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If there is anything covid has taught me its that collective action isn't something we can rely on and is a lot more wishful thinking about the state of humanit

• Chris2048 5y ago
  And if a country doesn't, are we willing/able to go to war? Given that some countries will burn down forests that pollute their airspace, and the airspace of their neighbours it's pretty likely there will be those that refuse the tax.
  • pas 5y ago
    Maybe not straight to war, but taxing cross border trade, embargo, etc. are all effective.
    • Chris2048 5y ago
      That was always the assumption. How effective was/is it against China? There's an "tragedy of the commons" wrt international trade.
      • pas 5y ago
        Do you mean Mr. Art of the Deal's trade war? That was basically already lost in the 1990s, right after the Tienanmen Square massacre, when the US continued to treat China as WTO good guy (Most Favoured Nation), instead of acting swiftly to connect the negative economic consequences of human rights abuses to. (But US big farm lobbied against it, and eventually no one with power really gave a shit. Just like nowadays with Hong Kong or Xinjiang.) On the other hand the embargo against Cuba, Russia, North Korea, Iran are pretty devastating for their economy. (Which might help absolutely zero percent in terms of human rights, but if the goal is to reduce GHG emissions, probably a lot of countries are willing to make pragmatic deals about technology to benefit from free trade than countries that are willing to change their whole political system.)
  • geewee 5y ago
    You smack import taxes on them that correspond to the carbon tax that should have been + 10%. Then they can either do the carbon tax or have their exports made much, much more expensive.
    • Chris2048 5y ago
      If you can smack a tax on their imports, why not already do it? This only works if you are a union/trading-block/superpower with the leverage to do so - and as the world gets globally competitive morally punishing taxes will require more and more "fighting the invisible hand" i.e working against the interests of free trade. To re-iterate the point that probably got my original post downvoted: It helps to have a large military-industrial complex to enforce embargos.
  • winslett 5y ago
    Exactly. He said “collective action” won’t work, then called for “collective action” among governments. In these thought analysis, an self-serving person is a good proxy for how any government will behave.
    • deleted 5y ago
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• endtime 5y ago
  Isn't it funny how COVID has caused the government-inclined to want more government and the government-disinclined to want less government? Almost as if this complex issue about which we still don't have all the facts has just made people feel that their prior beliefs have been confirmed? I wonder if there's a phrase for a bias like that.
  • dTal 5y ago
    Are you saying that Covid has had zero net effect on people's political inclinations? That the stark lesson in the importance of coordinated action has only hit home amongst those who were already "government inclined"? Because I don't that's true.
    • titzer 5y ago
      I would put it more broadly. COVID was put in service of continuing culture wars and political infighting, like literally everything else. People hate each so much they would rather have death (for them or for themselves) than agree. It's crazy. Everything politicized, even goddamn PPE and vaccination. > those who were already "government inclined" It isn't so much "government inclined", or even left versus right, it's in-tribe vs out-tribe. Some tribes, clearly, have only become more entrenched and delusional.
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  • bcrosby95 5y ago
    Isn't it funny how the "government-disinclined" that don't want to wear masks generally support Florida laws that makes it illegal for businesses to mandate masks?
• headmelted 5y ago
  This. A 200% value-added tax on fossil fuels that rises by 10% every year would provide the capital. EDIT: To clarify, this is not a suggestion to raise capital from the tax as much as it's to raise capital from the use of fossil fuels. It's a suggestion for an increasingly punitive financial cost to force behavioural changes.
  • throwaway744678 5y ago
    Wow, nice realistic solution! This will definitely not cause a major financial crisis. You should run for office.
    • headmelted 5y ago
      I do see your point, and I've thought about this consequence a lot. I sincerely don't think it would cause a financial collapse, as ridiculous as that might sound. 200% plus 10% compounding per annum is the lowest I think we could reasonably go in order to be in with a chance of reaching peak carbon by 2030. It forces deeply painful changes on the world, but no more painful than is necessary to avoid the collapse of civilisation. The problem until now is that people haven't been given the justification to go along with the astronomical task being asked (i.e. Stop burning fossil fuels immediately or we all die).
      • thehappypm 5y ago
        If COVID, and the 2008 crisis, have taught me anything it's that the economy is unbelievably fragile to shocks. Trying to levy huge taxes in a democracy is DOA for that reason. Most Americans will do just about anything to avoid another recession -- that's food off their tables.
        • acdha 5y ago
          One interesting question: say we tried that MIT economist's plan where you have a hefty carbon tax but give the entire thing back as a tax rebate[1]. That'd get a direct deposit/check arriving (hopefully frequently) and send a message that the faster you lower your emissions, the more other people are giving you free money. People don't like paying taxes but they allow love to get the better side of a deal. 1. https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2013/06/28/196355493/economists-have-a-one-page-solution-to-climate-change https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2013/06/28/196355493/econ...
• 1337shadow 5y ago
  Each human being emits 25 tons of CO2 per year just by breathing, should the businesses also be taxed based on their number of employees? People often forget the good parts about the little CO2 increase from the past century, I care a lot about environment (I'm a countryside person) but CO2 - many people forget it is the food of the plants that we need to eat - just takes all the place in the environmental debate and what I think are more important matters such as waste reduction, ocean cleaning, recycling, durable/fixable hardware... I'm hoping for people to do a cost/benefit analysis of the CO2 situation and start thinking rationally and work on what is actually bad for us, not just CO2 greenwhashing bs.
  • thomaslord 5y ago
    Obviously there are many other big issues, but the things you've listed don't have a (direct) impact on climate change specifically. There's lots of things going on that damage the environment in various ways and I agree that we should work on those too, but if we can't take action on climate change all that other stuff will sort of take care of itself when society as we know it ceases to exist.
