Propaganda is extremely effective.
> Nobody is willing to make the lifestyle changes it would take to have a real impact on climate change. And it’s not unique to the US. Canada and Australia have similar carbon footprints per capita, suggesting it’s more a combination of material wealth and low density. Blaming corporations instead of the people for all that is asinine.
People move where it is cheap to live comfortably. Every level of US government subsidizes the shit out of suburbs and car commuting. If the true costs of people’s lifestyle were factored into the price, behavior would change in a hurry.
Individual consumers don’t have the information or analysis time necessary to factor in systemic effects of every choice.
> And what are our best and brightest from Stanford, etc., doing? Figuring out carbon recapture?
Some of them are. But doing research takes funding. If we want the smartest to take careers as researchers instead of looking to sell out and retire young, we should (a) tax/regulate the financial industry down to near break-even and enforce laws against fraud and other financial crimes, (b) tax capital gains as income, add additional income tax brackets for those making millions per year, tax large inheritances into the ground, consider adding a wealth tax, and crack down on tax evasion, (c) enact sweeping campaign finance reform, (d) pump more public money into basic research, (e) stop subsidizing the fossil fuel industry and shift those subsidies toward renewable energy, (f) while we are at it, clean up the broken health insurance system.
You can't go from individual decisions and then infer group desires. The inferential step isn't sound. It's like saying fishermen must want to make fish extinct because they persistently overfish in the absence of fishing quotas.
IMO human society simply isn't mature enough to deal with this problem. I don't think there will be serious action until it's an emergency for enough wealthy people - and I don't think that's the system working, I think it's swerving at the last moment. There will continue to be a lot of collateral damage before the emergency is pressing enough.
I think it's an hypocrisy issue primarily. The people shouting for us to make a change won't make it first.
If even a majority of the people that say we should lower our carbon foot print bought only food and clothing produced without dirty electricity sources, didn't fly in private planes and only drove Prius/hybrid/electric cars, etc... (for starters)
Then maybe, just maybe they could convince everyone else it's even _possible_ to do what they expect everyone else to do to save the planet.
It's not. It's game theory; it's simple mathematics. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_action_problem
The effect of any one person being "non-hypocritical" is minuscule. Effects will only significant en masse, and defectors must be punished, because it's profitable to defect. That means some mechanism to keep people in line must be used - and in our world that normally means the state. So agitation for political change is the correct approach.
Moral systems are another way of enforcing group will against individuals that would otherwise find it profitable/ to defect. Shaming works more efficiently in locally connected societies, though, and it's hard to scale it up to this kind of global problem.
Did celebrities back then continue to blatantly litter while telling everyone else to stop littering?
That is what they are doing with climate change. Do as I say, not as I do.
Climate change is a collective problem and will _only_ be resolved by collective regulations and incentives. This is not a problem we can all just “chip in” on and have it magically go away.
Consider how things would be if Hollywood lead the way with all the celebrities (percentage wise easily top percent polluters in the US) giving up their gas guzzling vehicles, private planes, excessive travel, etc... Much of the public would follow their example automatically, even many politicians.
It sounds like you are advocating for "I don't have to do it if everyone isn't".
Hypocrisy from leadership (whoever they are) robs people of motivation and compassion towards both the subject and the message. (ie, climate change)
There are many examples in history where individuals stood up for a belief and lead the way to change.
Saying we should do something, meaning all of us collectively, and saying individuals should do something are two different assertions, though the verbiage is sometimes precisely the same. A person can very logically, and without hypocrisy, state that everyone should cut their CO2 output drastically to save the planet (which would be effective and help, and would also require major changes in infrastructure, law, and government) without taking drastic steps of their own (which would not be effective and would not help in any perceptible way).
Collective action problem.
> There are many examples in history where individuals stood up for a belief and lead the way to change.
This isn't a hypothetical. It's a worthwhile exercise to consider whether the hippies who have actually been taking drastic steps to lower their environmental footprint since the sixties have moved the needle at all, in terms of actual environmental degradation, public perception, or in terms of politics. Also consider whether they might have been more effective by working and spending money and effort engaging in mainstream politics and living like the rest of us.
> Hypocrisy from leadership (whoever they are) robs people of motivation and compassion towards both the subject and the message. (ie, climate change)
This might actually be true. An electorate that points at Al Gore and says "that guy uses a lot of CO2 so clearly this whole climate change thing is bullshit" is too stupid to live and will come to a bad end. I live in hope that at least a plurality of us will eventually be a lot smarter than that.
