Comment by clairity | Hacker News Reader

Comment by clairity | Hacker News Reader

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no, see, that's exactly the problem. CO₂ is a mediopolitical wedge issue designed to trap us in partisan gridlock, not bring meaningful change to the global population. that's why it's so fickle and formless, perfect for sowing discord, because it can be shaped in any number of desired directions.

and it's clearly not threat to anyone living today and probably not for many generations to come, no matter what the 'trust the science' rhetoric claims. pollution, however, has been and will continue to kill millions of people every year. it has the potential to unite all sorts of factions (something vested interests fear) and actually make meaningful progress.

CO₂ and climate change is a sideshow, but it's been brought front and center because it serves a powerful purpose for those vested interests. anyone jumping on the climate change train is only furthering those interests, rather than solving real problems. instead, we should focus on the actual problems like pollution, and discard the chosen mediopolitical narrative.

>and it's clearly not threat to anyone living today and probably not for many generations to come

I am not sure how to respond to this in productive way. You clearly deny the impact of climate change, and it is unlikely I will convince you otherwise, so I don't know if it's worth anyone's time. If you're open minded and want to have a conversation, maybe start by responding to the well understood impacts of climate change today, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_change#Impacts

the productive conversation is to compare that to millions of deaths per year from pollution.

Deaths linked to pollution and climate change are both on the order of millions per year. Are there particular solutions you advocate for investing in that don't tackle both issues?

you've been lied to. climate change has not killed millions of people[0]. pollution has.

the core problem with the climate change mediopolitical narrative is the focus on CO₂, which as i've noted before, is among the least important and most nebulous environmental issues, and therefore among the most attractive for political distraction and do-nothing gridlock. you see the effectiveness of this narrative all over hn, via the casuistry with which climate change is discussed.

in contrast with pollutants, which have squarely been introduced relatively recently by human industry, CO₂ is a gas on which life depends and has been abundant in our atmosphere for hundreds of millions of years. rising CO₂ levels is a long term issue, to deal with over centuries and millenia, not a short term one. pollution has been killing people for centuries now.

edit: to answer your question, there are many policy decisions that differentiate the two. what to tax, what to incentivize, what to regulate, what to evangelize, etc. we should be characterizing the externalities caused by each pollutant and then applying a tax or market-based solution (or whatever else) to address them.

[0]: to be precise, "more people", since our ecology inadvertently kills people all the time, throughout history.

>climate change has not killed millions of people[

"We found that 5,083,173 deaths were associated with non-optimal temperatures per year, accounting for 9·43% of all deaths and equating to 74 excess deaths per 100 000 residents."[1]

[1]: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanplh/article/PIIS2542-5...

that's motivated reasoning leading to hand-waved figures, driven by the desire to capitalize on the climate change frenzy.

I haven't seen any sources from you yet.

and in general, you won't, since we're each quite able to do our own research ourselves, and also because sources aren't ace-in-the-hole smackdowns but rather extended information that typically doesn't fit into a discussion post. no source, especially not recent research out of an academic journal, is by itself invulnerable enough to criticism that it can wholesale end a discussion, and therefore has limited utility in these circumstances.

but it's easy enough to verify that there have been at least dozens of papers (and at least hundreds of news stories) on coal by itself having killed millions of people over the past century and a half, and having nothing to do with CO₂ or climate change.

In this day and age of misinformation, I think reputable sources go a long way to making an online discussion productive rather than just spewing nonsense back and forth.

Also, they can short circuit a discussion. In fact, here are two articles that cover the exact topic we are discussing, and largely summarize the issue as climate change is a bigger threat and they are two sides of the same coin anyway:

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/why-clima...

https://www.unep.org/news-and-stories/story/air-pollution-an...

Can you point me to some sources that helped you reach your conclusion, or is this just an idea you came up with by looking at deaths due to pollution compared to deaths due to climate change historically?

national geographic is entertainment (read: misinformation, owned by disney). this article uses dramatic photography and liberally employs weasel words like "could" and "might". even "linked" isn't as strong as you might think, as that only implies correlation, not causation. it mentions no counter-factuals or alternate hypotheses, just drives boldly forward with the messaging.

as for the second, i agree that pollution and climate change are linked, but why address the boogeyman when we have the villian right in front of us? [insert tribal, mediopolitical reasons unrelated to making lives better.] pollution is clearly a problem now. climate change might be a problem in decades/centuries. and the causation is pollution -> climate change, not the other way around, so fixing pollution (not simply CO₂) is win-win, but not the other way around.

a long arc of digesting and triangulating information has led to my understanding of the problem, which doesn't easily link to a study or two. i'm a proponent of sensible environmentalism, not tribal bandwagoning. i was a member of https://netimpact.org/ in business school and took courses on sustainability (i.e., i've studied the problem using primary sources rather than relying on mass media to tell me what to think).

Respectfully, I don't feel like there is much value to be found in this discussion (arguing what's a more pressing issue between pollution and climate change), so I'm happy to land on agreeing on this statement and moving on:

> pollution -> climate change, so fixing pollution (not simply CO₂) is a win-win

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