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Comment by locknitpicker | Hacker News Reader

> "Making money" is the incentive system of society. Technology has now aligned society's incentive systems to promote climate action.

This personal belief is grounded on an assumption that all mankind follows a neoliberal or even libertarian economic model.

Back to reality, west Europe is firmly a social democracy where states impose behavior through law, regulation, and policy, which is topped by a federal system that coordinates policies. Countries such as China are totalitarian with a centrally managed economy that's guided by N-year strategic plans.

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My supposed "personal belief" is not normative it is descriptive.

Misconstruing this as normative, and attributing it to a political belief, is your cognitive dissonance trying to reconcile where actual climate action is coming from.

We must understand the world as it is, if we are to effectively change it to a better state.

> My supposed "personal belief" is not normative it is descriptive.

No, it is a expression of your personal and unsupported beliefs. Asserting that the whole world enforces a libertarian economical system is simply out of touch with reality. I mean, China alone is a totalitarian regimes that still manages it's economy through central planning.

> Back to reality, west Europe is firmly a social democracy where states impose behavior through law, regulation, and policy, which is topped by a federal system that coordinates policies.

And yet, air travel continues to grow (after a small hiatus due to COVID) and state and EU money will be dumped into a new airport near me, to support more than doubling current capacity, much further away from the city (adding tens of millions of car trips to and from the airport).

I'm simply the looney for not taking the kids on low cost European city escapes.

It starts from the “bottom”: people will talk about it, but will pretty much continue to do whatever the fuck they can afford to do. And Europeans, like Americans, can simply afford to much, while harping about what will happen to the world once the BRICS can afford the same.

Much of Western Europe has increasingly adopted neoliberal policies over the years, I would not call it “firmly” social democratic anymore.

Seriously, we have the US threatening to sanction (and has) politicians and judges that want to regulate US technology companies. The idea that neoliberalism doesn't have a massive influence on the world is straight up delusional.

Did we forget that EU took an austerity approach following 2008 and all that did was immiserate their population enough where they are voting for fascist/nationalist political parties?

Yes, although I wouldn’t blame the US solely, London also carries a fair amount of responsibility for it. Perhaps not as much as the US, but Thatcherism was certainly the Trojan horse for European entry of neoliberalism in the 1980s.

> This personal belief is grounded on an assumption that all mankind follows a neoliberal or even libertarian economic model.

This personal belief is usually coupled to people who have become wealthy following this belief. So it tracks that they would declare any solution that doesn't allow them to continue their plundering impossible.

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