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We are ‘greening’ ourselves to extinction

112 points by firstSpeaker 4y ago

agentultra 4y ago
Greening and green-washing are causing a lot of harm. Good on Al Jazeera publishing this article and Kolinjivadi for writing it. More Western publications need to follow suit!
- swader999 4y ago
  They won't, the industries criticized heavily advertise with them.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- ant6n 4y ago
  This al jazeera article seems to a repost of a guardian/Zeit investigation: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jan/18/revealed-forest-carbon-offsets-biggest-provider-worthless-verra-aoe https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jan/18/revealed... https://www.zeit.de/2023/04/co2-zertifikate-betrug-emissionshandel-klimaschutz https://www.zeit.de/2023/04/co2-zertifikate-betrug-emissions... I guess its true that more western publications should follow reposting this story originally published by western media. Eastern media too.
  - agentultra 4y ago
    Awesome, thanks for sharing those links. The more the better!
- landemva 4y ago
  The gcp, google cloud, data center choices with the green leaves give users the ability to claim to use green datacenters, so the green washing helps with the marketing.
andrewclunn 4y ago
Biggest point this article gets right: The political figures who brand themselves as environmentalists are there to syphon energy and support for these movements, while providing no real change. Biggest thing this article gets wrong: Not realizing that the dismissive approach to indigenous peoples and the poor does not make a policy (by defenitiion) ineffective. Turns out that environmentalism and humanism can be (and often are) at odds. I don't think problem 1 will be solved until problem 2 is addressed, because pretending like there is no contention or sacrifice by the already downtrodden in order to prevent climate change is the only way the grift maintains popular support.
- mc32 4y ago
  Indeed, whenever bigcos get onboard something in flashy ways, its mostly a me too gimmick with the purpose of providing cover for something nasty and at the same time gaining favor over their competition who are caught flat-footed and not taking advantage of this cover: one of the prim examples is Apple's manufacturing. On the one hand they project an aura of justice and caring, whatever, and on the other hand, they still use metals sourced under dire conditions and have their phone manufactured under less than ideal conditions --meanwhile, back in the West they pretend they are all for the good things every upstanding citizen stands for.
TruthShare 4y ago
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t43562 4y ago
Climate change has only one priority: stop releasing carbon into the atmosphere. We're all dead if we don't and we cannot afford to add one tiny extra burden onto that monumental task. Sorry. The alternative is death for us all and no chance of any justice ever.
- ramesh31 4y ago
  This is like saying "weight loss has only one priority; eat less food and exercise more". Of course, but people simply won't. So what do we do?
  - mavhc 4y ago
    Descend into a planet of billions of migrants, mass famine, ultra right wing governments, while the population drops by billions
    - korroziya 4y ago
      >while the population drops by billions Easiest way to reduce GHG emissions right there.
      - adrianN 4y ago
        But it's insufficient, both because it doesn't reduce emissions to zero and because it's much too slow to prevent catastrophic warming (indeed, if the population drop comes as a consequence of catastrophic warming, all is already lost).
    - b4je7d7wb 4y ago
      Oh no, not the right wing governments.
  - rootusrootus 4y ago
    > This is like saying "weight loss has only one priority; eat less food and exercise more". I think this is far more reasonable. Want to weigh less? Eat a bit less, move a bit more. OP said eliminate all carbon emissions. That's like starving to lose weight. A good compromise is "emit a little less, plant a few more trees" or something along those lines, which is basically what we're doing. We already know it won't be enough to avoid consequences, as those are already manifesting, but it's the most realistic path forward by far.
debacle 4y ago
I recently took a course on greenwashing, the history of distraction in the ecoactivist movement, and effective political activism. I don't know if there's a single movement that has been sidelined more than the conservation movement. Maybe the US labor movement.
- rosetremiere 4y ago
  What course was that? Any chance it's publicly accessible?
- willnonya 4y ago
  It is a bit of a stretch to conflate the conservation and labor movements like that.
  - PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
    It wasn't conflation. It was two examples of movements that can only exist through popular support being sidelined. The ways in which they have been both been sidelined may differ, but the sidelining itself is a common feature of them both.
spchampion2 4y ago
> But this fallacy has been repeatedly exposed. For one, the organisations that are supposed to certify that indeed enough tree-planting has taken place do not have the tools to verify that the declared emissions will definitely be absorbed. Another problem is that many offsetting activities do not actually offset anything. > A recent investigation into the world’s largest carbon standard found that 94 percent of its rainforest offset credits did not actually contribute to carbon reduction. When I looked at the offset market in the past, I realized that it was one of the few markets where both the buyer and seller are perfectly happy with fraud. - The buyer is motivated to seek the lowest cost offsets they can find. They're not paying for the cleanup - all they need is the offset document itself, often for legal purposes. - The seller is more than happy to take the buyer's money and spend it on looking like they're doing something. The rest is free margin. Neither side remotely cares about the underlying activity behind the offset, and neither side is really penalized if the underlying activity is fraudulent. In fact, both sides are actually better off if the whole thing is fraudulent! I can't think of many other markets where this dynamic exists.
- version_five 4y ago
  This is true for a lot of corporate training as well, in particular for compliance stuff. It's all bullshit to check a box. Whoever's paying for it wants to spend as little as possible, nobody cares what the content is or whether its actually learned, it's just about transferring liability. It's these silly regulatory constructs that are too detached from reality (like offsets) that give rise to this brand of bullshit
  - theragra 4y ago
    Indeed. I found i can pass 99% of these trainings without reading any materials beforehand. I just check reasonably sounding boxes. That's it. I failed such training only one time among hundreds! My colleagues pass these in foreign languages for the lulz
    - jwestbury 4y ago
      My favourite was a training I took once which, if clicked through fast enough, would just skip right past the tests. There was no final check for how well you did, so my "you passed" certificate at the end proudly displayed that I had passed with a 10% score (because I answered the first few questions before realising the bug).
T-zex 4y ago
"Net zero" and "carbon offsetting" are greatest hypocrisy catalyzers invented by greedy corporate sociopaths.
- canadiantim 4y ago
  Net zero without carbon offsetting would, of course, be the end of all animal life on earth (animals exhaust CO2). So the only way to net zero is through carbon offsetting. The tragedy though is that companies pretend to be climate warriors on one hand but with the other hand they're being the worst sort of environmental pollutants. These days it's all okay if you're destroying the environment so long as you're offsetting your CO2
mrleinad 4y ago
