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Discussion (281 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

multiplegeorges•about 3 hours ago
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 industry that will have to operate for a century, and probably past that so we can hit and maintain a CO2 level of 250ppm.

ThrowawayIP•about 3 hours ago
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 we get to watch the world burn down around us.

epistasis•about 2 hours ago
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 incentive systems to promote climate action.

People who refused to acknowledge the reality of human society, refused to acknowledge that the profit system exists whether they want it to or not, are responsible for focusing action on ineffective means of change.

Dumblydorr•about 1 hour ago
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.

croes•about 1 hour ago
> "Making money" is the incentive system of society.

Then explain voluntary work or all the people risking their lives for other people they don’t even know.

Human society existed before money.

And nobody said that a vegan diet would have stopped climates change, they said strict vegan diets, ground based mass transit, dense development & re-wilding, energy transition.

Just picking one and say that would help is a nasty tactic.

It’s like saying you need water, food and sleep to live and you say, nope, water alone doesn’t keep you alive.

The reality is, consuming and producing less works but it’s harder then keep going and hope for a technical solution.

Same with being overweight, more sports, less food works but doesn’t make fun.

paimapi•about 1 hour ago
>"Strict vegan diets" is the attitude of US activists telling the developing world that they need to change their behavior

https://woods.stanford.edu/news/meats-environmental-impact

>Livestock production accounts for 14-18 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, including 32 percent of methane gas emissions worldwide.

14-18% seems like a fairly significant chunk, no? and what if we just started with not eating beef, all of us, especially the USA? that'd cut down the emissions by quite a large bit

I also feel like the idea that technology will save us can only exist if you're fully ignorant of the sheer amount of money poured into lobbying by various industries into deregulation (like, for eg, the beef industry: https://www.ucs.org/about/news/agribusiness-industry-lobbyin... or Taylor Farms https://www.wired.com/story/diarrhea-outbreak-taylor-farms-m...)

not to mention the abandonment by state energy companies like Georgia Power of their solar/renewable goals and full buy-in to building yet more gas turbines in order to attract hyperscale data centers. I was part of some organizing against this in my city: https://atlpresscollective.com/2025/12/18/public-service-com...

just look at the funding for renewable R&D in the past few years - the reason we have the market we do now is that huge spike (thanks, Obama) in 2009 that drove down the cost of manufacturing and drove up conversion efficiency. that much investment into the renewables sector hasn't been the same since, especially now: https://www.theinvadingsea.com/2025/11/05/fossil-fuels-oil-c...

hn_throwaway_99•about 2 hours ago
> People who refused to acknowledge the reality of human society, refused to acknowledge that the profit system exists whether they want it to or not, are responsible for focusing action on ineffective means of change.

Thank you for writing that, because I think it is the key point. It's very easy to blame "decrepit old men" because that makes it someone else's fault - and I get it, as I think that there are a bunch of decrepit old men that deserve a lot of blame.

But democratic societies (and even authoritarian ones that are still somewhat subject to mass unrest) were never going to accept large negative impacts for a consequence that was not immediate and in your face. Like you put it, just go around and ask your average Joe or Jane if they would vote for any candidate who demanded strict vegan diets (or heck, even a lot of the other things on GP's list). You're fooling yourself if you think it's only decrepit old men who don't want that stuff.

And regarding GP's comment that "And more people made money sabotaging solar+battery pricing in the US." Yes, there are some people trying to sabotage this to make money for themselves, but it will not take them too long to fail miserably precisely because the economics are not in their favor. Just look at Texas - not exactly a place known for its love of vegan diets, among other things - and solar, wind and now batteries are now a huge portion of the energy mix and growing fast precisely because it's economical.

tcfhgj•about 1 hour ago
> Technology has now aligned society's incentive systems to promote climate action.

no, it has not

Der_Einzige•about 2 hours ago
Significant amounts of the third world are already eating de-facto vegetarian or vegan diets. Many for religious reasons (i.e. in India where the vast majority of people either eat no meat or only chicken/fish), and many others for financial reasons.

Strict vegan diets would objectively massively help reduce climate change.

mistrial9•about 2 hours ago
who wants a "strict vegan diet" ? I see detractors who want to derail the topic using distasteful, demanding examples..
locknitpicker•about 2 hours ago
> "Making money" is the incentive system of society. Technology has now aligned society's incentive systems to promote climate action.

This personal belief is grounded on an assumption that all mankind follows a neoliberal or even libertarian economic model.

Back to reality, west Europe is firmly a social democracy where states impose behavior through law, regulation, and policy, which is topped by a federal system that coordinates policies. Countries such as China are totalitarian with a centrally managed economy that's guided by N-year strategic plans.

charles_f•about 2 hours ago
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, Jancovici to name just one).

Technology is the only option in constant system, but with nothing happening, the system won't remain constant for long, and sacrifices will have to be made, not by choice.

newyankee•about 2 hours ago
Also while developed countries are affected , developing countries like Bangladesh, India are disproportionately affected, mostly a function of geography and a lot of history (very high population etc.). Honestly once AI becomes powerful enough most of these people will literally be leftovers with nothing left to contribute to the world with civil war precursors you see in other forms today essentially the same symptom of fight for limited resources.

The developed countries have so much land, water, resources that they will adapt although inequality within will be an issue and tbh at this point there is never any thought given to the wider world, which if one things about honestly never was.

nozzlegear•about 2 hours ago
I've been vegetarian for 7-8 years and think it'd be great if everyone stopped eating meat, but expecting even a single person to stop who hasn't already expressed interest in it is pie-in-the-sky wishful thinking. We should not base our strategies for fighting climate change on hoping all of humanity will take a sudden 180° turn on their natural instincts to eat meat.
irishcoffee•about 1 hour ago
I watched a woman break down crying in a grocery store, the guy behind her put 40 lbs of ground beef on the conveyor. She started off as angry “how can you bear the thought of eating all that dead animal?” “Oh it’s not even for me, it’s for my dogs.”

