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Comment by LatteLazy | Hacker News Reader

I don't think you're "wrong" but... There is just no way to convince 7bn people to all act together. And the global nature of the problem means you need basically everyone, and there is a HUGE incentive to be the one NOT acting.

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You don’t need to convince 8 billion people.

You simply need to convince the handful of people in charge.

Unfortunately, this climate change thing really throws some of those people:

https://youtu.be/3E0a_60PMR8

“Here’s a snowball, it’s very cold out…”

We send some pretty low IQ people to DC.

Republicans don't all not support climate change just because they don't believe it. Sure some don't believe it. But there's also those that believe it's not going to work out well to adopt aggressive climate saving measures if industrial and military rival nations don't also adopt the same measures.

Yes, the “what about China excuse comes up a lot”. Another worthless excuse for doing absolutely nothing. Ranks up there with “we don’t want to destroy the economy”

“adopt aggressive climate saving measures”

They could have adopted “non-aggressive” measures and not feed the climate deniers. By doing nothing sooner, requires more pain later. We have been discussing the problem for almost 5 decades.

How would you address nations such as China then? A lot of finger pointing here without addressing the point

There are probably more than a billion up and coming people in China, India, and other developing countries that would love to take advantage of lower flight and hotel prices in tropical destinations.

I'm not really sure China needed to be addressed. Simply putting significant money into green tech would have had a variety of effects - build out the sector earlier and faster; threaten control of the sector without competitive investment in other countries; demonstrate that the largest economy in the world is willing to put its money where its mouth is.

China invests a significant chunk more into renewable energies than the US. More than double actually.

In fact, a higher percentage of their total energy is met by renewables than for the US. They have 3x the capacity of the US while their per person energy usage and emissions are still significantly lower than US.

Let's not pretend China does nothing.

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2022/02/ranked-10-countries-e...

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/primary-energy-renewables

there are several ways to deal with countries that aren’t good citizens. I’d rather skip the conversation for the 100th time. Maybe you could come up with some common sense solutions? The funny thing about dealing with climate change, deniers, etc. is that once all the questions have been answered, they start all over again at the beginning.

The sort answer is: It’s really not an excuse for us not doing anything.

Realistically, through something like strong(er) accords and negotiation. But the first step is understanding the problem, recognizing it, and declaring an intent to address it with international cooperation. Saying "but my neighbor won't help" doesn't seem effective to get anything done. The mixed signals regarding thew science also don't help.

One of the principles of negotiation is showing goodwill, so let's all just start by doing our part, and then the international community can have a strong negotiating position with defectors. Being a defector ourselves doesn't help! (I prefer to suffer while striving for a good, than suffer slightly less knowing I'm part of the problem)

We know how to address China, and other nations. By international agreements and trade.

We have already done it multiple times. Does really no one remember the refrigerator gases, the CFCs?

The same economic doomsday arguments were made at the time, without them food production would suffer globally, and it won't matter anyway since it is a global problem and what about all the countries that will keep using them?

The onus on making a similar argument with greenhouse gases today would be on the ones saying it's impossible this time. The greenhouse situation may be so much more complex but the economic arguments are the same. We know how to solve them, by trade agreements and international tariffs.

One strong option is tying large tariffs to failure to hit emission reduction targets or failure to implement other globally determined necessary policies.

Like with everything, the problem isn't a lack of practical solutions, it is a lack of willpower to pay the short term polical / economic costs needed to avoid massive long term harm.

USA, China, India and pretty much everyone else in the "global south" will be more affected by climate change than, say, northern Europe.

This is old, but he was on science committee. If this is what they put on a 'science' committee. Then what else are they capable of.

U.S. House Rep. Paul Broun, a Georgia Republican, doesn't believe in evolution, the Big Bang theory, or the teachings of embryology. In fact, in a Sept. 27 talk at Liberty Baptist Church in Hartwell, Ga., the member of the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology, who is also a medical doctor, called those areas of science "lies straight from the pit of hell."

I personally think idiots get elected because people want them in charge. If they suddenly got smarter, they'd be replaced. That was my conclusion from Brexit and Trump voters: they're choosing to be arseholes, but want to pretend they're just ignorant. This is a variation on the "trump gives his followers something no one else can: permission to be their worst selves".

The same applies to Global warming but on both sides.

That's just my opinion though.

We also send smart people with smart teams that know how to appeal to the below-average voters back home, and they’re very successful at that. Are there dumb politicians? Absolutely. But I strongly believe that many play it up so their bases identify with them more strongly as a way to secure power then go on to do whatever benefits them and their wealthy donors / friends.

