I remember reading something somewhere in the 1990s that the entirety of New Orleans was going to be underwater by 2020 and the only way you'd be able to visit Bourbon Street was by boat.
You might wan't to rethink your example here... You don't need a boat yet, but New Orleans has suffered incredibly in the last 20 years, both materially and spiritually, because of the hurricanes and flooding.
I guess the human toll of all those things aren't really all that meaningful when it is not visually apparent to an outside observer. Which does make this a good example of what is going in general, you are right!
>I guess the human toll of all those things aren't really all that meaningful
Hilarious emotional appeal strawman. You can't even stay on topic after being proven wrong. Remember, New Orleans isn't underwater and it's past 2020.
>when it is not visually apparent to an outside observer.
I'm old enough to remember seeing all the pictures and videos of the aforementioned hurricanes. Don't project your ignorance on everyone else.
> Which does make this a good example
Yes, a good example of New Orleans still being there, all the highways are still there, the sports arenas are still there, there are over a million people that live there, etc.
Thank you for being so patient and kind. I am pretty slow in my thinking (low IQ), so it really helps when someone, point by point, explains to me why I am wrong in a compassionate and unassuming way. And I am glad I could entertain you with my stupidity along the way :).
I will work on not talking out of place, and not being so worried about climate change, but I do understand that I am in this position in the first place because of my moral and rational faults.
My best wishes to you and your loved ones, may you continue to find peace and stay dry (well, as you explained, you'll probably stay dry either way, still, the sentiment still stands).
Strictly speaking, that’s not wrong: it’s only through the Herculean efforts of the army corps of engineers that New Orleans is as unsubmerged as it is.
Don’t forget Hurricane Harvey: we spent ~$170B cleaning that up. It’s never that we can’t undo climate at a small scale, it’s that doing so may bankrupt entire states in the process.
Like it was pre-prepared. Climate change articles get quickly jumped on here with energetic negativity and are often flagged out. It's fascinating to watch; but a sign of a healthy debate, it is not.
While some of those were hard misses, maybe were indeed possible scenarios if nothing had been done. Since the 60s governments world wide have enacted progressively stricter regulations for industry emissions, industrial waste treatment, car emissions, appliance efficiency, CFC use, car fuel chemistry, etc etc. We would be in a much, much worse state if nothing had been done. And yet some of those are happening now. Permanent snowy mountains are now bare; insects are dying at alarming rates; yearly record temperatures, both harsher summers and harsher winters.
It's not news that newspapers use sensational headlines to sell more.
I picked one of these arbitrarily, “Manhattan underwater by 2015”, and couldn’t find any evidence of the LA Times ever having claimed that, but I did find that people have been claiming, incorrectly, that the ABC (Australia) said that.
So unless you post sources for these, people should assume you are a troll.
The only source I can find on this list are previous HN comments. Searching for some of them is turning up nothing outside of that. Do you have a link to these, or a better search option than Google or the latimes.com's search?
EDIT: Also found a screenshot of the list on Reddit. Seems it's been bouncing around for a few years, never with any supporting evidence.
You said "these are some of..." not "some of these are...".
"X1, X2, X3 are some of Y" means that {X1, X2, X3} is a subset of Y. "Some of X1, X2, X3 are Y" means that {X1, X2, X3} intersects Y. But you said the former!
News organizations designing headlines for attention does not undermine the data driven truth; resource consumption is real. Sorry the modeling techniques haven’t been as perfect as you’d prefer.
Your inability to be swayed by Anglo-gibberish is formidable but you’re a non-entity to me and I don’t have to optimize for your preferences.
Sit back down in your bubble and accept on a rock of 7 billion+ you are just one. TL;DR your evidence is insufficient and I’m likewise as unmoved by it as you are from your perspective.
Yes very big strong mtn man effort though cutting and pasting text to reiterate a repetitive rhetorical point as evidence of how stoic you are.
One might think you would also have sources to reference any of these articles (given it's your "hobby") but you're curiously silent when people point out most of these articles never got written.
Are you sure about those headlines? A Google search for 'latimes "Volcano caldera ready to wipe out civilization"' [0] reveals two hits - both of them previous comments of yours on this site.
Ignoring the fact that cherry picking the worst headlines says little about the average quality of journalism, I started looking into these claimed headlines and found that many were not in the LA Times, some were not headlines (they seem to be from the article text), and some don't seem to exist as described (like "5G cellular towers causes cancers" and "Volcano caldera ready to wipe out civilization").
You wrote "Here are some of the many of Los Angeles Times’ newspaper headlines". A reasonable person would understand that quote to say that the headlines are from the LA Times, but it's only some of the many bad headlines the LA Times has had.
You are mixing in random headlines that were not the results of my scientific consensus (cellphones and cancer?) and headlines that warned of the bad possibilities if nothing was done. The fact that scientific and other advancements have helped avert some of the issues we were warned about shouldn’t be misinterpreted as a failure of the warning but the opposite.
So, I just choose one example (1971), because most claims about 1970's Ice Age articles are overblown. I found no LATimes articles with the title "New Ice Age coming by 2020 or 2030" There were five times that "New Ice Age" was used in print, and of those 40% seem to be referencing an upcoming artistic event's theme (Holiday on Ice).
The main article about an ice age in 1971 would have been on October 24th, 1971. The front page of the LA Times did indeed feature the words "Ice Age" on the bottom of the front page in the "articles inside" block. It did not use the words "New", "coming", "by", "2020" or "2030" in the article title.
It doesn't look like the la times ever used the headline "Everyone will disappear in a Cloud of Blue Steam in", the only results in google was for an Alex Jones book or something
The climate crisis coalesces wealth inequality, war tension, national resources, economy, and a host of other pressing current issues. It is trivial to find the link to each of these topics.
I mean this respectfully, but there is absolutely no way a nation can 'over-allocate' to the climate crisis. Please provide a precise example or retract your claim.
Edit: I'm getting a lot of down votes for this comment but not a lot of conversation to explain how I have gone wrong here, and I think the request for a precise argument is not unreasonable.
Perhaps one of my critics could enlighten me to my error?
Anything that causes a backslide to the point people are burning more fossil fuels would be an over allocation. So would any attempt to pull so much CO2 out of the atmosphere that caused a mass green plant die-off.
It is possible to overshoot the problem. It seems improbable, but we could overshoot.
Thanks for clarifying. I think I understand the objection but I have a follow up question: are these hypothetical overshoots realistically possible? With the rate we enact change now, is it even possible to get 'slightly overshot' without opposing interests jumping all over it?
(This is not a rhetorical question: I'm not sure one way or another, though my expectation is that it isn't possible)
If you want to talk about the "climate crisis", I'm going to keep pointing to the lack of good modeling in regard to water vapor and air travel (which has a specific phase relationship with sunshine that must be taken into account). I'll also try to dig up that graph correlating the rise in air travel with temperatures. I'll insist that even if I accept human cause of these changes (which I'm willing to do), it is reasonably likely due to air travel and you can't show otherwise without those models.
In general, when you think you have evidence supporting your case it's a good idea to go ahead and just use it rather than talking about how you plan to use it.
The lack of good modelling is no reason to do less to reduce emissions. Poor modelling can mean that the problem is worse than the models predict. Every time we improve our models the predictions seem to get worse.
So far we are grossly understating it to avoid mass panic, is my guess. If people all really understood the impact and timeframes, society would fall apart.
It's not "simple" though, because this affects a lot of people's lives. I mean we're already experiencing what happens when fossil fuels get cut off; record price hikes, record inflation, and it'll have a knock-on effect for years to come.
Of course, this translates to democracy; if a sitting government decided to, for example, force a whole industry to shut down, do you think the people working in that industry would vote for the same party again? I mean granted, this issue is bigger than sitting parties and votes and I'm sure some are willing to sacrifice their political career - or the lives and livelihoods of civilians - for it, but you get what I mean.
SO lets apply logic to your statement. How can applying more resources to climate change be a misallocation of resources?
