15 ms·

I really respect anyone who's chosen to willingly sacrifice their lifestyle to reduce their carbon emissions. Very few people are actually willing to do that.

by gxon 7y ago

I really respect anyone who's chosen to willingly sacrifice their lifestyle to reduce their carbon emissions. Very few people are actually willing to do that. So I'm curious about your opinion. Do you think that promoting hope that what we're doing is enough is the right play at this point in time? Decades of warning from the scientific community have yielded effectively 0 progress on halting our exponential march towards ecological collapse. Sure, you can argue for marginal progress here and there. But when the likely end goal remains total collapse of civilization and possible extinction of our species, does it really matter? I know we tend to think of panic and despair as something that prevents us from finding solutions, or even make the problem worse. But maybe pretending that we're going to mostly be OK and figure out climate change is just causing us to be complacent and procrastinate on the problem until it's too late. It may already be too late due to tipping points being triggered. Like I said, I'd love to hear your thoughts, but I've increasingly started to believe that panic is an idea worth spreading. It may be the only way we can ever hope to collectively wake up and start making the sacrifices necessary to survive this extinction event.

incangold 7y ago
Same. Not sure why you're getting downvoted. People have been saying we need to avoid scaring people for decades, and look where we are. Panic now, helpfully, to avoid panic later when we are more helpless. I don't know what other options we have for effective systemic change, and would love to hear from anyone who has a better model. Clearly everything we've tried up until now has not worked.
- scarmig 7y ago
  I'm not sure there's a switch we can flip that turns people from apathetic to supporting a panic-driven set of aggressive and durable legislation to address climate change. The effects of climate change are too long term and stochastic for voters to link policy with their everyday lived experience. Even in Australia at this very moment, only about half of people think Australia should do more about climate change, and it's unclear how many of them would actually prioritize that over other things they value.
  - MiroF 7y ago
    Realistically, the solution has to be to lie and link every natural disaster that could plausibly be related to the climate to the climate. I hate to say that, but thats what needs to be done if we want to compel action.
  - gxon 7y ago
    I personally believe that a key switch we can try flipping is universal basic income. The reasoning is not obvious. Basically, I think we live in a world now where almost everyone is stuck in tunnel vision for surviving today. For example, we have studies now that show significant drops in IQ when people are stressed about how they're going to be paying bills. If the vast majority is struggling financially, they literally might be made dumber and less able to think about complex problems. If we change the rules in a way that effectively says, nobody is getting left behind and nobody is dying of poverty, then maybe, that will be enough to give the masses the breathing room to look up and see long term risks bearing down upon us. Maybe not, but I think it's worth a shot. That's why I'm all in on Andrew Yang. He's the only candidate who gives me a semblance of hope for waking everyone up so that we can try to solve these problems.
    - d10r 7y ago
      I also see this connection. On a game theoretical level, it doesn't pay off for the individual to make a personal effort, unless the right incentives are in place. The status quo would be a great opportunity for a drastic policy switch: introduce correct pricing of resources (nomore externalizing) and "recycle" the generated income as an UBI. If you do the pricing only (even if just small amounts), you get yellow vests. If you do the UBI only, you would likely just boost consumption and even aggravate the ecological problem. But combined, it could be the solution the world is looking for.
    - phillnom 7y ago
      Society is in no way set up to support UBI. Everyone gets $1000 and then rent, food, and everything else become more expensive. Instead focus should be on guaranteeing necessities like healthcare with Medicare For All, relinquishing student loan debt, and making public college free to attend. Bernie is the only one focused on universal coverage for all of these things.
- galangalalgol 7y ago
  I think we are stick from a policy standpoint. We have some climate engineering ideas that might work, with the certainty of side effects. Those might keep civilization chugging long enough for fossil fuels to become scarce enough to price themselves out of existence. Even alternative power sources have waste heat, so we have to taper power usage no matter the source, but that is a much longe term problem.
munificent 7y ago
> Decades of warning from the scientific community have yielded effectively 0 progress on halting our exponential march towards ecological collapse. This kind of doomsday fatalism is both factually incorrect and unhelpful. Between 2005 and 2015, a single decade, the US doubled its use of renewable energy [1]. co2 emissions from energy peaked in 2006 and have gently decreased since then [2]. Compared to significant upward slope before then, and the continued growth of the economy and population, that's a significant improvement. From 2000 to 2008, the number of people bicycling to work increased by 60% [3]. (It's still small in absolute terms, but this is a change that requires significant effort and lifestyle changes at the individual level.) In 2008, 30% of Americans felt dealing with climate change should be a top Presidential and Congressional priority. By 2018, that number was 44%, despite continued well-funded climate denial campaigns. The world is a giant ship with 8+ billion each with their own oar in the water. A vessel like that turns very slowly and with a danger on the horizon as complex and difficult to understand as climate change, we should not expect everyone to wake up overnight and be all-in on fixing the problem. But almost every trend shows that people are waking up, changing their habits, and shifting their priorities in the right direction. The ship is turning. Is it turning fast enough to avoid hitting the iceberg? No. But is it plowing full steam ahead? Not that either. > But when the likely end goal remains total collapse of civilization and possible extinction of our species, does it really matter? This is simply not true and you are very unlikely to find any reputable scientific source saying that. It is and will be a catastrophe. People have died and more will die. It has and will cause more political uprisings. But humanity as a species will almost certainly survive and as the reality of the problem becomes more and more apparent, we will put more and more resources into dealing with it. It's going to be bad, yes. But we (as a species and civilization) survived the Last Glacial Period, the Neolithic decline, the Plague of Justinian, the Black Death, multiple cholera pandemics, the fall of the Roman Empire, and the Spanish flu pandemic. We survived all of those with only a fraction of the technology, knowledge, and resources that we have today. Climate change is an entirely solvable problem with the capacity we have right now and we can and will solve as the necessity of doing so becomes more apparent and accepted. Only a hundred years ago, nearly 5% of the entire human population was wiped out by Spanish flu and today flu innoculation is a minor inconvenience for most and the pandemic is a footnote in history. We've kept humans alive in the hottest deserts, the coldest tundra, across oceans, and on the fucking moon. We are like cockroaches but smarter and better organized. [1]: https://www.energy.gov/eere/articles/4-charts-show-renewable-energy-rise-america https://www.energy.gov/eere/articles/4-charts-show-renewable... [2]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/183943/us-carbon-dioxide-emissions-from-1999/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/183943/us-carbon-dioxide... [3]: https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2014/cb14-86.html https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2014/cb14-86.... [4]: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/04/19/how-americans-see-climate-change-in-5-charts/ https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/04/19/how-america...
