Governments 'not on track' to cap temperatures at below 2 degrees: U.N

Re:Governments 'not on track' to cap temperatures at below 2... by munificent on Monday September 03, 2018 @01:22AM (#17900505)

I don't think we've hit a limitation of our brains. We used to be able to build cathedrals that took dozens of years to complete. Voyager 2 was launched in 1977 and didn't complete its initial mission until 1989. We planted trees that we knew would take a hundred years to reach full maturity.

We don't have a cognitive failure. We have an institutional failure. The corporate system that drives most of human society today is often unable to deliver long-term projects that benefit society. The tragedy of the commons is a viable business model — the way to compete is to exploit as much of the environment as you can before the other guy does.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Governments 'not on track' to cap temperatures at below 2... by TeMPOraL on Monday September 03, 2018 @01:35AM (#17900546)

I fear things you mention are exceptions that don't scale - that can be mostly traced down to a bunch of individuals believing in a mission and having a means to accomplish it, supported by lots of people doing it for money or being coerced. That, and religion, which is a way of rewriting people's cost/benefit calculations at scale. So with cathedrals, I'd expect most people involved were either paid, coerced by violence, or coerced by their religious beliefs; with Voyager, I expect there was a bunch of scientists and managers who cared and got public money to command, and thousands of people who were simply paid to do their jobs.

I'd love to see money go away as a factor, but I can't see how - especially for projects that require large existing industries (leveraging economies of scale).

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Governments 'not on track' to cap temperatures at below 2... by rapnie on Monday September 03, 2018 @02:42AM (#17900832)

Implied in your answer is that the root cause of climate change is failed economic systems. Isn't that what we should address?

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Governments 'not on track' to cap temperatures at below 2... by munificent on Tuesday September 04, 2018 @06:56PM (#17913585)

I believe so, yes.

Capitalism is a very powerful tool, but we've taken it to the point of religious dogma and its short-comings are very real at the scale of a global economy.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Governments 'not on track' to cap temperatures at below 2... by Razengan on Monday September 03, 2018 @01:39AM (#17900557)

Replying to other sibling comments similar to the one above:

> We have an institutional failure.

> What we are experiencing is a failure of particular institutions - government, industry, NGOs, Intergovernmental organizations etc. What an average brain might or might not care or related-to is a significant distance from this.

Those institutions are other humans. Why do we pretend they're not?

Is this more of a social hierarchy thing than biological; i.e. trusting our "superiors" to take take care of it, or basically "not my job."

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Governments 'not on track' to cap temperatures at below 2... by munificent on Tuesday September 04, 2018 @06:57PM (#17913596)

> Those institutions are other humans.

They are made of humans, but not equivalent to humans.

It's like saying the problem is a failure of neurons. There's nothing in a single neuron that will let you fix this problem. Likewise, I don't think looking in the head of a single human will fix it. It's the organizations that the humans built and they way they interact in them that causes the problems. It's an emergent phenomenon of the aggregation.

[ Parent | on HN ]