If the people calling for changes in society related to climate change are of this ilk/type/caliber, then there is no way anything will ever change ethically.
Though, it could be done through propaganda, deceit and force. In other words, tyranny.
Or, end the hypocrisy and lead by example. Everything else is hand waving and rhetoric or worse.
You've proven yourself incapable of identifying hypocrisy, in part because of your strange denial of the existence of collective action problems, but you're also flattering yourself if you think hypocrisy is anything other than a universal human trait.
This is all silly. If you're in a debate, debate the issues, don't attack the character of your opponent. If you're a citizen evaluating or advocating for or against a policy position, debate the pros and cons of the policy. What you are so fixated on is a weird non-issue.
Hypocrisy is a character issue and I think I have hypocrisy's definition correct. If you are honest/moral/ethical, can you be a hypocrite? I don't think so, hypocrisy at it's core is dishonest. Therefore if you practice hypocrisy, you are a liar. Seems like a logical conclusion.
If big oil companies had just pumped oil and responded to the market then I might agree with you. But that’s not at all what happened.
It is the purpose of advertising and propaganda to tell people how to want. It's misleading at best to say "people want new cars" without considering the decades of advertising selling the dream of new cars as a form of success and high social status, as an aspirational desire, as a reward for hard work, as a kind of personal freedom and ability to go anywhere on your terms, and then sell that as desirable, etc. There's a reason Hollywood SciFi films have Audi cars as product placement, and it isn't because "people want to see a future with up-market German cars" and Hollywood is responding to that demand.
People who think that's hyper alarmist underestimate how nasty things will get when the harvest fails.
People move out ... to where?
Now multiply this by a few cities every ten years. It's going to be nasty.
I don't think that LG markets it's Android phones as being disposable. I do think that they should, and I think that if they won't do it voluntarily that consumers should be made aware of the fact that these purchases are for disposable "products" through any other available means. If that requires regulation, so be it. No consumers stood up and demanded planned obsolescence from these corporations.
LG's easy for me to pick on, since their phones are essentially disposable pieces of junk, and I've been burned by them three times, but you could drop in most electronic manufacturers here. If they're selling disposable electronics then they should market them that way. The fact that we all accept that they're disposable is a separate problem from the demand, IMHO.
I also don't think that anyone ever thought that when they spend hundreds of dollars on a smartphone or a laptop or whatever that they wouldn't actually own it or have the right to service it on their terms. And yet, here we are.
Well yeah. That's true for a lot of the world; California is the leading exporter - and sometimes the only significant exporter - of a rather absurd number of varieties of fruits and vegetables. California's Central Valley has the right intersection of climate (plenty of sunshine, and snow is rare to the point of statistical irrelevance), good soil, adequate water (occasional droughts notwithstanding), and size (enough room for a lot of farmland) to be an agricultural powerhouse.
Why have we ended up here? Do you think it’s because the general population demanded cheap crap?
It’s the other way around.
Cheap crap is more profitable, hence a lot of its manufacturing have been off-shored decades ago to those willing to do it cheaper.
This cheap often unneeded crap is marketed as a dream and sold to an irrational population incapable of escaping evolution.
I keep saying this “collection” of what we call money is like a hoarding disorder.
Why keep collecting when I have enough that it cannot spent during several lifetimes?
Add to that, all science point to it destroying this very earth.
Looks like no one is escaping evolution.
This is a myth that is perpetuated by free-market libertarians and is completely disconnected from reality.
First of all, a very large number of people are demanding exactly that and large corporations have no interest in it. Consumers also cannot make the transition or demand a transition unless there are viable alternatives -- which requires research and if the private sector won't fund that research then viable alternatives won't show up. It's much easier, less risky, and cheaper for the private sector to try to kill a new industry (where they aren't entrenched) than it is for them to compete in it.
In addition, a lot of emissions are unrelated to the type of product being provided. Consumers might not have a green option (and thus cannot "vote with their wallet"), and even if they have a green option they might not care enough. According to the EPA[1] more than 75% of emissions are caused by transportation, industrial processes, and energy production. Reducing industrial emissions created during the manufacturing process of goods would have a much more significant impact than consumers changing what brand of soap they use.
We have laws to protect people from vendors selling tainted or poisoned food. By the logic of a free-market libertarian we should allow the sale of such food because consumers would choose not to purchase it and "market effects" would kill the business. But we all know that the reason those regulations were introduced is because before they were introduced people were dying because of unsafe food being sold.
