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Comment by toddmorey | Hacker News Reader

Have we ever as a species successfully changed our behavior on a scale needed to address something like climate change and underwater oxygen loss?

What would be the closest “we’ve got to change or perish” moment we’ve successfully navigated?

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We did a reasonable job with ozone depletion, but that has much lower costs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozone_depletion

Yesterday there was an article here about ozone vs aluminum from the spacex sattelites reentry (which soon there will be plenty of)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49062120

“Plasma Tunnels Reveal How Dying Satellites Fall to Earth” (ieee.org)

The cost of not addressing it is more distributed: at some point you can't go outside anymore since the UV index is so high, sunscreen can't block high-intensity UV-B and UV-C, plants get damaged to the point of catastrophic crop failures... you can live in denial about climate change in developed countries (for a limited time anyway) but ozone affects everyone.

True but at the time the ozone hole was mostly over the Antarctic so the average person didn't feel its effects which wouldn't then contribute to the change in policy.

I find the reverse of this argument significantly more compelling.

I get where you're coming from - our vantage point has a lot to do with that though. The average member of the public never had to sacrifice or even know about ozone, and there's so much complexity to climate science. People have a surface deep impression of what stands to be lost and they're working against a powerful propaganda machine. Virtually all extractive industry makes the problem worse, whether cattle farming, timber, energy, etc.

Acid rain as well.

Indeed. But still amazed we did anything about it, since it didn’t immediately affect population centers or cause economic impacts.

I just can’t see the same happening in today’s political climate…

Ozone hole over Antarctica.

It is possible for us to work together and fix these things.

Edit:

Moving away from leaded gas might be another example.

(CFCs and leaded gas invented by the same dude, fun fact: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Midgley_Jr. Quite a legacy...)

When the costs are low and require no change in personal behaviour, nor even belief in the problem. Billions of people had no idea about changes to aerosol propellants or refrigerants and they were not required to know or agree in order to solve the problem.

Do people have to know about what generates their electricity? They get input now, but we could probably just stop taking public input on new infrastructure and that would avoid poorly motivated protests of wind farms or nuclear.

Stop taking public input on public infrastructure. That would go over life a lead balloon.

Good point - maybe also stop taking public input on decisions. :V

I kid, but I get more sympathetic to totalitarian countries seeing how people react to some things too. it simplifies "banding together" if there's fewer decision makers I guess and I can't think of a good way to have that squared with democracy.

You also get no feedback from people, massive corruption and many useless megaprojects end up being built at the cost of everything else (because everyoneis too afraid to point out its nonsense & regime adjacent thugs will then make it 5x as expensive and pocket the extra money).

Totalitarianism only works well with a benevolent dictator. Unfortunately, power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Due to human nature, it will never ever turn out for the best.

They do not need to know what generates there electricity but...

- when what generates the power changes the landscape they can see, many people get upset, however irrationally

- many people are emotionally attached to lifestyle objects that use fossil fuels, i.e. cars, boats, planes, etc

- even where there are good options, most people are not willing to spend one extra penny

- even when there are options that cost less (i.e. bicycles, walking) humans spend a lot of their energy thinking about status and struggle to voluntarily choose things that they fear might result in a loss of status

- even if you solve all that, collective action problems are a named thing for a reason - they are hard and don't necessarily have obvious answers.

My point is not that everything is hopeless, but that OP who said "Have we ever as a species successfully changed our behavior on a scale..." has a point that we will have to grapple with if we want to actually change stuff. Wishing human nature away doesn't actually solve anything.

Perhaps more importantly than any of those, often people react out of fear of what they think other people will think.

Maybe everyone bitches about gas prices, but we would all get over it pretty fast if politicians just pulled the band-aid off. Instead they use it as an opportunity to pull down any crab that tries to save us from the bucket.

We haven't fixed the ozone hole yet. It'll take another 40 years for it to return to the levels prior to 1980:

https://science.nasa.gov/earth/earth-observatory/ozone-hole-...

It's not possible for us to work together and fix it, since most of the problem is coming from China, like with most pollution in general. Unless you're proposing something like nuking China.

The problem pre exists China’s development, and China’s per capita pollution production is already less than those in western developed countries, with the caveat being that China has a lot more people.

