I wonder what it feels like WRT climate change, for the next couple generations. For millennials, it was really depressing because the previous generations left this giant problem for us, but at least there was the slight mitigating factor that, while the situation was pretty well understood by scientists, at least it wasn’t totally obvious to the whole population.

Our parents might have been gullible but that’s a non-malicious failing. We’ve also done sweet fuck-all about global warming though.

We can say it is because we haven’t been able to grab the reins, but we’re hitting our 40’s pretty soon. We owed the next generation a revolution but we seem to be taking a “maybe I’ll get promoted” approach to things. It wasn’t enough.

I wonder if all we managed to do was kill the hope that “awareness” is actually going to accomplish anything.

Please consider reading Ritchie's "Not the End of the World" book I mentioned (or even just a summary).

Of course "awareness" is merely a necessary - and radically insufficient - condition. But a lot CAN be done, and it matters a great deal how MUCH, and how SOON we do them. The typical narrative of "we're completely screwed no matter what [so it doesn't matter what we do]" is both inaccurate and extremely harmful in that it impedes progress.

Acid rain and the ozone layer are a couple relevant examples of real success in global environmental challenges. Climate change is bigger and harder and more complex, but it's NOT "all or nothing". And there is room for -- even urgent need for -- rational optimism, which in turn motivates change of which we are capable.

It was depressing because the generation before you told you it was. Made a movie, got a few stars to promote. Demonized anyone who spoke against it. Cherry picked some data and put it in your generation to fix through a guilt campaign.

In another generation another crisis will exist. You will be blamed. It could be: Birth control, water bottles, owning pets, speaking against robot/human relationships, speaking against kids being raised by the government (to give everyone an equal playing field and to narrow the gender pay gap), speaking out against sharia law.

Good luck and don't forget to ignore it all.

This looks like a game where people that have power, fight others power, for their vision. Those whose power is not in the minimum threshold are not even taken into consideration. the power is just a curve distribution (bell curve)

Honestly the best thing is ignore everything, and live your own life peacefully.

We can't really ignore Climate Change, as it is something that is currently occurring and unlikely to stop. Also, it is slowly but surely having disastrous effects on society at large.

Odds are decent that if we ignored climate change it would cause billions of people to die and create massive disruptions in the lives of those who live over the next several centuries.

It would only be catastrophic, not existential. We should work hard to reduce the risks and mitigate the impacts, but the species will go on even if we ignore it.

And, almost everything is getting better faster than anyone predicted. There's a strong case for climate optimism, and a future that we can improve by continuing to take action and put in the hard work of fixing the world.

You personally can because you have no control over it. Unless you become the next ruler of China, India and Russia plus control three houses of US government what you personally do won't matter. So stop living in terror, not sleeping at night, thinking the world is hopeless.

The cold war was more serious and things worked out unexpectedly. World War I and II were more serious and they ended different than how everyone thought.

Landfills filling up was the concern now it's used for power generation. ACID rain.. holes Ozone layer. We fixed them.

Carbon in the air will be used to generate food as we find new ways to 3d print food. You will see. Our future problem will be not enough carbon

This is fundamentally why I find the technology / media narratives fairly compelling.

I tend to agree that the first order issue is that people seem to increasingly subscribe to "demoralizing narratives". But not just climate change. I see the same phenomenon, just with different narratives among my more "right wing" loved ones. Instead of the demoralizing narrative being climate change, it is that society is crumbling due to the decline of religion, or because men aren't manly enough and women aren't womanly enough, or because people like them are being censored into oblivion, etc.

But why is it that all these different kinds of doom narratives seem to be spreading so much and getting so much traction now, when they didn't seem to in the past? I have trouble seeing what else has changed significantly enough to cause this, if the explanation is not mass adoption of a new kind of media.

Which past? People have been willing to follow doom narratives into the abyss pretty consistently over history, yeah?

Well, obviously it's very hard to compare things like this across time, and be confident you're still comparing apples to apples. But for instance, the evidence seems fairly compelling that young people are experiencing more mental health issues now than in past decades. For instance, suicide rates are a pretty firm indicator of this problem. And in pretty much any one of those past decades, you can find similarly compelling "doom narratives" as those today. But it seems fewer people were following them "into the abyss" of death.

I think blaming it on the phones themselves though is incredibly useless. Yes, the phones and networks permitting the construction of these echo-chambers are a problem that does warrant attention, but it doesn't change the fact that there are numerous, wide scale, huge problems that we are just not dealing with as a society. Is it healthy to have those problems shoved in your face non-stop? No, of course not, but it's arguably even more unhealthy to pretend they don't exist, especially when many of these are existential threats to us as a species.

