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It'd be great to see how democratic support might be different were it not for the concerted, expensive effort to deny and downplay the problem by multiple enor

• whimsicalism 3y ago
  I was initially partial to this explanation, but I no longer think that ‘in the absence of interference’ people would vote for the price increases needed.
  • kccqzy 3y ago
    People would vote for these price increases once they see that the increases are paltry compared to the opportunity cost, or to the externalities.
    • fnimick 3y ago
      I disagree. Lots of people are perfectly happy to ignore externalities that happen to others. Just try to get a bike lane put in and you'll see it for yourself. Or as a lovely neighbor put it: "if you die, why is that my problem?"
      • kccqzy 3y ago
        I agree. However the key point in climate change messaging is informing people that this affects themselves, their kids, and their grandkids.
        • s1artibartfast 3y ago
          Which is often a lie, or at least situational simplification . The costs of climat change and mitigation are not evenly distributed.
        • whimsicalism 3y ago
          In my view, this is largely a lie in terms of the impact on themselves.
    • dpe82 3y ago
      I think you deeply overestimate people's ability to make painful near-term decisions to avoid long-term pain that they can't see, have never personally experienced and also nobody they know or have even heard of has personally experienced. It's human nature; we're extremely bad at making decisions related to seemingly abstract long-term problems.
      • r14c 3y ago
        People can make long term plans and execute them, but the systems that control the levers related to climate change are operated by people who don't habitually operate based on long term planning. Calling it "human nature" is a cop-out.
        • dpe82 3y ago
          For themsleves? Some people can, sometimes. For the commons? If humans were so naturally inclined we wouldn't be having this conversation. Blaming the problem on "people who don't habitually operate based on long term planning" is a likewise a cop-out while also kinda arguing my point.
          • r14c 3y ago
            I think there's a certain cultural movement that has been propagated violently across the world that rewards and requires such behavior. there are many enduring cultural traditions that teach patience and long term planning. "human nature" is complex, we naturally can do both honestly.
      • richrichie 3y ago
        How about you be the beacon of change and show us by taking the near term pain e.g. cutting down consumption (eat one meal a day of vegetables, stop traveling, stop taking vacations far away, live in a one room apt, no kids, etc.
        • deleted 3y ago
          [deleted]
    • secondcoming 3y ago
      There are a lot of people who can't afford these price increases _today_. Being able to worry about the years to come is actually a privilege.
      • fnimick 3y ago
        Having tried to advocate for better societal support for those people who "can't afford those price increases", I've honestly lost a lot of sympathy. I've had people explicitly tell me they want to see welfare benefits for people poorer than them cut so that they face less competition (and therefore less inflation and lower prices) for purchasing food. As if starving the poor to make your grocery bill better is a justifiable option. "why should you be entitled to food and shelter just because you were born as a human and not some ape? if you are useless and die, it's not my problem" If you have no empathy for anyone poorer than you, sorry, why should I be caring about your misfortune again?
        • whimsicalism 3y ago
          Nobody in the US has to starve with the current social system.
          • advael 3y ago
            A bizarre claim given that so many are, in practice, starving. Maybe they're just holding it wrong
            • polski-g 3y ago
              Please provide evidence that "so many people are starving in the US."
              • advael 3y ago
                Here's what 10 seconds on a search engine provided from a fairly official source https://www.ers.usda.gov/webdocs/publications/107703/err-325_summary.pdf?v=3986.7 https://www.ers.usda.gov/webdocs/publications/107703/err-325... Roughly 10% of households being food insecure, defined as having inconsistent or inadequate access to food. That amounts to roughly 30 million people Social programs existing is great, but they are in their present form inadequate to make the claim that was made It's also worth pointing out that most likely "households" excludes all homeless people, which is not an insignificant portion of the population (as many people on HN - especially those living in SF - are quite aware)
    • whimsicalism 3y ago
      Hope so! From my lifetime of observing humans though, I don't agree.
    • somenameforme 3y ago
      If the costs are paltry, and you have a government who even remotely cares about this topic, then why wouldn't they simply pay for the costs? We're $34 trillion in debt, and rapidly growing. We spend hundreds of billions of dollars on ever more inane ventures which are frequently unpopular, and probably making the world a worse place. But the only solution, to pay a "paltry" sum to solve climate change, is to raise taxes? For instance they could easily print money, in the normal way, by issue special 'climate bonds' with a promise that all revenue from said bonds would be spent on whatever you see as this affordable solution. Those bonds would certainly sell well, people could get their virtue signaling on on social media showing them off, and - best of all - absolutely 0 divisiveness. Even somebody like me who thinks our debt's become catastrophic would just shrug, since we're probably already way past the point of no return.
      • deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
  • advael 3y ago
    Your framing is designed to make that outcome inevitable. Of course if the proposal is keeping everything else the same but raising prices people would vote against it. Mitigating the catastrophic biome collapse we are already experiencing requires infrastructural changes, not just tweaking the economy a little
    • whimsicalism 3y ago
      In the absence of interference in the media by rich people. Not the absence of interference in climate change. > requires infrastructural changes, not just tweaking the economy a little 'Infrastructural changes' -> Seems like it can be subsumed in 'tweaking the economy', did you mean 'structural changes'? And if so, do you think people who are unwilling to pay $10/mo to avert climate change are going to support structural changes to the economy to do so?
    • WithinReason 3y ago
      what do you mean by infrastructural changes?
      • advael 3y ago
        An often-cited example is the considerable investment we've made into spread-out living spaces that require that people are doing long, daily car-based commutes. This kind of planning creates a situation where an increase in the price of gas is devastating to people's livelihoods and ability to move through the world, which is a lot of why gas prices going up can be a make-or-break political issue for so many people. The flight to suburbs is a relatively recent phenomenon that could be reversed with different infrastructure choices. We could invest into mass-transit and, probably more importantly, better colocation of the resources people need to live, especially in an era where a lot of job functions can be done remotely (and a considerable segment of the economy clearly want to work remotely if they're allowed to) Obviously this isn't going to just naturally occur, but we are already pretty artificially supporting the situation as it is: Part of the reason gas prices can stay low is that we already dump considerable subsidies into the already-profitable oil and gas industry
  • adrianN 3y ago
    The price increases would have been much more moderate if we had acted decisively forty years ago when the science was basically settled.
    • callalex 3y ago
      I don’t see how that follows. Solar panels and batteries have become massively cheaper in the past few decades and that has all relied on new materials science. I guess you could argue that windmills could have been made cheaper at scale with the right efforts 40 years ago.
      • s1artibartfast 3y ago
        Indeed, it may be the case that now is far cheaper than any time in the past, even taking into account co2 release in the past 40 years.
      • defrost 3y ago
        Seventy years ago, when AGW climate change was recognised internationally at the UN in 1970s, during an oil crisis, the largest per capita users of fossil feuls and emmitters of CO2 were the North Americans. They were open to change in behaviour at the time, it's a matter of public record that Koch Industries started to heavily fund a number of think tanks devoted to changing American perceptions; individual freedom is expressed by wanton consumption, bigger gas guzzlers are better, public transport is bad. They, and their partners in the petro businesses, sank very nearly every grassroots movement for small, midle, and large city public transport launching, expansion, or improvement. They backed every move for more and more freeways. What could have been a time that saw greater emphasis on resource efficiency and less fossil fuel consumption was not. What could have been a signal to all the then developing economies about the direction a world leader was taking remained so - and the message was consume, and consume more. Developing better renewable energy sources was (and still is) only part of a bigger picture of changing behaviour.
      • adrianN 3y ago
        Nuclear was around. But the real potential for savings was in reducing consumption by altering infrastructure investments. For example by favoring public transport and walkable cities over cars and sprawl, or requiring better insulation for new buildings. Today we don’t have the time to wait until simple tax incentives nudge people towards better behavior.
• Dig1t 3y ago
  If you scroll down to the bottom of this thread you’ll see a ton of flagged and dead posts from people who question this stuff. There are plenty of normal people who doubt the scientific conclusions of climate scientists. It doesn’t help that the solutions to the problem almost always seem to be taking away freedoms and raising taxes. See: farmers in the Netherlands getting their farms taken away by the government, French folks rioting over increased taxes, ULEZ cameras in London fining people for driving in the wrong neighborhood, etc. It seems that the solutions are all sticks and there are no carrots. The majority of people want to fix the problem, myself included. But I also deeply care about the growing authoritarianism that we are seeing across the world. I want to decouple fixing the climate from authoritarian governance.
  • lastiteration 3y ago
    This is exactly right. Let's engineer solutions that are technologically based and better than what we currently have, not increase government control over people. Freedom is at least as important as the climate. A solution that is mandated is not the same as a solution that emerges organically as better both for the user AND the environment.
    • fnimick 3y ago
      > Freedom is at least as important as the climate. This is a value judgment, not an absolute statement, and should be addressed as such. Should you have the absolute freedom to pollute as much as you want if it harms your neighbors? What if a solution exists that is better for you and the environment, should you have the freedom to not take it if you don't care about the harms to those around you? Do you view having to have emissions controls installed on your car as an unjustifiable infringement on your freedom?
• Log_out_ 3y ago
  People just vote with there feet against this life of monks and hermits offered. And the usual rat catchers take advantage. Which make those insisting on those non working policies of reduction, instead of boosting science, accomplices feeding democracy to the rats.