We have broken our world for the greed of a few. History will not be kind to us.
Yeah, and eternal shame is all we deserve.
It's a noble pursuit, but the key part for you is that you _wanted_ to avoid those mistakes and put forth an effort to learn how to. The necessity, in order to truly avoid them, is that enough individuals collectively desire and pursue that. It's why (good) public education is so important for the long term health of societies.
If you truly believe climate change is real then also admit that "We all have broken the world", except perhaps some uncontacted peoples in the Amazon.
Anyone who has ridden in an automobile, a train, a plane, a powered boat has contributed. Anyone who has used or purchased goods transported with any of the above has as well. Anyone who's eaten crops grown with large amounts of industrial fertilizers has contributed (e.g. most of the world).
The oil companies just produce what everyone in the world wants and wants cheap.
You are conflating participation from equality, yes everyone participates in the system, it takes a lot of privileged to be able to disassociate ones self from the system itself. The power dynamic within the system favors the wealthy, whom have decided that this is the path we are going down.
Who do you mean?
The vast majority of HN commenters are 10%ers and very many are 1%ers.
But there's always someone richer to complain about.
When someone says "the wealthy" are getting rich to everyone's detriment, they are almost never talking about the doctor who lives three doors down the street from you who drives a nice new 911 or the guy who owns 20 laundromats in your city. I think we all know who we're talking about.
I'm personally in the 'drill and burn as fast as possible in a mad rush to fusion power' camp so we get a way to fix this shit rather than the 'stop civilization from doing its thing overnight' camp. alas, neither is happening.
It can't very well be any more expensive.
Batteries give returns right now, fusion only in the future. Maybe.
If I cut down my plane flight in half that means I'll take a plane every two years, meaning I'll also see my family half as much. You'd also have to include that, since I travel economy, you'd divide my contribution by ~350.
If Taylor Swift cuts her plane travel by half she'd "only" make 51 trips a year [1] on a plane that carries 12 and would still make more money in a year than what I'll see in my lifetime.
IMO, saying that both of us are contributing equally as much to global warming is just unfair.
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/taylor-swift-spent-160-hours...
There's only what 10's of thousands Taylor Swifts in the world. Yet there's billions of everyone else. The majority of greenhouse gasses likely come from the aggregate of everyone.
A personal example: I don't drive. I use public transit a couple of times a year. I am in private cars maybe once every two year. I haven't flown in about 15 years. Clearly this is a contrived example. My energy use patterns are much more typical when using other metrics. That said, it is also the flip side of being a Taylor Swift of the world. There is a point in the developed world where the millions are using much more energy than the thousands.
I said developed world because there are also parts of the world that simply don't have access to my gratuitous level of energy use. To say that they are guilty of contributing based upon the technicality that they are directly or indirectly using a disproportionately small amount of energy is beyond insulting. It is also a blatant way to paper over our responsibility.
The “less-developed” bottom half of the world population still produces about a tenth of the annual co2 production annually.
That means instead of potential climate catastrophe in 10 years it’d take 100 years if the top half disappeared tomorrow. Obviously an overly simplistic argument but its meant to show that the problem would just be slower but not gone if we got rid of the “wealthy”.
Now I don’t believe they’re equally as culpable. Yet I also firmly believe the vast majority would choose the same as us in developed world have if they could.
Ultimately that’s more of my point. What’s happening isn’t due to some evil plot by the ultra wealthy. It’s the result of human nature.
Some unscrupulous ultra wealthy might hasten it by a few years or a decade, but the core problem is human nature and an abundance of fossil fuels.
The “wealthy” are also the most likely to prevent catastrophe by developing renewables, etc.
That didn't come quite through. You seemed to be taking a rather extreme position, while replying to someone who just pointed out the systemic issues, which of course don't absolve anyone of their own responsibility.
Taylor swift travels so much because the people want to see her in person.
A super majority of greenhouse gases emitted are due to the lives of the top 20-30% of the population (of which unfortunately I am a part). The remaining people's contributions are small. 80:20 rule in full glory.
Worst of all, the 80% are the most impacted by climate change as TFA illustrates.
Halving the population in 50 years is not a realistic plan.
Here are some projections to support that statement. Supposedly 2084 is peak population.
https://population.gov.au/sites/population.gov.au/files/2025...
I haven't read up on all the assumptions made for those projections. If something unassumed pops up that makes things substantially worse then the population peak would come earlier I guess. But that's a gamble.
The comic isn't even _always_ wrong; sometimes people are using gotchas or accusations of hypocrisy to dismiss otherwise valid concerns. Importantly, just because someone is a hypocrite, that doesn't mean they're wrong.
But in practice, the comic is often used by as a get-out-of-hypocrisy-free card by people who never want to to take any personal action to practice what they preach. Example:
Alice: I loooove my new iPhone 2026 Supermax XXL, it's at least 0.163% shinier than last years model! Oh but I heard that seven Chinese workers died in the Apple factory and that is soooo sad! I wish that could be avoided somehow. Oh well!
Bob: I agree, working conditions in Apple factories are deplorable. If you want to do something about it, you can consider buying a Fairphone instead, or simply delaying upgrading as long as possible. You don't really need to buy a new phone every year, you know!