> Nobody is willing to make the lifestyle changes it would take to have a real impact on climate change. Blaming corporations instead of the people for all that is asinine.
That's bullshit. See [1], individual consumers are one of the smallest contributors to climate change. The main contributors are industry. If emissions were taxed and there were tax breaks for operating in a green manner (such as the carbon tax which was repealed by our coal-loving Liberal government) then companies would have a financial incentive to do research into less polluting processes.
> And what are our best and brightest from Stanford, etc., doing? Figuring out carbon recapture?
Governments (in Australia at least) are cutting funding for climate change (at the behest of their political donors that, as above, have a vested interest against climate-change research). The intended effect of this is that there ends up being so much brain-drain away from public-sector research into climate change. Which is exactly what's happening. I agree that this is a very bad thing, but it makes no sense to blame PhD students (people with no money and no power) that couldn't get grants because the government is actively working against the public.
[1]: https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emis...
There are already viable alternatives. Buy less stuff, travel less, turn down your heating/AC, eat less meat and dairy. When people say "viable alternatives", they really mean "free lunch" - they want to maintain exactly the same lifestyle as they do now, just without the carbon emissions. That's completely untenable, no matter what technologies emerge over the next few decades. Even with the most optimistic forecasts of the pace of technological development, we'll have to make some radical changes to our lifestyle to prevent a climate disaster.
That's bullshit. See [1], individual consumers are one of the smallest contributors to climate change. The main contributors are industry.
Without consumers, there is no industry. Airline companies don't burn kerosene for the hell of it, they burn it because people keep buying plane tickets and keep shipping things by air freight. If we stop buying plane tickets and air freighted goods, they go out of business and so they stop burning kerosene.
The blame game over climate change is just blatant buck-passing. It's not my fault, it's the big corporations. It's not my fault, it's the government. It's not my fault, it's the people who vote for the other party. As long as there's someone else to point the finger at, you're absolved of responsibility. How many tons of carbon emissions does your lifestyle cause? What can you do right now to reduce that number? We'll only see meaningful change if a lot more people start asking those questions and acting upon the answers rather than waiting for someone else to act.
I'm going to repeat this again -- the vast majority of emissions are from industrial processes. Optimising the industrial processes to reduce emissions (as opposed to reduce costs) will result in emissions improvements.
Yes, in theory if the entire planet reduced its meat intake by 50% this would be a massive improvement -- but so would killing 50% of people. If your proposed solution to the problem is not viable from the outset you aren't proposing a solution, you're just deflecting blame.
Also -- contrary to popular belief, personal transport like cars (or commercial planes) are far from the largest emitters.
> Airline companies don't burn kerosene for the hell of it, they burn it because people keep buying plane tickets and keep shipping things by air freight. If we stop buying plane tickets and air freighted goods, they go out of business and so they stop burning kerosene.
Planes are actually more fuel-efficient than cars per-head. And planes are far from the largest polluters in "transportation" -- that would be trucks (especially older trucks that are under-maintained).
> The blame game over climate change is just blatant buck-passing.
You are buck-passing by arguing that it's the sole responsibility of the public to solve this crisis. Not corporations which knew about the effects of climate-change in the 60s and tried to hide it from the public and government. Not governments which are placating their donors by passing (or abolishing) milk-toast regulations to fix the problem.
I do my best to reduce my carbon emissions but that is not going to make any palpable difference.
If we wanted to go to war, then it would be the government's responsibility to organise the war effort. But if we want to stop humanity from going into war due to resource shortage all of a sudden it's about "personal responsibility".
Could we have a conversation offline? I'd like to learn more about your situation and what has brought you to this reply. Feel free to send me an email and we can schedule a time to talk.
rayiner has simply correctly pointed out that the markets follow consumer preference and that those preferences place low value on renewable energy & sustainability.
No one is calling man-made climate change into question.
> Blaming the “companies” and “lobbyists” is such a cop-out. The companies are just giving people what they want. If people demanded a shift to a climate friendly lifestyle tomorrow, Exxon would have no choice but to follow suit.
As we've seen with Russian propaganda efforts, the firehose of falsehoods can be extremely effective at keeping people in the dark or convincing them of something not in their best interest. People demanding a shift requires education around the topic, and Exxon literally prevented research on the topic from coming out for decades.
