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Comment by holoduke | Hacker News Reader

Unpopular to say, but people as a group will not change. it won't just happen. We will destroy part of earth and as a consequence we will engineer a fix for it. It is maybe an unfortunate thing. But that's how we people work. We mess up first and clean after. It's quite unrealistic to expect the world to look the same in 100 years from now. We will slowly take control over every single square feet on this planet. That goes not without troubles.

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There are a number of ways we, as individuals, can help.

Choose air conditioner and refrigerator coolants based on hydrocarbon refrigerants; urge politicians to invest in on-shore wind turbines; reduce food waste; eat less meat; and support restoration of tropical forests.

The summary (https://bit.ly/2Jg5XY1) is addressed primarily at policymakers who will enact laws that direct us, as a group, into making helpful changes.

For example, if corporations aren't legally allowed to sell gasoline-powered vehicles, then hybrids, EVs, and hydrogen-powered will be the only options available to the general public. I hope any enacted policies are sufficiently broad, meaningful, and timely to actually help.

This binary view is completely unhelpful towards a solution. We've taken important steps towards protecting the environment before (Montreal protocol, clean air act, etc) and have mobilized tens of millions of people to work on crucial problems, as in WWII.

Many small and incremental improvements can have important and large scale effects over time, and humans are occasionally capable of rising to the occasion if it becomes severe enough.

I am not so sure about the "as a consequence" part. If people engineer a fix, it is because the problem is grave enough that it calls for a fix, on the other hand it might be so grave that engineering anything beyond simple stick and stone tools might become impossible.

The problem we are talking about here is in the geologic scale of things (250 million years without a precedent perhaps, going back to the Permian-Triassic extinction event), which means our mental models and analogies become dubious.

And as for people messing up first and cleaning after, I'm not so sure either. That's not the way things turned out to be with the Ozone Layer Hole.

> And as for people messing up first and cleaning after, I'm not so sure either. That's not the way things turned out to be with the Ozone Layer Hole.

I'm not sure what you mean? We switched from CFCs and the hole has been shrinking ever since.

I had in mind what you are saying re CFCs, and more specifically that the approach was not "messing up first and cleaning after." The harmful practice was discontinued early enough to allow natural recovery processes to take place. So this is a counterexample to the claim that people "mess up first clean after." I still agree that, unfortunately, Climate Change so far does not seem to provide such counterexample.

> Unpopular to say, but people as a group will not change

I hope it's not unpopular here. I absolutely agree with you, human nature will not change.

We win through sufficient technological advancement, or a drastic reduction in the population. I see no other paths forward myself.

Reducing your carbon footprint, while the world population continues to grow, is noble, but utterly futile.

People as individuals don't change, but people as a group change deeply and rapidly. Our societies looked very different 100 years ago, and the rate of change has never been higher

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