"Fossil Future" is an interesting book on this topic that argues we need to use more fossil fuels instead of less. And it makes me kind of agree with the author, since I learnt that solar and wind only makes sense to use where it can offset the carbon footprint that it created when it was manufactured. I totally vote for nuclear, and I hope that it picks up, but we'll need fossil fuels for multiple industries anyway besides energy. And if we say "let's expand R&D to find alternatives" even that probably requires more fossil fuels and not less. Disclaimer: I don't deny global warming. I'm just not sure what the objectively realistic options are that don't include massively reducing global population and at the same time sinking millions into poverty due to lack of energy. We can go green, but we can't go green and have everyone maintain their living standards at the same time we also grow and perform R&D on multiple areas.
- savingsPossible 4y ago
  > We can go green, but we can't go green and have everyone maintain their living standards at the same time we also grow and perform R&D on multiple areas. I would hope (at least at a physics level, politics would be hard, of course) that cutting down on yatchs and maybe flights might be enough... (i.e.: only cutting for the 1% or maybe 5%)
  - midasuni 4y ago
    Nowhere near enough. Cut out every flight and every yacht in existence and you’re talking about a 10% reduction
  - mrleinad 4y ago
    > I would hope (at least at a physics level) I think that's all this movement has: hope, but without anything real to back it up. Virtue signaling seems to be their solution. I'm all for grounding Bill Gates to use a train to go anywhere, but I think we should have a serious discussion on the subject, with facts and not just "let's hope this works".
- rootusrootus 4y ago
  > solar and wind only makes sense to use where it can offset the carbon footprint that it created when it was manufactured IIRC, PV panels become (on average) carbon neutral after three years of operation. Given the lifespan, this suggests that there are very few locations you can put them where they won't more than pay back the carbon emitted in their production. I'm a former nuclear fan. In anything like its current form it is a dead end, and it is past time we move on.
InitialLastName 4y ago
It's worth keeping in mind that Al Jazeera (as the state-funded news outlet of an extremely wealthy state that is built entirely and existentially on the sales of oil) may not be unbiased on this particular analysis.
- kibwen 4y ago
  It appears to be decrying the ongoing sale of oil: "The supposed energy transition that has been undertaken has seen renewable energy production expanded, but there has been no indication that oil and gas are being substituted and ultimately phased out."
- alexb_ 4y ago
  [flagged]
  - kerkeslager 4y ago
    No, people on Hacker News don't read articles, they're too smart for that! But I should warn you that it's literally against the rules to call people out when they clearly didn't read the article.
    - kerkeslager 4y ago
      I've been flagged. Oh no! Corporate culture at its finest: perpetuating ignorance by commenting on articles you didn't read is a marketing problem. The solution is to brand anyone who points out ignorance as a big meanie.
  - garbagecoder 4y ago
    I did and if you don't consider the source then I'm not sure what kind of reader you are. Al-Jazeera English is happy to publish some of the most lefty writers on other topics but strangely not here.
    - jacooper 4y ago
korroziya 4y ago
From the article: "The supposed energy transition that has been undertaken has seen renewable energy production expanded, but there has been no indication that oil and gas are being substituted and ultimately phased out." That's not going to happen for another 27 years at least. I've said it before: Most people (including those who post here) are staggeringly illiterate when it comes to energy. Hydrocarbons store an immense amount of energy in a small, portable, cheap form. You can't just replace it in a year. And even if you COULD, oil and gas are used for more than fuel and power. Natgas is a major feedstock for nitrogen fertilizer. You cannot replace it with solar panels. Then there's the laundry list of byproducts like plastics and other materials made from oil and gas feedstocks which are essential for the modern world to function -also not able to be substituted by wind and sunlight. Funny how they never mention this at Vox, Mother Jones, or other progressive-leaning publications.
- rootusrootus 4y ago
  I haven't met that many people who think we can do it in a year. But it won't happen in 27 years if we don't make a consistent effort every year between now and then.
  - slothtrop 4y ago
    I'm not sure it will even happen in 27 years, with effort.
  - notacoward 4y ago
    The key is to make the right efforts. Putting so much passion into "build more bike lanes", discouraging people from buying EVs or installing solar "because of the environmental cost" etc. either doesn't move the needle or moves it in the wrong direction. It is its own form of greenwashing. What we need to do is look at the actual flows of carbon-energy production and usage, and work our way down from the biggest to the smallest. Here's a starting point from LLNL. https://flowcharts.llnl.gov/commodities/energy https://flowcharts.llnl.gov/commodities/energy https://flowcharts.llnl.gov/commodities/carbon https://flowcharts.llnl.gov/commodities/carbon (I'm pretty sure I've seen an even better one somewhere that breaks down e.g. personal vs. commercial transportation, but I can't find it right now.) Parallel to that, we need to address the political issues that obstruct even minimal progress. And yes, sometimes that means holding our noses and voting for awful "moderates" or "centrists". Why? Because in a divided country (as most are) getting elected means getting the votes in the middle. Education helps some, in the long term, because it helps move the dividing line between the two sides of any issue (not just environment). Condescension and demonization don't help at all. In the short term, though, the biggest bang for the buck is to vote for people who will meet voters where they are ideologically and get them to support some kind of progress. Secondarily, electing people who will vote to dismantle the structures that favor obstruction and NIMBYism over doing something will also help - not this election cycle or next, but hopefully within a 27-year time frame. So yes, consistent effort every year, but in ways that bear fruit and don't just satisfy someone's sense of superiority or self-righteous anger. There has been enough posturing. Every "that isn't good enough" or "they're both the same" delays actual progress. Like everything there's a strategy to this, and about 90% of what I see is a losing strategy.
deleted 4y ago
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rootusrootus 4y ago
> the push to replace fuel-engine vehicles with electric ones As opposed to what, replacing cars with public transit? It takes a serious amount of hubris to look at the world and think that we can just wave a magic wand and make public transit work in places that largely rely on cars (even in Europe, which is much denser and more friendly to public transit, there are a lot of personal cars). We will run out of oil way before we reach that sort of 'utopia', so electric cars are a far better option than just continuing to burn all the fossil fuels we can. It doesn't preclude us from also incentivizing more public transit options, either. Edit: the amount of downvotes any post that is skeptical of public transit as a global solution gets is really descriptive of how narrow the bubble is most HNers live in.
- bambax 4y ago
  We could make it harder and harder to use/own a car: more expensive, difficult to park, slower to use, etc. Then people would seek out other solutions by themselves, be it using a bike, public transport, or moving less (asking for more remote work options, for instance). We don't seem to even be trying to do this and it's depressing.
  - rootusrootus 4y ago
    This is a matter of politics. Right now the majority of the population doesn't agree with your position. That's the problem you have to solve. The real difficulty there is that people are by nature concerned more about near-term, local events. If you try too hard to make their life more expensive and difficult, they'll just vote you out of power.
    - bambax 4y ago
      Agreed.
  - Xymist 4y ago
