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> I wonder if that is why there is such resistance to climate change among older people... Responding to climate change in a meaningful way generally means mak

> I wonder if that is why there is such resistance to climate change among older people... Responding to climate change in a meaningful way generally means making lifestyle choices that are responsible. This would include driving a small car (instead of a SUV) and driving it at a fuel-efficient speed (not the maxiumum). This would include limiting reproduction. This would include not buying a new phone every n years. This would include buying more expensive, locally grown food. This would include voting for a party that is not about "jobs'n'growth" and "the economy" and "tax cuts for the rich" and one that is more about responding to the existential challenge. Nobody wants that. They want their cars and phones and their lifestyle and their overseas holidays and their 20 grandkids. We are taught to want that. From The Matrix (1999): "You have to understand, most of these people are not ready to be unplugged. And many of them are so inured, so hopelessly dependent on the system, that they will fight to protect it."

tomp 4y ago
Your actions alone won't solve the CO2 problem, so you might as well enjoy your life. Most of the actions you list at a societal scale are completely pointless, literally the only action we need as a civilisation (collectively, not individually) is building nuclear. With abundance of clean energy that nuclear can provide, we can drive fast, procreate a lot, and eat globally.
- katbyte 4y ago
  sad thing is we have known about the affects of fossil fuels, and had solutions, for near 70? years now and just haven't due to greed and politics.
  - Schroedingersat 4y ago
    117 years https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Cove https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Cove
  - refurb 4y ago
    Easy for you to say but how many human lives have been improved over the last 70 years do to economic growth which is highly dependent on fossil fuels? Billions? Many people wouldn’t mind being frozen in 1950’s USA (except those with cancer), but probably not 1950’s China or India.
- Schroedingersat 4y ago
  There is about 40,000,000kg of accessible fissile material (U235, Pu239) on earth. Each kg can produce about 30-70TJ of energy with existing nuclear technology. Primary energy is about 17TW Please explain how you can get 17TWy of energy per year from a sum total of <80TWy of fuel.
  - sidewndr46 4y ago
    There is some degree of agreement that nuclear fuel cycles exist for fissionable fuel. In other words, the waste from one reactor can simply be used as fuel for the next. There are already some niche uses for reactor waste, up until recently the decommissioned reactor in Chernobyl was actually still in use for some stuff like this. How many steps there are in this cycle and if actually is a net positive in energy production has not been born out by any research I am aware of. So your skepticism is warranted.
    - Schroedingersat 4y ago
      One other note is that reprocessing is distinct from breeding. Reprocessing doesn't create new fissile material. You're stuck with the small fraction of Pu239 in the waste (which is about a 7th of the original U235). It buys you very little extra energy at huge financial cost and in the current form releases more radiation than the rest of the nuclear industry combined if you exclude weapons tests and chernobyl -- it even rivals coal in terms of radiation released per joule. Plus there is a hidden amount of CFCs and other extremely potent greenhouse gases involved in the process. Breeding to close the fuel cycle would be great (if it could be done economically and safely), but there is a laundry list of reasons why it may never happen, and every tonne of fissile material used before it happens is 200GW that can't be produced until a decade is spent breeding it back.
      - sidewndr46 4y ago
        There might actually be an interesting opportunity to use excess solar & wind power during some times to do the reprocessing.
- MrVandemar 4y ago
  > With abundance of clean energy that nuclear can provide, we can drive fast, procreate a lot, and eat globally. You're thinking only of energy, but the world we live in is more way, way complex than that. Keep that up and we're living on Trantor, or Coruscant, not the Earth. Anecdotally, and I have no reason to doubt this, 200 species go extinct every day. Most people only know about 200 people. Imagine if one day you woke up and suddenly everyone you knew -- family, friends, colleauges, aquaintences, the people you see behind the checkout -- was gone. Just gone. Imagine that happening every day. Or maybe you have 1,000 followers on Twitter. Imagine every day you lost 200 of them. After 5 days, you don't have any followers. So: 1,000 species gone every 5 days. Less than a week. You do the math for a year. And that's just one angle on the problem. Another is that we are poisoning ourselves: plastics are endocrine disrupters. Microplastics are a serious environmental problem. We are using materials in our day-to-day life that haven't been proven safe to actually use. Nobody did studies to see if the things you are using are safe: they just wait until they're proven problematic and then "phase them out" over 5 years ... if you're in a country that does that (some countries still use DDT which is persistant and fucking toxic). And you're right that our actions alone won't solve the CO2 problem, or most other environmental problems. That needs to happen at a government and corporate level. But it's our responsibility to put pressure on those institutions. And you can make changes locally that affect your sphere of life. We live on a farm and have planted the landscape back, in places, with thousands of trees. These support birds, insects and small animals. It reclaims a little of what was lost. It doesn't make a huge difference in the broader sense, but it makes a big difference in the lives of other creatures.
