EPA to revoke endangerment finding, the basis for regulating greenhouse gases | Hacker News Reader

EPA to revoke endangerment finding, the basis for regulating greenhouse gases

cbsnews.com

38 pointsrntn14 comments

40 years after Carl Sagan addressed Congress, and here we are:

https://youtu.be/EuR9CzWcCfc?si=ViYRwdUDxTb6AN1Q

Hard to take selfish and self interested out of the fancy mammal. The system that led us here was/is suboptimal, a call for better systems to protect humans from themselves.

It seems to me we're stuck in an international prisoner's dilemma with climate change policy. Economies that defect and disregard environmental consequences will grow more quickly in the short term, especially so if other major players cooperate. So there is a perverse incentive that becomes increasingly impactful as scarcity increases. Poorer economies will have an extremely strong incentive to defect and ignore ecological consequences.

Measures like this will proliferate through an economy in proportion to how angry that population is. If your average voter feels like they can't even afford their groceries (whether or not this is actually true, in fact, is irrelevant), they will get angry at any administration that passes any GDP-hampering policy, and will support any administrations attempts at stripping away these policies.

I don't know what the solution is, but its clear that, from a game theory perspective, there will be large defectors to any kind of international cooperative agreement.

> I don't know what the solution is

I’m, of course, interested in an optimistic answer, but I think it’s clear that there is no solution. Humans are, by and large, really stupid and really selfish. You will never get enough of them to care more about each other (and, in this case, each other’s grandchildren), than care about their own immediate wants.

Solar and wind are cheaper in most of the world, TCO on EVs is lower too.

So, paying more to poison your children may not win in the market.

This is mentioned in the article:

> But the EPA's own regulatory impact report says limiting emissions for cars and trucks is expected to generate more than $2.1 trillion in net benefits over the next 30 years, including $820 billion in fuel savings and $1.8 trillion in public health and climate benefits.

All I have left is the vague hope that the absurd luck that has kept the human race alive as long as it has will persist. How many nuclear near misses are we up to now? Then again, that is probably just survivorship bias.

What has the EPA done to reduce carbon dioxide emissions that will change as a result of this? I thought the US didn’t have any kind of cap and trade or carbon tax

> Since it was signed by then-Administrator Lisa Jackson in 2009, the finding has been used by the EPA to regulate sources of climate change-causing pollution from cars, power plants and other sources of transportation like planes, as well as oil and gas operations.

Yes. Regulate how?

“is expected to save Americans $54 billion in costs annually through the repeal of all greenhouse gas standards“

That seems like an awfully small amount of money.

And just like that, the sixth mass extinction is confirmed

Alarmism isn't going to help.

The US isn't the world.

The rich will survive (for a long time, anyway).

What does a mass extinction event have to do with rich vs poor? This all life, all species, the entire biosphere. Part of the problem is people can't seem to stop thinking in human social terms and not large scale system changing.... Mass extinctions like this don't leave species like humans unscathed .. the very chemical composition of the sea and atmosphere will be changed within 500-1000 years beyond what humans can adapt to except living in underground bunkers.

Thinking humans will be fine during a MASS extinction event....shows me that people don't know much about previous events.

Correct, this is a problem for all living things.

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