Moralizing can work, though. Recall slavery, child labor, feminism, equal rights, welfare (,healthcare outside the USA).

Plant based meat substitutes will improve (via the production learning curve and competition) if there is enough demand.

(According to this article that attracted much comment[1] a few days ago, though, artificial meat is a non-starter.)

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28621288

Slavery took a civil war to be abolished in the USA. Child labour only ended following massive strikes that were violently repressed at first in Europe.

Not sure what you mean here by “modern feminism”. The idea that people should be treated as individuals regardless of their gender seems like a huge societal win.

Better than being headed into a new medieval era because climate change caused civilization to collapse.

Revealed preferences don't match that rhetoric.

- People are not migrating North in droves. They are not preparing in any way.

- Nuclear energy, the only realistic solution to climate change, is not being supported. It's actually being retired early in many cases and replaced with coal of all things.

- Property prices on the coastline are going up. President Obama, who has access to the best information and experts, bought a huge property on the Martha's Vineyard coast in 2019.

- There is little to no push to improve the water supply in preparation for droughts, not even in California.

People don't act rationally, that should come as a surprise to no one. Look at the number of people who are overweight, sedentary and/or smoke even though they don't want to die of cancer or heart disease.

Alternately, you could consider all of the people who don't think nuclear is the solution to climate change. Are they irrational?

Probably they are. Although I'm not convinced that nuclear is the cheapest solution to climate change.

If we continued to build nuclear rather than retire them then we wouldn't have any issues today except cars and air. What do you mean "not most cost efficient", there are no other options we know of today. They are all based on future tech we don't have, like being able to store wind or solar etc.

Do you really want to bet the future of earth on the chance that we find a solution to those problems before climate change really becomes a huge disaster? I wouldn't, I would build what we know works. And since many are saying that we are already heading for a disaster, we can say that your bet didn't pay off, the chase for viable solar and wind failed and nuclear was the only viable option.

We have the technology to store wind and solar: batteries for very short durations, electrolysis (optionally followed by a Sabatier reaction to make Methane) for longer duration. Both are quite expensive, but so is nuclear. I don't know which option is cheaper overall.

Nuclear is massively cheaper as long as you build it in scale 20 reactors at a time, like France did in the 1970s or China has been doing for the last decade.

The capital cost of any battery, flywheel or pumped storage is higher than the $30-50/MWh energy of a nuclear plant, without even having built any PV or wind generation.

To me it seems it's the only realistic solution ( more realistic than the grid scale storage required to make renewables only work for most countries). What does cost have to do with it? We either want to fix the problem before it renders a big chunk of the planet inhospitable and who knows what else ( e.g. the heat dome in the Pacific Northwest this summer ), or not. Money shouldn't be part of the conversation, like it wasn't in Chernobyl ( though to be fair, it did nearly bankrupt the Soviet Union and being about its downfall).

If you're right that it's the only solution then of course cost is not that important. Many people don't think that it's the only solution, so cost is important.

Well another completely wild solution would be to make end users responsible for storing electricity during non-generation hours. I.e. "each home having a battery device." I just made this up now but thinking about what the end result might be...

encourages:

  - more people to buy electric cars that can also act as a whole home battery
  - even more research dollars in storage/battery tech
  - distributed power grid
  - resell electricity to grid (or maybe even local neighbours)
  - short-term power outages are handled by design
  - people think more about their electricity usage
  - people may be more likely to generate power at home

downsides:

  - unnecessary extra cost to end users
  - might be less efficient then centralization
  - certain markets/peoples will not be able to easily access stored electricity?

Depends on the kind of nuclear doesn’t it? Thorium isn’t popular because it’s not useful for uranium enrichment. Efficient solar would be ideal, but the mining and harmful externalities would be best done away from the earth.

Cool. I wonder how you think calling people names advances a civil discussion? Good that you're open-minded on the topic.

I think that people don't act rationally outside of theories taught in Economics 101 classrooms is commonly known. I don't mean it in a derogatory way, being irrational is just part of human nature.

How many good discussions have you had after calling the other person's position irrational?

(just to drop the links again... You can deploy untold millions of solar panels while waiting for a nuclear plant to come online, and they will be considerably cheaper as well. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levelized_cost_of_energy )

I think the steelman pro-nuclear argument is that if we seriously wanted to replace all fossil fuels with nuclear, we'd have to build so many reactors that they become faster and cheaper to build. They also don't require expensive seasonal storage like solar panels and wind would in most of the world or expensive HVDC lines from always-sunny areas of the world to the areas requiring seasonal storage.

So it might be possible that nuclear in the end is cheaper than renewables. Personally I'm not sure about that, but I'm not an expert in the field.

I would expect that companies that sell electricity are the experts in this field, and they don’t appear to be jumping on the nuclear bandwagon. I don’t have anything against nuclear, personally.

"The differences in outcomes for different assumed discount rates are dramatic — for example, NEA LCOE calculation for residential PV at 3% discount rate produces $150/MWh, while at 10% it produces $250/MWh.[15] LCOE estimate prepared by Lazard (2020) for nuclear power based on unspecified methodology produced $164/MWh, while LCOE calculated by the investor for an actual Olkiluoto Nuclear Power Plant in Finland came out to be below 30 EUR/MWh.[16]"

And then during the night we do... ? (We should also probably mention the fact that unlike nuclear, decommissioning and recycling costs are not included upfront, so you should budget for those too).