  - alexashka 4y ago
    > But it's our responsibility to put pressure on those institutions. Is it? What amount of pressure results in a 100 IQ person making 140 IQ decisions? :)
    - MrVandemar 4y ago
      Choose a lever: Their jobs. Getting re-elected. Align the goal with their fidicuary duty to increase shareholder value. Historical imperative. Whatever.
SoftTalker 4y ago
At least in the USA, neither of the two big political parties are interested in solving the climate issue. It's way too good for getting votes to ever be solved. Same reason Congress never passed a law explicitly legalizing abortion. It was too good a wedge issue.
- anon400232 4y ago
  > At least in the USA, neither of the two big political parties are interested in solving the climate issue. It's way to good for getting votes to ever be solved. The Democratic Party (and its more liberal wing especially) are interested in passing policies to address climate change. Imperfectly, but orders of magnitude more than Republicans.
  - phpisthebest 4y ago
    >The Democratic Party (and its more liberal wing especially) are interested in passing policies to address climate chang No, no they are not. They are interested in passing laws that increase their power, and make people more dependent on government Massively redistributed policies, that are anti-business, anti-market in the name of "social" and "climate" "justice" most of which will do little to nothing to impact actual CO2 emissions
    - kube-system 4y ago
      Because they propose policies that are pretty mild compromises. If you think what they're proposing now is "anti-business", then I can only guess you haven't seen any policies that are aggressive in decreasing CO2 emissions. The very democrat who torpedoed recent climate legislation did so undoubtably in part because his family business that he founded is a coal company.
      - phpisthebest 4y ago
        I do not believe the solution to Climate Change (or any societal problem) can be found in the US Congress. If we are expecting the US Congress to save humanity we are all doomed Government needs to get out of the way and stop trying to pick winners and losers, they are bad at it (see Ethanol )
TOGoS 4y ago
"The idea of a personal carbon footprint was popularized by a large advertising campaign of the fossil fuel company BP in 2005, designed by Ogilvy.[10][15] It instructed people to calculate their personal footprints and provided ways for people to "go on a low-carbon diet". This strategy, also employed by other major fossil fuel companies borrowed heavily from previous campaigns by the tobacco industry and plastics industry to shift the blame for negative consequences of those industries (under-age smoking, cigarette butt pollution, and plastic pollution) onto individual choices." -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_footprint https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_footprint I'm not saying that one shouldn't try to live more harmoniously if they can, but we shouldn't blame individuals for failing so solve problems caused by huge corporations, because it takes eyes away from where they really should be.
akomtu 4y ago
Here I'd agree with Gates that shifting the blame to the small guy won't do anything. If you want to fix ecology, aim at the big guy - manufacturers. Demand that every item on sale - from cars to plastic bottles - must be marked with the manufacturer id, and when the item ends up in a pile of trash, charge the manufacturer with a disposal fee. This will destroy mindless consumerism, and with it all our economy. I'd compare this situation to a bus with broken brakes, packed with tourists, that's rapidly approaching a cliff. Everyone knows what to do, but is too afraid of the pain that would follow. So everyone is waiting and discussing solutions, such as rocking the bus to increase pressure on brakes, or opening windows to increase the drag. Some are blaming the driver, some are blaming the fat passengers who should've eaten more responsibly, but that's just a form of group therapy session.
- chrisandchris 4y ago
  And still, aim for the small guy. Because he (mostly) actually threw that stuff into the trash. If you want to fix id, you also need to educate people.
antifa 4y ago
> This would include not buying a new x every y years I'd love to, but it seems that approximately all manufacturers are no longer producing consumer goods that last forever, and we're in the last miles of a race to the bottom in terms of both product quality and reliable information about product quality.