Basically: Climate doomerism is a problem, yes. But climate change is also a problem, one that our power structures seem completely unwilling to address. And in such an environment, Climate doomerism is kind of a logical outcome: we know there's an issue, scientists have known since the 70's, yet we do precious little about it and fundamentally our leaders seem content to ride out the collapse of the biosphere and cash their checks. Of course that's fucking depressing.

> Basically: Climate doomerism is a problem, yes. But climate change is also a problem, one that our power structures seem completely unwilling to address. And in such an environment, Climate doomerism is kind of a logical outcome: we know there's an issue, scientists have known since the 70's, yet we do precious little about it and fundamentally our leaders seem content to ride out the collapse of the biosphere and cash their checks. Of course that's fucking depressing.

You seem to be exhibiting the exact symptom you are complaining about.

I fully accept that climate change exists and is human caused, and will cause serious problems in the future.

Where I differ from you (probably) is that I think cutting emissions to a useful degree will also cause serious problems. Maybe even worse problems. Both problems have the real potential to cause total war across the globe, not seen since WWII. Many people think we're already in the early stages of WWIII, and a big part of that is basically due to an utterly trivial minor disruption in the politics/trade of fossil fuels when compared to what is required by mitigating climate change via emissions reductions.

My view is obviously no less doomer-ish I suppose, but, in your view, the problem is "people suck", "politicians suck", etc., and I think that makes people cynical and resentful of other people, politically unstable in general.

I don't think people suck at all, politicians do suck though. Numerous ones are clearly on the direct payroll of fossil fuel companies.

And I mean, you're basically conceding then that the doomerism has merit, even if we might disagree on the specifics of why. Then why judge these kids for being depressed? Irrespective of what you decide to park as the "real cause" of the problems, the problems remain and the power structure is either refusing to or is incapable of solving it.

Nobody is judging kids for being depressed!

> the power structure is either refusing to or is incapable of solving it

This is where I think the whole doomerism project goes astray. It seems to only notice difficulties and challenges and never pay even a tiny bit of lip service to the flip side of the coin.

Surely "the power structure" must include the executive administration and a majority of the members of both houses of the last US Congress? Those people coordinated the passage of a hugely beneficial package of mostly carrots but also some sticks targeted directly at this problem.

The criticism of this always boils down to "well sure, but that's too little and too late", but that is letting perfect be the enemy of good. People who care about this should be energized by this, both by the opportunities it has created to work on research and deployment of useful technologies, and by the relatively paltry political backlash to it, suggesting more political capital can be spent on this moving forward.

It's a way more exciting time to be involved in solving this problem than it has ever been, certainly in my adult life and I'd say ever. But despite that, the "discourse" on it among young people seems to be one of cynical nihilism. I don't know for sure why that is, but I struggle to believe it has nothing to do with social media echo chambers.

> The criticism of this always boils down to "well sure, but that's too little and too late",

We're on track to not only surpass but pretty much blow away projections for CO2 emissions that will all but guarantee multiple degrees of heat gain over the next several decades, and all that entails: more super-storms, higher ocean levels, and a LOT more death in the developing world around the equator. That is definitionally too little too late. This isn't pessimism: scientists knew what we needed to do, and we have utterly failed to do it.

If your car was in an accident and couldn't be legally driven, and you requested your mechanic replace the control arms and called it job done, you'd rightly be called fucking insane. That's not letting perfect be the enemy of good, that's not doing what you need to do.

> People who care about this should be energized by this, both by the opportunities it has created to work on research and deployment of useful technologies

A ton of these technologies are greenwashing existing tech because there's federal grants to be had for attempting it. Others, like widely available solar, are complicated by the purveyors taking advantage of low-earners who've managed to get homes and fucking them into bankruptcy by adding money to their mortgage they can't possibly afford. Still others are things like EV's, which while better for the environment at point of use, are still highly damaging what with the incredible amounts of limited heavy metals required to build them, not to mention being shipped back and forth over the oceans because it's cheaper to build everything in Asia. And all of this is because things are done in our economy to make money and ONLY to make money, not to make the world better.

> and by the relatively paltry political backlash to it, suggesting more political capital can be spent on this moving forward.

You must be joking. The reactionaries are having a FIELD DAY with 15 minute cities, bug eating, what have you. And yes it's incredibly stupid shit utterly beneath engaging with, but it doesn't change the fact that tons of people believe it and parrot it.