    Perhaps don't advocate making good things in life shittier in order to make comparatively shit options you happen to approve of look good by comparison? If you want public transport to be an even barely acceptable alternative to cars: - Make it door to door, no connections, no hiking to or from a station/stop/port at either end - Make it on demand, no timetables or shortages - Make it actually show up, and not be susceptible to strikes or moderately bad weather - Make a ticket cost the same as or less than the cost in petrol (or electricity) for the same journey - Make it private, without the need to be crammed into a box with strangers These aren't unreasonable requirements, or some utopia situation. They're all things that personal cars provide that trains, planes, taxis, subways, and busses frequently (perhaps generally?) do not. I don't even commute, I work entirely remotely, and your proposal would still be a massive decrease in my quality of life whether it achieved your objective or not. If you want alternatives to be more popular, make them better than the status quo for every individual rather than just waving at "the world in general" and saying it's better for that/them.
8943gG4f 4y ago
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jeoqn 4y ago
I’m okay with all greening as long as it allows me to continue my lifestyle.
- Gasp0de 4y ago
  What if it will kill your children?
  - slothtrop 4y ago
    Why entertain a hypothetical that isn't anywhere near reflective of what is projected?
    - chimprich 4y ago
      It's a bit of an unnecessarily emotional way to frame the debate, but climate change under current projections will kill a lot of people, including children. Realistic forecasts suggest many deaths from increased natural disasters, air pollution, famine, drought, heat stress, poverty and war.
      - sacrosancty 4y ago
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- lezojeda 4y ago
  Unironically this is how most of the first world thinks while expecting us from the third to completely change our lifestyles and don't we even dare to try to develop the same way you guys did.
  - edgyquant 4y ago
    Why would you develop your economy like it was the 1800s?
    - ElectricalUnion 4y ago
SECProto 4y ago
This article has a couple non-sequiturs that undermine the whole argument, the biggest to me was the thrust of these two sequential paragraphs: > the growing electric vehicle industry may help reduce carbon emissions but it will also cause a massive jump in the demand for lithium and other minerals. [...] Apart from making climate change worse, Reducing and eliminating carbon emissions is key to climate change reduction. Other environmental impacts aren't consistently correlated with climate action.
erulabs 4y ago
> billions of dollars have been poured into big pharma, instead of public health and policies My biggest pet peeve is this idea that the human race or even some large swath (“investors”) are doing one thing instead of another. How does one “pour billions in to policies” anyways? How do investors investing in bigpharma in any way impact public health policy? It’s as if the author wants to take the entire human race aside and say “hey buddy, you’re making some mistakes”. Who? What? When! Planting trees isn’t great for carbon offset but it’s probably great for a dozen other reasons - and guess what - we can do lots of things simultaneously! If the worst miscalculation you can point at the human race making is accidentally planting too many trees - well - I think the author is perhaps the myopic one! Of course they immediately confuse other complex topics (wildfires bad is an extremely naive understanding of California!) so pulling apart any of this is hopeless.
- agentultra 4y ago
  > it was capitalism that doomed us and capitalism that saved us Saved whom? As I understand what happened it was the biggest wealth transfer in the history of humanity. The disaster investments pouring into the pharmaceutical industry before the pandemic wasn't the reason that the vaccines existed at all; there was decades of research that went into mRNA based vaccines. The pharmaceutical industry was more than profitable already and able to meet demands without the influx of investment. It seems to me that while it was beneficial to have the vaccines we had rolled out it didn't "save" all of us. It protected a good number of people. It wasn't evenly or fairly distributed. And it made a very few number of extremely wealthy people even more wealthy while increasing the number of already financially precarious people in the world.
  - landemva 4y ago
    The covid shots were quickly rolled out because of the emergency use authorizations which exempt the manufacturers and providers from safety regulations and liability. It's not a fair market when a favored industry can provide products without liability. That would be like an airplane manufacture not caring if the planes are unsafe. FDA is still issuing the EUAs. https://www.fda.gov/emergency-preparedness-and-response/mcm-legal-regulatory-and-policy-framework/emergency-use-authorization https://www.fda.gov/emergency-preparedness-and-response/mcm-...
ravenstine 4y ago
The very premise of modern environmentalism necessitates human extinction by logical extension. You can't act or believe as if humans can or should have no impact on the environment without entertaining humanity's gradual demise as part of the process of "saving the earth" when all other known options are exhausted.
- RetpolineDrama 4y ago
  >You can't act or believe as if humans can or should have no impact on the environment without entertaining humanity's gradual demise as part of the process of "saving the earth" when all other known options are exhausted. IMO this particular aspect of modern environmentalism is a religious root on a secular tree. Many religions imply that man isn't natural, that there's the nature world and that we are above it/not part of it. That core belief carries over into secular society/people even though they no longer believe the system of thought that lead to that conclusion. I assert that man is in fact natural not supernatural, and that the changes man makes to the world as as natural of a process a trees overgrowing a grassland to make a forest or an ocean eroding away an island.
  - ravenstine 4y ago
    Interesting. Yeah, the separation of many from nature (or perhaps that "nature" is even a comprehensible idea) seems demireligious in the sense that nature was given to man to have dominion over; man can become holy but not animals, depending on one's inherited belief system. There's other fallacious ideas around nature that may have nothing to do with religion that I think are just common breakdowns in logic. People commonly apply the idea of "balance" to areas where it doesn't apply, or at least doesn't apply in the way that they think it does. Earth is a complicated system of systems, but is it meant to be in balance? If that were so, Earth's climate would not oscillate (excluding changes in solar output) over geological eras. Was Earth out of balance during the ice age? "Balance" may in part be a proxy for our desire to want systems with which we are accustomed to not change. I've witnessed countless individuals, concerned with preserving nature, who would consider a plant or animal to be "non-native" or "invasive" while failing to recognize that the plants they believe to be "native" were introduced by animals in recent ecological history. They overlook the possibility (really a high likelihood) that the environment that explorers set foot on was significantly different from how it was even a century prior. It'd difficult for concepts of nativeness and invasiveness to be comprehensible if they did. Not that these aren't useful concepts in some domain, but many people interested in ecology or environmentalism believe them to be absolutely accurate or meaningful.
dr_dshiv 4y ago
The article accuses greentech and carbon-credits of genocide: "While guaranteeing high returns, this deception is tantamount to the genocide of the hundreds of millions of people who will perish from the effects of climate change within the next century because things are that bad." That's pretty harsh. But, if you think "things are that bad," let's also consider the moral culpability of people trying to stop the scientific study of geoengineering: https://www.solargeoeng.org/ https://www.solargeoeng.org/ Scientifically, stratospheric aerosol injection works: IPCC gives "high agreement that it could limit warming to below 1.5°C" with a material cost of less than $10B per year. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_geoengineering https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_geoengineering But, as we all know, it is intellectually unacceptable to be an advocate for geoengineering. For some reason, "Thou shalt not believe in a technological solution to global warming." Instead, billions of people need to voluntarily (or not) dramatically reduce their lifestyle. I really don't get it. Any insights?