> Looking at the major trends of the last several decades. People moving to brand new sunbelt suburbs where they drive everywhere in SUVs. Buying disposable clothes, electronics, etc., made in China and shipped over the ocean. Even the token attempts at being environmentally conscious are ridiculous. I go to Whole Foods here in Maryland and everything is grown in f—king California. It’s a joke.
I'm very confused what point you're trying to make here. That systems or not optimizing for environmental impact? Of course they aren't. They are optimizing based on the incentives they are following. People move to suburbs and drive SUVs to feel safer and more wealthy. People move to the sunbelt because the winter sucks. People buy disposable clothes and stuff is shipped from China because it's cheaper to do so. It's really expensive to grow produce in Maryland, so you ship it from California.
> Nobody is willing to make the lifestyle changes it would take to have a real impact on climate change. And it’s not unique to the US. Canada and Australia have similar carbon footprints per capita, suggesting it’s more a combination of material wealth and low density. Blaming corporations instead of the people for all that is asinine.
You're right, asking someone to give up their lifestyle sucks. However, you're equating changing lifestyle with fighting climate change. That's where we disagree. The goal of fighting climate change isn't to get people to change their lifestyles, it's to stop sequestered carbon from entering the carbon cycle. One way to do that is to ask people to stop being so excessive (e.g. changing lifestyle), but nowadays we have so many more options.
Most climate change solutions nowadays start with the assumption that we shouldn't ask people to change lifestyles, and just deploy carbon-free infrastructure that is a drop-in replacement for existing carbon-intense infrastructure. Solar, Wind, EVs, batteries, biofuels, etc. all never ask you to stop buying disposable shirts from China. All they do is replace the power that powers the factory and the fuel that is used to ship it to you with sources that don't add carbon the carbon cycle. So that when you are living your life in your disposable shirt and eating your California avocados, you're not contributing to climate change anymore.
> And what are our best and brightest from Stanford, etc., doing? Figuring out carbon recapture? No, working at Google figuring out how to more effectively advertise disposable consumer goods that are shipped over from China, used a few times, and shipped back to China for disposal.
We'll I'm just the best and brightest from UT-Austin, so not Stanford, but I did make the career switch from traditional tech to cleantech. And every time one of these threads come up I try to post that you, too, can make the switch from Google to cleantech. However, every time that happens, there are pessimists like yourself who shit all over my call for help. That's okay though, the capitalist in me kind of sees this as an opportunity. The fewer competitors I have in my particular niche, the more money I make. So I guess I should be partially thanking you for slowing down the climate change tech enlightenment :)
Where do you plan to find that in your non-lifestyle change world? Solar? That's 8000sqft of installed solar with the highest efficiency panels. That needs to be coupled with hundreds of kwh storage. Total cost : hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Good luck on that.
That being said, there is a lot of space where nobody lives in the US. There are some 28000 square meters per person in the US. Dedicating about 3% of that to solar panels doesn't seem impossible.
Some energy saving is also possible without changing the average lifestyle too much. Insulating homes helps quite a bit. Electric cars are more efficient that gas cars.
[1] https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/?page=us_energy_home
[2] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=10%5E20+joules+%2F+(3....
[3] https://www.quora.com/How-much-solar-energy-can-be-tapped-in...
At current prices, that much PV capacity would cost around 25 trillion dollars. That price doesn't include any storage capacity.
The climate is changing far too rapidly for us to hope for science fiction solutions. We need a major reduction in emissions now, which means both a vast increase in renewable production and a vast reduction in overall consumption.
Nuclear.
We have the research now, but people aren't changing their behavior.
> I'm very confused what point you're trying to make here. That systems or not optimizing for environmental impact? Of course they aren't. They are optimizing based on the incentives they are following. People move to suburbs and drive SUVs to feel safer and more wealthy. People move to the sunbelt because the winter sucks. People buy disposable clothes and stuff is shipped from China because it's cheaper to do so. It's really expensive to grow produce in Maryland, so you ship it from California.
And that is what causes climate change. Exxon is just giving people what they want. The blame rests with people who want a lifestyle that's incompatible with avoiding climate change, not the companies that simply are feeding consumer demand.
> All they do is replace the power that powers the factory and the fuel that is used to ship it to you with sources that don't add carbon the carbon cycle. So that when you are living your life in your disposable shirt and eating your California avocados, you're not contributing to climate change anymore.
