I don't think the op said stop using oil for productive uses. I assume they'd be against any large electric car too. People in rich/not poor nations use too many resources and I'd say even the vast majority aren't actually for building homes or producing food or contributing to making those things efficient/safe/redundant.

Sounds like what will actually happen _tomorrow_ if we don't act radically _now_.

Just to be sure, are you proposing killing people today so that they don't die tomorrow?

Because eating less meat, stop taking the plane, reducing our consumption level, replacing cars with bikes and trains and other stuff like that seems radical to you ?

So we can save the world by all becoming Dutch (biking) or Singaporean (public transport) vegans who never travel further than a few 100 km?

Boom, all problems suddenly solved?

You might want to run the numbers on that one some more.

> replacing cars with bikes and trains

1. What if you are disabled and have no train connectivity?

2. What about workers who need to travel by car to build trains? What about support workers who help those workers? And so on?

See what happens if we stop virtue signaling and think for a few more seconds?

Please stop with this zero-order thinking and spend a few seconds thinking of first-order and second-order effects when what you suggest can impact billions of lives.

Your rebuttal scenarios are weak, of course in this fantasy scenario some cars will still be allowed. But yes I do agree about butterfly effects, like in this scenario: https://www.bbc.com/future/bespoke/made-on-earth/how-the-cov... or https://archive.is/0inYa

Pandemic happened -> Europe went to lockdown -> Restaurants, hotels closed, weddings cancelled -> a drop of flower sales -> Kenyan flower growers suddenly find themselves out of work and out of income (plane-loads of flowers get flown everyday from Africa, M. East and S. America to Europe)

Yeah it was probably okay sailing for rich countries that can conjure up debt and give their citizens some relief, but how about for the poorer countries? India had a lockdown and day-wagers had to walk thousands of kilometers home, and the PM's response seemed to be "Not my problem!"

> Your rebuttal scenarios are weak, of course in this fantasy scenario some cars will still be allowed.

Then

> But yes I do agree about butterfly effects, like in this scenario: https://www.bbc.com/future/bespoke/made-on-earth/how-the-cov... or https://archive.is/0inYa

> Is the cure really worse than the disease? The health impacts of lockdowns during COVID-19

https://gh.bmj.com/content/6/8/e006653

Rich countries suffered too.

https://edpolicyinca.org/newsroom/california-test-scores-sho...

>What if you are disabled and have no train connectivity?

Ok, then you can have a car. Everyone else still can't.

>What about workers who need to travel by car to build trains? What about support workers who help those workers? And so on?

Company provided shuttle buses.

See what happens if we stop virtue signaling and think for a few more seconds?

> , then you can have a car

See how silly that sounds? These are just two things I thought of quickly. You will end up with ten thousand rules and caveats if we think a bit more. Why wasn't this included in the original comment? If you propose rules, make them at least 50% complete!

> Company provided shuttle buses.

TIL buses are equal to trains and cycles. Also shuttles will pollute more if they are sparsely occupied which is common.

You should read about Mao's idiocy. We shouldn't repeat similar idiocy in 2023.

Mate, nobody's writing comprehensive laws in the hacker news comment section. Stop engaging in bad faith.

The rest of your comment is also wrong, and I'm sure you know why if you stop to think about it for 30 seconds.

> What if you are disabled and have no train connectivity?

You likely already have an electric wheelchair or could buy one of the many e-trike or LSV options, and at least the former will benefit greatly from first-class bike infrastructure.

This is such a common concern troll talking point but it ignores the fact that many people have disabilities which prevent them from driving (e.g. blindness or epilepsy) or prevent them from having the kind of income needed to own a car, especially if it needs customization for them to use it. Those people are all better off with reduced car infrastructure: access services don’t get stuck in traffic, transit helps everyone, and all kinds of mobility devices benefit from safe car-free spaces.

