7 ms·

Someone submitted this a few posts earlier: "The Amazon is turning into savannah – we have 5 years to save it", https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29540946 ht

Someone submitted this a few posts earlier: "The Amazon is turning into savannah – we have 5 years to save it", https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29540946 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29540946 Two sides of the same coin but the groundwater problem seems easier to solve. Not because it is technically easier but because the incentives for (rich countries) seem to be a lot stronger. Preventing the own area from flooding is way less abstract than indirectly caused deforestation somewhere in the world, with effects that will be felt only years or decades into the future. Without wanting to highjack this submission (the Amazon submission didn't gain traction, unfortunately) but any ideas how this problem could be solved and how one could contribute to a solution?

deltree7 5y ago
Capitalism and Free Market. On an individual basis, apart from zero-cost sustainable habits, if you are capable, become a master of science, attempting to solve energy, material, carbon and climate issue at a physics level. If you are a craftsman, observe all the day-to-day activities of humans, tinker/hack and attempt to solve the same workflows more sustainably. If you have a solution either through hacks or science, you'll have unbelievable amount of capital coming to you to scale your solution. Capitalists will be tripping over themselves to hand you money. Here's what will 100% not work -- Activism or Trying to 'Policy' out of your way of Climate Change problems. Also, no government will ever fund your crazy little idea that has 0.0001% chance of succeeding with 10000x impact. Here's who may fund it -- your favorite evil Billionaire.
- nawgz 5y ago
  Yes, Capitalism will surely solve the problem that Capitalism wrought, and using tools like Regulation and Policy is sure to hamper Capitalism and not help consumers or the environment at all! How sad it is that the comment suggesting we try to not continue overpopulating the globe is downvoted while this propaganda piece isn't.
  - dgfitz 5y ago
    We're not overpopulating it anymore. That "solution" presents its own problems. https://www.bbc.com/news/health-53409521 https://www.bbc.com/news/health-53409521
    - nawgz 5y ago
      If by "we" you mean "the first world as it devolves into wealth inequality", sure, but it's clear there's nearly 8 billion people, so a 2.4 fertility rate not projected to turn til the end of the century probably still leaves us with 9 billion people by 2070 don't you think? And indeed, it is a massive problem that we face, but do you truly think proposing regulation-free unhampered-by-policy capital-c Capitalism - in an era we are watching abuse against employees rise while wages drop - is the answer? I find that laughably propagandist.
      - dgfitz 5y ago
        Imposing population limits in the developed world won’t change anything other than make population decrease problems occur faster. If this rate of birth decline continues, we’ll have a super healthy green planet, and no humans to inhabit it. This isn’t an argument against solar technologies et. al. It’s just the next problem that we don’t have an Al Gore for trumpeting it as an issue before it was widely known.
        nawgz 5y ago
        > Imposing population limits in the developed world It is hard to read this and mention of "Al Gore" as anything other than arguing in bad faith. No one would propose to introduce population control in a place where that is not a problem. Instead, reasonable actors would propose that we work to dismantle the global inequality that incentivizes impoverished families in the exploited third-world to birth many children by reigning in the ability for corporations to act as slavers in the third world and simultaneously pretend to be beacons of progress in the first. Wealth inequality, or maybe more precisely poverty, is a top driver of population growth, as children are cheaper to acquire than labor so those who need currency desperately are incentivized to birth children (and into horrendous conditions at that). Reforming the nature of globalist capitalism would surely both help to curb population growth in these places as they became less impoverished and greatly improve our ethics.
- davidw 5y ago
  Markets and capitalism are part of the solution, of course, but you absolutely do need policies to direct all that energy, at a high level. Absent "policies" and enforcement, the cheapest way for a factory to dispose of waste is to dump it in the river. Same thing applies to CO2: dumping it in the atmosphere is cheap right now because the policies to deal with that externality aren't quite there. An obvious example of a policy that might help would be a carbon tax that makes more carbon-efficient things more economically appealing.
  - IntrepidWorm 5y ago
    Carbon tax gets proposed often, but it does not work on its own as a singular policy. Existing implementations of this see the money raised by the carbon tax diverted to equally environmentally costly ventures. There really is no easy way to incentivize a society driven by capital to be environmentally responsible because capitalism necessitates a near-sighted and self-centered approach to these things. Take the focus on quarterlies- a company may be doomed long term by the decisions made in the present, but as long as they reflect positively in the quarterlies the people making the decisions stand to gain significantly more than they will eventually lose when the company collapses. Its this mindset that we have to fight if we hope to effect any real limit to climate change. There's no real incentive when climate change occurs on the scale of decades, and anybody with the power to change it thinks (and is thus affected) on the scale of years.
    - KennyBlanken 5y ago
      The reason carbon taxes work is because the upper echelons of society are responsible for far, far more carbon dioxide and pollution than the overwhelming majority of the world's population. Despite what we've been told, the planet won't be saved by worker-bees biking to work. It'll be saved by not having the ultra-wealthy flying everywhere in their private jets, and not spending tens of millions of dollars on multiple homes that are lavishly equipped / use massive quantities of energy to heat and cool / have armies of people keeping them clean and the grounds manicured.
