1) there are still trillions of "subsidies" (that includes some negative externalities)to fossil fuel each year according to IMF (IMF, not Greenpeace!).

2) Agents in the current system have incentives to prioritize short term benefits over longer term benefits. And a lot of climate related things are short term cost/investment for "profitable" long term benefits ; the current system sucks big time in this configuration.

3) The people having the least negative impact from climate change are the countries emitting the most greenhouse gas. The countries the more negatively impacted by climate change are countries contributing the least to climate change. There is a big misalignment of interest there making a purely "free market" "economical" solution difficult.

4) There are a lot of case in the real world were there is a strong economical incentive to switch to something different and were the different agents just don't... Because people don't want to change, because there can be some particular interest in the system, because of political motive... Human is not a rational animal, and his rationality is not only dictated by money

5) We need to do more than just switching from fossil to "green electricity"

> The thing that always stood between the world and climate action was the fact that fossil fuels were the best energy source.

this has not been true since 1951

What’s not true? Fossil fuels are and will be the best energy source for a long while.

fission

The world will go down when the sun expands to gobble up the earth, with much more global warming due to that. This should take a few million years but the Earth has an expiration date already after we die. I think it's hard to have people care about that the same way it's hard to have people care about issues that will come up 25 years after they die. When you're dead 25 feels the same as a few million years from what I was told.

> When you're dead 25 feels the same as a few million years from what I was told.

Not if you have children.

And the happiness of your children is affected if they know that their children will die from climate change. And so on, transitively.

It’s a beautiful thing that kids give you: a sense of purpose that extends below your own lifetime.

I'm starting the question chaotic climate happening in my lifetime - 37. "Not being around" is something geriatrics get to enjoy, so basically all of our politicians.

That's 4 billion years from now, in the meanwhile we could keep the planet livable and not on a course to venusian climate.

This is closer to paranoia than really concerns about the guy you answer. Million of years or billions don't matter much in the context of what he is saying, nor does it really serve his point. I see the mistake but not the malice. And I don't understand why you want to flag/ban.

Millions or billions of years after you're dead makes as much difference as 25, that is my point.

As for the rest of your calling for banning, people can look at my history of more than 10 years of comments on HN and decide if it's fair to call for banning someone like this, lol.

Because these are the same talking points billionaires use to scare people with maybe twenty five dollars in cash accounts and no savings and people who have a couple million dollars into believing misinformation about taxes. Our taxes (in the US) are pretty low by any standard. Saying a billion dollars is "a few million" is disingenous. Nobody is arguing for higher taxes on everyone. Normally, I would believe someone is just a useful idiot (like I am most of the time) but you seemed too knowledgeable to be ignorant.

> Im not dang but I would like to share a hypothesis why this maybe isn’t so terrible.

> The thing that always stood between the world and climate action was the fact that fossil fuels were the best energy source.

> Since a few years, the tables have turned and solar seems to be marching towards absolute dominance.

> So there isn’t much to do in terms of political climate action, since the incentives are now mostly economical.

If we could put climate change on hold for 50 years we would probably be in pretty good shape, because in 50 years we will probably have enough renewable energy that we can just decide to stop burning (most) oil.

But in the real world, in 2024 we haven't actually reduced emissions at all yet, and the possibility of cutting down emissions in 50 years isn't enough.

It's true that in that sense we aren't that far from a scenario that "isn't so terrible" but that seems more like an ironic fact than something that should be comforting.

Because of the way climate change works, the future possibility of reducing emissions simply isn't enough if we aren't actually currently reducing emissions when we would really need to be at approximately zero right now to fix the problem.