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I used to not worry about climate change. Now I do [video]

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Re: I used to not worry about climate change. Now I do [video]

#841

Post by scoofy »

nojvek wrote: post #742
ianai wrote: post #649

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's finding a way to input the external costs of consumption of emissive products into their final price(s). In reality, a gallon of gas causes significantly more damage than the price paid at the pump - it was like $16/gallon when I saw a figure for it around 2010. Imagine how much differently a world with $20/gallon gas would look. There'd probably be massive pressures from all corners to move away from oil.

I am personally pretty opposed to taxing co2 emissions and playing games with carbon credit. We should not be making energy expensive for the lay person. Provide subsidies to build new solar, wind and nuclear farms - sure. The world will quickly adapt renewable energy if it is much cheaper and convenient to use it. In similar vein, for god sake don’t tax solar panels above usual tax rate. I’m looking at Arizona. The…

>The biggest mistake any democratic government can make is life more expensive and miserable for their population.

>That seldom goes well.

We are the richest nation in the world, so calling life "miserable" is hyperbole beyond belief. You talk about this like it's a new problem.

We have been trying to get a carbon tax since literally 1992, but the response is always the type of nonsense your suggesting, which is designed to be feel-good bs.

If we want to stop climate change, we have to change our behavior, period. We could have done that slowly, but we chose to not do it at all.

If you're worried about life being miserable... buckle up.

Re: I used to not worry about climate change. Now I do [video]

#842

Post by hrududuu »

hiAndrewQuinn wrote: post #720
hrududuu wrote: post #718

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh cool, I'll check these out! I've been doing some coding myself to learn Finnish. I'll post a video of my tool in a little bit. I generate a daily set of exercises, and then track my progress over time. The tasks: scrape all the selko articles and then generate fi-> en translation tasks in the form of phrases (using an LLM). Same thing except en->fi. Free form task generation where I tend to use HS for articles (so…

Hell yeah, I'd love to see it in action! I was planning on doing a similar thing but my wife didn't seem terribly enthused by the current SOTA with Finnish text generation. Sometimes I do ask GPT-4 to "kerro minulle jotain kiinostavaa [aiheesta]" and throw the generated longform text into a single Anki card to read later on. The style definitely feels different, and it hallucinates a lot, but hey, it's still net bene…

Here's a link https://drive.google.com/file/d/1H_W6i4aa0Ak-vSAh99zYjJ4LcUT...

I'm pretty happy with translation, even with GPT-3.5. I haven't used it for native text generation. Happy to keep in touch :D.

Re: I used to not worry about climate change. Now I do [video]

#843

Post by trimethylpurine »

ianai wrote: post #825
trimethylpurine wrote: post #795

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have any example of a country driving less when fuel costs were ALWAYS higher? I would guess short term, yes, but eventually people will drive just as much, and they will spend less on housing, which will decrease costs of housing to allow for a larger portion of income to pay for gas. That seems like basic economics to me. Unless, you have a real world example that contrasts that. People still have to get to…

Absolutely, when gas doubled during the Great Recession I personally saw much less traffic on the roads in the major US city I lived in at the time. People were also much less aggressive on the roads. Unlike those days, people can now offset their use of oil for transportation with BEVs and PHEVs. See recent reports of oil/gas demand seemingly plateaued to decreasing. When the price of something increases, energy inc…

I maybe don't understand the point of downvoting. Am I unwelcome on HN because of a differing opinion that strikes actual thought about a topic that is overwhelmingly run by a one sided story of solar good?

It would be fine if it didn't prevent me from replying. But since it does, it feels exactly like you covering my mouth while you yell in my face.

It surely doesn't make me think that I should vote for solar. If anything it makes me sure that people aren't doing any critical thinking. Aren't interested in scientific debate. And are simply pushing a marketing agenda without discussion. The Nazis did the same thing. I'll take CO2 over a world where we can't speak any day. It inspires me to rally against solar. Surely if it was scientifically sound it would be easy to defend without covering my mouth?

Go ahead and downvote again. It says everything I need to know about YC and HN and the kind of regard that you people have for human life, which is apparently none.

An echo chamber of lies and self serving agenda. Certainly not a place for science. And definitely not for the betterment of the environment. It's disgusting in short.

Re: I used to not worry about climate change. Now I do [video]

#844

Post by jjjjj55555 »

zug_zug wrote: post #637

Just a contextual note -- one thing Sabine says is: AI won't help because we know the exact solution, we just aren't willing to do it. Presumably she's referring to her first proposal -- a carbon tax. It's my understanding that there's nearly consensus among economists that a carbon tax is the most efficient solution to global warming, but political consensus that it would never happen when framed as a tax. If you do…

I've been hearing for over a decade that carbon taxes are the solution. I've also been hearing that Republicans are standing in the way of this solution.

What I've never heard is an explanation of why some sensible, well-run scandinavian country hasn't already implemented this and brought their emissions down to zero.

If there are simple solutions to this problem then why hasn't some country already implemented them?