      - 5y ago
- long_time_gone 5y ago
  ==Here's what will 100% not work -- Activism or Trying to 'Policy' out of your way of Climate Change problems.== Capitalism and Free Market are solutions today exactly because we have aligned our "policy" to make clean energy more attractive to capitalists. People quickly forget policies like the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 [1] which invested $80 billion in clean energy. Tesla might not exist today if the DOE didn't loan them $465 million as part of the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 [2]. [1] https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2016/02/25/fact-sheet-recovery-act-made-largest-single-investment-clean-energy https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2016/0... [2] https://www.cnbc.com/id/100759230 https://www.cnbc.com/id/100759230
  - deltree7 5y ago
    It's delusional to think Tesla wouldn't have existed without government help. Tesla took a cheap government loan when it was available. Do you really think, Musk wouldn't have raised the piddly $500 Million from on his multiple silicon valley buddies? (including Thiel, Page)?
    - long_time_gone 5y ago
      The $465 million loan was given in April 2010. Tesla IPO'd in in June 2010 at a $1.7 billion valuation [1]. Maybe someone else would have given them the low-interest loan, we'll never know. We do know that this loan and the government subsidized EV tax credits helped them weather some very rough cashflow years. [1] https://www.barrons.com/articles/tesla-10-anniversary-ipo-electric-vehicles-elon-musk-51593437846 https://www.barrons.com/articles/tesla-10-anniversary-ipo-el...
- mitigating 5y ago
  Capitalism and the free market have already been in use and the single cause of the all environmental problems.
  - kspacewalk2 5y ago
    I'm gonna suggest that electricity is the single cause of the all environmental problems. Haven't pretty much all of environmental problems occurred since its unwise discovery? And, you know, electricity and man-made climate change are both about energy. So there you go.
- NationalPark 5y ago
  How does this solve the problem of externalities that exists today? And what do you do if no genius ever comes along with such a "silver bullet" solution to invite venture funding? Keep waiting and hope they are born before the externalities catch up and it's too late?
  - deltree7 5y ago
    Your sustainable solution, by definition, will reduce input costs for all business. Every business on planet earth will hand you money for reducing input costs. Once again think long-term. Short-term the externalities does get pushed around
    - selimthegrim 5y ago
      >Once again think long-term. Short-term the externalities does get pushed around Congratulations on the most bloodless hot take I’ve read on HN by a country mile
    - Dylan16807 5y ago
      > Every business on planet earth will hand you money for reducing input costs. Not if they can get someone else to pay. And not when the benefits are years or decades away.
- pjmorris 5y ago
  > Here's what will 100% not work -- Activism or Trying to 'Policy' out of your way of Climate Change problems. Two questions: 1. Are you familiar with the concept of the tragedy of the commons? [0] 2. How comfortable are you with the idea that capitalism and free markets are policies? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons
  - deltree7 5y ago
    I very well know about Tragedy of Commons. Property Rights, the bedrock of capitalism, if properly enforced, by penalizing individuals/corps that pollutes/destroys someone else's (including public) property, takes care of most governmental action that is needed. "Enforce property and individual rights and get out of the way".
- d--b 5y ago
  I fail to see how capitalism and free markets, which optimize for profit above all else can have any incentive in reigning in climate change. There is zero money in preventing deforestation. There is zero money in carbon capture. There is zero money in keeping ocean’s level low. But there is money in building levees and relocating sea-side communities. So technically capitalism will favor burning fossil fuels over not doing it. And later when problems like these start to arise, capitalists will create companies to cope with the broken climate and make money off it.
  - deltree7 5y ago
    If you apply property rights, the bedrock principle of capitalism. You'll solve all of these externalities.
pelasaco 5y ago
Population control. There is no way that we can fit 9-10 billion people on earth and are still able to be sustainable.
- notyourday 5y ago
  > Population control. There is no way that we can fit 9-10 billion people on earth and are still able to be sustainable. All BRICs are below replacement already.
- trhway 5y ago
  I suppose you can just schedule a cron to submit in 10 years the same post with updated number to say 12B :) Even with population control (suppose we found a way to do it and managed to avoid the large negative consequences of it which would be plenty) the uncontested growing consumption by the current population would do the planet anyway. Speaking about solutions - until significant part of Sahara desert and the likes aren't covered by solar panels, i wouldn't believe that anybody (who matters) is taking the climate change seriously.
  - pelasaco 5y ago
    > Speaking about solutions - until significant part of Sahara desert and the likes aren't covered by solar panels, i wouldn't believe that anybody (who matters) is taking the climate change seriously I think it is harder than we think, at least for the goals that Europe wants: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7OpM_zKGE4o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7OpM_zKGE4o The caveat about population control, is different than how we, humans, do with all other wild-life on planet earth, we cannot reduce the available food and habitat to lower the carrying capacity, compensate for the missing predators by killing individuals in the population, or slow the population's ability to reproduce.. We have to come up with a ethic solution. But people cannot put 3-5 kids or more on earth and don't have the means to raise them accordingly.
    - HappyDreamer 5y ago
      > We have to come up with a ethic solution If you try, won't some people somewhere on the Internet, get angry at the ideas you have, and start writing angry things to and about you?

