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There is no way to solve the problem without taking out what is causing it somehow. But it should not be the only measure taken. Saying so, if the problem is m

There is no way to solve the problem without taking out what is causing it somehow. But it should not be the only measure taken. Saying so, if the problem is money, the groups that made themselves astronomically rich putting directly or indirectly that CO2 there should be the main component of that economic equation. Essentially they created a problem, got rich doing that, but all the rest of the world is the one that should get poor trying to fix it is a bad pattern.

jl6 3y ago
At the macro level, everybody got rich from burning fossil fuels. A thousand or so billionaires who got extra rich doesn’t really make a dent on the activities of the other billions of people.
- JadeNB 3y ago
  I don't think that's entirely true. 100 companies are responsible for 71% of global emissions (https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2017/jul/10/100-fossil-fuel-companies-investors-responsible-71-global-emissions-cdp-study-climate-change https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2017/jul/10... ); I don't have the statistics—I seem to remember reading something on this recently, but I can't find it—but I think that it's not unreasonable to believe that a few billionaires, and now trillionaires, might have a similarly disproportionate impact on emissions.
  - nerdsniped529 3y ago
    [flagged]
  - chii 3y ago
    > 100 companies are responsible for 71% of global emissions these companies emitted carbon to satisfy the demands for goods/services from various populations around the world. By pinning the emissions onto the companies like this as responsible, it is indirectly implying that the end consumer has no responsibility. Which is absolutely not true. The way, i think, to fix it is to price carbon emissions properly. This requires _all_ countries in the world to participate and enforce.
  - jl6 3y ago
    The ultra-wealthy do have a disproportionate impact on resource consumption and carbon emission (lots of air travel, fancy cars, large houses and more) but it’s not 10000x like their wealth might imply. Their companies might be responsible for a majority of global emissions, but guess who’s responsible for a majority of those companies’ revenue? It’s everyone. When we buy a thing, we are funding the activity needed to produce the thing. When we see a small group of people getting ultra rich off economic activity, it’s tempting to blame them for all of the consequences of that economic activity, because that makes the problem seem easier to solve (“just get rid of the billionaires!”). But changing the beneficiary of all that corporate profit doesn’t change the underlying economic activity that is driving consumption and driving pollution. I’m not saying bad actors haven’t acted badly - demand generation is pretty evil, and we should definitely curtail that - but the problem is ultimately not the man in the boardroom or the White House or the luxury yacht. It’s the man in the mirror.
    - paulmd 3y ago
      > The ultra-wealthy do have a disproportionate impact on resource consumption and carbon emission (lots of air travel, fancy cars, large houses and more) but it’s not 10000x like their wealth might imply. it's actually around a million times. a single air trip alone (let alone a private jet) emits far more carbon than an average family, and the ultra-wealthy fly a lot. plus the rest of their emissions too, of course. https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/billionaire-emits-million-times-more-greenhouse-gases-average-person https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/billionaire-emits-mi... as the twitter classic goes: "the guy with only an Xbox one and a mattress in his room probably has the lowest carbon footprint but no one wants to talk about that". and yeah, that's dead right, the billionaire is probably into the billions of times multiplier over that guy. that's why it's silly to whammy on consumer electronics etc as supposedly being some horrible social sin - people are going to want to do things, and actually things that keep you in your house and not traveling via car or (especially!) air travel do drastically reduce emissions overall. Even buying a new PC every year is peanuts compared to your spring break in florida.
      - nkurz 3y ago
        I think you are interpreting your linked article wrong. The claimed "million times" is if you add up the effects of their investments. Individually (from flying, driving, houses, etc) it says the "average billionaire" uses about 8000 tons CO2e vs 14 for the "average American", so about 600x.
- meristohm 3y ago
  I think I get what you're saying here. I'm rich in that I have access to so many luxuries, and increasingly I see them as such. I can live without coffee, alcohol, videogames, driving frequently, and heating my house to a comfortable temperature (an extra layer works well. We keep the house in the low 60s F in winter, and even that feels like a luxury now. Like other animals, it's best to insulate ourselves rather than our spaces). People who control the extraction economies are far richer. Is it a pyramid scheme of sorts?
  - sanderjd 3y ago
