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Comment by gjulianm | Hacker News Reader

> There are such obvious first steps we could take without a complete understanding of cause if we really cared.

That's the issue, a lot of people just don't care or refuse to believe it. Questions like the one in the parent comment are starting to seriously annoy me because they're demanding an unachievable level of evidence before doing anything, a level that's never asked for in any other kind of intervention (for example, interest rate hikes).

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Everyone leaves out a large cohort - people that believe it, but don't want the solutions you're selling. We typically put forth constructive solutions like nuclear, which get shouted down / laughed out of the room instantly.

Without going to specifics, a large reason for that may be that among those who say this are a large number who loudly push for unrealistic ideas masquerading them as constructive. Some may be honestly ignorant about it, but it is also unfortunately quite an effective way to derail any discussion and delay progress. See for example any suggestion about real world hyperloops.

Unfortunately it's hard to tell the difference between people suggesting expensive and slow solutions because they're ill informed about the alternatives and the people suggesting expensive and slow solutions because they don't want to solve the problem.

And practically there's little difference, especially if the former are getting their information from the latter.

I think people are fine about solving the problem, positive even (right wingers love solar panels, after all). They're just not fine about being forced to sacrifice to solve the problem.

An easier first step before nuclear is reducing our power requirements. This one gets laughed out of the room both because we don't think purple will accept it and because there's a direct correlation between GDP growth and energy consumption, we don't care enough about energy use to give up GDP.

This will achieve the opposite: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

If you make something less critical, cheaper, it will be used for more and more ridiculous things.

Jevon's Paradox is a thought experiment focused on increased efficiency not decreased demand. History is full of examples where a decrease on demand didn't lead to an increase in ridiculous uses for the technology.

Not really, I don't distinguish between the different ways to solve it. I wish that was the discussion, but I feel like any solution that has any costs of any kind is just ignored because a lot of people don't feel like this is serious enough to do anything serious about it, doesn't matter whether it's reducing consumption, massive switch to nuclear, or whatever.

Most green parties, and greenpeace in particular grew up around opposing nuclear power as unnatural. I think that's where it comes from.

https://www.greenpeace.org/international/tag/nuclear/

So naturally, people assume anyone fighting against global warming is against nuclear. As far as I can tell, it's also true.

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