[beebmam]

It's a demonstrable fact that Carbon Dioxide as a % of the Earth's atmosphere is increasing, and virtually all serious models predict that it will have a significant impact on the planet's average temperature and other characteristics.

But there's a big prisoner's dilemma emerging over it, especially as globalism appears to be breaking down between the West and Russia/China. When trade and diplomacy erode to the point of a cold war between the two factions, there's nothing that can be used as leverage to prevent the other parties from cheating on climate agreements.

The West can try to tackle climate change in its own countries, but if the actions it takes puts them at a economic/military disadvantage to Russia/China, then it might do far more harm to the future of a free, non-totalitarian world than climate change could.

[MonkeyMalarky]

The way scientists are hunting down methane leaks and CFC cheaters using satellites gives me hope. Even in the cold war, there were nuclear test bans enforced using monitoring technology.

[uoaei]

The fact that we need satellites, whose manufacturing, launches, and operation produce insane amounts of GHGs, is disheartening and doesn't really justify the earth-sensing industry. Audits and enforcement can be achieved without satellites.

[immigrantheart]

De-globalization will slow down economy, human activities, resulting in less pollution, less production. As long as there are no world wars, or any war for that matter, I'm all for de-globalization.

[rospaya]

You might not have a problem with your phone costing $2000 dollars in that case, but there's so much machinery, equipment, chips, materials and various other products that would massively increase in cost or simply couldn't be produced anywhere else.

How would that affect healthcare, education, manufacturing, whatever? I'm guessing that the amount of avoidable deaths that would be caused just because you can't get a chip that you need for a medical diagnostic device would soon be rivaling potential climate change deaths.

Climate change needs to be tackled and globalization isn't my favorite thing in the world, but I don't think this is the right way.

[uoaei]

"De-growth" should be understood to mean we will have to give up some things in the name of the greater good.

Yours is quite a common argument, but ultimately it is justified by a sense of entitlement of having the technology that is now assumed to be necessary and inevitable. The reality is that we as a civilization have jumped too far, too fast, we don't actually need those things to survive, and we will need to be comfortable temporarily sacrificing certain luxuries to attain a long-lasting sustainable path forward.

[klabb3]

> we as a civilization have jumped too far, too fast, we don't actually need those things to survive, and we will need to be comfortable temporarily sacrificing certain luxuries

If you mean the average hacker news reader, you may be right. If you're talking about the average person on this planet, you're very far off. The type of global reform that makes a high earning tech worker's smart phone double in price will also have millions of people pushed back into poverty or outright starvation. The hypothetical political, economical or technological tools for reducing luxury consumption while at the same time having no net effect on survivability for the global poor, are entirely imaginary. You can say that we went too far when we discovered artificial fertilizer, which allowed the planet to support 2x its human population, but it's a bit late to put that genie back in the bottle now.

That said, doing nothing is a pretty good recipe for displacing and starving people as well, we just have much less information on exactly how and when that disaster will manifest itself.

[uoaei]

> The type of global reform that makes a high earning tech worker's smart phone double in price will also have millions of people pushed back into poverty or outright starvation.

I don't see any reason to believe this, nor any justification of that statement in the rest of your comment. Is it really so hard to believe that some of those at the top can lose a little bit of luxury, and the rest of the world can gain access to progressive economics, at the same time?

> it's a bit late to put that genie back in the bottle now

If we don't, the physical principle of conservation of mass will do it for us. We are demonstrably running out of the materials we need to continue down this path, both specifically with respect to artificial fertilizer as well as more generally with the finite resources available within reach given current and near-future technologies. Which approach do you think will cause less suffering: preparing for a dearth of resources that we can see coming before it happens, or waiting until people are dying of starvation en masse to start thinking about it?

[klabb3]

> I don't see any reason to believe this, nor any justification of that statement in the rest of your comment.

I hope you're right but am convinced you're wrong. There's no straightforward regulation that we can put into place that affects only the affluent layers. The most successful global regulation to date, that I can think of, is the elimination of CFCs, which was enabled because of readily available replacements. The replacements for fossil fuels are not even close, requires replacing the majority of existing infrastructure, and the cream on top is that climate activists are persisting in phasing OUT nuclear, when we need it the most.

> Which approach do you think will cause less suffering: preparing for a dearth of resources that we can see coming before it happens, or waiting until people are dying of starvation en masse to start thinking about it?

I think the former option does not exist in practice. Why? Because when you have a significant drop in standard-of-living over a short period of time, people turn to populism and will reject the paradigm that forces them to have worse lives than their parents, even if it's to their own or others' detriment in the medium-long term. Perhaps not the affluent classes, but certainly the working- and middle classes (that by the way have already been significantly eroded in the western world over the last decades).

The third option is technological advancements - in practice, finding non-fossil replacements at a cost that societies can bear. This is what, imo, the wealthy and climate-conscious nations should spend their time and resources on, to pave the way for others to follow when the solutions have become cheaper. The US can play a big role in this, but so can affluent, socially conscious and technologically strong smaller countries. Most of them, however, are living in complete denial and are instead intentionally crippling themselves to prove a point that developing countries don't give 2 shits about.

[rospaya]

Machinery, materials, medicines that save lives aren't luxuries and I don't think you can argue that needlesly letting a lot of people die is in any way a greater good.

Maybe dialing it back 10% and not 100% cold turkey?

[uoaei]

Where is this assumption coming from that I am advocating for cutting "100% cold turkey"?