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Comment by frabbit | Hacker News Reader

Exactly: our civilization, comfort, enjoyment and ease is built upon the relatively predictable and stable weather patterns.

Why would anyone take the risk of messing with that?

It's as though they assume that there will be generalized devastation but there will be some "safe place" which some powerful group can defend and use.

Instead it's possible that maybe for one year New Zealand will be great, but then there will be no rain for 10 years, while previously uninhabitable Brighton (UK) will be a lush, tropical paradise for a couple of decades. Everyone will haul their gear to Brighton and massacre the indigenous, but then everything will change again, etc.

Or we could stop driving 2000Kg of metal to get to our jobs or buy a bag of chips and keep all the tourists at home that are destroying Venice and leaving their feces and plastic containers all over the Himalayas.

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The reason people find this line of argument frustrating is that it's always presented in a weird, dismissive tone which makes it clear you already didn't like the things you're proposing to get rid of. If you want to persuade people who are attached to their 2000Kgs of metal, it'll be more productive to include some examples of things you'll have to give up even though you like them.

Nobody is articulating a vision for the future.

OK, I'll stop driving my 2000kg of metal tomorrow. The first grocery shop is 25 minutes walking, one way. Maybe with a good degree of planning my family won't starve. But we also need to go to work and school, and these are not within walking distance. Sadly, I have to take that back: I won't stop driving my 2000kg of metal, because I don't see how we can possibly live without it. (We're living within the boundaries of a large North American city, not even in the suburbs.)

It can get drowned out in online arguments sometimes, but a lot of people do articulate a vision for that problem. They believe that American urban planning makes it unreasonably hard and expensive to build walkable cities, and most people would want to live in one if they were more available. Vox gives a good overview of areas people are working in to enable walkable cities: https://www.vox.com/22662963/end-driving-obsession-connectiv...

North American urban planning is absolutely terrible. The problem is that all proposals I've seen are still insufficient at preventing excessive greenhouse emissions. Perhaps I am wrong. Prove it by pointing to a single 100k city (or larger) that has sustainable greenhouse emissions, when including food & durable goods.

25 minutes walking? Get a bike.

And as to the more general argument you can get away with it as long as you have been voting for every proposal to increase taxes to pay for public transport and prevent centralization of services and stores.

I'm afraid I do not buy it. I have lived in what are supposed to be the most car-bound US environments and also in the countryside and it is all a matter of choice: not just personal choice (which I will agree can be a displacement from central planning), but most especially of people choosing low taxation over public services every time.

I can't see how you can possibly continue to live as you have done with your 2000Kg of metal. In fact it's looking very probable that you will be accelerating a decline in many aspects of your life.

Sure. I lived in SoCal without a car for a few years in my youth, so it's possible. Until the first child. At a mature age, I'll take up biking just after I get that knee replacement I've been postponing for a while and learn to bike with a kid on my shoulder. Throw a couple more hours in a day and I'm game.

Joke aside, even if we were to stop driving a car and flying a plane in US (the biggest pop-enviro boogeymen) it will cut 25% of USA greenhouses emissions. US greenhouse emissions is 15% of the world. Completely eliminating the automobile and the plane from US will only cut global emissions by less than 4%. The world energy usage is growing at 1% per year, so all that was accomplished was to push the inevitable about 4 years into the future.

Lets up the ante and ban the automobile & plane globally. (Or wipe US economy off the map). That would only save 15% of global emissions, i.e. push the inevitable 15 years into the future.

Here's a challenge: go find a city of non-trivial size that is living a sustainable life according to Paris accord energy targets. Bikes, Passivhaus, local agriculture, solar rooftops, windmills, the works. You won't find any, other than perhaps 3rd world slums. The only known lifestyle that fits the Paris accord energy envelope is subsistence agriculture. And we can't go back to subsistence agriculture, there is too many of us.

(Obviously) Malthus was right.

It's not a negotiation in which there is give and take. It's _your_ last chance to do something to do something which can benefit both of us. I already have had a low carbon footprint for decades due to being "one of those environmentalists". I have little left to cut to improve _your_ life. What can you do to help?

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