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Comment by loceng | Hacker News Reader

How would it help a lot?

The issue with burning things is the pollution it can cause if not filtered properly before emissions released into the air. CO2 feeds plants to grow, which in turn provides more food and habitat for more life.

An incongruence in the West vs. the East's strategy is that we in the West have avoided nuclear - which generates zero CO2 - whereas the East's CO2 production (via building new coal power plants weekly) - has been skyrocketing:

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-co2-emissions-per-...

In this scenario with China doing the opposite to the rest of the world, there are exactly zero gains for CO2 reduction - far outweighed by the increase in CO2 production. And in this scenario as well the "polluter" or generator of the most CO2 is being rewarded for their behaviour by producing the cheapest energy possible, which allows their cost of production to be lower than the West, which allows their profits to be higher - for us to buy cheaper products to not only perpetuate but accelerate these current conditions.

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It would help because we have too much CO2 in atmosphere now. It accumulated. If we stopped putting CO2, plants and all the other earth chemical loops would take out that excess carbon.

> CO2 feeds plants to grow, which in turn provides more food and habitat for more life.

Yeah, unless they can't synthesize it because it's too hot and they didn't had a chance to adjust to new temperatures yet. It takes some time and will happen, but we pump CO2 a little too fast.

> In this scenario with China doing the opposite to the rest of the world, there are exactly zero gains for CO2 reduction - far outweighed by the increase in CO2 production.

Oh yeah, someone litters on the street, let's all litter and get rid of the trash cans. Alternative solution: we should stop buying from them so they will not generate that co2.

Saying we have "too much CO2 in atmosphere" isn't evidence and historically there was much higher levels, and much more life.

And yes, there will be a delay as part of evolutionary process for when plants and wildlife can adapt - for plants that are better adapted or capable of adapting to hotter temperatures-different climate will adjust - so indeed at minimum reducing the pace at minimum can be useful; and deploying technologies to slow down the increase we have arguably bumped up at least a little bit [remember the distance that Earth to the sun we are is the biggest factor of temperatures, and where are we in that 1000s of year cycle at the moment?] will help, but we could also prepare to pollinate and manage new growth areas with plants/life we know can adapt; the US policy makers on the side of believing climate change is a life-or-death urgent consideration want to spend $40+ trillion "fighting" it - so getting simply helping the Earth adapt, which is what we should be doing because it's unknown exactly how much our changing CO2 levels will actually impact things, is a no-brainer to do regardless - to create more life, to maximize it; and I also believe Elon is correct that Earth can sustain another 10x the current human population - however that will require succeeding in battle against industrial complexes and authoritarian wannabes who're involved in regulatory capture.

"Alternative solution: we should stop buying from them so they will not generate that co2."

Absolutely a good strategy to stop rewarding that behaviour, if that's the best course of action to not destabilize the world too much - which may not be a good idea to potentially force the CCP-China's hand into highly aggressive or bad-harmful behaviour.

But do you think the inflationary policy, money borrowing, $34 trillion in debt, and people currently struggling in the US and West in general will be able to handle the massive increase in costs of goods that will happen if that happens?

> Saying we have "too much CO2 in atmosphere" isn't evidence and historically there was much higher levels, and much more life.

We will have more life, but less humans and probably our civilisation will not survive. Apart from that, earth will be fine, so we should do as we please and put as much pollution as we want to?

Well, a bunch of the other dominant species would die too, but "life" referring to the construct of individual contained chemical reactions sustaining themselves will surely continue, which is basically the same thing

Folks often try on these arguments: it'll cost too much (to save all our lives). Or 'it got terribly hot before so somehow it's natural and ok'.

We may survive as a species. But our civilization will not survive the destabilization it causes.

E.g. folks depend on fish for a large part of the planet, from coastal waters. Kill the reefs (which we've made a good start on), the coastal ecosystem collpases (california crab anyone?) and not thousands, not millions but hundreds of millions of people starve.

Then what? Some kind of global rescue effort? Not hardly. Look at the last wave of 10,000 refugees, how every European country was winging about 'we can't accept a thousand! It's too much!'

Now add four zeroes to that number. Get the picture?

"Folks often try on these arguments: it'll cost too much (to save all our lives). Or 'it got terribly hot before so somehow it's natural and ok'."

This is a straw man argument. I didn't say it costs too much, I was stating options for how and where money may be better spent.

And if you haven't observed yet that the free market - save for regulatory capture - is far more efficient than government at most efficiently distributing resources where needed, then "you" aren't paying enough attention.

