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Comment by kocsonya | Hacker News Reader

Hot take on HN, but techno-optimism sounds so stupid when it comes to climate change... You can't engineer macro climate/ecology, since capital has no interest in human and it's surrounding environment balanced cohabitation.

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Techno optimist here who expects the following to make a big contribution to reducing human made future climate change: better batteries+solar/wind, nuclear fusion, self driving cars (we'll need to manufacture less cars for the same amount of miles humanity drives), AI helping with better resource allocation in general (hopefully).

The answer can't be, let's just consume 10x less. We have to engineer our way out of it.

> The answer can't be, let's just consume 10x less. We have to engineer our way out of it.

We will have to do both I am afraid

We will eventually do both but it won’t be willing. It’ll be through tragedy.

These are all helpful contributions, but ultimately we need buy-in from decision makers (i.e. rulers/heads of nations).

And at least in the US we do not have it and are actively going in the opposite direction, mostly in the name of money.

I know one way to get their "buy-in", if you catch my drift.

Ironically what is pushing many countries to a faster adoption of renewables is not climate change but the recent Iran conflict.

Yes tech can help but implementation depends on human nature.

Blowing up all the world's oil fields would probably do a lot to focus people's attention.

I’d be embarrassed to call myself a techno optimist and associate with someone who thinks empathy is bad.

I love technology but optimism about it is incompatible with the current capitalist system. Tech is exploited to make capital not to further our optimism.

Edit: if you’re gonna downvote at least offer a counter. lol pathetic.

These awesome things will enable a higher human population. We are like a virus taking over the host organism and overdoing it.

Like cancer

In almost every wealthy country the birth rate has fallen below sustainable, meaning we're shrinking if life expectancy doesn't magically explode.

Viruses btw never reflect on killing the host :P

To make energy requires not only a lot of time to be produced, but also a lot of energy to get it done. Industrial society is based on these "oil reserves" from the Mesozoic Era. All the stuff made in factories from the 19th century all the way to iPhones 17s relies on these diminishing EROI — which, instead of being underground, is now in our atmosphere. It's not like a jar on a shelf we can just take off because by the time the energy transfers through the ecosystem all the way it hits where the ecosystem the most fragile, melting the taiga and lowering the albedo.

The singular input for every plausible avenue for mitigating and addressing climate change is energy. And an astronomical amount of energy at that if you want to make a measurable dent over the next 100 years. You can't cheat thermodynamics.

Energy absolutely is something that you can engineer. It is one of the most fundamental things engineering is about. Nothing we can do will make a difference without serious investment in carbon-free power systems. There is a lot of money being invested in energy technology, the real question is if we will build enough of it.

The forest where the community hikes has no value unless the trees are turned into paper.

All to say, Capital at large seeks out the profit. Until climate change effects the profit considerably, mitigation will be the path less traveled.

The only real way to approach this problem is to reduce consumption across the board which as you might guess, isn't profitable.

reducing consumption across the board isnt just unprofitable, it would mean everyone agreeing to overcome our biological gradients. i do not think it is possible for us to do, and evolution has not equipped us to do that as far as i can tell.

my semi-superstitious take is that the race to achieve ai is grounded in needing something that knows whats going on and is able to make decisions aligned to generational time horizons. whether that works out or not time will tell, but i get the sense a "good enough" ai is probably our best shot at saving us from ourselves. it's clear we can't do that on our own.

I think it’s grounded with the thinking that whoever gets WOPR first wins.

Which is why, to be blunt, libertarians and conservatives are wrong to demonize government without being equally or more skeptical of the corrupting power of money.

Government is the only apparatus that can govern unregulated motivations of capital, and we need regulations on pollution and investments in clean energy and waste creation/collection to stop things like climate change.

Gen X and forward grew up in a world that by default was cleaner due to regulations like the Clean Water Act, better for seniors due to things like Social Security and Medicare, and safer due to things like food regulations and vaccine mandates. The people who rail against these things are railing against the very things that made their world safer and in some instances kept them alive.

Yeah, this is why I'm not a Libertarian. Concentrated power in the hands of single individuals impacts the freedom and liberty of everyone else. That holds if the person is the head of government, or the CEO of a corporation.

>The only real way to approach this problem is to reduce consumption across the board which as you might guess, isn't profitable.

We need a human civilization that is run for the benefit of human beings, not paper-clip maximizing overlords.

Then people cry "tyranny!" when they're not allowed to pollute a river.

We engineered ourselves into this, and we’re actually making good progress in engineering ourselves out. Not without some serious upcoming pain, but it’s not all doom and gloom. We as a species have accomplished many things that weren’t profit-motivated.

> capital has no interest

Selfish humans. "Capital" is a mental model, it's not some force of nature or hand of god.

