Ask HN: Why aim for reducing climate change?
For a long time, I thought preserving the environment through reducing greenhouse gas emissions would improve human wealth as a result - via ecosystem services, not having to move agriculture and populations when rain patterns change and so on.
But apparently, the IPCC estimates that the best scenario by far in terms of GDP per capita is the fossil-fueled development.[1] I was shocked to discover this.
Why is this the case? Did the IPCC not correctly factor how quality of life would deteriorate in case of climate change?
In light of this, why should we aim to reduce emissions at a significant detriment to human life? Is it because of unknown unknowns? Or solely to preserve endangered species?
[1] - https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/ipcc-scenarios?facet=no...
126 comments
[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 186 ms ] threadSSP1 - the 2nd place amongst GDP metrics - lowers poverty, reduces inequality, and helps the environment as well as improving health and education.
SSP5 - the 1st place - just bull rushes economic growth, but does little to reduce equality, and doesn't help health or the environment.
The broader sense of social well-being is maximised by SSP1. SSP5 is a short-term economic growth trend. Something shortsighted and ultimately very bad.
It's natural that investing into cheaper, more harmful resources, could benefit us more in the short term. But doesn't it make sense to go for the more beneficial long-term developments that will come down in cost with investment anyways? The earlier the better?
It's tempting to shoot for fossil fuels still, but scratch the surface and the benefits of developing sustainable resources is better now in a host of ways besides immediate economic growth, and better economically in the long run too once fossil fuels become scarcer and enviromental disasters damage industry.
Just look at recent issues like global instability's effect on energy import, and how our infrastructure can be impacted by small issues (shipping routes collapsing). Climate issues like flooding and rising sea levels, would dramatically imapct shiopping. And mass immigration from those disasters would increase likelihoods of wars that affect global trade.
Limiting the chances for these things to happen, at the cost of immediate GDP growth, is better for everyone.
It's a prisoner's dilemma between nations and currently everyone is playing to win only for themselves - and so everyone is losing.
That's a false premise - GDP =/= benefit to human life. It's actually just a subjective benefit to some humans who control capital in those high GDP countries. Human life goes far beyond GDP and things like happiness metrics and longevity metrics do not always directly correlate to GDP.
See e.g. US GDP growing 38% 2009-2019, but life expectancy being stagnant with a 0.5% increase.
[1] https://datacommons.org/place/country/USA?utm_medium=explore...
As other commenters are pointing out, it would be nice if there was a better measure of a population's health and happiness; but GDP corresponds to it to a large degree, perhaps up to a certain point of wealth, as you said.
Are you blaming individual choice for problems that are systemic in nature?
But if look at the scenarios for Middle East and Africa, it would take roughly 10 years longer for the Green Road scenario to get to $20k/yr, compared to the Highway.
https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/ipcc-scenarios?facet=no...
But there are lots of countries in the world that are not at high GDP yet, but will be high GDP in the future. Because their GDP is not high, GDP growth does correlate very strongly with their quality of life. They are not going to want to delay their growth just because of climate change, and it's probably immoral to force them.
I didn't claim it didn't correlate 'nicely' with life expectancy.
I said it doesn't 'always' correlate. There are outliers, as with most trends. And besides - quality of life is a more important metric than life expectancy. Russia, Qatar, Saudi Arabia are world leaders on life expectancy and GDP. But terrible on women's rights, equality, and human rights.
We shouldn't be measuring human benefit on GDP, we shouldn't be questioning the merits of reducing climate change based on maximising GDP.
It either correlates or it doesn't, and outliers, as the name implies, are statistical anomalies.
That being said I also think quality of life is important, but I think being dead is quite a poor quality of life.
[1] - https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/hidden-hunger-index-vs-gd...
[2] - https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/learning-outcomes-vs-gdp-...
This makes me think of Yoichi Kaya's formula: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaya_identity
It shows illustrates the dependency between GDP, population, energy and emissions. Assuming we don't want to reduce population and GDP, we are left with optimizing energy and emission intensity.
