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Greed and Excess Drive the Climate Crisis, So Why Aren’t They Being Questioned?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- tormeh 3y agoPeople like the feeling of personal progress, mostly through accumulating material posessions, increasing social capital, and raising kids. Getting in the way of any of those is a good way to get thrown out of office. So any solution to the climate crisis has to work within these constraints. I don't understand why people don't grasp this.
- ryan93 3y agoAlso most energy use is by your avg consumer heating cooling and consuming. Yachts and private jets are marginal.
- clircle 3y agoPretty sure yachts and jets qualify as consumption
- Paul-Craft 3y agoI disagree. A solution to the climate crisis needs to face up to the fact that we simply can't continue to consume as we have, if we want a world that's livable for current, much less future generations. It's not that goddamn hard to see.
- megaman821 3y agoStop consuming what exactly? Shelter, climate control, transportation, food? It is not like Starbucks and luxury handbags are causing the bulk of emissions.
- Paul-Craft 3y ago> Shelter, climate control, transportation, food Yes, those seem like some good things to work on reducing the impact of.
- megaman821 3y agoReducing the impact of those things by making people poorer is very different than reducing the impact by innovation. Degrowth is never going to fly.
- Paul-Craft 3y agoGive me a better alternative that avoids 2 degrees of warming, then. Burden of proof is on you at this point. "Innovation" had 50 years to work, and did nothing to get us out of this.
- jacquesm 3y agoInnovation so far is what made things worse, not better.
- throwawa14223 3y agoThat's not how burden of proof works.
- Paul-Craft 3y agoIt is, unless you think the last 50 years somehow didn't happen. We knew exactly what would happen then, and did nothing. Innovation, my ass.
- civilized 3y agoHigh gas prices and recessions are two of the best predictors of politicians losing elections. Degrowth will produce much more of both.
- jacquesm 3y agoThe earth doesn't actually care about gas prices, recessions or elections and we either adapt or we will be adapted forcibly and with far less choice about the outcome.
- Paul-Craft 3y agoThat has nothing to do with the merits of the solution, i.e. whether it will work or not. Meanwhile no alternative exists that will stop us from reaching 2C of warming.
- ryandrake 3y agoIt doesn’t matter if a solution is correct or will work, if it can never be implemented because it is politically impossible.
- jacquesm 3y agoThe ultimate conclusion then is that that political system will be broken on the wheel of physical reality. Adapt or die is a pretty blunt statement but it is nonetheless true.
- ryandrake 3y agoI believed this too, until COVID. Millions weren't even willing to do so much as wear a tiny piece of cloth over their faces. If they can't even put up with that minuscule level of discomfort for the greater good, do you think they will ever make the sacrifices needed to slow climate change? No way! No solution to climate change is politically viable if it means the general public needs to lift a finger. We know they just won't do anything, mandated or not. The ocean could be coming into their living room, and they will sit there, watching it, scowling about their political opponents. We had millions of people literally willing to spread a deadly disease and die, just to irritate the other side. Not only will these people do nothing in the face of climate change, they will do whatever they can to accelerate it if they believe their ideological opponents want to stop it.
- simple-thoughts 3y agoWho’s “we” and what do you mean by “livable”? There’s no mainstream climate model that predicts the globe becoming uninhabitable for humanity. Even the worst case scenarios in well done models only show global growth slowing by a few percent without any climate mitigation. Meanwhile we have a carbon neutral technology, nuclear energy, that even with its problems can easily provide energy albeit at a higher cost than coal. The predicted higher temperatures existed in the past and had some of the highest archeological rates of biodiversity. Thats not to say the outcome will be all positive; certainly some regions will encounter issues during the transition, but there’s also going to be a lot of opportunity opened up within the range of predicted outcomes by climate models. Increased agricultural production in northern regions, less cost of heating in many heavily populated areas, and of course new transport routes across the arctic. That’s not to mention all of the benefits fossil fuels are bringing to people much poorer than you in the global south.
