The Swerve • Hacker News Board

Re: The Swerve

#91

Post by aeturnum » Tue, Jul 05, 2022, 9:54 PM UTC

danhak wrote: post #16

jacquesm wrote: post #8

Something I read in another comment on HN: "Climate denialists have gone in one smooth move from 'we'll fix it' to 'it's too late to do anything about it anyway'". Which unfortunately rings very true. The really, really big problem is that people seem to think that they personally are going to be exempt from this, that it will happen to others, but not to them. Waking up from that will be pretty harsh. But if COVID d…

Here in the U.S., at least, what has widely been maligned as "COVID denialism" was actually a deeper and more nuanced conversation about whether sudden, sweeping changes to society would prevent more harm than they cause. And now looking at outcomes across different states (e.g. Florida vs. California)--and considering ALL outcomes (public health, homelessness, unemployment, substance abuse, mental health, truancy, g…

> there seems to be little introspection from those who propose sweeping policy change about the need to consider second-order effects on those whose lives and livelihoods will be upturned

I really encourage you to read more deeply on this, as I think you're painting climate advocates with the same broad brush you decry others for using. It is extremely common for climate people to insist that a just transition is the only transition worth making - which includes both gigantic structural changes around how we interact with the climate & also structural changes to society to change the material conditions of marginalized & adversely impacted groups. These recommendations are included in basically every climate change document produced by international efforts.

The inclusion of these considerations is also routinely mocked by US conservatives. Lots of people think that "climate is about climate" and the inclusion of social safety net reforms or serious retraining is a bad-faith inclusion from the left who are just using climate change as a cudgel.

If you're interested in a pretty up to date holistic (though to the left of many of the IPCC recs) take on climate recommendations, I would point you at the latest season of scene on radio[1]. It links together the chain of reasoning about why it is essential to address climate with other sources of marginalization and victimization.

The understanding of "what climate change activists want" that you're taking about in your post is frequently brought up by people who would like to obstruct action.

[1] http://www.sceneonradio.org/the-repair/

Re: The Swerve

#92

Post by jfjrkkskdik » Tue, Jul 05, 2022, 9:55 PM UTC

danhak wrote: post #16

jacquesm wrote: post #8

Something I read in another comment on HN: "Climate denialists have gone in one smooth move from 'we'll fix it' to 'it's too late to do anything about it anyway'". Which unfortunately rings very true. The really, really big problem is that people seem to think that they personally are going to be exempt from this, that it will happen to others, but not to them. Waking up from that will be pretty harsh. But if COVID d…

Here in the U.S., at least, what has widely been maligned as "COVID denialism" was actually a deeper and more nuanced conversation about whether sudden, sweeping changes to society would prevent more harm than they cause. And now looking at outcomes across different states (e.g. Florida vs. California)--and considering ALL outcomes (public health, homelessness, unemployment, substance abuse, mental health, truancy, g…

The thing is is the rest of us have free agency to optimize and adapt to our conditions.

I don’t actually owe giving up my agency to do so in deference to people thousands of miles away, whose lack of movement away from toxic industry is instigating the agency I have to take in the first place.

Stow your bucolic imagery of simple WVians. Those simpletons are having a dramatic impact on my life. Yet it’s unconscionable if I push back?

That’s a lopsided, abusive scenario. The people of WV do not rule the world.

The proud people of WV need to take their advice and pull themselves up by their boot straps; looks like they benefit from big government communism, to me: https://wallethub.com/edu/states-most-least-dependent-on-the...

Re: The Swerve

#93

Post by mistermann » Tue, Jul 05, 2022, 9:55 PM UTC

csdvrx wrote: post #82

jacquesm wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can think for yourself. But to spell it out for you: if all countries had simultaneously shut down travel for a couple of months then we could have all been at the level of New Zealand or Japan. Neither of which crashed their economies. Once vaccines were available we would have been able to open up travel again and we'd have been better off collectively. Even those places where they did shut down, because after…

> if all countries had simultaneously (...) Once vaccines were available (...) that would have happened (...) You are piling up suppositions upon suppositions to come up with a wild claim. It doesn't work that way. In case you doubt it, here's my equally plausible counter claim: if all the countries had simultaneously shut down, vaccine research would have taken the back burner, wouldn't have had sufficient funding,…

> It doesn't work that way.

Not in actual reality, but it works just fine in virtual reality, which is what people are actually observing when they contemplate reality.

I continue to worry that improving on our (be it mainly Western people or all people, I don't know) inability to distinguish between fantasy and reality at least to some degree may be a pre-requisite to adequately solving climate change. I simply can't see how it isn't an extremely important variable.

If intelligent people can't be bothered to wonder what is true, how do we expect climate "denialists" to manage it?

Re: The Swerve

#94

Post by shadowgovt » Tue, Jul 05, 2022, 9:55 PM UTC

I like Cory, but he's an optimist. He's missing a key fact about the first class passengers.

Globally, classism has become so pronounced that, to preserve the metaphor, if anyone tries to swerve the bus the first class passengers will just kill them and won't stop killing until the bus is light enough to jump the gorge. They don't see the need to now, because nobody is making any serious notions to grab the wheel. But the 1% can pay another 5% or so to leverage the asymmetric warfare tools available against the remaining 94%.

There are approximately 8 billion human beings on the planet right now. Cory is proposing a solution that saves 6 billion of them, maybe, if we play our cards right. But we already have weapons that can atomize cities. Removing a few key, highly populated cities from the planet would crater the number of people that our resources need to sustain, which is to say the number of people generating the sort of pollution that is threatening the biosphere, into the one to two billion range. And hey, bonus effect, overuse of those weapons results in a global cooling phenomenon. Win-win.