I just finished this comic book by Jancovici which explains all this and it is very easy to read. https://www.amazon.com/World-Without-End-Blain-Christophe-eb...
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/per-capita-fossil-energy-...
Also, do you not consider 2100 "long-term"? Do you think economic effects of the environment will only reflect later?
You can only have that because they outsource pollution.
But your point still stands, as you illustrate. Countries might be importing CO2- and methane-heavy products rather than manufacture their own.
The assessment that generated the SSPs puts SSP5 at an estiamted 4.4 degrees C increase in global average temperatures by 2100.
4 degrees of increase is brutal for the climate and the knock on effects on global resources are what I am focussing on. Extreme weather, flooding, drought, knock on effects on our globalised supply chains, and the hidden costs to offsetting all of this. GDP could increase, but so would population displacement, need for disaster recovery, moving agriculture to changing climate zones and so on.
SSP5 is generally considered a 'strange' approach to global social well-being, more of a 'what if fossil fuel fanatics tried their hands at global welfare, and just paid to mitigate the harm they create'. AKA a huge gamble and one that goes against human nature.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shared_Socioeconomic_Pathways https://www.greenfacts.org/en/impacts-global-warming/l-2/ind...
Indeed, a hot Earth would mean a lot of disruption. But we'd have a lot of time to deal with it, also. And IPCC (which is an institution created to summarize science and estimate the impacts) should have taken the disruption into account (it being the main purpose of its existence).
But thank you for the links, I will definitely read some more.
If we choose the fossil-fuel development aiming for SSP5, but we get SSP3 or SSP4 instead, then we will mess up the environment for little benefit. Perhaps we should aim for SSP1 because even if we fail then at least the environment will be in a good condition to be able to try again.
*In particular, SSP5 requires "a very high carbon price, and lots of carbon capture and storage". If we don't get that, we don't get the high GDP either.
I'm in Vietnam, and while the government fully acknowledges climate change, with projection and plan to lose xx% of our most populous city (currently 10+ million population) to sea rise, but fully go ahead with coal power generation for industry... so yeah. There is definitely some dysfunctional planning at play, but probably a lot of calculated risk too. I'm expecting China to have the same calculus.
I don't know if the experts do plan and account for those situations, but you definitely aren't gonna get a good layman discussion on a Western centric forum like this one. I'm barely comfortable to write this comment as is :-)
I thought the same reading earlier in the week that Vietnam is challenging China on the "building low level artifical islands in the Spratly Island's" game.
( I ocean surveyed there in the early 1990s and have memories of being stopped at sea by gun boats from every surrounding nation )
On this talk "the appealing neoclassical economics of climate change by Steve Keen". [0]
The talk goes into detail how the IPCC projections were made and all the wrong assumptions done on it.
[0] https://youtu.be/5LvyxH3O7kE
What a joke.
We, are the endangered species in the long term. For me this is the best I can do for other people, besides taking care for my family and friends. How can I help children and their children be able to grow up in an environment that is friendly to them? With all our luxury living is so easy, but with me living my life, I would like to not have a negative impact to the life of others. And here are a lot of unknown unknowns. I do notice I tend to be happier when I try to make my life more simple.
If I try to look at it objectively its only natural our population will go down. But if we are able to steer this, I would like to try that.
Could one really? Outside of a couple of petro-states whose high GDP comes from oil and gas resources, there are no countries in the top 30 GDP per capita that have even a loose form of slavery. Millions of slaves producing small amounts of value per capita doesn't add up to a rich nation with high GDP.
Allow me to quote the 13th amendment, Section 1, article 1: "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction."
Now look at the US carceral system and tell me if you can still say with a straight face that "there are no countries in the top 30 GDP per capita that have even a loose form of slavery"
The more interesting question is whether or not the Constitution should be amended to strike that bit, or whether prison labor is a good thing or a bad thing. Insofar as it provides an incentive to imprison more people, I think it's a bad thing; but in terms of giving duly-convicted prisoners a skill they could take with them after they're released, I think it can be useful. Of course, I'm not claiming that all forms of prison labor are like that.
