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Comment by MarkMarine | Hacker News Reader

The whole framing you’re using is wrong. If you can do climate modeling and math at the planet scale, you don’t need to be convinced you have read the research and you knew 30 years ago.

If you’re skeptical of scientific authority and lack those skills… as well as the critical thinking required to read the research and distill your own conclusions, there is basically no way to convince you. You can’t find objective truth yourself and you don’t trust the resources that can.

Doesn’t matter anyway, you as an ant in a large colony barely matter, no one needs to convince you. Capital needs to understand it’s in its interest to fix the problem and it will be fixed. Until that, get an A/C and contribute to the problem.

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> Capital needs to understand it’s in its interest to fix the problem and it will be fixed

You’re looking at Capital as a monolithic block. The problem is that the majority of the Capital at the moment sits with the block that can only function by burning more fossil fuels and mowing down the last of the forests to extract natural resources. The private equity firm that owns private beach resorts will never be able to convince the trillion dollar petro giants that they need to find alternatives.

Since 1990, global deforestation has improved by 50%. It is still net negative, but the rate of net loss is way down from 100 years ago.

Because there is so much less to cut down? And what is remaining is harder to reach/extract from?

Thats not a positive. Its like you’re falling from the sky, reach terminal velocity and celebrating that you’re not falling any faster.

I don’t see it that way. Some see the invisible hand of the market but I just don’t, the involvement in politics… the purposeful shaping of public opinion that is against the public interest, capital has an interest and it’s making its interest felt.

I’m pretty sure the burning fossil fuel and mowing down rainforest isn’t in the long term interest, I’m also sure that if I’m dumb enough to see this the people in control are as well. So I admit I can’t see the end state, but I’m sure the machine is being fed somehow

Often people in control of capital are in the second half of their lives. They care about their bonuses this year, not some future inconvenience when they’re already dead.

Capital, as a whole, barely thinks farther forward than the next fiscal quarter. If you are lucky, the absolute farthest out is end-of-career/lifetime for the current leadership suite. Why would capitalists be the saviors from climate change?

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