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So whats the alternative? Do nothing at all? If you have $100k left to pay on your mortgage, and somebody offers you $5k towards the mortgage are you going to

So whats the alternative? Do nothing at all? If you have $100k left to pay on your mortgage, and somebody offers you $5k towards the mortgage are you going to tell them they're offering you a "false hope because you'd still have $95k left to pay"? EDIT: This is also known as the "nirvana fallacy": because the solution is not perfect - that means it is worthless. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nirvana_fallacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nirvana_fallacy

Barrin92 7y ago
No, the alternative is to figure out how to change the very fundamental levers of the system in a way that enables change on a scale that matters. The individual consumption lens is going to accomplish nothing. If you could move an entire country from being car dependent to being largely car free, by pushing rapid urbanisation and transit and you put 20 car drivers onto a train or a bus, then we're starting to talk about measures that actually have some effect. Or if we eliminate meat consumption altogether rather than promising people magic lab meat every five years, that would have an effect. Or if we put some significant money into a manhattan project for carbon capture, that at least gives us a statistical shot. But buying a tesla or a linen bag at the supermarket or paying 50 cents for a biodegradable cup at starbucks isn't saving the planet, it's the modern version of paying the catholic church for absolution. And in the long and infamous history of bad references to fallacies, this isn't one either. If you need to go from 100 to 10 and you're spending billions on something that gets you from 100 to 99.9 you're wasting time and energy that you don't have.
- theworld572 7y ago
  So, while you sit there waiting for the perfect solution (which is completely unrealistic) people actively working on real solutions. > spending billions on something that gets you from 100 to 99.9 you're wasting time and energy that you don't have. Of course those numbers are just made up but they are also very far from reality. Solutions to climate change have actually been ranked in terms of total cost and total amount of CO2 reductions and electric cars come in at the 26th most cost-effective solution to climate change: https://www.drawdown.org/solutions/transport/electric-vehicles https://www.drawdown.org/solutions/transport/electric-vehicl... I really don't know why climate change seems to inspire so many people's inner contrarian where they just want to deride any attempt at preventing it because they haven't solved the whole thing in one go. There is no perfect solution, we are not going to fundamentally transform the world to a car-less society, or eliminate meat consumption. Its like if you buy an electric car, somebody tells you "BUT you still fly!". If you stop flying, somebody tells you "BUT you still eat meat!". If you stop eating meat somebody tells you "BUT you still heat your home with gas!" If you switch to electric heating based of clean energy sources somebody tells you "BUT you still buy avacados imported from across the world!" It never ends.
  - irq11 7y ago
    Do you know what the #1, most significant thing any of us can do to reduce climate change? Have one fewer child. Nothing else even comes close. It’s a simple fact. It’s easy to do. But nobody wants to do that. It’s far less painful to pretend that we can keep the Titanic from sinking by making sure we sip our boat drinks from metal straws. The point of the post is that we’re trying to consume our way out of a consumption problem, but predictably, a group of technology people want desperately to believe that if we just make the stuff we’re consuming better — with technology! — we’re helping. To this end, it’s worth pointing out that the only item on that list that relates to family size is midway down, where it talks about family planning for the third world...something other people can do, so that you don’t have to change your life.
    - ZeroGravitas 7y ago
      Someone should go through the comments and collect together all the "perfect" solutions. If we let the "ban cars" and the "ban children" folk fight it out then that frees up time for the "pragmatically improve things along many different dimensions, many of which would be beneficial even if we totally ignored climate change" folk to get on with things.
      - irq11 7y ago
        You can deny it all you like, but it’s true [1] and you’re just illustrating the point: nobody wants to do the things that actually matter, because those things are painful (not incidentally, #2 is “sell your car”). It’s far easier to mock the people who tell you the truth than it is to make substantial changes. [1] https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/environment/2017/jul/12/want-to-fight-climate-change-have-fewer-children https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/environment...
