Ask HN: Are You Hopeful About the Environment?

CO2 and global effort were being talked about and the IPCC was being created out of UNEP right back when we were starting to take action on CFCs.

Reagan and Thatcher together pushed for global action on CFCs, and were pretty central to the Montreal Treaty getting signed. Only Thatcher pushed for global action on CO2 in the late 80s. Her speech to the UN from 89 is surprising, if naively optimistic about business' role in things, but she seemed very well informed about a then little known or understood science, and even talked of stopping forest and species loss.

Approach the mid 90s and Thatcher was caught up in her dogmatic, failing government, while science, CO2 and plenty of other things were forgotten.

Reagan wasn't at all keen, even of the then new IPCC. Maybe had he been interested too...

https://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/10/science/the-montreal-prot...

The scary thing isn't the current state of the climate. The scary thing is passing a point of no return where climate change becomes non-linear and self-feeding. According to many reports, we are not far off from that point. Still, we are in a world where a non-negligible portion of the population believes that climate change is fabricated, or at least overstated. Scientists won't be able to really do anything other than measure the problem until public sentiment gets behind them. Startups won't do anything until VCs see an opportunity to make exponential returns on their investments. The best case is the linear portion of climate change hits us hard, corrects public sentiment, and we have enough time to fix the planet before true catastrophe.

I was so disappointed when I found out that this is how my recycling was being handled. I had this image in my head of my plastic waste being recirculated and reused that was so completely false.

As I understand it, recycling is just the long road to the landfill.

I believe in cycles. Things get worse, things get better. You never hear about when things get better.

For the last several years, people were saying that CA was in drought and that this was the "new normal". I didn't believe it, and I was right. This year is particularly colder than last year, even though we had 2 extremely hot days. This is how weather works, it's always changing. I think the next few years will continue to be wet in CA and then we'll hit another cycle of droughts and back and forth. It's also safe to note that the drought we experienced wasn't worse than the 1930s due to weather, it was worse because more water was being consumed by humans, which is a different sort of environmental disaster.

I do believe that the Earth is getting hotter, but I also believe we will get cooler over the next several years. But no one will talk about that because it doesn't get clicks.

We need to plant new trees and we need to incentivize countries to not cut down their forests. Places like Indonesia and Brazil, etc, need to be incentivized to keep their forests instead of cutting it down for cash crops.

I think the bigger crisis is plastic, pollution and chemicals in our water. We need to stop creating so much plastic and make extremely draconian laws controlling this. We need to stamp down on pollution from factories. Companies that spill into our lakes and rivers and oceans need to be fined with extreme prejudice. If they go out of business I simply don't care, I would rather see them out of business than have our water and environment polluted.

When I was a teenager, I thought I would never see my 30ieth birthday because of the hole in the ozone layer, or nuclear war, or something like it.

It was not a nice feeling.

Now I am a bit wary of doomsday scenarios. I am not convinced we have seen any real impact of global warming yet (higher temperatures perhaps, but no land has been flooded, for example. Nothing catastrophic has occurred).

I am pessimistic about human expansion, though. I think we are in the middle of a population explosion that started with the invention of agriculture and has not ended yet. Humans will consume everything that get's in their way.

That is the same as with all other species, though (like the classical fox and rabbits scenario - fox population growing until there are only few rabbits left, foxes starving, and so on). Once we hit a natural limit, things will balance out somehow. That doesn't imply that it will be pleasant.

I'm less worried about global warming. There are too many doomsday scenarios. I think if it was that easy to break the balance, it would have happened before. So I think there may be regulating mechanisms that we haven't really taken into account. "Hottest June ever recorded" may not mean that much. There can be smaller cycles (like some news now predict a coming mini ice age because of sun activity), measuring stations can have changed (cities are warmer), all sorts of things.

I think classical damage will probably be worse - agriculture, depleting water reservoirs, destroying top soil, depleting fish populations, deforestation, destruction of animals natural habitats... That's depressing for sure. Maybe the only hope is for capitalism to come up with better means of production. After all, the environment is actually doing better in some places than a couple of decades ago.

Ultimately I think it may also be an illusion that it would be normal for things to remain the same.