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- Hacker News
- After 50 years since I was born for the first I didnt eat grapes from my backyard in Southern Europe because they dried up due to extreme heat. In the rest of my life I might miss any other fruit.by tsoukase
- Our environment will collapse and the fat cats will still deny it and convince most of us that it was our fault and that nothing could be done and that we should just buy their anti-environment-collapse products to protect ourselves.by wateralien
- > Our environment will collapse and the fat cats will still deny
It is, and they are. We keep hitting record X Y and Z temperatures, cyclones, etc, and they're on the brig shouting "it ain't global warming you morons"
by charles_f - Want to do something about this?
El Niño this year is going to be especially crazy, worst in human history by a large margin looks like. I'm putting together El Niño Climate Week to work on averting the worst impacts. It's a good opportunity to move the conversation forward about how our climate is changing very quickly.
My projects tend to be pretty good schelling points for people that like to take action, in case you're finding the comments here frustrating ("I'm not surprised", "we just need to X", "we're doomed", "it will be fine", etc etc etc)
by tito - How could this happen? I've faithfully sorted all of my recyclables into their respective bins to maximize profit for my city's garbage collection just like they asked
- Telling you that you have power is one of the ways by which they ensure that you don’t have any power. Elections work the same way.by p-e-w
- We've gone the "crowdsorting" route but if we didn't go this way the fees for garbage collection would be higher and the city's garbage collection company would still make profits, that's a constant.by cbg0
- Why are we framing this as "the fight against climate change"? This framing puts the culprit outside of ourselves, as if it's some external force.
I feel that way of looking at it makes changing impossible. It's our own behaviours and systems that will have to change. There's nothing to fight here, the answer instead lies in collaboration.
by monneyboi - Great point. For example, we should encourage collaboration between people building hyperscale data centers, and people not building hyperscale data centers to find some middle ground that is good for the planet.
Collaboration implies we are all on the same side. Reality suggests some people have made it their business to be on the wrong side.
by kennywinker - Modern economies are addicted to growth, and asset prices are pinned to showing continued growth more than ever. As soon as any global power proposes to take a beat and re-evaluate the trajectory of innovation, they will be left behind. Global leadership is also effectively non-existent and aside from trade, no one seems to be able to really make inroads on big ticket issues. In a time where we need more collaboration that ever, governments seem to be skewing more nationalistic than ever.by mym1990
- Perfect example of "left behind" is EU, shooting itself in leg for many years with dubious results in terms of ecology ... and negligible in global scale.by shuwix
- Well, to be fair, the whole "enough growth" thought happened to spring into existence at the exact moment where we (the west) have comfortable living standards.
Something other developing nations would need growth for to achieve.
So that's kinda interesting, because degrowth is seen as this conceptual antagonist to the people letting the global south burn, but they both are letting them down - just marginally differently.
by hypfer - The story does not link to the report itself, which can be found here: https://www.unep.org/resources/limiting-overshoot-navigating...by aorth
- we have had the perfect storm to do a U-turn on most fossile fuels:
- COVID pandemics: everybody at home, less traveling, massive economic reset and massive capitals injected (EU recovery funding, quantitative easing)
- Russian attack on Ucraine, stopping a big chunk of gas and petrol to Europe
- Strait of Hormuz, also chocking oil coming to the rest of the world
We could have said: "oh, let's swap those energy sources to renewables", "oh, let's bind those capitals to de-carbonization projects", "oh, let's plant trees", "oh, let's stop deforestation". A lot of things could have been said and done. But, well, a certain degree of coordinated intelligence is too much to ask.
At this point I have lost all hopes, whatever comes, we have asked for it.
by dariosalvi78 - From my perspective, we simply didn’t evolve to have the kind of collective intelligence required. There’s no point in being angry about it, any more than it makes sense to be angry at any other animal for the abilities it hasn’t evolved to have.by senordevnyc
- It's hard to have people use data in these types of conversations, so I'll just link two charts.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita and https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-co-emissions-by-re...
Notice which countries are going down. Notice which countries are going up.
by internet2000 - Hey, quick question, who does virtually all manufacturing for US and Canadian and EU citizens? And why is the rise of Chinas emissions so coincidentally timed to the fall of those countries'?
I didn't go into the study, but looking at all the little text blurbs about the numbers, I don't see anything about if a US citizen purchasing a product that's made in China counts as US emission, as it obviously should.
by Tadpole9181 - Consumption-based charts are much better, as they account for the actual CO2 emissions of lifestyle in the country (since offshoring manufacturing from developed countries to developing countries doesn't reduce the total emissions, even if it makes our direct emissions stats look better).
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/consumption-co2-per-capit...
by 1d22a - One of the countries that is going up (China) is also doing more than any other country to rapidly roll out renewables both domestically and in other countries, and their emissions have peaked or are near peaking, and is capable of sticking with long term plans. Also a lot of their emissions are from making things for the rest of the world.
The other country that has grown significantly in the last 20 years (India) is still far below using their fair share of the world emission budget, and they are rapidly adding renewables.