Believe it or not, the small handful of people in charge got to their position by serving people to a certain extent. Any substantial reduction in emissions is going to cause substantial economic deadweight losses, which would be politically disastrous. This is why even the New Green Deal only proposes to throw money into projects rather than actively reduce emissions.

You don’t even need to convince the handful of people in charge. Independent geoengineering will become a thing faster than you expect.

I find hope in surprising places. For instance: have you ever considered how unlikely it is that the lounge suit, in the specific form it takes, should be quite as pervasive as it is?

That's massive, global, collective, directed, and specific choice. Now if we could just get the exact same class of people who wear lounge suits by default to consider acting on climate change as the same sort of default...

This is the way.

I think you're agreeing. The adaptation won't be based on collective action, but individual necessity.

Isn't this how humans work since the beginning of their existence?

Are you asking if all humans take individual actions based on needs?

I was clarifying that the OP was not suggesting grand collective action will take place to adapt to climate change.

Has been done before, and can be done again.

When have we ever gotten 8bn people to agree to painful, expensive changes simultaneously over a long term?

* Ban on leaded gazoline

* Ban on non-indigenous whaling

* Ban on ozone depleting gasses

* Several human rights treaties

* Nuclear non-proliferation

* Ban on mineral extraction and military activities on Antractica

* etc.

None of those are painful or expensive though?

Leaded petroleum was such an easy, local problem that solving it just happened at the national level, no need for binding international agreements.

I actually think the smart approach to serious action to prevent global warming would be similar to that taken for Nuclear non-proliferation: The big, strong countries force the others to accept they cannot have emissions and anyone who doesn't agree gets (at least) sanctioned into poverty or maybe "liberated"...

But most countries are much more interested in cheap energy (and meat and construction and other CO2e sources) than they ever were in nukes. Most citizens don't personally care if their leaders have nukes, but they care if they can afford meat and electricity.

And of course, for this to work, we would need those strong countries to ALSO give up their CO2e, something no world power has done and which the US and China are actively headed in the OPPOSITE direction of.

The ban on whaling is also a good example of a few bad actors ignoring the consensus and making the whole thing much less efficient. And that's (again) only for "whale meat", hardly as interesting a product as <almost everything that causes climate change>...

As the international whaling ban has demonstrated, it doesn’t matter if one or two bad actors (even large and powerful ones like Japan and Norway) don’t comply, as long as the majority and the most powerful nations do. Many whale species became critically endangered and it looked for a moment like they all would and we would simply loose whales from our oceans. That didn’t happen because the world came together and made the decision to kill the whaling industry instead of the whales.

With regards to global warming the responsibility of inaction lies solely on one bad actor, the USA, and only [initially] one political sub-faction in the USA. In 1997 all the world (including USA and China) came together and approved the Kyoto protocol, and made this painful discussion that would deeply affect our fossil fuel industry but save our climate. It was on its way to be ratified everywhere, public support was in its favor, so was the Clinton Administration, all European powers, and the Communist Party of China. Everybody agreed that the cost of climate change was greater than the benefits of cheap energy.

However at some point the oil industry in the USA fought against it, it got stalled in the USA senate and finally killed by the George Bush administration, in order to save their fossil fuel industry. If the USA hadn’t killed it, and even if they would have only half-assed the implementation, and even though China would come to ignore it, we would still be much further along the way of reducing our emissions.

You see, the world can come together and make painful decisions that affects all of us. It has done so multiple times in the past (even with respects to climate change) and it will in the future. It is really only because a certain industry has a disproportional hold over a certain country’s discourse that despite these agreements we have failed to act.

It's easy to say China, or even India, agreed to the Kyoto protocol when that didn't bind them to any goals. It just encouraged developing countries to adopt policies that encouraged reductions.

Aside from that, the US is currently below its 1990 levels while China is 4x its 1990 levels and double the current US production. It doesn't seem to line up with what you're saying about the US not taking action.

https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions

You can create a nice graph here and add counties to compare.

I didn’t say that USA didn’t take action. Arguably Biden’s 2022 Climate and Spending bill is the most ambitious climate bill by any country (if so, then god help us, we need 100x that and 100x more). What I did say was that USA was very hostile to any international pact which would have enabled collective action. It is USAs fault that “8bn people [haven’t] agree[d] to painful, expensive changes simultaneously over a long term”, despite the fact that USA did agree to it before it changed its mind.