Lookat this way, when jobs that are less efficient and re-structured to be more efficient the tendency is that we have job losses. Those can and will be offset by the re-allocation of resources towards green energy in the form of brand new jobs and career opportunities.
We can either fear the unknown or want to explore it.
Taken to the extreme: if you allocate literally all resources to fighting global warming, you're bound to end up with no resources for something. Let's take nuclear disarmament as a trivial example.
Moreover, I'm not seeing what job loss has to do with the parent's statement.
I think that any approach to climate change needs to actively monitor the motivations that a given country has to sabotage it.
In that respect, I don't think that climate change is solved by 'just give the EV companies all the money ever' but by pro actively addressing and then monitoring those detractive motives, nuclear threat inclusive.
There is currently some chance - possibly single digit percentages - that the northern hemisphere will dissolve in a nuclear fireball and the rest of us will freeze in a long sub-zero nuclear winter.
The sort of people who suggest we should only talk about the climate are dangerously foolish. Priority 1 is peace, priority 2 is prosperity (which helps keep the peace). Those two issues take priority over the climate, which is only interesting as a component of them.
I propose there is no dichotomy between addressing the immediate needs of a nation or people and the far-reaching needs of the environment and climate. Both can be addressed at the same time.
I would put education at the top of the list. We in the U.S. should re-emphasize rigorous topics of STEM, history, language, philosophy, logic, civics etc., set high standards for passing and graduating middle and high school, so that our voting population will know how to think and reason. Without this, I don't see how we as a country can make rational, reasonable decisions to deal with complex issues like climate.
I compost, watch what I buy and also own an EV. But as someone who went to engineering school I fully acknowledge that my actions basically don't even move the needle. There will always be people with less education or simply less means than me that quite frankly just have bigger issues. I think the big mistake alarmists make is blaming consumers and not huge companies like Exxon.
Even among my educated friends, it's clear that people acknowledge climate change but the ever increasing alarmism of "the world will end in 46 months" is flat out not helping. I barely got through 15 minutes of "Don't Look Up" which was clearly a bizarre politically charged hit-piece.
In the meantime I'll keep working with my local town's redwood conservancy and continue growing redwood saplings in my rural greenhouse :)
I don't want to be that guy, but driving an EV (unless you drive some sort of electric bicycle or scooter) is not that environmentally friendly as the manufacturers and marketing people want you to believe. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_impact_on_the_environmen...
If I'm reading that graph right, it looks like driving an EV is about halfway between an ICE car and no car? A 50% reduction seems pretty decent to me.
I’m gonna be THIS guy, though: first - there’s more to our environment than co2.
Prolonging life and reducing negative health impacts are another bonus.
Yes, there is still an environmental cost of the production of EVs but these vehicles don’t emit CO2 or greenhouse gases and so their lifetime carbon footprint is much lower.
For example, a recent Reuters study found that a Tesla Model 3 would need to be driven for 13,500 miles (21,725 km) before it does less harm to the environment than a Toyota Corolla:
The big issue with climate change is it's gradual.
There will never be a point where "Oh shit, everything has exploded!". Instead, it will be every year that deserts will get bigger, it will rain a little less, and a few more extreme weather events happen.
This will happen just a little bit more year by year.
There won't really be a point where you can say "This was the year climate change became really bad!" instead it will take looking at the current state and comparing it to the year 2000 or 1980 or whatever. And by that time, you've got a full generation that does not remember what those years were like.
That's the thing that scares me the most about climate change. It won't be something that will hurt all at once, instead it will just be a steady increase of bad events. And by the time it becomes unworkable, it's too late.
This. You've hit on the "shifting baseline" phenomena[1]. We cannot remember what our grandparents experienced in their daily lives.
I'll add the ongoing extinction crisis that is picking up steam, itself a knock-on effect of us gobbling up all land resources and also climate change, and pollutants. I remember days in the park in the 1980s where the air would be filled with bees and insects of all kinds. The insects are so few and far between. Like, I don't even see moths swarming around streetlights anymore. It's eerie.
Oh yeah, in just my 36 years of life, I've seen things change pretty drastically and have seen family videos for stuff I don't remember.
When I was born, my hometown would regularly see around 10ft of snow (I've seen the videos).
During my childhood, that reduced down to around 2->5 ft of snow.
Now, my home town is lucky to see 2->3 inches of snow.
This drought has caused major issues for a town that was built around farming. It's driven them to pull more water from the aquifer which itself has been in pretty rapid decline. Everyone just keeps drilling deeper and deeper pumps (30ft used to be enough, now 100+ft is what people are drilling).
These sorts of slow moving collapses are terrifying to watch. And, at the same time, infuriating to hear the deniers throughout my life claim it's a hoax/not real.
I look at it the other way. Because it is gradual, we have much more time to adapt. We may miss out seeing how we've made improvements because those improvements are also gradual.
We could have carbon-neutral aviation, and not with electric jets. We would need to develop an infrastructure capable of producing jet fuel from other sources, e.g. nuclear power. I don't think we'll ever get energy density from batteries even close to what liquid hydrocarbons offer. We just can't get said hydrocarbons from fossil sources.
Better yet: airships or even ship ships with decent internet connections and coworking spaces. You could work on the way and the extra travel time wouldn't use up your vacation days.
As one of those people, it isn't always. I'm politically opposite those typically associated with virtual signaling, and I drive an EV because it's way cheaper (total cost of ownership), more fun, and more pleasant than an ICE car.
Environmental concerns didn't factor into my choice at all - far more important to me is the thrill of silent, uninterrupted acceleration and not spending time at gas stations.
I agree that we should be giving a lot more attention to climate change. I don't think it's the only thing we should be talking about, but we should be regularly asking ourselves if there is more that we can do (and there certainly is).
Climate change is bad and we need to take it seriously, but there is a lot of reason for hope. A lot of trends are pointing in the right direction and we need to support those trends. Climate policy is still in a bad state, in large part because of the gerontocracy, but younger people are entering politics with a different view.
> Nothing matters as much as our bone-headed, mass-suicidal march toward extreme-weather oblivion. Not COVID-19, not the invasion of Ukraine, not even “The Godfather.”
Says a reporter living in Los Angeles, the 49th most expensive city in the world to live in. For a lot of people, what they need to talk about is how they're getting their next meal, how they're going to make rent, or survive a current war.
Maybe go to a war zone or a poor area and try to make the same point with a straight face.
What's your point? Their attempt to empathize with the impoverished / war torn is fool hardy and they should try to remain clueless of other people's experiences and whine about their own problems?
How is climate change “whining about their own problems?”.
The LA times author was making the point that, to him and his readers, nothing matters as much as climate change. While what is happening in Ukraine is absolutely terrible, in his mind it does not reach the level of concern that climate does.
Parents response was “oh you’re so privileged”, and my point is that just about everyone on this site is. Frankly, their comment came across less like empathy and more like standard deflection.
Finally, climate change is only “our problem” in the sense that it’s primarily driven by the global rich and privileged. The people who will bear the worst of it are the poor in the global south who did little to contribute to the problem.
So basically you think the person is hypocrite and that makes their point invalid. I think you should consider how we are going to achieve climate goals which require political consensus given the point OP makes personally, but noted.
My point is that they are not suffering at the levels I compared it to, yet have the gall to tell everyone else not only what to talk about - but that they shouldn't even be talking about anything else.
I may not be suffering either, but I'm not telling anyone that I know better then them what "the real problem is". I thought this would've been understandable, but maybe the clarification helps.
While I don’t agree with the author that climate change is the _only_ thing we should talk about, his premise that there are many issues and crises that compete for our attention is valid, and, further, his point that there needs to be a discussion about what to prioritize is a valid one as well.
Saying “oh you don’t suffer therefore you don’t have any right to tell people what to do!” is classic derailing and it is what the opposition has done with climate change for decades. I don’t doubt that you had good intent with your comment, though.