deltree7 5y ago

Capitalism and Free Market. On an individual basis, apart from zero-cost sustainable habits, if you are capable, become a master of science, attempting to solve energy, material, carbon and climate issue at a physics level. If you are a craftsman, observe all the day-to-day activities of humans, tinker/hack and attempt to solve the same workflows more sustainably. If you have a solution either through hacks or science, you'll have unbelievable amount of capital coming to you to scale your solution. Capitalists will be tripping over themselves to hand you money. Here's what will 100% not work -- Activism or Trying to 'Policy' out of your way of Climate Change problems. Also, no government will ever fund your crazy little idea that has 0.0001% chance of succeeding with 10000x impact. Here's who may fund it -- your favorite evil Billionaire.

nawgz 5y ago
Yes, Capitalism will surely solve the problem that Capitalism wrought, and using tools like Regulation and Policy is sure to hamper Capitalism and not help consumers or the environment at all! How sad it is that the comment suggesting we try to not continue overpopulating the globe is downvoted while this propaganda piece isn't.
- dgfitz 5y ago
  We're not overpopulating it anymore. That "solution" presents its own problems. https://www.bbc.com/news/health-53409521 https://www.bbc.com/news/health-53409521
  - nawgz 5y ago
    If by "we" you mean "the first world as it devolves into wealth inequality", sure, but it's clear there's nearly 8 billion people, so a 2.4 fertility rate not projected to turn til the end of the century probably still leaves us with 9 billion people by 2070 don't you think? And indeed, it is a massive problem that we face, but do you truly think proposing regulation-free unhampered-by-policy capital-c Capitalism - in an era we are watching abuse against employees rise while wages drop - is the answer? I find that laughably propagandist.
    - dgfitz 5y ago
      Imposing population limits in the developed world won’t change anything other than make population decrease problems occur faster. If this rate of birth decline continues, we’ll have a super healthy green planet, and no humans to inhabit it. This isn’t an argument against solar technologies et. al. It’s just the next problem that we don’t have an Al Gore for trumpeting it as an issue before it was widely known.
      - nawgz 5y ago
        > Imposing population limits in the developed world It is hard to read this and mention of "Al Gore" as anything other than arguing in bad faith. No one would propose to introduce population control in a place where that is not a problem. Instead, reasonable actors would propose that we work to dismantle the global inequality that incentivizes impoverished families in the exploited third-world to birth many children by reigning in the ability for corporations to act as slavers in the third world and simultaneously pretend to be beacons of progress in the first. Wealth inequality, or maybe more precisely poverty, is a top driver of population growth, as children are cheaper to acquire than labor so those who need currency desperately are incentivized to birth children (and into horrendous conditions at that). Reforming the nature of globalist capitalism would surely both help to curb population growth in these places as they became less impoverished and greatly improve our ethics.
davidw 5y ago
Markets and capitalism are part of the solution, of course, but you absolutely do need policies to direct all that energy, at a high level. Absent "policies" and enforcement, the cheapest way for a factory to dispose of waste is to dump it in the river. Same thing applies to CO2: dumping it in the atmosphere is cheap right now because the policies to deal with that externality aren't quite there. An obvious example of a policy that might help would be a carbon tax that makes more carbon-efficient things more economically appealing.
- IntrepidWorm 5y ago
  Carbon tax gets proposed often, but it does not work on its own as a singular policy. Existing implementations of this see the money raised by the carbon tax diverted to equally environmentally costly ventures. There really is no easy way to incentivize a society driven by capital to be environmentally responsible because capitalism necessitates a near-sighted and self-centered approach to these things. Take the focus on quarterlies- a company may be doomed long term by the decisions made in the present, but as long as they reflect positively in the quarterlies the people making the decisions stand to gain significantly more than they will eventually lose when the company collapses. Its this mindset that we have to fight if we hope to effect any real limit to climate change. There's no real incentive when climate change occurs on the scale of decades, and anybody with the power to change it thinks (and is thus affected) on the scale of years.
  - KennyBlanken 5y ago
