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Comment by Daishiman | Hacker News Reader

I continue to find it amazing that the destruction of the biosphere that supports human life as we know it barely makes the news.

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Humans don't naturally have glacial attention spans, pun intended.

The disaster is too slow-moving for human time scales to prepare for until it's too late. And our current systems of business and government aren't covering this natural blind spot when they're similarly incentivized to focus on short-term results/re-election.

On a lighter note, watch Invader Zim's Walk For Your Lives [0] episode which cleverly speaks to this problem in the subtext.

[0] https://zim.fandom.com/wiki/Walk_for_Your_Lives

Most people are not capable seeing longer than the tip of their nose as we say in Norway.

It is also very unpopular to tell people that they need to change.

> It is also very unpopular to tell people that they need to change.

Part of the problem is that the things a person can do are almost entirely negligible, compared to industry, or require systematic changes of how housing, cities, and jobs are structured, which isn't something an individual can really influence.

Another part of the problem is it means telling people to do the opposite of "keeping up with the Joneses".

This is why we need taboo-formation around environmentally damaging behaviors and nurture virtuous aspirations towards environmentally responsible spending.

That is, if it means riding your bike to work, or it is a shift in ostentatious spending, from e.g. square footage to bespoke furniture, keeping up with the joneses can actually be an excellent forcing function.

e.g. new england puritans were (are (?)) famously keeping up with the joneses by not buying flashy, wasteful things.

Similar mindsets - that are environmentally responsible - need to take hold (and can take hold. be that example.)

I disagree. The industry is a big emitter of co2 but they obly respond to demand from consumer. The oil industry would not pollute as much if nobody was driving a car or flying. The meat industry would not pollute as much if we weren't eating as much meat. It's a society problem but unfortunately unless you force people to change their habits I don't see this changing.

Lots of people are calling for WFH and legitimization of remoting. Alas, it seems to be a matter of monkey power, and the managers want you to burn tons of fuel to sit your butt in the chains they provide and smell his armpits from a distance.

shrug

Whatever a single person does is except for a few cases negligible. The problems arise when a lot of people buy manufactured goods without regard for the consequences. The problems arise when a lot of people consume meat and thus create a huge demand for it. Or think that their own house in some sprawling suburb was always their dream and now they require a car too, because of poor public transport.

People vote for all this with their life choices, by what they consume and literally at the ballot box. Saying otherwise is just a popular way to deny responsibility and the individual need to change.

Even friends of mine who are otherwise very conscious about social issues ignore climate change or push it all the way down. People seem to think corporations need to change and anything to suggest they need to change their lifestyle is basically drowned in cognitive dissonance. There’s also a significant amount of e we h as whataboutism even here in HN. Meat & dairy, car culture, fast fashion, consumerism especially that of low quality goods, travel, …etc are all things that could change or adapt. I just don’t see that happening.

Sadly, after seeing so many deny the threat of covid as it was killing hundreds of thousands, I’m not sure people are capable of seeing the tip of their nose.

People are not stupid but they also know that promises around benefits in the more distant future (50 to 100 years!) might never materialize. The physics don't even need to be in dispute for that. This all points to geoengineering at some point from a sociopolitical perspective.

Why people insist on minimizing the fact that modern hyper-industrialized society (which people rely on to survive) is founded on cheap energy? Trying to execute degrowth at a pace and intensity that would be necessary for climate change to reduce the impact of climate change to the most ideal IPCC model would quite literally kill tens of millions in a year. Europe can barely deal with electricity becoming slightly more expensive.

And even worse, it barely makes the news when it concerns us. The stark reduction in ecosystem complexity and loss of animal life ("Holocene extinction") is much more concerning to me. Even though some may call it aesthetics, but that's pretty cruel in its shallowness. "Half of the world’s habitable land is used for agriculture"... https://ourworldindata.org/land-use

Agriculture production as a major driver of the Earth system exceeding planetary boundaries

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/320356605_Agricultu...

And animal agriculture is the biggest culprit of them all ... but suggest that people should switch to plant based diets, and even climate activists will want to stone you.

People are the primary cause of climate change. We all want it to change, but too few wants to change.

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."

The doomsday cult approach doesn't work. People wear out very quickly from having imminent destruction that never materializes pushed on them. Whatever one's position on what we should be doing about climate change, it should be obvious that regular alarmism is not the way to get people to do stuff.

The destruction is quite evidently materializing all over the world with new heat and drought records being broken constantly. A this point some people are actively refusing to see it.

The problem is timescale, the drought in California was pointed to as an example of a climate change disaster but now it's just about over. Over time the droughts and heatwaves will get worse and worse but human brains aren't geared to think on those timescales.

Look at the changes in one year from the link below. https://droughtmonitor.unl.edu/CurrentMap/StateDroughtMonito...

Are you advocating for just more alarmism then?

There are heat waves and droughts but food production has tripled over the last half century, and the only thing I have ever seen during that period that kept the grocery store shelves from being fully stocked for more than a few days has been a pandemic.

You haven't seen it because you very likely live in a first-world country where neither subsistence farming nor farming exports are drivers of the local economy and welfare.

Droughts and heat waves have a very real impact in global affairs in the Middle East, South America, India, and Asia.

The tripling of food production has a very real impact in those areas.

You’d have to think that this is by design.

It's seemed very clear to me the media seem to be positioning humanity for one last all-out war before the ecosystem collapses.

The truth is more depressing - it isn't by design at all, it's by default- we ignore complex problems until they are existential threats. It's not a problem unique to modern society, it's just that our problems are much bigger now and approach faster. Our monkey brains and monkey social systems aren't equipped to handle these sorts of problems well.

I think our monkey brains are not that bad on their own. Meanwhile when influenced by capitalism...

Capitalism only exists in our monkey brains.

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