If I told a person in a war zone there was a planetary crisis that would guarantee the death of the children or grandchildren, I don't have a doubt in the world they would care about it. Just because someone living in danger or poverty doesn't make them a fool or a coward.
I'm sure they would care in an abstract sense. Probably they would not agree that nobody should be talking about the suffering they are going through. I have friends and family in Ukraine right now, and I've not heard anyone say anything remotely like they wished people were focusing on the climate instead.
When you're in a war zone, even if you're in the country but far from the action, the only thing you can think about is your immediate survival and the survival of your friends and family.
Thanks for editing your comment for additional clarity. There isn't much one can do about anything if they survive until the next day, but that does not mean they don't care about non-immediate concerns. Flight 571 survivors were not pro-cannibalism, they did what they had to in order to survive in terrible circumstances. People in poverty and conflict definitely still care about their familys' futures.
It’s funny how intensity triggers our anxiety like that. Triggers a disposition to ignore the future for the moment.
I wonder if western propaganda and hype generation for technology, quarterly gains, the latest stuff! could be leveraged intentionally to distract any human then given our shared biology.
That’s a rhetorical point since I know our biology is intentionally used against us like that by industry because marketing and PR execs have explained how it is just so they seek to keep our inner monologues flush with their phrases.
There’s plenty of new perspectives and applications of your agency available. Why not put yourself to them rather than demand others change theirs?
No? Going to sit at screen and PR others into action? Typical rich westerner; externalizing the change they want to see in the world.
Given how absolutely hard it is to get people to evacuate in front of an obviously on-coming disaster such as a flood or hurricane, I think your view of people is naive at best.
As someone living in the third world let me assure you those living in poverty have more pressing challenges for themselves and their children. They are fighting raw nature daily for survival and your attempt to redirect attention away from, say, business and work creation to your "end of the world (maybe)" fears is not going to go over well.
What I don't understand is your lack of doubt that they would (or should) care. The conviction is something analogous to religion.
What are you trying to argue? That we should not care about climate change because there are reporters who live in expensive cities? Or that no-one living in Los Angeles is allowed an opinion?
Well most of the proposed solutions to climate change issues involve making the proles' standard of living worse which is never going to work. Even something as minor as increasing fuel taxes led to the yellow vest protests. How are any of these major curtailing of consumption solutions going to fly globally without leading to massive civil unrest?
The issue is there is probably no good way to address climate change without impacting standard of living.
The solution is to emit less CO2. Carbon capture/reclamation will never be enough to actually change things particularly with the current levels of emissions.
So how do we address that? Best way, IMO, is to go after the largest CO2 emitters. That's transportation, electricity, and industrial emissions (mostly concrete and steel AFAIK). Hitting any of those industries with a tax to incentivize reduction will impact standards of living. It will raise the price of goods which ultimately hit the poor and middle class.
You could also subsidize switch over, but that's ultimately a lot harder (and probably less effective) than more general carbon taxes.
And, of course, this has to be done globally, so if we really wanted this to be effective then it'd mean not just fixing your own country but also ideally subsidizing or sanctioning/embargoing bad players.
I don't think this is what he is saying.
I think he is just saying that for a lot of people in the world it's hard to prioritize a potential decade(s) away crisis while dealing with life-threatening situations on daily basis.
I totally agree with what you say. To add on that, effects of Russian war in Ukraine may have extraordinary effect on global climate, given that to limit consumption of Russian oil and gas Europe invests more in renewables and even considers building new nuclear power plants.
The short term effect of Europe's move away from pipeline gas to LNG will be to increase CO2 emissions, if only because production and transportation of LNG consumes about 10% of the original gas.
Furthermore, emissions of methane from LNG production and transportation contribute to global warming - by some estimates at a rate comparable to the CO2 emissions.
The entire framing of the climate issue as "poor and middle class people need to use less energy, says a bunch of comparatively rich people living in high cost of living first world cities" guarantees political failure.
The only way we will get real traction against this problem is if we stop framing it around shame and austerity and instead frame it as a problem solvable via technological innovation that also frees us from the constraints of fossil fuel dependence.
That framing is also more correct IMHO, as there are numerous reasons to get off fossil fuels other than climate. The most significant of these is political independence and the fact that fossil fuels are a strictly limited declining resource whose depletion threatens our civilization on the supply side.
This is a technical problem not a moral problem. There is no god that is going to punish us for emitting carbon. It's just physics: more carbon, more retained solar heat, weather changes that will disrupt the food supply and threaten a bunch of major population centers.
It's also a problem about human self-interest not saving some mythical shibboleth of "unspoiled nature." Nature just is and we are only spoiling it for ourselves. As George Carlin put it: "Stop saying save the Earth! The Earth will be fine. We're fucked."
Edit: on a final note: yes it is true that we could probably absorb and adapt to even severe climate change. But the cost of non-carbon-based energy is falling rapidly as technology advances and renewable energy is scaled up, while the deferred cost of climate change is rising. These lines almost certainly intersected some time ago. Getting off fossil carbon is cheaper than continuing to make climate change worse. This effect is compounded by the fact that fossil fuels are being depleted and therefore that the more we invest in them the more fossil fuel infrastructure investment will eventually be stranded as worthless. That depletion will probably bite at about the same time as climate change, draining the economy right when that cost hits. When you consider the depletion and stranded investment angles getting off fossil fuels is probably many orders of magnitude cheaper than the alternative path.
We already have several options available to massively curtail our emissions (solar, wind, hydro, geothermal). While yes new technology would make this transition even faster, a major, MAJOR roadblock is lobbying by fossil fuel industries and related corporate interests.
What I'm saying is that the shame-and-austerity framing plays right into the hands of fossil fuel industry propaganda.
One of the most insidious bits of fossil fuel propaganda I've seen recently is this whole "moral case for fossil fuels" schtick. They're pointing out that fossil fuels have lifted billions out of poverty, which is technically true, and then using that combined with the "moral panic" framing of the green movement to argue that greens want to push those billions back into poverty.
Personally I think we have historically framed environmental issues as moral because we (meaning the USA) are a culture with puritan roots and the whole protestant moral panic framing is baked into our cultural DNA. It's how we often approach problems, especially collective or tragedy of the commons problems. We approach them by deploying shame to try to change behavior. It very often backfires like it is here, or like it does when we try to shame teenagers out of having sex.
First, I'll note that a lot of poor people IRL have just as much "social conscience" than other people, especially politically. Poor people vote based on the whole range of issues that everyone else votes on.
Second, the "i've got my own problems go away" response is applicable to everything, including poverty.
The older these tropes get, the less thoughtfully they are used.
Why do you think russia invaded Ukraine? Ukraine was working with Shell oil to extract vast oil deposits that are only able to be reached with modern tech. If they got that oil, it would make them the 14th largest oil state in the world. Ukraine also happens to be the main pipeline the USSR sold through. Ukraine, when it gets that oil will be able to side step russia and sell to Europe. Also of importance is that the independent zones that sided with russia happen to be right on top of deposits. The only thing russia has going for it is oil and they need to keep their monopoly. What this has to do with climate change is that russia would have to modernize all their soviet infrastructure to get costs down and also extend their pipelines to china, but it is easier to keep being dirty and crush the competition.
His audience is first-world readers, who have time to digest the material, and then in the face of the ugly implications upon their own action, respond with snark about how plenty of humans are facing more urgent crises so we shouldn't worry about the destruction of our planet.
Is there any solution that doesn’t either involve developed countries lowering their quality of life or preventing developing nations from cheaply industrializing?
> developed countries lowering their quality of life
I seriously disagree with this framing. Developed countries have been artificially inflating their quality of life through cheap energy available from burning fossil fuels. This is an unsustainable practice that will a.) come to end due to exhaustion of said fuels b.) have significant, compounding externalities that are subject to incredible levels of reality distortion from entities benefiting from the economies they intentionally structured to be dependent on said energy sources.
The truth is that western countries have developed too fast through the planetary equivalent of roid rage. We've gone massively into debt, dug into a huge reservoir that is emptying, and the waste products produced by our flagrant exploitation of dirty energy reserves are very bad for the planet.