  • TeMPOraL 5y ago
    I feel we need a new, completely separate word for "net emissions", because too often the discussion gets confused around this point. > Each human being emits 25 tons of CO2 per year just by breathing In almost all cases we care about net emissions. Breathing is net carbon neutral. What we really need is to tax the net carbon that's added to the "fast carbon loop" (the biosphere). That is, carbon that's being dug up from the ground.
  • xattt 5y ago
    Googling this number gives different answers for respiratory CO2 emissions per person. Various forms of wildlife obviously also emits CO2 and historically, this has not contributed to climate change prior to the last century. This is a moot point.
  • Toutouxc 5y ago
    > Each human being emits 25 tons of CO2 per year just by breathing I believe you may be off by two orders of magnitude.
• 1propionyl 5y ago
  > The greatest hope I see for the future of humanity is the incentive for a brilliant mind/leader to become the next Bezos/Musk via climate change technology > ...isn't something we can rely on and is a lot more wishful thinking about the state of humanity rather than a sober look at the reality. I don't mean for this to sound too critical but how do you square these two concepts? The idea of a great inventor/scientist/theorist is to me kind of obsolete. It existed in a time of much more low-hanging fruit but today most scientific/theoretic progress is slow and the collective result of many groups slow, focused, and methodical work. Even before, even the greats stood on the shoulders of myriad giants. The idea of hoping for a "great leader" who is solely capable of "fixing" things is to my mind a very concerning and alarming idea. Even if you may not think that... the idea that "one good idea" is enough to solve our problems immediately, or even just quickly enough, feels like escapism to me. No matter how good of an engineering solution is achieved there will be a slow and painful process of rolling it out fraught with cultural and political questions. It doesn't behoove us to push that off, even if the engineering questions feel more essential. It's an inevitable problem. We should consider it earlier rather than later.
  • toomanyducks 5y ago
    Came here to say this. I also want to add that there are no solutions with the West's current consumption habits. If we all switch to electric cars today, oil might be doing okay, but we'll still be exploiting workers and raiding resources in environmentally costly lithium mines. This is not a technical issue. This is a political issue. The question we should be asking is how we reduce our consumption and how to increase our reciprocity with the environment, not at an individual level, but at a systemic and societal level. And here's the hard part: this isn't done through innovation. This is done through reducing the capitalist pressures to consume and produce. This is driven locally, slowly, and radically by pushing back against what capitalism has done.
    • realce 5y ago
      Digging up lithium is nowhere near the same as mining fossil fuels. You're literally just washing rock with water and you can clean the water afterwards.
• galangalalgol 5y ago
  In democratic nations, government actions are collective action, and so they have the same problem. In non-democratic nations those in charge are often the beneficiaries of the status quo. I'm not hopeful for government action either. People want a quick fix with little loss in living standard and few changes. That tells me that either we won't notice the incremental changes enough to act, and we'll ride this to the end, or we'll wake up and suddenly fund a massive but cheap climate engineering project that will work, but have unintended consequences, like iron fertilization of the oceans for albedo impacts. Worst case we go snowball earth and kill everything instead of just ourselves.
• bko 5y ago
  Believe it or not, western countries have reduced carbon emissions over the last ~15 years, in both absolute and per capita terms (despite a growing population). The only countries that are growing their carbon emissions are developing countries; mainly China, India and Russia. China is particularly troubling since they make up 28% of all emissions (US is 15%) and they have both a growing population and growing emissions per capita. And it's not that China is producing emissions during manufacturing goods the entire world consumes. Take a look at "China: Consumption-based accounting: how do emissions compare when we adjust for trade?" and you'll see ~90% of their emissions are for consumption [2] > Annual consumption-based emissions are domestic emissions adjusted for trade. If a country imports goods the CO₂ emissions needed to produce such goods are added to its domestic emissions; if it exports goods then this is subtracted. 2018 had 8.96 bn carbon tons in consumption out of a total of 9.96 bn total tons (~90% consumption) The good news is that China is good at collective action. The bad news is, they're China. [0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/183943/us-carbon-dioxide-emissions-from-1999/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/183943/us-carbon-dioxide... [1] https://www.ucsusa.org/resources/each-countrys-share-co2-emissions https://www.ucsusa.org/resources/each-countrys-share-co2-emi... [2] https://ourworldindata.org/co2/country/china https://ourworldindata.org/co2/country/china
  • eganist 5y ago
    I'm looking at how China's currently pummeling their tech sector for the sake of the party* and am hoping that they'll apply the same decisioning to their emissions-heavy industries as well. Doubt it'll happen, but I can be wishful with my thoughts. ---- * https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/China-tech/China-s-tech-crackdown-widens-to-Tencent-from-Alibaba https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/China-tech/China-s-tech-cra...