The free market is crippled by 'the tragedy of the commons' when it comes to anything whatsoever that isn't simple self-interest. "Somebody else should do that" is typical, or more likely "If I spend anything on a social good, I will be less competitive and go out of business"

Solving problems like this are precisely where government, with all its flaws, is essential to doing it at all.

It goes one step further than you're thinking though: the government will become corrupted by the worst of the worst for-profit tyrannical bad actors, which is precisely why it's the free market - people en mass - who must actually address these common issues and right the ship.

It starts with industrial complexes forming an unfair advantage, leading to regulatory capture that selfishly sets up rules to benefit the industry's profits at the cost of people, society, the environment. As part of that regulatory capture the industries lobby to get politicians of their choosing into positions of decision making, those politicians progressively are more clever-deceptive and more authoritarian. These two sides of the same coin is fascism.

Got to admit, reading that, I thought it was describing the free market failure to 'right the ship'. The bad actors are not actually bad; they're just responding to market forces. They cannot choose to do otherwise, else they simple go out of business because they are uncompetitive.

The namecalling and villain-choosing is pointless. It's a system that must be designed, one that works with rules and forces in a useful direction.

"The bad actors are not actually bad; they're just responding to market forces."

You seem to be assuming, and wrongly assuming who I'm including in my referencing bad actors.

Where did I name call? Saying bad actors isn't name calling, firstly, and where the terminology to differentiate who exactly I'm referencing isn't clear enough - and you want to just jump to designing a system, but you need to base that design on who is either forced to into certain behaviour to maintain competing vs. those who are doing far more than just forced into certain behaviours, let's say a scenario where politicians are assassinated in worst case scenario - or where prior to that the bad actors fund politicians who will do exactly as they say if/when elected.

You seem to be ignoring the human cost, or maybe you just haven’t thought about it. Under your scenario, millions will die and millions more become migrants destabilizing the governments in the temperate zones. Maybe you are fine with that, a lot of us are not.

Huh? How under my scenario do millions die like how you stated? What assumptions did you insert in order to conclude with an ad hominem straw argument?

If you're willing to implement policy that increases the cost of energy then you're also in support of killing off the poorest, right? Jordan Peterson has regularly brought this up in this argument points against the current strategy of CO2 taxes, etc - which are actually worse for the environment because then people can't afford the less polluting energy sources, and then they burn wood - worse for environment for pollution, worse for their own health, and it destroys forests.

Oh, good, we're citing Jordan Peterson now.

Oh, good, HN is showing it's ideological-uncritical side - smearing/attacking individuals rather than argument points. Good job!

Your claim that people will switch from fossil fuels to wood rather than electricity needs some evidence, not just a theory from some random talking head. It’s possible that some people might, but how many?

Firstly, this "random talking head" theory is based on basic-foundational economics: when costs go up, less people can afford those costs - and if it's survival related, they will cut down trees if that is available for heating and cooking.

There also is legitimate research showing that once people earn "$5,000" per year minimum then they are able to actually start caring about non-selfish, holistic-society wide problems - otherwise survival rightly has them concentrating on themselves; which I hope logically makes sense to you, and you don't require me to dig up the link(s)?

Second, what source(s) are acceptable-authoritative to you, e.g. what source(s) will you actually believe?

Do you also think those people are properly or correctly accounted for?

It's why we should work from first principles of logic, and where zero or very near zero people (and I don't mean millions of lives being an acceptable number) are ; do no harm.

CO2 is also a greenhouse gas and makes our atmosphere store much more energy than it used to which destabilizes ecosystems in which those plants you want to grow bigger actually live. So yeah, they’ll grow faster, and then they’ll all die.

The rest of your argument is orthogonal to the issue. Taking CO2 out of the atmosphere works globally, it doesn’t matter who does or doesn’t reduce emissions.

"CO2 is also a greenhouse gas and makes our atmosphere store much more energy than it used to which destabilizes ecosystems in which those plants you want to grow bigger actually live. So yeah, they’ll grow faster, and then they’ll all die."

There may be a delay but then the CO2 gets absorbed and stored in the plants, and then in more animals that will be added mass to the cycles - the plants dying then goes into the soil, to support more growth, and eventually over millions of years that Earth gets compacted - turned into rock, then arguably more oil will be formed.

Your point doesn't argue anything because you stopped-didn't think exponentially through the cycle after they "die" part in the cycle - what happens next?