Solar on itself can only be a very small part of the solution. It needs storage most localities don't have the budget, place, technology to build.

> People are not migrating North in droves

Yes, because - you might be surprised to hear - people actually like to life where they are born and raised and require catastrophic hardship (such as the Syrian civil war) to actually start a migration.

Also: because climate has gotten a bit warmer, _a lot_ fewer people freeze to death.

I heard the argument, that one reason of the Syrian war is how agriculture becomes less and less possible there.

So we already see direct effects on society from climate change.

Many other countries don't produce their own food and don't have that issue, it is a small reason that I have never heard of as a factor, do you have information on its impact on the current situation?

I will not eat the bugs.

I prefer legumes as sources of protein myself as well.

You will eat the bugs and you will love it.

There are plenty of alternatives.

What’s your stance on the pod?

not a fan

Hysterical nonsense.

How many of your assumptions about food logistics do you expect to survive the collapse of the gulf stream?

You honestly believe that we will return to a medieval era if the gulf stream is disrupted?

The gulf stream is predicted to collapse in about 40 years. You won't catch me making strong predictions about what happens that far in the future, but the gulf stream is responsible for keeping North America's farm belt temperate, aka, farmable. The North is expected to cool dramatically, and closer to the equator is expected to warm dramatically -- perhaps inhospitably so. Additionally, the oxygen levels in the ocean may deplete to produce mass extinction in another major food source. I'm not sure what all is implied by "medieval era" to you, but all together, it looks pretty damned bleak. Evolution doesn't turn on a dime, but the weather might.

"Medieval era" implies a regression to subsistence farming and the end of today's technological civilization. Even a severe disruption to food production would result in substitution of foods, not a destruction of civilization.

I’ve seen that movie.

There is no universe where climate change causes the literal collapse of civilization. Exaggerating the risks of something just destroys the credibility of the people doing the exaggerating: consider DARE and drugs.

If it indirectly triggers nuclear war, it's plausible. Even just India vs Pakistan will lead to about a billion starvation deaths due to crop failures around the world as an externality. We were close to nuclear war in the 20th century despite no exogenous disturbances. What do you think will happen when there's mass migration and other stresses on the global order?

> mass migration

In case you’re wondering why he claims global warming will lead to mass migration, it is because the millions of miles of coastlines will change.

Florida has already so unsustainable that only the US government will insure the structures and buildings. The Netherlands and Venice are also another artificial human livable area. Frozen regions of the world will become habitable so livable landmass will actually increase in northern tundras.

What planet are you living on? There are tons of companies offering private flood insurance in Florida: https://www.floir.com/sections/pandc/floodinsurance/floodins...

Climate hysteria is really something else.

Tons? https://www.sun-sentinel.com/business/fl-bz-hurricane-season... >“In Orlando if a house predates 2010 and is worth less than $300,000, no company is going to write [insurance for] you,” warned Locke Burt, CEO of Security First Insurance Co. in a June 2020 Sun Sentinel article.

https://www.forbes.com/advisor/homeowners-insurance/why-is-h... Residents there that cannot afford the insurance that exists might as well mean that it doesn't exist the same way life saving surgery cannot be purchased by a person makes it nonexistant.

And even more land that becomes too hot, too dry, or not sustainable local sustenance

A large asteroid impact would do it.

>> There is no universe where climate change causes the literal collapse of civilization.

The confidence of this statement reeks of arrogance. How can you even claim to know what the potential impacts of climate change do not include? It's not like modern humans have lived in any era that was remotely similar.

Sorry, can’t hear you over the sounds of the ice age they prophesied in the 1970s.

Global cooling was never a majority opinion among climate scientists. It existed almost exclusively in popsci magazines.

Global cooling was a specific reference to cooling caused by particles emitted in areas with no air pollution laws. Oddly enough, it faded away when standards were raised.

Climate change already caused civilization to collapse 20 years ago according to this article published in 1990:

https://apnews.com/article/bd45c372caf118ec99964ea547880cd0

>" UNITED NATIONS (AP) _ A senior U.N. environmental official says entire nations could be wiped off the face of the Earth by rising sea levels if the global warming trend is not reversed by the year 2000. Coastal flooding and crop failures would create an exodus of ″eco- refugees,′ ′ threatening political chaos, said Noel Brown, director of the New York office of the U.N. Environment Program, or UNEP. He said governments have a 10-year window of opportunity to solve the greenhouse effect before it goes beyond human control...Coastal regions will be inundated; one-sixth of Bangladesh could be flooded, displacing a fourth of its 90 million people. A fifth of Egypt’s arable land in the Nile Delta would be flooded...UNEP is working toward forming a scientific plan of action by the end of 1990, and the adoption of a global climate treaty by 1992...