    • russli1993 5y ago
      First of all, saying China's actions against tech sector is for the sake of the ccp, or that ccp simply felt they are too big is a narrow way to look at it. And makes the regulatory actions as a political game and not legitimate. You need to look at case by case. I argue each case has a legit issue, and in many of the cases, government is enforcing the laws that already exists but weren't enforced earlier. Chinese government didn't place any regulatory burden on tech sector earlier. But as the tech sector grew, there have been significant issues: 1) consolidation of power and use dominate market power to negatively affect the competition 2) Vast collection of personal data, commercializing personal data detriment to privacy 3) Use of algorithms and big data to detriment of consumers or workers. Ex: Tests shows that Didi chuxing show more expensive prices on a device you use to order multiple times before than a device you have not for the same trip. meituan's delivery algorithm drives delivery workers to the extreme. The delivery algorithm also gets harder if you work harder, resulting in ever intensive work condition, and they penalizes you each time you can't meet the algorithm. I can present my points for supporting each of the regulatory actions but I won't go into details here. Overall, my view is that these regulatory actions are overdue. It doesn't mean we don't want tech sector. The society is a web of relationships between entities. Any time an entity that has a lot of advantage over another party, I argue that the red line should at least be that the more powerful entity shouldn't use its power to the detriment of the weaker party. The role of the government and laws should be to at least be to prevent that from happening. In terms of tech, the relationship is tech company vs its competitors, vs consumers, vs workers. In these relationships, a tech company can have significantly more advantaged because data it collected, characteristics of a digital business, network effects and capital. And if the weaker party is negatively affected because of the interaction between the powerful entity and the power difference, that should be a sign that public power should step in to either protect the weaker party or increase weaker party's power. In regards to environment. I can list specific actions Chinese government took just recently: 1) A carbon credit and trading system is operational. The first batch of companies required to tally carbon credits and purchase credits include 2000 companies in the power generation sector, covering an emission of 4 billion tons of co2 annually. Steel, metal, cement, petro-chemical sectors will also be included as the plan progresses(https://www.reuters.com/article/china-carbon-market-0714-wedn-idCNKBS2EK0K4 https://www.reuters.com/article/china-carbon-market-0714-wed...) 2) Government is ordering more crude steel capacity reduction, can you imagine any country where the government is forcing businesses to reduce production and capacity 3) Aug 1, government removed export tax benefit for 23 types of steel, and placed export tariffs up to 40% on a few types of steel. Does any other country has self imposed export tariffs? The purpose looks like reduce exports of energy heavy, pollution heavy, and low margin metal products. Aiding steel capacity reduction. (http://finance.people.com.cn/n1/2021/0801/c1004-32177024.html http://finance.people.com.cn/n1/2021/0801/c1004-32177024.htm...) 4) Many state owned companies, such as state grid, petrochina now have even more green development tasks and initiatives. For example, more ultra high voltage DC powerlines are being built. This removes one of the primary adoption blocker for more renewables in china. One of the successful development model is villages in the western provinces are building solar farms, the revenue from power sales are dividend given to the local people, increasing renewables at the same time increasing people's income. And some villages in the dessert, have found its even possible to grow plants under solar panel's shade where before the sun was too strong. Now they have agriculture + solar energy development parks. Solar, wind, hydro installation are all increasing. In terms of industry and private sector, EV sales continue to grow, I believe EVs in China, given the quality of the products, market competition and gains in infrastructure, is starting to reach the consumer acceptance. Sales of Chinese companies in green sector, such as CATL is growing by a lot, stocks reaching all time high.
• syshum 5y ago
  >> collective action isn't something we can rely on hmmm >>Governments need to You do understand that government is collective action, and you should not rely on it right? > tax CO2 emissions on the business side I am still opposed to Co2 taxation in most of the implementations proposed. it ends up just creating perverse incentives for companies to game the system, Just look at how destructive ewaste regulations have been for the environment were you have companies preventing the repair of their products to ensure they get "credit" for the destruction (aka recycle) of reparable electrics that then simply end up in some 3rd world nation for children to pick through I just cation that you need to fully look at the unintended consequences of taxation and government regulation, the road to hell is paves with good intentions. If you think the world has problems, what until you see government solutions to those problems...
  • cal5k 5y ago
    Bingo. Carbon taxes in Canada really function as yet another power grab, with the federal government promising to rebate the taxes back to Canadians. In effect it's a case of "Just trust us with the money... we promise we'll give it back", which will obviously change as soon as more money is needed to fuel their insatiable appetite for spending. It's not even a question of "if", it's "when". In practice, this means much higher home heating costs in areas where there aren't practical alternatives, higher transportation costs, higher costs for food production, and pretty much price inflation on any consumer goods that are transported by road, rail, or air... which is all of them. It makes Canadian industry less competitive than ever at a time when GDP per capita is lagging badly behind the US.
    • syshum 5y ago
      >>GDP per capita is lagging badly behind the US. Dont worry, our government (US) is trying its best to collapse our economy so it will not long before that trend reverses I am sure
• oakfr 5y ago
  Interestingly, covid seems to have taught me the opposite. When covid hit, the time-to-market of a new vaccine was 10-15 years. The collective action of governments divided this number literally by ten. Despite all the bad words we've heard about bad policies and mistakes done by governments, I think we should be proud of what humankind has achieved during covid (granted, some governments have done and still do very poorly but let's not enter this kind of discussion). As a consequence, I am quite optimistic about what we could do if the effects of climate chang were as obvious as those of covid (which unfortunately is not the case). And in that respect, I believe in both government action and the intervention of brilliant minds/leaders. We'll need (and have) both.
  • Cosmin_C 5y ago
    The collective actions of governments did nothing there. What happened is we got exceedingly lucky the research was already there for 30-odd years and interested parties pumped money into it like there was no tomorrow. Most governments since COVID started faffed about endlessly and took really poor measures all around for what it looked like eternity (with a few notable exceptions). Eventually they got around getting it half-right and here we are, massive death tolls that could have probably been avoided with earlier lockdowns, properly enforced mask wearing and so on. At the same time a lot of countries where education has been and is poor are full with people who eschieve vaccination for the dumbest reasons possible and see in this manifestations of their freedoms (of spreading further a potentially deadly disease). This pandemic brought the worst out of people and in a few situations the best. No, human kind cannot rely on collective actions because human beings are way too selfish to do something for the greater good. And we can see it because we are in this point in time with climate change, the final hour - and still there are a LOT of people denying climate change just as there are people denying COVID is a problem.
    • oakfr 5y ago
      I don't share your vision. Things are always obvious in the hindsight, but in reality, at least in Western Europe we did quite well. The challenges that governments faced were huge and numerous (if you account for social, economical, technical and political aspects). Of course we can always do better, but the reality is that today, we have dozens of millions of people double-vaxxed here, and we're making progress.
• Bodell 5y ago
  Here’s a long article addressing this idea specifically. Though this person was chastised quite brutally for being “negative”. https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/what-if-we-stopped-pretending https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/what-if-w...
• corey_moncure 5y ago
  We already have an ideal carbon capture technology optimized by Nature Inc. through a state of the art evolutionary algorithm running trillions of parallel processes for billions of years. It's called Trees (TM). With Trees (TM) the CO2 emissions problem has a simple two step solution that anyone can accomplish with ease: 1) Stop cutting down Trees 2) Plant more Trees That's it. The end. Problem solved.