        ZeroGravitas 7y ago
        Or those things will just scare people into doing nothing because it's so overwhelming and hopeless to be so uncompromisingly perfectionist about it. Whereas making a car or a plane trip or a burger or a child x% more expensive will move us in the right direction and even that will be resisted to a crazy degree.
- academic_nimrod 7y ago
  >the alternative is to figure out how to change the very fundamental levers of the system You can already do this. It's called voting, but unfortunately the majority of people don't want the government dictating to them every aspect of their lives (what they eat, drive, or where they live). >If you could move an entire country from being car dependent to being largely car free, by pushing rapid urbanisation and transit and you put 20 car drivers onto a train or a bus, then we're starting to talk about measures that actually have some effect. Are you advocating forced relocating? Should people just sell their homes? What if you don't like living in big cities? >it's the modern version of paying the catholic church for absolution. And your climate doomsday fearmongering is the modern version of Catholic eschatology.
- travisporter 7y ago
  First, A lot of people buy Teslas because of looks and performance, or a linen bag because of ocean pollution. It may not reflect a desire to address climate change. Second, we can do both moonshots and paper straws. Why not encourage people finally pulling their head out of the sand?
  - JoeAltmaier 7y ago
    Because, as indicated, it 'buys absolution' for the individual. That means they don't have to do anything else to feel they are contributing. Which shoots the moonshot in the foot.
    - yellowapple 7y ago
      You're assuming that they're indeed not doing anything else. I strongly doubt that's an accurate assumption.
      - JoeAltmaier 7y ago
        And I'm completely sure its exactly what's happening. In 99% of the people.
        theworld572 7y ago
        Based on what?
        JoeAltmaier 7y ago
        Same thing yellowapple based their baseless assumption on.
        theworld572 7y ago
        So you're basing it on nothing?
        7y ago
- benj111 7y ago
  Surely we need all of the above, we need to encourage public transport and EVs. Vegetarianism and lab meat. Carbon capture and carbon reduction. People are different, your idea of the best tradeoff and how to spend your carbon budget is likely to be different to mine, neither budget is more right or wrong so why not allow both.
- karthikb 7y ago
  >If you could move an entire country from being car dependent to being largely car free, by pushing rapid urbanisation and transit While these are the “right” solutions, they occur over decades. Planning for any rail line, then constructing, takes over a decade. Even in the environmentalist San Francisco Bay Area. Even bus lines. Try a google of “Van Ness BRT” to get a sense for how slow infrastructure projects work. You can buy a Tesla or a Leaf or an e-Golf and have significant personal emission reductions today.
  - magduf 7y ago
    >Planning for any rail line, then constructing, takes over a decade. Even in the environmentalist San Francisco Bay Area. Try a google of “Van Ness BRT” to get a sense for how slow infrastructure projects work. That's a uniquely American problem. Maybe America should fix itself so it doesn't take so long to build infrastructure.
    - yellowapple 7y ago
      Well unfortunately, fixing America will take far more time and effort than even outright abolishing ICEs and transitioning every automobile-driving American to electric vehicles (let alone let the market do its thing, given that the advantages of ICE relative to electric are rapidly evaporating). So, you know, why not push for the latter in the meantime while we work toward the former?
      - magduf 7y ago
        I'm not even talking about abolishing ICEs or anything like that. I'm just talking about fixing whatever political problems cause America to take literally decades to build a single bridge or other infrastructure, when other industrialized nations get it done in a small fraction of the time and cost.
    - yyyk 7y ago
      That's not a 'uniquely American problem' at all. e.g. Berlin's Brandenburg airport, UK's HS2, third Heathrow runway, etc. Infrasturcture projects lag in almost all developed countries for various political reasons.
- tryitnow 7y ago