So yeah, I completely disagree with the "lowering their quality of life" framing. It's true that if you've been going into debt your whole life, and suddenly stop spending like a drunken sailor, your quality of life might go down.
Framing aside it’s a fact that the quality of life will be lowered for some.
What you’re saying isn’t wrong, but it is what it is. This is a political issue, acting as if switching entirely to renewables will not result in some short term sacrifices is well, disingenuous.
I will still challenge these assertions. Lowering quality of life....to only a bazillion times better than a couple generations ago. When in reality the things people would be giving up are gluttonous wastes of energy like private jets and affordable vacations in the Caribbean (a new thing!).
I'll even go further to say that reducing fossil fuel usage for transportation (cars) and heating (natural gas) will improve quality of life for many. Air pollution is majorly bad for people's lungs, brains, and overall health. Not to mention the complete waste of time that rush hour represents.
That seems like obviously the wrong question, since it has at least the potential to rule out viable solutions a priori.
For example, what would be wrong with preventing developing nations from cheaply industrialising, while also subsidising them to do something else instead?
The question you pose is effectively why we’re in the situation we’re in. To solve the climate crisis all externalities need to effectively be captured in the price in order to stabilize the market failure with respect to said externalities.
Subsidies are what we do now already which is why we’re in the situation we’re in.
Conditional subsidies ("we'll give you money if you don't build that nasty coal plant") do capture an externality, so I'm not sure what point you're making.
Working on a web project about the reality of our situation and who can actually fix this and what we, as individuals, can actually contribute. A corrective to both the doomism and the superficial "recycle, plant a tree" listicles.
The climate crisis was interrupted by the Covid crisis, which resulted in a change of way of life that was harmful to the environment (masks in the water, more delivery is using more fossil fuels).
False dichotomy; we can - and are - doing multiple things at once. Absolutism isn't going to work, I mean if you want to deal with the climate crisis effectively, just elect me God-Emperor and I'll take care of it. Many of you will die, but that's a sacrifice I'm willing to make.
The thing about a crisis is that it forces you to act on it, right now. Something like being invaded by your larger neighbor is a crisis, because you have to drop whatever you're doing and think about defense, immediately and with all your effort.
The climate "crisis" is a slow boil. Ice caps melt a bit, water goes up a bit, a few houses fall in, no big deal. Drought happens, we have less food, we buy it from elsewhere, no big deal. Hurricanes increase, we fix the damage, no big deal. Everything bad about the climate crisis seems to be localized and episodic, on the scale of how we normally report the news. Put together it may well be much, much, worse, and far more expensive, but the way it happens makes a big difference to whether we do anything about it.
I fear that calling it a crisis trips the wrong false alarm override, there should be some other word. We keep getting told this COP is the last chance, and that we have 10 years at most. But we're still here, so we think the warning was overdone, and maybe we should just ignore it next time.
We should call it "the generational inheritance of our planet project" or something like that. I don't want to be the guy who screws up a crisis and the world ends, but I also don't want to leave a slightly shittier planet for my kids, and for them to do the same.
The issue there is that global warming isn't a crisis, until it suddenly is due to a weather event. Ice caps melting: not a crisis. Flooding during a weather event: Crisis. Average temperatures in a year going up by .5 degrees: not a crisis. Forest fires destroying your house, or droughts causing crops to fail: Crisis. Glaciers and permafrost melting: not a crisis. Ocean gulf stream stopping, causing warm water to no longer go north and vice-versa, triggering a new ice age and all of Scandinavia, northern Europe and northern America to be covered in a kilometer of ice: that's a bit of an issue.
I get it, it's not an immediate crisis for most, so people are like "huh I remember hot summers back in MY day", confusing weather for climate and not seeing a need to act.
I'm pessimistic though. Any change now will be too little, too late; we've passed the point of no return, of climate collapse years ago. Things like: permafrost is melting, releasing sequestered CO2 and methane in the atmosphere at a rate greater than our own pollution. Polar caps and glaciers are not recovering, making the ocean absorb more heat (ice reflects sun rays back into space). Rising sea levels and the like make water push ice up and about, causing large ice sheets to break off of Antarctica and float into warmer waters. The list goes on. I'm not very optimistic. I just hope to die of old age before famine and war strike; given the current instability of existing unions like Europe and NATO, I'm not very positive about that either though.
I fully believe in the climate crisis but this sort of talk is religious extremism. This is what religious extremists say and if you dare to disobey oir question them, you are considered a heretic and should be essentially punished or killed. The New Left has turned into religious extremists.
The climate crisis ISN'T the only thing we should be talking about. We also have problems with straight up pollution, and other things like countries like China that fish until extinction. There are 1000+ Chinese fishing boats parked in international waters off the coast of South America that are fishing until the point of extinction and then bringing the fish back to China, leaving nothing for the South Americans.
There are companies like Nestle whose CEO doesn't believe water is a fundamental right, and places like California and Canada that let it bottle water for essentially free and then sell it for more than gasoline. We have runoff of PFAS polluting water, we have so much pollution from microplastics, we have plastics polluting the Pacific Ocean, microplastics in our blood, etc.
So, NO. Climate crisis is NOT the only thing we should be talking about. That is utterly crazy, and sounds like something ISIS would say.
> The moment that, by the latest estimates, is less than 10 years away
The moment is always 10 years away.
Remember global cooling or the mini ice age of the 70s?
Remember Al Gore and global warming? It's an inconvenient truth that nothing has really materialised in the past 15 years following that, despite his hysteria. (He is surely sad that it hasn't, given his environmental investment portfolio).
I've seen nothing to indicate any change at all. The beaches of my childhood are the same, weather does change - but if anything, things seem cooler not warmer to me. There is surely pollution, but I lay all blame for that at the feet of corporations. They should pay, rather than getting their governments to socialise the expense of the population - by making us feel guilty for consuming, even teaching this in schools. Apparently we should feel guilty for merely existing. They can stick it.
I'm afraid that I do not trust the science, the media or politicians to convey truth to us here. They are all self-serving. They can stick it too.
And let's remember that this wasn't an issue until the Club of Rome came up with the idea to make Man the enemy in order to gain greater control of our lives on behalf of the oligarchs:
"In searching for a common enemy against whom we can unite, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like, would fit the bill. [. . .] All these dangers are caused by human intervention in natural processes, and it is only through changed attitudes and behaviour that they can be overcome. The real enemy then is humanity itself."
The Club of Rome, in their 1991 publications The First Global Revolution, under the heading “the common enemy of humanity is Man”.
Reading the thread, I guess all I need is to buy an EV and compost my food waste and then I won't have to worry anymore, plus have a nice moral ground to complain about climate scientists like the Republicans do.
Honestly, a huge majority of you need to be honest with yourselves: this kind of thing bugs you because you are business people, founders, people broadly trying to make serious investments in some kind of economic future that will (ultimately) lead to your (continued) success. Your aspirations are not bad in themselves, but neither is reporting about climate change, and the honesty comes in when you recognize there is a conflict of interest between the two here.
This is indicative of what I think is the primary problem we're all dealing with: we are all told to buy EVs and compost and recycle. It's OUR fault the Earth is dying. The consumers....
Which is HORSESHIT. Doritos bags made of shiny plastic, microplastics in products, pesticides used on crops... All of these things are corporate driven decisions. Those bags are used for chips because they make the shelf life longer, saving them money. Microplastics make it easier and cheaper to produce exfoliating products, which could be done with pumice or other stuff that's more expensive. Pesticides increase crop yield, increasing the bottom line.
So while us consumers are out here fretting over how our single coke can not recycled is killing the planet, large corporations make decisions every day that either make them money or save them money, and do irreparable harm to the world. But instead of fixing these problems, they run ads to tell us to recycle. That highly concentrated soap you use on your dishes that goes into the water supply? It's got a baby duck on the bottle so you can feel better about using it!