CalRobert 7y ago
Well, I used to worry a lot about my carbon footprint. Then I realized that it doesn't matter. I'm always just going to be that weird guy. I told Spanish colleagues I cringed when looking at upcoming transatlantic tickets because of environmental impact and they laughed! They thought I was joking. Honestly, I live in Ireland, Spain is likely to be destroyed, at least if you like producing food. So I stopped worrying about it. There was a time for that and it's past. However, more recently, I've been trying to live life like civilization has a decent chance of collapsing, and that has meant coppicing trees for heat, making a home out of materials that might be possible to produce directly (wood, not concrete) etc. - and that happens to be lower carbon. I worry about national defence but can only do so much. But I still cringe at the thought of flying, especially for work trips of dubious benefit. I am terrified of positive feedback loops - Australian fires igniting coal seams, dark blue oceans at the same time we finish dumping all that energy turning solid water to liquid in tha Arctic, etc. There was a time to stop the asteroid hitting Earth, but now you're better off trying to be on the other side when it hits.
- toomuchtodo 7y ago
  Depressingly accurate. We bought a property somewhere in the US that is likely to be least impacted by climate change. Efforts should still be made, but prepare for the worst.
  - CalRobert 7y ago
    Suspect we agree on a lot. Aim for the best, prepare for the worst, etc. We decided it was wise to seek another citizenship.
- MiroF 7y ago
  This is a dumb take. Differences at the margin still matter and just because we continue to emit doesn't mean you can abdicate yourself of personal responsibility.
  - CalRobert 7y ago
    Nice to see the hn ethos of attacking ideas, not people, in action. It's more like a death row inmate worrying about another cigarette. Anyway, like I said my current life is fairly low impact. Remote work helps a lot. But it doesn't make any difference, especially inasmuch as me not buying fossil fuels made infinitesimally cheaper for someone else to. It will stay that way until we price emissions appropriately. Converting a few acres of sheep grazing land to forest could make this chunk of my lifs carbon negative, for that matter. Lamb is especially bad.
jsgo 7y ago
I may be misreading/misinterpreting their comments, but the gist I got was that while natural gas isn't great, it is better than coal. And if we only focused on going for great, we'd still be coal only. I might be misreading, but I don't think they were advocating avoiding solar/wind/etc. (just that they weren't easy wins).
- scarmig 7y ago
  This is about where I stand. If there's a cheap and easy way to reduce carbon emissions that is already happening because of existing market forces, at the very least we shouldn't stand in its way. I'd even support government subsidies of it, if it helps it kill off coal, but it already seems like it'll do so without any help. Best would be strong climate change policies that set the price of carbon at its actual (high) cost, and that would naturally drive people from coal to gas and gas to low-carbon approaches, but that doesn't seem like it's in the cards in the short term.
  - MiroF 7y ago
    The real best approach would be going all in on nuclear but it's not a political possibility right now. Carbon neutral or at least very close to it is essentially obtainable now, we just lack the political will.
- gxon 7y ago
  I think the point is that it's not worth celebrating as a win, because the shift wasn't driven by a desire to reduce emissions. It was driven by the fact that gas is cheaper. It's just a nice coincidence that it's lower emissions. Sure, this is better than nothing, and every little bit counts, but it shouldn't give anyone hope that the tides are changing.
jeffdavis 7y ago
What actions would a panicked person take and how might those actions help?
- MiroF 7y ago
  invest heavily in solutions. panic isn't always bad and i'm unsure where that idea came from.
  - jeffdavis 7y ago
    Panic is a state suited to making decisions in an instant when seconds count based on very incomplete information and not much analysis. Climate change may be happening quickly in geological time, but it's plenty slow enough to take the time to think rationally.
- gxon 7y ago
  Spread fear and despair to everyone you're connected to. Yes, we need to move rationally and carefully, but we're only going to do that when a tipping point of people start believing this is an existential threat akin to an incoming asteroid that they or their children will be destroyed by. This is what's driving increasing movements like the Green New Deal. The closer we get to the impact, the more people notice, start freaking out, and demand action. The faster we can make the majority panic and demand change, the more likely we'll have time to do something effective. Realistically though, it's probably already too late to save our civilization.
  - oldprogrammer2 7y ago
    No, just stop eating meat and spread that message to everyone. You don’t need big acts of legislation. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-02409-7 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-02409-7
    - enilas 7y ago
      To that I raise this: https://www.reddit.com/r/zerocarb/comments/am5fo3/environmental_considerations_to_eating_meat/ https://www.reddit.com/r/zerocarb/comments/am5fo3/environmen... Vegetarianism could be fine if it's only with crops grown locally with not a whole lot of transportation involved, but that's not likely to happen anytime soon. Not to mention individuals have very little impact on the actual problem. https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2017/jul/10/100-fossil-fuel-companies-investors-responsible-71-global-emissions-cdp-study-climate-change https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2017/jul/10...
juanbyrge 7y ago
Sadly, I believe nothing will be done about climate change until something catastrophic begins to happen (e.g. millions of people start dying due directly to the effects of climate change). Climate change is way too abstract of a problem for humans to deal with given its large delayed time frames.
- MiroF 7y ago
  By the time that happens, we will likely all be dead and it will also be too late
mistrial9 7y ago
panic is not an idea worth spreading, nothing constructive and plenty destructive comes from it