But you are right, if you want to keep the Chinese poor so they don’t pollute as much as we do, then you’ll need to nuke them because they aren’t going back.

And if you think the problem is just China, wait until India gets it act together. The only real solution we have beyond nuking all the people striving to get rich like us is to figure out how to pollute less and still have rich lifestyles, and China is putting more effort into that than all the other countries combined.

The only truly global intervention I can think of whose impact might be discernible over geological timescales is the ban on testing nuclear weapons.

Well, we inadvertently stopped having as much children. That should help, but our current system economic systems can’t handle falling birthrates

Ozone, leaded motor vehicle fuels, asbestos, acid rain, DDT, commercial whaling, atmospheric nuclear testing.

(Not all of these were existential to humans necessarily, but all have been largely successes.)

Nuclear weapons (so far)?

Banning CFCs perhaps?

If you want to go older and more localised you could look at forestry and fisheries laws. Sometimes we self-regulate and form a stable state, other times we over-extract until collapse

Historically speaking over over a billion years almost every species has consumed one thing and output another to the point of extinction while another species that consumes that grows and repeats the cycle.

Climate change has been the story of evolution since life appeared on earth and aglae filled the atmosphere with gasses.

I mean yes but where does that get us? The great oxygenation event wasn't exactly good for the organisms that were alive at the time.

Lead in gasoline? https://ourworldindata.org/leaded-gasoline-phase-out

We almost eradicated several diseases, usually screwed over by designating an Omelasan child (though, that's a bad characterization, because letting parts of the world continue to suffer and serve as a reservoir for those diseases was actually completely unnecessary).

DNS, IP adresses and Emoji of course, all global efforts, with extinction level risks.

Food?

I.E. avoiding population collapse due to lack of ecosystem carrying capacity? Eliminating famine? etc.

the kind of changes that were required to avoid massive famines also rely on chemical fertilizer. aaand.... "the production of chemical fertilizers, particularly synthetic nitrogen-based ones, is a highly energy-intensive process that creates significant amounts of carbon dioxide"

We stopped using CFCs to fix the hole in the ozone layer

"We"? if by "we" you mean Chinese, then yes, as THEY have maintained a cultural structure and language far longer than we have, and adapting themselves and there environment to do that was something they have been doing successfully for millenia,China still venerates the first engineer "Gun"assigned to control the flooding on the yallu river 3300 years ago, and it is then no surprise that they are building solar, wind and other renewable fossil/carbon free energy sources at an unprecidented rate, and ultra high voltage grid systems to distribute that energy, while we wring our hands committing genocide on the Palistinians.

They've also gone through 13 major dynasties and about 2 societal collapses. That of course doesn't undo China's amazing cultural, technological, and social advances and achievements over the millenia, but it does suggest that their history is more nuanced.

I think that the banng of HFCs is a pretty good example of collective action.

Also, it's important to realize that climate change, as we best understand it right now, is not a "or perish" type of situation. RCP8.5 has now been soundly eliminated from the set of potential climate trajectories, so what we're left with is a question of 1) how much mass migration will be forced upon the world, with concomitant wars and social strife, and 2) how much economic loss results from that, as well as from lost opportunity by not adopting cheaper renewable energy routes.

Technological innovation has done something absolutely remarkable: the future with the cheapest and most abundant energy is the one that switches to renewable energy and storage the fastest. Every day we delay, not only do we end up with a worse climate outcome, but we also just light money on fire, with worse economic efficiency. And in economies built on the continual compounding interest of technological advancement, we subject humanity to far greater poverty for every day we delay the transition.

Most of the world will benefit from this technological change happening quickly. There will be some outliers, like the US, that choose to be poorer and less influential by actively subverting renewable energy in the marketplace (the Trump administration has done a huge amount of economic damage in only a small amount of time), but the US will come around. Texas is leading the way, because they are actually market driven more than they are politically driven, but the rest of the US is kind of screwed on that front for a while.

No matter how poor you think the US is, the average person in the rest of the world is indeed poorer.

True, but most people don't think about why that is the case. They'll blame slavery (abolished over 160 years ago), or the "exploitation" by capitalists (that produce wealth for all). Some may claim that the US has more natural resources, but The US is rich because of the freedoms and rights that our citizens have. Look at the poverty of the Soviet Union or Mao's China, or in Cuba today.

