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Comment by ck2

14 hours ago

Basically the oceans are way way way too hot which is melting even the most ancient ice and that can never be undone in our lifetimes (well maybe from a nuclear winter)

USA is about to have another El Nino summer which will be scorching from overheating oceans

But don't worry, USA is solving the problem by Biden banning cheap electric cars and Trump ending electric subsidies entirely, forcing coal plants to restart

71 comments

ck2

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e1ghtSpace  6 hours ago

Maybe we can nuke a handful of countries and try to go for just a light nuclear winter to get everything cooled down again.

_heimdall  14 hours ago

Electric cars aren't a magic bullet. We need to drive less, not scrap ICE vehicles and buy new electric vehicles made on the other side of the planet with globally sourced materials and shipped to the US.

  • bojan  13 hours ago

    Do they have to be a magic bullet?

    Switching from ICE to electric is a much smaller ask than switching from personal cars to... bicycles?

    • _heimdall  4 hours ago

      Is it really? Electric vehicles require a lot of resources to produce, and those resources are produced globally and shipped overseas multiple times. The batteries are only expected to hold up for 7-10 years, ask my 2014 Volt how the hybrid battery pack is doing.

      I get that a change in lifestyle is more difficult for the individual than a change in what we are buying. My point, though, was that only the former is going to have a much greater impact.

    • nDRDY  13 hours ago

      With a correspondingly smaller decrease in CO2 output. We're in a Climate Catastrophe on the edge of Global Tipping Points, remember!

      Sarcasm aside, I think this is why people have generally stopped caring as much. What we are being asked to do (buy new shiny things for some estimated small percentage decrease in lifecycle CO2 output) does not match the messaging.

      FWIW I cycle almost everywhere.

    • microtonal  13 hours ago

      Switching from ICE to electric is a much smaller ask than switching from personal cars to... bicycles?

      Bikes are awesome. I do 95% of my trips by bike. It's healthy, cheap, and has very low amortized emissions. Everybody can repair a bike with a small amount of training.

      More countries/cities have to do bike-centric road design.

    • bluGill  13 hours ago

      If there was some investment most of us could switch to public transit. The problems people have with transit are mostly around there isn't enough of it to be useful - when /where it is useful people use it.

      4 replies →

    • alberto467  13 hours ago

      True but also building a new electric car consumes many order of magnitudes more resources (and it will keep consuming them) compared to a bicycle.

      But hey, at least you get to keep 99% of your comfort while making 50% less emissions! (if it really is that much).

pcthrowaway  12 hours ago

I suspect the reason Trump is talking about annexing Canada is because of our vast swathes of land which have historically been too cold for settlement, which are going to become much more temperate in the near-ish future.

everdrive  13 hours ago

>But don't worry, USA is solving the problem by Biden banning cheap electric cars and Trump ending electric subsidies entirely, forcing coal plants to restart

People really think if they just buy the right products we'll solve this problem. People are really fundamentally unable to solve global warming issues. There are a few fundamental problems:

- Broad, collective action is not possible in just any direction. People can broadly get behind causes that are related to some fundamental human motivation, but generally cannot be guided towards nuanced political topics except via general tribalism and coalitions. (eg: you can go to the moon, but there's only broad support for this in the sense that it has consequences for national pride. You didn't have a whole nation helping the the logistics; you just had broad coalitional support.)

- People think that merely buying the right product will help, but major impacts to climate would require a serious modification in quality of life and material wealth. This will never have broad support. People will always scrape out the most comfort and most material wealth that is possible, and will only allow themselves to be constrained by hard limits. Technology can help here to a degree, but once technology helps, people just advance to the next hard limit. For instance the use of insecticides, industrial fertilizer, and large-scale factory farming just allowed for more population boom. Rather than arriving at a place where where had near infinite abundance, we just ate up the gains with expanded population and luxury products. (sort of how computers don't get faster; once the computer is made faster, the software does more and the actual UI responsiveness just stays in the same place.)

- People would need to intentionally decrease population and find healthy limits with the environment. No living thing does this. If you watch population curves in predators and prey, they occur because the hard limits force starvation and population decline. (ie, if the wolves eat too many deer, then the wolf pups starve, the wolf population declines, and then the deer can rebound.) In other words, nature is not "wise and balanced" but instead the balance is a mere fact of competition and death. The moment we produce an abundance, we use up that abundance. This may not be true in the case of some individuals, but broadly this is true for any population.

- No political body, even an authoritarian regime could force these things. People would revolt. Authoritarians themselves often get into power by promising abundance they can never actually deliver on. No authoritarian has gained power by promising to reduce abundance and material wealth.

  • bobson381  13 hours ago

    So I've been on a journey of discovering basically this - limits to growth - for the last few years. It's been .... an emotional roller coaster as someone living in the developed world. I'm following the work of Nate Hagens and others in the space, but The Dread still ebbs and flows.

    How do you hold this dispassionately? How do you get to a point of wanting to reproduce, or even wanting to continue, as an act of radical hope? Absurdism? Pure interest in watching it all unfold? I'm pretty aware that we are going to have constraints forced on us as like, a thermodynamic function, but ... how to cope? Go back to the tragedy?

    -confused, interested, fascinatedly dreading

    • Paradigm2020  4 hours ago

      Just don't do things that are absolutely not sustainable...

