Global warming will exceed 1.5-degree limit, UN says • Hacker News Board

Re: Global warming will exceed 1.5-degree limit, UN says

#191

Post by card_zero » Sat, Sep 05, 2026, 4:05 PM UTC

somenameforme wrote: post #152

epistasis wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Do you have kids? This right here, the absolutely preposterous idea that giving up kids is somehow climate action, is exactly the nonsense that a climate activist should never tolerate. You think climate action is everybody stopping having children?! You think extinction of the human race is the only option?! "Of course not!" You say, so clearly we must have some children. But how many? If we drastically reduce our…

It's also completely self defeating. Children tend to end up adopting the values of their parents over time. If climate people just remove themselves from the gene pool, their impact on the climate is going to be negligibly small, but there being that many fewer voices of similar values in the future, will have a much more significant impact. Imagine you're a hyper-partisan and you learn that 'the other side' is spre…

> Children tend to end up adopting the values of their parents over time

No, they don't. If that was true, we'd have prehistoric values. (It would mean you could turn matters of culture into genetic arguments, which is fun, I see the temptation, but it's just not true.)

Re: Global warming will exceed 1.5-degree limit, UN says

#192

Post by steve_adams_86 » Sat, Sep 05, 2026, 4:06 PM UTC

reilly3000 wrote: post #133

m00dy wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you explain what 'Luddite' means in a broader context? Not all of us grew up learning British history :)

Luddite: someone who is against using technology out of fear (of economic opportunities mostly)

Yeah, important to note that the way the label is used has deviated from its historic meaning. Colloquially it’s something like “someone who rejects new technology” with variable reasons as to why, but historically there’s more nuance and it’s grounded in rejection of technology which worsens working conditions, detracts from craft, and disrupts cottage industry/workers rights/wages/etc. They made more sense than the label presently suggests they did. I suppose you could think of them as activists protecting their crafts and trade privileges that were being undermined by specific machines and their owners

Re: Global warming will exceed 1.5-degree limit, UN says

#193

Post by fifilura » Sat, Sep 05, 2026, 4:06 PM UTC

multiplegeorges wrote: post #2

Not much of a surprise. Government action has been anemic at best. Industry action (overall) has been net negative. The only hope now is exponential growth of (solar and wind)+batteries making other sources uneconomic. This seems to be slowly happening, so I hope we hit the exponential curve soon and we're there quicker than we expect. This only stops it. Then, to fix it, we'll need a massive Direct Air Capture indus…

> Government action has been anemic at best.

I am not very surprised, since the people voted for the "drill baby drill" president?

I wouldn't classify that as anemic.

Re: Global warming will exceed 1.5-degree limit, UN says

#194

Post by epistasis » Sat, Sep 05, 2026, 4:07 PM UTC

LastTrain wrote: post #185

epistasis wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Do you have kids? This right here, the absolutely preposterous idea that giving up kids is somehow climate action, is exactly the nonsense that a climate activist should never tolerate. You think climate action is everybody stopping having children?! You think extinction of the human race is the only option?! "Of course not!" You say, so clearly we must have some children. But how many? If we drastically reduce our…

A) I’m not a millennial. B) I have kids. C) I used that as one of several sacrifices that can be made to reduce carbon footprint. I would say it is more valid than “being vegan” since that alone may or may not help. Everyone is very ready to wag their finger about the sacrifices they are willing to make but excuse or ignore the ones they are not.

A) I didn't say you're a millenial. B) Having kids is not an excuse for saying "don't have kids for the sake of the environment!" it's an awful, anti-environmental thing to say no matter what. C) Not having kids is not climate action, it doesn't stop climate change, it's at best a half-measure.

Most of all, when people say "don't have kids for the environment" it actually really hurts environmental action. Pretending that self-sacrifice is inherently environmental action, that we will save the world through sacrifice, is just one of those weird ways that Christian religion has worked its way into people's every day life.

We save the climate by stopping ALL emissions, and then also in the later half of the century actually sequestering CO2 at a pretty consistent rate. We don't get to that by halving the population, that's not a solution in any way. It's not going to be easier to get to zero emissions with half the population, if anything it's going to be harder. And we definitiely won't be sequestering CO2 in the later half of the century if we're dealing with all the challenges of reducing the population by any significant amount.

I'm willing to wag my finger at you, not about sacrifices, but falsely equating climate action with sacrifices. Climate action is one thing and one thing only: reducing emissions and eventually reversing some of them. It is not sacrifice for the sake of sacrifice.

Re: Global warming will exceed 1.5-degree limit, UN says

#195

Post by panta » Sat, Sep 05, 2026, 4:07 PM UTC

baq wrote: post #20

ThrowawayIP wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The technology-will-save-us mentality is part of the reason we are here. We live in a society that doesn't do anything unless it makes money for some set of decrepit old men. We had the means to avoid this (strict vegan diets, ground based mass transit, dense development & re-wilding, energy transition) but people made money doing the opposite. And more people made money sabotaging solar+battery pricing in the US. So…

Just like it isn’t possible to get politicians to stop spending other people’s money, it isn’t possible to stop enterprises from making as much money as possible while spending as little as possible on a global scale (it may work locally!) Thus, technology-will-save-us is the rational choice. Drill all the oil, build the biggest datacenters and speedrun to fusion before the collapse so we can sequester the carbon bac…

Neoliberism is not the only possible system, it is very well possible to change the boundaries of what enterprises can do. Technology-will-save-us is a quasi-religious belief, not supported by evidence. Also if it was true that we can't convince politicians and enterprises to change their course now, why should they do later when costs will be much higher?