- leetcodesucks 4y ago
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- yabones 4y ago
  From my understanding, there's two major issues with geoengineering. 1. You have to keep doing it forever, and likely accelerate the rate at which you do. If rapid decarbonization doesn't happen in tandem, you'll need to be adding more and more aerosols over time. And the second you stop, you get a sudden whiplash climate change event that has a hundred years of warming in one. The risk of that catastrophe isn't worthwhile to many. 2. Most of the compounds that are cheap and effective are both ozone depleters and cause acid rain. The one studied most is Sulfur Dioxide, which would cause ocean acidification after many years of sustained use. IMO, it's a fundamentally bad idea because it's using one form of pollution to fix the problem created by another. The second and third order effects could be unforeseen and catastrophic.
  - dr_dshiv 4y ago
    Just to break these separate arguments up into pieces: 1. "You have to keep doing it forever" 2. "[Stopping] creates a sudden whiplash climate change event" 3. Geoengineering will deplete the ozone 4. Geoengineering causes acid raid 5. Geoengineering causes ocean acidification 6. Fundamentally bad: "one form of pollution to fix the problem created by another" 7. "second and third order effects could be unforeseen and catastrophic" 8. If we use geoengineering, then people won't decarbonize (I'm assuming this is also a concern). 1. We do lots of things forever, like collecting taxes or taking out the trash. So I don't understand that issue. 2. Why would we stop, if it is so important? 3. Open to ozone depletion as a bigger problem, but just by tonnage, it should be 1/3 of the effect described here: https://meteor.geol.iastate.edu/gcp/studentpapers/1996/atmoschem/huff.html#:~:text=SO2%20depletes%20the%20ozone,ozone%20production%20is%20also%20reduced https://meteor.geol.iastate.edu/gcp/studentpapers/1996/atmos... 4. According to this article, acid rain from geoengineering would be a small fraction of the effect of current industrial pollution: https://doi.org/10.1029/2009JD011918 https://doi.org/10.1029/2009JD011918 5. Ocean acidification is a real concern. But I suspect 2 degrees of warming will much more dangerous to ocean ecosystems. 6. I don't understand the fundamentally bad argument. Neither CO2 nor SO2 are bad chemicals. Our goal should be to moderate the climate; maybe we need one chemical to balance the other. 7. This is my personal opinion, but I think the second and third order effects need to be studied scientifically. The second and third order effects of degrowth are also real. 8. I think a move to geoengineering would be politically advantageous for decarbonization policy. No one wants geoengineering. But if we need it, we need it—and if we might need it, we should study it carefully, scientifically.
lumb63 4y ago
Some of what the author says is accurate. Carbon offset credits are bunk. Industrial agriculture is harmful. There are environmental issues to a lot of the “greening” practices. There are issues around how equitably the climate change revolution is going to impact different demographics. Some of what the author says is false. Consumer choices do make a difference. I work in climate tech and the product my company produces monitors electricity usage in the home. The average user reduces their home electricity usage by 7% in the first month, solely due to becoming aware of what they are using. Residential electricity usage is something like 45% of electricity usage here in the states, I believe. That’s huge progress due to consumer choice. Electric vehicles are progress. There are companies developing new ways to extract lithium that do not destroy the environment as much as brining does. As where ICEs inherently must pollute (good luck having combustion without emitting CO2), electric power has the ability to become renewable and green. Oil companies are a hundred years ahead and have governments in their pockets, subsidies, and well-established infrastructure in place already. If renewable energy were in that position, there would be no contest in what was more eco-friendly. Calling for “reparative justice” is another fear-mongering, divide-and-conquer strategy. The proper path forward IMO is capturing externalities so they can be incorporated into the existing economic framework. That’s what drives behavior of companies. I’m talking about putting a price on carbon. I’m talking about taxing land use at different rates for agricultural operations based on the type of agriculture being done. Imagine how quickly companies would change their behaviors if they had to pay the full price of what their fossil fuel usage or monoculture farming costs us collectively.
- landemva 4y ago
  > The proper path forward IMO is capturing externalities so they can be incorporated into the existing economic framework. I totally agree! No way China should be able to have price advantages due to lack of manufacturing pollution control. And Mexico makes engine blocks for the north because of the difficulty of getting environmental approval for foundries in the north. Pollution parity import tariffs will level the playing field and allow low-polluting factories to compete with the high polluting areas that are harming everyone. > change their behaviors if they had to pay the full price The imported igadgets and solar panels and baby rockers will be more expensive. If we manufacture at home we can even reduce usage of energy for transporting things from China.
wing-_-nuts 4y ago
The dude has a great point about the need to verify carbon offsets. Where he loses me is this whole idea of 'reparative justice'. That will never happen. We can't even get everyone to agree to meet targets that will keep the world at 1.5c. The idea that we'll get powerful countries and corporations to fork over trillions to right past wrongs is laughable. It's a bad faith poison pill. If I didn't know any better, I'd bet this guy is funded by fossil fuel companies to ensure nothing gets done.
- theragra 4y ago
  I agree. Maybe it can happen to some extent, but sounds kind of dangerous way to follow. Same as with a law applied to previous crimes. If companies should pay for what was lawful at the time, how you can be sure something you are doing now won't be declared evil? Meat production, outsourcing to cheaper countries, not sharing natural resource profits on large scale with citizens, like in Norway? Hundreds of things that are looking sus now. CEO pay, among others. But who would make large effective enteprises in such climate? I don't like large corps, but ive lived in socialism, and it is way worse.
__derek__ 4y ago
> More than a decade ago, investment experts James Altucher [...] Wait, what?!
quantified 4y ago
Not "we", but "they".
jaxelr 4y ago
Somewhat related, John Oliver had an episode about Carbon Offsets https://youtu.be/6p8zAbFKpW0 https://youtu.be/6p8zAbFKpW0
dadna 4y ago
Kudos Vijay ! Good exposition of Climate change. Look for who is making the money and then you get it, always and every time
dadna 4y ago
Kudos to Vijay for the matter of fact exposition of reality. Look for who makes the money and you get it , always and every time
kkfx 4y ago
A small note: the Green New Deal is not much about ecology. It's a, needed, industrial revolution. Why? For the same reasons why we switch from mechanical cash registers to electronic ones: because making electronics is expensive in factories terms, but it's needed and can spit out gazillion of very cheap ICs needing not much raw material, while the previous mechanical version demand much more raw material, energy and labor per single unit. Similarly moving electricity is not that simple nor cheap, but still needed and far cheaper than moving gas, gasoline, diesel etc. Ecology? Ah, ok, there is SOME at the end, meaning much less need of raw materials ONCE the transition would be made. That's the point almost nobody want to state because in that case instead of getting a polarized cohort of fanatics on both side we would get a significant cohort of people stating "ok, let's do it BUT if we pay for product factories sustain the costs OR we participate to the costs and to the earning".