      Sustainable meaning: if everyone does this we need 5 planets...

      The good news is that with technology there will be fewer and fewer of those...

      But if you really wanna minimize / lead by example you could live in a small appartment in a big city... It's the most sustainable way to live. Besides that help improve / maintain the common infrastructure... Libraries Swimming pools Toolsheds / Makerspaces Schools Etc etc

      A tiny garden at your home < a big park and shared city vegetable plots Electric bicycle for 80℅ of your commutes and share / rental car when needed. Getting rid of stuff you no longer need (helps with living in a small place as well)

      Countless little big things.

      Also: - buying second hand phones - investing in solar projects -...

    • MaxHoppersGhost  12 hours ago

      Throughout human history entire families, tribes, villages, and cities were on the edge of death, whether it was by disease, famine, or invaders. This is nothing new. Don't by into the people selling fear.

mrlonglong  14 hours ago

Biden?!

leetharris  14 hours ago

[flagged]

  • myrmidon  13 hours ago

    Disagree with this perspective entirely.

    Not only is it factually wrong (US emissions are much higher than Indian ones despite India being like 4x as many people), it also ignores second order effects of sane environmental policy completely:

    By demonstrating that emission reduction is feasible, smaller wealthy western nations can have giant effects on billions of people living in poorer states. Not only does this demonstrate that wealth and environmental concerns are compatible, it also allows "follower-nations" to emulate such efforts cost effectively by picking proven technologies and avoiding technological dead-ends.

    Just consider wind/solar in China: I would argue that the whole industry and growth rates only got to the current point so quickly is thanks to research, development and investment done in western nations in the decades prior.

    Countries like Germany (<100M) had a huge effect on energy development in China (>1b people). If they had just kept using fossils until now, Chinese electricity might well be >90% coal power as well.

    Geoengineering is a naive pipedream in my view because all proposals are either the height of recklessness and/or completely financial lunacy: CO2 capture for small individual emitters like cars is never gonna be even close to cost competitive with just reducing those emissions in the first place (but I'm always curious about any novel approaches).

  • boudin  13 hours ago

    Our behaviour is also responsible for China's and India emissions. We've exported lot of our production to those countries and are importing it back. If we were to measure emissions not by the country of the producer but the country of the consumer, our numbers (USA and Europe) would look dramatically different.

    As consummer we are responsible for the whole world emissions in the end. Changing those habbits, can impact things far beyond borders. But that's a political choice which goes against a constant growth based economy and it seems that not many people in our countries are ready to accept this. We want to buy and travel as much as we always did but bear no reponsibilities for the impact it has.

  • kreyenborgi  14 hours ago

    Actually it would matter. Less CO2 would be released. It just wouldn't stop all the CO2 being released - but we don't need nor want to stop it all for it to matter.

  • 4fterd4rk  13 hours ago

    Right on schedule folks, it's a climate topic and we will now have the traditional recitation of the lies.

  • rcruzeiro  14 hours ago

    America could set the standard and then use its soft power (or sanctions if it came to that) to make India and china follow suit. The problem is that America is now hellbent on burning the world, and its soft power is all but gone.

  • giwook  14 hours ago

    China has actually been leading the charge in terms of green energy lately, at least in terms of making solar power equipment more accessible by way of driving down cost.

    I have no idea however if they're just exporting this to other countries or if they're also pushing renewable energy domestically.

    From what little I've read on this topic in recent years though they seem to realize that all of that smog is coming from somewhere and are taking meaningful action to remedy it, which is in stark contrast to what we're doing in the states these days with stifling clean energy and promoting coal.

  • wereHamster  13 hours ago

    China is already slowing down the addition new fossil fuel power plants. Yes, they still build new ones, yes they generate a lot of emissions. But they are also adding more than the rest of the world combined of renewable (solar, wind) electricity generation each year. Realistically, if China stopped 100% of emissions tomorrow, they'd be in much better position to replace it with clean alternatives than most other countries.

  • azan_  13 hours ago

    USA burns orders of magnitude more per capita. And if you take historical emission (and you should!) then the disproportion is absolutely absurd.

  • WorldMaker  13 hours ago

    That's a bit defeatist, and kind of a whataboutism. Sure, it is the greatest tragedy of the commons in history playing out as a slow motion trainwreck, but you don't solve the tragedy of the commons by continuing to make it tragic "because everyone else is doing it". You focus on your own impact and you also focus on diplomacy with your neighbors. You don't just stop, you put in twice the work.

    It's also somewhat easy to shift that viewpoint a little, too, right now: China's emissions numbers have started a rapid deceleration downward. They are doing more about their emissions faster than the US. Does the US want to lose to China that badly that we shouldn't even try to align US policy to more of the emissions reductions that China is already succeeding at today? (Much less their robust plans for future emissions reductions?)

  • _heimdall  13 hours ago

    Why so blatantly lean into Jevans paradox?

    In this case, there is no ceiling on global emissions. If one country reduces to zero there would absolutely be less emissions than if they hadn't. There's no incentive for China and India to pick up the slack and create more pollution just to cover what the US stopped making.

  • wat10000  14 hours ago

    Stopping 100% of emissions from the US would not be enough, but it would absolutely matter. We're still the #2 CO2 emitter. China is only about 3x more, not anything like "orders of magnitude." India is quite a bit less than the US.