  OK, you changed my mind. I still think buying an electric car is better than doing nothing, but I also see the emphasis on individual consumer decisions as a serious distraction. Sure, electric cars and other consumer decisions could maybe make a 10% contribution in solving the problem, but these individualist approaches are getting the bulk of the attention. I feel there should be a name for this phenomenon: When the solution that has a ~10% effect gets ~99% of the attention, whereas solutions that solve ~90% of the problem get ~1% of the attention. It's like a Pareto law of inversion of contribution versus attention. It should go without saying that this effect is everywhere in technology, especially software development. You're going to encounter it today at work.
  - s1artibartfast 7y ago
    If I understand the incremental benifit presented in the article correctly, upgrading to an ev before the useful life of your fuel vehicle is over could increase emissions, as would be buying a a ev as a secondary vehicle just used for commuting
- maxsilver 7y ago
  > If you could move an entire country from being car dependent to being largely car free, by pushing rapid urbanisation and transit and you put 20 car drivers onto a train or a bus, then we're starting to talk about measures that actually have some effect. This isn't necessarily true. Depending on how you put "20 drivers onto a bus" in a dense rapid urbanization, you are often generating more CO2 than the drivers were previously. Building an entire nations worth of new train lines generates a lot of extra CO2. "Rapidly urbanizing" everyone generates a ton of extra CO2 (and will instantly price out nearly all of the residents you want to 'urbanize', something EVs never do) In the US, most EV drivers with a renewable energy source are already emitting less CO2 per trip than the equivalent bus ride would emit (even after factoring in per-rider numbers for the bus). Depending on your area, the "largely car free" option is semi-regularly worse for the environment once an EV is factored in. > Or if we put some significant money into a manhattan project for carbon capture, that at least gives us a statistical shot. We already are? https://carbonengineering.com/ https://carbonengineering.com/ and https://www.climeworks.com/ https://www.climeworks.com/ That doesn't discount the work people are doing on EVs. Its still usually better to prevent emissions than to attempt to recapture them later.
- microtherion 7y ago
  And companies like Tesla not only don't accomplish anything to reduce car dependency, they (or at least their principals) are actively working to maintain or possibly even extend car dependency (cf. the Boring Company with its mission to direct even more transportation funding to individual transportation).
- YeGoblynQueenne 7y ago
  >> Or if we eliminate meat consumption altogether rather than promising people magic lab meat every five years, that would have an effect. With this I don't agree. People need meat for a healthy diet. Completely eliminating meat is just as fantastical as magical lab meat and indeed requires some magical unicorn technological solution (like giving everyone B12 supplements or whatnot). Reducing meat consumption, of course is another matter. However, we are going to have to live with at least some greenhous gas emissions and the ones from the animals we farm for their meat are the ones we will be forced to keep until last. Because, ultimately, we need to eat meat, but we don't need to drive cars, fly in planes, have each our personal communications device, etc etc.
addicted 7y ago
That’s not what the original author of the article is claiming from how I read it. He’s claiming that sure, take the 5k, but don’t let that fool you into believing you’re done. You still have to plan on finding the other 95k.
- theworld572 7y ago
  Sure but who is denying that you don't need to pay the other 95k? The article is arguing against a straw man. Nobody is saying that electric cars will be the end-all solution to climate change. Literally no one.
  - JKCalhoun 7y ago
    I'm seeing a few comments in this thread that come very close to saying just that.
- Goronmon 7y ago
  He’s claiming that sure, take the 5k, but don’t let that fool you into believing you’re done. You still have to plan on finding the other 95k. Specifically, from reading through the rest of the site, the author seems to be arguing that we need to give up technology and go back to farming with our neighbors. Oh and no entertainment either, just working on sustaining your existence. Edit: Someone downvoted me, but in another article one of the things the author states we must do is quit any job where you are paid and start working locally to help your community directly. Which means just about anyone reading Hacker News needs to leave their job right this moment.
jhoechtl 7y ago
> So whats the alternative? Do nothing at all? Change marketing in a way that muscle cars are uncool much the way smoking is uncool these days. This would pave the way for SEVs which are the best solution to start the change but are comparativelly weak in power.

