Comment by kalenx | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kalenx | Hacker News Reader

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Fair enough. I'll expand.

> The political criticism in the US (and in Canada where I'm from) against fossil fuel extraction makes no sense.

If you _must_ extract fossil fuel, you can arguably say that it's better to do it somewhere with higher environmental standards (of course, here I'm disregarding people disdain to see wilderness areas they know and have an emotional attachment with transformed into oil fields). But what about _stop_ fossil fuel usage? Sure, it would cost a lot of money. So is AI currently, for doubtful returns. Sure, it would require people changing habits. So has the Internet, and we went through it.

It's like hearing an alcoholic telling you that sure, he still drinks 3 bottles a day but hey, it's Canada-made alcohol, "all in all better than alcohol coming from Russia", right? Yes, I guess it's better for the Canadian economy, but what about just stop drinking?

About your Tesla, deciding to buy without any political consideration is your choice, which you are entitled to. But why would it be impossible to understand someone actually considering the political/social side of things? All your acts and conscious decisions are strictly driven by objective, scientific criteria, never taking into account anything else?

I try to be pragmatic and not religious/ideology driven and I try to take in the complete picture. I think we could all use more of that. A lot of my climate thinking is influenced by someone I know who is also very pragmatic and knows a lot more about this. I am more or less echoing some of those thoughts because I think they're important and I agree with them.

We are not all going to "just stop" using fossil fuels. That is not a realistic goal. If it was possible then I'd entertain it. Being religious about this doesn't help make progress because it alienates people. I am all for pragmatic measures that reduce fossil fuel usage globally. Tanking Canada's economy to make zero or negative global impact is how I evaluate some of the proposed aggressive policies. What is happening is that we are funding Russia's war on Ukraine indirectly due to our lack of ability to replace that supply in Europe. That to me feels like obviously bad policy.

I made changes in my life to reduce fossil fuel usage and am considering more. I also try and influence others where I can to make similar changes. I am not optimizing for $'s here, I can afford to spend more and use less fossil fuels. This isn't really to boast or anything, just to say that this approach works for me and can work for others.

My wife boycotts Nestle for political considerations. I sort of get it but also not get it. That's not to say I would never consider something like that but I also am not a believer in the efficiency of that driving change and I don't have time to research everything in enough depth to come to a conclusion about everything I buy. Not buying Tesla for politics X is a very one dimensional decision. I don't understand how to make that decision and so I don't bother.

I'm all for pragmatism. The issue is that most people claiming pragmatism are usually, in my experience, simply justifying status quo.

Sure, I get it, we won't literally _stop_ fossil fuels usage in the near future. I get it, other countries are large CO2 emitters. But why is it an argument to do nothing?

In Canada, Carbon tax was a pragmatic, reasonable policy. It was even enacted by conservatives. It was done at zero and even negative cost for most people. And yet, it was gunned down because it was easier to just yell "ax the tax" without even understanding what it was. All of it under the cover of "pragmatism" (hey, families are suffering, businesses are failing, we need to do something -- and of course, that something has nothing to do with the root causes of these issues).

I could go on: you cannot put bike lanes to encourage bike adoption (that's pragmatism: people stuck in traffic in their gaz guzzlers produce CO2!). You cannot improve public transport (that's pragmatism, it's too expensive and families don't want that anyway). You cannot have laws to enforce maximal arsenic content in the air in a residential neighborhood (that's pragmatism, what will the workers do when the plant close?). I could go on and on, just in Canada.

It's tiring to see pragmatism systematically invoked as an justification for doing the worst possible thing, environmentally speaking. It's tiring to see that this always raises the bar of what is environmentally acceptable, such that next decisions are even worse.

Kudos on you if you actually make pragmatic choices to reduce your fossil fuel consumption, both at an individual and societal level. But somehow I doubt it. I've seen too many "pragmatics".

The higher environmental standards that allow drilling in nature reserves?

Sorry that sounds like, if you get murdered than better here because the knives are cleaner.

Well I was trying to go with it for the sake of argument. I don't really think there is a "clean" way to extract fossil fuels, especially in oil sands like in Alberta. My point was that even if that was true, it still doesn't make sense to me.

> But what about _stop_ fossil fuel usage?

And how do you propose we do that if we’re not the ones selling the fossils?

Fossil fuel usage is for the most part, a transaction between willing participants at a fair market price. Will you ban that? How will you enforce it? I hate to be presumptuous, but I assume you’re not a fan of colonialism or wars in the Middle East.

While oil is as valuable as it is for heating, industry, transport, war, and gestures widely at our modern lifestyle. There are two realistic ways to stop it: replace it with something cheaper and better, or genocide.

Neither of these are likely to happen at the scale and timeline required to solve our predicament. But regardless, pretending we can just stop people far poorer than us from striving to meet our standing of living by… asking nicely? It doesn’t help, if your goal is indeed to solve the problem.

> And how do you propose we do that if we’re not the ones selling the fossils?

Because we would be the ones not _buying_ the fossils? There are multiple ways to reduce fossil fuels dependency, and they are known (and no, they do not involve genocide or colonialism). In Canada, carbon tax is an example, backed by economic studies (from right wight economists) and originally introduced by conservative (in Canada at least). Of course, then right wing parties started to convince people to "axe the tax" because it was the root cause of their problems (which is was, of course, not).

That's always the issue, and that's always been bugging me. Why is it that not being able to replace, today, 100% of the fossil fuels usage means "gee, we should do nothing, let's actually increase our production!"? How do we come from "such an energetic transition is a multi generation work" (which is true) to "meh too hard, let's double down"? How can we seriously make the argument "hey, I _could_ clean up the mess in my backyard, but anyway my neighbor is way worse and he has a larger backyard, let's do nothing instead"?

I really don't see how these positions are seen as the "voice of reason". To me, there at best the voice of laziness.

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