I wish those grabbing the wheel luck, because they're going to have to grab it faster than the first class passengers can reach for their knives.

Re: The Swerve

#95

Post by andybak » Tue, Jul 05, 2022, 9:56 PM UTC

SequoiaHope wrote: post #72

voakbasda wrote: post #4

It is just me, or is this an open call for a proletariat revolution against the bourgeois? Any successful "plunge past the first-class passengers" will not be a peaceful event.

I mean Doctorow writes books about communism so I think it is fair to say the answer is yes.

What?

Re: The Swerve

#96

Post by syrrim » Tue, Jul 05, 2022, 9:58 PM UTC

This analogy is too hopeful for a couple reasons. First, the swerve is made to seem like a decisive action that is taken once and then is never repeated. In practice, if people don't like that we've slowed the bus, they can speed it right back up again. Second, the one's blocking the swerve are supposed to "first class passengers", which seemingly stand in for the rich and powerful. In practice, its many of the least well off who are against decisive action to stop climate change, which they perceive as being especially harmful to themselves. If all it took was one person rushing to the front of the bus and yanking on the steering wheel, then it likely would have happened by now.

Re: The Swerve

#97

Post by ptero » Tue, Jul 05, 2022, 9:58 PM UTC

jacquesm wrote: post #89

SilverBirch wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actually think the people who think they'll be exempt are basically right. It's not like a tornado is going to pick your house up (unless, unfortunately that is exactly what happens). Sure, there are going to be hotter hot spells, and more extreme cold spells, but that's not seriously something that a New Yorker can't deal with. What is going to happen is poor people, foreign people, are going to starve to death an…

This is probably correct. But we are the cause, those 'poor people' predominantly are at the back of the bus and we are condemning them to that fate.

Not necessarily. Those poor people, today, are malnourished and lack access to the many benefits that higher energy use brings. And some of the same things that the top billion of the population has been enjoying for decades.

Telling them that they cannot get this (energy to bring water to the fields instead of hand-carrying it, tractors to work the fields) and, by the way, it is for their own benefit may not be very convincing. I think those poor people just got on the bus and think they are OK with where this bus is heading. And would club someone who tries to grab the wheel and put the bus in a ditch. My 2c.

Re: The Swerve

#98

Post by majormajor » Tue, Jul 05, 2022, 9:58 PM UTC

prometheus76 wrote: post #66

majormajor wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is a desire to invest rapidly in new, less environmentally disruptive, technology development wanting to "destroy the world's economy"? Seems like the opposite to me, unless your personal interests are tied up in legacy monopolistic businesses. It's like being opposed to Apple and Microsoft in the late 70s because you're worried about destroying IBM or mainframes.

The whole global economy is built around cheap energy sources that also happen to be at least 100 times more efficient than solar, wind, or even nuclear. Petroleum is BY FAR the most efficient way of storing energy. Wind and solar power are both intermittent. That's fine if you live in a coastal city in a temperate zone, but most people in the world do not. So efficient energy storage becomes a huge problem. And we h…

So then how about you get onboard with fighting for what I said, not the other position you're arguing against.

The one that's called "technology development."

Invest in alternatives, capture solutions, etc so that they get better faster. It's the same thing we've done in wartime, or for a moon mission.

The global economy was based on other things than it is today 30, 70, 150, 200, etc years ago. Shit changes. Steer the change instead of sitting back and being defeatist about the side effects of the most recent ones.

Plenty of people don't want to destroy the world to save it. Do you think your "let's just do nothing because uncertainty exists, let's just let the world destroy itself without bothering to learn more or try new things" pseudo-concern is better?

Re: The Swerve

#99

Post by jacquesm » Tue, Jul 05, 2022, 10:01 PM UTC

syrrim wrote: post #96

This analogy is too hopeful for a couple reasons. First, the swerve is made to seem like a decisive action that is taken once and then is never repeated. In practice, if people don't like that we've slowed the bus, they can speed it right back up again. Second, the one's blocking the swerve are supposed to "first class passengers", which seemingly stand in for the rich and powerful. In practice, its many of the least…

Funny, I read 'first class passengers' as 'those in the rich and developed countries who are for the most part responsible for climate change due to their excessive carbon footprint'.

Re: The Swerve

#100

Post by ryukafalz » Tue, Jul 05, 2022, 10:01 PM UTC

prometheus76 wrote: post #66

majormajor wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is a desire to invest rapidly in new, less environmentally disruptive, technology development wanting to "destroy the world's economy"? Seems like the opposite to me, unless your personal interests are tied up in legacy monopolistic businesses. It's like being opposed to Apple and Microsoft in the late 70s because you're worried about destroying IBM or mainframes.

The whole global economy is built around cheap energy sources that also happen to be at least 100 times more efficient than solar, wind, or even nuclear. Petroleum is BY FAR the most efficient way of storing energy. Wind and solar power are both intermittent. That's fine if you live in a coastal city in a temperate zone, but most people in the world do not. So efficient energy storage becomes a huge problem. And we h…

> If you end petroleum production, that also ends all plastic production.

Bioplastics exist. We need better ways to deal with them at end-of-life (industrial composting is not yet widespread) but they aren’t petroleum-based.

> Trains are electric, but you know what runs the electric motors on them? The on-board diesel generators!

Not if you electrify the network. And in fact, in the US we used to have over 5x as much electrified track in the 1930s as we do now.