    I think a better way to think of this is to attack it from the other direction. What can't you live without? Or more broadly, what do you consider to really not be a luxury, but truly table stakes? Here are some ideas: - You say you're happy with "in the low 60s F in the winter", but what if you had no heat? I don't know where you live, but where I live this would be untenable. Because of abundant energy, I can live in a place that is in the 0s through 40s pretty often, without having any wood-burning heat source in my house, or spending a large amount of my time cutting and splitting wood. Not to mention how much deforestation it would require if we didn't have abundant oil (which is much better to refine from petroleum than whales, btw), gas, or electricity. - You say you're happy without driving "frequently". But what about driving at all? The pre-gasoline solution to getting individual people to individual places was literally horses. Bicycles actually work pretty well now for this, but only because of all the roads that have now been built everywhere to support cars. - Speaking of that, are roads and sidewalks a total luxury, or are they more important than that? Concrete is another critical component of our modern infrastructure that is downstream of sucking super old dead stuff out of the ground. There is so much more of this sort of thing: grocery stores, modern medicine, illumination when the sun isn't up, it goes on and on. It is not hyperbole to say that human civilization at anything approaching the current scale and standard of living has been achieved on the back of abundant energy from fossil fuels. It would not be impossible to roll this all way back, but it would be impossible to do so without devastating impacts to people currently living. I strongly believe that rather than retreat, the far more promising path is to advance. As abundant as energy from fossil fuels has proved to be, they don't hold a candle to the energy that exists in nature: the sun sends us an astronomical amount of energy each day, the earth is mostly made out of rock that is hotter than industrial kilns, the bonds of particles within atoms themselves contain a huge amount of energy. The challenge is that these forms of energy are much harder to extract than lighting hydrocarbons on fire. The trick is to make sure we use enough the abundant and easily accessible energy we have today as an investment in our collective project to lever up our ability to tap into the even more abundant but difficult to use energy that is laying all around us.
- sanderjd 3y ago
  Well put! My power went out for and hours-long stretch recently, and it only highlighted how much richer my life is because our society figured out how to provide everyone energy at very low cost. The question now is whether we can keep doing so, while diminishing the externalities to a sustainable level. I think we can! The next question is how to do it. There is no one simple trick that's gonna do it. In my view, figuring this out is the work of our era. In other eras, people have figured out how to make enough food to feed everyone, how to move people around quickly, how to communicate across great distances near-instantaneously, and all sorts of other things. I think this is ours. That's scary but it's also exciting. We can be heroes!
- trog 3y ago
  It hasn't made a dent /yet/ but one of the key causes of climate change is that these billionaires were able to become so by taking advantage of a great big externality - dumping waste into the environment. If the price for (say) carbon had been properly baked into the cost of gasoline, there would have been significantly less fat to skim off the top and we'd have vastly fewer resources and energy billionaires. That is: yes, it's great that cheap energy has lifted billions out of poverty and afforded them the lifestyle they have today. But now those billions are going to be the ones that have to pick up the tab while also being the most exposed to the dangers.
go88faxme 3y ago
Need to balance it by taking out. Trees and algae are doing this. The solution is not green energy or going EVs. The solution already proven very effective and on mass scaleable...it is called ocean iron fertilization. Unfortunately, governments NOT interested in doing that. CO2 is a new source of laws to control masses and taxations. Iron fertilizations method is so successful that governments worldwide band together to discredit and even send in law enforcers to raid the scientists office. Majority academia (I know this first hand in 13 universities western world) have government people visiting and warning deans not to expand this method or even publish anything on it. If iron fertilizations can solve the co2 issue in a year, there is no money in it or enough issues to keep politicians stay elected. Nothing to see. Stick to your EVs, lithium batteries, carbon tax, and non-straw coffee.
- b7we5b7a 3y ago
  "We fucked up the air globally in <50y, lets fuck up the ocean faster to un-fuck the air issue temporarily". But seriously, we lack the understanding to do local geo-engineering, much less at global scale. Hard pass. Reducing CO2 emissions by going green and EVs (and not just EV cars), and removing CO2, is a longer but much more controllable and stable approach. I just wish we had better battery technology already, but we spent the last 100y deluding ourselves that a finite non-renewable energy source, that messed up our only biosphere, was the only course of action.

jl6 3y ago

At the macro level, everybody got rich from burning fossil fuels. A thousand or so billionaires who got extra rich doesn’t really make a dent on the activities of the other billions of people.