We lie to ourselves about all of this. Individual changes in behavior make no difference. The things we litter and don't recycle should simply not be there in the first place. I buy a lot of bacon, but it always comes in an un-resealable plastic bag, so they want you to use a Ziplock on it to put it in your fridge. Shit like that. 100 million decisions made by businesses every day killing the Earth. And we get blamed for it as peons.
Explain to me why we have to fly empty planes around the world just to make sure those airlines don't lose their terminal rights? Everything we do every day is optimized to make money at the expense of every other possible method of worth. We forgo reason, we forgo safety, we give up our world to make money. That's not going to change until there's no money left to earn, and we're all fighting over food.
We know how to fix this. Go to Marin and see their waste reclamation site. There is no landfill in that county. They recycle and compost and handle everything, even hazardous wastes like paint.
We have the tech, we know how to do it. But we don't. This entire comment section is full of the main reason why: y'all want yer money. Gotta make that paper. Fuck the world, I want mine.
I'm sorry, but this is utterly unhinged. There is no evidence of weather patterns of any kind, much less indications that we are about to face "extreme-weather". What caused the weather which led to the dust-bowl? What caused the ice-age?
The climate of the earth has changed for millions of years w/o humans, and while certainly greenhouse gases impact the current trends, they aren't cause for apocalyptic concern.
I realize many people will probably vote this into oblivion, but I do not think there is a climate crisis at all.
The dust-bowl wasn't specifically weather, it was farming practices (and apparently a drought).
> The Dust Bowl was a period of severe dust storms that greatly damaged the ecology and agriculture of the American and Canadian prairies during the 1930s; severe drought and a failure to apply dryland farming methods to prevent the aeolian processes (wind erosion) caused the phenomenon.
thank you - I thought someone might make a comment like this, which is why I added the qualifier ("weather which led to the dust-bowl") to distinguish it from the human factors - but hey - it's cool - and I love that you used the word "aeolian" - thats a really cool word :)
my point was just that weird weather has been happening for a long time, and if you think about it, if the weather people can't predict whether it will rain or not 2 weeks from now, how can they possibly predict there will be more or less storms 5 years from now, 10 years, etc?
- growing preferences for alternatives to red meat;
- work-from-home that reduces use of the roads and highways;
- widespread acceptance of plastics recycling;
and others.
I don't understand the use of the term "crisis" when we're already implementing pretty much every possible solution, and with some other cool solutions in the pipelines such as vastly improved batteries, better and safer nuclear fission reactors, electric aircraft, better and more efficient agriculture; better recycling of plastics, etc.
I would advocate continued and improved support for these approaches through tax incentives, research grants, and education. Also, we should spur economic growth, without which we can't afford to do any of the above. We can solve this without the need to panic.
Then why aren’t we talking about the the most promising solution to avert the crisis: solar radiation management? If things are really so dire, why are there efforts to even ban scientific research on solutions like marine cloud brightening or atmospheric sulfur injections?
From my perspective LATimes is often talking about climate change. I don't thoroughly read the LATimes but here's a selection of articles I've read from them.
Not sure why they are so focused on race. Race doesn't really have anything to do with climate change in the rest of the world. Perhaps that's what we are doing wrong?
>Paraphrasing the LA times articles like you do…give yourself a clap on the back and go back to Fox news.
I very rarely read fox news. I'm not from or in the USA.
Politically I am conservative but fox news will not provide me any new viewpoint or benefit.
Might I also point out how your attack on fox news is rather empty. I remember the keith olberman vs hannity/oreilly era. Fox news was one of the worst journalism entities there was. While keith was epic.
Oddly enough, fox took this criticism and certainly improved. Flipside, msnbc and keith are now the ones peddling disinformation. In a way they each became what the other was.
197 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 242 ms ] thread1966 - Oil gone in 10 years
1968 - Overpopulation will spread worldwide
1969 - Everyone will disappear in a Cloud of Blue Steam in 1989
1970 - World will use up its natural resources by 2000
1970 - Urban citizens will require gas mask by 1985
1970 - Nitrogen buildup will make all lands unusable
1970 - Decaying pollution will kill all the fish
1970s - Killer Bees!!!
1970 - Ice Age by 2000
1970 - Americans will be subjected to water rationing by 1975 and food rationing by 1980
1971 - New Ice Age coming by 2020 or 2030
1972 - New Ice Age by 2070
1972 - Oil depleted in 20 years
1974 - Space satellites show New Ice Age coming fast
1974 - Another Ice Age?
1974 - Ozone depletion a great peril to life
1976 - Scientific consensus planet cooling; famines imminent
1977 - Department of Energy says oil will peak in 90s.
1978 - No end in sight to 30-year global cooling
1980 - Acid rain kills life in lakes
1980 - Peak oil in 2000
1988 - Regional drought (that never happened) in 90s.
1988 - Temperatures in DC will hit record high (no records broken)
1988 - Maldive Islands will be underwater by 2018 (nope)
1989 - Rising sea level will obliterate nations if nothing done by 2000.
1989 - New York City Westside Highway underwater by 2018.
1990 - Cellphones caused cancer
1996 - Peak oil in 2020
2000 - Children won’t know what snow is
2001 - WiFi causes cancer
2002 - Famines if we don’t give up eating fishes, meat, and diary
2002 - Peak oil in 2010
2004 - Britain will be Siberia by 2024
2005 - Manhattan underwater by 2015
2006 - Super Hurricanes!!!
2008 - Arctic will be ice-free by 2018
2008 - Climate genius Al Gore predict ice-free Arctic by 2013
2009 - Climate genius Prince Charles says we have 96 months to save the world
2009 UK Prime Ministers says 50 days to “save planet from catastrophe”
2009 Al Gore moves ice-free Arctic prediction from 2013 to 2014
2010 - 4G cell tower causes cancers.
2013 Arctic ice-free by 2015
2014 Only 500 days before climate chaos
2019 - Hey Greta, we really need you to convince them this time.
2020 - Australian bush fires are caused by climate change.
2020 - 5G cellular towers causes cancers.
2020 - Polar bears could be lost by 2100
2021 - Volcano caldera ready to wipe out civilization
Ummmm, ok. Should I be unjading myself by now?
I might not...
Katrina, Harvey, Betsy, 1915, etc. New Orleans is still there. It's not under sea like all the prophecies foretold.
Hilarious emotional appeal strawman. You can't even stay on topic after being proven wrong. Remember, New Orleans isn't underwater and it's past 2020.
>when it is not visually apparent to an outside observer.
I'm old enough to remember seeing all the pictures and videos of the aforementioned hurricanes. Don't project your ignorance on everyone else.
> Which does make this a good example
Yes, a good example of New Orleans still being there, all the highways are still there, the sports arenas are still there, there are over a million people that live there, etc.
I will work on not talking out of place, and not being so worried about climate change, but I do understand that I am in this position in the first place because of my moral and rational faults.
My best wishes to you and your loved ones, may you continue to find peace and stay dry (well, as you explained, you'll probably stay dry either way, still, the sentiment still stands).
Don’t forget Hurricane Harvey: we spent ~$170B cleaning that up. It’s never that we can’t undo climate at a small scale, it’s that doing so may bankrupt entire states in the process.
Katrina, Harvey, Betsy, 1915, etc. New Orleans is still there. It's not under sea.
I asked about flagging accounts
Meanwhile I got 27 up votes.
Pitch in, accordingly to your needs.
Still get that newspaper delivered to my doorstep from way over there.
https://www.breitbart.com/environment/2019/09/20/nolte-clima...
It's not news that newspapers use sensational headlines to sell more.
So unless you post sources for these, people should assume you are a troll.
EDIT: Also found a screenshot of the list on Reddit. Seems it's been bouncing around for a few years, never with any supporting evidence.
I found a subset of this list here, with links to sources. But most of the sources aren't LA Times: https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/50-years-of-failed-doomsday-e...
But others, I couldn't find at all:
- 4G cell tower causes cancers.