  • msandford 5y ago
    If you want to get extra fancy, there's a different step 1. 1a) Cut down lots of trees 1b) Turn them into charcoal 1c) Bury the charcoal in agricultural land, sequestering the carbon and increasing yields
  • wongarsu 5y ago
    To offset our entire current greenhouse gas emissions with trees alone, we would have to increase earth's total plant biomass by 10% each year. Given how slow most types of trees grow that seems completely unfeasible unless we give up most meat (taking space that we now use for growing animal feed). (Yes, we have a lot of space in the desert, but studies show limited effect on global warming from planting anything there once you account for how well sand reflects heat back into space).
    • emacsen 5y ago
      > taking space that we now use for growing animal feed There was a recent Youtube video that explained how this isn't quite accurate: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sGG-A80Tl5g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sGG-A80Tl5g I'll save you the time (though you should watch it). 1. Much of the animal feed comes from agricultural byproducts. As an example, we eat corn on the cob, but much of the corn stalk is inedible to humans, but can be made into products for animals. 2. Much of the land used for animals is not suitable for growing crops. Some is, but it's not a 1:1 swapability factor.
  • NonContro 5y ago
    That's not really accurate, since the trees will biodegrade at the end of their lifecycle. We would need to recreate the Azolla Event: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azolla_event https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azolla_event Or even the Carboniferous period where microbes could not digest lignin and cellulose: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carboniferous https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carboniferous Which is impossible. We simply need to stop digging fossil fuels out of the ground in order to burn them.
• pmorici 5y ago
  Isn’t Musk the climate change guy you are looking for. He’s done more to advance the cause of sustainable energy than perhaps anyone.
  • verytrivial 5y ago
    He gives electric transportation and storage with one hand, and takes away with the promise of literally thousand of ultra-low-efficiency fuel (methane) burning rocket launches with the other.
    • pfdietz 5y ago
      How are rocket launches "ultra low efficiency"? Compared to what? I mean, no one is putting stuff into orbit with any other technology. Rocket engines are the most efficient heat engines in existence, and the energy efficiency of a rocket (in the sense of fraction of jet kinetic energy that ends up in the kinetic + change in potential energy of the thing put in orbit) can be very high. It takes a lot of propellant to get to orbit. That isn't because rockets are ultra low efficiency, it's because it takes a lot of energy to get to orbit.
      • verytrivial 5y ago
        The most efficient heat engine is not the most efficient method of converting fuel to transportation though, is it? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Specific_impulse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Specific_impulse Whether we should include Mars as a distination for transport, or indeed incrementally faster broadband as good uses for energy are up for debate. But Elon does, so here we are. Light 'er up and let the hippies argue amongst themselves! SpaceX may have the absolute bee's knees in rocket engine, but that assumes that leaving the atmosphere is what we need to do, and need to do now. People are mumbling 'mass transit' and 'intercontinental travel' with respect to Starship for crying out loud. It's completely insane.
        • pfdietz 5y ago
          High specific impulse can actually reduce efficiency, though. Consider: a rocket is most efficient at converting jet kinetic energy into the kinetic energy of the vehicle if the exhaust velocity = - vehicle velocity (so the jet is left stationary in the chosen frame of reference). An ideal (and unrealizable) rocket would have Isp that increases during the launch. It should initially be very low, then increase with time. Efficiency can (ideally) approach 100%. But I wonder what you mean by efficiency of conversion of fuel "to transportation". Do you mean the irreducible minimum energy needed to achieve a given transportation task? Because the latter can be ZERO here on Earth: the energy needed to go from one place to another at the same elevation and latitude is zero: there is no change in kinetic and potential energy before and after. By your criterion, a terrestrial transportation system has 0% efficiency in this case (and extremely low efficiency in many more cases.) > SpaceX may have the absolute bee's knees in rocket engine, but that assumes that leaving the atmosphere Yes, tell me about what can be done in space without leaving the atmosphere. You seem to have written a veiled screed against space travel itself. It's not about efficiency at all.
• f6v 5y ago
  > Governments need to tax CO2 emissions on the business side Europe is so taxed I can't even fart without paying to the government. Don't get me wrong, I get a lot for what I pay, but it's borderline too much.
  • justsid 5y ago
    Tough luck everyone, OP said he already pays too many taxes, so unfortunately climate action has to go on the back burner. But good news, at least while we are still alive he won’t feel like the government is taking took much.
    • jazzyjackson 5y ago
      You’re mocking a useful data point: governments operate by the consent of the governed - if you put too much pressure on people, they will replace you democratically or otherwise.
      • justsid 5y ago
        I am painfully aware. The person I replied to is obviously not the only one with that mindset, which is what makes this such a tough sell. At the same time, this is an absurdly shortsighted way of looking at the problem. I get that paying taxes suck, but if the consequence is unmitigated climate change, then maybe taxes are the lesser evil? To me this whole thing is absolutely absurd, most everyone agrees that we need to do something about climate change, as long as it isn’t them having to change. This isn’t going to get us out of this, at some point we’ll have to realize that “it’s only the big corporations at fault and I’m just a humble innocent cog in the machine” isn’t true and we are all complicit in this. That we all have to do something about this. But hey, finding a scapegoat is always the nice and easy solution. Now we can lean back, pat ourselves on the shoulder because we have identified the problem. We, collectively as humans, are borderline insane.
    • f6v 5y ago
      For example, even if the greens get majority in Germany, they'll be in a very tough spot. Their core electorate will think they're underdelivering. But their proposed measures won't be accepted by others.
• rubyist5eva 5y ago
  Ah, so even more cronyism on the backs of taxpayers than there already is. Perfect plan!
  • mempko 5y ago
    This! People really don't understand that we have plenty of authoritarianism already and it's that authoritarianism is what got us here. If Musk could have invented something to solve climate change, you think we would still be spending so much time trying to get off the planet?