The sane way for a planet to use fossil fuels is for countries to use them to build up to the stage where they are wealthy enough to switch to renewables. If the ones that do that earlier stay on fossil fuels too long so that you get climate problems they can't just expect the countries that are not as far a long to just give up on becoming wealthy. They need to heavily subsidize those other countries in renewables so they can shorten or skip the fossil fuel bootstrap stage.
Because of the long time CO2 stays around in the atmosphere, about 40% of the CO2 currently in the atmosphere from human activity came from the US and Europe.
by tzs - That's such a narrow minded point of view. Yeah, who produces your laptop ? Your lawnmower ? Heck, even your knifes ?by Faaak
- I'm mostly stopped feeling autistic since adolescence, but climate change is one of those times. It's obviously real, and it's also obvious that shuffling chairs in developing countries is rounding to zero effect. We're converting to cleaner energy anyways because of pollution and better economics, so the push for decarbonization in itself is... what do you call a rounding error when it's already rounding to zero?
And it's FAR from hopeless. Again, global warming is obviously happening. But the amount of adapting and reacting to it is virtually nil. Installing AC. Tree cover in every city. Start serious discussions on what level of risk we want with geoengineering.
Because yes, there absolutely is an acceptable risk level with geoengineering. Planting trees is that. Carbon capture is also that. And better and more effective tech will definitely be available.
But we're in a social climate where I don't even dare write down examples of what those more effective methods would be, because if you're not luddite enough you're the enemy.
- When you find yourself stuck in a hole the first step to solving the problem is to stop digging. We're still digging at a superhuman speed. Meanwhile here you are talking about how you aren't worried because ladder building technology is really coming along, but nobody wants to talk about ladders.by breakyerself
- Can you explain what 'Luddite' means in a broader context? Not all of us grew up learning British history :)by m00dy
- Because if I can do nothing and make you do it, you solve it for me, for free. They'll make some argument (like western nations having used up the energy (and paid for it), and want to make them pay for it again. For a lot of countries that, and nothing else, is the purpose of climate action). Now get to work, taxpayer!
Because for most countries (and certainly for the largest oil producer in the world, Russia), global warming saves greatly on winter fuel use and increases agricultural harvests AND allows them to keep their population happy (because nothing keeps populations calm like cheap fuel/energy). That is the net effect, today.
Because for a lot of countries that really are the beneficiaries of causing global warming, ie. the oil producer countries, Russia, Saudi Arabia, US, Venezuela, Norway, and many small ones Azerbeidjan, causing global warming (ie. selling fossil fuels) is often the only reason they have an economy (mostly all except the US). So they demand a LOT of money, for free, to stop it. And nobody will pay that.
The last argument even goes for countries that are not direct oil or coal producers, like India or China but it's effectively the same argument (China runs on coal, and the country works on exports. Without energy no exports, so their coal usage is still increasing. Ie. same argument as above, they only have an economy because they're causing global warming, just more indirectly than Saudi Arabia)
Because WW2 was won with oil, and so countries that either want to start a war ("or fear they'll be the target/victims of the next big war") want access to oil. This argument goes especially for China, who fear they'll be targeted/"victimized" when they attack half of Asia starting with Taiwan and to a lesser extent for India (who feel they'll be at war with Pakistan, and Bangladesh whether they want to or not, and maybe China too) and even for EU countries (ie. for the ones that matter, France and Germany)
Look up China's oil reserves. You'll be collecting your jaw from the floor, I promise.
Summary: because most governments care about various things ... and not at all about people, about you. Mostly governments not even about their own people and certainly not about the climate where you live. They have a million concerns, a lot of which require fossil fuels, and for the people that compose those governments, climate change just doesn't matter.
Plus, if they can just do nothing, you still have to solve global warming. So doing nothing, aside from being very profitable, is also a great tactic to get you to fix it.
by spwa4 - I agree with your message overall, but this kind of, I dunno, martyrdom posturing ("But we're in a social climate where I don't even dare write down examples of what those more effective methods would be, because if you're not luddite enough you're the enemy.", "it's not socially acceptable to discuss alternatives to orthodoxy") is funny to see on HN. This is not Xitter or Reddit, no one is going to ban or attempt to dox you and get you fired for saying "We should seriously consider injecting reflective stuff into stratosphere" here. In fact, your message will likely even have a positive rating overall.by lII1lIlI11ll
- I'm not going to lie, and this is not meant as an insult, but I could not comprehend what a single sentence here is trying to say.by mym1990
- Supposing all anthropogenic emissions went to zero today, we'd still keep warming almost as far as three degrees with all of the disasters and famines that entails, because there's a lag time between existing emissions and their effects.
We need massive bounty programs that pay out irrespective of nationality for every possible kind of improvement and gain to carbon capture technology if we want to prevent 90% of all land on Earth between 30°N and 30°S from slowly turning into copies of the uninhabitable stretches of the Middle East.
by OgsyedIE - We need to print much more money!by throw8393739
- might not be entirely accurate:
https://www.carbonbrief.org/explainer-will-global-warming-st...
https://www.researchgate.net/figure/CO2-emissions-and-respec...
by tcfhgj - Just Zeroing isn't enough, what ever efforts we put into negating it never seems to have frontpageby cobalt60