I'm not sure what to think about this list. I would be extremely interested in the source articles, if they're actually out there.
https://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-cellphone-5g-health-2...
"X1, X2, X3 are some of Y" means that {X1, X2, X3} is a subset of Y. "Some of X1, X2, X3 are Y" means that {X1, X2, X3} intersects Y. But you said the former!
Your inability to be swayed by Anglo-gibberish is formidable but you’re a non-entity to me and I don’t have to optimize for your preferences.
Sit back down in your bubble and accept on a rock of 7 billion+ you are just one. TL;DR your evidence is insufficient and I’m likewise as unmoved by it as you are from your perspective.
Yes very big strong mtn man effort though cutting and pasting text to reiterate a repetitive rhetorical point as evidence of how stoic you are.
It’s a pet project of mine and a fun one at that (of many hobbies).
Thanks for confirming you understood the sentiment.
[0] https://www.google.com/search?q=%22Volcano+caldera+ready+to+...
> Here are some of the many of Los Angeles Times’ newspaper headlines that they used to help with their circulations:
I'm not a fan of CEI, but you can see scans of some of these articles here: https://cei.org/blog/wrong-again-50-years-of-failed-eco-poca...
I said …”some” …
You wrote "Here are some of the many of Los Angeles Times’ newspaper headlines". A reasonable person would understand that quote to say that the headlines are from the LA Times, but it's only some of the many bad headlines the LA Times has had.
The main article about an ice age in 1971 would have been on October 24th, 1971. The front page of the LA Times did indeed feature the words "Ice Age" on the bottom of the front page in the "articles inside" block. It did not use the words "New", "coming", "by", "2020" or "2030" in the article title.
I would ask for sources on your list.
I mean this respectfully, but there is absolutely no way a nation can 'over-allocate' to the climate crisis. Please provide a precise example or retract your claim.
Edit: I'm getting a lot of down votes for this comment but not a lot of conversation to explain how I have gone wrong here, and I think the request for a precise argument is not unreasonable.
Perhaps one of my critics could enlighten me to my error?
It is possible to overshoot the problem. It seems improbable, but we could overshoot.
(This is not a rhetorical question: I'm not sure one way or another, though my expectation is that it isn't possible)
We should be simple executing what was agreed in the Paris Agreement as it reflects our best evaluation of the cost to benefits ratio.
But current policies are aiming at 1.5 degree higher than what we evaluated as the optimal solution.
If you want to talk about the "climate crisis", I'm going to keep pointing to the lack of good modeling in regard to water vapor and air travel (which has a specific phase relationship with sunshine that must be taken into account). I'll also try to dig up that graph correlating the rise in air travel with temperatures. I'll insist that even if I accept human cause of these changes (which I'm willing to do), it is reasonably likely due to air travel and you can't show otherwise without those models.
Here's a fluff piece: https://globalnews.ca/news/2934513/empty-skies-after-911-set...
Something better, but need to follow references: https://www.csmonitor.com/Environment/Bright-Green/2010/0201...
The jury is still out on this and it seems to have a large effect and can do so in a very short time (on the order of days).
Of course, this translates to democracy; if a sitting government decided to, for example, force a whole industry to shut down, do you think the people working in that industry would vote for the same party again? I mean granted, this issue is bigger than sitting parties and votes and I'm sure some are willing to sacrifice their political career - or the lives and livelihoods of civilians - for it, but you get what I mean.
https://theconversation.com/four-hiroshima-bombs-a-second-ho...
A second! We are basically in a nuclear holocaust of epic proportions and this is nowhere near exaggerating it.
Lookat this way, when jobs that are less efficient and re-structured to be more efficient the tendency is that we have job losses. Those can and will be offset by the re-allocation of resources towards green energy in the form of brand new jobs and career opportunities.
We can either fear the unknown or want to explore it.
Moreover, I'm not seeing what job loss has to do with the parent's statement.
In that respect, I don't think that climate change is solved by 'just give the EV companies all the money ever' but by pro actively addressing and then monitoring those detractive motives, nuclear threat inclusive.
The sort of people who suggest we should only talk about the climate are dangerously foolish. Priority 1 is peace, priority 2 is prosperity (which helps keep the peace). Those two issues take priority over the climate, which is only interesting as a component of them.
- How to be decent human beings to each other, and especially how to not kill each other
- The media has too much power
- Government over-reach
Probably other things, but I don't know, these seem like way better hot-button issues.
I think there’s a whole generation out there that never read “the boy who cried wolf”.
I compost, watch what I buy and also own an EV. But as someone who went to engineering school I fully acknowledge that my actions basically don't even move the needle. There will always be people with less education or simply less means than me that quite frankly just have bigger issues. I think the big mistake alarmists make is blaming consumers and not huge companies like Exxon.
Even among my educated friends, it's clear that people acknowledge climate change but the ever increasing alarmism of "the world will end in 46 months" is flat out not helping. I barely got through 15 minutes of "Don't Look Up" which was clearly a bizarre politically charged hit-piece.
In the meantime I'll keep working with my local town's redwood conservancy and continue growing redwood saplings in my rural greenhouse :)
I don't want to be that guy, but driving an EV (unless you drive some sort of electric bicycle or scooter) is not that environmentally friendly as the manufacturers and marketing people want you to believe. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_impact_on_the_environmen...
Prolonging life and reducing negative health impacts are another bonus.
Yes, there is still an environmental cost of the production of EVs but these vehicles don’t emit CO2 or greenhouse gases and so their lifetime carbon footprint is much lower.
For example, a recent Reuters study found that a Tesla Model 3 would need to be driven for 13,500 miles (21,725 km) before it does less harm to the environment than a Toyota Corolla:
https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/lifeti...
“We are probably already dead”
Facing existential suicide is something us Cold War kids remember
It does make a difference to go through the grieving process, denial is a part of it, because it takes radical commitments to break the cycle.
We’re not even close to a radical commitment yet.
We can’t even turn off Russian oil globally, much less fossil fuels as a whole.
But climatetech is (finally) established as a legitimate space.
Now we need govtech to change how we make political decisions.
Because climate change is a symptom of how our political systems work - reactionary & summative instead of proactive & iterative.
There will never be a point where "Oh shit, everything has exploded!". Instead, it will be every year that deserts will get bigger, it will rain a little less, and a few more extreme weather events happen.
This will happen just a little bit more year by year.
There won't really be a point where you can say "This was the year climate change became really bad!" instead it will take looking at the current state and comparing it to the year 2000 or 1980 or whatever. And by that time, you've got a full generation that does not remember what those years were like.
That's the thing that scares me the most about climate change. It won't be something that will hurt all at once, instead it will just be a steady increase of bad events. And by the time it becomes unworkable, it's too late.
I'll add the ongoing extinction crisis that is picking up steam, itself a knock-on effect of us gobbling up all land resources and also climate change, and pollutants. I remember days in the park in the 1980s where the air would be filled with bees and insects of all kinds. The insects are so few and far between. Like, I don't even see moths swarming around streetlights anymore. It's eerie.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shifting_baseline
When I was born, my hometown would regularly see around 10ft of snow (I've seen the videos).
During my childhood, that reduced down to around 2->5 ft of snow.
Now, my home town is lucky to see 2->3 inches of snow.
This drought has caused major issues for a town that was built around farming. It's driven them to pull more water from the aquifer which itself has been in pretty rapid decline. Everyone just keeps drilling deeper and deeper pumps (30ft used to be enough, now 100+ft is what people are drilling).
These sorts of slow moving collapses are terrifying to watch. And, at the same time, infuriating to hear the deniers throughout my life claim it's a hoax/not real.
Never say never
The Clathrate gun hypothesis pretty much about this where inside one human generation the temperatures can rise beyond any expactations
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clathrate_gun_hypothesis
See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arctic_methane_emissions
Do something that costs you, and you have better credibility. Here's my litmus test: commit to never flying anywhere ever again.
Environmental concerns didn't factor into my choice at all - far more important to me is the thrill of silent, uninterrupted acceleration and not spending time at gas stations.
