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I've noticed an even more disturbing trend of learned helplessness and misanthropic Malthusianism in these threads over the years. Not a single comment, at tim

I've noticed an even more disturbing trend of learned helplessness and misanthropic Malthusianism in these threads over the years. Not a single comment, at time of writing, has had a positive tone, and there are very few actionable suggestions. No consideration is given to the many positives in modern life, nor to realistic, productive tradeoffs. Everyone wants to wail in dismay at the perceived impending doom and do nothing, or they want to actively destroy modern society. Where is the hacker spirit? Where are the builders? If HN is no longer the place where people do things, then what is?

tclancy 5y ago
Because this isn’t about Malthus or about hacking. It’s about the fact people trumpeting the many positives tend to ignore the people capitalism explicitly does not take care of who see none of it and are ground down to an early death. I’ve been making twenty hot meals a week for our local warming center because I have plenty of free time because I am wildly overcompensated for being able to code and every time I walk in people hold doors and thank me for the small act of bringing them meals we should all have access to regardless of how capitalism values us.
qqqwerty 5y ago
There are plenty of folks on HN who are trying to solve climate change, myself included. But if you spend enough time in the industry, it becomes apparent that it is incredibly difficult to move the needle without significant government level intervention. For example, no matter how hard you try, there will be no profitable carbon capture venture under our current regulatory regime. Every scheme to sell some sort of carbon capture derived chemical product will fail to compete against traditional fossil fuel produced equivalents. It is a matter of physics, not hacker spirit. The government either needs to support the carbon capture market, or regulate against the fossil fuel industry. There is no "free market" approach that works here.
- pirate787 5y ago
  The free market approach is to tax carbon emissions. Capture the externality of carbon in the economic and pricing system, and you'll unleash innovation and competition to reduce that cost.
  - nitrogen 5y ago
    This gets repeated so often I've come to believe it's not the right call. We need to think both bigger and smaller, and put the innovation first. We should also be looking at mitigations and adaptations, not just prevention. Is anyone researching ultra-rapid construction techniques to repair infrastructure damaged by flooding? Rapid assembly temporary bridges to evacuate people over swollen rivers? New techniques to raise entire cities like Portland was ages ago? Personal inflatable rafts with built-in emergency kits for navigation in flooded cities? Better and faster sea walls? Directing rising sea levels into below-sea-level basins through canals (Salton Sea beachfront property!)?
- utexaspunk 5y ago
  Sadly, the most profitable use for the CO2 might be piping it to an aging oil field and using it for a [CO2 flood](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide_flooding https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide_flooding) to recover more oil. So even when you're doing good you're still doing bad. :\
foobiekr 5y ago
What birds really need is an ad-supported video social network and dating site with feed delivery.
tejohnso 5y ago
> trend of learned helplessness I call your 'learned helplessness' and raise you 'rational acceptance'. > No consideration is given to the many positives in modern life One can see the many positives in life while also pointing out the hopeless state of affairs we've created. > Everyone wants to wail in dismay at the perceived impending doom and do nothing, or they want to actively destroy modern society. Everyone deals with grief differently. There's no shame in being a nothing-doer, a wailer, or a destructive rebuilder. There is room for all options. I think that if you look, you will find plenty of people who are attempting to build and do, if that's what you prefer to see. You might even be able to contribute, if that is your wish. Here is a writeup[1] about one project you might be interested in, and that site will have other projects reviewed as well, I'm sure. [1]: https://www.thecarbonic.com/post/harvard-researcher-leads-grassroots-meer-reflection-project-to-save-humanity-from-climate-change https://www.thecarbonic.com/post/harvard-researcher-leads-gr...
scythe 5y ago
>there are very few actionable suggestions. The actionable suggestions of a carbon tax and land-value tax have been proposed to deal with our largest environmental problems since decades ago and the progress has been agonizingly small. It's not surprising people are frustrated [1]. You can't preserve the atmosphere, oceans [2] and wilderness -- which by their nature are not owned -- within the legal-economic framework of ownership and exchange. Even if something happens to be both profitable and climate-friendly (like electric cars), the benefit to emissions is accidental, and this kind of coincidence does not provide a path to a general solution to the problem, because we cannot simply hope that happy accidents will occur whenever we want them to. It's a textbook tragedy of the commons, but there's no practical way to "de-commonize" and sell shares of ownership in the atmosphere, and anyway exercising control over those shares would just turn into a second government, because practically nobody does anything that doesn't involve the atmosphere. There are all sorts of interesting innovations that might replace contemporary technologies in a more sustainable future, but since the market price of those technologies