- wizofaus 3y agoYou hardly need to go anywhere near "the globe becoming uninhabitable for humanity" before you run into pretty devastating consequences for significant percentages of the world's population. And even if we encouraged poorer countries to burn as much cheap fossil fuel as they possibly could to improve their standards of living, I very much doubt it would even come close to enabling them to mitigate against some of the worst sorts of natural disasters and weather extremes that are expected to be more severe and frequent as the planet continues to warm. Though realistically it won't be lack of cheap energy that continues to hold back economic development for much of the world anyway.
- Paul-Craft 3y ago"We" is "humanity." You, me, and everybody. I didn't say "uninhabitable," although, yes, FYI, major climate models do predict certain areas becoming uninhabitable due to intolerable wet bulb temperatures. I said "liveable," as in "can sustain some modicum of semi-modern civilization." That's a far lower bar. Meanwhile, we have a technology we literally cannot build enough of in the next 5 years to stop any of this from happening. And, if we continue to burn fossil fuels, once we exhaust them, we'll literally reach C02 levels not seen since the Cretaceous period, when temperatures were 10 C above the pre-industrial revolution era. How does that benefit the global south, or anybody? I do not believe you have thought this through. You bring up so called "opportunities" forecast by climate change models, yet fail to consider that we're already looking at severe weather events such as floods, storms, and heat waves, that would normally be 1 in 100 or 1 in 1000 events, starting to happen on a multiple times a decade time scale. It's not possible to build in the face of that; even insurance companies are recognizing that today. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cretaceous_Thermal_Maximum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cretaceous_Thermal_Maximum
- javajosh 3y agoIMHO we need a cure that isn't worse than the disease. I think we need to embrace capitalism, up to a point. That is, maximize profit until you hit a certain point, then stop. I call it the policy of "Enough". Make the threshold generous, or even self-declared. I don't think the ideology of capitalism suffers all that much from this adjustment. Once you succeed to a certain point, you leave the game and enjoy your life. Plus, we don't have to be too draconian about solutions. For example, we can and should mandate that no new vehicles above a certain weight, and no new small jets, should be produced. The ones in existence we leave alone, and let decay take its course. The same with billionaires: leave them alone, and limit the next generation. I'm happy to hear criticism, but bear in mind that I'm rather attached to this idea. It's novel, as far as I know, and I think it could satisfy both hard-core capitalists AND environmentalists, which is a rare thing. So please, try to offer ideas to improve it. As for the right Enough number, I think for me it's about 10M 2023 USD. I'd like to get to a point in human history where everyone can get there.
- jacquesm 3y agoI like it. One way to do this is to create a personal consumption budget based on what a normal life would look like if the resources were equally shared and everything was done in a sustainable way. The rich would have to come down many steps of the ladder (and pretty much everybody reading this would be classified as rich) and the poor would be able to go up a bit. I don't think it could be done with 8 billion people though, but doing the math on this is super complex and probably would be years worth of work.
- esafak 3y agoMaximize profit then stop what?
- SnorkelTan 3y agoThe church has been questioning greed for quite a while. If trends in the west continue the church is going to go away before the instinct to be greedy does. I think this is a fundamental problem for all of the current solutions to our climate crisis. Any strategy which requires everyone to stop being greedy and consider others is most likely going to fail. I think that a lot of people are under the impression that all that needs to happen is things just need to get bad enough and then eventually people will see the error of their ways. Self delusion is such a powerful force in both directions I think it’s unlikely to happen.
- jfghi 3y agoI find this quite ironic given the astronomical levels of greed of the mainstream churches.
- readthenotes1 3y agoJust because the recognize the din of greed doesn't mean they know the cure ...
- clircle 3y agoI hate headlines like that. If greed and excess drive the climate crisis then what don’t they drive?