I highly recommend this video from the wonderful Kurzgesagt science video series: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LxgMdjyw8uw
Climate change is bad and we need to take it seriously, but there is a lot of reason for hope. A lot of trends are pointing in the right direction and we need to support those trends. Climate policy is still in a bad state, in large part because of the gerontocracy, but younger people are entering politics with a different view.
Says a reporter living in Los Angeles, the 49th most expensive city in the world to live in. For a lot of people, what they need to talk about is how they're getting their next meal, how they're going to make rent, or survive a current war.
Maybe go to a war zone or a poor area and try to make the same point with a straight face.
The LA times author was making the point that, to him and his readers, nothing matters as much as climate change. While what is happening in Ukraine is absolutely terrible, in his mind it does not reach the level of concern that climate does.
Parents response was “oh you’re so privileged”, and my point is that just about everyone on this site is. Frankly, their comment came across less like empathy and more like standard deflection.
Finally, climate change is only “our problem” in the sense that it’s primarily driven by the global rich and privileged. The people who will bear the worst of it are the poor in the global south who did little to contribute to the problem.
Privileged people arguing with each other about who has standing to put it forward as an issue certainly is though.
I may not be suffering either, but I'm not telling anyone that I know better then them what "the real problem is". I thought this would've been understandable, but maybe the clarification helps.
Saying “oh you don’t suffer therefore you don’t have any right to tell people what to do!” is classic derailing and it is what the opposition has done with climate change for decades. I don’t doubt that you had good intent with your comment, though.
When you're in a war zone, even if you're in the country but far from the action, the only thing you can think about is your immediate survival and the survival of your friends and family.
Literally nothing else matters.
TIL. That was a terrifying read..
I wonder if western propaganda and hype generation for technology, quarterly gains, the latest stuff! could be leveraged intentionally to distract any human then given our shared biology.
That’s a rhetorical point since I know our biology is intentionally used against us like that by industry because marketing and PR execs have explained how it is just so they seek to keep our inner monologues flush with their phrases.
There’s plenty of new perspectives and applications of your agency available. Why not put yourself to them rather than demand others change theirs?
No? Going to sit at screen and PR others into action? Typical rich westerner; externalizing the change they want to see in the world.
What I don't understand is your lack of doubt that they would (or should) care. The conviction is something analogous to religion.
The solution is to emit less CO2. Carbon capture/reclamation will never be enough to actually change things particularly with the current levels of emissions.
So how do we address that? Best way, IMO, is to go after the largest CO2 emitters. That's transportation, electricity, and industrial emissions (mostly concrete and steel AFAIK). Hitting any of those industries with a tax to incentivize reduction will impact standards of living. It will raise the price of goods which ultimately hit the poor and middle class.
You could also subsidize switch over, but that's ultimately a lot harder (and probably less effective) than more general carbon taxes.
And, of course, this has to be done globally, so if we really wanted this to be effective then it'd mean not just fixing your own country but also ideally subsidizing or sanctioning/embargoing bad players.
Furthermore, emissions of methane from LNG production and transportation contribute to global warming - by some estimates at a rate comparable to the CO2 emissions.
The only way we will get real traction against this problem is if we stop framing it around shame and austerity and instead frame it as a problem solvable via technological innovation that also frees us from the constraints of fossil fuel dependence.
That framing is also more correct IMHO, as there are numerous reasons to get off fossil fuels other than climate. The most significant of these is political independence and the fact that fossil fuels are a strictly limited declining resource whose depletion threatens our civilization on the supply side.
This is a technical problem not a moral problem. There is no god that is going to punish us for emitting carbon. It's just physics: more carbon, more retained solar heat, weather changes that will disrupt the food supply and threaten a bunch of major population centers.
It's also a problem about human self-interest not saving some mythical shibboleth of "unspoiled nature." Nature just is and we are only spoiling it for ourselves. As George Carlin put it: "Stop saying save the Earth! The Earth will be fine. We're fucked."
Edit: on a final note: yes it is true that we could probably absorb and adapt to even severe climate change. But the cost of non-carbon-based energy is falling rapidly as technology advances and renewable energy is scaled up, while the deferred cost of climate change is rising. These lines almost certainly intersected some time ago. Getting off fossil carbon is cheaper than continuing to make climate change worse. This effect is compounded by the fact that fossil fuels are being depleted and therefore that the more we invest in them the more fossil fuel infrastructure investment will eventually be stranded as worthless. That depletion will probably bite at about the same time as climate change, draining the economy right when that cost hits. When you consider the depletion and stranded investment angles getting off fossil fuels is probably many orders of magnitude cheaper than the alternative path.
We already have several options available to massively curtail our emissions (solar, wind, hydro, geothermal). While yes new technology would make this transition even faster, a major, MAJOR roadblock is lobbying by fossil fuel industries and related corporate interests.
In terms of the technological discussion though, I am excited by the recent work done in molten salt cathode batteries for scale use (https://interestingengineering.com/molten-salt-12-week-batte...).
What I'm saying is that the shame-and-austerity framing plays right into the hands of fossil fuel industry propaganda.
One of the most insidious bits of fossil fuel propaganda I've seen recently is this whole "moral case for fossil fuels" schtick. They're pointing out that fossil fuels have lifted billions out of poverty, which is technically true, and then using that combined with the "moral panic" framing of the green movement to argue that greens want to push those billions back into poverty.
Personally I think we have historically framed environmental issues as moral because we (meaning the USA) are a culture with puritan roots and the whole protestant moral panic framing is baked into our cultural DNA. It's how we often approach problems, especially collective or tragedy of the commons problems. We approach them by deploying shame to try to change behavior. It very often backfires like it is here, or like it does when we try to shame teenagers out of having sex.
First, I'll note that a lot of poor people IRL have just as much "social conscience" than other people, especially politically. Poor people vote based on the whole range of issues that everyone else votes on.
Second, the "i've got my own problems go away" response is applicable to everything, including poverty.
The older these tropes get, the less thoughtfully they are used.
Your point isn't what you think it is.
However, if this is an existential problem that threatens all of mankind, why is her article locked behind a paywall?
So how about you first?
Sometimes I don't understand how something like that end up on HN...
This is not climate denialism. I am not going to panic at the whim of a newspaper editor.
I seriously disagree with this framing. Developed countries have been artificially inflating their quality of life through cheap energy available from burning fossil fuels. This is an unsustainable practice that will a.) come to end due to exhaustion of said fuels b.) have significant, compounding externalities that are subject to incredible levels of reality distortion from entities benefiting from the economies they intentionally structured to be dependent on said energy sources.
The truth is that western countries have developed too fast through the planetary equivalent of roid rage. We've gone massively into debt, dug into a huge reservoir that is emptying, and the waste products produced by our flagrant exploitation of dirty energy reserves are very bad for the planet.
So yeah, I completely disagree with the "lowering their quality of life" framing. It's true that if you've been going into debt your whole life, and suddenly stop spending like a drunken sailor, your quality of life might go down.
What you’re saying isn’t wrong, but it is what it is. This is a political issue, acting as if switching entirely to renewables will not result in some short term sacrifices is well, disingenuous.
Trivially you could just ban those things. I think we’d agree in saying that would be very bad for many.
For example, what would be wrong with preventing developing nations from cheaply industrialising, while also subsidising them to do something else instead?
Subsidies are what we do now already which is why we’re in the situation we’re in.
Educating girls and empowering them on those countries also will make birth rates to decline faster.
The climate "crisis" is a slow boil. Ice caps melt a bit, water goes up a bit, a few houses fall in, no big deal. Drought happens, we have less food, we buy it from elsewhere, no big deal. Hurricanes increase, we fix the damage, no big deal. Everything bad about the climate crisis seems to be localized and episodic, on the scale of how we normally report the news. Put together it may well be much, much, worse, and far more expensive, but the way it happens makes a big difference to whether we do anything about it.
