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Ask HN: Will the world ever get serious about tackling climate change?

10 points by headmelted ↗ HN
As the title says really.

Green technologies are advancing, solar is becoming more efficient at capturing energy per square foot of panel, and wind farms are (depending on geography) contributing to large reductions in fossil fuel use in some parts of the world.

Obviously, this is only part of the equation and there are a lot of agricultural and industrial changes that would be needed too, which we haven't seen happen as of yet.

My question is in part whether or not the surface of the Earth will look like the start of Wall-E before we collectively say "yeah might be time to do something about this".

I didn't want to ask "Will the world tackle climate change in time?" because the thread would become a debate around whether or not it's already too late and I don't think I could take the nihilism of it all today. It also wouldn't be particularly inspiring or helpful.

4 comments

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onion2k
What I believe is inevitable is that we'll see mass migrations and wars due to the climate in the next 50 years. North America, Europe and the northern countries in Asia are going to see hundreds of millions of people moving away from the equator in the second half of the century. If you have children now their life is going to change dramatically when they're middle-aged.

Whether or not that'll be enough to make humanity serious about climate change is still debatable though.

headmelted
This is something I've wondered about, too.

Will people rightly realise "we all did this to the world"?

Sadly history would tell us that most of the folks already resident in those parts of the world furthest from the equator will just complain about and intimidate what they see as "filthy immigrants" trying to steal their country.

Realistically, we need to fundamentally change how the educational system works from the age of about four years old to tackle the worst of our problems. Guiding children to value science above things like celebrity/entertainment/money at a young age would help them understand how things have gotten to the stage they have and likely go a long way to helping us turn this around.

I don't want to say that people have gotten steadily less intelligent over time, but I see very little interest left in objective truth among the public at large.

Science, being at it's core the pursuit of objective, provable truth, would correlate with us advancing as a species. Not to go nauseatingly Will McAvoy, but we did used to revere intelligence and the advancement of our understanding - at least as I remember it.

petargyurov
Lately I have been quite pessimistic about this exact scenario.

The current global powerhouses, in terms of emissions (and, well, power) are reluctant to do any effective large-scale changes that reduce their emmissions - why? - corporate greed. Nobody wants to go green when it means a reduction in profit margins.

What makes me sad is that this sort of immoral negligence and greed are rooted deeply in the government bodies themselves. Capitalism in the US has reached dystopian levels of political control. China's desire for growth and power will stop at nothing, be it a tree or a human being. European powers are happy talking about green energy when they are still heavily dependant on off-shore oil rigs, mining and natural gas imports/exports. Latin America is destroying itself to make a buck satisfying western bellies.

I don't know... Maybe I just need to drink my coffee and cheer up.

jka
Incremental change can be hard to notice; I believe that more than enough people can, will and are getting serious about climate change. It's always worth building more momentum.

CO2 output reduced[1] by over 35% in the UK between 1990-2017, and that demonstrates that real, impactful change can accumulate thanks to simultaneous improvements in multiple areas. The linked reference includes a Jupyter notebook with Python analysis code and original data sources for anyone curious.

The UK isn't alone in this - many other European countries and the US also reduced CO2 emissions between 2005-2015[2].

The UN Environment Programme produces yearly 'gap reports' such as this one[3] from 2019 that provide assessments of worldwide progress on greenhouse gas emissions relative to countries' commitments via the Paris Agreement.

It's still a difficult battle and some people won't care to help for various reasons; some benign, some selfish or ignorant.

In my opinion much of the capability to improve requires strong, well-informed political leadership who are able and willing to encourage and improve energy efficiency.

Since we have good tools to collect and analyze information nowadays, I believe that in the years to come it'll become increasingly apparent which groups have been working earnestly to tackle climate change and which groups have been impeding progress.

[1] - https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-why-the-uks-co2-emissio...

[2] - https://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/climate-change-co2-emissi...

[3] - https://www.unenvironment.org/resources/emissions-gap-report...