> You likely already have an electric wheelchair or could buy one of the many e-trike or LSV options, and at least the former will benefit greatly from first-class bike infrastructure.

Not very useful during winter. There're places with lots of snow (meters) and temp dropping down to -30F and below. Simply can't bike when snow falls heavily. People live in such places. And their almost exclusive options (except air) are:

- cars (unreliable: engine fail or no fuel/battery with hundreds km from the nearest town means death too often when it's -30F)

- and railway (very reliable and cheap).

Yes, some people in certain very remote/extreme locations might need an enclosed vehicle. We weren’t focused on that because most of the human population doesn’t live in those conditions, especially in urban areas, but if you want that tangent buses, trains, and enclosed LSVs are all good choices depending on circumstances. If you live in Yakutsk, your needs are already different from 99% of the people in the world in many ways.

Remember, nobody is saying that 100% of trips should be on bicycle. We’re saying that we should break the previous century’s default assumption of using a multi-ton vehicle per person for every trip, especially in urban areas where cars make everything worse for everyone including the drivers.

No more air travel is very radical!

this is a big one. there is a surgery i'll need within 10 years that i can't access in north america. i could definitely give up flight for play, probably for work, not for health

What if it was replaced by boat travel?

You could take a boat. It takes longer but you said it's not an emergency.

yeah i'd love if ocean liners were a thing again. afaik there's only one, and it's a ritzy and touristy affair

Ships are worse than planes.

https://theicct.org/marine-cruising-flying-may22/

in this theoretical world without commodity air travel, we'd have ocean liners fit for purpose. right now the only one i know of is effectively a cruise ship payload stuffed into an ocean liner hull. based on the numbers for cargo favoring sea over air, it seems reasonable that liners _could_ be more efficient than flight

The huge amount of time saved with plane vs boat makes the former the superior option. There's no way a ton of CO2 is worth the comparative QALY loss you get from five days in a boat compared to the other things you could be doing with that time (if you're on a properly efficient liner rather than a super inefficient modern luxury cruise liner). Even the extreme upper end of CO2 externalities don't go above $1000/ton with most reasonable estimates below $100/ton.

I took my first plane at 28 or so. Before it was just too expensive.

I survived, and traveled to many, many countries without it. ( car, buses )

Now, I live between two continents. Take plane at least once a year or every other one.

I would still be in favor of plane restriction.

It will happen anyway: but by prices purely and the most affluent of us will be the less impacted.

There is no need for it to happen. This weird idea that getting poorer will ensure the long-term survival of humans is in error.

Don’t you think oil will keep getting more expensive?

That what I had in mind. It seems more and more costly to extract it.

Oil will eventually be very cheap because demand will be a lot less than it is now.

I never heard that projection before. Because demands will plumet?

Then It might just be not cost effective at all to go dig deeper or use more complex process to get it.

How does that works with current recent trends? Globally we consumed more oil in 2023 than 2022 for instance.

If demand plumet somehow … can we still support a extraction industry ? Recently ( pre 2019 ) shale gaz was worth it because of high prices… then it switched again to lower price and extracting it made little sense ( till next time )

Once oil is used only marginally for fuel and heating, the demand will be a lot less (minus 80% or thereabouts) and going after difficult to extract sources might indeed not be economical but also not needed to satisfy demand (unless this happens very very late).

During the transition there could be cost spikes at demand levels that are awkward to fill without expensive resources, though.

Motor véhicule is 50% and aviation 5%, idk about heating.

So we assume that we replace all explosion engine by EV. Correct?

Mostly replace, yes, there is also electricity generation via oil to be replaced.

And we talking about individual cars & trucks. Correct ? Not mass transportation. Can we build that much batteries, lithium wise ?

Everything (with perhaps a few exceptions like aviation that might use fossil fuels longer). Also, don't think it will all be batteries (and then all lithium), as there are other ways to store electricity, too.

The OP you replied to implied that we need to completely tank the economy to do anything. It just “stop taking the plane” and “eating less meat”.

