If you could move an entire country from being car dependent to being largely car free, by pushing rapid urbanisation and transit and you put 20 car drivers onto a train or a bus, then we're starting to talk about measures that actually have some effect.

Or if we eliminate meat consumption altogether rather than promising people magic lab meat every five years, that would have an effect. Or if we put some significant money into a manhattan project for carbon capture, that at least gives us a statistical shot.

But buying a tesla or a linen bag at the supermarket or paying 50 cents for a biodegradable cup at starbucks isn't saving the planet, it's the modern version of paying the catholic church for absolution.

And in the long and infamous history of bad references to fallacies, this isn't one either. If you need to go from 100 to 10 and you're spending billions on something that gets you from 100 to 99.9 you're wasting time and energy that you don't have.

> spending billions on something that gets you from 100 to 99.9 you're wasting time and energy that you don't have.

Of course those numbers are just made up but they are also very far from reality. Solutions to climate change have actually been ranked in terms of total cost and total amount of CO2 reductions and electric cars come in at the 26th most cost-effective solution to climate change:

https://www.drawdown.org/solutions/transport/electric-vehicl...

I really don't know why climate change seems to inspire so many people's inner contrarian where they just want to deride any attempt at preventing it because they haven't solved the whole thing in one go. There is no perfect solution, we are not going to fundamentally transform the world to a car-less society, or eliminate meat consumption.

Its like if you buy an electric car, somebody tells you "BUT you still fly!".

If you stop flying, somebody tells you "BUT you still eat meat!".

If you stop eating meat somebody tells you "BUT you still heat your home with gas!"

If you switch to electric heating based of clean energy sources somebody tells you "BUT you still buy avacados imported from across the world!"

It never ends.

This isn't true. No one is arguing we should sit around and wait for a perfect solution, and that's a really dishonest framing of this article.

The argument is that electric cars are over-weighted as a solution, and it's one I see all the time. Not only that, but it directly conflicts with other goals. In the US, cities and states are still investing in expanding highway and car-based infrastructure at a time when we desperately need to be moving away from car-centric cities. Infrastructure is expensive and time-consuming to build, so putting resources into car-centric infrastructure means that a) we will be stuck with car-centric cities for a long time, and b) there will be less money for non-car infrastructure. If instead, we stopped building new car infrastructure and poured our efforts into non-car infrastructure, we'd be much better off.

Nothing else even comes close. It’s a simple fact. It’s easy to do. But nobody wants to do that.

It’s far less painful to pretend that we can keep the Titanic from sinking by making sure we sip our boat drinks from metal straws.

The point of the post is that we’re trying to consume our way out of a consumption problem, but predictably, a group of technology people want desperately to believe that if we just make the stuff we’re consuming better — with technology! — we’re helping.

To this end, it’s worth pointing out that the only item on that list that relates to family size is midway down, where it talks about family planning for the third world...something other people can do, so that you don’t have to change your life.

If we let the "ban cars" and the "ban children" folk fight it out then that frees up time for the "pragmatically improve things along many different dimensions, many of which would be beneficial even if we totally ignored climate change" folk to get on with things.

It’s far easier to mock the people who tell you the truth than it is to make substantial changes.

[1] https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/environment...

But people don't want to listen to the harsh truths. They would rather consume their way out of the problem with electric cars, education for third world countries, reforestation, solar power and other false hopes.

I'm sorry but I think this crosses the line. I don't want to impose my morality on you but in my opinion me saying "most people should not have children" is not the same as basically telling people to kill themselves.

I understand that I am in the minority when I say this I think not conceiving children is not the same as telling people to kill themselves. I think people do not have a fundamental right to reproduction at the same level as they have the right to be left alive (which I think comes higher).

I'd much rather see most people not have children rather than they kill themselves.

irq11 does not consider the costs of implementing a world-wide child reduction policy. A combination of solutions including education, birth control, electric cars, reducing flying, solar energy etc. is FAR more realistic than the "no kids, no cars" approach. He complains about harsh reactions but he is the one who started this off from a very antagonistic perspective that everybody is just a mindless consumer while he is the arbiter of harsh truths that people are too weak-minded to admit to.

It’s not surprising at all (as I said, people don’t want to actually change their lives), but it does become a self-satire.

Whereas making a car or a plane trip or a burger or a child x% more expensive will move us in the right direction and even that will be resisted to a crazy degree.

“You know how you were gonna have a second kid? Here’s a thought: consider using the time and money you’d spend on that to do something else. Like retire early.”

If we can’t convince people not to do an expensive, time-consuming, painful thing in order to help stop global warming, we really do have problems.

