Comment by vivekd | Hacker News Reader

Comment by vivekd | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

If we assume you're right and we are heading towards mass death and catastrophe - why is the solution to make software that uses less energy? Seems a little weak of a response to mass death?

Why not something like cloud seeding with sulfates?

https://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2023/altering-our-clouds-...

Why not the easy technical solution that doesn't relegate people to use less of a basic resource required for human development?

I have so many questions like what are the actual projections and how do we know it's effects. What of past projections that failed. Where are we getting this claim of mass death, when is it expected. Does it account for changes like the fact that we phased out coal. Does it account for the fact that we recently reduced cooling sulphate in the atmosphere.

The answer seems to be don't ask questions and if you do lots of people will die. That doesn't sound like science or good policy.

> Why not something like cloud seeding with sulfates?

Same reason we don’t reach for surgery every time anything in our body hurts: we want a least intrusive (for the planet) method rather than crazy ideas that we don’t know the consequence of. We know very well what happens when people use less carbon, there are plenty of countries on the world right now who are doing that. But no, if it’s not out of sci-fi it doesn’t tickle your fancy enough to try.

So when we say we don't need surgery then are we conceding that there is no climate emergency and things might not be as catastrophic as they are sometimes made out to be. If we have time to look for less intrusive methods than cloud seeding maybe we have time to also look for less economically intrusive methods

We know very well what happens when we tell that people should use less carbon - they don't.

From the perspective of what countries are willing to do, spending some billions of dollars on some technology is far more feasible than large cuts to energy consumption or restricting beef consumption.

Drastically cutting down on energy is itself a crazy idea we don't know the consequence of; it could have catastrophic effects on the economy and on how people live. Weird tech solutions are not crazy alternatives to business as usual; they're crazy alternatives to other crazy alternatives.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com