Exactly, every part of this problem is divided up so much that individually nothing is significant. Its all just snowflakes in the avalanche.
The per country stats are not very useful either because as far as the environment is concerned countries do not exist. You could draw a line half way through india and call both halves a new country and now both parts have reduced their emissions by 50% but thats not a very useful observation.
And then on the thread where someone proposes reducing transport emissions in the US there will be a comment "But transport in the US is only x% of global emissions"
There needs to be action taken on every single one of the sources all at once.
US leadership (dont know how big percent of population is in denial) first needs to accept that there is a human caused global warming and ecological destruction problem. The biggest global polluter is leading in denial also.
It's pretty clear that the HN crowd wants to solve a mute problem with bioengineering and hacking. The ACTUAL problems, you know, the stuff that's so daunting that few startups will ever take on - well, we burry our heads in the sand. Any mention of this fact gets you downvoted.
The same story with energy generation. HN has a big crush on nuclear. Nevermind that nuclear takes decades to approve and to build out - time that we just don't have. But hey, as long as we can feel good about it, right?
> Nevermind that nuclear takes decades to approve and to build out - time that we just don't have. But hey, as long as we can feel good about it, right?
A big part of this is bitterness over the way nuclear energy has been treated. We used to have decades, we spent billions upon billions on renewables while demonizing nuclear energy, and now we don't have decades. Hell, it's very likely that we'd have fusion by now if all that money and effort was redirected to fusion research.
Yep. We had decades of time. We put those decades into what amounts to a boondoggle, with wind and solar and vague hopes that efficiency of generation and storage technology would just materialize with no real clear path. So we have basically nothing to show for the last 50 years.
We could have invested in replacing fossil fuels with extant nuclear technologies and put a huge dent in the problem. And put more research into fusion, which is still subjected to a painful lack of funding that is the biggest roadblock to its eventual viability.
The problem with renewables is that we are not deploying enough of them. I don't see how you can say that we have nothing to show for the last 50 years.
The EU gets 55% of electricity from nuclear + renewables.
Germany is playing on hard mode by shutting down it's nuclear power plants and the added renewables far exceed what little capacity they have shutdown so far.
The root problem is that we consume too much energy and other resources, increasingly. Both per capita and in total. Our biological instinct is to grow in numbers as much as we can, and economical incentive is to sell (and consume) more and more. What can you do about these?
When that comment shows up, there are two very different motivations. One (mine) is to underscore the math to better visualize the size of the problem. Note that I still said it's worth doing.
Another is to use it as some sort of premise to implicitly argue we shouldn't do anything, which is completely different, and which I explicitly disavowed.
We need to tackle all of the "only 5%" issues.