112 points by firstSpeaker 4y ago

Greening and green-washing are causing a lot of harm. Good on Al Jazeera publishing this article and Kolinjivadi for writing it. More Western publications need to follow suit!

swader999 4y ago
They won't, the industries criticized heavily advertise with them.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
ant6n 4y ago
This al jazeera article seems to a repost of a guardian/Zeit investigation: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jan/18/revealed-forest-carbon-offsets-biggest-provider-worthless-verra-aoe https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jan/18/revealed... https://www.zeit.de/2023/04/co2-zertifikate-betrug-emissionshandel-klimaschutz https://www.zeit.de/2023/04/co2-zertifikate-betrug-emissions... I guess its true that more western publications should follow reposting this story originally published by western media. Eastern media too.
- agentultra 4y ago
  Awesome, thanks for sharing those links. The more the better!
landemva 4y ago
The gcp, google cloud, data center choices with the green leaves give users the ability to claim to use green datacenters, so the green washing helps with the marketing.

andrewclunn 4y ago

Biggest point this article gets right: The political figures who brand themselves as environmentalists are there to syphon energy and support for these movements, while providing no real change. Biggest thing this article gets wrong: Not realizing that the dismissive approach to indigenous peoples and the poor does not make a policy (by defenitiion) ineffective. Turns out that environmentalism and humanism can be (and often are) at odds. I don't think problem 1 will be solved until problem 2 is addressed, because pretending like there is no contention or sacrifice by the already downtrodden in order to prevent climate change is the only way the grift maintains popular support.

mc32 4y ago
Indeed, whenever bigcos get onboard something in flashy ways, its mostly a me too gimmick with the purpose of providing cover for something nasty and at the same time gaining favor over their competition who are caught flat-footed and not taking advantage of this cover: one of the prim examples is Apple's manufacturing. On the one hand they project an aura of justice and caring, whatever, and on the other hand, they still use metals sourced under dire conditions and have their phone manufactured under less than ideal conditions --meanwhile, back in the West they pretend they are all for the good things every upstanding citizen stands for.

TruthShare 4y ago

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t43562 4y ago

Climate change has only one priority: stop releasing carbon into the atmosphere. We're all dead if we don't and we cannot afford to add one tiny extra burden onto that monumental task. Sorry. The alternative is death for us all and no chance of any justice ever.

ramesh31 4y ago
This is like saying "weight loss has only one priority; eat less food and exercise more". Of course, but people simply won't. So what do we do?
- mavhc 4y ago
  Descend into a planet of billions of migrants, mass famine, ultra right wing governments, while the population drops by billions
  - korroziya 4y ago
    >while the population drops by billions Easiest way to reduce GHG emissions right there.
    - adrianN 4y ago
      But it's insufficient, both because it doesn't reduce emissions to zero and because it's much too slow to prevent catastrophic warming (indeed, if the population drop comes as a consequence of catastrophic warming, all is already lost).
  - b4je7d7wb 4y ago
    Oh no, not the right wing governments.
- rootusrootus 4y ago
  > This is like saying "weight loss has only one priority; eat less food and exercise more". I think this is far more reasonable. Want to weigh less? Eat a bit less, move a bit more. OP said eliminate all carbon emissions. That's like starving to lose weight. A good compromise is "emit a little less, plant a few more trees" or something along those lines, which is basically what we're doing. We already know it won't be enough to avoid consequences, as those are already manifesting, but it's the most realistic path forward by far.

debacle 4y ago

I recently took a course on greenwashing, the history of distraction in the ecoactivist movement, and effective political activism. I don't know if there's a single movement that has been sidelined more than the conservation movement. Maybe the US labor movement.

rosetremiere 4y ago
What course was that? Any chance it's publicly accessible?
willnonya 4y ago
It is a bit of a stretch to conflate the conservation and labor movements like that.
- PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
  It wasn't conflation. It was two examples of movements that can only exist through popular support being sidelined. The ways in which they have been both been sidelined may differ, but the sidelining itself is a common feature of them both.

spchampion2 4y ago

> But this fallacy has been repeatedly exposed. For one, the organisations that are supposed to certify that indeed enough tree-planting has taken place do not have the tools to verify that the declared emissions will definitely be absorbed. Another problem is that many offsetting activities do not actually offset anything. > A recent investigation into the world’s largest carbon standard found that 94 percent of its rainforest offset credits did not actually contribute to carbon reduction. When I looked at the offset market in the past, I realized that it was one of the few markets where both the buyer and seller are perfectly happy with fraud. - The buyer is motivated to seek the lowest cost offsets they can find. They're not paying for the cleanup - all they need is the offset document itself, often for legal purposes. - The seller is more than happy to take the buyer's money and spend it on looking like they're doing something. The rest is free margin. Neither side remotely cares about the underlying activity behind the offset, and neither side is really penalized if the underlying activity is fraudulent. In fact, both sides are actually better off if the whole thing is fraudulent! I can't think of many other markets where this dynamic exists.

version_five 4y ago
This is true for a lot of corporate training as well, in particular for compliance stuff. It's all bullshit to check a box. Whoever's paying for it wants to spend as little as possible, nobody cares what the content is or whether its actually learned, it's just about transferring liability. It's these silly regulatory constructs that are too detached from reality (like offsets) that give rise to this brand of bullshit
- theragra 4y ago
  Indeed. I found i can pass 99% of these trainings without reading any materials beforehand. I just check reasonably sounding boxes. That's it. I failed such training only one time among hundreds! My colleagues pass these in foreign languages for the lulz
  - jwestbury 4y ago
    My favourite was a training I took once which, if clicked through fast enough, would just skip right past the tests. There was no final check for how well you did, so my "you passed" certificate at the end proudly displayed that I had passed with a 10% score (because I answered the first few questions before realising the bug).

