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Comment by dsign | Hacker News Reader

This. I have, lying around unpublished, a few science fiction novels that I wrote where I assumed we actually did everything realistically needed to stop climate change. Like, not the deal "we make some solar panels but keep all the industries," but the real thing: "we take down the industries, we promote degrowth, we embrace and promote a proper demographic collapse, we shame meat eaters, we put youth into environmental enforcement militias, and we change global culture to embrace all of that."

It's a world that has nothing to do with this one. Of course deceiving ourselves with plastic straws is easier.

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I agree in principal, but what is it with the plastic straws thing?

That was never about climate change that I am aware of. It was about pollution, same with plastic bags.

Plastic is a curse on the environment, especially the single use plastic that goes directly in the bin and into landfill or the oceans. Eventually it ends up in the food chain as microplatics.

Do we not want to reduce plastic pollution now? OK, maybe straws are fraction of the plastic pollution created, but surely every little bit helps?

People moan because it is a regular minor incovience to their life. If society can't get over something so trivial we are fucked.

People moan because it’s empty corporate misdirection that misplaces and deflects blame from the actual problem. More than half the plastic in the sea is industrial fishing refuse but sure, the straw in your smoothie is the problem.

I think people just don't like change, and the minor inconvenience turns it into something to moan about. Along with it being on trend to be cynical about everything.

If we just finger point nothing gets done. Yes, industrial fishing destroys the oceans in more ways that one, but that is a global problem, and global consensus on anything is in short supply at the moment.

Probably the best thing to do in the case of fishing waste is to stop eating fish (or pick the source very carefully). That might be an inconvenience as well though...

The solution you suggest is necessary sounds absolutely horrible and very anti human.

Well, it does. Which is the problem. We essentially have three choices: one , we walk the knife edge which is our current-day thinking, where we hope that we somehow enable some magical thing--in the future, always in the future--that solves climate change without making life even a little worse for anybody. Two, we do nothing and adapt to climate change however it comes. Three: we do something unpleasant. Four is "go and make colonies in space" but for most folk that's the same as three.

I mean, the most likely outcome is that we vaporize 80% of humanity in a nuclear war that lasts a few minutes, and then global temperatures end up cooler for a decade thanks to nuclear winter. I guess that falls under "we do something unpleasant", but it's unpleasant in the sense of being life-ending for a majority of humanity and then civilization-destroying for the remainder.

Is it more human to barrel forward filled with greed into extinction? I guess so, sadly

With the way the world is nowadays, maybe a fascist hellhole really is more human to the average idiot.

I hope the evil genius that came up with the idea of making young republican-voting libertarians so angry about plastic straws got a bonus.

Judging by these threads he's pretty much singlehandedly destroyed any attempt to move humanity to cheaper, cleaner, safer, inexhaustible energy supplies.

I don't think it was a republican the one who "destroyed... inexhaustible energy supplies". It was well-meaning environmentalists in Europe who didn't bother with math nor science when they demanded to take down nuclear power and to buy gas from Russia. They were raised in the "end of history" culture of the nineties that was a little too cheerful, but busy shifting manufacture to Asia, and it favored more humanities in schools in this part of the world, in itself not a bad thing, but to the detriment of exact and logical thinking. Maybe all of it made our thinking an easy prey of the people selling the oil and the gas.

Republican or German butterflies (as in "butterfly effect") should not be blamed when they start a big scale avalanche on loose snow.

Yes good point, the evil genius who convinced republican-voting libertarians to irrationally love nuclear power and so nurse an unquenchable grudge against environmentalists and renewables should get a runners up medal in terms of how much damage he's done to the planet.

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