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Comment by littlecranky67 | Hacker News Reader

I think it is fundamentally a demographic problem. We have a growing aging population in the worst-offending western countries, soon to be the majority voters (in some countries we are approaching 50% voters above age of 50). Wealth and fortune tend to come with age, so the same group sits on the assets needed to make a change (and are the worst offenders regarding CO2 production). At the same time, this group cares the least about the future livability of the planet, as the worst symptoms will only start to show when they have already passed away.

That is a fundamental problem that you will not solve by asking youger folks, who are actually affected and have all reason to agree and comply, to make a change.

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I doubt that even younger folks in developed countries will be affected as drastically as "livability" perhaps implies.

I get the feeling that many are confused and fear the literal destruction of our planet by accelerating warming.

The reality is that the underlying physics fundamentally work in the opposite way, with warming slowing down rather than accelerating. I understand that for warming below 2C, the confidence is high that it is roughly a linear relation to additional CO2 emitted.

I'm optimistic about most things in life, perhaps it's a flaw of mine.

I do think we have decades, if not centuries, to develop solutions to climate change. Our planet will remain livable.

That said, I understand some ecological damage that may occur with global warming could be irreversible, and it makes sense to reduce emissions as soon as possible.

> I doubt that even younger folks in developed countries will be affected as drastically as "livability" perhaps implies.

From what I have seen its more linked to affluence of countries than anything else.

I think the whole framing of climate issues as "saving the planet" is misguided. Yes, the planet will remain livable pretty much no matter what. The threat of climate change isn't the literal destruction of the planet, or even the literal extinction of humanity. Rather it's such severe changes to the planet's biosphere that human civilization would be threatened.

Potential climate catastrophe scenarios where rapidly rising sea levels submerge many inhabited areas and various knock-on effects disrupt the food chain, even in those scenarios the planet is fine on geological timescales. What's not fine is human civilization, on human timescales. And I think this is what gets inadvertently hidden behind planet-saving rhetoric. If the worst case scenarios are "only" about billions of people dying due to resource scarcity and conflicts over said resources, this is something to be avoided.

I see a parallel with global nuclear war. Such a war would probably not end the species, there would be groups of survivors here and there. But human civilization as we know it would be over, with the global population being back to what it was in the hunter-gatherer era.

Isn't even that dramatically overstated?

If sea levels rise significantly faster than over the last century, this seems likely to cause economic disruption, rather than threatening human civilization.

Even when we look at knock-on effects and food security, it seems very unlikely to threaten wealthy, developed countries with diversified food supply.

It is still going to disproportionately affect developing countries that are already struggling.

The biggest issue in the near to medium term is that tons of people in southeast asia will soon be living below sea level. This will require either an enormous infrastructure program or a massive refugee crisis.

I just don't fully agree anymore.

I always cared. But I care more as I age. Why? Because I know (vaguely) the danger and I have ____KIDS____.

Older people usually have kids too. For anyone, ANYONE who accepts/knows the dangers we face to just shrug, knowing it's their own kids and grand kids that will suffer (wars, political upheaval, riots, deaths, migration) - no. I don't buy it.

Principally, it's the ignorance of the people to the things that matters most. Maybe they are partially sticking their heads in the sand a bit. But if it truly was properly reported on prime-time news and so on, they would know, and they would care.

90% of people are stupid and people who think this deep like you are basically <1%

so better to just live in SF or certain areas of the midwest

where climate change won’t affect me

It will affect you via second order effects

not as long you are rich (relative to the rest of the world)

> But if it truly was properly reported on prime-time news and so on, they would know, and they would care.

I don't know a single person that isn't aware of the issue, it's just a significant portion of them think it is outright fake or they just otherwise don't care because they see it as a lame thing to care about. How does one fix that side of things? It seems a major impediment to any progress.

In my experience, being a parent is unfortunately a poor predictor of caring and being ready to act on climate change or its effects.

The split seems mostly generational; my parents and other parents around their age seem to not really care (there are still dinner table debates about whether Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth was a scam or not), but as my other-millennial friends are becoming parents, the vast majority of them do care, because this issue has been so front-of-mind for people my age. We're hyperaware of the fact that my country has more wildfires, milder winters, and hotter summers than it did when we all were growing up.

(There may be selection bias at play here; while I don't go out of my way to avoid them, I don't have many friends who deny the issue of climate change).

Many of us are also tracking the second- and third-order effects of these things; crop failures, droughts, and the migration and public services strain that come as a result of this; most frustrating is that the biggest voter blocs won't enact policy that's responsive to this, so when the inevitable (mass, climate-change-driven migration) grows over the coming decades, we'll be unprepared, and we'll either be overwhelmed by the movement of people, or complicit in one of the greatest humanitarian crises in history (and very possibly both).

> Older people usually have kids too

They are NOT, and the trend is pointing downwards. That is the demographic shift, which many call demographic catastrofe.

It's hysterical seeing the younger generations being asked to forego plastic straws while leaders in their parents and grandparents generations wage selfish wars. I'm sure saving on those straws will catch up to all those oil tankers that were burned in the last few months.

I'm middle aged and have no kids so I probably fall into your category, in the sense that as long as it doesn't bite hard before I go it's in my top 5 political priorities but not at #1.

However my friends who have kids and grandkids care a great deal about climate change and generally do what they can politically (i.e. vote for Greens and so on) within the constraints of life (i.e. they're not out there throwing soup at paintings or whatever).

Maybe that's what it will take. I expect ecoterrorism to become a serious thing in the next decade or two. Who knew the Amish were right all along?

> Who knew the Amish were right all along?

