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Comment by drclau | Hacker News Reader

Here’s a maybe unpopular opinion: do we need to convince everyone? We just need to take action. This is about the survival of the civilization, not about pampering every lunatic.

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The problem is not necessarily lunatics who deny the reality of AGW, but energy companies, industry, and their political agents who have known the reality for over half a century. Lunacy was purposefully propagandized and indoctrinated to protect their power.

We are past the window for incentives -- we have sufficient observation of how individual incentive-guided action plays out in a finite world built of externalities. We are in the window for action: nationalization/collectivization of the offenders, forfeiture of their assets, and redirection into massive creation of renewables, sustainable industry, carbon capture/mitigation, and global relief for the people displaced and impoverished by climate and food disruption.

What if they are actually a democratic majority?

Not everyone, but it's probably a good strategy to convince as many people as practically possible. Because all measures with material impact will involve large reductions in the quality and confort of life for most people, so will almost certainly be quite unpopular.

I would say there's a big problem when some of those lunatics are at the steering wheel of big nation states.

So yeah, maybe not everyone, but the reward matrix in this game makes very difficult to ignore all of them.

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