- kdamica 3y agoA ridiculous and uninformed article. This is a great example of the type of magical thinking we often see when it comes to issues like this. The reality is that changing the behavior of superemitters is not nearly enough to make a difference, compared to the sum total of the emissions of ordinary people. Let’s redo the headline: - People driving their kids to school is driving the climate crisis - People having enough to eat is driving the climate crisis - People taking nice vacations with their families and friends is driving the climate crisis The problem doesn’t seem too easy to solve now. Just as we can’t fund a robust welfare state by taxing the rich alone (everyone must pay high taxes for it to be enough), we will do nothing about climate change by focusing only on superemitters (most aspects of life must be decarbonized if we’re going to stop climate change).
- timeon 3y ago> Let’s redo the headline: - People driving their kids to school is driving the climate crisis - People having enough to eat is driving the climate crisis There is huge range between excess and shortage. There are people in developed world who do not drive their kids in SUVs. There are people in developed world who walk their kids to school. Good urban design / spatial planning is better for live and environment. > we will do nothing about climate change We will do nothing. This attitude is just looking for excuses. CO2 emissions per capita in Austria are half of those in USA.
- DueDilligence 3y ago[dead]
- mistermann 3y ago[flagged]
- dang 3y agoYou can't post like this to HN. We ban accounts that do. Please don't do it again. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Edit: we just had to ask you the other day to stop posting unsubstantive and/or flamebait comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36857356 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36857356. I don't want to ban you but if this keeps up, we're going to have to—so please fix this.
- 40yearoldman 3y ago[flagged]
- magic_hamster 3y agoCarbon emissions biggest offender is the energy industry. How is that the work of the unwealthy masses?
- civilized 3y agoThe energy industry powers all of industrial civilization. Everyone, wealthy or not, relies on industrial civilization to survive.
- jacknobody 3y agoThat has only been true for a few hundred years at most. Perhaps we could have avoided this outcome, and perhaps there's still a way to return to a sane life.
- 40yearoldman 3y agoLife is sane. People are living longer than they ever did in history, most live better than kings of the past. Must of history lived in horrid conditions, so I don't think this outcome is all that bad. Yet sane life here with flushable toilets, antibiotics, and global communications, is something we should avoid... None of these can be had without the infrastructure we have built. None of the advances in the human collective knowledge could have happened. We know this because we can look back in history and see how long humans clanked rocks together and yelled at the sky above for rain. Only a fool would suggest we should have avoided this outcome, all while typing on a keyboard connected to the most advanced thing humans had ever made.
- chiefalchemist 3y agoUn-wealthy === un-powerful. It's flawed and naive to point fingers at those with relatively no power. This issue is not new. It's been on the radar of those with power for *decades*. But it easy to shun responsibly and accountability when you're redirecting the narrative from your yacht.
- twhitmore 3y agoGreed, excess and short-term capitalism. My particular beef is disposable/ short-lived goods -- the impact on the Earth of a product that lasts for 30 years is far less than one designed to need replacement after 5. Yet weenie product managers & vulturous MBAs are constantly engineering things weaker & less repairable. Sometimes to make the unit cost 0.5 cents cheaper, but perhaps more often to force earlier replacement and another revenue opportunity.
- haunter 3y agoGood luck telling to the billions of people living in poverty in South America, Africa, and Asia that they have to give up on the dreams for a more affluent life. While we (The West, the rich countries etc call it whatever you want) enjoyed the high living standards for decades.
- chiefalchemist 3y agoIt's more accurate to say, good luck telling the faux affluent they need to cut back on the mindless and excessive consumption. For example, we know the negative impact of factory farming. We're also aware that too much animal protein has health consequences. And yet The West- as unhealthy as ever - can't help itself.
- Paul-Craft 3y agoHow exactly was that dream going to happen with the global north constantly exploiting the global south anyway? (Asia seems to be doing just fine these days, so I don't know what you're talking about there.)
- voisin 3y agoGreed and excess are at the core of our economies which are based on infinite growth. It just doesn’t add up to a healthy society or healthy environment. We need to embrace degrowth and radically change our economic system. But we won’t, at least not in time, so I hope the survivors of our post-capitalist meltdown are able to craft something better.