36 ms·

> The list goes on, but having spent decades watching people debate passionately over why the planet is warming all while going further down the same path my on

> The list goes on, but having spent decades watching people debate passionately over why the planet is warming all while going further down the same path my only conclusion is that we just don't give a damn. When push comes to shove we would rather buy new cloths imported from the other side of the world, throw resources at new construction and gut job renovations, and will happily fly around the world on vacation rather than stay home and enjoy the world around us. Yes exactly. You hit on something that I often say, though we come at "solutioning" from opposite angles and, from the sounds of your comment, will find little agreement. What we agree on is that understanding anthropogenic global warming and its causes is important and can inform solutions, but it does not tell us what the "right" solutions are since we have other complicating factors to consider. Such as things like human rights, standards of living, morality and the role+purpose and limitations of government. For some of us the debate is not over whether AGW is a scientifically understood phenomenon that represents a problem (even a critical problem at that). The debate is over what the solutions ought to be, what tools are the right tools for the job and what course corrections are considerable given factors that we must also contend with that lie outside of our scientific understanding of the problem.

paulmd 3y ago
> Such as things like human rights, standards of living, morality and the role+purpose and limitations of government. Unfortunately, the dustbins of history are full of civilizations that took disruptive events carefully and with grave dignity and solemnity and respected the rights of powerful stake-holders within their society. That the people who make such arguments generally live in the places best positioned to weather out the situation, is also unfortunate. While people in well-pr tut about whether it's really proper for a government to take action to avoid calamity from befalling its citizens, other people will be literally dying. It's a rather crass and callous/indifferent position you've staked out, you're kind of not coming off like a very good person here. Like it's literally "I guess you'll have to die, then, not like we're going to unwind the economy just for you" once again. It is, as someone notes upthread, basically the same as masks during COVID. Some people will stroke their chin and pontificate about utilitarianism and the greater good, but that's not really comfort to anyone whose loved one dies from excess pollution or a transmissible disease. And of course the people taking this position are usually the most protected themselves - we all can WFH here if circumstances dictate, it's different if it's your wife stocking a grocery store, they care a lot less about the GDP impact and more about the direct personal impact than you do. And the existence of this subgroup - such as yourself - fundamentally forestalls the ability of the other 70% of the society from being able to protect itself. Kind of a problem in general - the american system (and the EU and UN as well, but particularly the US) provides too many brakes on action and biases to inaction (via checks-and-balances) such that even supermajority level political control often is not enough unless it is single-party control of every single branch of government and lever of power. You don't just need 50%, you don't just need 70%, you need 70% across every possible dimensionality that the US distributes political power over - essentially single-party control is the only way to rule if the minority does not consent, and we are talking about people who openly state that they will never consent. It'll end in deaths sooner or later, whether that's from inaction, or from those whose deaths would be caused by inaction taking action themselves (which is why almost everyone is forecasting conflict and political instability from climate change to kick up majorly in the second half of the century). Again, the only disappointing part is that this too will be visited on the least-fortunate instead of the responsible parties (who will largely be fine, and we will probably even bail out florida and other affected areas anyway). What happens when the unstoppable force of climate change meets the immovable object of modern political system's bias-to-inaction? Fireworks, basically - because unlike HN you can't just tone-police the discussion away in the real world, people won't just take "I guess you'll have to die so I can have the new xbox this year" lying down.
- gspencley 3y ago
  You should run for politics. The level of strawmanning and platitudes that your reply just levied is something typically only seen from politicians.
  - paulmd 3y ago
    It's pretty objectively crass to ask people to die so that you can continue your consumption unabated. Just as it was with COVID. Pretty much anyone who opens up with "the proper role of government" is guaranteed to using some self-insert version of the founding fathers as a debate-terminating cliche, and it's usually followed by some incredibly crass take like "you're going to have to die so that GDP and consumption can continue growing". Like, it's all just numbers, and it turns out the numbers are a lot more important than the lives of the affected individuals. Does "I will never mask up, I don't care if a million front-line workers die, reopen the economy and let's get GDP back on track" make you a bad person? Well, it doesn't make you a good one. At best it makes you the edgy kid in your college debate club, but people tend not to like that "abstract, formal" argumentation when it's their lives you're debating. It's not polite to say it here, of course. But treating a practical issue with real-world consequences as a boring dry debate club to score points over is kind of a shitty approach in general. And nobody else is obligated to play along with that and treat every possible position you might take as having inherent and equal merit, which is really the point of the tone-policing thing. Taking a position that we should just let climate change happen (TFA announcing yet another "hottest month on record" and "hottest year on record", let's remember) because otherwise it would make your imaginary version of the founding fathers sad is not a position that deserves a whole lot of rhetorical merit or gravity. Of course it is "the role of government" to take action to mitigate dangers to its citizens - whether that's indian attack, or a socialized healthcare system for merchant sailors, or controlling an outbreak of smallpox, or climate change. And it's objectively silly to get hung up on what some 16th-century document thinks about it. The debate-club stuff and the faux-neutrality doesn't really matter, and actually probably is offensive to the people whose lives you are debating. And again, that's an observation you are not really allowed to make here, that maybe this faux-debate-club schtick and enforced politeness around deadly issues isn't really healthy or right. (I don't think anything I've said here is any more offensive than a PG essay - go read "haters", that's not an essay you could write on HN today, it's dismissive of people's opinions! it doesn't treat them as having inherent merit and deserving equal respect just because someone farted them out! but I expect to be tutted before too long anyway.)