does not reflect the environmental benefits they offer, there is no guarantee they will be successful in the present economic system. I think one misleading historical phenomenon was that around the '70s a bunch of left-wing activists started to raise alarms about running out of various resources: hazards which would fail to materialize. But capitalism is pretty good at managing resources when the availability of those resources follows a smooth price-supply curve, which is true of almost all natural resources which are not byproducts of other resources. However, the same was not true with ozone, it wasn't true with sulfur dioxide, and it won't be true with carbon dioxide either. Even Hayek admitted air pollution was a problem. [1] These are the wonkish eco-capitalist approaches, which earn the ire of populists because they can sometimes put pressure on people who are sympathetic, or seem to be unfair when contrasting a few anecdotal experiences. But if you are going to talk about "hacker spirit" and "realistic, productive tradeoffs", these are precisely the kind of ideas you asked for, and you are precisely the kind of person who should be advocating for them. Obviously the crunchy crowd wants green jobs or whatever. [2] The absence of a corresponding tax (cf. carbon, land-value) suggests a new Pigouvian tax: some kind of liquid efflux tax. But this is extraordinarily hard to quantify.
jillesvangurp 5y ago
Exactly, fatalism achieves nothing. Worse, it actually makes people feel powerless and powerless people tend to just ignore their issues rather than solving them. There's every reason to be optimistic and interested in this topic for investors and hackers. There are smart people all over the world doing some real problem solving and a lot of the solutions are a combination of highly profitable and disruptive. Bird populations declining is a complex problem that has a few root causes of which intensive farming is the obvious number 1 to address. Intensive farming needs to be disrupted in a profitable way so we can replace it with something less likely to destroy what remains of our planet (much of it has already been transformed into desert) and actually turn around that process. Plenty of interesting companies in this space. Also plenty of money being invested. Here. More of that and less of the dooms day thinking. In the US one form of intensive, large scale farming that is worth addressing is corn production. Corn syrup is not a thing that you need in a balanced diet. It's bad for you. There's no reason to keep on subsidizing corn production the way the US currently does that results in industries emerging to find uses for all the subsidized corn. Corn syrup, bio fuels, animal food, etc. are all things that are made with corn that are probably doing more harm than good. Simply putting a stop to that would improve people's health and free up a lot of land for more productive and less destructive purposes. Whether it is forestry, organic farming, or even having sheep/cows graze on the land, it's all better than over fertilizing and eroding the soil in order to produce corn.
cheese_goddess 5y ago
> Where is the hacker spirit? Where are the builders? The builders? Of technology, you mean? Why, you can see their hand in all the technological advances that have caused the loss of habitat that the article flags up as the most likely driving factor for the decline of bird populations. The article mentions "intensification" of agriculture. That's the abuse of technology to increase production yields. That's the culprit, right there. Your builders and your hackers are the ones chiefly responsible for the mess we're in, because of course that famous hacker mentality makes no space for any considerations of long-term safety and sustainability of economies or the environment. It's just a blind, magical belief in technology as something that can never go wrong, that can never destroy and harm, anyone. The damage to the environment that was caused by abuse of technology in the first place is not going to be addressed by creating even more technology. You want a solution? Less technology, fewer machines, less burning of fossil fuels, less use of pesticides, less deforestation, less soil depletion by ever intensifying agriculture. That is the solution. And it is blindingly obvious.
lambdadmitry 5y ago
I agree, and chimed in with a few comments to a similar effect. What's especially frustrating is how shortsighted the Malthusian "degrowth" response is. It honestly feels like people don't realise that "the West" is just one billion people out of eight and its carbon impact is shrinking both in relative and absolute numbers. Therefore any measure that might work have to be acceptable to the developing world. In fact, I'd say we need to introduce the MAP test: can you convince Modi, Assad, and Putin to implement your proposed measure? If you can't, bin it, we don't have time for it. The only general approach I can see working under that test is tech. We "just" need to make low carbon options more economically attractive, and then it'll happen automatically. No amount of Western self-sacrifice in the name of degrowth, no amount of high minded rhetoric about "overconsumption" will do that. US becoming an eco fascist state and going to net zero overnight will barely move the needle. But it's so easy to forget about that in the tiny bubble of Western eco activists.
- wizardofdos 5y ago
  The emissions of the top 10% richest people globally where 17.60 tCO2 while the bottom poorest 50% globally emitted 1.57 tCO2 (2015). Or in absolute numbers, the top 10% emitted 3x the amount of the whole bottom 50%. And that is without taking historic emmisions into consideration. What we don't have time for is doing nothing (ie continuing the destruction of our habitat). The 1.5° C goal is already getting out of reach.