Re: I used to not worry about climate change. Now I do [video]

#845

Post by trimethylpurine »

ianai wrote: post #825
trimethylpurine wrote: post #795

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have any example of a country driving less when fuel costs were ALWAYS higher? I would guess short term, yes, but eventually people will drive just as much, and they will spend less on housing, which will decrease costs of housing to allow for a larger portion of income to pay for gas. That seems like basic economics to me. Unless, you have a real world example that contrasts that. People still have to get to…

Absolutely, when gas doubled during the Great Recession I personally saw much less traffic on the roads in the major US city I lived in at the time. People were also much less aggressive on the roads. Unlike those days, people can now offset their use of oil for transportation with BEVs and PHEVs. See recent reports of oil/gas demand seemingly plateaued to decreasing. When the price of something increases, energy inc…

Okay, I'm going to give you the Great Recession, despite the fact that it was temporary which is counter to your argument. And despite the fact that you can't tell if it's causal or not. For all we know, people drove less because they had no job to drive to. And in response, gasoline prices went up to compensate for lesser sales, while operating costs remained unchanged. Or, in short, gas prices went up because we drove less. A similar argument could be made for Europe today. High gas prices, because they drive less. Not less than they used to, but less. Meanwhile operating costs are the same.

But let's take it. So the assumption is that there is an alternative that is better than gasoline. Nuclear is largely dominant on the coasts and gasoline usage is roughly half for goods delivery across the middle of the country where everything is coal powered. So at least for the moment, do you prefer reliance on gasoline or coal for goods delivery?

https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/use-of-energy/transporta...

Re: I used to not worry about climate change. Now I do [video]

#846

Post by barbazoo »

jcfrei wrote: post #743
zug_zug wrote: post #637

Just a contextual note -- one thing Sabine says is: AI won't help because we know the exact solution, we just aren't willing to do it. Presumably she's referring to her first proposal -- a carbon tax. It's my understanding that there's nearly consensus among economists that a carbon tax is the most efficient solution to global warming, but political consensus that it would never happen when framed as a tax. If you do…

A carbon tax will not be politically viable for two simple reasons: 1) Some people who would need to pay can't really afford it: It's people living in old houses or who have to drive very far to work or rely on cheap energy for heating and electricity - It's not gonna affect the software engineer who drives his Tesla to work. 2) Another big chunk of the working population would lose their jobs because their industry…

Have a look at https://www.ctvnews.ca/politics/carbon-pricing-in-canada-wha... about the Canadian carbon tax and how rebates can work.

Re: I used to not worry about climate change. Now I do [video]

#847

Post by dang »

pk-protect-ai wrote: post #330
jjackson5324 wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lmfao I think this is the actual video - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4S9sDyooxf4 Somehow OP must've linked to the RDCWorld video by mistake and somehow this still got to the top of HN? I guess HN just upvotes without clicking the link?

The video link was correct at the start. I believe that OP has decided to change it due to rate of doomism and rising depression levels.

No, it was a mod error (copy-paste failure or something like that - see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39170137).

Submitters can't change URLs once they've submitted.

Re: I used to not worry about climate change. Now I do [video]

#848

Post by ajross »

pk-protect-ai wrote: post #824
ajross wrote: post #607

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I observe that people aren't scared enough to take action. They continue to dance around the issue in political euphoria. The changes to our lifestyle are happening too slowly to be effective. These are all reasonable observations, but they don't remotely substantiate "The chances of humanity surviving are incredibly slim, IMO." Just tone down the hyperbole. No serious informed science exists to predict human extin…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_extinction_events https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clathrate_gun_hypothesis Citation: The associated period of massive carbon release into the atmosphere has been estimated to have lasted from 20,000 to 50,000 years. The entire warm period lasted for about 200,000 years. Global temperatures increased by 5–8 °C.[21] The hot-models Sabine referred to are in range of 4.8 - 5.6 if I'm n…

So, to avoid engaging in a Gish Gallop on this issue, I'm going to ignore the specifics except to point out that neither of those links says anything about human extinction at all.

It is reasonable to be concerned. But deploying easily-refuted hyperbole makes your (our!) cause MORE likely to be ignored as crackpot nonsense, not less.

Re: I used to not worry about climate change. Now I do [video]

#849

Post by K0nserv »

jjjjj55555 wrote: post #844
zug_zug wrote: post #637

Just a contextual note -- one thing Sabine says is: AI won't help because we know the exact solution, we just aren't willing to do it. Presumably she's referring to her first proposal -- a carbon tax. It's my understanding that there's nearly consensus among economists that a carbon tax is the most efficient solution to global warming, but political consensus that it would never happen when framed as a tax. If you do…

I've been hearing for over a decade that carbon taxes are the solution. I've also been hearing that Republicans are standing in the way of this solution. What I've never heard is an explanation of why some sensible, well-run scandinavian country hasn't already implemented this and brought their emissions down to zero. If there are simple solutions to this problem then why hasn't some country already implemented them?

Sweden has had a carbon tax since 1991 and has almost halved co2 emissions since.

Sources:

https://ourworldindata.org/co2/country/sweden

https://government.se/government-policy/swedens-carbon-tax/s...

Re: I used to not worry about climate change. Now I do [video]

#850

Post by splitstud »

trimethylpurine wrote: post #843
ianai wrote: post #825

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely, when gas doubled during the Great Recession I personally saw much less traffic on the roads in the major US city I lived in at the time. People were also much less aggressive on the roads. Unlike those days, people can now offset their use of oil for transportation with BEVs and PHEVs. See recent reports of oil/gas demand seemingly plateaued to decreasing. When the price of something increases, energy inc…

I maybe don't understand the point of downvoting. Am I unwelcome on HN because of a differing opinion that strikes actual thought about a topic that is overwhelmingly run by a one sided story of solar good? It would be fine if it didn't prevent me from replying. But since it does, it feels exactly like you covering my mouth while you yell in my face. It surely doesn't make me think that I should vote for solar. If an…

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