paulmd 3y ago

> Such as things like human rights, standards of living, morality and the role+purpose and limitations of government. Unfortunately, the dustbins of history are full of civilizations that took disruptive events carefully and with grave dignity and solemnity and respected the rights of powerful stake-holders within their society. That the people who make such arguments generally live in the places best positioned to weather out the situation, is also unfortunate. While people in well-pr tut about whether it's really proper for a government to take action to avoid calamity from befalling its citizens, other people will be literally dying. It's a rather crass and callous/indifferent position you've staked out, you're kind of not coming off like a very good person here. Like it's literally "I guess you'll have to die, then, not like we're going to unwind the economy just for you" once again. It is, as someone notes upthread, basically the same as masks during COVID. Some people will stroke their chin and pontificate about utilitarianism and the greater good, but that's not really comfort to anyone whose loved one dies from excess pollution or a transmissible disease. And of course the people taking this position are usually the most protected themselves - we all can WFH here if circumstances dictate, it's different if it's your wife stocking a grocery store, they care a lot less about the GDP impact and more about the direct personal impact than you do. And the existence of this subgroup - such as yourself - fundamentally forestalls the ability of the other 70% of the society from being able to protect itself. Kind of a problem in general - the american system (and the EU and UN as well, but particularly the US) provides too many brakes on action and biases to inaction (via checks-and-balances) such that even supermajority level political control often is not enough unless it is single-party control of every single branch of government and lever of power. You don't just need 50%, you don't just need 70%, you need 70% across every possible dimensionality that the US distributes political power over - essentially single-party control is the only way to rule if the minority does not consent, and we are talking about people who openly state that they will never consent. It'll end in deaths sooner or later, whether that's from inaction, or from those whose deaths would be caused by inaction taking action themselves (which is why almost everyone is forecasting conflict and political instability from climate change to kick up majorly in the second half of the century). Again, the only disappointing part is that this too will be visited on the least-fortunate instead of the responsible parties (who will largely be fine, and we will probably even bail out florida and other affected areas anyway). What happens when the unstoppable force of climate change meets the immovable object of modern political system's bias-to-inaction? Fireworks, basically - because unlike HN you can't just tone-police the discussion away in the real world, people won't just take "I guess you'll have to die so I can have the new xbox this year" lying down.

gspencley 3y ago
You should run for politics. The level of strawmanning and platitudes that your reply just levied is something typically only seen from politicians.
- paulmd 3y ago
  It's pretty objectively crass to ask people to die so that you can continue your consumption unabated. Just as it was with COVID. Pretty much anyone who opens up with "the proper role of government" is guaranteed to using some self-insert version of the founding fathers as a debate-terminating cliche, and it's usually followed by some incredibly crass take like "you're going to have to die so that GDP and consumption can continue growing". Like, it's all just numbers, and it turns out the numbers are a lot more important than the lives of the affected individuals. Does "I will never mask up, I don't care if a million front-line workers die, reopen the economy and let's get GDP back on track" make you a bad person? Well, it doesn't make you a good one. At best it makes you the edgy kid in your college debate club, but people tend not to like that "abstract, formal" argumentation when it's their lives you're debating. It's not polite to say it here, of course. But treating a practical issue with real-world consequences as a boring dry debate club to score points over is kind of a shitty approach in general. And nobody else is obligated to play along with that and treat every possible position you might take as having inherent and equal merit, which is really the point of the tone-policing thing. Taking a position that we should just let climate change happen (TFA announcing yet another "hottest month on record" and "hottest year on record", let's remember) because otherwise it would make your imaginary version of the founding fathers sad is not a position that deserves a whole lot of rhetorical merit or gravity. Of course it is "the role of government" to take action to mitigate dangers to its citizens - whether that's indian attack, or a socialized healthcare system for merchant sailors, or controlling an outbreak of smallpox, or climate change. And it's objectively silly to get hung up on what some 16th-century document thinks about it. The debate-club stuff and the faux-neutrality doesn't really matter, and actually probably is offensive to the people whose lives you are debating. And again, that's an observation you are not really allowed to make here, that maybe this faux-debate-club schtick and enforced politeness around deadly issues isn't really healthy or right. (I don't think anything I've said here is any more offensive than a PG essay - go read "haters", that's not an essay you could write on HN today, it's dismissive of people's opinions! it doesn't treat them as having inherent merit and deserving equal respect just because someone farted them out! but I expect to be tutted before too long anyway.)