I’m not listening to the China argument, I’ve heard it many times before, it is always the same, and it is always done in bad faith. It was even the reason claimed by the USA senate to stall the Kyoto protocol over 20 years ago. We now know it had nothing to do with the supposed unfairness and everything to do with the fossil fuel lobby muddying the water,

> With regards to global warming the responsibility of inaction lies solely on one bad actor, the USA

Sure sounds like you’re saying the US isn’t taking action. And in calling them a bad actor you’d think that emissions are going up out of control instead of down below levels that predate the protocol by 7 years. It sounds like your arguments are in bad faith.

> With regards to global warming the responsibility of inaction lies solely on one bad actor, the USA.

> I didn’t say that USA didn’t take action.

It sure does sound like I just moved the goalpost here doesn’t it. However if you continue reading the paragraph it surely should be clear I’m talking about inaction in commit to an international agreement. That was also what my parent was talking about, getting people to agree to act, not the action it self.

However even if you didn’t misunderstand me, and I’m actually being disingenuous here, you’d still be wrong. The Kyoto protocol called for industrialized nations to reduce 8-20% of their 1990 emissions by 2012. Most countries stayed within their targets, with a notable exception of Canada. Canada notable followed USA and withdrew the protocol after USA failed to ratify it. USA was still at +4% emissions in 2012 and didn’t go back to 0% until 2020, where Covid pushed them over the edge. 2020 was supposed to be the second target with most nations targeting -20% reduction. USA will not reach that in another decade.

USA is responsible for a huge part of historic emissions, prior to 1997 China was responsible for almost none of it. Had the Kyoto protocol held, China could still be a party to the 2020 target.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cumulative-co-emissions?t...

This is the graph you should be looking at, when judging fairness of the protocol, and bad actors. You should ask your self in 1997 when China had the population of Europe and USA combine, while still only responsible for the equivalent of the UK alone. If in 2001 USA and Europe would start to flatten out while China stay under Europe. You should look at the top line, the biggest historic emitter, and ask, why were the USA the first country to bail on the protocol, and why have subsequent trials of another protocol mostly failed.

It sounds like doublespeak to me. Inaction is a lack of action. You're saying they didn't act, but you they did act and therefore what you said is correct. You're argument is quite convoluted at this point.

That graph is good at pointing out that historically the US has contributed more than anyone. I didn't dispute that. It just seems like a silly argument to go back hundreds of years before any powers recognized it was an issue and use that as a basis for what should be done going forward so that other countries can catch up to the US's historically awful record. You see something, you fix it.

The argument in the Kyoto protocol was that industrialized nations were already industrialized and had the economic and industrial capabilities to replace their infrastructure with less polluting ones. Poorer nations didn’t have this benefit, so it would be unfair to ask the same of them.

You can say this argument is not sound, if you do, just be aware this is the same tactic used by the oil lobby that killed the protocol, it was not done in good faith back then, and I think the same is true of modern incarnation of these refutations.

Actually in more resent climate proposals, delegates from poorer nations, and climate justice advocates, have actually been trying to push for a development fund in which richer nations fund green infrastructure projects in poorer countries, the historic polluters—especially the USA—have predictably pushed back against this and landed on a much weaker climate relief fund at the last COP. If the oil lobby (and by extension the USA government) was sincere about the supposed unfairness of the Kyoto protocol, this would be a great compromise, and totally align with You see something, you fix it. But alas, they are bad actors, and such proposals yielded limited results.

I don’t think it is fruitful for us to be arguing about what I meant by inaction in my previous posts. You obviously misunderstood me, I tried to clarify but you still persist that I didn’t mean what I say I meant. The original point was that there exists a historic president for an international agreement of reducing carbon emissions, which everyone agreed to. Future agreements should therefor be possible. Identifying bad actors and pointing fingers at those at fault for previous agreements failing seems relevant to this discussion.

It just seems squirrely to double down that inaction doesn't mean inaction. You seem to be pushing your ideas more than you seem to be thinking about what they actually sound like.

But it is right, inaction to commit to international agreements does not mean inaction to reduce carbon emission. Those are separate things. And when the conversation is explicitly about the (im)possibility of international agreements, it should be clear which inaction I’m talking about.

And of course I’m pushing my ideas. The history of who killed the Kyoto protocol is still up for debate. I’m of the opinion that the death of the Kyoto protocol and all subsequent agreements rests in one bad actor, the USA. There is not a historic consensus about this, and you’ll find historic accounts that disagree with this (or more likely you’ll find historians putting less importance on the Kyoto protocol than I do). I’m pushing what I believe is the most accurate—or rather the most relevant—narrative of history here.

