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.
I agree though, the extend to how people are happy to just roll over and accept that the world will go down with them is surprising.
this has not been true since 1951
I think though that is getting harder and harder to ignore actual climate issues (storms, floods, heat), wonder what will be these parties next claim to convince voters "is the left wing/immigrants that generated the floods?"...
Leaning towards left (aka progressive) is good, but if you're not paying a cost for it, someobody else is - and it's likely someone leaning right that's being forced to do so. They're not gonna like it regardless if whether it's generally a good thing.
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"
You support immigration if you have a stable job and own a house but you don’t if you are getting laid off and aren’t sure what you next job will be.
And it seems most of Earth has lately been in a rougher place.
Of course it does, telling people that they have to reduce fossil fuel use directly means that they are part of the problem, people really don't like that.
Why are you @-ing dang as if his job is to maintain some kind of particular consensus in order to ... idk, support some kind of political narrative? Hah!
I think social progress is linked to technological progress (increased communication, education, etc.) and it is absolutely true that technological progress is on a rocket headed to the moon.
Those are emotional definitions having absolutely nothing in common with the situation
“Times are not good” not because of some unknown force but because of policies/actions creating those “not good times”
I similarly am quite surprised to scroll past ten top voted comments all just saying slight variations of "I used to care, but now I don't" followed by some "whataboutism".
Almost like this whole post has been astroturfed. I'm not even sure though it is.
I think the US in particular is experiencing mental whiplash to how bad it really is and how much comfort the whole planet has to give up to prevent it.
Can we bring the planet back into equilibrium, absolutely. But I think many people over 20 have absolutely no interest in it. They want a solution that won't change their standard of living, which won't happen.
I expect the governments of the world to be toppled or redirected by the next two generations as they can clearly see how drastically everything is changing.
I gave up any hope of having meaningful relationships with other people in the name of building a good career in my life because that's what my parents wanted from me. I got into pistol shooting because it was primarily a solo activity.
Then the government passed laws decreeing that handguns have no place in civilized society. So I wanted to get into motorcycles. But that's just wrong because CO2 emissions. Now I'm being told that having space for myself, for a work from home office is wrong too because we need to increase density for the sake of efficiency.
Meanwhile price my groceries has went from $60 what I paid for in 2019 to $110 for that same bag of food. A small bag of flour went from $2.50 to $5 this year. Rice has gone from $14 to $22 for a large bag. And rent has became mad in many ways; last year average rent in this city was $1450 a month. This year, it's $1700 a month.
Then you've got one side that's yelling that we need to transition cars to electric but the nearest one to what you have is $20,000 more. And you're being told that we need to be looking at a way to get rid of the terrible CO2 emitting gas furnace for something more efficient like a heat pump. But the heat pump that can handle our climate is $15,000 to install.
Then they ban single use plastics like bags because of the issue of microplastics. And it annoys you but at this point it doesn't overly matter because you can't afford to eat out as much anymore anyways. But you're lucky enough to be able to afford rent and food, because you know people that are asking food banks for anything and being told the wait times are now at least 1 to 2 weeks because of the number of people in front of them waiting for food too.
All that verbal diarrhea to say... I'm tired. I'm tired of being told that it's my fault the world is screwed up. I'm tired of seeing seeing the roads I took to whatever little stability I have now being closed behind me. Tired of it seeming like that at some point in my future, the only thing I'll have left to enjoy will be the jab of a syringe full of heroin.
Overly dramatic yeah. It doesn't make any sense but it's how I feel. Dunno if it's anyone else that feels like this way, be a little surprised if it's really just me.
As for the reasons why I have (like anyone else) two or three ideas.
And whatever it is, it ain't making me feel optimist about what's to come.
> 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.
I'm not sure, HN has always been welcoming to contrarian views unless it is something particularly nasty like racism.
If I could point to anything it would be the fact that we are getting close to an election in the US.
It's not your fault specifically though, it's our fault.
I'm fortunate that I'm in Australia, so my parents now have a hybrid car, a heat pump hot water and solar panels.
I have an EV, electric hot water, solar and home battery but... it was only 2 years ago I was renting, I had no solar panels, gas hot water, petrol car, and no home battery.
I did my best to reduce my electricity usage + paying extra to use the 'green power' option, my car was the smallest/most efficient I could get, I got a motorcycle to reduce the amount of oil use for daily trips to work.
My point of view is that you can only do what is in your capacity to do, and so long as you can say that to yourself you're good, we need more people like you.
For example, I'm anti-car. In principle I'm pro-EV, but I also see EVs making things even worse with respect to all the other damage cars do besides exhaust emissions. They are heavier, more powerful and at best neutral with respect to safety and social issues.
But if you look through the one dimensional lens I'm just "anti-EV" because I don't want them.
All I can tell you for sure is that perceptions of trends on HN are usually unreliable. You definitely can't judge it by one thread. The Launch HN posts of startups working in climate tech generally get favorable receptions, for example.
I do realize HN trends are unreliable. As a few others who replied, it felt peculiarly acute in this thread, but my impression was not based merely on this thread, but on several such 'huh' moments in the past two years. While HN always felt somewhat heterogeneous and still does, compared to 7-10 years ago, to me it feels that there is relatively more science contrarianism or even denialism with regards to climate, vaccination, etc., more subthreads derailing into religion because someone justified some strongly held position upthread using religion and more socially/culturally conservative attitudes. These are things which for lack of a better term I labeled a rightward trend in the USA sense of the word. In my unreliable memory, I remember HN being mainly economically right leaning and culturally left leaning which mirrors the corporate environment which found it much easier and cheaper to gain good will points that way. In retrospect, the pandemic feels kinda like an inflexion point (both HN wide and society wide).
I also have a limited POV into HN, for example I never really looked at the Launch HN threads (for the simple reason that most focus on the USA, at least in early stages, while I am in eastern EU) so I never really got those data points. With no real data and just remembered personal anecdotes is is hard for me to tell if this was merely an illusion or things haven't changed but I have become more aware of these aspects or whether the trend is real. Others in this subthread have proposed explanations for the trend and I think several theories can be found both society wide and HN wide. But while we do have some evidence the trend is real society wide, I thought it worth checking if the it is true HN wide before hypothesising explanations. Also, (compared to FB for example which we know captured a certain cohort and is aging along with it) with HN allowing easy account creation and throwaway accounts I think it is hard to accurately measure how well the HN sample reflects the population of society at large (we do at least know there is a heavy US-centric bias for obvious reasons).
I wish there was a reliable political alignment text classifier I could use to science this.
I am disappointed to see some have interpreted this inquiry on my part as me trying to police the thread.