
Ask HN: What must happen to humanity to solve the climate change problem? - manx
I&#x27;m not asking about practical things like reducing greenhouse gas emissions, but rather what prevents us to make these decisions.
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gkbrk
It is cheaper or even profitable for corporations to take actions that either
don't improve, or actively undermine the ecosystem and the environment.

Make it profitable to be clean, or force them to be clean by government
action, and the problem will resolve itself in your country.

If other countries are polluting, stop trading with them if you can or tax
them heavily and invest the tax money into environmental pursuits.

In short, this is an economic problem. Governments, and even individuals, can
vote with their wallets to improve the situation.

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LandR
> what prevents us to make these decisions

The vast majority of people are greedy, uneducated and selfish.

Fix that and you won't just fix climate change you'll fix a lot of our issues.

~~~
seotut2
> The vast majority of people are greedy, uneducated and selfish.

That's a naive view of human personality. The reality is that all people are
"greedy" and "selfish" in that they consciously or subconsciously pursue their
own interest. (Some people do suffer from various degrees of developmental
trauma that affects their ability to do that easily, but the part of the brain
that is responsible for that still exists. "psychologists" sometimes refer to
this as inability to perceive borders, perception of self etc).

Now, the set of people that you are referring to by exclusion, i.e. those that
are not "greedy, uneducated and selfish" simply find themselves in a
priviledged position and signal virtue by painting themselves as climate
conscious individuals. Of course, the brain hides most of the real motivation
behind this reasoning.

Are there also people who want to see the world burn? Absolutely. Again trauma
does that to people. But most mentally "healthy" people don't want the planet
to become uninhabitable for human life.

This is all coming from someone who was at one point in life deeply affected
by intense destruction of natural ecosystems around, intense logging, illegal
deforestation. I was an avid cyclist and used to love nature and was seeing
the destruction on my rides. But you learn to accept that, this is the way of
life.

===============

Now, to answer to original question. What must happen for humanity to
coordinate on solving this problem? I don't expect humanity to be able to do
it. But I think what would need to happen as a stepping stone, is to end most
of the conflict in the world right now. This is of course impossible to do in
one generation. When you stop seeing the world in "us vs them" and the vast
majority of people emphatize with everyone else and other life forms, i think
coordination is possible. I doubt humanity will reach that point though.

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fjfaase
We evolved in a species that is just intelligent enough to develop technology
but not intelligent enough to handle it properly. You do not only see this
with the (ab)use of fossil fuels, but also, for example, with respect to the
use of antibiotics.

With respect to our closest relatives, it is interesting that our level of
aggression is in the middle of the chimps and bonobo's. Apparently, we are at
the right level between individualism and cooperation to have developed the
kind of intelligence we posses. If we would have been more cooperative, and
value our personal interests less than that of the species, we would not have
developed the technology that we now cannot handle. That we are a species that
can use language to create intrinsic lies, is also not helping. On one hand
language has helped us to cooperate without submitting to the whole, but also
has lead to the development of politics: leaders who can convince others that
they are good leaders based on what they say.

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troydavis
A lack of severe present-day consequences. This year’s west coast US wildfire
smoke is as close as the US has seen to motivation. Society would need that
for weeks every year (or a different consequence of about that amount of
discomfort) to be motivated enough for meaningful change.

(Yes, this means we’ll wait a long time before acting.)

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bobm_kite9
This wasn't the summer I was expecting: although we've managed to melt a huge
amount of the arctic ice cap, temperatures in the northern hemisphere were
still bearable, even though this was one of the hottest summers on record, and
there were lots of forest fires in Siberia and the US.

An even hotter summer heatwave causing large numbers of deaths in continental
cities should make politicians take much closer notice.

Although it doesn't please me to say this, I think this is the crisis we need
in order for this problem to start being taken much more seriously. Change can
happen in a crisis.

~~~
jfengel
Politicians don't notice until their supporters notice. There's really no way
for a politician to turn around and say, "Hey, it turns out I just noticed
that climate change is a real and bad thing, and we should do something about
it." Politicians elected on a climate-change-is-a-hoax platform will continue
to do so, crisis or no crisis.

For that matter, the climate-change-is-a-hoax politicians are doing equally
well with COVID19-is-a-hoax.