Reducing massively our meat consumption might have some effects on some part of our economy indeed, same if we choose two divide by 2, 3, 4 the number of cars we're producing.

Nothing of that sort will happen "tomorrow", and even if true it would not justify genocidal policies today.

The true genocidal policy is to continue dumping CO2 into the atmosphere in increasing amounts. Personally, I feel it is more honest for us to deal with the outcomes of what "we" are doing now, rather than just leaving it for our children to deal with.

The future is fundamentally uncertain. Climate change will be addressed but not by corporate welfare programs like net zero nor by impoverishing rich populations.

The idea that the simplistic socio-economic models/pathways are in any way right or predictive was just a fantasy.

> The future is fundamentally uncertain. Climate change will be addressed but not by corporate welfare programs like net zero nor by impoverishing rich populations.

This is very wishful thinking. It's like a doc telling you your body is collapsing due to lung cancer, you need to stop smoking, and you answering "the future is fundemantally uncertain, I'm sure something will come along and figure out this cancer for me, got a light?"

If you take the physics as given, all we can say that is if nothing different from the model is happening, things will be bad. The nature of "different" is, however, extremely broad.

Wishful thinking is that expensive sacrifices for the far future will be politically feasible while at the same time people need to already mitigate the effects of climate change. There need to be way better policy and technological packages than now.

I think he implying nature will solve the problem regardless. I tend to agree and it’s probably not going to be pleasant for all of us.

Yeah, the narrative needs to be changed from saving the planet to saving civilization, but sadly a return to say the climate of the 70's (where the winters were snowy and summers weren't weeks of deadly 120 F weather) is even less realistic as people wanting to have a "America Great Again" (with current tech, wahey let's keep waiting for that deus ex machina!).

But we aren't even close to lung collapse level predictions.

AFAIK worst case predictions for climate change death aren't above a billion life years.

Not even our children. We will deal with it in 5 years. We're past the fucking around phase, now it's time to find out in increasingly large amounts every year.

They may never explicitly admit this, but proponents of "just stop using oil" do intend the mass death outcome. Of course, they have nothing but Good Intentions, these people believe that a steep drop-off in population is inevitable, and they'd rather effect it sooner than later.

It’s extremely depressing that you can’t have more than a couple paragraphs’ discussion without extremism kicking in. No, thinking people shouldn’t drive a 2-ton vehicle for 40km to buy 200g of Wagyu every other day is not the same as planning mass murder. Your comment is inflammatory and delusional.

>people shouldn’t drive a 2-ton vehicle for 40km to buy 200g of Wagyu every other day

Your example describes a fantasy.

The vast majority of people do not travel anywhere close to 40km to buy groceries. Even in a car-centric country like America, the average driver travels just 4km.

If someone has to travel 40km or more to get to a grocery store, it's because they live rural. People who travel that far for groceries do not buy 200g of wagyu at a time. They typically only go once or a few times per month and they stock up.

The population of people who live rural is very small. People who live rural are also quite poor.

The carbon emissions, environmental impact, and fuel consumption of this population of people is so unbelievably small, it's irrelevant.

But, you are targeting this small population of poor people. No wonder you get so much pushback, or "extremism". I guess poor people defending their way of life is extreme.

Here in the UK, if I had to travel 'just 4km' then I wouldn't take a car. In any case it's the other 50% of journeys that are 4km+ (20% of journeys are 10+ miles) that are the problem:

https://www.energy.gov/eere/vehicles/articles/fotw-1230-marc...

The USA is a young country, built from the ground up around the automobile. Undoing that both physically and psychologically is just not possible in my opinion.

The UK is smaller than Oregon. It's really not an ideal comparison.

Doesn't matter how big it is, nobody lives in "Oregon" the same way nobody lives in "The UK".

People live in communities, cities, towns. You can build a human scale town in Oregon just as well as you can in the UK.

