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Comment by guelo | Hacker News Reader

An elephant in the room not being discussed here are the propaganda networks that are persuading voters and preventing any kind of government action on climate. Disrupting these propaganda businesses is another necessary angle of attack for preventing climate change catastrophe.

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I recommend the book "Collision Course" by Kerryn Higgs for anyone interested in reading the history of this kind of propaganda. It won't immediately provide a path forward, but it will help explain how we've arrived at where we are today in terms of inaction regarding global warming.

> The notion of ever-expanding economic growth has been promoted so relentlessly that “growth” is now entrenched as the natural objective of collective human effort. The public has been convinced that growth is the natural solution to virtually all social problems—poverty, debt, unemployment, and even the environmental degradation caused by the determined pursuit of growth. Meanwhile, warnings by scientists that we live on a finite planet that cannot sustain infinite economic expansion are ignored or even scorned. In Collision Course, Kerryn Higgs examines how society's commitment to growth has marginalized scientific findings on the limits of growth, casting them as bogus predictions of imminent doom.

> Higgs explores the resistance to ideas about limits, tracing the propagandizing of “free enterprise,” the elevation of growth as the central objective of policy makers, the celebration of “the magic of the market,” and the ever-widening influence of corporate-funded think tanks—a parallel academic universe dedicated to the dissemination of neoliberal principles and to the denial of health and environmental dangers from the effects of tobacco to global warming.

https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/collision-course

The public believes in and supports climate change prevention. The problem is not so much that propaganda convinces public opinion that the people in power do not have an incentive to make any changes.

Unfortunately there's no profit motive for this.

Of course there is, for companies with technology to reduce or reverse the carbon in our atmosphere there's a giant profit potential.

This of course balanced by the interests of those protecting their current cash flows in established carbon releasing industries.

There's no innate profit potential for this technology. If the governments decide to pay lots and lots and lots of money to sequester carbon, then there's a giant profit potential for anyone who can do it. But note the "if" - as of now, there's no indication that they're going to do so; and if/when it comes to such an emergency that they will, they might as well nationalize (or 'globalize') that tech and implement the solutions at-cost without any meaningful profit for the owners of these technologies; if push comes to shove enough so that the major powers of the world will be willing to invest a nontrivial share of their GDP in fighting climate change, honoring international intelectual property agreements will be the least of their concerns.

> There's no innate profit potential for this technology.

I don't know if that's true or not in the long term - not even first order. Wind turbines weren't innately profitable until at one point they became a low cost leader in power generation by some measures. Humanity may find a fairly low-power input catalyst that give us cheaper fuels than digging it up from miles underground, shipping it thousands more miles, refining it and shipping it hundreds of more miles. Right now, in this instant of technology, I'd agree on first order profitability.

Second order systemically it's almost certainly a profit vs needing to rebuild so much civil infrastructure for hurricane resistance, new and expanding flood plains, fire resistance, farm droughts, etc.. or incurring all sorts of other health costs for fossil fuels infrastructure. The cost of acting to curb climate change is still cheaper than letting it all go chaotic.

Where's the profit in global eco-suicide?

Do you have a reference for a single climate model prediction that's come true? In most other areas dealing with science, if the theory does not predict the reality, then the validity of the theory is questioned.

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