Hacker News Reader

Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled."

  Feynman

In this case, nature will not just not be fooled, it will extract retribution, unfortunately also on those that weren't fooled in the first place.

View on HN

"Those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it. Those who do learn from history are doomed to watch everyone around them repeat it."

The only thing that we learn from history is that no-one learns from history.

Let’s not get carried away with hubris. Nature wrote our genes. Nature made us the way we are.

All this nonsense you see going on is ultimately a result of cognitive biased thinking, especially confirmation bias. The fact that we differ so deeply from these biases was not our decision, it was thrust upon us by nature and it helped us survive in an environment very different from the one we found ourselves in now.

No, most people believe in climate change. In a fundamentally anti-human move, oligarchs have put a climate denier in office so he would push against doing anything about it, as it goes against their short-term interests.

My pet theory, if we indulge in a bit of conspiracy theory about the oligarchs, is that they're in fact benevolent and that the final outcome with be a net good for humanity in relation to the climate challenge.

I mean, Trump is so blatantly destroying american influence that it would be hilarious if it wasn't so tragic. When you think about the alternative, that is, a "regular" american elite saying that climate action is important with their regular hypocrisy, pretending to be doing anything at all, but in fact going the other way, then things don't look so bad in the medium term. Sure, a bit of short term pain, but otherwise, might end up being better off.

I mean, try to put yourself in the shoes of one of those oligarchs a few years ago and ask yourself how you'd actually solve the climate problem, given current cultures around the world. Maybe you'd come up with the "let's prop up Trump".

That being said, it's just a pet theory. I actually have doubts that such smart oligarchs exist.

However those biases are supposed to favour our survival and, more importantly our children's survival. That's how we got this far.

It says something when we act against that.

All it says to me is that the modern world is far more complex than our simple biases (heuristics) can deal with.

You're getting downvoted, but you have pointed to a possibly important factor. We're intelligent, but definitely have primate intelligence, and we're closest to the murderous bastards known as chimpanzees.

That said, nothing about this has been inevitable. So many accidents along the way. There are many other results that have been possible. Our social/political setting may be related with technology but it's wholly unclear how deterministic each step has been.

The path we’ve taken was definitely not inevitable, just like the path a ball takes down a long bumpy hill. Yet the broad strokes of where that ball ends up are reasonably foreseeable: at some local minimum but not necessarily a global minimum.

So what are the broad strokes of humanity that could have reasonably been foreseen? A trend towards greater societal social complexity, increased resource consumption, increased energy use, economic efficiency, and wealth concentration.

The old reports were somehow protecting us?

Carbon emissions can only be reduced by engineering and manufacturing advances

The impression I get from the extreme right (trump and his fans) is that they don't want to reduce carbon emissions at all and are working for the opposite. Denying the reality of climate change is one tool in their chest to get others to ignore it as well.

In a way, yes, they were: they forced us to contemplate the long term consequences of our short term actions. Denying that is the opposite of protecting us (and, eventually, our offspring, who will deal with the consequences in a way that we never will).

Carbon emissions can first and foremost be reduced by reducing the combustion of fossil fuels.

Everything else is just bookkeeping and icing on the cake.

> Carbon emissions can first and foremost be reduced by reducing the combustion of fossil fuels.

Exactly! It can’t be reduced or increased by edits to federal PDF files that nobody reads

Commercial efforts are the only solution, and will happen because new energy is cheaper and better. Photovoltaic and battery improvements are our best path forward. Industrial policy can help but we’ve never really had that in the US

If nobody reads them and they have no effect, why are they being rewritten?

Because politics is hopelessly dysfunctional

Carbon emissions can also be reduced by our extinction.

No you see, carbon emissions can also be reduced by moving production to china and not looking too hard how they do it. Yay for climate champion Europe!

World in Data has carbon stats including imports and exports.

It makes a difference but basically doesn't change the big picture.

https://ourworldindata.org/consumption-based-co2

In 2020, China had 253GW of total solar capacity. In 2024, China installed 277GW of additional solar capacity. In June, they were up to 1,100GW of total solar capacity. In 2023, 60% of the global solar installation happened in China.

China is so far ahead of the world in green energy it's ridiculous. We can't pretend that it's still 1995 and China still gets most of its energy from coal anymore.

Top four coal consumers as of 2023 (last year for which this data set is available):

China 91.9 exajoules

India 22 exajoules

United States 8.2 exajoules

Japan 4.54 exajoules

https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/coal-cons...

China uses a shitload of coal. The US uses far less because we moved to other fossil fuel sources. It turns out that coal is not the only ghg emitter. China is installing way more zero-emission power generation. Looking only at coal and ignoring gas is very odd.

https://www.iea.org/countries/china/energy-mix

Their green energy line _is_ on the increase, but it's effectively flat compared to the growth lines on coal and oil.

Nature has no feelings, there will be no retribution, things will work out just fine, it will just be tough for us, maybe even wiped out, but nature will prevail. life will find a way, look at places where humans get excluded, everything regenerates.

It is not a crises of nature, it is a crises of habitat for us as species, and a bunch of other like us.

"Save the planet? The planet's fine - it's us that are fucked."

-- George Carlin

Yes, I always found environmental protection kind of funny, nature does not need protection, it will survive until Earth becomes finally uninhabitable [0], it's us that might not make it that long if we don't take enough care.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future

What we call environmentalism is actually 5 different concerns:

- human health, pollution

- preservation of natural resources useful for humans

- preservation of biodiversity, nature in its original state

- concern for animal suffering

- aesthetic concern for human habitat

These things typically overlap, but sometimes they even contradict.

And how many other species will we take down with us?

Most probably, but nature doesn't care. We will probably destabilize many eco systems with our behavior and make them collapse.

George Carlin is a comedian. That line is a joke, not an actual serious retort to somebody using the phrase "save the planet" to talk about stopping climate change.

This is a pretty pointless nitpick. It's akin to saying that a large meteor strike is not the end of the world because the planet will still be here.

I think there is also a reality in which our scope of what we care about is widened beyond just the human species. As a species that has such a powerful impact on other beings, it would be nice to try and reduce the amount of unnecessary suffering and pain that we place on them. While we cannot eliminate it, life takes life yadayada, we can reduce it and try to curb the mass extinction that we are actively causing.

From another angle, it's taken a really long time for evolution to get to this point, what can be experienced from the myriad life forms is quite wide and widening, it would be a shame to return to only the level of a microbe.

Must we take everything else down with us?

You think the scope of what humans can do will surpass the impact of various ice ages? the various volcanism/anoxic events?

Lizzies love high temperatures - it will be the second coming of the Dinosaurs!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com