tclancy 5y ago

Because this isn’t about Malthus or about hacking. It’s about the fact people trumpeting the many positives tend to ignore the people capitalism explicitly does not take care of who see none of it and are ground down to an early death. I’ve been making twenty hot meals a week for our local warming center because I have plenty of free time because I am wildly overcompensated for being able to code and every time I walk in people hold doors and thank me for the small act of bringing them meals we should all have access to regardless of how capitalism values us.

qqqwerty 5y ago

There are plenty of folks on HN who are trying to solve climate change, myself included. But if you spend enough time in the industry, it becomes apparent that it is incredibly difficult to move the needle without significant government level intervention. For example, no matter how hard you try, there will be no profitable carbon capture venture under our current regulatory regime. Every scheme to sell some sort of carbon capture derived chemical product will fail to compete against traditional fossil fuel produced equivalents. It is a matter of physics, not hacker spirit. The government either needs to support the carbon capture market, or regulate against the fossil fuel industry. There is no "free market" approach that works here.

pirate787 5y ago
The free market approach is to tax carbon emissions. Capture the externality of carbon in the economic and pricing system, and you'll unleash innovation and competition to reduce that cost.
- nitrogen 5y ago
  This gets repeated so often I've come to believe it's not the right call. We need to think both bigger and smaller, and put the innovation first. We should also be looking at mitigations and adaptations, not just prevention. Is anyone researching ultra-rapid construction techniques to repair infrastructure damaged by flooding? Rapid assembly temporary bridges to evacuate people over swollen rivers? New techniques to raise entire cities like Portland was ages ago? Personal inflatable rafts with built-in emergency kits for navigation in flooded cities? Better and faster sea walls? Directing rising sea levels into below-sea-level basins through canals (Salton Sea beachfront property!)?
utexaspunk 5y ago
Sadly, the most profitable use for the CO2 might be piping it to an aging oil field and using it for a [CO2 flood](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide_flooding https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide_flooding) to recover more oil. So even when you're doing good you're still doing bad. :\

foobiekr 5y ago

What birds really need is an ad-supported video social network and dating site with feed delivery.

tejohnso 5y ago

> trend of learned helplessness I call your 'learned helplessness' and raise you 'rational acceptance'. > No consideration is given to the many positives in modern life One can see the many positives in life while also pointing out the hopeless state of affairs we've created. > Everyone wants to wail in dismay at the perceived impending doom and do nothing, or they want to actively destroy modern society. Everyone deals with grief differently. There's no shame in being a nothing-doer, a wailer, or a destructive rebuilder. There is room for all options. I think that if you look, you will find plenty of people who are attempting to build and do, if that's what you prefer to see. You might even be able to contribute, if that is your wish. Here is a writeup[1] about one project you might be interested in, and that site will have other projects reviewed as well, I'm sure. [1]: https://www.thecarbonic.com/post/harvard-researcher-leads-grassroots-meer-reflection-project-to-save-humanity-from-climate-change https://www.thecarbonic.com/post/harvard-researcher-leads-gr...

scythe 5y ago

>there are very few actionable suggestions. The actionable suggestions of a carbon tax and land-value tax have been proposed to deal with our largest environmental problems since decades ago and the progress has been agonizingly small. It's not surprising people are frustrated [1]. You can't preserve the atmosphere, oceans [2] and wilderness -- which by their nature are not owned -- within the legal-economic framework of ownership and exchange. Even if something happens to be both profitable and climate-friendly (like electric cars), the benefit to emissions is accidental, and this kind of coincidence does not provide a path to a general solution to the problem, because we cannot simply hope that happy accidents will occur whenever we want them to. It's a textbook tragedy of the commons, but there's no practical way to "de-commonize" and sell shares of ownership in the atmosphere, and anyway exercising control over those shares would just turn into a second government, because practically nobody does anything that doesn't involve the atmosphere. There are all sorts of interesting innovations that might replace contemporary technologies in a more sustainable future, but since the market price of those technologies does not reflect the environmental benefits they offer, there is no guarantee they will be successful in the present economic system. I think one misleading historical phenomenon was that around the '70s a bunch of left-wing activists started to raise alarms about running out of various resources: hazards which would fail to materialize. But capitalism is pretty good at managing resources when the availability of those resources follows a smooth price-supply curve, which is true of almost all natural resources which are not byproducts of other resources. However, the same was not true with ozone, it wasn't true with sulfur dioxide, and it won't be true with carbon dioxide either. Even Hayek admitted air pollution was a problem. [1] These are the wonkish eco-capitalist approaches, which earn the ire of populists because they can sometimes put pressure on people who are sympathetic, or seem to be unfair when contrasting a few anecdotal experiences. But if you are going to talk about "hacker spirit" and "realistic, productive tradeoffs", these are precisely the kind of ideas you asked for, and you are precisely the kind of person who should be advocating for them. Obviously the crunchy crowd wants green jobs or whatever. [2] The absence of a corresponding tax (cf. carbon, land-value) suggests a new Pigouvian tax: some kind of liquid efflux tax. But this is extraordinarily hard to quantify.

