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Comment by sobkas | Hacker News Reader

Then there should be consequences for destroying environment and making earth inhabitable for humans. Oil industry knew that burning fossil fuels will lead to global warming. Plastic industry knew that recycling is a total sham, and most of it will at best end up on a landfill at worts everywhere including our food. They knew but then they lied to us to make more profits. Maybe we should take that ill gotten profits from them and if it will bankrupt them so be it. Because we're slowly getting out of time to do anything.

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I think developed nations collectively bought into fossil fuel-driven civilization, so it seems like scapegoating to lay all the blame at the feet of the producers.

But like you say, it is appropriate to blame the producers for hiding what they knew about the greenhouse effect and well-funded lobbying and propaganda campaigns to deny and minimize it.

I think is the uncomfortable truth is we're all to blame for a certain extent. People def hide evidence and acted to their own benefit but to a certain extent so many of us were known accomplices.

It is true that the people demanded the lifestyle provided by fossil fuel emissions. But corporations didn't just say "oh if you insist." When new policies and regulations are attempted that will not affect the lifestyle of the people but will eat into corporate profits, they fight tooth and nail.

An honest corporation that was just acting to serve the needs of the people wouldn't do something like fight to reduce the exxon valdez spill fine by 100x or raise a fit when regulatory agencies mandate generation shifting.

I think we've KNOWN what this shit does to the air and water for at least, what 40 years?

At what point do we blame ourselves to increasing fossil fuel usage, even in the what, past 5 years?

All boats float:

Let’s partner with oil companies to collectively solve carbon capture at planet scale? They get to keep functioning, citizens & government helps with subsidization and research programs. Put a time limit on progress and penalize the oil companies by making fines exponentially rise by time if possible and unmet. A select subcommittee can oversee the process and politicians can coordinate partnerships with other countries.

You need BOTH the carrot AND the stick to get behaviors to change.

I think that we can also reasonably blame people who use a disproportionate amount of electricity for their harm caused to the planet. I don't think that some sort of redistribution effort that accounts for past harm is impossible.

But I also think that the effect of even a megamillionaire who takes a private jet everywhere is dwarfed by the effect of corporate leadership, lobbying, and legal teams who successfully undo regulation via the courts and legislatures so that they can make more profits.

> we blame ourselves

So I buy shrimp that was grown locally.

Then I read up that shrimps were transported to the other side of the world, peeled there, and shipped back, travelled 20,000 miles, before landong on my plate.

I buy canned pairs, and turns out the same story. What am I suppose to do, starve?

The capitalist machine prioritises fictitious resource of money, over real resource of oil. It wastes huge amount of enegy just to take advantage of a poor country's low wages.

I drive an ebike to work. You can go vegan, quit heating your house, take cold showers, none of it will make any difference if the industry does not change it's practices.

People forget that as consumers we arent free to be choosey. We only can chose among options the market has already made available to us, options that are presented in the first place because economies of scale have been developed to put them in front of every consumer. All of that cannot be unwound overnight or restarted with some alternative since it took so much iteration just to reach this point at all.

Yep. Even if consumers want environmentally friendly products, this only achieves the advertisement of environmental friendliness unless there is associated regulation. Companies can find a way to convince consumers that their products are environmentally friendly without actually changing the effect they have on the world. Consumers have minimal access to information to see through this effect. We need help from governments.

> Companies can find a way to convince consumers that their products are environmentally friendly

For some reason, whenI lie to the insurance company, its fraud and I am a criminal.

But when a company lies to me about my environmentally friendly product, it's just business.

If the world stopped consuming fossil fuels today, overpopulation would no longer be an issue in about a year or two.

Because 90% of the population would die.

Well you don't have to stop in a matter of one day, because that's impossible and unrealistic anyways, but we could at least finally start with reducing our consumption, with the goal to land as close as possible to 0 as soon as possible.

Then again, we missed the window to stop long ago. So why bother anyways, right?

My main point is that demonizing the use of hydrocarbons is absurd. Our use of them is one of the main reasons we've been going from a world where most people was incredibly poor 200 years ago, to most of the world's population living in relative prosperity today (compared to 200 years ago).

Now that we're developing alternative energy sources, we should start/continue to move away from fossil fuels, but if we try to do it too quickly, the price may be higher than the benefit.

That seems to be an excuse that's been in use for decades. Meanwhile, we're just dragging our feet about stopping oil use and kicking the can down the road for the next generation to deal with.