Barrin92 7y ago

No, the alternative is to figure out how to change the very fundamental levers of the system in a way that enables change on a scale that matters. The individual consumption lens is going to accomplish nothing. If you could move an entire country from being car dependent to being largely car free, by pushing rapid urbanisation and transit and you put 20 car drivers onto a train or a bus, then we're starting to talk about measures that actually have some effect. Or if we eliminate meat consumption altogether rather than promising people magic lab meat every five years, that would have an effect. Or if we put some significant money into a manhattan project for carbon capture, that at least gives us a statistical shot. But buying a tesla or a linen bag at the supermarket or paying 50 cents for a biodegradable cup at starbucks isn't saving the planet, it's the modern version of paying the catholic church for absolution. And in the long and infamous history of bad references to fallacies, this isn't one either. If you need to go from 100 to 10 and you're spending billions on something that gets you from 100 to 99.9 you're wasting time and energy that you don't have.

theworld572 7y ago
So, while you sit there waiting for the perfect solution (which is completely unrealistic) people actively working on real solutions. > spending billions on something that gets you from 100 to 99.9 you're wasting time and energy that you don't have. Of course those numbers are just made up but they are also very far from reality. Solutions to climate change have actually been ranked in terms of total cost and total amount of CO2 reductions and electric cars come in at the 26th most cost-effective solution to climate change: https://www.drawdown.org/solutions/transport/electric-vehicles https://www.drawdown.org/solutions/transport/electric-vehicl... I really don't know why climate change seems to inspire so many people's inner contrarian where they just want to deride any attempt at preventing it because they haven't solved the whole thing in one go. There is no perfect solution, we are not going to fundamentally transform the world to a car-less society, or eliminate meat consumption. Its like if you buy an electric car, somebody tells you "BUT you still fly!". If you stop flying, somebody tells you "BUT you still eat meat!". If you stop eating meat somebody tells you "BUT you still heat your home with gas!" If you switch to electric heating based of clean energy sources somebody tells you "BUT you still buy avacados imported from across the world!" It never ends.
- irq11 7y ago
  Do you know what the #1, most significant thing any of us can do to reduce climate change? Have one fewer child. Nothing else even comes close. It’s a simple fact. It’s easy to do. But nobody wants to do that. It’s far less painful to pretend that we can keep the Titanic from sinking by making sure we sip our boat drinks from metal straws. The point of the post is that we’re trying to consume our way out of a consumption problem, but predictably, a group of technology people want desperately to believe that if we just make the stuff we’re consuming better — with technology! — we’re helping. To this end, it’s worth pointing out that the only item on that list that relates to family size is midway down, where it talks about family planning for the third world...something other people can do, so that you don’t have to change your life.
  - ZeroGravitas 7y ago
    Someone should go through the comments and collect together all the "perfect" solutions. If we let the "ban cars" and the "ban children" folk fight it out then that frees up time for the "pragmatically improve things along many different dimensions, many of which would be beneficial even if we totally ignored climate change" folk to get on with things.
    - irq11 7y ago
      You can deny it all you like, but it’s true [1] and you’re just illustrating the point: nobody wants to do the things that actually matter, because those things are painful (not incidentally, #2 is “sell your car”). It’s far easier to mock the people who tell you the truth than it is to make substantial changes. [1] https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/environment/2017/jul/12/want-to-fight-climate-change-have-fewer-children https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/environment...
      - ZeroGravitas 7y ago
        Or those things will just scare people into doing nothing because it's so overwhelming and hopeless to be so uncompromisingly perfectionist about it. Whereas making a car or a plane trip or a burger or a child x% more expensive will move us in the right direction and even that will be resisted to a crazy degree.
academic_nimrod 7y ago
>the alternative is to figure out how to change the very fundamental levers of the system You can already do this. It's called voting, but unfortunately the majority of people don't want the government dictating to them every aspect of their lives (what they eat, drive, or where they live). >If you could move an entire country from being car dependent to being largely car free, by pushing rapid urbanisation and transit and you put 20 car drivers onto a train or a bus, then we're starting to talk about measures that actually have some effect. Are you advocating forced relocating? Should people just sell their homes? What if you don't like living in big cities? >it's the modern version of paying the catholic church for absolution. And your climate doomsday fearmongering is the modern version of Catholic eschatology.
travisporter 7y ago
First, A lot of people buy Teslas because of looks and performance, or a linen bag because of ocean pollution. It may not reflect a desire to address climate change. Second, we can do both moonshots and paper straws. Why not encourage people finally pulling their head out of the sand?
- JoeAltmaier 7y ago
  Because, as indicated, it 'buys absolution' for the individual. That means they don't have to do anything else to feel they are contributing. Which shoots the moonshot in the foot.
  - yellowapple 7y ago
    You're assuming that they're indeed not doing anything else. I strongly doubt that's an accurate assumption.
    - JoeAltmaier 7y ago
      And I'm completely sure its exactly what's happening. In 99% of the people.
      - theworld572 7y ago
        Based on what?
        JoeAltmaier 7y ago
        Same thing yellowapple based their baseless assumption on.
        theworld572 7y ago
        So you're basing it on nothing?
        7y ago
benj111 7y ago
Surely we need all of the above, we need to encourage public transport and EVs. Vegetarianism and lab meat. Carbon capture and carbon reduction. People are different, your idea of the best tradeoff and how to spend your carbon budget is likely to be different to mine, neither budget is more right or wrong so why not allow both.
karthikb 7y ago