> But despite that, the "discourse" on it among young people seems to be one of cynical nihilism. I don't know for sure why that is

Probably something to do with the fact that this discourse has been happening for half a century now and we're producing more CO2 than EVER and burning the rainforest down.

Your car analogy is not very good. First of all, the car is not un-driveable yet. It has a ton of clear and worsening mechanical deficiencies that are hindering it, but it's still running. Secondly, we can't take it to the mechanic, we have to fix it while it's in motion. Also, there wasn't an accident, a single clear moment where it went from pristine to hopelessly damaged, it has been developing these mechanical issues gradually over a long period of time; they were predictable (and predicted), but accumulating slowly at first and then accelerating more recently.

So a bunch of people are now hanging out the windows and strapped to the undercarriage trying to fix the thing while it's rolling, and a bunch of other people are sitting in the back seat typing on their phones about how there is no problem, or about what we coulda woulda shoulda done, or about how the people working on the fixes are doing the wrong things, or about how we should just crash the car and get it over with. And that's all fine, people can make their own choices, but I'd rather be trying to figure out how to be one of the people working on fixing the cracks, rather than just being along for the ride.

> That is definitionally too little too late.

Note that I didn't actually say it isn't too little too late. But this is exactly how "perfect is the enemy of good" works. "Good" is never good enough, but it's still good. I agree with you that it's too little and too late to avoid a whole slew of bad things like the ones you listed, and probably worse. But I don't think it's too late to avoid the existential risks to the species. I do think it's too little, but its success makes me more, rather than less, optimistic about more efforts to come. And I get it, you'll think, "oh great, so all these horrible things will happen, and now we want to pat ourselves on the back just because we may be on the path to avoid wiping out the whole species?". And yes, that is the way in which it is good, despite not being good enough.

> A ton of these technologies are greenwashing existing tech because there's federal grants to be had for attempting it.

Which things are "greenwashing", in your view? It is indeed mostly targeted at existing technologies, because we already have really good technologies, which if deployed far more widely will already go a very long way toward solving the problem. This is a very good thing! We do need to invent more things, but that's not the bottleneck yet, the current bottleneck is deployment of things we've already invented.

> Others, like widely available solar, are complicated by the purveyors taking advantage of low-earners who've managed to get homes and fucking them into bankruptcy by adding money to their mortgage they can't possibly afford.

Residential roof-top solar is indeed not the thing to be excited about with respect to solar deployment, which is why it is not a major focus of the provisions in the IRA.

> Still others are things like EV's, which while better for the environment at point of use, are still highly damaging what with the incredible amounts of limited heavy metals required to build them, ...

The metals thing is not a non-issue, but is also wildly overblown. Importantly, EVs do not burn those metals; they are akin to the fuel tank, not the fuel. This is an advantage that is not ignored, exactly, but is often underrated.

> not to mention being shipped back and forth over the oceans because it's cheaper to build everything in Asia.

The IRA included provisions aimed at localizing material sourcing and manufacturing. Again, if your argument is that this isn't good enough, then I agree, but if your argument is that "the power structure" has done nothing about the issues you're worried about, then I don't agree.

> You must be joking. The reactionaries are having a FIELD DAY with 15 minute cities, bug eating, what have you.

I'm not sure how old you are, but if you weren't around for it, it might be enlightening for you to read about the backlash to the ACA (Obamacare). That is what a political backlash looks like. A fringe of reactionaries throwing silly pot-shots online is not a political backlash. There have been no mass protests calling for a repeal of the IRA because of its climate provisions. The opposition nominee for the presidency is not making this a center-piece of his campaign. Sure, there are some targeted things that they intend to undo or roll back, but it is not a major part of anyone's campaign rhetoric.

This is, truly, as good as it gets for a major piece of legislation. Nobody is particularly pissed about it, and the vast majority of its provisions are going to stand, regardless of who wins the next election. That is a very successful political outcome! Resist the urge to overindex on noisy edgelords online.

> Probably something to do with the fact that this discourse has been happening for half a century now and we're producing more CO2 than EVER and burning the rainforest down.

No, we have not been having this discourse for half a century. The discussion has shifted massively just over the decade and a half of my career, due in no small part to the massive shifts in the solutions we have to bring to bear on the problem.

Cynicism and nihilism are not the right conclusions to draw from the history of humanity working on this problem. The right conclusion is that progress can be made, and is being made more quickly now than at any point thus far, and continues to accelerate. Thank goodness!