    The reason carbon taxes work is because the upper echelons of society are responsible for far, far more carbon dioxide and pollution than the overwhelming majority of the world's population. Despite what we've been told, the planet won't be saved by worker-bees biking to work. It'll be saved by not having the ultra-wealthy flying everywhere in their private jets, and not spending tens of millions of dollars on multiple homes that are lavishly equipped / use massive quantities of energy to heat and cool / have armies of people keeping them clean and the grounds manicured.
    - 5y ago
long_time_gone 5y ago
==Here's what will 100% not work -- Activism or Trying to 'Policy' out of your way of Climate Change problems.== Capitalism and Free Market are solutions today exactly because we have aligned our "policy" to make clean energy more attractive to capitalists. People quickly forget policies like the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 [1] which invested $80 billion in clean energy. Tesla might not exist today if the DOE didn't loan them $465 million as part of the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 [2]. [1] https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2016/02/25/fact-sheet-recovery-act-made-largest-single-investment-clean-energy https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2016/0... [2] https://www.cnbc.com/id/100759230 https://www.cnbc.com/id/100759230
- deltree7 5y ago
  It's delusional to think Tesla wouldn't have existed without government help. Tesla took a cheap government loan when it was available. Do you really think, Musk wouldn't have raised the piddly $500 Million from on his multiple silicon valley buddies? (including Thiel, Page)?
  - long_time_gone 5y ago
    The $465 million loan was given in April 2010. Tesla IPO'd in in June 2010 at a $1.7 billion valuation [1]. Maybe someone else would have given them the low-interest loan, we'll never know. We do know that this loan and the government subsidized EV tax credits helped them weather some very rough cashflow years. [1] https://www.barrons.com/articles/tesla-10-anniversary-ipo-electric-vehicles-elon-musk-51593437846 https://www.barrons.com/articles/tesla-10-anniversary-ipo-el...
mitigating 5y ago
Capitalism and the free market have already been in use and the single cause of the all environmental problems.
- kspacewalk2 5y ago
  I'm gonna suggest that electricity is the single cause of the all environmental problems. Haven't pretty much all of environmental problems occurred since its unwise discovery? And, you know, electricity and man-made climate change are both about energy. So there you go.
NationalPark 5y ago
How does this solve the problem of externalities that exists today? And what do you do if no genius ever comes along with such a "silver bullet" solution to invite venture funding? Keep waiting and hope they are born before the externalities catch up and it's too late?
- deltree7 5y ago
  Your sustainable solution, by definition, will reduce input costs for all business. Every business on planet earth will hand you money for reducing input costs. Once again think long-term. Short-term the externalities does get pushed around
  - selimthegrim 5y ago
    >Once again think long-term. Short-term the externalities does get pushed around Congratulations on the most bloodless hot take I’ve read on HN by a country mile
  - Dylan16807 5y ago
    > Every business on planet earth will hand you money for reducing input costs. Not if they can get someone else to pay. And not when the benefits are years or decades away.
pjmorris 5y ago
> Here's what will 100% not work -- Activism or Trying to 'Policy' out of your way of Climate Change problems. Two questions: 1. Are you familiar with the concept of the tragedy of the commons? [0] 2. How comfortable are you with the idea that capitalism and free markets are policies? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons
- deltree7 5y ago
  I very well know about Tragedy of Commons. Property Rights, the bedrock of capitalism, if properly enforced, by penalizing individuals/corps that pollutes/destroys someone else's (including public) property, takes care of most governmental action that is needed. "Enforce property and individual rights and get out of the way".
d--b 5y ago
I fail to see how capitalism and free markets, which optimize for profit above all else can have any incentive in reigning in climate change. There is zero money in preventing deforestation. There is zero money in carbon capture. There is zero money in keeping ocean’s level low. But there is money in building levees and relocating sea-side communities. So technically capitalism will favor burning fossil fuels over not doing it. And later when problems like these start to arise, capitalists will create companies to cope with the broken climate and make money off it.
- deltree7 5y ago
  If you apply property rights, the bedrock principle of capitalism. You'll solve all of these externalities.