I admire anyone and everyone who wants to be a vegetarian/vegan. Expecting the rest of the world to follow suit is a fools errand.

jgilias•about 1 hour ago
In medicine there’s this well known axiom that if an intervention regime would technically work, but is something that the patients tend to not follow through, then the intervention regime doesn’t work.
SoftTalker•about 1 hour ago
Yep. "Just eat less" would work, but patients don't do that, so semaglutide it is.
zaken•19 minutes ago
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.
clickety_clack•33 minutes ago
The means to do it would be things like uranium steel mills and concrete plants (via hydrogen production) or any of the huge number of industrial uses of heat. The amount of coal and oil burnt to produce industrial heat is mind-boggling.

People are meat eaters. If I was to run a campaign to keep the green movement unpopular, I’d promote enforced veganism as one of its core ideas.

rapind•about 1 hour ago
At least we've discovered that trying to get people to behave differently at scale without the presence of an *immediate* emergency is a failed endeavour... So maybe now we can stop that nonsense and focus all of our energy on technological solutions?
rrr_oh_man•about 1 hour ago
I fear ideologists who’d rather engineer emergencies
fullshark•about 3 hours ago
Technology is more feasible than politically driven "degrowth" or any of the other proposals.
breuleux•about 1 hour ago
Would it work as well, though? The basic idea of "degrowth", to me, is to slow down the car until the braking distance is smaller than the viewing distance, so we're safe no matter what. Whereas technology is more like swerving constantly to avoid obstacles. The latter is just intrinsically more likely to get us into a crash.

I'm not saying degrowth is feasible, mind you. I agree that it probably isn't. But the fact we can't do something doesn't mean the alternatives must be good. It might just mean we're cooked.

ch4s3•about 1 hour ago
No country will ever vote for degrowth so it either has to be done secretively which will cause a populist backlash like in the UK or at gun point. Degrowthers are IMO all basically eco fascists.
satvikpendem•about 1 hour ago
It was oil companies that created the notion of a "carbon footprint" as a way of deflecting blame from them to individuals and now you're falling right into their propaganda with "strict vegan diets" etc. And regardless, we have no alternative but technology to solve the issue because, are you just going to maintain the CO2 status quo in the atmosphere?
LastTrain•about 2 hours ago
I’m guessing the things you listed are the sacrifices /you/ are willing to make but omit the ones you are not willing to make. Do you travel by plane? Do you use AI? Do you have kids? Do you own a car? Etc etc.
b40d-48b2-979e•about 2 hours ago

    Do you have kids?
One of these things is not like the others.
epistasis•about 2 hours ago
> 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 population, we will continue with the same broken systems, same energy systems, etc.

Only by keeping society running do we have the energy to switch our society's engine to zero carbon energy sources.

It's insulting to tell people not to have children, it's not realistic, but worst of all, it's not a climate solution to not have children.

"Don't have kids" is just Malthusian nonsense from a prior environmental era, uncritical thinking, pure slop.

And it greatly harms actual climate action when this extremely stupid idea gets associated with the climate movement. Stop. Just stop.

rib3ye•about 2 hours ago
You really had to throw veganism into the mix there…?
Vegenoid•about 1 hour ago
I think that convincing people to go vegan is one of the least plausible ways to combat climate change, but livestock are responsible for 10-20% of greenhouse gas emissions: https://thebreakthrough.org/issues/food-agriculture-environm...
jghn•37 minutes ago
I mean, nearly all of my produce, meat, and dairy from a handful of small, local farms. They're all organic, focus on "happy animals", all that. I'll shift to a strict vegan diet once everyone else abandons their giant mega-agriculture lifestyle.
hax0ron3•about 2 hours ago
I think that vegan diets never took off primarily because the vast majority of people do not want to follow vegan diets. Money factors such as subsidies are secondary. There are also potential health impacts. I followed a vegetarian diet for a few years when I was younger because of ethical concerns, and I felt healthier once I started eating meat again. This is just anecdotal evidence of course, and many people argue that you can be as healthy or even more healthy vegetarian as you can be omnivorous. But it's a potential psychological factor arguing against the likelihood of mass adoption of veganism.

Mass transit and dense development are potentially doable, but at this point the suburban sprawl + car model has been popular in the US for decades and it would feel like a downgrade for many people to live in smaller places in more heavily urbanized environments. I think that many Americans don't even have a clear idea of what it would look like to raise kids in a multi-story residential building in a city without it seeming like poverty.

Also, in some parts of the US, mass transit and dense urban living run into the problem of anti-social behavior including street violence. Many of the people in the US who care the most about stopping climate change also oppose the kind of intensive policing that would be required to keep crazy dangerous people off buses and clean up troubled neighborhoods enough that the average person would feel safe living there. Violent crime rates have largely been going down since the early 90s, but are still much higher than in Europe. One of the reasons for the high rates, through definitely not the only reason, is the availability of guns, but getting US right-wingers to accept gun restrictions is probably even less probable than getting US left-wingers to accept major crackdowns on street crime.

hgoel•about 1 hour ago
Apparently between technology and soul crushing authoritarianism at an unprecedented scale, you would much rather the latter than the former.
lukeify•about 1 hour ago
I didn’t ask for the world to have 8 billion people in it, and I sure as hell won’t be stopping enjoying fairly basic luxuries like consuming protein just because others tell me to do so.

