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Comment by bamboozled | Hacker News Reader

Because politicians can't sell going backwards. They can definitely sell going forwards, ie Green tech to the masses. If they weren't lobbied so hard by resources companies and unions we'd have been there along time ago.

So let's put self-regulation aside, you will never see it happen on a policy level because it won't be popular.

Same for emissions trading schemes, they're actually great things, but they aren't popular with the masses.

Anyway, let's drop The War on Terror and The war on Drugs and begin the War on Climate Change?

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Why is less mobility necessarily "going backwards"? We have the technology for large-scale remote working, but companies still require employees to be on-site mostly for historical cultural reasons. If the government brought in regulations requiring companies to provide remote working as a choice, unless there was a good reason to require employees to be on-site, I don't think people would see that as "going backwards", so much as being forced to go forwards.

Your food is shipped (often by air), you go on holidays by plane, you drive cars etc, stopping that _is_ going backwards.

I'm not entirely saying I agree with people just flying around for the sake of it, but let's be honest, putting an end to most transport doesn't exactly seem like progress, let's also think of it this way, the problem is caused by the burning of fossil fuels, not traveling.

"companies still require employees to be on-site mostly for historical cultural reasons."

If you're a Doctor, truck driver, pilot, builder, fisherman etc, then how do you work remotely? The majority of the workforce can't just work remotely because knowledge workers can. Besides, data-centers also have a large environmental cost, remote work creates it's own mess.

I'm also a knowledge worker, but I just choose to live in the city close to my office and ride to work so I have a very small / no carboon footprint from transport.

I've also worked remote full-time, it wasn't for me, I think it has it's own set of issues.

None of that is going backward, it's the blowback of maintaining an unsustainable growth way past the equilibrium point. We call that "instability".

We got used to it but it doesn't mean it's the way to go. We're acting like spoiled kids discovering that no, you can't have it all, all the time, for free.

I can see a couple of potential reasons (at least for America):

- We have built our society around the assumption of mobility so it could be difficult to just switch overnight.

- Remote work doesn't work for many people and/or many situations.

- Opportunities are not evenly distributed across the country.

- Tolerance of alternative lifestyles is not evenly distributed.

- Access to hobbies, cultural institutions, etc. is not evenly distributed.

Humans are peculiar creatures. When faced with a choice between deadly heatwaves, or trains and buses, they will go with deadly heatwaves!

It seems a bit of a grand scheme of Prisoner's Dilemma. "If other people just drive less cars, I'll be able to keep driving mine. No, I won't quit driving mine, you quit yours, cuz I important!"

Driving cars is just an example, the other ones being flying less, procreating less, eating less meat.

Going backwards in the sense we're talking here is the only known way forward. (i.e. significantly reduced use of expensive transportation and consumer goods, having fewer children --real lifestyle changes.) The alternative is a destroyed ecosystem and likely lots of death and suffering. We need to sell people on the idea that we're doomed by the status quo, or else we're doomed. It sounds like hyperbole, but of course it isn't.

How do you sell going backwards to people who are less well off than you?

The fuel crisis of the 70s resulted in us 'going backwards' successfully by trading in the useless land yachts for less massive cars. The 70s is considered a miserable decade by motorheads ime but it eventually led to better cars and better design.

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