tomp 4y ago

Your actions alone won't solve the CO2 problem, so you might as well enjoy your life. Most of the actions you list at a societal scale are completely pointless, literally the only action we need as a civilisation (collectively, not individually) is building nuclear. With abundance of clean energy that nuclear can provide, we can drive fast, procreate a lot, and eat globally.

katbyte 4y ago
sad thing is we have known about the affects of fossil fuels, and had solutions, for near 70? years now and just haven't due to greed and politics.
- Schroedingersat 4y ago
  117 years https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Cove https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Cove
- refurb 4y ago
  Easy for you to say but how many human lives have been improved over the last 70 years do to economic growth which is highly dependent on fossil fuels? Billions? Many people wouldn’t mind being frozen in 1950’s USA (except those with cancer), but probably not 1950’s China or India.
Schroedingersat 4y ago
There is about 40,000,000kg of accessible fissile material (U235, Pu239) on earth. Each kg can produce about 30-70TJ of energy with existing nuclear technology. Primary energy is about 17TW Please explain how you can get 17TWy of energy per year from a sum total of <80TWy of fuel.
- sidewndr46 4y ago
  There is some degree of agreement that nuclear fuel cycles exist for fissionable fuel. In other words, the waste from one reactor can simply be used as fuel for the next. There are already some niche uses for reactor waste, up until recently the decommissioned reactor in Chernobyl was actually still in use for some stuff like this. How many steps there are in this cycle and if actually is a net positive in energy production has not been born out by any research I am aware of. So your skepticism is warranted.
  - Schroedingersat 4y ago
    One other note is that reprocessing is distinct from breeding. Reprocessing doesn't create new fissile material. You're stuck with the small fraction of Pu239 in the waste (which is about a 7th of the original U235). It buys you very little extra energy at huge financial cost and in the current form releases more radiation than the rest of the nuclear industry combined if you exclude weapons tests and chernobyl -- it even rivals coal in terms of radiation released per joule. Plus there is a hidden amount of CFCs and other extremely potent greenhouse gases involved in the process. Breeding to close the fuel cycle would be great (if it could be done economically and safely), but there is a laundry list of reasons why it may never happen, and every tonne of fissile material used before it happens is 200GW that can't be produced until a decade is spent breeding it back.
    - sidewndr46 4y ago
      There might actually be an interesting opportunity to use excess solar & wind power during some times to do the reprocessing.
MrVandemar 4y ago
> With abundance of clean energy that nuclear can provide, we can drive fast, procreate a lot, and eat globally. You're thinking only of energy, but the world we live in is more way, way complex than that. Keep that up and we're living on Trantor, or Coruscant, not the Earth. Anecdotally, and I have no reason to doubt this, 200 species go extinct every day. Most people only know about 200 people. Imagine if one day you woke up and suddenly everyone you knew -- family, friends, colleauges, aquaintences, the people you see behind the checkout -- was gone. Just gone. Imagine that happening every day. Or maybe you have 1,000 followers on Twitter. Imagine every day you lost 200 of them. After 5 days, you don't have any followers. So: 1,000 species gone every 5 days. Less than a week. You do the math for a year. And that's just one angle on the problem. Another is that we are poisoning ourselves: plastics are endocrine disrupters. Microplastics are a serious environmental problem. We are using materials in our day-to-day life that haven't been proven safe to actually use. Nobody did studies to see if the things you are using are safe: they just wait until they're proven problematic and then "phase them out" over 5 years ... if you're in a country that does that (some countries still use DDT which is persistant and fucking toxic). And you're right that our actions alone won't solve the CO2 problem, or most other environmental problems. That needs to happen at a government and corporate level. But it's our responsibility to put pressure on those institutions. And you can make changes locally that affect your sphere of life. We live on a farm and have planted the landscape back, in places, with thousands of trees. These support birds, insects and small animals. It reclaims a little of what was lost. It doesn't make a huge difference in the broader sense, but it makes a big difference in the lives of other creatures.
- alexashka 4y ago
  > But it's our responsibility to put pressure on those institutions. Is it? What amount of pressure results in a 100 IQ person making 140 IQ decisions? :)
  - MrVandemar 4y ago
    Choose a lever: Their jobs. Getting re-elected. Align the goal with their fidicuary duty to increase shareholder value. Historical imperative. Whatever.