I cannot for the life of me understand the increasing popularity of socialism and communism in the US today. Those forms of government have a proven track record of failure.

Let's consider the economies of Communist nations. I suggest we take into account a bit of regional history.

North Korea is a basket case. But after three generations of tyrants it is arguably a monarchy.

China is a success story, end of. By any measure, China has come a long way since the Communist regime took over in 1949.

You could say something similar about Soviet Russia. By the 1980s it had stagnated, but the average Russian was incomparably better off than in 1917.

How far have Russians come since then? Has capitalism ushered in a golden age of prosperity and well-being? Here's a clue: life expectancy peaked in 1986. Russians lived longer 40 years ago, under Communism, than they do today.

Vietnam has done reasonably well since other countries stopped invading it.

American foreign policy hasn't done much for Cubans, either. Especially in the last few months.

Perhaps we should finally let go of the cold war mindset. It's imperial thinking, and we can't afford it. US power is fading fast.

Castro and Ho Chi Minh will go down in (our) history as Communist revolutionaries, but they weren't fighting against capitalism. They succeeded by uniting their people against colonial rule.

The USA was the colonial power that Castro was fighting, of course.

At least we no longer think of Nelson Mandela as a Communist and a terrorist. The US state department finally acknowledged as much in 2008, nearly 10 years after he had retired as president of RSA.

Note that I referred to Mao Zedong's China and not the China of today, which has embraced a "controlled capitalism" after their flirtation with communism failed miserably (as it always does).

Can you trust the USSR lifespan statistics? I wouldn't.

You cite other countries, none of which are under a purely communist government, because that has never worked out for anyone other than the dictators that ruled them.

I don't think statistics are the issue, or what the exact definition of a communist is. For what it's worth, self-described communists are still in charge in all of the countries I mentioned, with the obvious exception of Soviet Russia.

Let's step back for a moment. I think you should acknowledge that you have constructed a world in your head where communists do battle with capitalists, and capitalists are the good guys.

That idea is outdated and increasingly ridiculous. Clearly it is a narrative that serves the interests of billionaires in West Palm Beach. I don't know that working people buy it. It wasn't communists who put them on a zero hours contract.

I do not see it as a battle or war. I pity the poor subjects of every totalitarian regime, and at the same time I feel blessed to live where I do. No system is perfect, and most of the people of the world live in fear of their government (including many in the USA).

The USA is rich for a reason, and that reason is the freedoms that this system of government allows. The likely outcome of any US shift toward socialism or communism is the destruction of wealth. We are seeing it happen today in places like California and New York City. Both places have recently moved toward socialism and they are now less desirable places to live than they once were. By any index, the quality of live in those places is worse today than it was 10 years ago.

The FRED house price index has roughly doubled in both states in the last 10 years, which does not speak to wealth destruction.

As it happens I have visited places where people actually had socialist governments, and freedom was curtailed. East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Belarus, and Vietnam.

I have also lived in West Germany and the UK, countries in which politicians like AOC and Mamdani would be considered mainstream or even centrist. This is entirely compatible with being freedom-loving democracies.

To me New York remains the city of Gordon Gecko. Silicon Valley remains the playground of venture capitalists.

But I respect your belief in whoever informed you that socialists have taken over and that millions of Americans are impoverished and oppressed.

So can you give me $3000? I am helping veterans pay for dog surgery.

Socialism is increasingly popular because people are seeing that capitalism makes them LESS free. People don't have the freedom to own a home, the freedom to get medical care, the freedom to travel, etc. When they see that many of those things (particularly medical care) are available in socialist (relative to the US) countries, it's no surprise that they abandon capitalism.

I'm not understanding how this observation relates to my comment, in any way.

Renewables are cheaper than fossil fuels. The areas that are just developing widespread electricity now will do it far cleaner than the US did, skipping the lower development stages of electricity and jumping directly into the future, if that's what you're saying. But I'm having trouble understanding what you mean.

The average person in the rest of the world lives in a dramatically different social structure than Western late stage capitalism. In effect the social contract of capitalism was "give up the culture, social institutions, etc. that make for a stable collectivist society and in exchange enjoy the benefits of consumerism." I don't think it is surprising that people are angry when the Capital class decides that they don't get the consumerism either.

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