Comment by mortdeus | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mortdeus | Hacker News Reader

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10 years ago when I still lived in CA (where i grew up), I was the liberal rebel in my family of CA Republicans, I argued with my grandfather (who was still alive at the time) about the issue of Global Warming but rather than trying to take him on head on about the ethical nature of supporting it, I tried to take the approach of talking about Electric Cars and how Elon Musk was paving the way towards a future where nobody would need to use fossil fuels anymore. (this was back when Tesla was still pretty much a pitch)

He asked me how much would a new Tesla cost? I said well right now they are $120k, but eventually Elon Musk plans to get that price all the way down to $40k.

My grandfather said, he can go right now and buy a 4 cylinder truck for $2000 dollars that gets 25 miles to the gallon and with gas at $3 a gallon he could literally get 360,000 miles out of a vehicle, and then guess what buy another truck for $2000 dollars for the same amount of money it took to buy a 40k electric car...

His argument was very simple, and having moved to Oklahoma after the economy crashed in 2007, I understand now more than ever why his conservative pov was correct.

The reality is that you can't make the world conform to your utopia when it first conforms to its budget.

You think this issue can be solved with simply a 10% reduction each year, when you need to realize people don't buy gas because they are going on family trips all the time they can choose to do the right thing and cut back on.

People are buying gas to go to work and back everyday. Literally the only way we could cut back on our current fossil fuel usage is if Andrew Yang's worst nightmare came to fruition and the robots did take all the jobs, that way we didn't have to commute to work everyday.

You need to think about why people need gas to go to work and back every day. They do this because their work is located far away from their home. And why is that? Because it was economically viable to set it up like that, because of the low price of gas.

Increase the price of gas, and you will get an economic recession in the short term, for sure. But after that, people will adjust, and you will see a reversal of the current trend of centralizing all jobs in the big cities. Towns would get more local businesses, people doing business would invest more in high-quality video conferencing instead of traveling to meetings by plane all the time, and so on. Some things that are possible today would not be possible anymore, and we would have to deal with that.

I think it is a fallacy to see the current way society works as a constant. Everything is holistically connected, and if you change one variable (price of fossil fuels), then the rest of society will have to shape itself around that.

You would get lynched by taxi drivers within the first month of implementing such a ridiculous policy.

Mandate taxis to be zero emission. Which is coming for some big urbs.

You would get lynched by everybody! But we have to realize that anything we do to solve climate change is going to make our living conditions worse here and now, because we have spent the last century making every aspect of society dependent on fossil fuels.

I think it is also ridiculous to not do something, because we know what the outcome is going to be, and it is almost certainly going to be more unpleasant than an economic recession and a bunch of pissed off taxi drivers.

Edit: Also, note that I do not want to increase the price of gas through a policy affecting only gas for cars, e.g. via taxation. That will never work, because it is a local policy that will be a short-term loss for the first country to implement it. I want to limit the extraction of fossil fuels globally, causing the short-term losses to be distributed to every nation in the world which depends on fossil fuels. This will, as a consequence, cause gas prices to increase.

Unless Americans start accepting that all of this is down to POLITICAL CHOICES we get nowhere. America has by choice built a car centric society where people like your grandfather HAVE TO buy a car and drive around.

Until I actually lived in the US, I did not grasp why Americans were always driving and why they could not use say public transportation. When I lived in the US I realized that almost EVERY American city was planned in a way that made driving a car very nice, but walking or public transportation was made to be absolutely terrible.

You cannot solve this problem with an individualist approach where you assume some Messiah like Elon Musk will just produce a magical product that will save everybody. There is no way around making political choices.

Of course I see this is hard to achieve in a country where politics is broken and it is normal to think the government is evil and should not be trusted.

That is why I think the top priority in the US ought to be fixing its political system. Get money out of politics. More transparency. Change the laws to facilitate multiple parties. Get away from the toxic two party system. Just voting on a 3rd party today does not do that as your vote is wasted. You need to actually change how the voting works otherwise multiple parties are not possible. Use preferential voting or proportional voting system e.g.

False. Scientists and economist have proposed to introduce carbon pricing, which would increase the prices of fossil fuels and oil, without forcing any utopian ideas, by simply including the cost of fighting the effects of global warming in the prices of fossil fuels and oil: https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/bxgd5p/single_mo...

Except he couldn't have gotten a $2k truck for 25 mpg back then and it would've been spewing emissions onto asthmatic children wherever he drove.

That's why I use electric scooter to work. It costs 300$ and I spend 1$ a month on electricity to charge it (I could charge at work). It's an 10X improvement for short distance travel. It's much cheaper and convenient, since I don't wait in traffic and I don't have to worry about parking. The only drawbacks are: less immune to the weather, it could be hard to take it into some places like restaurants and you can't transport heavy or large stuff.

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