When the Amish said that modern technology destroys the family they weren't envisioning a climate catastrophe being the thing that destroyed the family.

I recently travelled to the primary old-order region of my country, where I hadn't been in about a decade, and all the horses in the fields I remember have now been replaced by tractors. Let's be real: They don't fear climate change any more than the average Joe does, possibly less having less exposure to the science and messaging. All they have ever feared was families being broken apart by the kids leaving for the big city lights.

> However my friends who have kids and grandkids care a great deal about climate change and generally do what they can politically

As long as you got money, you can afford to "save on CO2" and buy a prius or whatnot. The thing is, we can't really avoid making things that are bad for the environment without making everything expensive. You can ban a product, like oil or fosil fuels, but you are banning the best solution - which is often also the cheapest. If it wasn't the best/cheapest, then why would you need to ban it, people would not be using it.

Climate politics eventually raises cost of living. If we could lower cost of living AND save the environment we would be already doing it.

So all the measures to save the climate will inevitable impact the lowest income households the most. Which is - and here we close the circle - the young, working population. The retired one have the wealth and assets, as established earlier.

Often the cheapest solution is only cheapest because its producers aren't paying for externalities.

You made my point. If those externalities are priced in, the producers will have to pay more, and ultimately all prices are passed on to the consumer -> rising cost of living.

> That is a fundamental problem that you will not solve by asking youger folks, who are actually affected and have all reason to agree and comply, to make a change.

Younger folks tend to be more enthusiastic about "making a change" by direct action means, so you shouldn't count them out!

Individual action isn’t enough and they don’t have the resources.

Which is literally OPs point.

It is true that they don't have the resources in their natural state, but it is extraction and use of those resources that causes the problem. Letting the resources remain in their natural state is the solution!

Here's the thing: Resources aren't extracted just for fun. It is only done so to serve the consumer, and those consumers are disproportionately young-to-middle-age adults. Not using resources is the only way to combat this. That is fully within their control.

It was a joke based on the historical fact that students frequently trigger violent uprisings...

Democracies in general are suffering the fallout of losing its information economy.

From the death of local newspapers, the end of classifieds and the pressures on ad revenues, journalism had no real options but to shrink and consolidate.

The more content we create, the more the market focuses on creating content that could garner attention.

People are going to vote based on the information they have. If they are part of a captive market, then they are going to pick between the choices they are presented or decline to participate.

It’s some sort of irony, that as a society we developed ways to neutralize free speech and expression by flooding the zone with more content, not by controlling content.

I think partly it’s also that democracies aren’t great at longer term planning.

Like in my country there is a big election every 4 years and you have state elections in between. So any government needs to constantly appease the people to stay in power and do anything. It’s basically impossible for them to make and more importantly realise any plans that go beyond that 4/5 year timeframe.

And to solve something like climate change we would need to think in decades or centuries.

I guess that’s why I see a lot more future in China. No need these short term goals. They can have goals spanning decades.

They say they plan long term but look at what they do: build entire cities for nothing. A Supreme Leader who clings to power in advanced age, with no successor, setting the system up for a power struggle after his departure.

They can have long term plans but they suffer from the consequences of authoritarian government.

Not the same problems as democracy but I would argue that authoritarianism is even worse.

This is a tradeoff.

We have tried autocracies over and over again, and they have the same failure state. Eventually you get to a leadership that is not capable of adapting to the situation and has no pressure to change, and all the ability to suppress life saving change.

I agree 100%. Autocracies are even worse like I said in my other comment.

But tur shortsightedness of democracies also seems to lead to disaster long term.

I guess on a long enough timeline the survival rate for everyone drops to 0, there is no real way to prevent it

> approaching 50% voters above age of 50).

IIRC,this is already true for some?

I'm not sure your age cut off is quite right, I'm 50 in a few months and my wife and our friends are all quite "pro climate" (just to easily sum it up), most people I know from the younger end of GenX are... the problem lies just a few years beyond that with the older GenX and up into the Boomers, which is where all the money is.

Yea it’s not an age thing as much as it’s a “I got mine and I’m gonna pull up the ladder and defend it” mentality. Yes, a stereotypical Boomer take, but not necessarily limited to or locked to the entire generation.

> and are the worst offenders regarding CO2 production

Unless you're doing those strange mental gymnastics of entities like oil companies are the emitters and not the consumers, that's not true. Old people who have gained large amounts of wealth have also lost large amounts of mobility and tend to not produce much co2 because they don't do much in life anymore, comparatively speaking. The data is clear that peak carbon emitters are in their 30s-40s, and they're still the ones most often seen crying about not being able to afford a home.

Do the voters matter?

A third of CO₂ emissions come from a country that is not a democracy.

So 2/3 from those that are? It just means that those that are need to do more heavy lifting because there is at least a choice. Fair? No, but Earth doesn't care about what is fair and who does the most. It only cares about total output and so will the environment you live in.

> It just means that those that are need to do more heavy lifting because there is at least a choice.

That will not work because it means people just move high emitting activities to those countries.

For example the evisceration of the British steel industry means we import steel from China: dirtier energy mix, plus transport of a very heavy commodity.

My math is a bit rusty, but I'm pretty sure 1/3 is less than 1/2.

It is. How is that relevant?

If you want to compare democracies to non-democracies then you have to add all the other non-democracies too which would give you more than half.

The people of China vote.

You are right that they don't have a democracy because the people are unable to truly organize without the powers that be at the top putting an end to any movements, but the people in the remaining 2/3s of the world never bother to take time to organize either, so the democracy they do have is really only a belief, something theoretical, and they if they ever decided to exercise it in the future may find out that they weren't actually under democracy after all.

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