by gxon 7y ago

incangold 7y ago

Same. Not sure why you're getting downvoted. People have been saying we need to avoid scaring people for decades, and look where we are. Panic now, helpfully, to avoid panic later when we are more helpless. I don't know what other options we have for effective systemic change, and would love to hear from anyone who has a better model. Clearly everything we've tried up until now has not worked.

scarmig 7y ago
I'm not sure there's a switch we can flip that turns people from apathetic to supporting a panic-driven set of aggressive and durable legislation to address climate change. The effects of climate change are too long term and stochastic for voters to link policy with their everyday lived experience. Even in Australia at this very moment, only about half of people think Australia should do more about climate change, and it's unclear how many of them would actually prioritize that over other things they value.
- MiroF 7y ago
  Realistically, the solution has to be to lie and link every natural disaster that could plausibly be related to the climate to the climate. I hate to say that, but thats what needs to be done if we want to compel action.
- gxon 7y ago
  I personally believe that a key switch we can try flipping is universal basic income. The reasoning is not obvious. Basically, I think we live in a world now where almost everyone is stuck in tunnel vision for surviving today. For example, we have studies now that show significant drops in IQ when people are stressed about how they're going to be paying bills. If the vast majority is struggling financially, they literally might be made dumber and less able to think about complex problems. If we change the rules in a way that effectively says, nobody is getting left behind and nobody is dying of poverty, then maybe, that will be enough to give the masses the breathing room to look up and see long term risks bearing down upon us. Maybe not, but I think it's worth a shot. That's why I'm all in on Andrew Yang. He's the only candidate who gives me a semblance of hope for waking everyone up so that we can try to solve these problems.
  - d10r 7y ago
    I also see this connection. On a game theoretical level, it doesn't pay off for the individual to make a personal effort, unless the right incentives are in place. The status quo would be a great opportunity for a drastic policy switch: introduce correct pricing of resources (nomore externalizing) and "recycle" the generated income as an UBI. If you do the pricing only (even if just small amounts), you get yellow vests. If you do the UBI only, you would likely just boost consumption and even aggravate the ecological problem. But combined, it could be the solution the world is looking for.
  - phillnom 7y ago
    Society is in no way set up to support UBI. Everyone gets $1000 and then rent, food, and everything else become more expensive. Instead focus should be on guaranteeing necessities like healthcare with Medicare For All, relinquishing student loan debt, and making public college free to attend. Bernie is the only one focused on universal coverage for all of these things.
galangalalgol 7y ago
I think we are stick from a policy standpoint. We have some climate engineering ideas that might work, with the certainty of side effects. Those might keep civilization chugging long enough for fossil fuels to become scarce enough to price themselves out of existence. Even alternative power sources have waste heat, so we have to taper power usage no matter the source, but that is a much longe term problem.

