211–220 of 591 posts
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No more air travel is very radical!
this is a big one. there is a surgery i'll need within 10 years that i can't access in north america. i could definitely give up flight for play, probably for work, not for health
My prediction is that geo-engineering will be done when a certain death/disturbance threshold will have been reached (too many climate refugees for example and western world can't achieve a closed border, or too many weather disasters that hit the western world and populations are convinced it is because of global warming). However I don't think we will reach it in the next 5-10 years, but maybe after that period. Al…
Why would you think we have tricks up our sleeves? What’s that mean “geo-engineering will be done when…” The whole problem is we aren’t capable of doing what we know needs to be done.
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The future is fundamentally uncertain. Climate change will be addressed but not by corporate welfare programs like net zero nor by impoverishing rich populations. The idea that the simplistic socio-economic models/pathways are in any way right or predictive was just a fantasy.
> The future is fundamentally uncertain. Climate change will be addressed but not by corporate welfare programs like net zero nor by impoverishing rich populations. This is very wishful thinking. It's like a doc telling you your body is collapsing due to lung cancer, you need to stop smoking, and you answering "the future is fundemantally uncertain, I'm sure something will come along and figure out this cancer for me…
Wishful thinking is that expensive sacrifices for the far future will be politically feasible while at the same time people need to already mitigate the effects of climate change. There need to be way better policy and technological packages than now.
It's odd how everytime somebody mentions slashing oil production by 50 or 75%, people are immediately up in arms. Same for red meat or cheap air travel. Western rich countries have too many really spoiled consumers. It's weird to say, but we should crash the economy if it can slow down climate change. I mean there are plenty people in other parts of the world who don't have such a high standard of living, and it's no…
> there are plenty people in other parts of the world who don't have such a high standard of living, and it's not that big of a problem. Go live like that for 6 months and get back to us: food insecurity, inadequate healthcare, and few civil services or safety net. Those other countries are not net zero pollution either. You wanna crash the economy? How then will we develop the innovations to fix this problem? Can't…
- private cars and their usage are too cheap
- air travel is too cheap
- producing garbage is to cheap
- politics is top centered around providing infinte fuel for "growth" instead of distributing resources rationally
Yes, this is a political opinion.
The stunt many people do is pretending that climate denialism and politics centered on fueling growth are not a political opinion but "rational" and sustainable.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The future is fundamentally uncertain. Climate change will be addressed but not by corporate welfare programs like net zero nor by impoverishing rich populations. The idea that the simplistic socio-economic models/pathways are in any way right or predictive was just a fantasy.
> The future is fundamentally uncertain. Climate change will be addressed but not by corporate welfare programs like net zero nor by impoverishing rich populations. This is very wishful thinking. It's like a doc telling you your body is collapsing due to lung cancer, you need to stop smoking, and you answering "the future is fundemantally uncertain, I'm sure something will come along and figure out this cancer for me…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
And what about all the countries that won’t do anything regardless? So we should just tank our own economy while being unable to do anything about our neighbors? It won’t take tanking the economy, it would take world war 3.
> So we should just tank our own economy while being unable to do anything about our neighbors? Yes.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
No more air travel is very radical!
this is a big one. there is a surgery i'll need within 10 years that i can't access in north america. i could definitely give up flight for play, probably for work, not for health
Earlier quoted context omitted.
And what about all the countries that won’t do anything regardless? So we should just tank our own economy while being unable to do anything about our neighbors? It won’t take tanking the economy, it would take world war 3.
Why does a green transformation have to "tank" the economy? Can't we have green economic revival ? Would it not create more jobs to transition faster ?
It's odd how everytime somebody mentions slashing oil production by 50 or 75%, people are immediately up in arms. Same for red meat or cheap air travel. Western rich countries have too many really spoiled consumers. It's weird to say, but we should crash the economy if it can slow down climate change. I mean there are plenty people in other parts of the world who don't have such a high standard of living, and it's no…
Now I'm not anti-capitalist, because capitalism is social darwinism and is a description of how resources get distributed under contention due to scarcity. It doesn't need defending. It also can't be stopped. So it doesn't care if you believe in it or not.
But the rampant corruption and crony/late-stage capitalism we live under today has metastasized. And most people don't know it. I'm sure that 50% of the people reading this are just fine with the status quo. They have high incomes and can take care of their families and that's great.
What they probably aren't thinking about on a conscious level is that the median income for individuals globally is right at $10,000 annually. An American making $36,000 is already standing on 3 other people's backs. HN viewers making $100,000-$250,000 are standing on about 10-25 people. A billionaire making $100 million stands on 10,000 people. Our uber-rich stand on 1 million people or more.
So what we think of as buying a $30,000 automobile and spending that again on fuel and maintenance steals 6 years of someone's life, not to mention the life lost by the owner working to make payments. A $300,000 home ($600,000 with mortgage interest) steals 60 years of life. A house is someone else's lifetime. You can see where I'm going with this.
It's not so much that we can't imagine a life without fossil fuels. That's actually pretty easy: solar panels on our roofs and electric cars, home hydroponic robotic gardens, recycling of all things (even landfills), off-grid living. Solarpunk.
It's that we can't imagine ourselves at the bottom of the capitalist pyramid, toiling our lives away so that someone somewhere can be wealthy at our expense, forever separated from financial stability and self-actualization like the 7 billion people propping up the billion people in "developed" countries. So we project our generational trauma onto the people we depend on most.
That's what the Russia-Ukraine war is about. That's why the Middle East can't seem to get left alone. That's why the Global South struggles to eat. That's why we're seeing continuous decline in all things from economics to health to the environment. That's why we won't solve global climate change. And that's why the most likely future currently is a dystopian one.
We can't change the world, but we can change ourselves. As we each pull ourselves up by our bootstraps since the wealthy do nothing about any of this, we begin to manifest a viable future.
Personally I have stopped fantasizing about disruption and winning the internet lottery. Now I meditate on how to bring $10,000 of resources to every single person in the world through automation to free humanity from forced labor and enter the New Age.