Dude, work on your reading comprehension. Hyperbole is a literary device.

This was hyperbole in case you didn’t notice.

But also not entirely unrealistic, I live in an european city with good public transport, but if I want to buy something special like a good cut of beef, I’ll be doing a 30km round trip by car.

You can keep raising strawmen, but the extremism is going from a suggestion of reduced car traffic and reduced meat consumption, to accusations of not caring about lives and mass murder.

>That was hyperbole.

>But also not entirely unrealistic

Well which is it? Hyperbole or not, the intent behind it is the same, which seems to focus the climate change problem on some of the weakest sources of fuel consumption who also happen to be some of the poorest, most vulnerable people.

I think it's a kind of subconscious projection, that the example you've brought to the fore is those poor people driving to buy their groceries, not the industrial behemoths doing the real dirty work.

> some of the poorest, most vulnerable people

This is a strawman you introduced into the conversation. This is really about average car driving behaviour, consumption patterns, the system of centralized food distribution through massive supermarket chains. It’s urban planning and public policies, not lords vs servants. Note that I didn’t suggest individuals should stop driving to fight climate change, these changes can only start happening at a much higher level.

Emissions from transportation (that includes the trucks that supply these supermarkets) is responsible for 29% of all pollution [1]. The numbers are similar for most of Central and South America.

[1] https://www.epa.gov/transportation-air-pollution-and-climate...

No, poor people getting disproportionately harmed by many climate change proposals is not a strawman, it's a very real consequence that needs to be addressed.

What do you think will happen if the temperatures keep rising, the oceans keep rising, and currently livable areas of land that hold billions of people become inhabitable?

The same thing that's continued to happen: We adapt and create solutions.

People have been screaming "everyone will die!!!" via religious based prophecies for... all of human history. The Cult Of Climate Change is no different: a little bit of truth and a lot of faith in Revelations and the unavoidable apocalypse.

Prophecies like "all the icecaps will be gone by 2020" and "billions will die from starvation" (hint: those forecasts failed)

https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/18-spectacularly-wrong-apocal...

This is no different than the people who follow the pastor that's wrong about the date of Jesus' second coming. every year he looks at the numbers and says "next year, on x date". That date comes. and goes. and the faithful see the failed prophecy and he goes "oh look... I was wrong... it's really next year on y date". The faithful see this each year and their faith grows stronger as each failed prophecy means the next one MUST be true.

What do we think will happen? More failed prophecies. The Church of Climate Doom faithful becomes more convinced that theirs is the One True Faith as each prediction continues to prove them right.

The problem with your argument is comparing climate science to religion. There -is- actual science to support the climate doomers. You can cherry pick headlines all you want, but the models have actually been pretty decent so far. Even a little too conservative.

But it's a political problem in the end, anyway, not a science one.

> There -is- actual science to support the climate doomers.

No, there are only people taking the worse estimates and using them to support the doom hypothesis.

That's why we call them doomsters.

They are the same people that in the past supported the idea that the World would end on the year 1,000. It was a tiny minority of doomsters, largely over represented in legends and myths. The majority of people did not believe that, just like today only few small groups believe it will actually happen this time.

No scientist has ever claimed that we are facing an existential crisis that could end up with the extinction of the human race.

"there is actual science"

There is SOME truth. but not all of it.

Just like there is truth in religions - be nice to your neighbors. Do unto others. Truth. surrounded by bullshit (religion, dogma, etc).

There is truth and "actual science"... but there's also half truths, lies, bad prophecies, etc.

"you can cherry pick" likewise, you can cherry pick some facts about carbon... and then ignore stuff like the destruction required to make batteries, the inability to recycle a MASSIVE fuckton of "green" (wind mill blades, batteries, solar panels, etc - all ending up in land fills).

"models" yeah... except that models are limited, have increasing error rates and you end up with the spaghetti modeling with the simple stuff like weather for next week - much less the weather for next year.

