[ridicter]

In the United States, meaningful climate action is primarily a political problem to be solved -- not technology, policy, technology research, or policy research.

If you're interested in getting involved in addressing climate change, here are two options for citizens to get involved:

1) The Citizens Climate Climate Lobby has been around ten years, and it currently has a bill in Congress that has bipartisan (1 Republican, 30+ Dems) support: The Energy Innovation and Carbon Dividend Act (http://energyinnovationact.org/). With this plan, all the revenue from a carbon tax* is directly returned to citizens as a yearly check--no enlargement of the state. This is the organization cofounded by NASA scientist James Hansen, who first testified to Congress about the perils of climate change over 30 years ago.

2) If you're a millennial/gen Z, and you're more skeptical of a market-based solution, the Green New Deal and Sunrise Movement are making waves. Rather than a concrete policy in Congress, they have a set of principles/values that they are pushing forward.

In addition, if you live in the states of Oregon and New York, both are on the cusp of passing similar legislation. And there are many more out there in various stages of development...

*Carbon pricing (which can come in the form of a tax or cap and trade) is the single most effective mechanism to address climate change, according to economists. The idea is to internalize the _real_ costs of climate change into the price we actually pay--ramping up the price on carbon over time until it is prohibitively expensive to use fossil-fuel-expensive products, and incentivizing the economy to adapt.

[dev_dull]

> If you're a millennial/gen Z, and you're more skeptical of a market-based solution, the Green New Deal

Does anyone here who has looked even a little bit into this “bill” think it will solve even a fraction of our problems without creating 100x more?

This is an honest question. I feel like I’m on crazy pills when I talk to people about this. 10 trillion dollars? 1/3rd of all the money in the entire world?

I mean, it doesn’t even consider nuclear energy...

[shkkmo]

I'm not a particular supporter of the green new deal as a whole, however most attacks on the cost of it seem rather simplistic at best and factually misleading at worst.

A substantial portion of that cost estimate is the single payer healthcare, but this is money that is mostly already being spent by the US gov, individuals and companies. Regardless of the wisdom of a single payer system, this is mostly just shifting the cost, not creating a new one.

The other major part of this is guaranteed jobs, is a pretty broad estimate that spans a whole order of magnitude.

In order to get that 10 trillion a year estimate you have to ignore the first issue, take the top estimate for the second and then round up. Also, the global GDP is about 75 trillion so that 1/3rd number is pretty far from true regardless of the other issues.

Which is not to say it isn't an expensive plan, but throwing around misleading numbers is unhelpful.

[dev_dull]

> A substantial portion of that cost estimate is the single payer healthcare

That’s exactly what I’m talking about. It’s both everything and nothing at the same time. And worst yet if I openly come out against it I come off as some kind of climate denier? The whole thing stinks. It’s the worst kind of politics I’ve ever experienced. It’s as if the bill was just a simple way to divide people up into tribes.

Also that 36 trillion came from the first link on google for a search of “how much money is there in the world”[1]. Not that it matters.

1. https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/how-much-money-is-there-...

[dahart]

That link says “physical” money right at the top. Ignoring that it’s a wild guess, it’s barely even related to the sum total financial wealth of the world.

36 trillion is incredibly far off, there’s a lot more wealth than that in the US alone. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_position_of_the_Un...

Wikipedia lists over 300 trillion in global wealth, and people on Quora suggest it’s actually over 1 quadrillion. So 10 trillion isn’t more than 3% of global wealth, and might be less than 1%.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_w...

https://www.quora.com/How-much-money-is-in-the-world

I don’t know much about the GND, but I’m not sure I understand what’s wrong with a price tag on fixing the environment. We’re going to pay it either way. It’ll be cheaper the sooner we start, and extremely expensive if we wait even longer. It won’t take very long to lose 10 trillion dollars when we lose a few coastal cities to rising sea levels.

[sp332]

Well the Green New Deal doesn't have any actual policies, so it's impossible to put a real number on it. https://www.factcheck.org/2019/03/how-much-will-the-green-ne... [Edit: I don't mean to be snarky here, the resolution posted by AOC https://ocasio-cortez.house.gov/sites/ocasio-cortez.house.go... is just a position paper.] And it's important to compare the cost of radical action on climate change against the cost of not taking radical action on climate change. The options are not $10T vs. $0.

[arcticbull]

Agreed nuclear needs to be considered.

[briandear]

Isn’t this comment a verbatim cut and paste from a few days ago?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19981905

Using HN as a campaign platform seems to violate the guidelines.

[chias]

I can only speak for me, but I found the comment informative and helpful, even if it had already been made elsewhere.

[TeMPOraL]

Yeah. I also miss that one HNer who repeatedly pasted "so you want to help fight climate change?" comments with news on the cleantech space under each climate thread some time ago.

EDIT: found it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15127154

[drilldrive]

That may be so, but one should use a disclaimer if he is pasting the same comment into multiple threads.