If we need to make such drastic changes to human consumption, have people considered if we have a overpopulation problem?

Supermancho•about 1 hour ago
The demographic collapse was a forgine conclusion in the 80s. There is no global overpopulation problem over the next century. There will be food shortages due to a lack of labor and dessicated farmland. It will be rough for the average human.
baq•about 3 hours ago
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 back into the ground and still have energy left to run Haber-Bosch, ideally with hydrolysis instead of natgas.

Disclaimer: I used to be heavily in the sustainability camp in my younger years

panta•about 1 hour ago
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.

mik1998•about 2 hours ago
"strict vegan diet" AKA supporting industrial byproducts made into ultraprocessed food made on the other side of the globe rather than consuming vegetables, fish & meat produced locally and ecologically.
blurbleblurble•about 2 hours ago
> strict vegan diets

sabotage achieved

maxerickson•about 2 hours ago
Ah yes, the profit motive kept us off of strict vegan diets. Right, sure.
partiallypro•about 2 hours ago
The issue with the global warming advocates is that they seem to believe that in order to solve global warming we need to make everyone's life worse. That was already a non-starter. It's just terrible marketing.

You say it's for the benefit of "decrepit old men," but the fact is that more and more of the globe is being lifted out of poverty and living more comfortably than ever before. The unfortunate fact is that global warming is an unstoppable force now, humans would have to go extinct for it to waiver.

I'm not saying we should do nothing, but I am saying that your framing is exactly why no one listens to global warming advocacy. We are powerless against it, not because of governments, but because people are living better and no one is going to sacrifice that; and even if they did the math doesn't add up to reverse course. The people that say we should all be sacrificing are often the richest among us that don't even know what sacrifice entails, contrary to your point.

collingreen•about 2 hours ago
Your framing, that no collective action can ever include reduction or sacrifice, implies this is an inevitable and fatal path we cannot come back from.

I hope you are wrong that nothing requiring sacrifice can ever be accomplished.

zerot_•about 2 hours ago
> to solve global warming we need to make everyone's life worse

This is ignoring that _not_ solving global warming will make everyone's life worse regardless.

zzzeek•about 2 hours ago
what's your proposed path to "strict vegan diets" exactly?
davidguetta•about 2 hours ago
Like "stop consuming" was a realistic idea lol.
irishcoffee•about 1 hour ago
Oh, it is. That idea absolutely terrifies china. Their entire economy is predicated on global consumption.
boredtofears•about 2 hours ago
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.
myaccountonhn•3 minutes ago
Nah, believing technology saving us is full copium and makes us not take action.
WarmWash•about 3 hours ago
>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."

jkahrs595•about 3 hours ago
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...

dopa42365•about 1 hour ago
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?

benfortuna•about 3 hours ago
Even cutting back on meat can have an impact. Halving quantities in cooking etc. really is hardly noticeable.
guy200•about 1 hour ago
Even mildly advocating for veganism as a vegan would be infuriating if it wasn’t so comedic. The mental contortions that even intelligent people will put themselves into in order to either avoid the topic or keep their head in the sand are truly something to behold. And ultimately it often feels like arguing with a past version of yourself, who perhaps held some of the same views.
jezzamon•about 3 hours ago
People need cars... But not trucks for work :)
WarmWash•about 3 hours ago
Yeah, good catch, thanks.
dreamworld•about 3 hours ago
Acting politically for what matters is not giving up :)

Though, as always, we can and really should do both.

sagarm•about 2 hours ago
Government is the means by which the electorate acts collectively. Pushing for policy changes is not giving up.
zhann_dc•about 3 hours ago
Well, truth be told.. It _is_ nothing compared to Big Oil.
WarmWash•about 3 hours ago
Spoiler: It's individuals who are driving that demand. The impact of the decisions of big oil are nothing compared to the collective decisions of individuals.

Big oil isn't going to kick down your door when you buy an EV and switch to solar. There is no rancher in the grocery aisle slipping steaks in your cart.

quickthrowman•about 2 hours ago
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.
Tadpole9181•about 1 hour ago
Using corporate externalities to trivialize individual contribution is utter nonsense, though. Coke does not make plastic bottles because they think it's fun. Big oil executives don't just fill big Scrooge McDuck swimming pools of the black stuff.

Individuals purchase products from companies, driving that demand. Then are absolutely unwilling to make even the tiniest, temporary sacrifices to demand those companies reduce those externalities.

Hell, half of these individuals don't even both to vote. That's straight-up the bare minimum participation trophy level of effort.

jmclnx•about 2 hours ago
If the Gov stopped Oil Subsidizes, incentivize the move to renewals and nuclear instead of promoting Oil say 20 years ago, we could keep our A/Cs and 60 degrees (~16C) if we wanted to. The sames goes to flying and beef, make it expensive.

So yes, Governments share by far most of the blame for this. A specific individual is not going to change their life stye unless forced to, that is human nature.

Instead we have had governments in the US being too afraid to do the right thing. The only possible US President that was willing to make big changes climate wise had his election stolen by the Supreme Court in the year 2000.

So here we are still with no politician willing to really force changes on people's life style in the "first world". All they are doing is trying to keep the price of oil low.

One final thing, in the US, if you try to use electricity from all renewals, the price is much higher. And in some cases electricity you receive is still generated from fossil fuels.

nkohari•about 3 hours ago
Governments and industry are responsible. Personal consumption/waste is not the primary driver of climate change, no matter how much corporations tell us that using paper straws is the solution. It's tough to expect average people to take major action when corporations are essentially given carte blanche.
WarmWash•about 2 hours ago
And who is buying all that stuff from corporations? Who is actually the one consuming?