Ultimately, it's a very poor excuse to state that because we can't stop immediately, that we might as well continue digging as much oil as possible out of the ground for burning.

There’s no credible path for reducing carbon emissions enough to reverse warming under current models that doesn’t involve gigadeaths.

I suppose that's what happens when we leave it as late as possible to even start to do anything.

Unfortunately, we're going to have far more gigadeaths when crops fail due to the climate becoming unpredictable and wars over clean water become ubiquitous. It always surprises me that people claim that deaths will result from cleaning up our act when that's a small fraction of the deaths that will be caused by climate catastrophes.

"As late as possibe" might be something like year 2200-2300, after global temperatures have already risen 5-10 degrees.

> crops fail due to the climate becoming unpredictable and wars over clean water become ubiquitous

Currently, we're facing what can become the worst famine in decades because of a single war that was NOT caused by global warming or access to water. Just simple nationalism.

The food supply 50-300 years from now is really hard to predict. If the birth rate stays at current levels, and also reach such levels in the few countries where the birth rate is still high today (mostly Africa), there will be a lot fewer mouths to feed in 2100 than today.

And if the birth rate goes back up, and exponential population growth resumes, no amount of food production will ensure that we never run out.

Right now (or rather, before 2022), the amount of food produced per capita globally, is probably higher than at any time before since the dawn of time.

Thanks in very large parts to fossil fuels used for farm machinery and in fertilizers.

I have difficulty believing any of what you are claiming.

e.g. how is Africa going to have a high birth rate when it'll be largely inhabitable due to the high temperatures?

Also, what famine are you referring to and why does it not feature here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_famines

I'm talking about the potential famine of 2024, it didn't really start yet. Caused mostly by reduced food exports from Ukraine and Russia.

Also, about Africa: That's the only continent where birth rates remain really high today, and they have very far to go before the continent becomes uninabitable due to temperatures.

Anyway, my point was that UNLESS Africa continues to have such birth rates, the population seems to be falling sharply globally in the next century. In other words, the main assumption is that global pupulation is going down, with the Africa part only being a qualifier.

so you think its a collecrive decision made by all of us with full knowledge, and fossil fuel companies are just doing what the consumer wants?

Then why do journalists investifating recycling sham, oil spills, etc. frequently end up dead or in prison?

What amazes me is that you just can't opt out, short of jumping off a cliff. Everything you do involves the destruction of non-renewable resources. If you look at what you produce in terms of garbage and other waste every month it is completely insane. Everything is packaged in plastic, high grade cardboard, glass etc. The amount of energy and materials required is ridiculous. And yet, not a month goes by or something that used to be packaged in paper suddenly is only available in plastic, something that was available in re-usable glass is only available in plastic and so on. The hold-outs seem to be beer bottles but I don't drink beer...

> If you look at what you produce in terms of garbage and other waste every month it is completely insane. Everything is packaged in plastic, high grade cardboard, glass etc.

This has bothered me since I was a child and drove by a landfill and realized just how much trash we produce. I met someone that went a month without using one time use plastic and she couldn’t really avoid it. It’s everywhere.

As Jacques Ellul says (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BOCtu-rXfPk): when the bridge collapses, who is to blame?

Someone is trying to do that https://www.stopecocide.earth

It is unfortunately very hard to address this with suits and getting even harder. Rules around standing can be leveraged to deny suits and the power of administrative agencies keeps getting hamstrung by the new major questions doctrine. Montana is the only state that guarantees a right to a clean environment in its constitution, but conservatives are seeing how this can be leveraged against polluting industries and are mobilizing to remove this right.

Megacorps have a tremendous amount of power in our political system and that makes it very very very difficult to hold people to account for anything.

Why do fewer climate related deaths; down 98% the past century

and a more green planet than a century ago

and far fewer people in poverty

all lead you to believe it's becoming uninhabitable?

because half of bees are gone, half of barrier reef is gone, 75% of insects are gone, UK has like 10% tree cover left, emperor penguins, had zero chicks survive

Do you think you can survive if the biosphere is gone?

In 2022, the Australian Institute of Marine Science (AIMS) reported the highest levels of coral cover across two-thirds of the Great Barrier Reef (GBR) in over 36 years.

Why is the planet more green today than a century ago?

Perhaps because of all the chemical-induced algae blooms turning previously blue water into murky green?

There were an estimated 750 billion trees worldwide in the 1920s. We now have approximately 3.04 trillion trees in the world.

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