They've probably done more to combat global warming than most "ban cars/meat/flying" fanatics.

What the heck are you talking about? Every industrialized nation now has negative population growth if you ignore immigration. People are having fewer children, and frequently, none.

If you elect to have one fewer child, you can drive a car everywhere and fly first class for vacation and eat a big steak every week of your life, and you’ll still be greener than your neighbor with the solar panels and the Tesla. Doesn’t matter what birth rates are in the industrialized world.

Drive a Tesla and put solar panels on your house and eat vegan and shop local at the co-op. Knock yourself out. But the single guy next door with no kids who drives a muscle car and eats big red steaks every day is still doing more for global warming than you are. It’s not even a question.

"Educating Girls" and "Family Planning" are ranked 6th and 7th on the list (out of 80). So I don't know why you are saying that its midway down the list?

According to this logic the real number one thing you could do is to kill yourself, but it fails for exactly the same reason.

You're just measuring the impact and not the cost. Doing one thing with a large impact and an even larger cost is worse than doing three things whose total impact is more and total cost is less than that of the one thing. Especially since in this context they stack -- if you buy an electric car and switch to electric heat and install solar panels on your roof, but so too do your spouse and three kids, that's going to have more impact than having two kids while you're all driving ICE cars and getting heat from fuel oil and electricity from coal, since the impact of each measure is multiplied by each of the five people in your family.

On top of that, you're not considering the economic and political implications. If there are fewer children then there will be fewer working people per retiree. That means a resource crunch, which is exactly the sort of thing that will prevent people from being able to afford sustainable alternatives that may cost a little bit more, and then you've doomed us all.

However, the responses to this simple fact continue to be enlightening: people would rather commit all sorts of tortured fallacies of reasoning than change their lifestyles in any meaningful way.

It's the same result. You're just choosing it for yourself instead of your parents having chosen for you, which only seems fair -- I know I'd rather be the one to choose for myself. But the point is that the choice, in either case, is not worth the cost when there are better alternatives.

If we were at the point that population reduction was the only possible solution then we would be soliciting volunteers, but it's not.

> However, the responses to this simple fact continue to be enlightening: people would rather commit all sorts of tortured fallacies of reasoning than change their lifestyles in any meaningful way.

Why would anybody want to do that when it isn't necessary? You can't just buy an electric car and call it done, but it's one among a collection of things you can do that sum together to an actual solution that doesn't require people to abandon their standard of living.

Edit: choosing not to have children (and I don't think that's a reasonable way to expect people to try and address climate change) is not population reduction. It's population control, if you like. You are making sure that the population doesn't keep increasing. Killing people on the other hand is population reduction. They're really not the same thing at all.

I don't think anybody wants to have the abortion debate right now, so let's not.

> choosing not to have children (and I don't think that's a reasonable way to expect people to try and address climate change) is not population reduction. It's population control, if you like.

The fertility rate is already below the population replacement rate in developed countries, so having fewer children than the current baseline is a (further) population reduction.

I mean, a small-but-growing number of young adults are already doing exactly that.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/some-millennials-climat...

https://qz.com/1590642/these-millennials-are-going-on-birth-...

https://www.businessinsider.com/millennials-americans-worry-...

> The point of the post is that we’re trying to consume our way out of a consumption problem,

I don't think that's true. People are trying to find better ways to solve the minimum amount of consumption they need to continue to exist. That's not the same thing as what you've described, that's not "consuming our way out".

People aren't buying EVs because they want to vacation all the time and/or take fun extra road trips 24/7. It's mainly about "I have to be able to get to Work/School/Home in a quick and safe manner, because capitalism demands it for my survival. How can I emit as little CO2 into the air as possible, while still meeting the requirements a capitalist nation demands of me. Which of these solutions can I afford?"

> it talks about family planning for the third world...something other people can do, so that you don’t have to change your life.

Because many "first world" nation birthrates are already abstaining pretty significantly. In the US specifically, birthrates have fallen to all-time record lows - https://money.cnn.com/2013/09/06/news/economy/birth-rate-low...

The primary cause of population growth now isn't the birth rate, but rather life expectancy. People are living 20+ years longer than before.

If you take your argument to its logical conclusion, the #1 most significant thing you can do to reduce climate change is suicide. And the most significant thing a nation can do is genocide.

The author acknowledges electric cars are a modest improvement.

And who is working on the better solution?

The article claims it is a problem of consumption, but yet also it's a systemic problem. You can't fix systemic problems from consumption choices, and blaming individual consumers for systemic problems misses the point entirely of: a) who is to blame, and b) who could fix it.

People are different, your idea of the best tradeoff and how to spend your carbon budget is likely to be different to mine, neither budget is more right or wrong so why not allow both.