T-zex 4y ago

"Net zero" and "carbon offsetting" are greatest hypocrisy catalyzers invented by greedy corporate sociopaths.

canadiantim 4y ago
Net zero without carbon offsetting would, of course, be the end of all animal life on earth (animals exhaust CO2). So the only way to net zero is through carbon offsetting. The tragedy though is that companies pretend to be climate warriors on one hand but with the other hand they're being the worst sort of environmental pollutants. These days it's all okay if you're destroying the environment so long as you're offsetting your CO2

mrleinad 4y ago

"Fossil Future" is an interesting book on this topic that argues we need to use more fossil fuels instead of less. And it makes me kind of agree with the author, since I learnt that solar and wind only makes sense to use where it can offset the carbon footprint that it created when it was manufactured. I totally vote for nuclear, and I hope that it picks up, but we'll need fossil fuels for multiple industries anyway besides energy. And if we say "let's expand R&D to find alternatives" even that probably requires more fossil fuels and not less. Disclaimer: I don't deny global warming. I'm just not sure what the objectively realistic options are that don't include massively reducing global population and at the same time sinking millions into poverty due to lack of energy. We can go green, but we can't go green and have everyone maintain their living standards at the same time we also grow and perform R&D on multiple areas.

savingsPossible 4y ago
> We can go green, but we can't go green and have everyone maintain their living standards at the same time we also grow and perform R&D on multiple areas. I would hope (at least at a physics level, politics would be hard, of course) that cutting down on yatchs and maybe flights might be enough... (i.e.: only cutting for the 1% or maybe 5%)
- midasuni 4y ago
  Nowhere near enough. Cut out every flight and every yacht in existence and you’re talking about a 10% reduction
- mrleinad 4y ago
  > I would hope (at least at a physics level) I think that's all this movement has: hope, but without anything real to back it up. Virtue signaling seems to be their solution. I'm all for grounding Bill Gates to use a train to go anywhere, but I think we should have a serious discussion on the subject, with facts and not just "let's hope this works".
rootusrootus 4y ago
> solar and wind only makes sense to use where it can offset the carbon footprint that it created when it was manufactured IIRC, PV panels become (on average) carbon neutral after three years of operation. Given the lifespan, this suggests that there are very few locations you can put them where they won't more than pay back the carbon emitted in their production. I'm a former nuclear fan. In anything like its current form it is a dead end, and it is past time we move on.

InitialLastName 4y ago

It's worth keeping in mind that Al Jazeera (as the state-funded news outlet of an extremely wealthy state that is built entirely and existentially on the sales of oil) may not be unbiased on this particular analysis.

kibwen 4y ago
It appears to be decrying the ongoing sale of oil: "The supposed energy transition that has been undertaken has seen renewable energy production expanded, but there has been no indication that oil and gas are being substituted and ultimately phased out."
alexb_ 4y ago
[flagged]
- kerkeslager 4y ago
  No, people on Hacker News don't read articles, they're too smart for that! But I should warn you that it's literally against the rules to call people out when they clearly didn't read the article.
  - kerkeslager 4y ago
    I've been flagged. Oh no! Corporate culture at its finest: perpetuating ignorance by commenting on articles you didn't read is a marketing problem. The solution is to brand anyone who points out ignorance as a big meanie.
- garbagecoder 4y ago
  I did and if you don't consider the source then I'm not sure what kind of reader you are. Al-Jazeera English is happy to publish some of the most lefty writers on other topics but strangely not here.
  - jacooper 4y ago

korroziya 4y ago

From the article: "The supposed energy transition that has been undertaken has seen renewable energy production expanded, but there has been no indication that oil and gas are being substituted and ultimately phased out." That's not going to happen for another 27 years at least. I've said it before: Most people (including those who post here) are staggeringly illiterate when it comes to energy. Hydrocarbons store an immense amount of energy in a small, portable, cheap form. You can't just replace it in a year. And even if you COULD, oil and gas are used for more than fuel and power. Natgas is a major feedstock for nitrogen fertilizer. You cannot replace it with solar panels. Then there's the laundry list of byproducts like plastics and other materials made from oil and gas feedstocks which are essential for the modern world to function -also not able to be substituted by wind and sunlight. Funny how they never mention this at Vox, Mother Jones, or other progressive-leaning publications.

rootusrootus 4y ago
I haven't met that many people who think we can do it in a year. But it won't happen in 27 years if we don't make a consistent effort every year between now and then.
- slothtrop 4y ago
  I'm not sure it will even happen in 27 years, with effort.
- notacoward 4y ago
  The key is to make the right efforts. Putting so much passion into "build more bike lanes", discouraging people from buying EVs or installing solar "because of the environmental cost" etc. either doesn't move the needle or moves it in the wrong direction. It is its own form of greenwashing. What we need to do is look at the actual flows of carbon-energy production and usage, and work our way down from the biggest to the smallest. Here's a starting point from LLNL. https://flowcharts.llnl.gov/commodities/energy https://flowcharts.llnl.gov/commodities/energy https://flowcharts.llnl.gov/commodities/carbon https://flowcharts.llnl.gov/commodities/carbon (I'm pretty sure I've seen an even better one somewhere that breaks down e.g. personal vs. commercial transportation, but I can't find it right now.) Parallel to that, we need to address the political issues that obstruct even minimal progress. And yes, sometimes that means holding our noses and voting for awful "moderates" or "centrists". Why? Because in a divided country (as most are) getting elected means getting the votes in the middle. Education helps some, in the long term, because it helps move the dividing line between the two sides of any issue (not just environment). Condescension and demonization don't help at all. In the short term, though, the biggest bang for the buck is to vote for people who will meet voters where they are ideologically and get them to support some kind of progress. Secondarily, electing people who will vote to dismantle the structures that favor obstruction and NIMBYism over doing something will also help - not this election cycle or next, but hopefully within a 27-year time frame. So yes, consistent effort every year, but in ways that bear fruit and don't just satisfy someone's sense of superiority or self-righteous anger. There has been enough posturing. Every "that isn't good enough" or "they're both the same" delays actual progress. Like everything there's a strategy to this, and about 90% of what I see is a losing strategy.

deleted 4y ago

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rootusrootus 4y ago

> the push to replace fuel-engine vehicles with electric ones As opposed to what, replacing cars with public transit? It takes a serious amount of hubris to look at the world and think that we can just wave a magic wand and make public transit work in places that largely rely on cars (even in Europe, which is much denser and more friendly to public transit, there are a lot of personal cars). We will run out of oil way before we reach that sort of 'utopia', so electric cars are a far better option than just continuing to burn all the fossil fuels we can. It doesn't preclude us from also incentivizing more public transit options, either. Edit: the amount of downvotes any post that is skeptical of public transit as a global solution gets is really descriptive of how narrow the bubble is most HNers live in.

bambax 4y ago
We could make it harder and harder to use/own a car: more expensive, difficult to park, slower to use, etc. Then people would seek out other solutions by themselves, be it using a bike, public transport, or moving less (asking for more remote work options, for instance). We don't seem to even be trying to do this and it's depressing.
- rootusrootus 4y ago
  This is a matter of politics. Right now the majority of the population doesn't agree with your position. That's the problem you have to solve. The real difficulty there is that people are by nature concerned more about near-term, local events. If you try too hard to make their life more expensive and difficult, they'll just vote you out of power.
  - bambax 4y ago
    Agreed.
- Xymist 4y ago
  Perhaps don't advocate making good things in life shittier in order to make comparatively shit options you happen to approve of look good by comparison? If you want public transport to be an even barely acceptable alternative to cars: - Make it door to door, no connections, no hiking to or from a station/stop/port at either end - Make it on demand, no timetables or shortages - Make it actually show up, and not be susceptible to strikes or moderately bad weather - Make a ticket cost the same as or less than the cost in petrol (or electricity) for the same journey - Make it private, without the need to be crammed into a box with strangers These aren't unreasonable requirements, or some utopia situation. They're all things that personal cars provide that trains, planes, taxis, subways, and busses frequently (perhaps generally?) do not. I don't even commute, I work entirely remotely, and your proposal would still be a massive decrease in my quality of life whether it achieved your objective or not. If you want alternatives to be more popular, make them better than the status quo for every individual rather than just waving at "the world in general" and saying it's better for that/them.

