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Ask HN: Are You Hopeful About the Environment?

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

#51

Post by slg »

iso1337 wrote: post #50
slg wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is worth remembering that less than 2 years ago thousands of Americans were killed and 3 million plus Americans spent months without electricity due to a hurricane. It is impossible to link that single event to climate change since climate is about trends and not single events, but that event came and went and generally speaking the country barely seemed to care.

Are you referring to the one that hit Puerto Rico? Cynically I think that's because many people don't consider that truly part of America. (Note that's not my personal views, but just trying to make sense of why there was such a lackluster response). My original comment was really trying to get at the human factors involved as to why we don't care. We just seem to be bad at responding to trends but better at respondi…

Yes, I was referring to hurricane Maria that impacted Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands.

>We just seem to be bad at responding to trends but better at responding to single events.

That is the problem since climate change is only visible when looking at trends. 100 year floods were very much a thing before climate change so you can't point to a single 100 year flood as a sign of a problem. You instead have to point to X number of 100 year floods in Y number of years.

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

#52

Post by agentultra »

lancewiggs wrote: post #40

I'm terrified. For example: The ice cap melts are accelerating a lot faster than modelled. The mechanisms are not yet perfectly understood. The major flows of sea water (e.g. Gulf Stream) are at risk of changing completely with the temperature changes, which means dramatic changes in climate for Europe (colder), USA (warmer) (for example) are possible. Who knows - and the answer is nobody really. The acidification of…

Agreed.

I think one of the ways we could survive this is to radically reform our philosophies and politics. We need to make amends with and reform indigenous rights. LBGTQ+ and women's rights. Abandon capitalism. Accept immigrant and migration. Change our perception of what it means to be happy from endless consumerism to self-actualization and social acceptance. We may have to scale back our modern lives: abandon international tourism, next-day delivery, unlimited energy and clean water, built-in obsolescence, disposable culture etc. Re-design the technology too useful to abandon to be low-impact: as little energy as possible, reliable and interchangeable components, peer-to-peer networks and protocols, etc. Design our lives for near-zero emissions, near-zero waste. Re-learn lost arts like ship building, wood working, forestry, cloth making, foraging, water management, perma-culture, and what it's like to live without plastic, etc.

I believe we have as much capacity for making the environment better as we do for destroying it. It's a matter of will, perception, determination and luck.

I hope we all make it.

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

#53

Post by loons2 »

mikeash wrote: post #9
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.

For a couple weeks, there was almost nothing else in the news. JFK was a single tired guy in a submarine? We might be thinking of different Cuban Missile Crises.

https://www.history.com/topics/cold-war/cuban-missile-crisis

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

#54

Post by state_less »

iso1337 wrote: post #50
slg wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is worth remembering that less than 2 years ago thousands of Americans were killed and 3 million plus Americans spent months without electricity due to a hurricane. It is impossible to link that single event to climate change since climate is about trends and not single events, but that event came and went and generally speaking the country barely seemed to care.

Are you referring to the one that hit Puerto Rico? Cynically I think that's because many people don't consider that truly part of America. (Note that's not my personal views, but just trying to make sense of why there was such a lackluster response). My original comment was really trying to get at the human factors involved as to why we don't care. We just seem to be bad at responding to trends but better at respondi…

As far as human factor go, do you think political groups would do well to take more 'extremist' positions like outlawing gas burning cars and outlaw kerosene-based air travel, etc? It seems extreme, but isn't that what we are going to need to do anyway?

The environmental political base would stomach it, the opposition would think you're crazy, but they weren't going to help anyway. The tuned-out folks might take notice, "You want to do what?"

Talking about an abstract fossil fuel tax is not visceral enough. Threaten to take away something tangible and you might have their attention. Once you have their attention, explain why you're (we're) in this bind, then ask them to help. Ask them what they want to do if not your plan? Don't settle for anything less than serious fossil fuel withdrawal.

It feels heavy handed, but not too far off the mark from what's needed.

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

#55

Post by mikeash »

loons2 wrote: post #53
mikeash wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

For a couple weeks, there was almost nothing else in the news. JFK was a single tired guy in a submarine? We might be thinking of different Cuban Missile Crises. https://www.history.com/topics/cold-war/cuban-missile-crisis

Vasily Arkhipov was a single tired guy in a submarine. The Soviet submarine B-59 was being depth charged and its captain wanted to launch a nuclear torpedo at the US Navy fleet that was pursuing it. Two other officers had to agree to launch the torpedo. One agreed, and Arkhipov was the other. They argued but he refused and convinced the captain to surface.

JFK's role was pretty important too. The military tried quite hard to convince him to go to war. Good thing he wasn't stuck in a broken-down, overheating submarine with explosions going off all around it, or he might not have been so steadfast.