You perhaps further imply that this system does in fact incentivize the government to imprison more people than it otherwise would; I'm not sure that's true. Some estimates[1] show that not even 1% of violent criminals in several categories are imprisoned, and I've read that the average state prisoner has ten arrests and five prior convictions before they enter the prison for the first time. If anything, it seems like policy is erring on the side of keeping fewer people in prison.
[0]: https://www.aclu.org/news/human-rights/captive-labor-exploit...
[1]: https://www.rainn.org/statistics/criminal-justice-system
This is a known fact by decades, but there is simply no other metric "as simple" and effective to measure.
You are aware, that we are on of those endangered species' when we don't change anything about climate change?
Are you trying to maximize "human wealth", "human life", or "quality of life"? You've brought at least three different priorities into it, and none of them are necessarily related to each other.
In any case, "climate change" will wreak havoc on humanity and everything else. We should aim to avoid that to the extent that we think wreaking havoc on humanity and everything else is bad. This will involve tradeoffs, some of which are certain to be unpleasant. Adapt-or-die is a fact of nature, so having to justify adapting is at least curious.
I remember a man on television many years ago who said he was in favor of "saving the planet", but who would pay for it? The implication was that if it cost too much money, he'd rather just let the planet die. That's a pretty wild idea, you know? Imagine a comet on a collision course with the planet, and we ask ourselves, you know, whether it's really worth spending all that money to prevent the annihilation of all life.
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According to these scenarios, the planet won't die, in as much as it can support GDP.
- it's behind Poland and Lebanon or Barbados for life expectancy
- it's behind Poland or Morocco for safety
- is behind Poland or Slovenia or Turkey for work-life balance
- is middle of the pack for environment (despite its gigantic size most people live in so and so unhealthy places)
- is below average for civic engagement
- is middle of the pack for social mobility
- somehow US is among the highest in education rankings globally, something I have a hard time believing considering the emphasis on standardized tests and overall simplicity of US curricula (I guess research gets conflated with education, but ranking high schoolers for their math proficiency or functional literacy gets US middle of the pack)
- is among the highest ranking for depression and other mental illnesses
The best ranking countries in the world in all of those are...European social democratic countries that have never put GDP growth over social or environmental matters.
Facts are that being born in LA and coming from a high GDP family likely won't give you a better life by most metrics than being born in Latvia. You're not gonna be happier nor healthier nor more fulfilled.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/life-expectancy-vs-gdp-pe...
Once you get past $20k/yr GDP per capita, there's indeed limited additional benefit (there are diminishing returns). Which country is ahead of which other is essentially random. It depends on other factors, not GDP.
But if look at the scenarios for Middle East and Africa, it would take roughly 10 years longer for the Green Road scenario to get to $20k/yr, compared to the Highway.
https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/ipcc-scenarios?facet=no...
I am genuinely curious, as this often comes up in these discussion. Often, an argument would be that moving away from family and friends to a country where you do not speak the language is difficult. And yet, millions of people move to the US, which is a lot more difficult. So why not?
The reverse is also true. There isn't really a huge migration from Sweden or Switzerland to the US.
> And yet, millions of people move to the US, which is a lot more difficult.
We live in a society and world where you're brainwashed since your birth into thinking that money is the most important thing in the world. Thus people that already make good money move to the other side of the world (say to Silicon Valley) because they will make much more money there.
Then they find they aren't necessarily living a better life, just that they can afford more things.
I've been in places and cultures where there isn't such an emphasis on money and material things, like in central asia, and I think people there live much happier lives than most of us in high income countries do.
I haven't seen that, but I'm pretty sure that's not what he meant. It sounds like capability, not intent - people do need money both to live and implement the solution, so if no one's willing to pay then it can't be done.
Your example with the comet is a totally different situation, looking at the funders instead of the implementers like that first person you referred to.
Human wealth enables to do anything beyond the natural course of events where most people die after a very short-lived and miserable existence. Where we're subject to starvation, disease, dangerous animals, or perishing due to mundane cold, heat and other natural events.