8943gG4f 4y ago

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jeoqn 4y ago

I’m okay with all greening as long as it allows me to continue my lifestyle.

Gasp0de 4y ago
What if it will kill your children?
- slothtrop 4y ago
  Why entertain a hypothetical that isn't anywhere near reflective of what is projected?
  - chimprich 4y ago
    It's a bit of an unnecessarily emotional way to frame the debate, but climate change under current projections will kill a lot of people, including children. Realistic forecasts suggest many deaths from increased natural disasters, air pollution, famine, drought, heat stress, poverty and war.
    - sacrosancty 4y ago
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lezojeda 4y ago
Unironically this is how most of the first world thinks while expecting us from the third to completely change our lifestyles and don't we even dare to try to develop the same way you guys did.
- edgyquant 4y ago
  Why would you develop your economy like it was the 1800s?
  - ElectricalUnion 4y ago

SECProto 4y ago

This article has a couple non-sequiturs that undermine the whole argument, the biggest to me was the thrust of these two sequential paragraphs: > the growing electric vehicle industry may help reduce carbon emissions but it will also cause a massive jump in the demand for lithium and other minerals. [...] Apart from making climate change worse, Reducing and eliminating carbon emissions is key to climate change reduction. Other environmental impacts aren't consistently correlated with climate action.

erulabs 4y ago

> billions of dollars have been poured into big pharma, instead of public health and policies My biggest pet peeve is this idea that the human race or even some large swath (“investors”) are doing one thing instead of another. How does one “pour billions in to policies” anyways? How do investors investing in bigpharma in any way impact public health policy? It’s as if the author wants to take the entire human race aside and say “hey buddy, you’re making some mistakes”. Who? What? When! Planting trees isn’t great for carbon offset but it’s probably great for a dozen other reasons - and guess what - we can do lots of things simultaneously! If the worst miscalculation you can point at the human race making is accidentally planting too many trees - well - I think the author is perhaps the myopic one! Of course they immediately confuse other complex topics (wildfires bad is an extremely naive understanding of California!) so pulling apart any of this is hopeless.

agentultra 4y ago
> it was capitalism that doomed us and capitalism that saved us Saved whom? As I understand what happened it was the biggest wealth transfer in the history of humanity. The disaster investments pouring into the pharmaceutical industry before the pandemic wasn't the reason that the vaccines existed at all; there was decades of research that went into mRNA based vaccines. The pharmaceutical industry was more than profitable already and able to meet demands without the influx of investment. It seems to me that while it was beneficial to have the vaccines we had rolled out it didn't "save" all of us. It protected a good number of people. It wasn't evenly or fairly distributed. And it made a very few number of extremely wealthy people even more wealthy while increasing the number of already financially precarious people in the world.
- landemva 4y ago
  The covid shots were quickly rolled out because of the emergency use authorizations which exempt the manufacturers and providers from safety regulations and liability. It's not a fair market when a favored industry can provide products without liability. That would be like an airplane manufacture not caring if the planes are unsafe. FDA is still issuing the EUAs. https://www.fda.gov/emergency-preparedness-and-response/mcm-legal-regulatory-and-policy-framework/emergency-use-authorization https://www.fda.gov/emergency-preparedness-and-response/mcm-...

ravenstine 4y ago

The very premise of modern environmentalism necessitates human extinction by logical extension. You can't act or believe as if humans can or should have no impact on the environment without entertaining humanity's gradual demise as part of the process of "saving the earth" when all other known options are exhausted.

RetpolineDrama 4y ago
>You can't act or believe as if humans can or should have no impact on the environment without entertaining humanity's gradual demise as part of the process of "saving the earth" when all other known options are exhausted. IMO this particular aspect of modern environmentalism is a religious root on a secular tree. Many religions imply that man isn't natural, that there's the nature world and that we are above it/not part of it. That core belief carries over into secular society/people even though they no longer believe the system of thought that lead to that conclusion. I assert that man is in fact natural not supernatural, and that the changes man makes to the world as as natural of a process a trees overgrowing a grassland to make a forest or an ocean eroding away an island.
- ravenstine 4y ago
  Interesting. Yeah, the separation of many from nature (or perhaps that "nature" is even a comprehensible idea) seems demireligious in the sense that nature was given to man to have dominion over; man can become holy but not animals, depending on one's inherited belief system. There's other fallacious ideas around nature that may have nothing to do with religion that I think are just common breakdowns in logic. People commonly apply the idea of "balance" to areas where it doesn't apply, or at least doesn't apply in the way that they think it does. Earth is a complicated system of systems, but is it meant to be in balance? If that were so, Earth's climate would not oscillate (excluding changes in solar output) over geological eras. Was Earth out of balance during the ice age? "Balance" may in part be a proxy for our desire to want systems with which we are accustomed to not change. I've witnessed countless individuals, concerned with preserving nature, who would consider a plant or animal to be "non-native" or "invasive" while failing to recognize that the plants they believe to be "native" were introduced by animals in recent ecological history. They overlook the possibility (really a high likelihood) that the environment that explorers set foot on was significantly different from how it was even a century prior. It'd difficult for concepts of nativeness and invasiveness to be comprehensible if they did. Not that these aren't useful concepts in some domain, but many people interested in ecology or environmentalism believe them to be absolutely accurate or meaningful.

dr_dshiv 4y ago

The article accuses greentech and carbon-credits of genocide: "While guaranteeing high returns, this deception is tantamount to the genocide of the hundreds of millions of people who will perish from the effects of climate change within the next century because things are that bad." That's pretty harsh. But, if you think "things are that bad," let's also consider the moral culpability of people trying to stop the scientific study of geoengineering: https://www.solargeoeng.org/ https://www.solargeoeng.org/ Scientifically, stratospheric aerosol injection works: IPCC gives "high agreement that it could limit warming to below 1.5°C" with a material cost of less than $10B per year. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_geoengineering https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_geoengineering But, as we all know, it is intellectually unacceptable to be an advocate for geoengineering. For some reason, "Thou shalt not believe in a technological solution to global warming." Instead, billions of people need to voluntarily (or not) dramatically reduce their lifestyle. I really don't get it. Any insights?