We can quibble about edge effects like "induced demand", but by and large, people just love cheap energy, cheap calories, and can shift the moral burden by playing "not my responsibility" games.

psadri•about 2 hours ago
I have been wondering: more solar means we are making Earth less reflective. Solar energy that might have been reflected back to space is now absorbed by the PV to make electricity. But that delta has to go somewhere? Where does it go in terms of Earth’s temperature. Same with more nuclear… we’d be pumping more energy into the system.

Don’t take this as an argument against these technologies. It’s a huge win to not be increasing the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels.

philipkglass•about 2 hours ago
Yes, this does happen. Solar farms have an albedo modification effect. The good news is that compared to fossil powered generation, the albedo modification is "paid back" in less than a year due to lower GHG emissions:

"Small reduction in land surface albedo due to solar panel expansion worldwide"

https://www.nature.com/articles/s43247-024-01619-w

If you download the supplementary information PDF, figure 19 shows a plot of GHG payback times by site. The most common time is about 1 month. The greatest time they found was about 9 months. These times go down as solar panel efficiencies continue to creep upward, because solar panels in 2026 don't have lower albedo than in 2024, but they do have better light-to-electricity conversion efficiency.

jbotz•about 2 hours ago
We're actually heating the earth in two ways... one is by increasing the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. The other is simply by using energy; any use of energy means moving something to higher entropy and thus producing heat, even if that energy comes from 100% clean or renewable sources. However, nobody talks about this second way of heating the earth because it's about two orders of magnitude behind the first, i.e. for now pretty insignificant.

As for making the earth less reflective with PV panels... yes, you are right and most of that absorbed solar energy directly contributes to heating the earth because PV panels aren't anywhere near 100% efficient in converting it to electricity, but even the part that is converted to electricity will become heat again in the end, like when it powers AI data centers. (If PV was 100% efficient, then the lack of reflection wouldn't directly do any heating, the heating would all happen when the electricity is used.)

For now that isn't a big concern because the greenhouse gases our civilization is releasing into the atmosphere do so much more heating than all our use of energy, but if we do become 100% renewable and survive that particular danger, then by Jevons' paradox we'll soon be using 10x to 100x more "clean" energy and be heating the earth all the same again.

maxerickson•about 1 hour ago
Compare anthropogenic heat release to daily solar gain and radiative losses.

Then note that a higher temperatures will increase the radiative losses.

100x heat release and it's still about 1% of solar gain.

p1mrx•about 2 hours ago
A solar array makes the earth less reflective by a fixed amount, for as long as the array exists.

Every unit of fossil fuel we burn makes the earth permanently less reflective (or at least something on the order of 100 years). You could compare a 1GW solar array (for its lifetime) to a 1GW coal plant running for x days, though I don't have the value of x.

mr_toad•about 2 hours ago
Current levels of solar panel coverage on Earth are approximately 0%. If we ran the entire Earth on Solar power we’d need ~ half a million square kilometres, around 0.1 percent of the Earth’s surface.
fifilura•about 1 hour ago
> 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.

xnx•about 2 hours ago
Population decrease will have the biggest impact.
adrianN•3 minutes ago
Decades too late unless you suggest we start killing people.
brabel•44 minutes ago
Good news then: most of the world already has a decreasing population or about to start decreasing. Only exception being Africa.
smallerfish•about 1 hour ago
Yeah and there's two ways to get there - planned and unplanned. It'll happen one way or the other.
lukeify•about 1 hour ago
The unpopular answers are usually the correct ones.
anonzzzies•about 2 hours ago
Yes, but you cannot say that. We need more people, for money.
jandrewrogers•about 1 hour ago
Direct Air Capture at any meaningful scale is predicated on mining billions of tons of refined minerals. The environmental impact of that would be so enormous that it will never be allowed to happen, never mind the severe resource crunch.
epistasis•about 3 hours ago
It is quite ironic that capitalism and the profit motive are now the best hope for staving off climate change, all thanks to the technologists and entrepreneurs that have mad renewables and storage so cheap.

The 2020s climate action movement in the US (and the UK) was disastrous in their strategy, action, and outcomes. I was there, I followed along because it seemed like the best way to get climate action, but things like Sunrise and XR at their very best did nothing. They focused on all the wrong people, focused on all the wrong levers. They turned allies into enemies, by "protesting" tech companies that were at the forefront of real action. They refused to acknowledge the massive effects of technology change, and the need for quick adoption, and the huge money saving nature of the solution.

I have zero patience for those attitudes now, the difference between a degrowther and a climate change denying politician are minimal in effect, and the effects are all that matter now.

woodgala•about 2 hours ago
What about energystar? That had significant impact. Remember how we fixed the ozone hole? It’s entirely possible to drive change through policy or community. We just choose not to do it because the Epstein class wants culture war not class war.
epistasis•about 2 hours ago
Yes, policy does change things!! You give examples where a community got together, changed policy, affecting all of society.

This is precisely the opposite of the disastrous 2020s action, which had no concrete policy demands, which leaned into the culture war. They ceded the ground to the right wing, who does that sort of culture war much better, as they have focused their efforts on it for so long.

With culture war, no policy changes. The fight takes place in vibes.

We need policy, execution in concrete changes of physical things in the real world. That's where Sunrise and XR failed.

kogasa240p•about 2 hours ago
>Then, to fix it, we'll need a massive Direct Air Capture industry that will have to operate for a century, and probably past that so we can hit and maintain a CO2 level of 250ppm.

Removing CO2 from seawater would be more efficient because some of the work is already done for you, and you'd be de-acidifying the ocean long term.

hypefi•about 2 hours ago
the best CO2 capture are trees
ben_w•about 2 hours ago
Probably algae.