"The rest of your argument is orthogonal to the issue. Taking CO2 out of the atmosphere works globally, it doesn’t matter who does or doesn’t reduce emissions."

So you don't think the West "being responsible by reducing CO2" - getting hurt by costs going up - while the East massively increases CO2 production and gets rewarded by doing so, doesn't have an impact?

Please actually address my specific points, rather than just making a general claim if you want to continue discussing this.

> here may be a delay but then the CO2 gets absorbed and stored in the plants, [...] turned into rock, then arguably more oil will be formed.

Yes, the planet and life on earth will do just fine. The problem is can our civilization survive? Like, can our current civilisation survive the next 100 years of worsening conditions? Humans will survive, we are the most widespread species already (from hottest to coldest places on earth). Some areas will be a little too unhabitable of course, billions will die, but who cares, right?

The political difficulty with handling CO2 appropriately is orthogonal to whether it's bad. A likely outcome without some form of geoengineering is vast swathes of currently inhabited land becoming uninhabitable due to flooding, extreme storms, and lengthy wet-bulb events. In some sense that's also just a political problem, but if we can't agree that CO2 production has significant negative effects then I think we'll struggle to deal with 3B homeless people [0] [1].

[0] Of course, many of them won't be able to migrate at all and will just die (I'll posit that's also bad).

[1] Do think through this for just a second. Our current economic systems include property ownership, and basically all land on earth is owned by somebody. If the land owned by 3B people becomes worthless (both in an economic sense and also in that they can't live there anymore), they'll have to either die, or they'll have to start using land owned by other people. Suppose no significant numbers of people move till they have to (since if we can't coordinate on CO2 sequestration/production, we probably can't coordinate on mitigating the harm from that initial lack of coordination). There are solutions, but they all represent at best a global transfer of resources. Is solving that problem easier than handling CO2 correctly to start with?

"The political difficulty with handling CO2 appropriately is orthogonal to whether it's bad."

I think rational-reasonable people, who are usually the most competent and resourceful - aside from industrial complexes with wealth and willingness to do bad in order to achieve regulatory capture to selfishly benefit themselves - will and are landing on that CO2 is an issue to address but how urgent and how close to castrophou we are is the question, but that also then has to be balanced by how harmful could or will the response be to it, e.g. increasing energy costs by adding a CO2 tax will then kill off how many millions around the world, slow how many more millions from getting out of poverty sooner, and how much natural forest environment gets destroyed from people now needing to cut down forests unsustainably because they need a cheap fuel for heating and cooking?

The issue is "armchair" conversations like this, where most people aren't accounting for or factoring everything necessary for a balanced approach - and there seems to be a big ideological divide and vast amount of teaching to happen, whether people are even calm enough to be willing to listen - or if they're fixed and avoidant, succumbing to whatever hysteria and fear mongering propaganda that they may have been misled by (not to claim everything they believe is false).

A bigger threat in my eyes are authoritarians who want to use climate alarmism to manufacture consent to implement further authoritarian-lockdown type policy.

You at least acknowledge there's a CO2 problem though, which was my only communication goal. Even if the end result is mostly ignoring it for the time being, I think our efforts will be much better spent if we agree that problem exists and decide to side-step it for rational reasons than if we bury our heads in the sand.

Perfect! Now we just need "everyone" to align on a common understanding of the COVID "pandemic" and the Israel-Palestine "conflict" - so people can be calm enough to find common ground for resolution, rather than blindly believing, being indoctrinated into propaganda - from either side, to see the truth; why free speech is so important, and why it's always the bad actors who want to suppress truth under the guise of so-called "misinformation" being more harmful than a lack of free speech.

> then arguably more oil will be formed

No, modern decomposes are more effective than ancient ones. Rare events like landslides might bury carbon effectively, but for the most part it will be returned to the biosphere long before it ends up resembling oil.

Fair enough, so instead more CO2 will be captured in more plants and more animals - and more infrastructure if we use wood or capture it in concrete, etc.

How much more, and on what schedule? The destabilizing effects of "more CO2" antecedent may interfere when the "therefore more wood" consequence.

For instance, here in Colorado we're seeing a lot of our wood turn into CO2 due to an invasive beetle. I can't say for sure if the warming climate is what catalyzed the invasion, but it's plausible.

My point is just that it's uncharted territory, which is inherently more dangerous than charted territory. The system will surely find a new equilibrium eventually but there's no guarantee that we're going to like the path it takes.

