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Comment by chasing | Hacker News Reader

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...)

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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-...

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