Now, if you don't care about wealth, you basically end up being a consumerist. Fritter away whatever humanity can manage to produce on immediate consumption. Progress stagnates and humanity degenerates. If you claim to be none of those, you're probably just anti-human. In which case, nothing is stopping you from a pro-active start on depopulation.
If NYC floods (a la Sandy) a few times a year, you can sure as hell bet there will be negative GDP consequences.
> By 2300, seas could stand as much as 5 meters higher under the worst-case scenario.
https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/148494/anticipating...
I didn’t say NYC would be flooded, I said it would have significantly more sandy-like events (where the storm surge was already 3-4m in battery park city).[1]
And I don’t know how much you know about tides given your above comment, but starting out a meter higher usually has nonlinear effects on how far inland waves can travel.
[1] https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/national/2012/10/supplemental...
Don't forget Sandy was a Category 1 hurricane whose eye made landfall in Southern New Jersey. It was by no means a worst case scenario.
You can minimize climate change all you want, but maybe do some research first?
With that in mind, and considering that fossil fuels are for now still the cheapest and most reliable source of energy for those who need it the most -- that is, the global poor -- I think an immediate phase-out of fossil fuels without an equivalent alternative is a non-starter, climate change or not. There is a lot of investment into renewable energy sources so it's possible that we reach that point of equivalence soon, though.
In terms of climate change itself, the argument I find most persuasive to significantly reduce emissions is to prevent geopolitical instability arising from climate-related natural disasters, mainly crop failure and famine. I happen to think that there's more pessimism than warranted in that regard, but nonetheless it's a real risk.
https://www.pranaair.com/blog/harmful-effects-of-carbon-diox...
The critiques make me more interested, not less. One man's cherry-picking is another's identification or isolation of important signals.
The reason to be a good environmental steward is to make the earth habitable for ourselves. This is why people who claim “I don’t want kids because of global warming” are so incredibly stupid - the earth does not care a smidgen about them, it’s a rock. If they really cared about the environment they would have as many kids as they could in hopes of raising a great scientist to help the environment!
Another thing to remember is that the earth has been much warmer and much cooler during the time of humanity. We had a little ice age throughout the Middle Ages. While we are most certainly making the earth warmer with technology, this isn’t a death blow to us. We as a species will adapt.
Even if humans had zero output on the environment we would still have to deal with a changing climate - the earth cycles between colder and hotter naturally over time. So becoming better able to heat or cool the earth technologically will be a very good technique for our species.
What even is this argument?
People who are saying they don’t want kids because of global warming are saying that because they don’t want their kids to grow up in a world where the consequences of generations of not caring about global warming are evident.
And why are they stupid, exactly? Because they don’t want to inflict potential suffering on their kids? Because they don’t want to add to the overpopulation of the planet? True monsters, these people.
There are 8 billion people in the world already. Every single one of them does not have to make a baby for humanity to survive. Some people already pick up the slack as it is.
Honestly, you should get over yourself! You are yet another in a long line of Malthusian doomsayers that believes the world is ending. Simply absurd
Why would you want to bring a life into a world that is becoming increasingly inhospitable for your species?
Just a different explanation for this: If one has a super pessimistic view of effects of global warming in the next 50~100 years, e.g., collapse of civilization, it's reasonable not to have kids to prevent their suffering.
What does that mean? Why should that be a goal?
> why should we aim to reduce emissions at a significant detriment to human life?
What? How do you concluded that reducing emissions would cause "a significant detriment to human life?" Are you saying that climate change would not be a significant detriment to human life?
What are you getting at here? What are your assumptions?
We humans must become better shepherds of the earth we inhabit. It's not just out of the goodness of our hearts, but due to a moral obligation that binds us all.
One person's "natural preservation" is another person's status quo bias. Would you consider "natural preservation" to be a valid argument for, say, continuing a tradition that everyone agrees is harmful?
I think preserving nature can be quite harmful: https://www.animal-ethics.org/wild-animal-suffering-matters/
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_nature
(BTW, I think it's important to fight global warming -- but not because preserving the planetary status quo is important for its own sake)
Arthur Schopenhauer; Ueber die Grundlage der Moral, 1840:
"the everyday phenomenon of compassion, … the immediate participation, independent of all ulterior considerations, primarily in the suffering of another, and thus in the prevention or elimination of it…. Only insofar as an action has sprung from compassion does it have moral value; and every action resulting from any other motives has none."