Relying mostly on technology that doesn't yet exist seems absurd to me. We have an incredibly hard problem to solve and maybe a narrow window of action, we should use all the tools we have at our disposal: rapid deployment of available solutions, sustained research into better ones, adoption of more frugal lifestyles, development of alternative sociological, political and economical frameworks.

Re: Global warming will exceed 1.5-degree limit, UN says

#196

Post by senordevnyc » Sat, Sep 05, 2026, 4:07 PM UTC

roughly wrote: post #169

I think the conversation here is making me more depressed than the news. The number of people who don’t believe collective action is possible, who somehow believe the current techno-capitalist model is determined by god or history or whatever, who don’t have any particular knowledge about history, economic development, etc but are very happy to very loudly yell that the only thing we can do is more of the same but ma…

Can you point to any examples where democratic populations have engaged in the kinds of sacrifice at scale needed to avert this problem?

Do you have any specific, actionable proposals to solve this problem that don’t rely on us magically solving the collective action problem?

A vague sense that “we can do it if we just try!” is no better than what you’re decrying.

Re: Global warming will exceed 1.5-degree limit, UN says

#197

Post by Dumblydorr » Sat, Sep 05, 2026, 4:08 PM UTC

epistasis wrote: post #27

ThrowawayIP wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The technology-will-save-us mentality is part of the reason we are here. We live in a society that doesn't do anything unless it makes money for some set of decrepit old men. We had the means to avoid this (strict vegan diets, ground based mass transit, dense development & re-wilding, energy transition) but people made money doing the opposite. And more people made money sabotaging solar+battery pricing in the US. So…

No it isn't, the idea that strict vegan diets would have stoped climate change is just nonsense. Run the numbers. "Strict vegan diets" is the attitude of US activists telling the developing world that they need to change their behavior before the US activist is willing to accept driving less or adopting dense urban infill housing. "Making money" is the incentive system of society. Technology has now aligned society's…

It’s one piece of many. They never said it was the only piece. You’re straw-manning this comment.

And vegan diets would make a big dent, look up agricultural sector emissions, look up beef emissions and methane from their burps. It’s a major factor after transport and electricity.

Re: Global warming will exceed 1.5-degree limit, UN says

#198

Post by dopa42365 » Sat, Sep 05, 2026, 4:08 PM UTC

jkahrs595 wrote: post #6

WarmWash wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Not much of a surprise. Government action has been anemic at best. Industry action (overall) has been net negative. And individual action has switched to just holding governments and industry responsible. Which basically amounts to giving up. "Welp, just gonna buy this truck, enjoy my burgers, set the AC at 68 and fly on all vacations this year because it's nothing compared to Big Oil."

Don’t forget eating meat, the easiest thing to stop doing (people needs cars and trucks for work, they don’t need cheeseburgers). People can’t be bothered to make any changes, it’s always someone else’s problem. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/sep/27/meat-gas...

More specifically, beef and lamb.

https://ourworldindata.org/food-choice-vs-eating-local

Replacing those with basically any other meat (pig, chicken, fish) would make a huge difference already. And it's far more realistic than no meat. Indirect demand destruction (from cost increase) through carbon credits or something like that in the future?

Re: Global warming will exceed 1.5-degree limit, UN says

#199

Post by breuleux » Sat, Sep 05, 2026, 4:08 PM UTC

epistasis wrote: post #74

charles_f wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're assuming that we keep the same system and that no sacrificing can be made. Technology is seen as the only solution because of the primary assumption that we need to keep growth and late stage capitalism. Degrowth, relocalisation, lower consumption are all solutions that would work better than technology (there are very serious people out there who demonstrated that technology won't replace the energy we need,…

> You're assuming that we keep the same system and that no sacrificing can be made. No. I am not. I'm saying that unless the incentive system is aligned with our goals, then it's not actually climate action. Technologists succeeded at doing that. People who decided to use non-policy driven political action failed utterly at this. The degrowthers are particularly bad at this, but then all their thinking was muddled an…

> Technologists succeeded at doing that.

Have they? How have they done that? I just want to know what you mean here.

Re: Global warming will exceed 1.5-degree limit, UN says

#200

Post by adrr » Sat, Sep 05, 2026, 4:09 PM UTC

mrob wrote: post #45

Schiendelman wrote: post #4

There hasn't been a question about this in a decade or more. There was no path, even theoretically, to stopping our CO2 emissions without dramatically lowering quality of life for maybe a couple billion people. We won't slow climate change. We can build resilience to the effects, and we have good incentives to do so. But we'll keep burning fossil fuels for a very long time.

There was an obvious path that the environmentalists mostly opposed. A decade is plenty of time for massive scale buildout of nuclear power. If we'd started that a decade ago we'd be in a good position now.

Nuclear power is expensive. One of the most expensive ways to produce electricity when you capitalize expense of the construction of the plant into the electricty cost. Path forward is wind/solar + storage which is cheapest next to hydropower.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levelized_cost_of_electricity