jillesvangurp 5y ago

Exactly, fatalism achieves nothing. Worse, it actually makes people feel powerless and powerless people tend to just ignore their issues rather than solving them. There's every reason to be optimistic and interested in this topic for investors and hackers. There are smart people all over the world doing some real problem solving and a lot of the solutions are a combination of highly profitable and disruptive. Bird populations declining is a complex problem that has a few root causes of which intensive farming is the obvious number 1 to address. Intensive farming needs to be disrupted in a profitable way so we can replace it with something less likely to destroy what remains of our planet (much of it has already been transformed into desert) and actually turn around that process. Plenty of interesting companies in this space. Also plenty of money being invested. Here. More of that and less of the dooms day thinking. In the US one form of intensive, large scale farming that is worth addressing is corn production. Corn syrup is not a thing that you need in a balanced diet. It's bad for you. There's no reason to keep on subsidizing corn production the way the US currently does that results in industries emerging to find uses for all the subsidized corn. Corn syrup, bio fuels, animal food, etc. are all things that are made with corn that are probably doing more harm than good. Simply putting a stop to that would improve people's health and free up a lot of land for more productive and less destructive purposes. Whether it is forestry, organic farming, or even having sheep/cows graze on the land, it's all better than over fertilizing and eroding the soil in order to produce corn.

cheese_goddess 5y ago

> Where is the hacker spirit? Where are the builders? The builders? Of technology, you mean? Why, you can see their hand in all the technological advances that have caused the loss of habitat that the article flags up as the most likely driving factor for the decline of bird populations. The article mentions "intensification" of agriculture. That's the abuse of technology to increase production yields. That's the culprit, right there. Your builders and your hackers are the ones chiefly responsible for the mess we're in, because of course that famous hacker mentality makes no space for any considerations of long-term safety and sustainability of economies or the environment. It's just a blind, magical belief in technology as something that can never go wrong, that can never destroy and harm, anyone. The damage to the environment that was caused by abuse of technology in the first place is not going to be addressed by creating even more technology. You want a solution? Less technology, fewer machines, less burning of fossil fuels, less use of pesticides, less deforestation, less soil depletion by ever intensifying agriculture. That is the solution. And it is blindingly obvious.

lambdadmitry 5y ago

I agree, and chimed in with a few comments to a similar effect. What's especially frustrating is how shortsighted the Malthusian "degrowth" response is. It honestly feels like people don't realise that "the West" is just one billion people out of eight and its carbon impact is shrinking both in relative and absolute numbers. Therefore any measure that might work have to be acceptable to the developing world. In fact, I'd say we need to introduce the MAP test: can you convince Modi, Assad, and Putin to implement your proposed measure? If you can't, bin it, we don't have time for it. The only general approach I can see working under that test is tech. We "just" need to make low carbon options more economically attractive, and then it'll happen automatically. No amount of Western self-sacrifice in the name of degrowth, no amount of high minded rhetoric about "overconsumption" will do that. US becoming an eco fascist state and going to net zero overnight will barely move the needle. But it's so easy to forget about that in the tiny bubble of Western eco activists.

wizardofdos 5y ago
The emissions of the top 10% richest people globally where 17.60 tCO2 while the bottom poorest 50% globally emitted 1.57 tCO2 (2015). Or in absolute numbers, the top 10% emitted 3x the amount of the whole bottom 50%. And that is without taking historic emmisions into consideration. What we don't have time for is doing nothing (ie continuing the destruction of our habitat). The 1.5° C goal is already getting out of reach.