JadeNB 3y ago
I don't think that's entirely true. 100 companies are responsible for 71% of global emissions (https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2017/jul/10/100-fossil-fuel-companies-investors-responsible-71-global-emissions-cdp-study-climate-change https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2017/jul/10... ); I don't have the statistics—I seem to remember reading something on this recently, but I can't find it—but I think that it's not unreasonable to believe that a few billionaires, and now trillionaires, might have a similarly disproportionate impact on emissions.
- nerdsniped529 3y ago
  [flagged]
- chii 3y ago
  > 100 companies are responsible for 71% of global emissions these companies emitted carbon to satisfy the demands for goods/services from various populations around the world. By pinning the emissions onto the companies like this as responsible, it is indirectly implying that the end consumer has no responsibility. Which is absolutely not true. The way, i think, to fix it is to price carbon emissions properly. This requires _all_ countries in the world to participate and enforce.
- jl6 3y ago
  The ultra-wealthy do have a disproportionate impact on resource consumption and carbon emission (lots of air travel, fancy cars, large houses and more) but it’s not 10000x like their wealth might imply. Their companies might be responsible for a majority of global emissions, but guess who’s responsible for a majority of those companies’ revenue? It’s everyone. When we buy a thing, we are funding the activity needed to produce the thing. When we see a small group of people getting ultra rich off economic activity, it’s tempting to blame them for all of the consequences of that economic activity, because that makes the problem seem easier to solve (“just get rid of the billionaires!”). But changing the beneficiary of all that corporate profit doesn’t change the underlying economic activity that is driving consumption and driving pollution. I’m not saying bad actors haven’t acted badly - demand generation is pretty evil, and we should definitely curtail that - but the problem is ultimately not the man in the boardroom or the White House or the luxury yacht. It’s the man in the mirror.
  - paulmd 3y ago
    > The ultra-wealthy do have a disproportionate impact on resource consumption and carbon emission (lots of air travel, fancy cars, large houses and more) but it’s not 10000x like their wealth might imply. it's actually around a million times. a single air trip alone (let alone a private jet) emits far more carbon than an average family, and the ultra-wealthy fly a lot. plus the rest of their emissions too, of course. https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/billionaire-emits-million-times-more-greenhouse-gases-average-person https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/billionaire-emits-mi... as the twitter classic goes: "the guy with only an Xbox one and a mattress in his room probably has the lowest carbon footprint but no one wants to talk about that". and yeah, that's dead right, the billionaire is probably into the billions of times multiplier over that guy. that's why it's silly to whammy on consumer electronics etc as supposedly being some horrible social sin - people are going to want to do things, and actually things that keep you in your house and not traveling via car or (especially!) air travel do drastically reduce emissions overall. Even buying a new PC every year is peanuts compared to your spring break in florida.
    - nkurz 3y ago
      I think you are interpreting your linked article wrong. The claimed "million times" is if you add up the effects of their investments. Individually (from flying, driving, houses, etc) it says the "average billionaire" uses about 8000 tons CO2e vs 14 for the "average American", so about 600x.
meristohm 3y ago
I think I get what you're saying here. I'm rich in that I have access to so many luxuries, and increasingly I see them as such. I can live without coffee, alcohol, videogames, driving frequently, and heating my house to a comfortable temperature (an extra layer works well. We keep the house in the low 60s F in winter, and even that feels like a luxury now. Like other animals, it's best to insulate ourselves rather than our spaces). People who control the extraction economies are far richer. Is it a pyramid scheme of sorts?
- sanderjd 3y ago