Speaking of cherry picking... you'll cherry pick one or two models from a decade ago and ignore the 100+ others that are wrong.

"political not science" it's both. and religious. It's faith in models that have been cherry picked while ignoring inconvenient truths about "green" solutions that are based on bad models that can't be proven and that don't cover all the possibilities.

the problem with your response is your apparent faith in science and, like a Catholic who will downplay problems with priests, you'll ignore the parts you are uncomfortable with.

climate change is real (little c, little c). Has been happening for... all of history.

Climate Change is not (big C, big C). It is a religion.

One is based on facts and science. the other is based on faith.

Thanos is that you?

Wanting to kill people now, to hopefully save the environment in the future.

You have to consider how many people will die in the future from climate change

This sort of extremist desperation plants the seeds for justifying horrific, subhuman destruction. There are no limits. This is beyond dangerous, it’s foolish and cancerous.

Indeed, we need real order of magnitude numbers here of deaths from energy scarcity vs deaths from future climate change. Otherwise we're just blowing hot air around.

The environment will be fine. They want to kill people now in order to hopefully save people from dying in the future.

How this is not a parody is beyond me.

Maybe the novel coronavirus was meant to be exactly that. Or at least a trial run.

> They want to kill people now

this is drastically wrong and dangerous rhetoric

Why do you think people have to die? Keep the strictly necessary things, get rid of the superfluous. Doesn't seem too difficult to me.

Good luck figuring out which is which from the legislative armchair.

I recommend the book Seeing Like A State.

Ok, but you still have to try because we all agree the alternative is worse right?

I didn't mean to say that it's easy, just that it's simple. Simple things can still be hard to accomplish.

Strong “dropbox could be done in a weekend with rsync” vibes.

Also “If You Can Keep Your Head When Everybody Round You Is Losing His, Then It Is Very Probable That You Don’t Understand the Situation”

I never said it will be easy, but it still needs to be done.

Dropbox wasn't built in a weekend, but it was built.

> What do you think will happen if the temperatures keep rising, the oceans keep rising, and currently livable areas of land that hold billions of people become inhabitable?

It’s really not so bad. Not compared to killing millions of people today by increasing the price of energy. Estimates are of a rise of [2-4 degrees centigrade by 2100.](https://dnr.wisconsin.gov/climatechange/science#:~:text=Glob....) This will likely result in an [increase](https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/6/1/014....) of arable land. [As the number of storms are estimated to decrease, the threat vector is slightly increasing storm intensity.](https://climate.nasa.gov/news/3184/a-force-of-nature-hurrica....) Humans can handle storms. We can rebuild homes, change where we settle and live, build with better materials and practises, and improve storm infrastructure and protections.

[Approximately 600,000 people die each year from extreme heat, while 4.5 million die from extreme cold.](https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanplh/article/PIIS2542-5...) Let's ignore the ratio for now, because there are second and third order consequences beyond extreme heat like famine to account for. 4.5 million people die each year because of inadequate access to cheaper energy. This is of course linear. Every time energy prices go up, so too do the number of people dying. That is the direct cost of the war on oil, coal, and natural gas, and there are many indirect costs (and lives) which go far beyond this. The intention of climate activists is to make fossil fuels much more expensive, meaning many more deaths.

Of course, maybe the goal here is worth killing 4.5+++ million people per year. There are no perfect solutions; only compromises. Maybe many more will die if we don't act. [The IPCC estimates that an additional 250,000 people per year, between 2030 and 2050, will die from the effects of climate change.](https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/climate-cha...) That covers all modes of death, such as famine. For those in the room doing the math, many times more people will die today by making energy more expensive. Activists are asking us to sacrifice millions of lives per year today to save an estimated 250,000 lives per year decades from now.

