Climate change is hitting the planet faster than scientists originally thought

Re:Climate change is hitting the planet faster than scientis... by acdha on Tuesday March 01, 2022 @01:29PM (#30517957)

> How many times in that past 1000 years have we solved large hard problems through a global agreement to make everyone worse off?

People said the same thing: we couldn't afford clean water, emissions controls or fuel economy systems for cars, ending use of DDT (and that even years after its effectiveness had fallen off of a cliff due to selected immunity), power-efficient appliances, replacing incandescent lightbulbs with those using massively less power, etc.

Each and every time they've been completely wrong, and this will be even more powerfully so because one very consistent finding has been that the costs of not dealing with climate change are MUCH greater than the mitigation measures, especially because they happen at uncontrollable intervals whereas you can make plans around something like the need to buy an EV instead of an ICE car.

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Re:Climate change is hitting the planet faster than scientis... by philipkglass on Tuesday March 01, 2022 @01:47PM (#30518240)

I'm not sure if you are agreeing with the point you are responding to or contesting it. These positive developments have a large technological component to them. Adopting new and improved technologies didn't make people worse off. People got the same amount of light from LED bulbs while reducing the consumption of electricity by 75%. A purely behavioral approach to the lighting problem would mean something more like "everyone still uses incandescent bulbs, but for 75% fewer hours per year." That actually makes people worse off and has much worse prospects for widespread adoption.

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Re:Climate change is hitting the planet faster than scientis... by acdha on Tuesday March 01, 2022 @02:20PM (#30518725)

Both: most of these technologies had substantial R&D investments by the government and significant encouragement for adoptions. A lot of people think things like CFCs or acid rain were overblown because the major governments of the world acted promptly, and I think that's a message we'll need a lot this century.

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Re:Climate change is hitting the planet faster than scientis... by twblalock on Tuesday March 01, 2022 @01:45PM (#30518197)

> People said the same thing: we couldn't afford clean water, emissions controls or fuel economy systems for cars, ending use of DDT (and that even years after its effectiveness had fallen off of a cliff due to selected immunity), power-efficient appliances, replacing incandescent lightbulbs with those using massively less power, etc.

Almost all of the things in that list were solved by technological solutions which replaced things people had with better things and made people better off, not by people sacrificing their quality of life.

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Re:Climate change is hitting the planet faster than scientis... by acdha on Tuesday March 01, 2022 @02:12PM (#30518623)

Anyone who grew up in the 80s heard a TON of whining about how seatbelts & DUI laws were destroying freedom and having to a less-polluting car burning unleaded fuel was expensive and no fun. Phasing out CFCs, dealing with acid rain, EnergyStar appliances, etc. were all decried as devastating the economy but that didn't happen and very few people want to go back. If you weren't around back then, all of this was portrayed by some people as a massive quality of life sacrifice and most of them were not industry shills.

My main point was that very little of this happened in a vacuum: government policy pushed R&D on most of those technologies, pushed people to adopt them, used taxes to compensate for externalities, etc.

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