>If you could move an entire country from being car dependent to being largely car free, by pushing rapid urbanisation and transit While these are the “right” solutions, they occur over decades. Planning for any rail line, then constructing, takes over a decade. Even in the environmentalist San Francisco Bay Area. Even bus lines. Try a google of “Van Ness BRT” to get a sense for how slow infrastructure projects work. You can buy a Tesla or a Leaf or an e-Golf and have significant personal emission reductions today.
- magduf 7y ago
  >Planning for any rail line, then constructing, takes over a decade. Even in the environmentalist San Francisco Bay Area. Try a google of “Van Ness BRT” to get a sense for how slow infrastructure projects work. That's a uniquely American problem. Maybe America should fix itself so it doesn't take so long to build infrastructure.
  - yellowapple 7y ago
    Well unfortunately, fixing America will take far more time and effort than even outright abolishing ICEs and transitioning every automobile-driving American to electric vehicles (let alone let the market do its thing, given that the advantages of ICE relative to electric are rapidly evaporating). So, you know, why not push for the latter in the meantime while we work toward the former?
    - magduf 7y ago
      I'm not even talking about abolishing ICEs or anything like that. I'm just talking about fixing whatever political problems cause America to take literally decades to build a single bridge or other infrastructure, when other industrialized nations get it done in a small fraction of the time and cost.
  - yyyk 7y ago
    That's not a 'uniquely American problem' at all. e.g. Berlin's Brandenburg airport, UK's HS2, third Heathrow runway, etc. Infrasturcture projects lag in almost all developed countries for various political reasons.
tryitnow 7y ago
OK, you changed my mind. I still think buying an electric car is better than doing nothing, but I also see the emphasis on individual consumer decisions as a serious distraction. Sure, electric cars and other consumer decisions could maybe make a 10% contribution in solving the problem, but these individualist approaches are getting the bulk of the attention. I feel there should be a name for this phenomenon: When the solution that has a ~10% effect gets ~99% of the attention, whereas solutions that solve ~90% of the problem get ~1% of the attention. It's like a Pareto law of inversion of contribution versus attention. It should go without saying that this effect is everywhere in technology, especially software development. You're going to encounter it today at work.
- s1artibartfast 7y ago
  If I understand the incremental benifit presented in the article correctly, upgrading to an ev before the useful life of your fuel vehicle is over could increase emissions, as would be buying a a ev as a secondary vehicle just used for commuting
maxsilver 7y ago
> If you could move an entire country from being car dependent to being largely car free, by pushing rapid urbanisation and transit and you put 20 car drivers onto a train or a bus, then we're starting to talk about measures that actually have some effect. This isn't necessarily true. Depending on how you put "20 drivers onto a bus" in a dense rapid urbanization, you are often generating more CO2 than the drivers were previously. Building an entire nations worth of new train lines generates a lot of extra CO2. "Rapidly urbanizing" everyone generates a ton of extra CO2 (and will instantly price out nearly all of the residents you want to 'urbanize', something EVs never do) In the US, most EV drivers with a renewable energy source are already emitting less CO2 per trip than the equivalent bus ride would emit (even after factoring in per-rider numbers for the bus). Depending on your area, the "largely car free" option is semi-regularly worse for the environment once an EV is factored in. > Or if we put some significant money into a manhattan project for carbon capture, that at least gives us a statistical shot. We already are? https://carbonengineering.com/ https://carbonengineering.com/ and https://www.climeworks.com/ https://www.climeworks.com/ That doesn't discount the work people are doing on EVs. Its still usually better to prevent emissions than to attempt to recapture them later.
microtherion 7y ago
And companies like Tesla not only don't accomplish anything to reduce car dependency, they (or at least their principals) are actively working to maintain or possibly even extend car dependency (cf. the Boring Company with its mission to direct even more transportation funding to individual transportation).
YeGoblynQueenne 7y ago
>> Or if we eliminate meat consumption altogether rather than promising people magic lab meat every five years, that would have an effect. With this I don't agree. People need meat for a healthy diet. Completely eliminating meat is just as fantastical as magical lab meat and indeed requires some magical unicorn technological solution (like giving everyone B12 supplements or whatnot). Reducing meat consumption, of course is another matter. However, we are going to have to live with at least some greenhous gas emissions and the ones from the animals we farm for their meat are the ones we will be forced to keep until last. Because, ultimately, we need to eat meat, but we don't need to drive cars, fly in planes, have each our personal communications device, etc etc.

addicted 7y ago

That’s not what the original author of the article is claiming from how I read it. He’s claiming that sure, take the 5k, but don’t let that fool you into believing you’re done. You still have to plan on finding the other 95k.

theworld572 7y ago
Sure but who is denying that you don't need to pay the other 95k? The article is arguing against a straw man. Nobody is saying that electric cars will be the end-all solution to climate change. Literally no one.
- JKCalhoun 7y ago
  I'm seeing a few comments in this thread that come very close to saying just that.
Goronmon 7y ago
He’s claiming that sure, take the 5k, but don’t let that fool you into believing you’re done. You still have to plan on finding the other 95k. Specifically, from reading through the rest of the site, the author seems to be arguing that we need to give up technology and go back to farming with our neighbors. Oh and no entertainment either, just working on sustaining your existence. Edit: Someone downvoted me, but in another article one of the things the author states we must do is quit any job where you are paid and start working locally to help your community directly. Which means just about anyone reading Hacker News needs to leave their job right this moment.

jhoechtl 7y ago

> So whats the alternative? Do nothing at all? Change marketing in a way that muscle cars are uncool much the way smoking is uncool these days. This would pave the way for SEVs which are the best solution to start the change but are comparativelly weak in power.