Alice: What? You expect me to walk around with last year's model like a poor person? I would literally die of embarrassment. And of course I _would_ totally buy the Fairphone if only it came in rose gold with sequin bedazzling which is an absolute necessity to match my purse.
Bob: Okay but these seem like really petty reasons to keep buying Apple products. I find it difficult to take your complaints about working conditions in Apple factories seriously when you're not willing to make any sacrifices or lifestyle changes yourself to improve the situation.
Alice: Oh, I see. You're one of those "gotcha" guys. [Link to comic] Here, this tells me you're just a smartass, and I can do whatever I like while complaining about whatever I want. After all, I'm _just_ like the medieval peasant who wants to improve society somewhat.
It got me wondering. Alright, what's his problem. Well, his manager is breathing down his neck too. It's literally his job to make my day as stressful as possible. Okay, why? You trace that chain and where does it end up? Fat capitalist?
Well, something something mutual funds. Okay, that's beyond me.
But what else? Well, where's that pressure coming from? It's the customer. If the company stopped whipping us, and let us work at a normal pace, they'd need 40% more employees to cover the work. Delivery costs would increase proportionally, and suddenly grandma would stop buying from us. She'd go to the company that whips their employees. The whole place would go under.
Something something, Moloch is my nan?
A different slice: went to the supermarket the other day, late on a Sunday. There were two workers in the whole supermarket, both elderly women in their 70s.
Economy sucks here so pensions are bad, they chose to keep working.
But obviously they didn't chose to work on Sunday night. They didn't have a choice there.
If they owned the place, they would have closed at a normal hour.
One of them let out an exasperated sigh when I walked in. More work for her, but not more profit.
I overheard one say to the other, "and then at the end of the month you go to the bank and collect 800 Euros."
There's a great book on the subject called "Merchants of Doubt" by Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway.
Idk, quoting straw men isn’t a good-faith way of arguing.
But I also believe that much of what's going on in the world isn't solely their fault and is also in many ways an emergent behavior. We are all like ants in an ant mill. Each of us is doing the things that locally make sense for us (even taking into account our desires to take care of the earth!), but our interactions with the economy and the market build a sort of giant super-organism out of us all whose behavior is to fuck up the climate.
Easily lead by chemtrails, yes - but it is a fact that some individuals have disproportionately more influence over "local zeitgeist" than others.
As a brief recap; the atmosphere become a greater and greater insulating blanket as a direct result of human use of fossil fuels was solid science as far back as 1967 [0] and the larger more influential nations of the world accepted that finding and discussed actions in the 1970s [1].
Since that time there's been a near non stop flood of FUD about the inevitable effect of rising CO2 that has been pushed out by the likes of the Koch brothers (now just one), Christopher Monckton, and many others directly benefitting from fossil fuel industry.
People in middle North America rolling coal and spitting on public transport projects have had their worldview been shaped by media crafted by think tanks with a mandate to obscure cold(?) reality and that lifestyle has set as aspirational to the world.
[0] Thermal Equilibrium of the Atmosphere with a Given Distribution of Relative Humidity - Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences Volume 24 Issue 3 (1967) https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/atsc/24/3/1520-04...
[1] eg: United Nations Conference on the Human Environment Stockholm, Sweden, June 1972.
Yes, that was the first sentence of my comment.
> As a brief recap; the atmosphere become a greater and greater insulating blanket as a direct result of human use of fossil fuels was solid science as far back as 1967 [0] and the larger more influential nations of the world accepted that finding and discussed actions in the 1970s [1].
Yes, and I'm well aware of all of that and am firmly on the side of believing in climate change.
And yet, I still go to a grocery store and buy produce that was grown using fertilizer made from petroleum products, shipped across oceans on ships burning fossil fuels, then driven to the store in trucks burning fossil fuels, wrapped in plastic bags.
So even while I am aware of the problems, my own behavior as a tiny cog in the machine furthers the problems of climate change. I can bring reusable bags to the store (I do), drive a fuel-efficient vehicle (I try to), and shop at farmer's markets to reduce transit usage (sometimes), but that only chips away at the problem. My entire lifestyle is predicated on massive use of petroleum products and processes that worsen climate change. I walk on concrete side walks, have electricity in my home, go to a doctor's office that uses plastics pervasively.
I am part of the system that leads to climate change, as are you. Writing and reading this comment is spending electricity that is likely partially fueled by fossil fuels.
For what it's worth, I'm part of a rural community far far away from middle North America and eat and consume much as my parents and grandparents did (my father, born 1935) when they were young and during those times (WWI, WWII, Covid years) when we were isolated from much of the world.
My personal consumption habits are pretty damn lean - my professional consumption patterns have been large, although easily arguably subject to being amortised across tens of millions, and have led to kind of global resource mapping and geodetic data that this current generation should be using to address excessive fossil fuel consumption.
I never wanted my electricity to come from coal but it has been mostly forced upon me.
Basically there is more money in polluting tech than the alternatives that were available to us for the last 100 years or more.
Air travel would be inconsequential if the rest of the world operating on nuclear, solar and wind.
Over the last two decades I’ve attended climate rallies etc. I think it has had an impact. But due to the corruption we’re in trouble.