• jdavis703 5y ago
  COVID-19 was a program of systemic action. The US had lockdowns, mask mandates and even soft vaccine mandates. None of this was enough to crush the virus. Why? Because systems are made of individuals who will decide whether or not they want to collaborate on solving a problem.
  • asd4232 5y ago
    That's why individuals should not have the freedom of choice. China's actions against the virus proved rather effective because the government actually has authority there. Western democracy is clearly weak when it comes to dealing with crisis of any kind.
    • cle 5y ago
      Individuals always have the freedom of choice. Authoritarian governments only work when people choose to tolerate them. If the Chinese people lose faith in their government, we'll see how effectively it can manage a crisis... In the US, many people don't have faith in strong centralized authorities. Becoming more authoritarian will only make that worse, not better. It is not a problem of political systems, it is a deeper cultural phenomenon.
    • gruez 5y ago
      >Western democracy is clearly weak when it comes to dealing with crisis of any kind. Sounds like a feature to me. They're also "rather effective" at setting up reeducation camps in xijiang to deal with the "crisis" of "extremism and terrorism by Uygurs"[1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xinjiang_internment_camps https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xinjiang_internment_camps
      • istorical 5y ago
        American democracy is just as capable, see Japanese internment, Guantanamo Bay, the Tuskegee experiment, warrantless wiretapping, etc.
      • dredmorbius 5y ago
• newbamboo 5y ago
  Bingo. It’s great folly to think climate change can be solved by “waking people up” and that whole endeavor probably just makes things worse. It becomes a red/blue issue where nearly half the population take opposing sides, like mindless zombies. A solution, if we are to find one, will not come from the many but from the few, maybe just a single person or invention. Emerging economies pollute, necessarily. That’s the real problem. Surely it feels good to some people to say “I told you so!”, to see oneself on some noble crusade to enlighten the masses about the troubles that are to come. But it’s not at all productive in fact it’s the opposite. Not everyone has the ears to hear. The good side has to accept that sad truth and give up on the political squabbling. Spend energy thinking about solutions that don’t require building consensus with the guys in jack up trucks and the poor third world nations that pollute to survive.
  • mempko 5y ago
    The solution is not authoritarianism. We have plenty of that now and got here because of that. We have not just governmental authoritarianism, but also in business. In fact, business authoritarianism is arguably why we are here.
  • Voloskaya 5y ago
    > A solution, if we are to find one, will not come from the many but from the few, maybe just a single person or invention. This is going to sound harsh, but to me this argument seems like a mental contortion to absolve yourself from doing anything and not feel bad about it. In the past 20 years we have seen significant progress in slowing down, or even reducing for some countries, the emission of CO2. It is not enough, but it's definitely significant. This happened thanks to the many, via awareness campaign and political pressure. And this bought us some precious time. Even if you truly believe the solution will come from a Messiah appearing with a techno-miracle, you should still push to wake people up: The more people are truly aware of the problem, the more will be interested in working in climate-related tech, giving us more chance for "that single invention" to appear. And you also want the mass to be enlightened about this to continue trying to slow down the train, giving more time for technological breakthrough to appear before we are completely screwed.
• mempko 5y ago
  What did Musk or Bezos build? What did they invent? Nothing. Everything built and invented was by their workers. The success of Amazon and SpaceX/Tesla is a form of collective action. The collective action of employees, and the collective action of government policy which provided the playground that Bezos and Musk play in.
  • hpkuarg 5y ago
    Good leaders make for good collective action.
  • dredmorbius 5y ago
    This is a frequent but weak argument. If you've ever tried to organise a group lunch for a party of more than two, you've got some sense of how difficult it is to orchestrate group activities. Whatever you think of Musk and Bezos, and I'm not much of a fan of either, they've both led organisations to transformational accomplishments. That in itself is something, notable, and has been recognised throughout history. The question of whether those accomplishements are good or worthwhile, or how reward and profit should be allocated, are separate ones. But your object is a lazy and tired one.
• phkahler 5y ago
  >> Governments need to tax CO2 emissions on the business side... I'd say its easier to tax those who extract carbon from the ground (or import it). Far fewer companies. (for this post I'm assuming the goal to reduce CO2 emissions is correct)
  • gruez 5y ago
    You probably need a mix, because "extract carbon from the ground" wouldn't work for other sources (eg. methane or cement production).
• wutbrodo 5y ago
  > Governments need to tax CO2 emissions on the business side and pour the money into carbon capture technology in the private space through investment and perhaps some sort of bounty program Unfortunately, getting this proposed, passed without mutilation, and enforced is also a collective action problem. Though I agree with your implied point that decentralized solutions should be the baseline, especially as they don't preclude coordinated action if that somehow becomes possible. To do otherwise is to pointlessly leave a powerful, relatively easy-to-deploy policy tool on the table for essentially religious reasons. Unfortunately, there's a pretty powerful contingent of superstitious economic illiterates in our politics that see market-based solutions as automatically suspect, in the same way that there are powerful scientific illiterates that see nuclear as "unclean" (which is basically "unholy" laundered by modernity). > I'm past hoping for people to do the right things en masse What scares me is that there doesn't even seem to be a constituency for bold action on climate. I used to at least be comforted by the political left carrying the torch, but the most recent iteration of the party has a "climate policy" that just dresses up the same old unrelated economic wishlist in climate rhetoric like a skinsuit (again, any proposal that doesn't emphasize nuclear is unserious; the Green New Deal explicitly rejects it)
  • amanaplanacanal 5y ago
    In the US, I expect solar and wind plus storage is cheaper than nuclear. It doesn’t really matter though, if you put high enough taxes on carbon the market will sort it out. The government shouldn’t be picking individual technologies, because they are likely to fuck it up.