We don't have time to develop all that technology: https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-why-the-ipcc-1-5c-repor.... According to new, revised estimates, having a 50/50 chance of limiting tempeature increaes to 1.5C leaves us with 14 years of carbon emissions at current levels. After which point the world economy has to hit zero carbon emissions. Meanwhile, carbon emissions are still going up: https://www.climatechangenews.com/files/2017/03/238eb46742db.... From 2000-2015, China added an amount of CO2 output that exceeds the entire US output. China continues to grow, while India is approaching where China was before 2000 and may have a similarly explosive growth in CO2 emissions in the next two decades.
Not only is there no solution that allows us to keep living the way we are living while averting climate change. There never was. Even if we had listened to the hippies and cut U.S. emissions by half starting in the 1960s, China's growth alone would have completely wiped out that savings multiple times over.
They are. Clean energy mandates are being passed in many states; climate change and the Green New Deal is a front and center topic in the Democratic presidential primary race; the Paris Climate Agreement passed on a global scale; China is electrifying transportation and building as much solar, wind, and nuclear as fast a possible; India is phasing out coal as fast a possible; and on and on.
A person as an individual isn't changing their behavior to a large extent, but people in aggregate are.
> And that is what causes climate change.
No, it's not. Again, climate change is caused by injecting sequestered carbon into the carbon cycle. Previously, it just so happened that the act of driving your SUV around did exactly that. However, more and more that's not true. As we electrify transportation and clean the grid, the act of driving around becomes less and less what causes climate change.
> We don't have time to develop all that technology
We already have the technology, it's just a matter of deploying it. Every auto manufacturer is releasing major electric models by next year. Clean energy generation in the U.S. is set to surpass coal generation this year. China is electrifying transportation and switching to clean energy (including nuclear) as fast as possible. India is building more solar than ever and accelerating that deployment.
As I'm sure you've seen, my favorite climate change joke is, "They say we won't act until it's too late... Luckily, it's too late!"
Climate change is my generation's great challenge. If we lose, we die. So, many of us are fighting with everything we have. Some are trying to get people to change behavior, some are trying to make drop-in replacements. But none of us are giving up. It sounds like you've already given up.
FYI, HN is limiting reply depth, so I doubt I can reply more. Please email me back if you can.
Well, Purdue Pharma is also only giving people what they want. In and of itself, that doesn't mean much.
Exxon is doing significantly more than just giving people what they want [1], as do many (most?) of the big dinosaurs of the established industries that currently make the world go round. Do we need to go into the vast efforts at influencing the public that such entities expend in order to maintain their domination and wealth? You have vastly more expertise on this subject, so I wouldn't be able to tell you anything new.
The world does need to advance, but advance to where? Thermodynamically, it must slow down or it will overheat and crash into the ceiling.
> Not only is there no solution that allows us to keep living the way we are living while averting climate change. There never was. Even if we had listened to the hippies and cut U.S. emissions by half starting in the 1960s, China's growth alone would have completely wiped out that savings multiple times over.
You don't know that, and it's a false dilemma anyway. People change their lifestyles all the time in response to their economic environment and incentives, as they have been doing throughout history.
I tend to listen more to the experts when they say something is possible. When they tell me in no uncertain terms that a very important problem has no solution, I listen more to the kids.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/23/climate/exxon-global-warm...
Doerr and Khosla probably soured SV on cleantech
I am not responsible for the planet and saving it. So please don't try to guilt me into taking responsibility for "saving" the planet. I've already done my part by not having children. It is up to parents and people who care enough about the species to save the planet and humanity. I'll be dead in a decade and not really bothered by this impending doom.
Planets, Nations and species die every day, given the vastness of the universe. It's admirable to try to save something, but the willingness to do so must come from within, free from external collective pressure mixed with shaming and guilt.
Looking at the major trends of the last several decades. People moving to brand new sunbelt suburbs where they drive everywhere in SUVs. Buying disposable clothes, electronics, etc., made in China and shipped over the ocean. Even the token attempts at being environmentally conscious are ridiculous. I go to Whole Foods here in Maryland and everything is grown in f—king California. It’s a joke.
Nobody is willing to make the lifestyle changes it would take to have a real impact on climate change. And it’s not unique to the US. Canada and Australia have similar carbon footprints per capita, suggesting it’s more a combination of material wealth and low density. Blaming corporations instead of the people for all that is asinine.
And what are our best and brightest from Stanford, etc., doing? Figuring out carbon recapture? No, working at Google figuring out how to more effectively advertise disposable consumer goods that are shipped over from China, used a few times, and shipped back to China for disposal.