For this reason, I no longer support making energy more expensive. I support environmental efforts to reduce pollution, but I can no longer justify the high cost of human life associated with taxes on energy. Instead, I really think activists should focus on making energy cheaper. This means working on solutions to make renewable energy and nuclear cheaper per unit of energy than fossil fuels. That's a path to saving lives which I think most people can get on board with.

Rare to see an effortful post so full of citations! Bravo for raising the standard of debate, even if your conclusion is disagreeable!

>This will likely result in an [increase](https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/6/1/014....) of arable land.

This is my point. We already have major immigration/refugee issues all over the world. Even if we are 100% certain climate change will result in more farm land for humanity, the issue is where are the people now and where will that farm land be then? Do you think Russia (or any other country) will be happy to take in a billion people from South-East Asia? Legal immigration is an issue now. This will be a humanitarian catastrophe larger than any war humanity has ever faced by orders of magnitude.

do you think Russians will gladly accept a crash of their economy instead?

with no guarantees that it would solve anything?

> This will be a humanitarian catastrophe larger than any war humanity has ever faced by orders of magnitude.

We have literally survived a shrink of 99% of our total population as humans, you are grossly overestimating the effects of what's currently happening.

Famine in Africa is an existential risk with or without global warming. Currently 822 million people are estimated to be malnourished. As per the citations above, global warming will provide only a slightly elevated risk of famine relative to present day.

Overpopulation in Africa is a problem to be solved either way. Ameliorating global warming won’t make any meaningful improvement to that.

I genuinely don't understand how your comment is a response to mine. Where are we going to move the billions of people living in coastal South East Asia when oceans rise and their land becomes un-farmable due to climate change?

Rising oceans aren’t going to make coastal areas in Asia uninhabitable for any appreciable proportion of people for centuries. Asia has huge tracts of unused land. Over the centuries, people will migrate.

I tried to explain to you that overpopulation has almost nothing to do with global warming, and conflating the two diminishes our ability to solve each.

You scenario seems to only correlate increasing price with lower consumption.

I think there should also be viable paths where increased prices for some energy forms translates to increased demand for cleaner forms instead

A carbon tax matched by a matching carbon dividend could transfer funds to poor people.

A fuel consumption tax can be matched by a matching tax cut on miles driven. Transferring demand from fossil fuel to other transportation means.

There may be loads of pitfalls in those two example of course, they are mostly meant to illustrate the point.

The goal is to make energy cheaper. I would much prefer it to be clean energy, but this is secondary. If we could devise a way to make clean energy cheaper than untaxed fossil fuels, I’m all in. It just hasn’t worked that way so far, and activists are almost entirely focused on making fossil fuels more expensive, rather than clean energy cheaper.

> People will starve, become homeless, and maybe anarchy will reign. Not just in the developed world but globally.

The irony of this comment.

This is only true if you literally crash the economy and do nothing else. What we can do is instead shift priorities, like food and housing security, while reducing the economy by not doing useless, pointless things. Do we really need all these things we buy at the store now?

We cannot build windmills, solar farms, and nuclear energy plants overnight. We cannot stand up new buildings and create local food supply chains overnight. I was responding to the proposal to cut oil production by 50%-75%, which would be great, but must be done gradually so that our current economic systems have time to respond, i.e. not crash.

Maybe we can announce a ban on pork, beef, plastics, TVs, consumption, etc but it should not be done overnight for the same reasons.

What you have to do is make it worthwhile for people. Steve Keen's idea of a dual price is imo a great idea. How it works is everything has both a dollar price and a carbon price. Everyone in society gets the same amount of carbon credits. You can sell these credits for dollars and vice versa. Those who use a LOT of carbon have to buy them from those that have the credits. What this does is create a wealth distribution down while at the same time capping carbon usage. Those who use very little carbon benefit because they can buy things they previously couldn't, while those that use a lot are punished. Since the vast majority of people are at the lower end of carbon usage, I believe this would be a very popular program.

That’s at risk of happening either way.