[ricardoplouis]

It's worth asking what made issues surrounding climate change so unpopular in the first place. Advocates and activists are working against decades of misinformation from oil execs. Even something as straightforward as replace coal with renewables is deeply unpopular in large parts of the country because there's the stigma of job loss associated with it. While it's easy to take aim at climate advocates, why not take aim at the ones who actively profit off the destruction of the planet?

[evandale]

For me it's unpopular for a few reasons:

1. The activists are hypocrites: buying beachfront properties when you think every coast in the world will be swallowed up by 2050 is very telling. Flying around in jets to tell people to stop flying and eating meat is also infuriating and condescending.

2. It's frustrating to live in Canada and be told we're the biggest problem in the world with our 2% of all emissions. All because of our per-capita emissions are high due to a small population and our economy relying on industry everyone else in the world needs. Yet China continues to increase their emissions every year (and plan to till 2030, fat chance, but that's a different discussion) by more than all of Canada's emissions.

[ForHackernews]

Climate activists cannot win with your lot: Al Gore elite types get hate for being hypocrites, hyper-purists like Greta Thunberg get shat on for being shril and unreleasitic.

I'm so done with whining like this. I'm going to keep voting for you to lose, and for your emissions (and Al Gore's and China's and everyone else's) to be regulated. If that means you can't drive your two-ton SUVs and eat burgers for every meal, then so be it.

Now you'll moan about how we're threatening your lifestyle.

[danhor]

> It's frustrating to live in Canada and be told we're the biggest problem in the world with our 2% of all emissions.

It's frustrating to live in china and told we're the biggest problem in the world, even we're responsible for less than 15% of carbon in the atmosphere. Wealthy countries like Canada and the US have profited from blowing carbon in the atmosphere over centuries and got wealthy from it, but now refuse to lower their emissions and blame us for wanting to get rich too.

It's all a question of framing.

[evandale]

> Wealthy countries like Canada and the US have profited from blowing carbon in the atmosphere over centuries and got wealthy from it

It was done at the scale of 30m and 300m populations, not a population 1.5b so it's hardly a fair comparison.

We have cleaner methods now, and my province doesn't even have any coal plants left. Our energy costs are through the roof because of that effort to save the planet. Meanwhile China continues to pollute more and more yoy, undoing any progress the rest of the world makes, at a mind boggling scale using outdated technology with no regard for the rest of the world.

[lambertsimnel]

> It was done at the scale of 30m and 300m populations, not a population 1.5b so it's hardly a fair comparison.

I think the idea is to compare countries' per-person impact. Otherwise, a country as populous as China is being held to a higher standard. How else should we compare countries?

[evandale]

Per-person statistics mean literally nothing when we're talking about a global problem that doesn't care about man-made boundaries.

edit: to elaborate, if I was allowed to immigrate to China I'd lower my per-capita emissions overnight and be a better citizen in the world. Or if Canada allowed mass immigration and tripled our population our per-capita would drop like a rock. Except I highly doubt it works that way and would solve climate change...

[lambertsimnel]

> Per-person statistics mean literally nothing when we're talking about a global problem that doesn't care about man-made boundaries.

As the climate doesn't care about man-made boundaries, isn't that all the more reason gauge emissions on a per-capita basis, without reference to borders?

> to elaborate, if I was allowed to immigrate to China I'd lower my per-capita emissions overnight and be a better citizen in the world. Or if Canada allowed mass immigration and tripled our population our per-capita would drop like a rock. Except I highly doubt it works that way and would solve climate change...

If migration could lower per-capita emissions as you describe, wouldn't that count in favour of that migration? (Of course, we also ought to consider any variation in per-capita emissions both in locations with net immigration and in locations with net emigration.) Maybe economies of scale help explain lower per-capita emissions in some locations (but not necessarily at national level).

[ForHackernews]

> It was done at the scale of 30m and 300m populations

In other words, Canada and the US were even worse polluters with their small populations.

[josephcsible]

> we're responsible for less than 15% of carbon in the atmosphere.

This isn't true. In 2020, out of 34.81 billion tons of CO2 emitted from fossil fuels, 10.67 billion tons of it came from China. Source: https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions

[wmorgan]

The GP said CO2 “in the atmosphere” meaning that if you count all the industrialization in the 1800s and 1900s then China doesn’t look so bad.

[josephcsible]

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2012/jan/16/greenhou... says "Between 65% and 80% of CO2 released into the air dissolves into the ocean over a period of 20–200 years." So isn't most of the CO2 emitted from so long before China became the world's worst polluter no longer in the atmosphere?

[wmorgan]

Sure, it’s just a different frame: “you developed doing this thing. Now you’re saying we can’t do that same thing.” Why should The West “get credit” for the ocean’s CO2 dissolution capacity just because they industrialized earlier? Either way, we have to lift everyone out of poverty. Again, just a different way of framing the problem.

[evandale]

This page has another thing that pisses me off so much about the per-capita emissions and how Canada gets ripped into that so hard. These paragraphs right here:

> The world’s largest per capita CO2 emitters are the major oil producing countries; this is particularly true for those with relatively low population size. Most are in the Middle East: In 2017 Qatar had the highest emissions at 49 tonnes (t) per person, followed by Trinidad and Tobago (30t); Kuwait (25t); United Arab Emirates (25t); Brunei (24t); Bahrain (23t) and Saudi Arabia (19t).

