Of course, many problems have fairly obvious physical solutions you ignore all costs of said "solutions". Containing a pandemic is also not rocket science. Just have everybody stay at home simulataneously for 2 or 3 months.

It's not even that simple: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-species_transmission

With pathogens that jump between species, as SARS-CoV-2 has with several populations, including white-tailed deer[1] in the US, you potentially need to isolate all reservoir species from each other as well.

[1]https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02110-8

Cross species transmission is rare and while some cases have been reported, they're really the exception rather than the norm.

If there was really that big of a risk where we'd need mammals to isolate as well, then veterinarian services the world over would have collapsed under the weight of house pets contracting the virus.

edit: curious about the downvotes. Perhaps you have proof that has eluded the virologists researching SARS-CoV-2. Please do speak up ;)

Why would they get severe disease when they get infected? Even most humans don't, let alone other species with different receptor setups. The virus is absolutely in non-human animal populations almost everywhere, and is not a candidate for eradication.

> Just have everybody stay at home simulataneously for 2 or 3 months.

You probably wrote this half-jokingly, but actually… this is exactly what Australia tried last year and … well it’s still trying.

It's not possible to have everyone in the whole world stay home for 2 months. That was never an option.

Asbestos and lead in gas were things that had suitable replacements. What you're asking people to do is give up personal transportation, which is to some their sense of freedom and in some cases the ability to head and cool their homes.

This isn't going to be easy not because it's technically difficult but because you're going to end up asking humanity to give up much the lifestyle it's grown accustomed to over the last 150 years.

You illustrate precisely why I'm confident that humanity will never make any meaningful progress on the problem. People will talk about it, but when it comes right down to it they not only won't give up their comfort, they'll think it is ridiculous or impossible to do so.

Progress is easy - nuclear power.

> What you're asking people to do is give up personal transportation, which is to some their sense of freedom

This is an unusual POV unique to the US when compared with the rest of the world. When I lived in San Francisco, I didn't drive a car for ten years, and didn't miss it for one minute. There's also an incredible amount of recaptured freedom available when you stop driving, as most commuters are aware. This equates to having more time to walk and enjoy the world, more time to listen to podcasts and music and read, and less stress rushing and worrying about getting into an accident.

The vast majority of the world is not accustomed to a car-forward culture like the slowly decreasing majority of the U.S. is.

No, but it's primarily the US and other rich western countries that need to change. Those countries where few people drive a car to this day aren't the problem.

The top 5 CO2 emitters (2017)

% of world emissions, emissions per capita [t/person/annum]:

  China          29.34%    7.7
  United States  13.77%   15.7
  European Union  9.57%    7.0
  India           6.62%    1.8
  Russia          4.76%   12.3
  Japan           3.56%   10.4

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

This is misleading because it does not represent outsourced production nor accumulated emissions, which is related to building up wealth to a point where greener solutions can be afforded.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cumulative-co2-emissions-...

The US is supposed to do more given the damage it has done, but has been and still is dragging its feet. Same applies to the EU.

That graph depicts cumulative (historical) emissions, which is interesting, but not pertinent to the question of how to fix up things for the future.

It is not "only" the West that is a problem here. The biggest current polluter is China. If you look at per capita data, you have among the biggest polluters the US, definitely, but also Russia, Japan, South Korea, Saudi Arabia, Canada. That's not "the West". Per capita, China emits more than the EU.

Sure, "the West" needs to clean up its act (the US in particular), but this is without doubt a global problem.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-co-emissions-by-re...

The parent also ranks the countries by % of world emissions rather than by emissions per capita, which tells a very different story.

There realy wasn't. Engines switched to fuel injection, which made the octane number less critical, and catalytic converters were mandated that made lead destructive to the car itself.

> give up personal transportation

Wtf? Nearly every human has personal transportation built in. It's called having legs.

>you're going to end up asking humanity to give up much the lifestyle it's grown accustomed to over the last 150 years.

Which is a totally reasonable ask considering the climate.

The issue is that you're asking young people to give up a lifestyle that their parents considered normal, in order to compensate for the pollution that past generations have caused.

>you're asking young people to give up a lifestyle that their parents considered normal

Which has already happened for every generation for the past few centuries. Peoples lifestyles change all the time. There's no need to ask, it is an inevitable thing that happens, you can't freeze time.

CFC gasses where a big one. They were hugely useful for many things but were found to be breaking down ozone and were very rapidly banned effectively.

These are good but also poor examples. The solutions to those were much much easier. If carbon reduction were that easy we would have done it already.

The problem with carbon reduction is that carbon production is a multi-billion dollar global industry whereas CFC production was not.

Quite often in human history the hard problems are only hard because people profit from those problems not being solved.

Can you support your reasoning here?

Do you mean easy as in "technically possible" or easy as in "the people with the current political power and wealth will benefit from this change and will suffer the consequences if they dont?"

Climate change is the second type of hard.

As was, for example, "freeing the slaves", "giving people the vote" and other such problems that often needed bloody wars and revolutions to be settled.

