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Comment by VonGuard | Hacker News Reader

I have come to the conclusion that climate change will have to cause enough scarcity and enough chaos to require despotic governmental changes towards environmental preservation. It's going to have to get absolutely terrible, and when it does, we'll snap very far back in the other direction and put people to death for polluting...

The mealy mouth bullshit we do now, where every individual is accountable, but the corporations behind most of the emissions and waste are not, is absurd. We'll never have resealable, recycleable plastic chip bags, for example, because that would cost someone money....

We're basically cornering humanity into some kind of horrible hellscape future where we're all going to be killing each other for electricity or waffles or god knows what...

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Half of the US is still in denial that the pandemic was a big deal after 600K+ deaths, and they are even outspoken here. And I imagine climate denialists are in even stronger numbers.

What path do you think it will be taken seriously even after the heat waves, freezes, wildfires, storms we've already been having?

In 6-12 months trend may show up in averages, pointing to escape of temperature and with still more extreme events picking up. The sad part is if this really happens, it may already be too late. If events cool down a bit, the excuses come back on.

Once icecaps melts and sea levels rise there's no known turning back. CO2 can't and won't drop significantly in our lifetime without unconvential means.

https://gml.noaa.gov/ccgg/trends/gl_gr.html

Would like nothing better than to be proven wrong.

You could argue that the chaos is already starting.

My faith in humanity is so low at this point that I expect the solution could just as easily end up being global conflict that significantly decreases the population, rather than actually fixing anything. Poor countries will suffer terribly long before rich countries give a flying fart about it.

End up? It's a circle. The rich will just hang out in their New Zealand bunkers until the chaos subsides, then back to square 1.

> End up? It's a circle. The rich will just hang out in their New Zealand bunkers until the chaos subsides, then back to square 1.

Kinda sorta. If things become so chaotic that they have to flee to those bunkers, there's a decent chance the political situation afterwards won't allow them to return to their previous positions.

So, unless their bunker has enough weapons for a small army and they have the skills and mentality to become a petty warlord in rural post-apocalyptic New Zealand, all they can really count on getting from it is a somewhat higher chance to survive.

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