Comment by delegate | Hacker News Reader

Comment by delegate | Hacker News Reader

My only practical contribution to fixing this issue is to upvote this article.. and write a message on HN.

I'm in Spain.

I really hope that after this summer, people of Europe will wake up and make fixing the climate their highest priority - at home, at work, in politics. We have very little time left, maybe a few years.

I can still see news articles everywhere blaming 'climate change' and 'CO2 emissions', pointing the finger at the oil companies and the likes. But those 'bad' guys are not operating in a void - they supply the products which are in high demand from me and you and our families - our entire lifestyle is built around them. So what needs to change is our life styles, philosophy, economic order .. drastic changes.

Consumerism needs to go, tourism needs to go, advertising needs to go, travel and logistics needs to be reinvented, industrial production needs to drop by orders of magnitude, everything replaced with healthy and efficient alternatives.

How can this be done peacefully is beyond me, it probably can't. We've had precedent during covid, when the whole world stopped because everyone was scared that they're going to die. It's not so different now.

Much of what you suggest is a drop in the ocean and requires people's habits to change in ways people are not happy to listen to - and - again - it's a drop in the ocean. Go vegetarian, it helps the environment - but don't expect anyone to follow, and don't expect it to mean anything.

Massive electrification - production (solar+wind+storage) and usage (EVs, as people won't stop driving no matter what, and heat pump heating and cooling) can be successfully driven with incentives and would have meaningful impact. People love to save money without losing comfort, incentives are ultimately budget neutral on a timescale, and for Europe this also ties into strategic energy sovereignty which is a nice added driver. Vote out and call out politicians not prioritizing this.

Bonus, you get to call them unpatriotic as they reinforce dependence on people who we're no longer on friendly terms with (no matter whether you look west or east)

> Bonus, you get to call them unpatriotic

Not sure that this is as big a bonus as you think. "Patriotism" is a bad word around these parts.

> How can this be done peacefully is beyond me

What you're proposing (ending consumerism, tourism) is nothing short of revolutionary. I don't imagine that the future is going to be bloodless with or without a revolution.

I’m convinced one of the best ways is to make the right choices financially easier, and make the wrong ones (much) more expensive. Fully subsidise trains and tax the crap out of flying. Do the same for cars running on fossil fuels Tax carbon heavy foods like meat. Repeat until this starts changing consumer behaviour

I agree that this is a reasonable place to start. Unfortunately, I don't think that politicians will be able to implement reforms like this without severe backlash from the public. So the ones that do might just get voted out in the next election. But it's what we need to do at a minimum.

Even just taxing jet fuel at the usual rates for other fuels would be a useful start.

I suspect consumerism and tourism would mostly evaporate bloodlessly if advertising were successfully banned.

I'm not sure a successful ban is even possible, given e.g. influencers. However, ending social media may inherently solve this pathway?

Reworking an economy so that wasteful overproduction on gadgets and (specifically: over-engineered) hobby equipment* ceases, without also breaking the supply of industrial capacity that allows a military to ramp up fast in a hot war, is I think completely unsolved?

* see Mrwhosetheboss videos about, well, a lot; but specifically all the things he goes back to after a while and reveals were over-rated and didn't really solve problems despite being shiny at first glance

Seriously, how do you fix it?

The biggest issue that keeps accelerating climate change is that people buy too much stuff, travel too much, and more importantly eat in a way that is bound to destroy the climate.

Now go tell people to buy less crap, use more public transport and stop filling their mouths with beef and fish every day, good luck.

And even that would merely slow the progress, not stop or revert climate change.

Sincerely this is a disaster, each generation just keeps doing worse than others, gen z may actually be the firsts to really give 2 damns, or pretend better.

> Seriously, how do you fix it?

Temporary SO₂ injection to treat the symptoms while we continue to make progress on transitioning to green energy.

I think the biggest issue is actually even further that these ones: it's the population itself. Overpopulation has been a huge driver, and it's a problem without a solution ; but it's still too absent from the conversation, especially because the system and the economy rely a lot on the population growing.

But i agree, in absence of a good solution for this part, the next best thing is a change of habits for the people.

> Overpopulation has been a huge driver, and it's a problem without a solution

Population is predicted to reach a peak and then start declining according to all the modelling I have seen so overpopulation is not a problem without a solution.

And the vast majority of that population is not consuming most of the energy. India's per capita consumption is less than one tenth of that of the US [1]. Even though they have three times the population they still consume less than one third of what the US does.

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/energy-mix?country=IND%7E...

that's all nice, now tell it to Americans, Chinese, Indians and most of the developing world, EU residents won't fix a thing besides ruining their economy

people are not going to die over hotter weather, at least not if they won't resist adapting to it instead of trying to change it, I would say it's easier to different climate/weather than trying to change it

Roads were not paved because people had bought cars and now were complaining that they only had cobblestone roads—crowded with meatbags—and dirt to drive them on. Look at the US. A “car-centric” culture. What, but how? Because making huge roads, bulldozing communities to make ugly and inefficient highways right through cities, giant parking lots—it was policy. Infrastructure. Top-down, with politicians and the Car Lobby.

Then continue to look at the the US. Huge, dangerous, and not at all used for “sport utility” SUVs. Yeah, people were blameworthy for starting to buy them. But the drive to make them dominate the whole car market was driven by the industry; much lower safety standards meant less cost and much fatter profits. But they were just meeting consumer demand...?

The global economy, very integrated, fucking giant container ships shipping raw products across the world to be slightly refined to then be shipped back again. Was that designed by anyone. Or just meeting consumer demand? That must have been some giant mass delusion of post hoc agentic reasoning; economists taking the credit for a globalized economy, every corner specialized and competing at what they can do best, exporting that and importing the rest. But I guess they are wrong? Just meeting consumer demand?

Consumer Capitalism. Curious name. It’s not Capitalism with a consumerist culture. It is Capitalism predicated on the mass of workers to “consume”. But I guess it is really optional after all? This economy of ours, the forever-servant of the collective us—it will just metamorphize itself organically to adjust to the realities of your fantasy of mass and uncoordinated consumer behavior change?

> My only practical contribution to

The only practical input you have is in the service of obfuscation. Of division. Of cheap reasoning. I saw someone litter once; that must be at the heart of the problem. I saw someone drive a sport car once; that must be at the heart of the issue. Of scapegoating.

You know your practical input is worthless. And still you will feel vindicated in ten years time when your practical input has yielded fucking nothing.

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