munificent 7y ago

> Decades of warning from the scientific community have yielded effectively 0 progress on halting our exponential march towards ecological collapse. This kind of doomsday fatalism is both factually incorrect and unhelpful. Between 2005 and 2015, a single decade, the US doubled its use of renewable energy [1]. co2 emissions from energy peaked in 2006 and have gently decreased since then [2]. Compared to significant upward slope before then, and the continued growth of the economy and population, that's a significant improvement. From 2000 to 2008, the number of people bicycling to work increased by 60% [3]. (It's still small in absolute terms, but this is a change that requires significant effort and lifestyle changes at the individual level.) In 2008, 30% of Americans felt dealing with climate change should be a top Presidential and Congressional priority. By 2018, that number was 44%, despite continued well-funded climate denial campaigns. The world is a giant ship with 8+ billion each with their own oar in the water. A vessel like that turns very slowly and with a danger on the horizon as complex and difficult to understand as climate change, we should not expect everyone to wake up overnight and be all-in on fixing the problem. But almost every trend shows that people are waking up, changing their habits, and shifting their priorities in the right direction. The ship is turning. Is it turning fast enough to avoid hitting the iceberg? No. But is it plowing full steam ahead? Not that either. > But when the likely end goal remains total collapse of civilization and possible extinction of our species, does it really matter? This is simply not true and you are very unlikely to find any reputable scientific source saying that. It is and will be a catastrophe. People have died and more will die. It has and will cause more political uprisings. But humanity as a species will almost certainly survive and as the reality of the problem becomes more and more apparent, we will put more and more resources into dealing with it. It's going to be bad, yes. But we (as a species and civilization) survived the Last Glacial Period, the Neolithic decline, the Plague of Justinian, the Black Death, multiple cholera pandemics, the fall of the Roman Empire, and the Spanish flu pandemic. We survived all of those with only a fraction of the technology, knowledge, and resources that we have today. Climate change is an entirely solvable problem with the capacity we have right now and we can and will solve as the necessity of doing so becomes more apparent and accepted. Only a hundred years ago, nearly 5% of the entire human population was wiped out by Spanish flu and today flu innoculation is a minor inconvenience for most and the pandemic is a footnote in history. We've kept humans alive in the hottest deserts, the coldest tundra, across oceans, and on the fucking moon. We are like cockroaches but smarter and better organized. [1]: https://www.energy.gov/eere/articles/4-charts-show-renewable-energy-rise-america https://www.energy.gov/eere/articles/4-charts-show-renewable... [2]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/183943/us-carbon-dioxide-emissions-from-1999/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/183943/us-carbon-dioxide... [3]: https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2014/cb14-86.html https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2014/cb14-86.... [4]: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/04/19/how-americans-see-climate-change-in-5-charts/ https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/04/19/how-america...

CalRobert 7y ago

Well, I used to worry a lot about my carbon footprint. Then I realized that it doesn't matter. I'm always just going to be that weird guy. I told Spanish colleagues I cringed when looking at upcoming transatlantic tickets because of environmental impact and they laughed! They thought I was joking. Honestly, I live in Ireland, Spain is likely to be destroyed, at least if you like producing food. So I stopped worrying about it. There was a time for that and it's past. However, more recently, I've been trying to live life like civilization has a decent chance of collapsing, and that has meant coppicing trees for heat, making a home out of materials that might be possible to produce directly (wood, not concrete) etc. - and that happens to be lower carbon. I worry about national defence but can only do so much. But I still cringe at the thought of flying, especially for work trips of dubious benefit. I am terrified of positive feedback loops - Australian fires igniting coal seams, dark blue oceans at the same time we finish dumping all that energy turning solid water to liquid in tha Arctic, etc. There was a time to stop the asteroid hitting Earth, but now you're better off trying to be on the other side when it hits.

