What you did in this thread was egregious and we've banned this account. Please do not create accounts to break HN's rules with.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Sorry to meta-comment, but I think this really isn't in the spirit of the kind of discussion we try to maintain on HN. It is also demonstrably false and not even a good generalization.

It keeps the community healthy though, and you still get to consume high signal content.

Downvoted.

Because it's easy to blame other things.

It's hard to find workable solutions and you are not contributing any value. HN is not Reddit.

Yeah, good idea, let's do nothing for another 100 years.

So get involved in something. Demonstrate, join a local activist group, volunteer, vote, change your lifestyle drastically. Pointing fingers over the internet isn't helpful.

Changing the dialogue maybe, but thats not what your (now removed) comment did. It targeted a specific group of people and shifted the blame onto them. I've been involved in various climate and environmental related protests, blockades, open source projects and acts of (peaceful) civil disobedience and I've seen people from all age groups and walks of life getting involved. Alienating, blame shifting and generalising helps nobody. Instead point your frustration and energy at the system that they're a product of.

"Boomers" are just people born before us. If you or I were born earlier would we have acted better than them? Probably not because people are shaped by their culture and environment. So whats the point of this argument?

I think the angst with "boomers" is due to the fact that today's culture and the environment and modern science points out that we, all of us, should act in a better way to our environment. However a lot of older folk seems to think that can reasonably hold onto the prevailing view that existed when they were born rather than confront reality. Young people today have an eye's open approach to the disasters that are coming and a lot of the responsible people are going skip out helping with the bill. The anger is understandable.

Certainly, but the way forward is to come up with convincing arguments and better solutions to the problems at hand. Blaming boomers is not effective. My point is that if you or I were born 30+ years earlier, we would be behaving (statistically) exactly the same way. So the blame game is pointless, in the end people are people.

You're right, people are people. The blame game makes perfect sense. :P

People have been making great arguments for decades, but that hasn't worked. There hasn't been any substantial change. In fact, Trump has been gutting environmental laws, rolling back emissions rules, and castrating agencies like the EPA.

The time has passed to sit idle. Seriously, people need to get mad and start taking real action, because congress is not doing anything about it.

Real action? What specific climate fixing action would you recommend people take? I suspect eliminating electricity and transportation would have the greatest impact, although that is not realistic.

A big way to eliminate transportation is to legalize the construction of housing and the operation of businesses in and near cities, then allow people who commute for an hour or two to move so they don't have to commute. This is impossible, because we (boomers) have decided that it's important for our society for local governments (boomers) and sometimes residents (boomers) to have veto power over housing construction and the ability to delay business openings by years.

That strikes me as rather short-sided and not based on science.

Given that A and C are already happening with zero effect, I think that leaves B as the only way we start to see any change.

C isn't happening yet, and congress is still about 2/3rd boomers. I don't think A is significant enough to affect retirement accounts, so it's not something boomers are passionate about.

Its not just boomers. I think we should look at people individually and not just generalize a whole group of people.

Individual actions are generally justifiable.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons

The tragedy of tragedy the commons is that it is not based on evidence. Elinor Ostron won the nobel prize by proving that the commons are sustainable most of the time. Things only become unsustainable when those who exploit the land have no physical relationship with it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elinor_Ostrom.

No, she proved that the commons are sustainable only when those exploiting the land have a physical proximity and relationship to the land. Her research was entirely focused on small local communities organized around the exploitation of a specific natural resource (i.e., fishing village in Maine, forest village in Nepal).

In all other cases, the tragedy of the commons applied.

She has proved that it is not the form of management that causes environmental problems, but rather large-scale exploitation. In doing so, she has discredited the hypothesis of the tragedy of the commons, which was never based on evidence.

Many private industry owners do not even step on the ground they are exploiting. Why the tragedy of the commons gain so many traction?

So how does this make it okay to generalize a whole generation as one point of view?

That's what the data shows.