  • TOGoS 5y ago
    > What scares me is that there doesn't even seem to be a constituency for bold action on climate. I used to at least be comforted by the political left carrying the torch, but the most recent iteration of the party has a "climate policy" that just dresses up the same old unrelated economic wishlist in climate rhetoric like a skinsuit The left != the party (by which I assume you mean the Democrats) A sizeable fraction of the population understands that climate change is an enormous problem and when polled has said solving it should be a priority (no numbers or poll link offhand, sorry). They are also routinely told that they are terrible people if they don't support the party that at least acknowledges climate change in their rhetoric over the one that for all I can tell is 100% committed to turning the planet into one big oil spill. Don't confuse the actions of the politicians with what the populace actually cares about. Something like 70% wants universal government-run healthcare (yeah, even the people who watch Fox news[1]) but even with Democratic majorities in congress the politicians can't seem to scrounge the two craps to even pretend like they want to make it happen. [1] https://youtu.be/zmlL8SRrImQ https://youtu.be/zmlL8SRrImQ
• minikites 5y ago
  >the next Bezos/Musk via climate change technology We have the technology and expertise now, we just choose not to use it.
  • lotsofpulp 5y ago
    What technology has the convenience and cheapness of fossil fuels? The versatility and strength of plastics, the power of diesel, and the portability and ease of use of all the fossil fuels?
• anyonecancode 5y ago
  > If there is anything covid has taught me its that collective action isn't something we can rely on and is a lot more wishful thinking about the state of humanity rather than a sober look at the reality. If climate change plays out the way the pandemic has, I think we will have collective action, but it'll be uneven and fall short. We'll avoid the most dire outcomes, but blow right past acceptable outcomes. Many, many will die who could have been saved, the cost will be enormous, but we'll successfully avoid the absolute worst cases. I don't know if we call that a successful failure or a failed success.
  • BoxOfRain 5y ago
    If the pandemic is anything to go by, the collective action will harm the common people (especially the poor) while the elites get to play by entirely separate rules! While there's no doubt that sacrifices in quality of life are going to have to be made I think it's very important that the elites are seen to suffer as much as the common man otherwise the inevitable result will be increasingly ungovernable countries.
    • anyonecancode 5y ago
      Absolutely -- inequality has brought us to this pass, continues to be an obstacle, and will make the consequences far worse. Should we, as individuals, eat less meat, drive more fuel efficient vehicles, fly less, and other such activities to reduce our carbon output? Yes, but as many have pointed out in this and other discussions, that doesn't come anywhere close to being enough. It's the dynamic of the rich scolding people for a Starbucks latte habit, writ large. Should the elite aggressively pivot their companies to carbon neutral strategies, divest their substantial investments from greenhouse gas producing holdings, put their political muscle toward laws that will get us off our current disastrous path, and fund this change via taxes on their wealth? Yes, and this would do far, far more to change things for the better. If you can figure out how to make this happen, well you'll be some kind of sociological and political genius.
  • daxfohl 5y ago
    It'll play out like the recycling/renewables industry. Some people will do things that are easy and catchy, there will be some net gains, but much of it will eventually turn to barely break-even or worse, like the unsustainable single-stream recycling or trendy-but-usually-fails-before-breaking-even things like reusable straws. The world is just going to change and we'll either figure out how to live with it (probably) or we won't (if there's a mass biome collapse that leaves us foodless, unless we can generate 9B people's worth of food from bacteria or something).
• robomartin 5y ago
  > I'm past hoping for people to do the right things en masse. Getting people behind goals with long timelines is pretty much impossible. As you said, the pandemic demonstrated (and continues to demonstrate) how we behave and think. > Governments need to tax CO2 emissions on the business side and pour the money into carbon capture technology No. Sorry. You are buying into propaganda. Put simply: We (humanity) cannot do a thing about atmospheric CO2 concentration. This is a planetary-scale problem requiring resources and energy over tens of thousands of years, not a few dozen. It is unreasonable to think we can actually affect a planetary-scale problem in anything approaching a human time scale. Yet this is exactly what we are being sold. We are far more likely to kill all life on earth than to fix atmospheric CO2 concentration. This is NOT a guess on my part. This conclusion is well supported by data going back 800,000 years. The science is there and this conclusion has already been reached. The problem is that the issue of climate change has been politicized to the point where --much as is the case with certain aspects of the pandemic-- the scientific truth does not matter. Most intelligent people with a modicum of science coursework are perfectly equipped to understand this conclusion. The problem is in pulling people away from what has effectively become indoctrination to have them take a few minutes to actually exercise critical thinking. What if I told you a high school kid with basic math skill could understand this conclusion? How many of those reading this would be open-minded enough to say: "OK. Show me. I am willing to do the work in the interest of learning if what I am have been led to believe is wrong.". In my experience people would rather stick to their beliefs, punitively issue a down-vote and move on rather than understand. In this way one is no different from anti-vaxers. OK, so a few of you are interested in confirming this claim. Good news. It's easy. Here's the first and simplest claim to confirm: If all of humanity left the planet today and all of our technology was shutdown, it would take somewhere in the order of 50,000 years for atmospheric CO2 to drop 100 ppm. How do you confirm this? What if we had atmospheric CO2 data from before humanity industrialized to the point of being relevant? We do! We have 800,000 years of very accurate atmospheric CO2 data extracted from ice core samples. Here it is: Here's that graph: https://cdiac.ess-dive.lbl.gov/images/air_bubbles_historical.jpg https://cdiac.ess-dive.lbl.gov/images/air_bubbles_historical... And the data: https://cdiac.ess-dive.lbl.gov/trends/co2/ice_core_co2.html https://cdiac.ess-dive.lbl.gov/trends/co2/ice_core_co2.html You then fit straight lines to the graph in order to determine the rate of change of both atmospheric CO2 accumulation and decline. Here are my lines for the decline portion of the data: https://imgur.com/37AKa8L https://imgur.com/37AKa8L Looking at it in rough strokes, it looks like it took, on average, somewhere