Hacker News Reader

Comment by tim-star | Hacker News Reader

at the end of the day 'personal changes' as a fix for climate change are just another lie big corporations fed us to make it feel like the onus was on a personal level.

the amount of co2 that industries pollute and that various regulation would be able to change is multiple orders of magnitude compared to regular personal responsibility.

View on HN

This sounds right. An individual person can’t change a complex system that gives him everything they have, from plastic forks to gas cars. The society can get together and agree on things, but the society clearly just isn’t concerned enough. There is no solution or workaround to this, unless certain scientific discoveries get made that change the warming trends by sheer coincidence. They would have to coincide with popular demand, like more attractive electric cars, and new materials, or fusion energy that’s cheap. Or, perhaps, AGI decide it for us.

Changes to those corporations will obviously have downstream effects that voters will largely not tolerate.

Even outside of America?

"The amount[...] that industries pollute" is just "personal changes" with more steps.

Personal changes against the grain or personal changes following the grain.

Imagine I want to be responsible by drinking soy milk but it's hidden in a corner of the supermarket.

Now imagine every supermarket prominently displays soy milk and cow milk is hidden in the corner. Seems easier to make the change, right? Many people will change automatically because they don't really care and just do what's easiest.

I wish the soy one were hidden on a corner on my local supermarket. There isn't even one anymore in my country, and that's the biggest soybean producer in the world.

Other plant milks are 3x the price of the cow one because of economies of scale and subsidies. It's all a big joke.

In some countries they're not allowed to call it "soy milk" which is a big joke. I understand why you can't call it "milk <font size=1>of the soy variety</font>" but nouns with adjectives can, in fact, refer to things the adjective-less noun doesn't refer to.

So the soy yoghurt in Germany is called Alpro - the brand name. The dairy industry even fucked themselves over, because even their real yoghurt doesn't meet the strict definition and has to be called "mild yoghurt" instead.

Who do these corporations pollute for? Isn't it for individuals?

Who benefits from a corporation? Is it the customers, the workers or the owners?

In many cases, it's all three.

But not equally.

In some cases it might be and others it might not. In many cases that's going to be extremely hard to measure and equality might not even be desirable.

And in other cases, it's extremely bad for the consumers. See: enshittification due the lack of good regulations, https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/26/ursula-franklin/

For the accumulation of wealth and power. This is the natural consequence of unregulated capitalist incentives. Do you think the corporations care about the individuals?

I suppose you can see it that way, but ultimately the power is mostly in the hands of individuals, either by voting in elections or voting with their wallets.

However, this does not mean corporations aren't actively trying to influence and manipulate them, or that they don't exert pressure on politicians. Aren't Americans responsible as a whole for electing Donald Trump, for example?

Over 70% of Americans oppose data centers being built in their local area, yet they continue to be built, even when local elected representatives publicly oppose it. It's easy to see who really has the power and how futile elections can be.

We should abolish oil companies and make sure the only place you can gas up your lifted truck is the Democratic People's Fuel Depot, that will solve climate change.

Frankly, the self reinforcing methane loops we have already triggered make emissions almost irrelevant at this point. If we want a planet compatible with human prosperity, we have no choice but to do planetary scale geoengineering; albedo management and metascale carbon capture are really the only options at this point. We crossed the rubicon a few years ago and even stopping emissions altogether tomorrow won’t stop the avalanche at this point. It would buy us a few decades, at best.

What's your evidence we hit the methane runaway tipping point?

I think it’s fairly speculative, but I used to hang out with scientists from the UAF geophysical institute, I still keep in touch. They seem to believe it is the case. some of them have told me that if they were to publish it would be career suicide, and one is actually afraid to talk about it except when he’s drunk.

I figure if those guys, at least as smart as I am and way, way better informed, think it’s probable then I should consider it a significant possibility.

I really hope they are all full of shit lol.

I mean, in the real world, people will just vote out politicians who raise their gas prices.

Doesn't seem to have worked this time.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com