> However, many of the major oil producers have a relatively small population meaning their total annual emissions are low. More populous countries with some of the highest per capita emissions – and therefore high total emissions – are the United States, Australia, and Canada. Australia has an average per capita footprint of 17 tonnes, followed by the US at 16.2 tonnes, and Canada at 15.6 tonnes.

Give me a break! How do Qatar, Trinidad and Tobago, Kuwait, United Arab Emirates, Brunei, Bahrain, and Saudi Arabia get designated as a major oil producing countries but Canada is left out?

Canada produces more oil than all of those countries except for Saudi Arabia and the USA: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/oil-production-by-country...

I thought "Ok maybe per-capita oil production isn't significant so that's why Canada was lumped in with the US and Australia". Nope! Canada isn't on the same scale as the oil producing countries per-capita for oil, but Canada does better per-capita than Trinidad (who is considered an oil-producing nation), USA, Australia, and China: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/oil-prod-per-capita?time=...

Why doesn't Canada get any credit for their energy production? Canada generates a wild amount of energy from clean sources and nobody in the world comes close to touching Canada: https://ourworldindata.org/energy/country/canada?country=QAT...

[danaris]

The fact that you believe some minuscule number of hypocritical celebrity activists are representative of the movement as a whole speaks much more of your desire to find an excuse to ignore the problem than of what the climate change activism movement actually looks like.

[evandale]

Ok, what does activism actually look like? All I hear are solutions that punish regular citizens (eat less meat, pay taxes, stop traveling, paper straws) instead of going after the rich and their mega corporations who are the biggest polluters.

[ericd]

Revenue neutral carbon tax with dividend, definitely punishes the rich, poor could end up ahead, and should let the market sort out what to incentivize.

[ZeroGravitas]

I'm amused that we're in the same thread that started with someone claiming that climate activists dont believe in clmnate change, they just want to help the poor and do left wing things, and now here you are complaining that all their solutions hurt the poor and dont target the big polluting corporations.

Feels like at least one of you is wrong.

[evandale]

> climate activists dont believe in clmnate change, they just want to help the poor and do left wing things

If that argument was made, then I don't agree with the "want to help the poor and do left wing things" part. I agree with the not believing it climate change part though - if they did they wouldn't be buying beachfront properties and flying around in jets while scolding us poor people. They'd be taxing the shit out of themselves and their corporations. They would push for price ceilings so they can't pass the taxes onto poor people.

Yet here they are scolding us for our habits and trying to make the 99% of us change while they make record profits every year. They have no desire to put their money where their mouth is though.

[danaris]

Who actually is "they" to you? Given the accusations you're making, there must be some fairly specific people this applies to.

Who do you see as a "climate activist" who's buying up beachfront property, flying around in a private jet, and making record profits?

And why on Earth would you think that one person or a small group who does those things is in any way representative of the environmentalist movement as a whole? How can you possibly believe that most environmentalists have the money to do those things?

[jokethrowaway]

The job loss is real. The increased costs are real.

Retraining is hard and slowing down the economy will damage people, mostly poor and middle class.

There is no way around, hence why climate activists are always saying "it's a price we need to pay". That price to pay is why it's unpopular.

Also, the solution proposed are not the only way forward and the negatives are overblown.

The measures feel like they're done to fulfill the Keynesian politicians' agenda more than actually improve the situation (for that you would need way more global cooperation)

[origin_path]

"Advocates and activists are working against decades of misinformation from oil execs"

This is a popular misconception but not really true. Go search for and read stuff that argues against various climatological beliefs and you'll find they're almost all unaffiliated individuals, often retired engineers or researchers of various kinds. Even in the case where they are affiliated with think tanks and the like, that came long after they independently built a name for themselves engaging in skepticism - the funding followed their beliefs, not the other way around.

This does actually matter. I've become a hard climate change skeptic especially in the past few years, and the first step along the road was going looking for these "oil execs" because I thought it'd be funny to laugh at their transparently motivated reasoning. Couldn't find them. The so-called oil companies all reinvented themselves as energy companies a long time ago and have significant non-oil investments now. They're all fully on board with the climate narrative. Instead there's a whole lot of earnest bloggers who make strong points about the robustness and quality of the underlying science. Before COVID I was only marginally receptive to widespread claims of corruption in academic science. Nowadays it's far easier to believe and I'm listening.

"Even something as straightforward as replace coal with renewables is deeply unpopular"

It's unpopular because it's a strategy that doesn't work technologically, that's why Europe now faces an energy crisis, but anyone who pointed out out over the preceding decades was immediately attacked with vicious ad-hominems such as those you're displaying here. "But what about storage?" ... "shut up oil exec who profits off destroying the Earth". That kind of thing will make the people doing it unpopular pretty quickly in any context.

[luckylion]

> It's worth asking what made issues surrounding climate change so unpopular in the first place.

They've been unpopular before. "We must abandon capitalism", "We must not eat meat" etc didn't suddenly come up with climate change, they've been here before, and their proponents seem to be using climate change as the train they can attach their issues to.

[hn2017]

I like how nobody acknowledges the fact of decades of rampant misinformation from oil companies and blatant climate change denial from right wing media. How can we fix things if one side doesn't even believe its a problem?