That applies to only half the population in one country with about 4% of the
world's population, but it's responsible for 25% of the greenhouse gas
emissions (and 20% of the COVID19 deaths). The new data may nudge enough of
them to cause a significant change in the outcome if an election, but it would
at best be temporary since so many other things can nudge it back come the
next election.

I don't see anybody taking climate change seriously who isn't already. It's
just too effective as a political strategy.

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raxxorrax
Economic collapse? Kidding, but that might actually help.

Otherwise I think the impacts of events from climate change must be more
pronounced before we see more focused action.

A co2 tax disallows companies to externalize the damage to the environment.
Hoping for innovative forms of energy production and storage. We have some of
that already, but the investment costs are too high.

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giantg2
Because people won't give up their modern lifestyle and no country will
support the massive programs that would be necessary to reverse the warming
trend.

Resource consumption is the root of all environmental impact. High populations
tend to exacerbate that impact to the point where it is negative. So once the
population reaches a certain level, even a minimal existence creates a
negative impact.

Good luck convincing even a majority of the population to reduce offspring
(capitalism as we know it requires population growth), reduce consumption
(people are greedy and wasteful), and change their lifestyle (from eliminating
chemical products, adopting a zero trash lifestyle, to giving up cars, yes
even the electric ones). Then you'd have to get countries to work together not
just to essentially ban greenhouse emissions, but also reverse the warming
trend by blocking solar energy in space or the atmosphere and recapturing
greenhouse gasses, etc.

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throw_this_one
No individual has the incentives to help nip this in the bud before it spirals
out of control. At this point, it needs to be a top down effort from
governments/UN. But of course, the finite resources in this world are zero
sum. And there are the fools out there that think the free market can save us.

It's gonna be tough or impossible.

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onecommentman
Investment decisions are based on expected costs and benefits AND a
characterization of the uncertainties in those estimates. Parametric
uncertainty in climate models can be beaten to death with Monte Carlo
techniques and the like. Structural uncertainty — how certain are you in the
functions and their couplings — is a lot harder. A single feedback loop
missed, a single additional factor unaccounted for...and 3.5 C becomes 5 C, or
-2 C.

Consider the models that were used in the first days of the COVID pandemic to
predict the trajectory of deaths over time by US State. It wasn’t that they
were wrong...that was to be expected. What was problematic was their
_estimates of the uncertainty in their estimates_ of those trajectories which,
if I remember, was way too small. You will overinvest if the uncertainties are
understated...and the very modelers who understated the uncertainties will be
first line to sop up the money. Convenient.

The loudest voices, whether politicians or scientists, will generally
overestimate how much confidence we should place in their predictions. “The
seersucker principle - for every seer, there’s a sucker.” Especially when
there is a 10 Trillion Dollar international slush fund waiting to be
established and milked. That’s a lot of graduate stipends, and somebody has to
eat all those Viennese pastries at international conferences.

Well, what about consensus? You mean a Mongolian cluster...umm...let’s just
say that there is no way to quantify the reduction in uncertainty when a group
of experts, who stand to gain reputationally (for at least as long as it takes
for their kids to get out of college), say that something is a sure thing. I
believe that a relevant phrase from finance is “lipstick on a pig”.

But we have to do something, right? Well, are there lower risk investments?
Well, a lot of folks are going to die in China, India and the like from air
quality, if certain health models are correct. Models that can be verified a
lot more easily than global climate models. India needs technologies to plant
crops without burning fields. Those are well-established technologies that
could be implemented in India today with a small fraction of just 1 Trillion.
Scrubbers on coal plants in China? Direct lives saved this decade. Electric
vehicles? A win-win according to some analysts for both short term and, if the
climate models are correct, long term. Nuclear power? Replacing burning wood
with cleaner household fuels? Let’s address deforestation too.

What about climate modelers? We still need researchers and research...because
we live here. On Earth. Nice to know where the light switches are, for a lot
of good reasons.

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ebcode
evolution

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samuelma
It needs to be seen and felt by a large majority of people, especially in the
richer countries. And even then there will be political promises more than
action, until it's probably going to be too late, if it's not already.

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scott31
China needs to change

~~~
runawaybottle
Of all the countries, I’d say China is being the most aggressive in terms of
going green due to the sheer pollution it’s creating.