Land only slightly beats the ocean, like a 53-47 split or something, and trees are only part of the primary production on land: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primary_production

This is also why you sometimes see startups pumping green goo through plastic pipes for home-scale solar biofuel systems.

xnx•about 2 hours ago
They are good at capture, but not sequestration.
OgsyedIE•about 3 hours ago
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 land on Earth between 30°N and 30°S from slowly turning into copies of the uninhabitable stretches of the Middle East.

brabel•33 minutes ago
Global warming is much faster in the higher latitudes. It has not significantly impacted the region you mentioned much at all. Most impact has been due to intensification of natural cycles like the Indian Monsoons, the Atlantic hurricane season and El Niño, which are not really limited to that particular area of the Globe. The idea that the problem with global warming is that parts of the world will just become too hot to live seems to be mostly misguided.
cobalt60•about 2 hours ago
Just Zeroing isn't enough, what ever efforts we put into negating it never seems to have frontpage
throw8393739•about 3 hours ago
We need to print much more money!
internet2000•about 1 hour ago
It's hard to have people use data in these types of conversations, so I'll just link two charts.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita and https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-co-emissions-by-re...

Notice which countries are going down. Notice which countries are going up.

Faaak•about 1 hour ago
That's such a narrow minded point of view. Yeah, who produces your laptop ? Your lawnmower ? Heck, even your knifes ?
Tadpole9181•about 1 hour ago
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.

zb3•about 1 hour ago
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..

kennywinker•24 minutes ago
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.
radu_floricica•about 2 hours ago
I'm mostly stopped feeling autistic since adolescence, but climate change is one of those times. It's obviously real, and it's also obvious that shuffling chairs in developing countries is rounding to zero effect. We're converting to cleaner energy anyways because of pollution and better economics, so the push for decarbonization in itself is... what do you call a rounding error when it's already rounding to zero?

And it's FAR from hopeless. Again, global warming is obviously happening. But the amount of adapting and reacting to it is virtually nil. Installing AC. Tree cover in every city. Start serious discussions on what level of risk we want with geoengineering.

Because yes, there absolutely is an acceptable risk level with geoengineering. Planting trees is that. Carbon capture is also that. And better and more effective tech will definitely be available.

But we're in a social climate where I don't even dare write down examples of what those more effective methods would be, because if you're not luddite enough you're the enemy.

mym1990•about 2 hours ago
I'm not going to lie, and this is not meant as an insult, but I could not comprehend what a single sentence here is trying to say.
hectdev•about 2 hours ago
They're saying "I can see logical ways we can deal with this but the common folk are afraid of technology and change"
radu_floricica•about 1 hour ago
More like "it's not socially acceptable to discuss alternatives to orthodoxy", but yes.
margalabargala•about 2 hours ago
I didn't find it particularly inaccessible, and I do agree with most of the points made.

Maybe try giving it a second pass?

spwa4•about 1 hour ago
Because if I can do nothing and make you do it, you solve it for me, for free. They'll make some argument (like western nations having used up the energy (and paid for it), and want to make them pay for it again. For a lot of countries that, and nothing else, is the purpose of climate action). Now get to work, taxpayer!

Because for most countries (and certainly for the largest oil producer in the world, Russia), global warming saves greatly on winter fuel use and increases agricultural harvests AND allows them to keep their population happy (because nothing keeps populations calm like cheap fuel/energy). That is the net effect, today.

Because for a lot of countries that really are the beneficiaries of causing global warming, ie. the oil producer countries, Russia, Saudi Arabia, US, Venezuela, Norway, and many small ones Azerbeidjan, causing global warming (ie. selling fossil fuels) is often the only reason they have an economy (mostly all except the US). So they demand a LOT of money, for free, to stop it. And nobody will pay that.

The last argument even goes for countries that are not direct oil or coal producers, like India or China but it's effectively the same argument (China runs on coal, and the country works on exports. Without energy no exports, so their coal usage is still increasing. Ie. same argument as above, they only have an economy because they're causing global warming, just more indirectly than Saudi Arabia)

Because WW2 was won with oil, and so countries that either want to start a war ("or fear they'll be the target/victims of the next big war") want access to oil. This argument goes especially for China, who fear they'll be targeted/"victimized" when they attack half of Asia starting with Taiwan and to a lesser extent for India (who feel they'll be at war with Pakistan, and Bangladesh whether they want to or not, and maybe China too) and even for EU countries (ie. for the ones that matter, France and Germany)

Look up China's oil reserves. You'll be collecting your jaw from the floor, I promise.

Summary: because most governments care about various things ... and not at all about people, about you. Mostly governments not even about their own people and certainly not about the climate where you live. They have a million concerns, a lot of which require fossil fuels, and for the people that compose those governments, climate change just doesn't matter.

Plus, if they can just do nothing, you still have to solve global warming. So doing nothing, aside from being very profitable, is also a great tactic to get you to fix it.

m00dy•about 2 hours ago
Can you explain what 'Luddite' means in a broader context? Not all of us grew up learning British history :)
reilly3000•about 2 hours ago
Luddite: someone who is against using technology out of fear (of economic opportunities mostly)
steve_adams_86•about 1 hour ago
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
notarobot123•about 1 hour ago
More generously: someone who resists new technologies due to their perceived harmful effects (economic but also social and environmental)
tsoukase•9 minutes ago
After 50 years since I was born for the first I didnt eat grapes from my backyard in Southern Europe because they dried up due to extreme heat. In the rest of my life I might miss any other fruit.
monneyboi•36 minutes ago
Why are we framing this as "the fight against climate change"? This framing puts the culprit outside of ourselves, as if it's some external force.

