Ask HN: Are You Hopeful About the Environment?

You can get ahead of the eventualities and help by learning how to survive without the use of fossil fuels which is difficult but more or less achievable today. Use electric bikes, cars and motorcycles. Work remotely. Try to find an efficient home. Live in a climate that doesn't require too much heating or cooling. Eat vegetables more and so on.

I know you didn't ask for it, but there is a political factor too. Vote for politicians who take the environment seriously. There are industries that need regulation. No matter how much you're trying, if they aren't, progress on the solution will be slowed or stopped.

I agree that it will take some pain before we get behind fixing the problem. My concern is that once it is painful, we won't be technologically capable of saving the planet.

It's "lack of information" or in this case being mislead by whoever promised them their recycling is contributing to being green...

1. Rate of progress and market adoption of key technologies (ICE alternatives and renewables) is much higher than I would have anticipated even 10 years ago, let alone 15 years. I am hopeful that, even with only market forces, by the end of my lifetime developed economies will have more-or-less righted the ship on GHG production with a corresponding blueprint for the rest of the world.

2. I think we still have a long time before some of the worst-case feedback loops are triggered.

3. The realities of climate change are becoming difficult to ignore. This is, paradoxically, good news because it makes denial a less tenable barrier to action in the mid-term future.

All that said, I'm hedging my bets with real estate investments in regions that are most likely to benefit from mid-term impacts of warming.

My more specific take: As a human of generally European-ish descent born in the United States, the wave of extinctions that gave land-dominance to mammals, the likely genocide of closely related hominids by the homo-sapiens, the ecological changes putatively caused by the first wave of human occupants including all the extinctions of large land animals on this continent, the subsequent genocide of the first human occupants, the conflicts and wars that caused my ancestors to emigrate, ... those were all necessary conditions for the exact experiences I've had in my life.

I'm not saying I support genocide! (my ancestors are mostly all Jewish.) I'm just saying that the farther something is in the past, the more it just seems like a fact of history, no matter how miserable and wrenching it was for all the organisms that lived through it.

We have no way of knowing what we're really creating, and it may well be that we're creating a hundred thousand years of extinctions and inhospitable weather which will be more difficult to live through for our descendants than the conditions we were born into. We may be radically shrinking our own natural habitat. We may be paving the way for a different dominant organism. We may be living in an era that future humans will give as much thought to as we give to the years 1000-1100 C.E. Who knows! and in the long game, the thousands and millions of years perspective, who's to say what's good or bad?