toomuchtodo 7y ago
Depressingly accurate. We bought a property somewhere in the US that is likely to be least impacted by climate change. Efforts should still be made, but prepare for the worst.
- CalRobert 7y ago
  Suspect we agree on a lot. Aim for the best, prepare for the worst, etc. We decided it was wise to seek another citizenship.
MiroF 7y ago
This is a dumb take. Differences at the margin still matter and just because we continue to emit doesn't mean you can abdicate yourself of personal responsibility.
- CalRobert 7y ago
  Nice to see the hn ethos of attacking ideas, not people, in action. It's more like a death row inmate worrying about another cigarette. Anyway, like I said my current life is fairly low impact. Remote work helps a lot. But it doesn't make any difference, especially inasmuch as me not buying fossil fuels made infinitesimally cheaper for someone else to. It will stay that way until we price emissions appropriately. Converting a few acres of sheep grazing land to forest could make this chunk of my lifs carbon negative, for that matter. Lamb is especially bad.

jsgo 7y ago

I may be misreading/misinterpreting their comments, but the gist I got was that while natural gas isn't great, it is better than coal. And if we only focused on going for great, we'd still be coal only. I might be misreading, but I don't think they were advocating avoiding solar/wind/etc. (just that they weren't easy wins).

scarmig 7y ago
This is about where I stand. If there's a cheap and easy way to reduce carbon emissions that is already happening because of existing market forces, at the very least we shouldn't stand in its way. I'd even support government subsidies of it, if it helps it kill off coal, but it already seems like it'll do so without any help. Best would be strong climate change policies that set the price of carbon at its actual (high) cost, and that would naturally drive people from coal to gas and gas to low-carbon approaches, but that doesn't seem like it's in the cards in the short term.
- MiroF 7y ago
  The real best approach would be going all in on nuclear but it's not a political possibility right now. Carbon neutral or at least very close to it is essentially obtainable now, we just lack the political will.
gxon 7y ago
I think the point is that it's not worth celebrating as a win, because the shift wasn't driven by a desire to reduce emissions. It was driven by the fact that gas is cheaper. It's just a nice coincidence that it's lower emissions. Sure, this is better than nothing, and every little bit counts, but it shouldn't give anyone hope that the tides are changing.

jeffdavis 7y ago

What actions would a panicked person take and how might those actions help?

MiroF 7y ago
invest heavily in solutions. panic isn't always bad and i'm unsure where that idea came from.
- jeffdavis 7y ago
  Panic is a state suited to making decisions in an instant when seconds count based on very incomplete information and not much analysis. Climate change may be happening quickly in geological time, but it's plenty slow enough to take the time to think rationally.
gxon 7y ago
Spread fear and despair to everyone you're connected to. Yes, we need to move rationally and carefully, but we're only going to do that when a tipping point of people start believing this is an existential threat akin to an incoming asteroid that they or their children will be destroyed by. This is what's driving increasing movements like the Green New Deal. The closer we get to the impact, the more people notice, start freaking out, and demand action. The faster we can make the majority panic and demand change, the more likely we'll have time to do something effective. Realistically though, it's probably already too late to save our civilization.
- oldprogrammer2 7y ago
  No, just stop eating meat and spread that message to everyone. You don’t need big acts of legislation. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-02409-7 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-02409-7
  - enilas 7y ago
    To that I raise this: https://www.reddit.com/r/zerocarb/comments/am5fo3/environmental_considerations_to_eating_meat/ https://www.reddit.com/r/zerocarb/comments/am5fo3/environmen... Vegetarianism could be fine if it's only with crops grown locally with not a whole lot of transportation involved, but that's not likely to happen anytime soon. Not to mention individuals have very little impact on the actual problem. https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2017/jul/10/100-fossil-fuel-companies-investors-responsible-71-global-emissions-cdp-study-climate-change https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2017/jul/10...

juanbyrge 7y ago

Sadly, I believe nothing will be done about climate change until something catastrophic begins to happen (e.g. millions of people start dying due directly to the effects of climate change). Climate change is way too abstract of a problem for humans to deal with given its large delayed time frames.

MiroF 7y ago
By the time that happens, we will likely all be dead and it will also be too late

mistrial9 7y ago

panic is not an idea worth spreading, nothing constructive and plenty destructive comes from it