  I think a better way to think of this is to attack it from the other direction. What can't you live without? Or more broadly, what do you consider to really not be a luxury, but truly table stakes? Here are some ideas: - You say you're happy with "in the low 60s F in the winter", but what if you had no heat? I don't know where you live, but where I live this would be untenable. Because of abundant energy, I can live in a place that is in the 0s through 40s pretty often, without having any wood-burning heat source in my house, or spending a large amount of my time cutting and splitting wood. Not to mention how much deforestation it would require if we didn't have abundant oil (which is much better to refine from petroleum than whales, btw), gas, or electricity. - You say you're happy without driving "frequently". But what about driving at all? The pre-gasoline solution to getting individual people to individual places was literally horses. Bicycles actually work pretty well now for this, but only because of all the roads that have now been built everywhere to support cars. - Speaking of that, are roads and sidewalks a total luxury, or are they more important than that? Concrete is another critical component of our modern infrastructure that is downstream of sucking super old dead stuff out of the ground. There is so much more of this sort of thing: grocery stores, modern medicine, illumination when the sun isn't up, it goes on and on. It is not hyperbole to say that human civilization at anything approaching the current scale and standard of living has been achieved on the back of abundant energy from fossil fuels. It would not be impossible to roll this all way back, but it would be impossible to do so without devastating impacts to people currently living. I strongly believe that rather than retreat, the far more promising path is to advance. As abundant as energy from fossil fuels has proved to be, they don't hold a candle to the energy that exists in nature: the sun sends us an astronomical amount of energy each day, the earth is mostly made out of rock that is hotter than industrial kilns, the bonds of particles within atoms themselves contain a huge amount of energy. The challenge is that these forms of energy are much harder to extract than lighting hydrocarbons on fire. The trick is to make sure we use enough the abundant and easily accessible energy we have today as an investment in our collective project to lever up our ability to tap into the even more abundant but difficult to use energy that is laying all around us.
sanderjd 3y ago
Well put! My power went out for and hours-long stretch recently, and it only highlighted how much richer my life is because our society figured out how to provide everyone energy at very low cost. The question now is whether we can keep doing so, while diminishing the externalities to a sustainable level. I think we can! The next question is how to do it. There is no one simple trick that's gonna do it. In my view, figuring this out is the work of our era. In other eras, people have figured out how to make enough food to feed everyone, how to move people around quickly, how to communicate across great distances near-instantaneously, and all sorts of other things. I think this is ours. That's scary but it's also exciting. We can be heroes!
trog 3y ago
It hasn't made a dent /yet/ but one of the key causes of climate change is that these billionaires were able to become so by taking advantage of a great big externality - dumping waste into the environment. If the price for (say) carbon had been properly baked into the cost of gasoline, there would have been significantly less fat to skim off the top and we'd have vastly fewer resources and energy billionaires. That is: yes, it's great that cheap energy has lifted billions out of poverty and afforded them the lifestyle they have today. But now those billions are going to be the ones that have to pick up the tab while also being the most exposed to the dangers.

go88faxme 3y ago

Need to balance it by taking out. Trees and algae are doing this. The solution is not green energy or going EVs. The solution already proven very effective and on mass scaleable...it is called ocean iron fertilization. Unfortunately, governments NOT interested in doing that. CO2 is a new source of laws to control masses and taxations. Iron fertilizations method is so successful that governments worldwide band together to discredit and even send in law enforcers to raid the scientists office. Majority academia (I know this first hand in 13 universities western world) have government people visiting and warning deans not to expand this method or even publish anything on it. If iron fertilizations can solve the co2 issue in a year, there is no money in it or enough issues to keep politicians stay elected. Nothing to see. Stick to your EVs, lithium batteries, carbon tax, and non-straw coffee.

b7we5b7a 3y ago
"We fucked up the air globally in <50y, lets fuck up the ocean faster to un-fuck the air issue temporarily". But seriously, we lack the understanding to do local geo-engineering, much less at global scale. Hard pass. Reducing CO2 emissions by going green and EVs (and not just EV cars), and removing CO2, is a longer but much more controllable and stable approach. I just wish we had better battery technology already, but we spent the last 100y deluding ourselves that a finite non-renewable energy source, that messed up our only biosphere, was the only course of action.