Ask HN: Are You Hopeful About the Environment?

#1

Post by _fol8 » Tue, Jul 02, 2019, 10:12 PM UTC

I guess this is sort of an open-ended question, but I just wanted to know if people on HN were hopeful about solving environmental change/damage.

Last June is now officially the hottest June ever recorded. I guess you can add that to the laundry list of environmental issues we have. My worry is that its looking more and more like we need some sort of technological miracle (or everyone everywhere just stops buying most stuff). And tech seems to be a step function - sometimes you get big things like the Internet and the Engine which can spawn lots of smaller things. But those big things historically have seemed to come about by chance and happenstance as much as hard work. I sometimes worry that we might not solve the environmental crisis because we just won't get lucky.

Does anyone else feel this way? Or are people here mostly hopeful that this thing will all work itself out (please say how!)? Anyone here working on that next big thing?

PS

If you don't believe in a coming environmental catastrophe, that's fine and I'd be happy to have your opinion on why you think so in this thread. But tin foil hatters and political partisans are boring and this isn't really what this thread is about - please spend your time elsewhere. Thanks!

Re: Ask HN: Are You Hopeful About the Environment?

#2

Post by gtsteve » Tue, Jul 02, 2019, 10:32 PM UTC

It's easy to be pessimistic but do you remember CFCs[0]? I don't have time to re-read the article but my recollection of the timeline of events goes somewhat like this:

1. CFCs invented

2. CFCs are in high use

3. Thesis: It's bad for the environment; ozone layer is depleting

4. Antithesis: It's problematic for some businesses to give these up

5. Synthesis: Global effort to stop using them and find replacements

6. Ozone layer is slowly getting better

On one hand, I'm hopeful something similar could happen again.

On the other, the aforementioned events happened in a pre-post-truth world so it might not. You might argue that would be natural selection at work.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chlorofluorocarbon

Re: Ask HN: Are You Hopeful About the Environment?

#3

Post by loons2 » Tue, Jul 02, 2019, 11:18 PM UTC

Records are set every year. A record just means no observation was previously recorded.

There's a catastrophe every generation that turns out to have been a false alarm by the time the next generation's catastrophe is fabricated.

For instance, my wife was told "no homework tonight since we'll all be dead tomorrow anyway." (Cuban Missile Crisis)

Around the time of the first Earth Day, the predictions of environmental apocalypse were legion, yet societies somehow seem to find ways to fix things that societies broke. They also seem to find ways to fix things that tyrants broke.

When you see dozens of such dire predictions over a lifetime, you start to get skeptical. Skepticism is a good thing, btw. Without it, there wouldn't be any science.

Re: Ask HN: Are You Hopeful About the Environment?

#4

Post by anm89 » Tue, Jul 02, 2019, 11:23 PM UTC

Unfortunately not at all.

A lot of this comes from extensive travel and spending time in the third and second world. Many of the poorest billion simply do not realize that it is against their interest not to, for example, dump chemicals and trash in water they drink from and bathe in. Or just simply that littering is a problem. To be clear I'm not faulting them, like everyone else they are mostly good people and if they had better access to information I have no doubt they'd act differently but there is a huge need to educate people that is not being met.

It's also just hard to imagine consumption of everyday objects at the global scale.

But it's really hard to feel like recycling one more bottle is going to save the world when you've seen dump trucks waiting in line to dump industrial waste in rivers. But this sort of thing is likely happening every day, repeatedly, in many places around the world.

I once drove through a section of highway in north western Peru that was just an open air landfill on both sides, maybe 5 feet tall on average, continously for an hour. It's just hard to imagine that stuff like this exists if you've never been exposed to it.

And that doesn't even match things I've seen only in documentaries like https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=dd_ZttK3PuM

I believe that our problems are technically still fixable but that the coordination necessary is, if not totally infeasible, far beyond our current willpower to achieve.

The rich (and all but the poorest Americans are rich for this discussion) will basically be fine maybe minus inconveniences for the near future.

But I think things are going to get drastically worse for many people over the next 50 years.

Re: Ask HN: Are You Hopeful About the Environment?

#5

Post by tunesmith » Tue, Jul 02, 2019, 11:28 PM UTC

I wonder how much we've improved trends already. I mean, I realize that we are in a worse situation now than has been previously projected, but with hindsight knowledge, I wonder how much worse off (in tenths or hundredths of degrees or whatever) we'd be if we hadn't globally taken the environment actions we've already taken. The amount of solar we have now has made a dent, hasn't it?

Re: Ask HN: Are You Hopeful About the Environment?

#6

Post by billconan » Tue, Jul 02, 2019, 11:29 PM UTC

I am pessimistic about the future. I guess I will not raise any child, given I don’t think humanity will last long.

Re: Ask HN: Are You Hopeful About the Environment?

#7

Post by qsymmachus » Tue, Jul 02, 2019, 11:29 PM UTC

So long as economic growth remains the primary goal of most societies, and so long as that economic growth is tied to the use of fossil fuels, then climate change will not be stopped.

Re: Ask HN: Are You Hopeful About the Environment?

#8

Post by maxbendick » Tue, Jul 02, 2019, 11:30 PM UTC

No, not at all. Incentives aren't alligned in politics, industry, or in the home for real change to happen. It's a tradgedy of the commons.

Re: Ask HN: Are You Hopeful About the Environment?

#9

Post by mikeash » Tue, Jul 02, 2019, 11:35 PM UTC

loons2 wrote: post #3

Records are set every year. A record just means no observation was previously recorded. There's a catastrophe every generation that turns out to have been a false alarm by the time the next generation's catastrophe is fabricated. For instance, my wife was told "no homework tonight since we'll all be dead tomorrow anyway." (Cuban Missile Crisis) Around the time of the first Earth Day, the predictions of environmental…

Lots of catastrophes came true. Your example of the Cuban Missile Crisis is particularly odd: there was nothing at all overblown about the worry, and there’s a pretty good case to be made that the fate of the world came down to a single tired, sweaty guy in a submarine making the right decision.

Re: Ask HN: Are You Hopeful About the Environment?

#10

Post by qsymmachus » Tue, Jul 02, 2019, 11:37 PM UTC

gtsteve wrote: post #2

It's easy to be pessimistic but do you remember CFCs[0]? I don't have time to re-read the article but my recollection of the timeline of events goes somewhat like this: 1. CFCs invented 2. CFCs are in high use 3. Thesis: It's bad for the environment; ozone layer is depleting 4. Antithesis: It's problematic for some businesses to give these up 5. Synthesis: Global effort to stop using them and find replacements 6. Ozo…

Phasing out CFCs was much easier to do because CFCs do not make up the backbone of the global economy the way fossil fuels do.

There were some hacks in the aerosol and chemical industries who tried to deny that it was a problem (the chairman of the board of Dupont declared that ozone depletion theory was "a science fiction tale...a load of rubbish...utter nonsense"), but they were small fry in relative terms.

The bottom line is that too many powerful peoples' wallets are lined with money earned by burning fossil fuels. That's why there is no Montreal Protocol for carbon dioxide.