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

311–320 of 401 posts

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

#311

Post by swed420 »

epistasis wrote: post #232
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.

The straw man is claiming that "strict vegan diets" are necessary. People bring up "strict vegan diets" to sabotage climate action. It's a hindrance to achieving the very possible change we need.

> People bring up "strict vegan diets" to sabotage climate action.

They also tend to use polarizing identity politics that vilify all men, or all old people, or all white people, etc, even though most of those groups are suffering with everybody else.

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

#312

Post by boredtofears »

myaccountonhn wrote: post #292
boredtofears wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We’re so far past this, technology is 100% the only hope and always was. Getting stuck in the mentality that we can shame our way out of this for a decade was (and continues to be) a colossal waste of time.

Nah, believing technology saving us is full copium and makes us not take action.

I never said I believed it was going to save us.

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

#313

Post by tzs »

Dumblydorr wrote: post #197
epistasis wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> It’s one piece of many

It is one of the last pieces to focus effort on.

If I stopped eating all meat and dairy it would reduce the world's annual emissions by 0.0000000026%, assuming we can ignore animal quantization and market effects which could easily actually reduce the reduction to 0.

It only makes a difference if a whole lot of other people do that. If I decide individually to do it for the climate even though I will be less happy on a vegan diet and it is not also done by a whole lot of other people I've made myself worse off for no benefit.

To get enough people to do it will require government incentives. It's hard to see how incentives specifically for this could be designed to be both effective and not so unpopular as to get the government replaced at the next election.

If it ever comes about it is far more likely to be as the result of something more general such as a revenue neutral carbon tax. That might raise the input costs for meat production shifting some people to non-meat diets. (They will still mostly prefer meat, but this way they might not blame the government as much).

Compare to other things individuals can do, like switch to EVs. For the vast majority of people with good home charging an EV will generally be as good as or better than an ICE car except that it is several thousand dollars more expensive than a similar ICE car.

That's something governments can incentivize. Subsidize the cost difference and subsidize home charging equipment purchase and installation, and you will get people switching. Not because they want to help the climate and are sacrificing something for that, but because it is an improvement to their current driving setup and it helps the climate.

The biggest wins though are in the things individuals don't directly deal with. Replace fossil fuel power plants with renewables backed with storage that just use gas occasionally for example, and to the user it is all just electricity. You don't have to convince individual they need to change their lifestyle to so this kind of change.

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

#314

Post by rrr_oh_man »

croes wrote: post #304
rrr_oh_man wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Human society existed before money. That is a very broad claim that can be challenged easily. Maybe it would make more sense to say: "Money is not everything, and pockets of altruism exist"?

You need a society for money so society comes first means there was society before money

https://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/05/magazine/monkey-business....

Depends on your definition of money and society.

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

#315

Post by watwut »

quickthrowman wrote: post #107
zhann_dc wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, truth be told.. It _is_ nothing compared to Big Oil.

Who do you think benefits from the use of oil? Everyone. We’re all guilty, it’s not just oil companies. Goods are transported on ships, railroads, planes, and trucks. Virtually none of these are electrified because of energy density constraints. They all use oil. Anyone that consumes is an oil consumer.

This chain of blaming random persons is both useless and distraction. It failed in the past. And it is not even a good faith argument.

Guilting people for existing in society wont fix anything. Actually regulating largest contributors to the issue can fix things. And individual behavioral changes will logically follow once rules and laws change.

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

#316

Post by irishcoffee »

myaccountonhn wrote: post #289
irishcoffee wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is much lower-hanging fruit than demanding people alter their diets. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/aug/31/turkmeni...

Thing is, we need to reach for high-hanging fruits

Did you read the link? Spending 1 million bucks to fix all the methane leaks in the world is such an insane bang-for-buck win that I can’t even fathom spending one billion bucks for a tenth of the gain.

But sure, go for it. Logic be damned.

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

#317

Post by watwut »

sajithdilshan wrote: post #67

It’s way easy to preach vegan diets, solar/wind installations, etc. from the comfy chairs by the citizens of first world countries. But for someone living in a dirt poor country, climate change is the last thing in their mind even though they might be the hardest hit population. For them it’s about survival and meeting basic human needs.

Solar/wind installations are demonized from comfy chairs by the citizens of first world countries. Anti environmental agenda is agenda of rich conservatives, CEOs and their western right wing friends.

Dirt poor countries do care about climate change per polls.

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

#318

Post by eptcyka »

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…

Going vegan 1 day a week is trivially easy - if everyone does this, the emission reduction is not trivial. We need not have to go full militant vegan to make a dent. And I totally agree with energy/transit/real estate planning being the sectors where a government can twist knobs a bit easier with greater effect. But I strongly believe that we need holistic approaches- reducing emissions on an individual level will move the needle en masse.

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

#319

Post by jhanschoo »

bilater wrote: post #301
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 that's not how the world works. Most of climate change happens not because some decrepit old man lives on his yacht but poor people in third world countries get their first air conditioners. As they should. The only way is through. Most of are not going to be living the suffocating life you think we should. We will grow, innovate and accelerate out of this.

> Most of climate change happens not because some decrepit old man lives on his yacht but poor people in third world countries get their first air conditioners.

You're confusing acceleration with velocity. Poor people are far from the greatest per capita contributors.

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

#320

Post by breuleux »

epistasis wrote: post #246
breuleux wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Technologists succeeded at doing that. Have they? How have they done that? I just want to know what you mean here.

I mean this: https://www.climaterealityproject.org/blog/why-clean-energy-... Technology did that. With lots of government subsidies, and in particular with Germany kick starting a ton of solar industrial development. Even in the US, with concerted anti-renewable sentiment at all levels of decision makers in both electric utility leadership and government leadership, new electricity is overwhelmingly carbon-free, beca…

Sure. That's good, I fully agree with you on that. But is this the solution, or just treating the symptom rather than the root cause?

Technology by itself has never been the problem, the problem is the scaling up of it. Fossil fuels are harmless at a small scale, it's only once you exploit enough of them that you start to see harmful effects. But renewables are no different: we're drawing from the Earth's natural energy allocation, but that's the same energy that heats the planet in the first place -- so as we scale up renewables, we will also end up wrecking the planet. We'd need to scale it up so much it feels preposterous, but it seems obvious to me that if we can, we will. There is no upper limit to energy demand.

And that's what I'm worried about in the long term, I suppose: that surprised Pikachu moment where human ingenuity (and AI, I guess) worked so hard on extracting every bit of solar energy that the rest of the planet, not receiving any of it anymore, predictably turned into an ice ball. This kind of nonsense could never happen if we could properly look and plan ahead as a society, but neither would climate change, so.

Don't get me wrong, it's great that renewables are booming, but we could also have built a sustainable utopia on the back of fossil fuels if we had properly budgeted their use. We need to switch ASAP and start budgeting, because the problems we currently have aren't the only problems we will ever have, and the size of them, unfortunately, tends to scale with energy.

Post reply on HN