While these are the “right” solutions, they occur over decades. Planning for any rail line, then constructing, takes over a decade. Even in the environmentalist San Francisco Bay Area. Even bus lines. Try a google of “Van Ness BRT” to get a sense for how slow infrastructure projects work.

You can buy a Tesla or a Leaf or an e-Golf and have significant personal emission reductions today.

It is akin to saying 'I recycle my meagre household waste, I am doing my best!' while that's addressing probably 1% of the actual problem (most recycling ends up in garbage and corporations are bigger polluters than individual consumers).

If I am to put words into OPs mouth, we should be pushing for real changes at a society level. This would mean a bigger and more intrusive governance which will come in the form of things like no meat, 2 children per family, all electric cars, no 2 day shipping and so on. I am sure there one in there that will hurt everyone, which is where people should be willing to put their energy into.

FWIW at a macro level, I do see the point. I can put money on the fact that people won't elect or push for societal changes that actually affects them though. These are the reasons why giant systems pretty much never completely overhaul themselves: They might course correct a little, but unless aliens invade or a giant conflict happens - we are kinda set. (Do you see my cynical side yet :)

That's a uniquely American problem. Maybe America should fix itself so it doesn't take so long to build infrastructure.

So, you know, why not push for the latter in the meantime while we work toward the former?

You only mentioned airports in your examples. America can't even build rail lines that go to airports!

Speaking of cherry picking, I think that referring to high-speed passenger train alone is an example thereof, especially as it ignores the large and successful American fright train infrastructure. California made the mistake of being too ambitious, a more modest plan from the start would have worked.

As for California, it's just CA, it's the whole country. Where's the high-speed rail in the northeast, where they have the highest density of people who would use such a system? It doesn't exist (and again, no, the Acela doesn't count). What about between Seattle and Portland? Why isn't the federal government involved, since this should be an interstate issue? This whole country is just a fucking disaster when it comes to public infrastructure.

Anyone who has been to Tokyo knows that you can survive without a car.

Sure, electric cars and other consumer decisions could maybe make a 10% contribution in solving the problem, but these individualist approaches are getting the bulk of the attention.

I feel there should be a name for this phenomenon: When the solution that has a ~10% effect gets ~99% of the attention, whereas solutions that solve ~90% of the problem get ~1% of the attention.

It's like a Pareto law of inversion of contribution versus attention.

It should go without saying that this effect is everywhere in technology, especially software development. You're going to encounter it today at work.

Second, we can do both moonshots and paper straws. Why not encourage people finally pulling their head out of the sand?

With this I don't agree. People need meat for a healthy diet. Completely eliminating meat is just as fantastical as magical lab meat and indeed requires some magical unicorn technological solution (like giving everyone B12 supplements or whatnot).

Reducing meat consumption, of course is another matter. However, we are going to have to live with at least some greenhous gas emissions and the ones from the animals we farm for their meat are the ones we will be forced to keep until last.

Because, ultimately, we need to eat meat, but we don't need to drive cars, fly in planes, have each our personal communications device, etc etc.

This isn't necessarily true. Depending on how you put "20 drivers onto a bus" in a dense rapid urbanization, you are often generating more CO2 than the drivers were previously. Building an entire nations worth of new train lines generates a lot of extra CO2. "Rapidly urbanizing" everyone generates a ton of extra CO2 (and will instantly price out nearly all of the residents you want to 'urbanize', something EVs never do)

In the US, most EV drivers with a renewable energy source are already emitting less CO2 per trip than the equivalent bus ride would emit (even after factoring in per-rider numbers for the bus). Depending on your area, the "largely car free" option is semi-regularly worse for the environment once an EV is factored in.

> Or if we put some significant money into a manhattan project for carbon capture, that at least gives us a statistical shot.

We already are? https://carbonengineering.com/ and https://www.climeworks.com/

That doesn't discount the work people are doing on EVs. Its still usually better to prevent emissions than to attempt to recapture them later.

He’s claiming that sure, take the 5k, but don’t let that fool you into believing you’re done. You still have to plan on finding the other 95k.

Specifically, from reading through the rest of the site, the author seems to be arguing that we need to give up technology and go back to farming with our neighbors. Oh and no entertainment either, just working on sustaining your existence.

Edit: Someone downvoted me, but in another article one of the things the author states we must do is quit any job where you are paid and start working locally to help your community directly. Which means just about anyone reading Hacker News needs to leave their job right this moment.

Change marketing in a way that muscle cars are uncool much the way smoking is uncool these days.

This would pave the way for SEVs which are the best solution to start the change but are comparativelly weak in power.