around 25,000 years for a 100 ppm increase and, say, 50,000 years for a corresponding 100 ppm decrease. In some cases it took twice that time, I am just trying to generalize. The planet did this entirely on its own...because we were not around or we were insignificant during this time period. This is extremely valuable data and an equally valuable conclusion because it establishes an important baseline: BASELINE: If humanity LEFT THE PLANET tomorrow, it would take about 50,000 years for a reduction of about 100 ppm in atmospheric CO2. I'll repeat that: If we left the planet and all of our technology was shut down, you are looking at a minimum of 50,000 years for a meaningful "save the planet" change in CO2 concentration. At this point the question becomes glaringly obvious: How does anything LESS than leaving the planet even make a dent on CO2 at a human time scale? Because of the baseline revealed by this data we know, without any doubt, that anything less than leaving the planet cannot possibly delivery a faster rate of change, a faster decline than 100 ppm in 50,000 years. It's a planetary-scale problem that requires planetary-scale time. Any solution proposed by anyone must pass the simplest test: How is that more than humanity leaving the planet? Solar panels all over the planet? How is that MORE than leaving the planet? A billion electric vehicles? Same question. No more fossil fuels? Nope. In fact, Google Research boldly set out to show the world that a full migration to renewable energy sources could address the issue. To their credit, when they discovered just how wrong they were, they published the data. In this charged environment these researchers deserve a ton of respect. They went in --and say so themselves-- with a position of believing that renewables could save the planet. What they discovered instead was precisely what I understood through the simple exercise on this graph, that this is an impossibility. Their methodology was different from mine, the result was the same. Here's that paper, it is well worth reading: https://storage.googleapis.com/pub-tools-public-publication-data/pdf/43326.pdf https://storage.googleapis.com/pub-tools-public-publication-... From the paper: "we had shared the attitude of many stalwart environmentalists: We felt that with steady improvements to today’s renewable energy technologies, our society could stave off catastrophic climate change. We now know that to be a false hope" "Trying to combat climate change exclusively with today’s renewable energy technologies simply won’t work" "if all power plants and industrial facilities switch over to zero-carbon energy sources right now, we’ll still be left with a ruinous amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. It would take centuries for atmospheric levels to return to normal" "<snip> to see whether a 55 percent emission cut by 2050 would bring the world back below that 350-ppm threshold. Our calculations revealed otherwise. Even if every renewable energy technology advanced as quickly as imagined and they were all applied globally, atmospheric CO2 levels wouldn’t just remain above 350 ppm; they would continue to rise exponentially due to continued fossil fuel use." "Suppose for a moment that <snip> we had found cheap renewable energy technologies that could gradually replace all the world’s coal plants <snip> Even if that dream had come to pass, it still wouldn’t have solved climate change. This realization was frankly shocking" Well worth reading. Like I said, these guys deserve a ton of respect for effectively saying "we were wrong, and here's why". Why aren't we talking about this AT ALL? This is reality. Not what we are being told by politicians and zealots. Climate change has become a religion or a cult and science has been left far behind. Here are two ways to come to the same general conclusion. One uses a super-simple look at 800,000 years of atmospheric CO2 data. The other took a detailed look at mathematical climate and other models. The conclusion was the same: We can cover the planet with renewable energy sources and do NOTHING to atmospheric CO2, or worse. I've been trying to elevate this to some level of consciousness here on HN any time the topic comes-up. It is often met with a pile of downvotes and attacks. Because, of course, they "know", even though none of the detractors bothered to devote even 1% of the time I have trying to understand reality in a sea of nonsense. Frankly, I am not sure what else to do. In this charged political climate it is actually dangerous to stick your neck out too far. I am not denying climate change, I am simply saying "the emperor has no clothes" to all the nonsense we seem to be told to focus on. I think we need to learn to live with whatever is coming. We can't do a thing about it. New industries will sprout to help us manage it. The planet will deal (and is dealing) with CO2 as it has for millions of years. And that's the other set of questions that the graphs and some research can answer: How did CO2 increase when humanity was not around to muck it up? Continental scale forest fires burning for 25,000 years as well as other sources of CO2. The fires in CA right now are contributing more CO2 than (informed conjecture) the entire fleet of internal combustion vehicles in California, if not the country. It is hubris to think we can counter this and "save the planet". Truly laughable in some sense. How did the planet bring it down? Rain, storms, cyclones, hurricanes, and the regrowth of vegetation over 50,000+ years. So, we have to learn to deal with changing weather patterns and perhaps start helping the planet a tiny bit by planting trees. Judiciously though, because more trees could also mean more fuel to burn. In other words, we could, if not careful, actually increase CO2 if we plant a billion trees and create the conditions for the mother of all forest fires. Please push for promoting an understanding of the reality we are living rather than a the fantasy of thinking we can actually affect planetary-scale problems. We need to apply our minds, investment and effort towards transitioning into a high CO2 future rather than a fantasy that says we can control how an entire planetary ecosystem works in 50 years. It would be like believing we can "install" an atmosphere on Mars in 50 years. Yeah. Pretty crazy if you ask me.
• glogla 5y ago
  Seeing the Apple thing and the Australis thing and the EU thing, I'm happy humanity will kill itself by Climate Change. We have built systems that make it impossible for evil to fail, it will always succeed. You can see it popping up everywhere - loss of privacy, climate change denialism, covid denialism, fascism everywhere, chinese extermination camps, ... We will all die out and it is a good thing. We will all suffer terribly and that's good, we deserve that too.
  • joshmarlow 5y ago
    Even assuming your take is right and humanity deserves the fate we're actively constructing, it's not just our fate. We're a hardy and clever species - by the time we are extinct from climate change, it'll be a hard environment for mammals in general. Even if you believe we deserve to go, it's still worth trying to fix things for those who can't.
• serverholic 5y ago
  This is why libertarianism doesn't work. Some things need a central authority to enforce it.
