[ligerzer0]

What I find scary is that we might invest lots of resources into "reversing" climate change, and while under this belief that the reversal is just around the corner, we let the degradation continue at unnecessary rates, pretty much creating a race between the ability to reverse it, and it reaching a point of no reversal

[KerrAvon]

What's scary is that we might not invest any resources either to deal with or reverse climate change, because the billionaires in charge are planning to jet to New Zealand until the waters recede (they're not generally very bright).

[mrguyorama]

They aren't smart, but they are old and they know that. The don't expect to live long enough to see the bad shit they are causing, so they don't care.

[donkarma]

Billionaires have kids so

[Sunspark]

You are making the assumption that they care about their kids. A sociopath thinks only of themselves.

[bigiain]

I dunno why you’re being downvoted, when the richest guy in the world has a daughter who’s changing her name to avoid being associated with him…

[bryananderson]

True, but not that many people are true sociopaths. Much more common among “bad” people is garden-variety self-centeredness with lots of rationalization. Everyone has selfish instincts, but very few people can sleep at night if they see themselves as a bad guy. Fortunately for them, humans are ridiculously good at mental gymnastics to subdue that cognitive dissonance.

[bigiain]

Not many people are billionaires either, and anecdotal evidence (or maybe just internet pundits assertions?) suggests there’s probably some strong correlation between the two.

“Everybody has selfish instincts“, but the magnitude of “selfishness” required to amass a wealth of a billion dollars is way way beyond “normal”. Whether that guarantees sociopathy or not is not a simple question I guess.

[JadeNB]

> True, but not that many people are true sociopaths. Much more common among “bad” people is garden-variety self-centeredness with lots of rationalization.

When you're talking about billionaires, I think statistics from the general population aren't really relevant.

[hooande]

It would take massive social change to dramatically slow the current rate of climate change. I would guess that it would politically require about the same amount of time as carbon capture / reduction technology.

Out of the blue, I'm thinking that everyone on earth would have to use 20%-30% less energy on a daily basis to effectively slow or reverse the process of climate change. Technological improvement seems much more realistic, to me.

[imiric]

One hundred companies are responsible for 71% of global greenhouse gas emissions.[1]

Rather than trying to change the habits of everyone on earth, a more realistic goal would be to change a fraction of these corporate polluters.

Efforts to place the responsibility of climate change on individuals is mostly corporate propaganda. Not that altering our habits wouldn't be an improvement, but it's not addressing the main cause of the problem.

[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2017/jul/10...

[adhesive_wombat]

That's a measure of consolidation in the energy industry (a lot) and a measure of the proportion of anthropogenic carbon that comes from fossil fuels (also a lot, more than 71%, because there are more than 100 such companies). It wouldn't matter if that 71% of carbon was emitted by a million companies, or by one hyper-giant mega-corporation. Those fossil fuels were getting dug up and burned regardless of the logo on the side of the drilling rig.

Furthermore, as long as fossil fuels exist as a mainstream energy sources, fossil fuel companies, whether a great many small ones, or a few huge ones, will represent a very large proportion of the emissions. You can't change them, that's just literally what they are. You have to either stop them (e.g. make fossil fuel extraction illegal) or change everyone else to remove the market (e.g. encourage use of sustainables, including nuclear, everywhere).

[cdelsolar]

Why do you think companies exist? For customers…

[bigiain]

That’s a funny way to spell “shareholders”.

If you start something to benefit other people, you run a charity or a non profit.

Companies are started and run by people who want to make money for themselves and their investors. You might be using “benefitting our customers” as a tool in your profit-making, but it’s not why you get out of bed every morning (whether you admit it to yourself or not).

[ratsforhorses]

Who are their customers? Other companies... honestly when you take a bit of perspective, the need for companies to make a profit is a huge cause of the overuse of resources... indeed the lack of a social net in the US is probably the cause of it huge part in the world's pollution...as in China the ability to work less or not at all isn't encouraged by the system in place...and please don't get me started on if you don't work who's producing the (junk) food... in WW2 the British poor actually eat better thanks to rationing... maybe less meat, ice cream, bread would be good for the world and the more developed countries...

[bigiain]

> It would take massive social change

The optimist in me observes that there really has been a “massive change” in renewable energy in the last few decades. Too little and too slow, perhaps, but who would have imagined 20 or 30 years ago that we’d have electricity prices dropping below zero at times because of an over abundance of wind and solar power?

I also believe that _people_ reducing their daily energy use by 30% is totally a realistic thing. Where I am (.au) the energy market is going crazy, with electricity retailers bumping prices by 30-50%, and even publicly advising customers to go elsewhere because their rates are going to jump by so much. Almost everybody I know has had discussions lately about what the best way to reduce energy use is. All these price rises are going to tart hitting peoples bills at the end of this month or quarter, and I’m positive those energy saving discussions are going to ramp up then.

[tsimionescu]

> I also believe that _people_ reducing their daily energy use by 30% is totally a realistic thing.

It is, but it will have more or less 0 effect on global warming if nothing else changes. The global shipping industry, manufacturing of trillions of tons of junk no one actually needs are the biggest problems. Cheap fashion, cheap gadgets, cheap toys, cheap home decor, cheap jewelry and many other things which go from resource in the ground to cheap junk back to landfill in less than a year, while directly producing CO2 in chemical refinent processes, and indirectly producing more CO2 in energy costs, and producing more CO2 to be shipped halfway across the globe.

And all propped up by a marketing and advertisement industry that works very hard to find new psychological tricks to manipulate adults and children to buy more of all of these.

Of course, other more useful industries are also massively wasteful - inordinate amounts of food are produced, transported around the world, stored in massive warehouses until they are no longer considered sellable, and then thrown away. Same with cars, furniture, appliances.

And let's not forget the vast amounts of computation being thrown away - most spectacularly by Bitcoin and Ethereum, but also by so many advertising AI projects, mobile "games" that are just slot machines without any payout, and just general waste (we've built our backend in JS and run it on a Python interpreter in a container in an x86 VM running on an ARM processor, in a cluster with three master nodes for 1 worker node because we have to be highly available for our 3 customers who open the app once every week).

[TheSpiceIsLife]

Hi from Tasmania.

I think what you mean is the wholesale spot price dropped below zero at some times due to an over production of electricity generated by renewables.

I'm not aware if any retail customers being paid to use electricity.

I'm not as optimistic as you about people reducing electricity consumption here in Australia, much of it is nondiscretionary.

What we need is federal level legislation to protect at least some of our gas and oil production for the local market, like Western Australia has.

[fnordpiglet]

Don’t look up!