You misread the article. Climate change will cause those problems, but not by the year 2000. Carbon emissions have very long term effects that are hard to reverse. Twenty years ago we had already emitted enough CO2 to cause dramatic changes over the next couple of generations. That's why all IPCC scenarios with tolerable warming nowadays include magical atmospheric carbon scrubbing technology.

That quote doesn't support your hot take at all.

> if the global warming trend is not reversed by the year 2000

The trend was not reversed, so now we wait to see if the prediction comes true. Given the low lying geography of some nations (esp pacific islands) I would bet money that this does indeed come true in the future.

Nowhere in the quote does it say, as you claim, that civilization would collapse in 2000.

I'm sorry but this is such an poor attempt to nit pick the obviously false claims made by the UN back then. It's been 20 years since they said we would be past the point of no return and almost no one today believes we are past the point of no return.

Furthermore, those unspecific weasel words they were using back then to try and wriggle out of any predicitons they made back then, they are still using today when they say we will be past the point of no return in 10 years from now. Their wording was clearly meant to trick people into believing there would be mass destruction and climate refugees in 10 years, and people believed it back then, just like people today believe we will be seeing the same in 10 years from now.

The goal posts have moved significantly since the early nineties. Back then we had a realistic chance of limiting warming to well below one degree. We're now far past the point of no return for that. Today we talk about approaching the point of no return for 2° warming. Chances are good that we'll still talk about approaching the point of no return in another decade, only this time we'll talk about 3°.

It really shouldn't be necessary to link to this on Hacker News, but Snopes [1] does a good job putting this article into context.

1. https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/nations-vanish-global-warm...

I sometimes wonder where we would be without the UN. Such luminaries.

I'm pretty sure that a carbon tax was never considered in the Middle Ages.

Right. Prices, not arbitrary bans, are the correct way to incorporate externalities in the costs of a product. People are far too happy to promote ad-hoc bans of all sorts of arbitrary things without creating any kind of general incentive structure that would automatically optimize the metrics of interest. The result is malinvestment, economic inefficiency, and global poverty.

The problem is that the externality is set arbitrarily by people who think beef in particular is bad --- it's a sin tax. If you're being honest about pricing emissions, you internalize externalities universally, uniformly, and transparently. An across-the-board carbon tax is defensible; such a tax would likely affect beef. A fee on beef by itself --- that's just disingenuous and moralistic nonsense.

What bothers me most isn't the malinvestment (though that sucks) or a faliure to calculate costs and benefits, but the fact that they're moralizing zealots. A zealot can justify anything in the name of The Common Good

(naturally, they are the ones who decide what The Common Good is)

Taxing and stopping externalities has nothing to do with the common good. It's very much about individual rights. You have no right to pollute in my backyard (including the air I breathe), just as you have no right to punch me in the face or give me brain damage with lead petrol usage. It's a justified use of government force to stop you if for some reason you think you are entitled to violate my rights.

  "moralizing zealots"

But I agree there's an elitism and power game aspect to it that I find revolting. Emotionally, I really want to put my middle finger up and take the compete opposite position just to spite the virtue signalling snobs. Rationally, though, it seems to be a real problem that we need to solve as a species, irrespective of how self-righteous and smug some of the activists are.

Time to bring out the old CS Lewis quip:

"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience."

A big problem is that the moral busybodies who propose laws banning random things are the same moral busybodies who censor internet discussion.

OTOH 50% of emissions are due to the richest 1%. [1]

They are price insensitive for the most part. Their yachts and personal airplanes don't make a dent in their billions of assets.

I still support carbon taxes as a source of investment for sustainable transition.

https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/carbon-emissions-ric...

> To make it into the richest 1 percent globally, all you need is an income of around $34,000 [0]

That group is still pretty price sensitive. Maybe not enough to drop beef completely, but enough to at least partially move to pork or chicken.

[0] https://foreignpolicy.com/2012/02/27/were-all-the-1-percent/

Yes, good point. And we aren't going to finger-point our way out of this.

Oxfam press release:

> In 2015, around half the emissions of the richest 10 percent - people with net income over $38,000 - are linked to citizens in the US and the EU and around a fifth with citizens of China and India. Over a third of the emissions of the richest one percent – people with net income over $109,000 - are linked to citizens in the US, with the next biggest contributions from citizens of the Middle East and China. Net incomes are based on income thresholds for 2015 and represented in $ 2011 PPP (purchasing power parity).

From the paper they are linking to:

> The richest 10% of the world’s population (c.630 million people) were responsible for 52% of the cumulative carbon emissions – depleting the global carbon budget by nearly a third (31%) in those 25 years alone (see Figure 1); > The richest 1% (c.63 million people) alone were responsible for 15% of cumulative emissions, and 9% of the carbon budget – twice as much as the poorest half of the world’s population (see Figure 1);

https://oxfamilibrary.openrepository.com/bitstream/handle/10...

Additional data point: I don't have a yacht.

I bet most of the folks reading this are in the richest 1%. I don’t know about you, but I am definitely price sensitive.

How about a progressive carbon tax? (Progressive in the same way that income taxes are.)

It might be a bear to administer, though...

Naw, too complicated. They'll just pit us against each other, cull us here and there maybe finish us off with robots.