leetcodesucks 4y ago
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yabones 4y ago
From my understanding, there's two major issues with geoengineering. 1. You have to keep doing it forever, and likely accelerate the rate at which you do. If rapid decarbonization doesn't happen in tandem, you'll need to be adding more and more aerosols over time. And the second you stop, you get a sudden whiplash climate change event that has a hundred years of warming in one. The risk of that catastrophe isn't worthwhile to many. 2. Most of the compounds that are cheap and effective are both ozone depleters and cause acid rain. The one studied most is Sulfur Dioxide, which would cause ocean acidification after many years of sustained use. IMO, it's a fundamentally bad idea because it's using one form of pollution to fix the problem created by another. The second and third order effects could be unforeseen and catastrophic.
- dr_dshiv 4y ago
  Just to break these separate arguments up into pieces: 1. "You have to keep doing it forever" 2. "[Stopping] creates a sudden whiplash climate change event" 3. Geoengineering will deplete the ozone 4. Geoengineering causes acid raid 5. Geoengineering causes ocean acidification 6. Fundamentally bad: "one form of pollution to fix the problem created by another" 7. "second and third order effects could be unforeseen and catastrophic" 8. If we use geoengineering, then people won't decarbonize (I'm assuming this is also a concern). 1. We do lots of things forever, like collecting taxes or taking out the trash. So I don't understand that issue. 2. Why would we stop, if it is so important? 3. Open to ozone depletion as a bigger problem, but just by tonnage, it should be 1/3 of the effect described here: https://meteor.geol.iastate.edu/gcp/studentpapers/1996/atmoschem/huff.html#:~:text=SO2%20depletes%20the%20ozone,ozone%20production%20is%20also%20reduced https://meteor.geol.iastate.edu/gcp/studentpapers/1996/atmos... 4. According to this article, acid rain from geoengineering would be a small fraction of the effect of current industrial pollution: https://doi.org/10.1029/2009JD011918 https://doi.org/10.1029/2009JD011918 5. Ocean acidification is a real concern. But I suspect 2 degrees of warming will much more dangerous to ocean ecosystems. 6. I don't understand the fundamentally bad argument. Neither CO2 nor SO2 are bad chemicals. Our goal should be to moderate the climate; maybe we need one chemical to balance the other. 7. This is my personal opinion, but I think the second and third order effects need to be studied scientifically. The second and third order effects of degrowth are also real. 8. I think a move to geoengineering would be politically advantageous for decarbonization policy. No one wants geoengineering. But if we need it, we need it—and if we might need it, we should study it carefully, scientifically.

lumb63 4y ago

Some of what the author says is accurate. Carbon offset credits are bunk. Industrial agriculture is harmful. There are environmental issues to a lot of the “greening” practices. There are issues around how equitably the climate change revolution is going to impact different demographics. Some of what the author says is false. Consumer choices do make a difference. I work in climate tech and the product my company produces monitors electricity usage in the home. The average user reduces their home electricity usage by 7% in the first month, solely due to becoming aware of what they are using. Residential electricity usage is something like 45% of electricity usage here in the states, I believe. That’s huge progress due to consumer choice. Electric vehicles are progress. There are companies developing new ways to extract lithium that do not destroy the environment as much as brining does. As where ICEs inherently must pollute (good luck having combustion without emitting CO2), electric power has the ability to become renewable and green. Oil companies are a hundred years ahead and have governments in their pockets, subsidies, and well-established infrastructure in place already. If renewable energy were in that position, there would be no contest in what was more eco-friendly. Calling for “reparative justice” is another fear-mongering, divide-and-conquer strategy. The proper path forward IMO is capturing externalities so they can be incorporated into the existing economic framework. That’s what drives behavior of companies. I’m talking about putting a price on carbon. I’m talking about taxing land use at different rates for agricultural operations based on the type of agriculture being done. Imagine how quickly companies would change their behaviors if they had to pay the full price of what their fossil fuel usage or monoculture farming costs us collectively.

landemva 4y ago
> The proper path forward IMO is capturing externalities so they can be incorporated into the existing economic framework. I totally agree! No way China should be able to have price advantages due to lack of manufacturing pollution control. And Mexico makes engine blocks for the north because of the difficulty of getting environmental approval for foundries in the north. Pollution parity import tariffs will level the playing field and allow low-polluting factories to compete with the high polluting areas that are harming everyone. > change their behaviors if they had to pay the full price The imported igadgets and solar panels and baby rockers will be more expensive. If we manufacture at home we can even reduce usage of energy for transporting things from China.

wing-_-nuts 4y ago

The dude has a great point about the need to verify carbon offsets. Where he loses me is this whole idea of 'reparative justice'. That will never happen. We can't even get everyone to agree to meet targets that will keep the world at 1.5c. The idea that we'll get powerful countries and corporations to fork over trillions to right past wrongs is laughable. It's a bad faith poison pill. If I didn't know any better, I'd bet this guy is funded by fossil fuel companies to ensure nothing gets done.

theragra 4y ago
I agree. Maybe it can happen to some extent, but sounds kind of dangerous way to follow. Same as with a law applied to previous crimes. If companies should pay for what was lawful at the time, how you can be sure something you are doing now won't be declared evil? Meat production, outsourcing to cheaper countries, not sharing natural resource profits on large scale with citizens, like in Norway? Hundreds of things that are looking sus now. CEO pay, among others. But who would make large effective enteprises in such climate? I don't like large corps, but ive lived in socialism, and it is way worse.

__derek__ 4y ago

> More than a decade ago, investment experts James Altucher [...] Wait, what?!

quantified 4y ago

Not "we", but "they".

jaxelr 4y ago

Somewhat related, John Oliver had an episode about Carbon Offsets https://youtu.be/6p8zAbFKpW0 https://youtu.be/6p8zAbFKpW0

dadna 4y ago

Kudos Vijay ! Good exposition of Climate change. Look for who is making the money and then you get it, always and every time

dadna 4y ago

Kudos to Vijay for the matter of fact exposition of reality. Look for who makes the money and you get it , always and every time

kkfx 4y ago

A small note: the Green New Deal is not much about ecology. It's a, needed, industrial revolution. Why? For the same reasons why we switch from mechanical cash registers to electronic ones: because making electronics is expensive in factories terms, but it's needed and can spit out gazillion of very cheap ICs needing not much raw material, while the previous mechanical version demand much more raw material, energy and labor per single unit. Similarly moving electricity is not that simple nor cheap, but still needed and far cheaper than moving gas, gasoline, diesel etc. Ecology? Ah, ok, there is SOME at the end, meaning much less need of raw materials ONCE the transition would be made. That's the point almost nobody want to state because in that case instead of getting a polarized cohort of fanatics on both side we would get a significant cohort of people stating "ok, let's do it BUT if we pay for product factories sustain the costs OR we participate to the costs and to the earning".