SoftTalker 4y ago

At least in the USA, neither of the two big political parties are interested in solving the climate issue. It's way too good for getting votes to ever be solved. Same reason Congress never passed a law explicitly legalizing abortion. It was too good a wedge issue.

anon400232 4y ago
> At least in the USA, neither of the two big political parties are interested in solving the climate issue. It's way to good for getting votes to ever be solved. The Democratic Party (and its more liberal wing especially) are interested in passing policies to address climate change. Imperfectly, but orders of magnitude more than Republicans.
- phpisthebest 4y ago
  >The Democratic Party (and its more liberal wing especially) are interested in passing policies to address climate chang No, no they are not. They are interested in passing laws that increase their power, and make people more dependent on government Massively redistributed policies, that are anti-business, anti-market in the name of "social" and "climate" "justice" most of which will do little to nothing to impact actual CO2 emissions
  - kube-system 4y ago
    Because they propose policies that are pretty mild compromises. If you think what they're proposing now is "anti-business", then I can only guess you haven't seen any policies that are aggressive in decreasing CO2 emissions. The very democrat who torpedoed recent climate legislation did so undoubtably in part because his family business that he founded is a coal company.
    - phpisthebest 4y ago
      I do not believe the solution to Climate Change (or any societal problem) can be found in the US Congress. If we are expecting the US Congress to save humanity we are all doomed Government needs to get out of the way and stop trying to pick winners and losers, they are bad at it (see Ethanol )

TOGoS 4y ago

"The idea of a personal carbon footprint was popularized by a large advertising campaign of the fossil fuel company BP in 2005, designed by Ogilvy.[10][15] It instructed people to calculate their personal footprints and provided ways for people to "go on a low-carbon diet". This strategy, also employed by other major fossil fuel companies borrowed heavily from previous campaigns by the tobacco industry and plastics industry to shift the blame for negative consequences of those industries (under-age smoking, cigarette butt pollution, and plastic pollution) onto individual choices." -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_footprint https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_footprint I'm not saying that one shouldn't try to live more harmoniously if they can, but we shouldn't blame individuals for failing so solve problems caused by huge corporations, because it takes eyes away from where they really should be.

akomtu 4y ago

Here I'd agree with Gates that shifting the blame to the small guy won't do anything. If you want to fix ecology, aim at the big guy - manufacturers. Demand that every item on sale - from cars to plastic bottles - must be marked with the manufacturer id, and when the item ends up in a pile of trash, charge the manufacturer with a disposal fee. This will destroy mindless consumerism, and with it all our economy. I'd compare this situation to a bus with broken brakes, packed with tourists, that's rapidly approaching a cliff. Everyone knows what to do, but is too afraid of the pain that would follow. So everyone is waiting and discussing solutions, such as rocking the bus to increase pressure on brakes, or opening windows to increase the drag. Some are blaming the driver, some are blaming the fat passengers who should've eaten more responsibly, but that's just a form of group therapy session.

chrisandchris 4y ago
And still, aim for the small guy. Because he (mostly) actually threw that stuff into the trash. If you want to fix id, you also need to educate people.

antifa 4y ago

> This would include not buying a new x every y years I'd love to, but it seems that approximately all manufacturers are no longer producing consumer goods that last forever, and we're in the last miles of a race to the bottom in terms of both product quality and reliable information about product quality.