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Comment by albumen | Hacker News Reader

And yet millions of people still play the lottery.

I don’t think it’s as simple as uncertainty. Nobody wants to change their lifestyle to avert climate change. People prefer carrots to sticks.

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People prefer carrots to sticks.

I sometimes think those in the environmental movement have made a mistake with their messaging. It is too often "we need to suffer to save the planet". It could also be things like:

  "Why do you want to pay more to drive a giant expensive gas guzzling vehicle to work so that you can pay for a giant expensive gas guzzling vehicle to go to work in".

  "Why do you want to pay for extra electricity when conservation and efficiency will help save money for other things"

  "Single use items are thing you pay for time and  time again. Durable maintainable items you pay for once."

  "Throwing things in the garbage is like paying to store things forever (landfills are not free)"

It is true that there are, at times, good reason to do things that are not at the extreme of conservationism and environmentalism. If the messaging was a little more carrot than stick we might see more progress.

It’s also been tried (endlessly), but society is too enamoured with consumption and GDP as the principle guiding metric for it to have had much effect. Some large number of people, wilfully or otherwise, reject intellectualism as a whole.

That ignores the fact that there is a incredibly well founded coalition of organisations with idiological (climate change by its nature requires collective action, but collective action is bad...) and economic (big oil, big tobacco...) motivations that has been running a massive desinformation campaign for decades. We know desinformation is much easier than factual information, climate change is almost a poster boy for this. It would have not mattered an iorta if "environmentalists" would have used different messages, in fact they primarily used exactly the messages you proposed, the fact that you remember it as being ”you all have to suffer to save the planet" just shows how powerful the desinformation campaign was. Because that was their prime message, not the one of climate activists.

It's that the marginal benefit of individual action accrues mostly to other people, or (on a national scale) to other nations. The fraction of benefit that accrues locally isn't enough to justify the cost (unlike, say, the ban on CFCs, or control of local pollution.)

So absent something enforcing prohibition of defection from a collective action, the collective action doesn't happen.

You want to actually solve the problem? Find such an enforcement mechanism (CO2 tariffs, perhaps), reduce the cost of solution (sufficiently cheap non-fossil energy), or find another solution that doesn't require global cooperation (albedo modification, say).

A solution that just requires everyone to get along and cooperate to their marginal net detriment doesn't seem like it will work.

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