Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Global warming will exceed 1.5-degree limit, UN says

pbs.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

271–280 of 395 posts

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

#271

Post by roughly »

senordevnyc wrote: post #196
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.

There are long histories of cultures managing collective resources democratically over extremely long periods. Both the water temples of Southeast Asia and the rituals around salmon runs and controlled burns in the Pacific Northwest maintained careful husbandry of scarce resources across time periods that extend well beyond the time period since the tragedy of the commons was discovered by the same people who are asserting that kind of coordination to be impossible. This is a cultural problem, and it’s with our culture, not humanity writ large.

With regards to concrete solutions, we could stop pretending that financial optimization and private equity is anything other than looting at scale, we could stop pretending that it’s the god-given destiny of every imaginable product to get shittier and require more rapid disposal and replacement, we could stop imagining that Jeff Bezos shooting people into space is the sign of a functioning economy, but very very directly, we could start actually taxing people and corporations for the long-term effects of their actions, we could prosecute people who attempt to buy, bribe, or market their way past social issues, and we could start incorporating the full cost of, eg, offsetting category 5 hurricanes and large scale droughts or heatwaves in our calculations of the benefits of our modern supply chains and globalized markets. All of those things would be fine starts to drive policy in the directions we want. All of them run afoul of the current winners of the current systems, which is why they’ve been tarred as the unrealistic fantasies of people who aren’t interested in spending the rest of their lives in hermetically-sealed air conditioned boxes so Sam Altman and Elon Musk don’t have to go to therapy.

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

#272

Post by kennywinker »

zb3 wrote: post #239
Tadpole9181 wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey, quick question, who does virtually all manufacturing for US and Canadian and EU citizens? And why is the rise of Chinas emissions so coincidentally timed to the fall of those countries'? I didn't go into the study, but looking at all the little text blurbs about the numbers, I don't see anything about if a US citizen purchasing a product that's made in China counts as US emission, as it obviously should.

My view is that current "emission reduction" just moves jobs to China and India, which decreases overall labor rights and negatively affects the working class.. Still, if you want to have your new iPhone 18/19/20 pro ultra max, it has to be produced somewhere.. So maybe it's time to rethink this and get back to the drawing board..

Actual emissions reductions is different from just shell-gaming emissions from the US column to the China column. Greenwashing is real, but that doesn’t mean reducing emissions isn’t a real thing we can do.

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

#273

Post by tcfhgj »

OgsyedIE wrote: post #14

Supposing all anthropogenic emissions went to zero today, we'd still keep warming almost as far as three degrees with all of the disasters and famines that entails, because there's a lag time between existing emissions and their effects. We need massive bounty programs that pay out irrespective of nationality for every possible kind of improvement and gain to carbon capture technology if we want to prevent 90% of all…

might not be entirely accurate:

https://www.carbonbrief.org/explainer-will-global-warming-st...

https://www.researchgate.net/figure/CO2-emissions-and-respec...

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

#274

Post by bix6 »

tyre wrote: post #264
Dumblydorr wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, but there is zero shot at doing this versus energy and transportation. The major limiter of veganism is cultural. People love eating meat. It’s a major source of protein and calories, especially in developing countries. Americans are not going vegan, so it’s kind of silly, in my opinion, to focus on it as a solution. Compare to building nuclear energy or solar / wind + batteries. China, the US, Europe, and India…

How come veganism is cultural but alternative energy is political? Could one not be the other?

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

#275

Post by zaken »

ThrowawayIP wrote: post #16
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…

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…

The everyone-should-try-harder mentality doesn't work either unfortunately. It would be great if everyone rode bikes and went vegan but that's never going to happen so we have to stop making people feel bad for buying gas cars and eating cheeseburgers because it just causes division which ultimately hurts progress.

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

#276

Post by dariosalvi78 »

we have had the perfect storm to do a U-turn on most fossile fuels:

- COVID pandemics: everybody at home, less traveling, massive economic reset and massive capitals injected (EU recovery funding, quantitative easing)

- Russian attack on Ucraine, stopping a big chunk of gas and petrol to Europe

- Strait of Hormuz, also chocking oil coming to the rest of the world

We could have said: "oh, let's swap those energy sources to renewables", "oh, let's bind those capitals to de-carbonization projects", "oh, let's plant trees", "oh, let's stop deforestation". A lot of things could have been said and done. But, well, a certain degree of coordinated intelligence is too much to ask.

At this point I have lost all hopes, whatever comes, we have asked for it.

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

#277

Post by card_zero »

cbg0 wrote: post #224
tito wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The top 10% richest humans emit about half of all emissions. Decile 10 (richest): ~48% Decile 9: ~15% Decile 8: ~10% Decile 7: ~8% Decile 6: ~6% Deciles 1 through 5 combined: ~12%, so about 1 to 3% each I wouldn't necessarily focus on it, but it's something good for your mental model of how to solve the challenge. The reason I say I wouldn't focus on it is I'm coming around to the idea that "carbon footprint" is effe…

The figures aren't based on real measurements of what every person actually emits, they're based on a model that allocates consumption-based CO2 emissions across income groups. Regardless of that, I agree that making useful policy changes is important, replacing some plastic straws won't make a huge change, but getting rid of coal will.

So that means if you buy something made of steel, and the steel was made in India, you get assigned that part of India's emissions, counted as your emissions. The whole concept of "your emissions" then is based on blaming the blaming the consumer, the buyer, for what the emitter, the seller, did. Implicitly the buyer has a duty to control the seller in the other country, but the sellers (and their legislature) are unable to make choices.

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

#278

Post by iamnothere »

shimman wrote: post #259
iamnothere wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Much of Western Europe has increasingly adopted neoliberal policies over the years, I would not call it “firmly” social democratic anymore.

Seriously, we have the US threatening to sanction (and has) politicians and judges that want to regulate US technology companies. The idea that neoliberalism doesn't have a massive influence on the world is straight up delusional. Did we forget that EU took an austerity approach following 2008 and all that did was immiserate their population enough where they are voting for fascist/nationalist political parties?

Yes, although I wouldn’t blame the US solely, London also carries a fair amount of responsibility for it. Perhaps not as much as the US, but Thatcherism was certainly the Trojan horse for European entry of neoliberalism in the 1980s.

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

#279

Post by hyperbovine »

shuwix wrote: post #269
mym1990 wrote: post #149

Modern economies are addicted to growth, and asset prices are pinned to showing continued growth more than ever. As soon as any global power proposes to take a beat and re-evaluate the trajectory of innovation, they will be left behind. Global leadership is also effectively non-existent and aside from trade, no one seems to be able to really make inroads on big ticket issues. In a time where we need more collaboratio…

Perfect example of "left behind" is EU, shooting itself in leg for many years with dubious results in terms of ecology ... and negligible in global scale.

Hey at least they are trying.

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

#280

Post by adrianN »

bix6 wrote: post #274
tyre wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but there is zero shot at doing this versus energy and transportation. The major limiter of veganism is cultural. People love eating meat. It’s a major source of protein and calories, especially in developing countries. Americans are not going vegan, so it’s kind of silly, in my opinion, to focus on it as a solution. Compare to building nuclear energy or solar / wind + batteries. China, the US, Europe, and India…

How come veganism is cultural but alternative energy is political? Could one not be the other?

My washing machine doesn’t care how the electricity is produced, but most people can tell a vegan dish from a steak.
Post reply on HN