Great questions - I wish the side who's wanting to do drastic-widespread and costly changes would also ground their reasons in facts; in contrast, authoritarians-tyrants manufacturing consent to implement policies to control and limit others isn't uncharted territory - and it is what must first be kept at front of mind in all of these conversations.

Perhaps we need our leadership to be a bit more afraid of us so that they we can encourage them to authentically attempt to address these concerns rather than use them as cover for some kind of alternative agenda--which seems to be what you're implying they'll do--but that strikes me as orthogonal to the issue of deciding what steps would be effective in the first place.

Well, in the great scheme of things after millions of years nothing matters really, but this is not a reasonable argument for talking about harm done to humans and ecosystems _now_.

The atmosphere does a good job of mixing CO2 emissions, so someone emitting a ton of CO2 affects others pretty much equally no matter where they are. Unless you can make a good case that some people have some kind of natural or divine right to a lifestyle that emits more CO2 than others the only sensible way to allocate whatever global CO2 allowance we decide we need to stay under is per capita.

Of course, you missed my point though. You can't look at climate in a silo, just like you can't look at the economy in a silo, nor can you look at any one nation in a silo - geopolitics mattering - and the harmful increase in costs the West is taking on with policy is further benefitting the East who's policy allows them to crank up their CO2 production even further, reducing their costs, and benefitting . It's a blatantly obvious disconnect that people pretend doesn't need to be solved at the same time otherwise disadvantage and harm isn't evenly distributed; if harmful policies are going to be implemented instead of technological solutions that don't cause harm but instead accelerate a shift.

> The issue with burning things is the pollution it can cause if not filtered properly before emissions released into the air. CO2 feeds plants to grow, which in turn provides more food and habitat for more life.

You're right, provided you're willing to wait a few million years for everybody to adjust to the new norms. That might be quite an uncomfortable transition though, it's not clear what would survive.

Adaptation can happen far faster than that, and even faster if facilitated further by conscious effort of humans - like tree planting but on specialized steroids; we could technically "seed bomb" areas with seed species that we know thrive in the newer conditions of the area, and even have missionaries on the ground who help cultivate a minimally adequate ecosystem for it to continue to spread on its own.

I'm not sure we have the knowhow to engineer a minimally adequate ecosystem. It seems like every time we zoom in on an ecosystem we find that it's more complex than we thought.

Biodiversity holds secrets which we have a much better shot at discovering than we do at inventing (e.g. novel protein structure and function). Committing to a large scale terraforming project means clobbering the unknown with the known and shutting the door on those secrets forever. It may be one day necessary but it's an outcome that we should avoid at all costs.

We have developed some insights at least, for example a certain type of algae fed to cows reduces their methane released by something like 80% - so mass producing that food additive, ideally in non-harmful way to environment like monocrops cause, and getting that distributed to all cows [which will increase the cost of meat, of the highest nutrient-calorie dense food possible] could be one way to immediately reduce CO2 impacts; but at what externalized costs, if you are taking away-reducing too much of a necessary source of nutrients and caloric intake for certain demographics - and maybe that is more harmful in the short and long-term than executing on other strategies?

The best solution, most efficient, and most harmless solution appears to be driving for abundance so more and more people have more money to pay for what's minimally necessary for products-services that follow minimally acceptable processes; raise the floor for everyone, but not while opening up major cracks hurting or killing off millions or potentially billions if a societal-economic systems collapse and ensuing chaos/disorder - virtue signalling it's for "the greater good" while killing off those who are out of sight and out of mind of the constituents voting them into power [assuming democratic-fair election process - even if gamed unethically to win, still needing to keep up appearances to their ideological mob voter base].

Carbon tax can solve this issue.

Only if it's equally applied globally, at the same time.

Otherwise currently, for example, Canadians are suffering with the increasing CO2 tax - while the East is skyrocketing their CO2 emissions - where arguably the majority of Canadian products bought come from; making Canadian produced goods more expensive due to the CO2 tax, making Chinese goods cheaper to produce - and therefore not only ceding power to China but also destroying more ethical production-manufacturing of goods here in Canada.

I think my comment was perhaps not clear about what should be taxed - if any form of local tax is applied (a direct tax or other administrative measures that make carbon extensive production more expensive) then imports should be comparably taxed.

If economically significant markets implement this then it can have a real global effect. Implementing a local tax only makes the local markets only less competitive and will favor imports from countries that do not implement proper measures.

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