I fear that calling it a crisis trips the wrong false alarm override, there should be some other word. We keep getting told this COP is the last chance, and that we have 10 years at most. But we're still here, so we think the warning was overdone, and maybe we should just ignore it next time.
We should call it "the generational inheritance of our planet project" or something like that. I don't want to be the guy who screws up a crisis and the world ends, but I also don't want to leave a slightly shittier planet for my kids, and for them to do the same.
I get it, it's not an immediate crisis for most, so people are like "huh I remember hot summers back in MY day", confusing weather for climate and not seeing a need to act.
I'm pessimistic though. Any change now will be too little, too late; we've passed the point of no return, of climate collapse years ago. Things like: permafrost is melting, releasing sequestered CO2 and methane in the atmosphere at a rate greater than our own pollution. Polar caps and glaciers are not recovering, making the ocean absorb more heat (ice reflects sun rays back into space). Rising sea levels and the like make water push ice up and about, causing large ice sheets to break off of Antarctica and float into warmer waters. The list goes on. I'm not very optimistic. I just hope to die of old age before famine and war strike; given the current instability of existing unions like Europe and NATO, I'm not very positive about that either though.
The climate crisis ISN'T the only thing we should be talking about. We also have problems with straight up pollution, and other things like countries like China that fish until extinction. There are 1000+ Chinese fishing boats parked in international waters off the coast of South America that are fishing until the point of extinction and then bringing the fish back to China, leaving nothing for the South Americans.
There are companies like Nestle whose CEO doesn't believe water is a fundamental right, and places like California and Canada that let it bottle water for essentially free and then sell it for more than gasoline. We have runoff of PFAS polluting water, we have so much pollution from microplastics, we have plastics polluting the Pacific Ocean, microplastics in our blood, etc.
So, NO. Climate crisis is NOT the only thing we should be talking about. That is utterly crazy, and sounds like something ISIS would say.
Feeling guilty for existence and making things worse - is original sin.
Recycling, putting oneself to trouble and expense - is penance.
Scientist and politicians - are the priests.
Saving the earth - is heaven.
The moment is always 10 years away.
Remember global cooling or the mini ice age of the 70s?
Remember Al Gore and global warming? It's an inconvenient truth that nothing has really materialised in the past 15 years following that, despite his hysteria. (He is surely sad that it hasn't, given his environmental investment portfolio).
I've seen nothing to indicate any change at all. The beaches of my childhood are the same, weather does change - but if anything, things seem cooler not warmer to me. There is surely pollution, but I lay all blame for that at the feet of corporations. They should pay, rather than getting their governments to socialise the expense of the population - by making us feel guilty for consuming, even teaching this in schools. Apparently we should feel guilty for merely existing. They can stick it.
I'm afraid that I do not trust the science, the media or politicians to convey truth to us here. They are all self-serving. They can stick it too.
And let's remember that this wasn't an issue until the Club of Rome came up with the idea to make Man the enemy in order to gain greater control of our lives on behalf of the oligarchs:
"In searching for a common enemy against whom we can unite, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like, would fit the bill. [. . .] All these dangers are caused by human intervention in natural processes, and it is only through changed attitudes and behaviour that they can be overcome. The real enemy then is humanity itself."
The Club of Rome, in their 1991 publications The First Global Revolution, under the heading “the common enemy of humanity is Man”.
Honestly, a huge majority of you need to be honest with yourselves: this kind of thing bugs you because you are business people, founders, people broadly trying to make serious investments in some kind of economic future that will (ultimately) lead to your (continued) success. Your aspirations are not bad in themselves, but neither is reporting about climate change, and the honesty comes in when you recognize there is a conflict of interest between the two here.
Which is HORSESHIT. Doritos bags made of shiny plastic, microplastics in products, pesticides used on crops... All of these things are corporate driven decisions. Those bags are used for chips because they make the shelf life longer, saving them money. Microplastics make it easier and cheaper to produce exfoliating products, which could be done with pumice or other stuff that's more expensive. Pesticides increase crop yield, increasing the bottom line.
So while us consumers are out here fretting over how our single coke can not recycled is killing the planet, large corporations make decisions every day that either make them money or save them money, and do irreparable harm to the world. But instead of fixing these problems, they run ads to tell us to recycle. That highly concentrated soap you use on your dishes that goes into the water supply? It's got a baby duck on the bottle so you can feel better about using it!
We lie to ourselves about all of this. Individual changes in behavior make no difference. The things we litter and don't recycle should simply not be there in the first place. I buy a lot of bacon, but it always comes in an un-resealable plastic bag, so they want you to use a Ziplock on it to put it in your fridge. Shit like that. 100 million decisions made by businesses every day killing the Earth. And we get blamed for it as peons.
Explain to me why we have to fly empty planes around the world just to make sure those airlines don't lose their terminal rights? Everything we do every day is optimized to make money at the expense of every other possible method of worth. We forgo reason, we forgo safety, we give up our world to make money. That's not going to change until there's no money left to earn, and we're all fighting over food.
We know how to fix this. Go to Marin and see their waste reclamation site. There is no landfill in that county. They recycle and compost and handle everything, even hazardous wastes like paint.
We have the tech, we know how to do it. But we don't. This entire comment section is full of the main reason why: y'all want yer money. Gotta make that paper. Fuck the world, I want mine.
Glad I never had kids.
Does anyone on any side of this issue have anything substantially new to say?
If we have heard it all before, then what more is there to say?
Perhaps we shouldn't be doomsaying 24/7. It isn't healthy for anyone involved.
The climate of the earth has changed for millions of years w/o humans, and while certainly greenhouse gases impact the current trends, they aren't cause for apocalyptic concern.
I realize many people will probably vote this into oblivion, but I do not think there is a climate crisis at all.
> The Dust Bowl was a period of severe dust storms that greatly damaged the ecology and agriculture of the American and Canadian prairies during the 1930s; severe drought and a failure to apply dryland farming methods to prevent the aeolian processes (wind erosion) caused the phenomenon.
from Wikipedia
my point was just that weird weather has been happening for a long time, and if you think about it, if the weather people can't predict whether it will rain or not 2 weeks from now, how can they possibly predict there will be more or less storms 5 years from now, 10 years, etc?
https://theconversation.com/farmers-are-depleting-the-ogalla...
- Residential and commercial buildings with solar panels;
- electric vehicles (albeit, the production of EV batteries is reportedly very dirty);
- more efficient consumption of oil/gas;
- CO2 capture and sequestration;
- backyard farming (raising chickens, composting, vegetable gardening);
- growing preferences for alternatives to red meat;
- work-from-home that reduces use of the roads and highways;
- widespread acceptance of plastics recycling;
and others.
I don't understand the use of the term "crisis" when we're already implementing pretty much every possible solution, and with some other cool solutions in the pipelines such as vastly improved batteries, better and safer nuclear fission reactors, electric aircraft, better and more efficient agriculture; better recycling of plastics, etc.
I would advocate continued and improved support for these approaches through tax incentives, research grants, and education. Also, we should spur economic growth, without which we can't afford to do any of the above. We can solve this without the need to panic.
Like how Race is involved with climate change: https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2022-03-18/race-enviro...
Also how climate change is itself racist: https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-02-13/climate-...
Then also covering anti-climate change politician as black face of white supremacy? You'll have to read the article to understand how a black dude is a white supremacist. https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-08-20/recall-c...
Dont worry about the title; the article definitely brings up race: https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-03-22/what-has...
Not sure why they are so focused on race. Race doesn't really have anything to do with climate change in the rest of the world. Perhaps that's what we are doing wrong?
I very rarely read fox news. I'm not from or in the USA.
Politically I am conservative but fox news will not provide me any new viewpoint or benefit.
Might I also point out how your attack on fox news is rather empty. I remember the keith olberman vs hannity/oreilly era. Fox news was one of the worst journalism entities there was. While keith was epic.
Oddly enough, fox took this criticism and certainly improved. Flipside, msnbc and keith are now the ones peddling disinformation. In a way they each became what the other was.