Comment by wmeitzler | Hacker News Reader

Comment by wmeitzler | Hacker News Reader

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Another complex question asked in good faith: Nothing has been done? Nothing? This seems like an overtly emotional value statement to the global response to a complex problem-- our industrial activities have side effects that effect our environment. The challenge is, what can we do about it, and what has worked so far?

Can we explore this issue from a not-panicked perspective? Off the top of my head (feel free to hit me with Cunningham's Law):

- Aerosol CFC's were a problem we addressed

- Leaded paint and gasoline were another example

- There is a dramatic increase in interest in electrification, which seems to be spearheaded by the environmentalist movement

- I see more discussion about E-waste now than I did 10 years ago. Right to repair seems to be gaining speed in the Reduce/Repair side of the 3 R's

- Are we seeing increased efficiencies in extracting fossil fuels? Fracking seems to fit that niche

"Nothing was done" seems to be a value statement. If we are to agree on progress, we have to agree on who we are serving. Nether Molech (Unbounded consumption at the expense of the human) nor Malthus (Humans are an evil virus) strike me as great options.

The second derivative of CO2 levels turned negative in 2015. In other words, before 2015 we were increasing our CO2 levels by a greater amount every year. Since 2015 we're still dumping more CO2 into the atmosphere each year, but the amount we're dumping every year is decreasing by a small amount.

Obviously, it's not anywhere close to enough and the effects won't be significant until the first derivative goes negative too, but anybody telling you we're doing nothing is selling you panic rather than solutions.

> Can we explore this issue from a not-panicked perspective?

I think we tried doing that. See, for example, Carl Sagan testifying before Congress in 1985 [1].

I _wish_ that fossil fuels could be on your list. I think a main reason why nothing is being done is that oil is big business! Oil companies have toppled a democratically elected government because that government was cutting into their oil profits [2]. Moving away from fossil fuels would cut into oil's bottom line, so they paid lots of money to discredit and oppose climate change research for decades [3].

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wp-WiNXH6hI [2]: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/bp-and-iran-the-forgotten-histo... [3]: https://www.bbc.com/news/stories-53640382

Iran wasn't reducing the oil production, but taking it away from the British at a time when Britain still had a very colonial mindset.

The whole Iran coup wasn't really so much the oil companies toppling government as Churchill wanting to ensure access to oil to permit Britain to recover quickly after the war.

Just look at most of the comments in any climate thread. They are mostly people dooming “it’s too late” or similar (nothing has been done!)

Ignoring the scientific realities, the public is hopelessly lost and emotional on the subject.

It’s frustrating to say the least but this is the effect of mass programming. The question to me is why are these people being programmed to think that everything is hopeless?

It’s not a helpful strategy for actually making changes that can help the climate

I don’t see that, but in many ways, it is actually too late, maybe not catastrophically, but in ways where most people will pay a cost higher than the manufactured fear around the potential costs of doing anything about it, the profits around it have been privatised, the costs socialised

What specific costs are you talking about?

"Too late" is the only logical conclusion I've been able to make. And just to be clear, "too late" is entirely subjective. The universe will be fine with or without the human ape.

But I recognize living in an information bubble, and I've been educated as a truth seeking scientist.

Can you point me to resources that talk about this entirely opposite conclusion?

Are you implying humans will go extinct because of climate change?

What’s too late? Why are the doomers wholly unable to provide a solid claim or example of a prior claim of catastrophe that has come to pass?

Stop saying it’s too late, and use words to explain exactly what you’re saying. Otherwise it’s fear mongering and that’s all this conversation ever is

Look, I'm as anxious about the whole thing as you. We need to start changing our societies in a fundamental level. Like yesterday..

i hope you don’t read this as snarky as it’s going to sound, i really don’t mean it snarky at all… but people were pushing for changes decades ago in a non-panicked way.

I didn't even have to be "pushing for changes" to be ridiculed by most everyone I knew (with the exception of my mother and my 5th grade teacher). All I had to do / say was be in agreement with the scientists who actually understood the issue. That was enough for most to label me a "tree-hugging hippie". Truth is that the ridicule just pushed me even further toward serious concerns about the future of our environment, because it opened my eyes to the fact that most people aren't gonna worry about it until it directly impacts their lives in a truly undeniable way (by which time it's already far too late).

Yeah does anyone remember "An Inconvenient Truth"?

Leaded paint and Asbestos are examples of things where nothing was really done about them other than the manufacturers were required to slowly phase the products out. As late as the 1980s drywall contains asbestos, and both leaded paint and asbestos persists in a remarkable amount of products that remain installed in many houses throughout the US, to the degree where you're risking liability by not just blanket warning potential tenants about it.

So we didn't really do much about it from the homeowner's perspective.

Fracking is heavily decreased efficiency in extracting fossil fuels. To the point where it's economic viability is under question... (How can a whole industry be in the red for more than a decade ? Is this a giant scam caused by post-2008 easy money ?) There's a reason why in the industry they call it "scraping the bottom of the barrel". So it (along with Canada's bituminous sands) should never have been extracted. You would think that we would have threatened to turn North America into a pariah if they proceed with extracting them, but nope, nobody seems to have cared enough... but of course that's just in the same vein as Bush declaring USian mode of life as "non-negotiable". (Indeed, natural laws do NOT negotiate.)

P.S.: You hurt your credibility by using a straw man of Malthus.

What’s most galling is not necessarily the amount done, but the massive success of the disinformation around the issue where even now we have very reasonable sounding people asking, why can’t we have a nice discussion about it without the panic?

Look at all this progress! https://blog.friendsofscience.org/2022/10/25/cop-27-the-show...

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