to carbon neutrality.

This has been agreed multiple times, most notably the Paris agreement of 2015, which set deadlines for countries to achieve carbon neutrality.

The plan failed in e.g. the US because politicians didn't follow through. Trump literally withdrew from the Paris agreement.

All but 3 countries in the world participate in the Paris agreement. This includes all big CO2 emitters, like China, US (now withdrawn), India and EU countries.

That's a goal more so than a plan.

Can you share with us why this distinction is so important?

Because it doesn't describe action.

"Be fit!" is a goal.

"Go to the gym at least 5 days a week" is a plan.

If that's the case, there was a lot of plans. I'm confident that you can web search them.

Any solution involves less money for oil shareholders and thus would be opposed tooth and nail

The Paris Climate Accords were supposed to be this.

Before that there was Kyoto. I get that the US is braindead and can't make things happen. But what about all the other countries?

To be fair, if all the world except the US and China change, we're still probably doomed.

What about them? You're moving the goalposts.

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