Selfishness has nothing to do with it. Capitalism rewards anti-social investment strategies and capital accumulation, so that's what we get. "Capital" is not a force of nature, it's an emergent force from our economic system. It behaves sort of predictably and can be described: that's economics.

EDIT: got to love how anytime you write something even remotely critical of capitalism you get auto-downvoted. Fine, "climate change is only because of bad, selfish people". Is this explanation more palatable?

While I agree with you that the system itself inevitably causes these issues, I don't see how this absolves those who use anti-social investment strategies etc. of selfishness. On an individual scale they're still making morally bad decisions, and worse: they're actively influencing the system to exacerbate these mechanisms.

Perhaps, certainly even, but that's not a really interesting way of looking at things. And individual blame is often used as a substitute to systemic analysis of issues.

Techno optimism is bullshit created by power hungry VCs to ostracize anyone who argues against their myopic world view and further fill their own coffers at the expense of others. Anyone want to argue against that? I’ve yet to see a compelling counter.

I don't get the impression of much techno-optimism here lately, it's mostly just incessant whining about how they think everything's AI generated.

Climate also doesn't change in macro over a lifetime.

It's very real, but the notion that it's changing over a 5 year period is nonsense.

things aren't "shutting off".

Wishful thinking...

I wonder how people like you end up so hostile to experts.

Climate has changed over a lifetime though.

I am old enough to have witnessed how the climate has completely changed in Europe, where I live.

In the same place where I live now, when I was young there was permanent snow cover for 3 to 4 months.

During the last 10 years, there have been years with no snow and in the others a little snow has been present for 3 or 4 days of a year, when it melted the second day after falling.

I have not used again my winter boots and my winter jackets for the last 15 years or more.

This is really a huge change during less than a human lifetime.

Better keep those winter clothes in case the current shuts down.

What you've said is emotionally compelling, but scientifically very weak. Personal recollection is selective and location-specific. You’ve described a memory, not established a mechanism.

What you perceive as change isn't macro, it's micro.

It doesn't mean macro change isn't happening, but it's not happening on our timescale.

I'm 50 FWIW.

What are you considering 'macro' climate change to be then? The mechanism they described was warming climate.

> it's not happening on our timescale.

Talk to anyone over 30 and they'll tell you the climate has already changed.

Well anyone that doesn't have a political agenda or shares in ExxonMobil.

Even ExxonMobil scientists came to the conclusion. They made an internal study in the 70s and it was actually incredibly solid: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abk0063

Meteoroligista says thw same thing. They have measurements, cause humanity was able to measure and record 30 years ago.

What has no value is to pretend it is not happening because ones favorite ideological movements said so.

You can paste this exact response under your other post, as well. Emotionally compelling, scientifically weak. Worth nothing.

But also, what you wrote is just wrong. There are plenty of measurable, significant, ood effects in the last few decades on the climate and its impact.

Here’s one study onglacier retreat over the last 20 years.

https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2021GL09...

And here’s a paper on the effects of the mechanism:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-025-02282-5

I’m sure you’ll read them earnestly.

Just look at any glaciar in the Alps (or almost anywhere in the world really). Over the last 50 years, your liftime, there have been enourmous changes.

Looking back at the amount of snowfall I saw as a kid and the amount of snowfall I see now in my 30s, or at the number of hot summer days ... I find it hard to claim that climate is not changing over a lifetime. 20 years isn't even a lifetime, that's like 1/4th of a lifetime

Maybe climate is more stable wherever you live

There's a problem with memories. You can have a snowy week and remember it as the entire winter, if it affected you in particularly memorable ways. Kids usually get out of school and play building snowmen and having snowball fights.

When I was a kid in the midwest USA, 100 degrees in the summer happened every once in a while. Still does. July and August were always hot. Still are. As a kid the heat didn't bother me so much, I'd go out and play in the sprinkler or go to the pool. Now, I've got to wear clothes and work. Makes the heat more noticable.

But we have undeniable evidence that the number of record highs to record lows has been increasing dramatically over the past few decades. It's just measurement, there's no magic behind it.

Summers are actually hotter and winters are actually warmer on average, that's real.

Likewise in the winter, as a kid in the 90s I remember my dad wondering if we'd have a white Christmas (wondering if snow would fall before Christmas or not). There's even songs from decades earlier about it.

Whether we'd get snow before January has always been a toss-up, and I'd hazard we've gotten it more often recently than when I was a kid. Like about 10 years ago I even remember a huge blizzard in November.

Same as my childhood in the 1970s.

I refer you to: https://xkcd.com/1732/

Huh? Sudden events are a very real part of larger processes like evolution and climate change. A volcano eruption, a meteor impact, or a drought year, or the ceasing of a current can absolutely have massive implications on larger systems.

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