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Comment by graeme | Hacker News Reader

>The crazy thing is that we have basically everything we need right now.

Have you travelled? This doesn't describe most of the world. Most of the world would need to increase carbon emissions to live the way you're describing.

You aren't describing a zero carbon lifestyle, you're describing a lower carbon lifestyle. And we still use carbon in building the things in your scenario: the building, the car, etc.

Lower carbon lifestyles can slow the speed of the increase in global warming, but as long as we're emitting any carbon we're increasing global energy forcing.

By all means choose lower carbon lifestyles, but fundamentally we need nuclear or renewables + battery or all of the above such that we don't face a tradeoff between energy use and getting stuff people want.

Energy is extremely useful.

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The idea of average individuals being the relevant actors in global carbon emissions is pure misdirection. They're not, it's systemic with industry being the main culprit and the rich being the ones who benefit from that socialization of pollution costs.

The AMOC shutdown isn't merely "possible" and due "this century" either. The math of the dynamics of complex systems shows the current behavior to be signs of a phase transition in the process of happening. The speed of that shutdown isn't "decades" either, it's more likely just years.

The voices of "experts" telling you it was all some incomprehensible conundrum should deeply worry you. They're either not being honest or they're no experts.

> They're not, it's systemic with industry being the main culprit and the rich being the ones who benefit from that socialization of pollution costs.

You two might agree if we consider that when you say "rich" you might describe the average individual on this website (if we consider all people alive).

I do believe that 90% of the people would not want to actually destroy the planet the way it seems to be happening, but I also believe that 90% of the people can't refrain themselves from bad health habits either. So, to fix the root cause I would discuss more about people's bad emotional/impulse control, otherwise we will just change one issue (climate) to any of the others (violence, unhappiness, etc.)

It's an even smaller percentage of people that are most responsible. Any multimillionaire is already someone who could have an impact, but mostly it's the 100 million club and up that are causing the most damage. And bug LLCs in general, since those are essentially optimising for profit only.

No, you're entirely wrong.

The impact an individual has on carbon emissions is directly correlated with their wealth. The distribution of which is extremely uneven: as of 2024, the top 1% worldwide possessed as much as the lower 95% combined, 57 trillion US$. That has gotten only worse in the last two years.

It's not about "bad habits", impulse control or whatever, at all.

Wealth distribution is an issue, but lots of "wealth" is due to stuff that is owned by some and used by many.

Take a landlord as an example: he might have 100 houses and own 99% of the wealth in a village, but if the houses are inhabited, people still use them. If those people want to use a 300 sq meter houses rather than 50 sq meter studios, they do contribute as well to the climate issue.

This holds for other fields as well. Example: "... private air travel accounted for 6.3% of the ‘total commercial plus private aviation emissions’ in the USA in 2019, and 7.9% in 2021." https://www.nature.com/articles/s43247-024-01775-z

I honestly can't say that 92.1% which is from "normal" population is ignorable.

There are no easy solution and everybody is responsible by different degrees. Pointing fingers and wanting "others" to fix it first is not in my view something that ever worked.

> I honestly can't say that 92.1% which is from "normal" population is ignorable.

It would be even harder to ignore if the 0.003% of the population causing 7.9% of the emissions were banned from private flight and had to start doing "normal" flight like everyone else :)

Your simplistic take is fundamentally wrong. It would take someone in the bottom 99% of the world's population more than 1,500 years to match the personal lifetime carbon footprint of a billionaire.

People in the top 1% can be attributed with 25% of emissions when you take their investments into account also.

But most importantly, they are the ones who actually "steer the boat". They are responsible for the utter lack of proper action against the pollution.

Your "arguments" are precisely the deflection they employ to steer public attention away from them. Notice the utter absurdity of asking the bottom 99% of humanity to take responsibility for what they have absolutely no control over.

In the event that it helps: telling people that they're wrong repeatedly is not a very effective way to get your point across.

It certainly doesn't help them, but it does help others reading the comment chain.

> Notice the utter absurdity of asking the bottom 99% of humanity to take responsibility for what they have absolutely no control over.

I notice the absurdity of you suggesting you have no responsibility.

It is a matter of how you choose the percentage. You choose 99%. If you would have said 50%, than whoops, suddenly you would include yourself in the responsible part. I claim that most rich people (western countries) are in the responsible part and maybe they should start reason like that.

You claim that rich people shouldn't fly. I would be fine with nobody flying. Or, even, with only rich people flying but not more than today (that would be still a 10x reduction in CO2!).

In my opinion too many people think in the terms of "what should the others do" rather in terms of "what should we all do", so that they have an excuse to do nothing.

You consistently try to re-frame the matter in a factually incorrect way.

While average individuals do have responsibility, theirs is many orders of magnitude smaller. Not only from their personal impact being comparatively minuscule, but because their objective possibilities to make substantial changes is negligible.

It's not "a matter of how you choose the percentage": the distribution is as it is, a "hockey stick" shape. The numbers just help to understand that.

Western people are far from being uniform in their wealth. While generally certainly substantially richer than other parts of the world, their societies nonetheless are wildly uneven in their wealth-distribution. You might want to look at actual data on the subject, your intuition is way off.

You're right on principle in that collective action is needed. But the reality of the matter is, collective action in western societies is captured by the rich. They control the media, the purse and the government effectively.

Most of that wealth is just a tag on physical things that would happen anyway, just with another tag.

This ignores that physical things can happen in many different ways, most of which are decided by those who have the money. The choices of the rich aren't preordained, so there's no reason to absolve them of the responsibility for their decisions.

This isn't true at all. If all of the global rich immediately became carbonless monks....we would cut only a portion of emissions. And continuing to emit increases global warming. Even if you estimate that the top 1% use 70% of our carbon (implausible) that still just pushes threshold back a few decades.

And if industry stopped producing with carbon billions would starve. Industry makes stuff for people. Energy is useful, we aren't just taking oil, coal and gas and burning it in factories for fun.

Them becoming carbonless would already cut 16.5% of emissions. Together with their investments they are responsible for 25% of emissions.

But more importantly, the reason nothing is happening to cut the systemic reasons for the pollution is due to them.

You present a straw man when you point at simplistic nonsense like "energy is useful". There is no dichotomy "either carbon pollution or we sit in caves". You argue from ignorance.

> Even if you estimate that the top 1% use 70% of our carbon (implausible) that still just pushes threshold back a few decades.

Getting a few more decades to handle this thing would be amazing!

Indeed I have traveled, and I am in favour of nuclear and renewables and batteries for pretty much the reasons you state. There are other issues (concrete production comes to mind, and it always bugs me that houses in Europe are so dependent on concrete when its a huge emissions source) but when you're running your building equipment and factories and transit networks on zero emissions electricity (so we can include nuclear, which I suppose isn't renewable but is still very low carbon) then the building, the car, etc. have lower embodied carbon as well.

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