• ttiurani 5y ago
  > I'm past hoping for people to do the right things en masse. This isn't either or: we can heavily incentivize creating climate change tech AND drive for a systemic change. It is IMO immoral to just give up on a sustainable political solution because it is hard: huge changes have happened in the past and can happen again.
• fangorn 5y ago
  Too much of a good thing... I can picture a scenario, admittedly science fiction for now, when carbon capture is so lucrative it's removed to an extent plants don't have enough of it. Not to say carbon capture is bad, just that humans + greed = unintended consequences, every time.
• jpfed 5y ago
  As a programmer, I empathize with the impulse to go with the elegant, unified solution of carbon taxes. The problem is that everybody gets hurt, in at least a short-term sense, by a carbon tax. And yes, a lot of people will understand that this is a necessary pain. But all the worst carbon offenders that might campaign against a climate policy would get hurt by the same thing at the same time, so they would provide a large lobbying voice to weaken or destroy what's hurting them (this example is about carbon taxes, but really any sort of universal punitive measure) as a policy. Politically, punishments will remain effective for longer if they are targeted so that the opposition to them remains divided. It _might_ help if carbon taxes could be adopted on a per-industry basis, because polluters are nothing if not keen to avoid thinking about anything that they perceive as not their problem- it should be possible to avoid triggering any sort of sense of polluter-solidarity on their part. Another possibility is offering positive financial incentives to stopping fossil fuel activity. The government could directly give cash to companies that stop pulling coal and oil out of the ground, or stop burning it. Fracking companies in particular should be given a ton of money if they convert to geothermal.
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  • derbOac 5y ago
    Ecologically sustainable changes will happen when it's cheap and/or comfortable to do, period. Increasing the costs of carbon-based choices will just lead to civil unrest. I think this is already part of where recent problems in the US are coming from. Carbon taxes and similar solutions implicitly assume that the individual making the carbon-positive choice is the one who should bear the cost. I feel a bit like it's you have decades of individuals and groups insulating themselves from real costs, through deception and ignorance, and then us deciding to pass those costs onto those who can't or don't want it anyway. Socialized risk, capitalized gain all over again. You might say that nature is going to extract those costs one way or another, but this is one case where I think the moral responsibility is in spreading those costs out in ways that can be borne realistically. Better for the average person worldwide to make the sustainable choices cheaper rather than increase the costs of the unsustainable choices, because then that's implicitly just increasing costs for everything in many situations.
• rmoon 5y ago
  "if the world acts fast".., from the article, then I understand that it is going to be really difficult too.
• wolverine876 5y ago
  > collective action isn't something we can rely on and is a lot more wishful thinking about the state of humanity rather than a sober look at the reality I understand that is a popular worry these days (and I understand why some might feel that way, given how troubling recent history is) but I think the news from history is much better than that - it's actually very good: In just the last half-century: Civil rights, women's rights, the overthrow of non-democratic regimes worldwide (E. Europe, S. Africa, S. Korea, etc. etc.), etc. In fact, the current reactionary (for lack of a better word) movement - the one that obstructs progress on Covid and climate change, among other things - is collective action to a significant extent. It's interesting to me that as the tools for collective action have improved by orders of magnitude (i.e., the Internet and its applications), those tools are instead used to spread a message to depress action. More interesting is that the message only spreads on one side of the political world - the reactionaries aren't telling each other how useless and impossible their goals are. Whatever the reason, it's very convenient for the status quo, for the people in power, that the public disavows their own ability to challenge them. > The greatest hope I see for the future of humanity is the incentive for a brilliant mind/leader to become the next Bezos/Musk From my perspective, what a depressing and self-demeaning outlook. We don't need some 'great person' to do it for us; we can do it. We can do it, right now, which means to first stop telling each other that we can't. Nothing can stop us, literally, except us not trying. For centuries, the American story has been that we can accomplish anything together, that any person can make a difference. It's the faith behind Silicon Valley startups too. We've revolutionized politics, government, freedom, prosperity, technology ...
• aantix 5y ago
  You mean… what you have determined as “the right thing”. Even though others may also have different needs, desires, and risks.
• TOGoS 5y ago
  > collective action isn't something we can rely on > Governments need to tax CO2 emissions on the business side Getting the government to do anything that impacts the profits of powerful companies will itself require heroic amounts of well-organized collective action. > the incentive for a brilliant mind/leader to become the next Bezos/Musk via climate change technology The problem is political, not technical. Moreover, people who become billionaires are averse to questioning the economic systems that prevent us from being able to take collective action to tackle climate change (and other systemic problems), because it has served them so well. That's why they build bunkers and space ships in the hope of personal salvation. They ain't going to fix this for us. It's collective action or apocalypse.
• Lammy 5y ago
  > If there is anything covid has taught me its that collective action isn't something we can rely on Thank goodness dummies like me have smart authoritarians like you to make decisions for us about what The Right Thing™ is :)
• 5faulker 5y ago
  The history of humanity is filled with stories where technologies require a full adherence to a set of rules to avoid externaliies. And since this cannot be done, it explains much of what's happening in the world today.
• GordonS 5y ago
  > collective action isn't something we can rely on and is a lot more wishful thinking about the state of humanity rather than a sober look at the reality. Governments need to tax CO2 emissions I fully agree, but if history has taught me anything about Western politics, it's that power and money reign supreme. The term of politicians only lasts a few years, and many will do everything they can to feather their cap during that time, doing the bidding of big business. And the top priority for many is to stay in power - changes to help the climate are expensive, and indeed getting more expensive the longer we delay, so few have what it takes to be bold and put policies in place that may be unpopular with a large segment of their constituents. And then there is the economic arms race that is characteristic of our modern, divided world. Countries don't want to make hard decisions, because they know some others won't. Honestly, it looks very, very grim. To have any hope of mitigating what's going to come, we need massive global action that is going to be to the short to medium-term detriment of many politicians, corporations, lobbying groups, and of course regular citizens too. I strongly hope I'm wrong, but I just can't see any future where any of that happens :(