pelasaco 5y ago

Population control. There is no way that we can fit 9-10 billion people on earth and are still able to be sustainable.

notyourday 5y ago
> Population control. There is no way that we can fit 9-10 billion people on earth and are still able to be sustainable. All BRICs are below replacement already.
trhway 5y ago
I suppose you can just schedule a cron to submit in 10 years the same post with updated number to say 12B :) Even with population control (suppose we found a way to do it and managed to avoid the large negative consequences of it which would be plenty) the uncontested growing consumption by the current population would do the planet anyway. Speaking about solutions - until significant part of Sahara desert and the likes aren't covered by solar panels, i wouldn't believe that anybody (who matters) is taking the climate change seriously.
- pelasaco 5y ago
  > Speaking about solutions - until significant part of Sahara desert and the likes aren't covered by solar panels, i wouldn't believe that anybody (who matters) is taking the climate change seriously I think it is harder than we think, at least for the goals that Europe wants: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7OpM_zKGE4o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7OpM_zKGE4o The caveat about population control, is different than how we, humans, do with all other wild-life on planet earth, we cannot reduce the available food and habitat to lower the carrying capacity, compensate for the missing predators by killing individuals in the population, or slow the population's ability to reproduce.. We have to come up with a ethic solution. But people cannot put 3-5 kids or more on earth and don't have the means to raise them accordingly.
  - HappyDreamer 5y ago
    > We have to come up with a ethic solution If you try, won't some people somewhere on the Internet, get angry at the ideas you have, and start writing angry things to and about you?