I feel that way of looking at it makes changing impossible. It's our own behaviours and systems that will have to change. There's nothing to fight here, the answer instead lies in collaboration.

kennywinker•30 minutes ago
Great point. For example, we should encourage collaboration between people building hyperscale data centers, and people not building hyperscale data centers to find some middle ground that is good for the planet.

Collaboration implies we are all on the same side. Reality suggests some people have made it their business to be on the wrong side.

dariosalvi78•18 minutes ago
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.

sajithdilshan•about 2 hours ago
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.
tito•about 2 hours ago
Want to do something about this?

El Niño this year is going to be especially crazy, worst in human history by a large margin looks like. I'm putting together El Niño Climate Week to work on averting the worst impacts. It's a good opportunity to move the conversation forward about how our climate is changing very quickly.

https://elninoclimateweek.com

My projects tend to be pretty good schelling points for people that like to take action, in case you're finding the comments here frustrating ("I'm not surprised", "we just need to X", "we're doomed", "it will be fine", etc etc etc)

aorth•about 2 hours ago
The story does not link to the report itself, which can be found here: https://www.unep.org/resources/limiting-overshoot-navigating...
mym1990•about 2 hours ago
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 collaboration that ever, governments seem to be skewing more nationalistic than ever.
hypfer•about 1 hour ago
Well, to be fair, the whole "enough growth" thought happened to spring into existence at the exact moment where we (the west) have comfortable living standards.

Something other developing nations would need growth for to achieve.

So that's kinda interesting, because degrowth is seen as this conceptual antagonist to the people letting the global south burn, but they both are letting them down - just marginally differently.

shuwix•26 minutes ago
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.
hyperbovine•13 minutes ago
Hey at least they are trying.
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raymond_goo•25 minutes ago
Are you saying Germany ruined it's industry for nothing?
wateralien•about 2 hours ago
Our environment will collapse and the fat cats will still deny it and convince most of us that it was our fault and that nothing could be done and that we should just buy their anti-environment-collapse products to protect ourselves.
charles_f•about 2 hours ago
> Our environment will collapse and the fat cats will still deny

It is, and they are. We keep hitting record X Y and Z temperatures, cyclones, etc, and they're on the brig shouting "it ain't global warming you morons"

qoez•about 2 hours ago
Maybe if I develop really strong anxiety about this, it's gonna solve the problem
cbg0•about 1 hour ago
I'm guessing you're being facetious? The options aren't to either develop anxiety or not care at all.
infinitezest•about 2 hours ago
Maybe if you don't, the problem will go away.
unchocked•about 2 hours ago
Geophysically, there are 3 pillars to climate stabilization:

1. Emitting fewer greenhouse gasses. Need to do that more than ever, but we are now in overshoot so…

2. Actively remove greenhouse gasses from atmosphere. Will need to do that, but land use and dirty energy trends away from net negative. Also, it’s a 100 year project once started.

3. Shade Earth. Not regions, The whole globe. There are two ways to do that:

a. Stratospheric aerosols b. Planetary sunshades in space, at Sun-Earth L1.

That’s the whole solution space, conceptually. As long as we continue to fail within that space, we will suffer compounding effects of unmitigated climate change.

hyperbovine•11 minutes ago
Two of these things will definitely work. One of them is completely untested, poorly understood and with potentially massive consequences for the climate and food production.
gozucito•about 1 hour ago
Precisely! The world needs to spend 15 billions a year on reflective aerosols while it reduces emissions thanks to renewables.

This will not address the acidification of the oceans which is very bad but something is better than nothing.

Carbon capture is way too slow to work. It’s a rounding error.

jt2190•about 3 hours ago
Interestingly, financial markets are a good place to see the “price” of some environmental issues. A made up example: “Should I buy bonds that are backed by electricity sales from a yet-to-be-built hydroelectric dam? Will there be enough rainfall to fill the reservoir reliably? I’ll have to receive a higher interest payment to offset that risk.”
hypfer•about 2 hours ago
From my understanding, the West never truly committed to that goal. It just said so as a PR thing, so that the much more affected countries quiet down, because "hey hey we said 1.5°". "Oops, sorry, we tried".

The West knows that it will manage even with more than that, but it also knows that not everyone will.

Jury's still out on whether the neglect is just due to apathy or because it might be beneficial. Only time will tell.

mr_toad•about 2 hours ago
It was a New Year’s resolution that was broken by the next morning.
hypfer•about 1 hour ago
I'm not sure if I'd agree with that, because that sounds like what normal humans do.

Systems and politics are not that. Not at all. They're cold, calculating and fundamentally sociopathic.

A more fitting analogy I think would be "Yes we were bought by a bigger company, but trust us, there will be no changes". Of course the buyout came with exact plans on who to lay off when, but panic would be bad for business.

kubafu•about 1 hour ago
Since land warms much faster than water, and Earth's surface is mostly water, then 1.5C average means how much land warming itself? Isn't talking in averages a way to feel better about all this?
Schiendelman•about 3 hours ago
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.

dariosalvi78•11 minutes ago
I was a kid in the early 90s and my school book mentioned climate change and need to change energy sources. This could have been, if not prevented, at least greatly mitigated. We have had plenty of time. But well, I guess that our species is not that intelligent after all. Too bad, maybe the next one will be better...
mrob•about 2 hours ago
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.
adrr•about 1 hour ago
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

Tadpole9181•about 1 hour ago
The Wiki page above didn't really go into it much, but how much of the cost of nuclear power is self-inflicted? I.e. regulatory costs and actually paying the cost of externalities up-front. And if we were more consistent at building such facilities and producing said fuel, would there be cost reductions from scale?
r_lee•about 2 hours ago
yup.