Technically possible. There were alternatives developed quickly to the CFC problem that worked about as well and were only slightly more expensive. This lead to support for them politically because it was a no-brainer to switch over.

On the other hand, alternatives to oil and gas are much more expensive and require significant sacrifices compared to just using oil.

Electric cars are more expensive than ICE. They have less range and there is a lack of equivalent charging infrastructure. Those are being solved but it’s taken 30 years or more of working on battery technology and efficiency to match ICE cars for convenience.

Solar panels and wind has been similar. Years of development and billions of dollars to optimize it and still has downsides compared to oil and gas.

Things like airplane fuel and plastics there are no easy solutions to still.

Even the things that have solutions like electric cars, solar panels, etc require tons of new infrastructure to switch which is expensive both in dollars and carbon cost.

Just look at the total dollar amount of replacing all oil-using cars/trains/planes/power plants/factories/etc and compare to all CFC-generating devices it’s a lot more.

Possibly I missed it, but you don't seem to have listed a single technical reason why it's harder than the CFC issue?

When you say something is "much more expensive" you're mostly talking politics since basically everyone agrees it's cheaper to deal with climate change.

Well, the alternatives for CFC-generating are already developed and in the marketplace. There are still no equivalent alternatives for many oil-using products. Kind of indicates that it is technically easier.

The fact that there are CFC replacements but not oil replacements for all use-cases indicates that it's more difficult, no?

> basically everyone agrees it's cheaper to deal with climate change

I'm not sure that's the case. Seems like a lot of people are either hoping that it's not going to affect them that much, or that some miracle technology will be developed which will fix the problem more cheaply and not require any change in behavior on their part.

I think we're still talking past each other.

My thesis is that the reason there are not sufficent oil alternatives, is that the people who benefit from oil being burned for fuel have made sure that is the case.

The quick and simple way to a) make use of all existing alternatives where feasible and desireable and b) ensure a market exists for people to develop new alternatives is to introduce a carbon tax that accounts for the externalities.

That has been a hard task (though we've made some limited headway) and it was not technical challenges that held us back but political.

Your argument is the equivalent of a King saying, "Well, that sounds great in theory but democracy is too technically difficult", "No it's not" "Well if it's so easy why hasn't it already happened yet" "Because you murdered anyone who suggested it" "Oh yes, so I did".

I think it's you that need to support your reasoning. It is true that the capitalist elite wants to maximise profits for themselves with no regard other concerns, and since they don't have to pay for the gruesome externalities they inflict, then they will continue to happily make bank out of gassing the world if they are not forced to stop.

On the other hand, it's ridiculous to say that the solution is "just stop bro". It's anything but technically simple. If you outright ban all fossil fuels, how do you make electricity? How do you stock supermarkets? How do all goods get transported? How do people move about? Obviously it's not so simple as that. You need a plan to transition to sustainable energy and a sustainable economy in general. For instance, you need a massive Green New Deal to fund this transition, you need carbon price+cap schemes to force the transition, etc.

Which part of adding a tax to a product or a government investing in stuff are you saying is technically difficult?

I can't really think of anything related to this that anyone has ever said "even if the entire human race worked together on this for 3 decades we dont know how to achieve it" (actually, I've seen people say that a lot e.g. modern civilization isn't possible without fossil fuels because of EROEI, but those people are wrong and/or lying)

> But, I think to clearest, easiest way is to just ban "coal, gas, oil".

Doing this would result in mass deaths. Food transportation would collapse within hours. And mechanized farming would be unfeasible anyway. Death toll would be in billions.

That is nonstarter.

And that is without part "people would freeze to death in unheated homes" applying in many places.

If you mean "reduce dependency on them slowly over years/decades" then it would more reasonable but it is not "just ban".

The error with lead was the opposite one. It was a moral panic that's lead to the current health crisis, both mental and physical. People need heavy metals, they are essential.

I’m going to assume for the sake of discussion that you aren’t trolling. Do you have links to some papers explaining why you think this?

They’ve been advocating heavy metals for a while. IT’s a really bizarre infatuation, but far enough from reality that it’s unlikely to make any difference and harm anyone.

It’s interesting in that I can’t think of any political or cultural conflict it ties into? They just enjoy their daily cadmium, it appears.

It isn't motivated politically. It just seems to be true and declaring them toxic seems like an error.

Anyway, give me a better explanation why people don't look like they did only a few decades ago.

Are you talking about the obesity epidemic? There was a recent paper discussed on HN talking about how it was probably an environmental change, but I don’t think they mentioned heavy metals. I think they mentioned plastics and lithium as possibilities. Was lead widespread in the environment before the 20th century? I don’t remember pre-20th century photographs showing widespread obesity.

The reason why I think so is that the versions of proteins with heavy metals seem to be superior to those with the supposedly "correct" metal, as well as the heavy metal being extremely strongly preferred by the metabolism.

In the case of lead, it seems to be necessary for glucose transport, and seems to have effects similar to Rapamycin. It seems that Rapamycin basically only works by compensating for lead deficiency to some degree.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03784...