Collectively, we might do more about climate change (and other problems) if we weren't spending all our time and energy on our phones...

Phones use very little energy, and if it causes a person to move around less, then it would greatly help reduce worldwide energy consumption.

Energy = mass * acceleration * distance

Oh bullshit. What are people supposed to do? More importantly, what COULD people do that would be 10% as effective as proper, top-down regulation on emissions and environmentally destructive industry? It's been bluntly obviously demonstrated at this point that this problem is above consumer activism's ability to solve. Maybe the market could be persuaded at one time to buy more electric cars and eat less meat, but we're reaching a point where politely asking is no longer sufficient if we want the planet to continue supporting us. Now we need to DEMAND it.

> Now we need to DEMAND it.

Demanding it is part of what "we'd do better if we put down our phones".

I understand how it can feel very daunting to figure out the right step, but there are tons of useful things to work on in this space. There is a huge amount of technological work going on, from academic research labs to commercial deployment. And there are also lots of people working on the policy and politics, which work is not actually primarily about doom-posting on social media.

But it still is hard, I get it, it's either time consuming on top of a "normal" job, or likely to be less lucrative as a career than most things the HN audience can do.

But it's not true that there's nothing people can do, if they want to.

> "if the explanation is not mass adoption of a new kind of media"

there it is

The narrative around climate change, i.e., that it's happening and that we need to do something about it, is not demoralizing. What's demoralizing is that the people with the power, money, and influence to take the biggest steps refuse to do so. Someone has figured that the only way to get them to care is to badger them with the facts until they do, and a lot of us are okay with that. It's preferable to the alternative, which is ecoterrorism. Trying to sweep the situation under the rug while things become more troubled and people become more desperate just makes the latter more likely. In this case, the opposite of mopey and depressed isn't optimism, it's rage.

"How we *CAN* be" is doing a lot of lifting there. Boomers, GenX, and older Millennials all had ample opportunities to do something before we arrived here.

We / they did a lot.

We actually took steps and saved the Ozone layer.

Invented and made the solar panel economically viable.

Electric cars aren't exactly designed by the youngest generation either.

We / they have taken big steps to stop trade in tropic hardwoods.

The generation before us built the systems and societies that we today take for granted. To the best of their abilities, very many of them worked very hard to give something better to us than they got themselves.

Go further back and they actually stopped the most well oiled war machine that has ever existed, the nazis. Later they stopped the Soviet by outcompeting them.

Hindsight is 20/20.

But a little humility should be mandatory I think.

And ironically, we have the environmentalists of the past to thank for the fact that we don't have several times as much nuclear power for base load (and also several times less

> we have the environmentalists of the past to thank for the fact that we don't have several times as much nuclear power for base load

Ask yourself why environmentalists succeeded in shutting down nuclear power, the one viable alternative to fossil fuels, when they failed at literally everything else. That might lead you to who was actually responsible.

Because of Chernobyl.

And they did not fail at everything else.

They succeeded in a lot of cases.

For a rather large win, as I mentioned, the Ozone layer was saved. Another big one was banning of DDT and introduction of regulations on everything from new pesticides / herbicides to emissions (or fuel saving as we used to refer to it until recently).

This blaming the environmentalists for nuclear's failures is quite a tired argument. In addition to being false (environmentalists didn't have the political capital for it in the critical decades) the enormous public subsidies towards nuclear power in the past 80 years were an opportunity cost away from renewables. If we had spent even a small part of that on renewables r&d investment starting in the same timeframe (40s/50s) we could have transitioned from fossil fuels decades earlier.

I'm sorry, but I don't think so.

All the sociopolitical difficulties that hinder solutions today were just as, if not more, insurmountable for all those generations.

And the technological landscape is much more promising today than at any point since this problem was identified. And people from all the generations you listed are strongly represented among the people who created and began scaling those technologies.

No generation has been better positioned to contribute to solving this problem than the one entering adulthood today. It will be a damn shame if most of them but into doomerism and let it keep them from taking their shot.

Didn't downvote you, but that's not a hopeful attitude. If the damage is done, figuring out who to blame doesn't repair it. Sometimes we gotta clean up somebody else's mess or nobody will. As programmers, quite routinely I suppose :P

But it sure is useful to figure out what policies and who did that... considering those are basically still the people in power. For any world-wide change you need to either change them or wait for them to die.

The "don't look up" mindset practiced by generations both current and previous reaches a new height of cognitive dissonance. The interesting question is that why such a thing didn't cause more widespread mental health problems before (though it did for many).