The world was on the brink of a war that would make WWII look like a fun walk in the woods. Am I supposed to think that a couple of weeks of non-stop news coverage was excessive?

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

#56

Post by primroot »

agentultra wrote: post #49

I don't believe that the next ~200 years will be anything but catastrophic for life on this planet. I'm not hopeful that we can "solve" climate change or avert catastrophe. As I understand it we're in the early phases of a sixth mass extinction event caused by many factors. Most of them anthropocentric. The only thing we have power over now is determining how severe the building catastrophes will be. If we can mobili…

I am now remembering that book by W. Heisenberg "Das Naturbild der heutigen Physik," which talks about how Physics and Mathematics overcame the Cartesian mindset. I think that Cartesian mindset needs to be questioned more than ever now that we need to come up with unprecedented measures against all odds. For example, I see modernity as being predicated on this platonic notion that we humans have our minds separate from the material world, and from these minds ideas emerge, including the ideas about what we should aspire to. There is little regard for the way in which technology tends to be a tool for us to indulge in our more basic impulses (unless, I think, one works in PR). I refuse to say primitive because the impulses I am thinking of are more of the nature mentioned by Veblen when he talks about conspicuous waste. So as a result of this tendency, we are in this paradox, in which technology actually seems to be shrinking our possibilities (I think David Graeber mentions this in another context), and the world is turning into a monoculture both literally and metaphorically. The result is less resilience in the face catastrophe and less capacity to adapt in the face of energy shortages, because the complexities that allowed for adaptation (different ways of living, biodiversity, crop diversity) have been steadily eliminated. There are also economic impulses behind this, related to the process of commoditization, and the reliance on debt. The first is seen as good because allows creating economies of scale. The latter makes scarcity be a good thing, because if things are not scarce enough then they cannot be converted into enough money to pay debts. Hence, people worry about employment and growth. Environmental degradation never subtracts from growth, and neither do chronic diseases.

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

#57

Post by primroot »

agentultra wrote: post #52
lancewiggs wrote: post #40

I'm terrified. For example: The ice cap melts are accelerating a lot faster than modelled. The mechanisms are not yet perfectly understood. The major flows of sea water (e.g. Gulf Stream) are at risk of changing completely with the temperature changes, which means dramatic changes in climate for Europe (colder), USA (warmer) (for example) are possible. Who knows - and the answer is nobody really. The acidification of…

Agreed. I think one of the ways we could survive this is to radically reform our philosophies and politics. We need to make amends with and reform indigenous rights. LBGTQ+ and women's rights. Abandon capitalism. Accept immigrant and migration. Change our perception of what it means to be happy from endless consumerism to self-actualization and social acceptance. We may have to scale back our modern lives: abandon in…

I can't upvote this enough. The way I see it, the Holocene is over, no more neolithic civilization, unless we keep powering the machines with lots of energy in order to cling to the past (which is a big part of the use we have been giving to machines, and the reason why Modernity is a sham) as mythified by our collective amnesia. We need to integrate our lives with the ecosystem in order to create virtuous cycles of soil restoration, reconsider ways of living that would make us more resilient in the face of modern technology being unavailable, and start questioning the institutions of civilization such as marriage and private property. When collapse arrives the latter too are just unavoidable, the Earth will ruthlessly desecrate our myths and idols, so it's better if we ourselves do it in a more orderly fashion, waking up from the dreams for which we have abused technology as a sort of hallucinogenic soporific.

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

#59

Post by dpflan »

This Wordsworth poem has stuck with me for years. It's from ~1807 and still rings true about humanity and nature:

The World Is Too Much with Us

  The world is too much with us; late and soon,
  Getting and spending we lay waste our powers;
  Little we see in Nature that is ours;
  We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
  This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon,
  The winds that will be howling at all hours,
  And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers,
  For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
  It moves us not. --Great God! I'd rather be
  A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
  So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
  Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
  Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
  Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_Is_Too_Much_with_Us

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

#60

Post by futureastronaut »

primroot wrote: post #57
agentultra wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. I think one of the ways we could survive this is to radically reform our philosophies and politics. We need to make amends with and reform indigenous rights. LBGTQ+ and women's rights. Abandon capitalism. Accept immigrant and migration. Change our perception of what it means to be happy from endless consumerism to self-actualization and social acceptance. We may have to scale back our modern lives: abandon in…

I can't upvote this enough. The way I see it, the Holocene is over, no more neolithic civilization, unless we keep powering the machines with lots of energy in order to cling to the past (which is a big part of the use we have been giving to machines, and the reason why Modernity is a sham) as mythified by our collective amnesia. We need to integrate our lives with the ecosystem in order to create virtuous cycles of…

You won't find much neolithic civilization outside of North Sentinel Island and the deep Amazon.
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