I remember seeing just a few years back, a Greenpeace postlet moaning about dangerous nuclear energy

I think it's pretty clear that nothing meaningful will be done because there's no shock value to entertain the "empaths" like there is with war and other stuff

ViewTrick1002•about 2 hours ago
The problem is that we attempted to build nuclear power. It just didn’t deliver. There was massive state support behind it.

It is hard looking at Vogtle, Virgil C. Summer, Olkiluoto 3, Flamanville 3, Hinkley Point C, Hanhikivi and the countless cancelled projects and think: ”That’s what I want some more of!!”

p-e-w•about 2 hours ago
Indeed. At this point I’d say that the “green movement” has done more damage to the planet than the fossil fuel industry.

The entire Western world (with the exception of France) pretty much stopped building nuclear power plants 40 years ago, because of a single accident that by its most pessimistic estimates killed fewer people in total than coal emissions kill every 3 days. It’s madness.

dfdydx•about 2 hours ago
What was the fossil fuel industry plan to massively shrink the fossil fuel industry exactly?
ViewTrick1002•about 1 hour ago
Nuclear power had already collapsed due to its own costs and timelines.

In hindsight it’s much easier to blame the accidents rather than face the structural problems nuclear power has.

Which has only been exacerbated by renewables and storage disrupting the global energy markets, forcing ”baseload” plants to become peakers. Against their will.

ako•about 3 hours ago
Quality of life will be dramatically lower for many because we did not take action
lotsofpulp•about 3 hours ago
What if lots of people stop having kids? Then the amount of people who have a lower quality of life can be reduced.
throw-the-towel•35 minutes ago
What do you mean, "if"? It's happening worldwide as we speak. It's still not enough.
Sharlin•about 2 hours ago
Antinatalism is becoming a more reasonable philosophy every day.
whatever1•about 3 hours ago
Maybe it will be a good incentive to rebuild our global infrastructure without having to go through a world war ?
__natty__•about 3 hours ago
Say this to global warlords not to random user on Hacker News
mistrial9•about 2 hours ago
fourth airport opening in the DC area this week, the news says
benfortuna•about 3 hours ago
> We can build resilience to the effects

Oh yeah, would love to see the resilience that would have prevented the Nepalese disaster

what_hn•about 3 hours ago
Yeah, not build in the lowest point where there is a glacier upstream
sagarm•about 2 hours ago
The US version: kill the national flood insurance program so we stop subsidizing property owners in disaster prone areas.
jmclnx•about 2 hours ago
>Climate scientist Bill Hare, CEO of Climate Analytics, said that "although UNEP does a good job of describing the hole we've dug ourselves into, it does a poor job of showing us that there's a way out."

I need to say WTF, the way out is to stop pumping CO2 into the atmosphere. That means stop using fossil fuels. How many times does this need to be said ? Already it probably has been said millions of times.

sokoloff•about 2 hours ago
In practical terms, that’s closer to stating the problem than it is to stating the solution.
dpacmittal•about 1 hour ago
Not surprising when leader of the free world is doing such shenanigans - https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/aug/06/rwe-deal-win...
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shubhamjain•about 2 hours ago
It’s surreal how quickly this went from being the most important problem in the world to barely being on anyone’s mind, all in less than a decade. I had plenty of problems with the fear-mongering and doomed-by-2030 predictions, but the current situation, where we seem basically fine with doing nothing, is genuinely scary. Technology has its limits, billions of people still aspire to a European standard of living, and global population isn’t expected to peak until near the end of this century.

I just hate this post-Trump, post-Covid, post-Russia-Ukraine-war world. I don’t know what the trigger was, but there must have been a point where things just went to shit. And here we are: an increasingly ultra-capitalistic dystopia where wealth seems to be the only thing that matters.

sajithdilshan•about 2 hours ago
Because it’s truly a first world problem. Rest of the world has other problems like hunger, clean drinking water and other basic necessities to solve
dfdydx•about 2 hours ago
Aren't those "other problems" somewhat affected by climate change though?
sajithdilshan•about 2 hours ago
All those problems were already there even before climate change was a topic, so nothing new regarding that front
tito•about 1 hour ago
HN's community moderation tools seem to fail at times, so I'm responding to ssearyus's comment that is marked [dead]:

ssearyus: At the risk of being immediately downvoted, let me point out that a 250ppm CO2 level is borderline disastrous for plant life -- at 180ppm, plants would starve globally. The increased CO2 levels in recent years (slightly added to by human activities) is immensely helpful for drought-resistance, as stomata do not then need to open as much to get sufficient CO2 with the result that they transpire less water. The above, and the fact the by far the most important GHG in the atmosphere is water vapor (CO2 is comparatively a rounding error) should give reasonable people pause for thought.

My response: I think there's something you're trying to say, but it doesn't come through clearly in these many points.

- 250ppm is not disastrous for plant life. That's around preindustrial levels of CO2 (280ppm) and plants did just fine

- What do you mean by "starve" here regarding 180ppm?

- And why are you talking about 250ppm and 180ppm specifically? No one is talking about 250ppm or 180ppm as targets (or maybe you are?)

- Water vapor is indeed a greenhouse gas, and contributes to warming. But it's best thought as an accelerant. Warmer temperatures bring more water vapor bring higher temperatures, bring more water vapor etc etc. The rise of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is so important because it trigger in many ways a feedback loop, one of which is rise in water vapor as a greenhouse gas. The feedback loop caused by temperature/water vapor is one of the reasons we need to be very careful with our human-made emissions.

- "CO2 is comparatively a rounding error": Whether by mass or volume, CO2 is not a rounding error by comparison to water vapor. There's roughly 4 to 6 times the amount of water vapor as CO2. I wouldn't call 25% a rounding error. Maybe there's something I missed here.

