Comment by garmaine | Hacker News Reader

Comment by garmaine | Hacker News Reader

> If the summer heat, followed by Hurricane Dorian, hasn’t convinced you that climate change is real, probably nothing will.

If you think the "other side" is a climate change denier, you don't have a grasp of the issues involved and I'm really suspect that your op-ed is preaching to your crowd rather than actually trying to engage the problem.

The issue has never been denying the scientific fact that CO2 reflects infrared light, causing a greenhouse effect. It's a question over the scale of the problem, the timelines in which it plays out, and the panic and alarmism exhibited by one side of political debate.

Moving off fossil fuels is going to cost a lot of money, and it is going to be substitutive spending, not the growth-building kind. The Green New Deal, if enacted as specified, would send us into a prolonged, generation-long recession. Is is worth it? Is it necessary? That depends on how alarmist you are in your global warming predictions. And that is where we disagree. I've lived through two major economic recessions, and seen the effect that has on young people and opportunities. I wouldn't want to wish that on an entire generation. Millennials think boomers gave them a bad break, but wait until their kids see what opportunities their climate change policies leave them with...

We need to move off fossil fuels. But we can do it in a way that is gradual and growth-positive, while exploiting the warming climate in a way that boosts agricultural yields and adds living space for the growing population of the world. That requires a healthy debate about trade-offs and choices, and recognition that this is a complex, multi-faceted issue that people come to with multiple opinions and that's okay.

The per-capita CO^2 emissions of well-to-do western countries like Norway and Germany are a little over half as much as that of the US, France is around a quarter of US emissions (mainly due to Nuclear).

You're the one who's being alarmist if you're trying to argue that the US is staring down some decades-long recession to move more in that direction, which is pretty much all that's being suggested by some fringe politicians in the US.

Is German and Norwegian youth looking at having to deal with decades of recession, rising unemployment, rising income equality etc? No, they're not.

If you're arguing that the US should invest heavily in new nuclear energy plants, you'll find no objection from me.

I'm saying your prediction of doom and gloom are obviously detached from reality if you look at a country like Germany, which has next to no Nuclear use. Yeah, it would be neat, but not necessary.

You’re comparing apples to oranges. Germany is not carbon neutral, 100% renewables.

> exploiting the warming climate in a way that boosts agricultural yields

The world getting 1.5C hotter on average doesn't mean everywhere just gets 1.5C hotter all the time. If the increase means more droughts and more excessive rainfall, it's limited what you can do to exploit it for agricultural yields.

I suggest you examine this chart:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:65_Myr_Climate_Change.p...

Which is taken from this excellent Wikipedia article:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geologic_temperature_record

A change of 1.5C is just a nudge in the direction of historical averages.

The idea that a huge infusion of Keynesian spending into the economy is going to trigger a generation-long recession has to be the least informed take.

The choice is a stark one: either invest in technologies and infrastructure to decrease CO2 production, or give future generations the gift of a dead planet.

> The choice is a stark one: either invest in technologies and infrastructure to decrease CO2 production, or give future generations the gift of a dead planet.

The science says otherwise. Did you know that for most of Earth's evolutionary history the climate was far, far warmer with higher CO2 concentrations than today? Global warming has lots of negative ramifications, but it is not going to create a "dead planet."

Spreading outright falsehoods doesn't help things.

That's a neat fact, but the reality is that to support a human population of 7B+ with intensive agriculture and industrial production, the planet heating up is in fact devastating.

Literally the science states that continued warming is going to have devastating impact on the environment and on the ability of industrial society to exist.

We're facing ecological collapse on more than a few fronts (the collapse of fisheries, insect and bird populations, water crises in heavily populated regions, etc), why throw in a full-blown climate crisis in there as well.

> That's a neat fact, but the reality is that to support a human population of 7B+ with intensive agriculture and industrial production, the planet heating up is in fact devastating.

Are you sure of that? Increased CO2 causes plants to grow faster. Higher temperatures lead to greater precipitation. Shorter winter means you can squeeze in an additional growing season.

In fact the fossil and sedimentary record shows that until recently in evolutionary history CO2 levels and temperatures were much higher, and the world was covered in tropical rainforest.

If anything we are greening the world, reversing a desertification trend that started when grasses started out competing rainforest.

Of course we are doing it while polluting the planet and acidifying the ocean, which are real problems.

Why are you assuming climate scientists have never thought of this?

It may just be hyperbole, but I don't think you can rule out a dead planet.

Aside from a few extinction events in which the vast majority of life on Earth did indeed die, the climate has changed slow enough for evolution to take its course. If what "naturally" would've happened over the course of a million years instead happens over centuries or even decades years then things become much more bleak.

> The Green New Deal, if enacted as specified, would send us into a prolonged, generation-long recession.

Source? The last New Deal helped get us out of the Great Depression. Seems crazy to suggest that a new similar one would cause one.

First point, the last new deal didn't get us out of the great depression. You might recall that the great depression lasted throughout the 1930's. It was World War 2 and its aftermath that ended the depression.

But anyway, the only similarity is in the name. The FDR new deal built new infrastructure. The Green new deal replaces infrastructure. Adding infrastructure where there was none before increases productivity, and therefore causes economic growth. Replacing infrastructure has net-zero change and therefore while the activity adds to GDP, it has no lasting effect on the economy. And since it substitutes for things that would have led towards growth, it actually causes stagnation or decline.

In the social sciences, this is known as the "broken window fallacy." There's a lot of papers you can find with those search terms.

If you want an idea of the best-case scenario of what life would be like under the Green New Deal, look to Japan with it's 20+ years of economic stagnation. Except without nationalized pensions we'd be asking a whole generation to live through work-until-you-die conditions. I'm sorry, but I don't think I want to do that to my kids unless it is a real do-or-die scenario as the alarmists claim. But the alarmists are wrong. The world is not ending tomorrow, or even the day after. We can deal with the change at a pace that doesn't result in economic suicide.

Saying the New Deal got us out of the Great Depression is like saying Gavrilo Princip started Word War I.

Are you saying, then, that any legislation entitled "Foo Bar New Deal" will therefore have a positive effect?

If so, I would like to propose a Pink New Deal. It's even better than the Green one, trust me. And it seems crazy to suggest otherwise.

The legislation is similar, not just the name. It creates jobs, reduces wealth inequality, it builds new infrastructure, etc. It's a stimulus package, of sorts.

Wow, who could argue with such a great package.

BTW, since you care about reducing wealth inequality, can you send a dono to my paypal?

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