From the Schopenhauer perspective, the 'right' answer if I recall correctly is to embrace asceticism. To deny the will.
How would you fix what for which reasons? As long as we pretend this to be mainly an ideological problem while ignoring the practical difficulties of not just solving stuff, but figuring out what to solve using which metric, we are unlikely to do anything sensible. Because every error and uncertainty in the conclusion to that question is extremely profitable to exploit.
I would be willing to go one step further, the more people dont talk about this, but are having trivialized arguments in which you know to be right pushing for vague calls to action, the less likely is it that we are doing anything sensible.
I am also confident, that if i were wrong on this, somebody could explain why. While there is a limit to complexity of possible solutions, ignoring the problem doesnt make it go away. It makes it worse.
edit: In case its not obvious, this flawed approach of framing something as an ideological argument while discouraging goal oriented approaches would also be how sabotage looks.
I doubt there will be a catastrophe associated with climate change. I could be wrong. Since we're not going to stop emitting carbon we'll find out.
Civilization is perpetually 7 days away from collapsing. Once the food chain collapses, in 7 days so does every modern amenity that you take for granted. GDP isn't the end goal, our survival is.
I'm not all that confident, given the way strong nationalism, isolationism, and anti-immigrant sentiment seem to have made major comebacks in rich nations far from the equator, that this would really happen.
But the bulk of the more serious ecosystem collapse scenarios probably don't happen until the next century. You can certainly make the argument that more people, more money, and significant investment into basic research and geoengineering stands a better chance of addressing this than stomping on emissions to prevent it. Higher GDP is probably a prerequisite to this happening, but political will and strong, trusted governments are another. We can't just have that GDP going toward bigger houses, faster cars, smarter targeted advertising, and even better-funded attacks on public services, science, and expertise.
I'd love it if this could be handled peacefully, and Canada just sells a big chunk of some northern province to the Indian government: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33483424 But history doesn't exactly leave me optimistic here.
Nothing is as cheap and vastly availible, doesn't require an overhaul of the grid, no need to develop new tech, it's all understood down to the last detail.
Everything else is just gaslighting, hypocrisy and selfishness that has people in rich areas of the world and especially the very rich areas within very rich countries (think California, New York, Oslo, Stokholm) care more about their children and their children's children than people who are alive right now.
The worse are those who don't have children and don't plan to have children but they still live in those rich areas and use climate to virtue signal. In one word Leonardo Di Caprio.
Amazing actor, great producer and fundraiser, delicious taste as far as his women but completely unaware of the trade-offs necessary to do what he wants.
The moment actors and people from the show-biz stopped supporting Africa and turned to climate you understand the deep divide between Hollywood, NYC and the priorities of the rest of the country, even with something as trivial as empathy. The rest of the country has empathy for humans whereas NYC and LA graduated to empathy towards animals and inanimate object such as climate.
This will not help. It does not matter where the emissions happen because CO2 circulates globally. We have already burnt enough fossil fuels to put enough CO2 into the atmosphere to guarantee decades of climate change. If we continue burning fossil fuels, the rate of climate change will continue to increase.
I meant it as a way to fight the CO2 which causes cancer and respiratory problems, so you move the large emissions to unpopulated areas and then use high voltage to bring electricity in populated areas.
The rest of the world wants to fight pollution, only the elites want to fight climate change because their wealth affords them to focus on problems and time horizons which are simply not relevant nor accessible for the rest of the world.
I doubt you'd be holding the same stance if you were dying of HIV and/or Malaria.
And besides in general people living in bubbles of wealth rarely are conscious about being in them or the priorities of people outside such bubbles.
If you asked a billionaire they'll probably perceive themselves as the underdogs fighting for the forgotten men and women, oh wait the #1 person on Forbes shouts and whines about being an underdog fighting for the forgotten men and women each day, multiple times per day.