- And when you say water vapor is "by far the most important GHG in the atmosphere", does that mean you're working on lowering water vapor levels in the atmosphere? Or what are you working on regarding solving for this? Maybe something with airplane cloud formation trapping heat?

beloch•about 2 hours ago
We already know we need to pump the breaks on AI for a host of safety issues. However, perhaps the biggest concern is the sheer scale of electricity generation they require. One hyperscale data centre can require electricity equivalent to a fair sized city. Many data centre builders are keen to claim they'll use renewable energy sources... eventually. They'll just suck power off the grid "temporarily" or rely on "clean" natural gas for a few years. There are a decent number of states, provinces, etc. whose total emissions will double in a matter of months. Could the timing possibly be worse?

From a warming perspective, it's utter madness to let this build-out proceed unimpeded. New data centres should be required to be net-zero at power-up. Unfortunately, it's a race and the U.S. side of it has an administration that is actively rolling back policies that fight climate change.

amazingamazing•about 2 hours ago
When will the rich, say top 10% of planet decrease their emissions?
cbg0•about 2 hours ago
How exactly would that make a dent? CO2 sources:

- Electricity + heat production ~40–42%

- Industry + manufacturing ~20–22%

- Road transport ~12–13%

- Deforestation & land-use change ~10%

- Direct fuel use in buildings ~5–6%

- Aviation ~2–3%

- Shipping ~2–3%

- Rail, pipelines & other transport ~1%

- Flaring / other energy & industrial sources ~2–4%

I'm guessing the private jets is what you're hinting at? Aviation above includes all flights, not just private jets.

tito•about 2 hours ago
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 effectively a marketing campaign brought on by oil companies to have us focus our individual power where it has the lowest leverage - sorting trash, our own individual emissions, etc, Instead of mobilizing hundreds, thousands, millions, and billions of people to change policy and technology.

Sources like this: www.oxfam.org.uk/media/press-releases/richest-1-emit-as-much-planet-heating-pollution-as-two-thirds-of-humanity-oxfam/

card_zero•36 minutes ago
That "top 10% richest" means the 10% of the planet, 800,000,000 people, which is the richest 10%. (It could be understood differently, as if it meant those earning more than 90% of the maximum income anybody has.)
cbg0•about 1 hour ago
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.

pingou•about 2 hours ago
European Union annual CO2 and greenhouse gas emissions have decreased by over 30% since 2005 (no, not just by getting their stuff manufactured in China).
p-e-w•about 2 hours ago
The top 10% of the planet aren’t “the rich”, what a gross and incendiary misuse of the term.
tito•about 2 hours ago
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

Sources like this: www.oxfam.org.uk/media/press-releases/richest-1-emit-as-much-planet-heating-pollution-as-two-thirds-of-humanity-oxfam/

hocuspocus•about 2 hours ago
If you live in better material conditions than 90% of the world population, you're rich, by definition. This is nearly half the global CO2 footprint.
infinitezest•about 2 hours ago
What would _you_ call the top 10% richest people in the world? Middle upper, upper, upper, upper class?
roughly•about 1 hour ago
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 maybe faster - man, y’all call yourselves hackers, but you sure are an incurious and gullible lot.
dariosalvi78•4 minutes ago
climate change became to be discussed as an issue since the 80s. I am in my late 40s and I have been hearing about since forever, and yet so little has been done since then. Now you can understand why I, as probably many here, have zero faith in this being solved in any sensible way.

Go and get depressed... or maybe go and eat your Brazilian meat burger, drive your SUV and book your flight to Hawaii, it won't last long.

senordevnyc•about 1 hour ago
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.

roughly•24 minutes ago
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.

skeledrew•about 2 hours ago
Burn baby burn!
fithisux•about 2 hours ago
This is not bad news. At some time we should decide to get along with Mother Nature.

The Industrial party of the last 2 centuries is over. We should love the trees, the animals, the land and leave ASAP from the cities.

Unfortunately, the plutocracy has different plans.

xyst•about 1 hour ago
anybody still grinding out a 9-5 for a trust fund baby at this point is wasting their life.

billionaires, boomers, decrepit old men, and o&g industry have fucked future generations and humanity.

kpmcc•about 2 hours ago
Buddy with all 24/7 gas powered data centers in the works we’ll be lucky to keep below 3 C.
monster_truck•about 2 hours ago
How could this happen? I've faithfully sorted all of my recyclables into their respective bins to maximize profit for my city's garbage collection just like they asked
cbg0•about 1 hour ago
We've gone the "crowdsorting" route but if we didn't go this way the fees for garbage collection would be higher and the city's garbage collection company would still make profits, that's a constant.
p-e-w•about 2 hours ago
Telling you that you have power is one of the ways by which they ensure that you don’t have any power. Elections work the same way.
tito•about 2 hours ago
They tell you you have a particular type of power. You have the power to sort your trash, nothing wrong with that. But what's left off and out is you have the power to change what dozens, thousands, millions, and billions of people do. "Carbon footprint" was a marketing trick played by the oil industry. It worked great.

What's needed now is something like a "carbon wave", where you evaluate your impact by how quickly you move the entire world forward.

There's a new book on this to that just arrived to me last week: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-carbon-wave-leah-c-stok...

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wateralien•about 2 hours ago
This is mostly the UN’s own fault. Nation governments refrain from getting “hardcore” on this because the better options are expensive and they don’t want to be undercut by another country. The UN is supposed to somehow use its deep diplomatic negotiating and deal-making skill to find and enforce agreement between these states so we all adopt the changes together… and penalise the hold-outs (we all know who) together.