Complaining about someone saying they aren't committing to do something while they generally do that thing doesn't seem like a good complaint. Diplomacy has a lot of moving parts.

after the ultimate changes in climate, will there still be 7bn people?

The better question would be whether they would still be alive.

in what other manner did you interpret that?

That having a few hundred million corpses lying around would put a bit of a strain on funeral services...

Mass die offs have happened historically but nothing short of the black plague is in line with the range of possibilities before us.

> but nothing short of the black plague is in line with the range of possibilities before us.

What do you mean? Now I'm scared...

Why would people just suddenly start dropping dead?

I really don't want to spoil your dinner but the chances of millions of dead per year are fairly high, and that's up to 2100, not many models look beyond that (the uncertainty is too large). The extremes of those models (things that could happen but with a much smaller likelihood) are enough to make you miserable.

The good news is that there are similar possible outcomes that things won't be that dire.

250K dead / year by 2050, 5 million / year or so by 2100.

The tough part is that such models have a lot of uncertainty and that it is very well possible to be alive but to be utterly miserable. I'm normally fairly optimistic about our ability to influence our lives but on this one I'm not, this will happen and we're along for the ride, it's a rearguard action at this point where we can try hard to minimize the damage but not avoid it completely.

Not to trivialise it, but those 250k/year or 5 million/year are against the ordinary level of 67 million deaths per year worldwide, UN data:

https://bigthink.com/the-present/births-and-deaths-per-year/

When we think how many of those deaths - and the suffering leading up to them - could be changed by reducing obesity, reducing sugar intake, increasing exercise, reducing air pollution, reducing smoking, increasing vitamin D levels, reducing alcohol consumption, reducing stress by any means (city noise to hypercompetitive workplaces to ragebait media), improving road safety, and "we" don't act on most of that. And then how much more we would have to act to hold or reverse climate change to save comparatively fewer people, it seems ... not a bad idea, but a sadly unlikely one.

(Incidentally, 67 million -> 72 million is about a 7% increase in deaths. Which is in the region of the excess deaths in 2022 which correlate with COVID vaccination in 2021 in European countries. A study from a Norwegian University finds a correlation of 1% increase in population vaccinated in 2021 -> 0.1% increase in excess deaths in 2022. Not caused by COVID which they excluded, not caused by a bounceback after a year of fewer deaths which they accounted for, and as far as the authors can tell not caused by delayed access to health care which was widespread and not linked to vaccination levels in different countries; and if that's roughly in the region of the expected climate change deaths, you can see that not only are we not doing much about this, we are barely even talking about it in public, which doesn't bode well for the climate change equivalent: Dr on YouTube citing studies and evidence and not conspiracy theories: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iyo2UNQcdpQ )

Yes, obviously the number of expected deaths is ~ the number of people alive / average lifespan.

But the number of people dying due to climate change is a difficult to pin down number. Do you or do not include for instance people dying in wars when the proximate cause for the war was climate change or mass migration? Some believe you should, others say that wars have always been fought. So it's a tricky problem for many intrinsic reasons and it is an even trickier problem because there are so many ways to interpret the data.

All this adds up to us doing nothing until it is way too late.

> 250K dead / year by 2050, 5 million / year or so by 2100.

Can that be fully offset by increase standards of living and improving healthcare/medicine? 250k is not a lot statistically on a global scale (and I really doubt the capability of these models to accurately predict what's going to happen in 50+ years)

> The tough part is that such models have a lot of uncertainty and that it is very well possible to be alive but to be utterly miserable.

I'm not saying it's going to be tough for a lot of people in some places. But I don't really see how for humanity as a whole it can be much more than a slowdown than potentially can be fully compensated by further technological progress. Of course increasing economic inequality can likely only make it worse rather than better

birth rates are going down and if current trends continue total population should start decreasing at some point. But everything comes down to that. Human societies existed and even slowly grew in much worse conditions. So I’m sure what could happen because of climate change to offset modern medicine/agriculture/transportation/etc.

No. But by then it will be way too late to matter for the purposes of mitigating climate change. We've blown through 1.5C. 2C will be next. 3, 4, 5, 10, how far will we get before the results catch up with the causes?

What you're saying is that mankind needs a benevolent dictator to solve the problem. An empowered and effective benevolent dictator.

Thanos was right ;)

[Sorry, couldn't resist, please downvote]

Unless they were some sort of Superman, they'd just be overthrown. It would be a big effort to convince people to go for actually cutting CO2e. And that is without people (republicans, conspiracy theorists and 1001 other groups) poisoning the well...

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