Why would you support a system that you recognize makes it impossible to do the right thing even as we're dying from its consequences?
Value for who? Value as determined by who?
> Finally please give chapter and verse for the 'dying'.
You're commenting on it right now. Rivers here are drying out. Glaciers are melting. Forests are burning. How long do you think we can keep going like this?
> Maybe compare the world of 2026 with that of 1900 and the quality of life for people in general and our concern for the life on this planet.
You can compare the results of those 126 years right here: https://static01.nyt.com/images/2023/01/23/learning/GlobalTe...
Regarding your quality of life claim, let me refer back to the burning forests, drying rivers etc. Would you call that an improvement?
Clearly, its not going great. And action is actively being sabotaged by the most capitalist major power: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/06/climate/trump-climate-int...
So how do we proceed with all this in mind?
How long can we keep optimizing for capital self-reproduction at the expense of the base conditions we survive on? The incentive structure does not allow for making the systemic changes required for continued thriving of humanity. What good is it then? How is it anything but a suicide pact?
Batteries have only recently-ish gotten energy dense and cheap enough for electric cars to be competitive, completely different solutions are needed for long distance shipping by sea or air.
It's the same situation across many other sectors like agriculture, construction and waste management. Lots of things causing emissions that's not electricity generation.
The US is busy sending warships across the planet to blow up oil refineries which will be rebuilt. It's not bad enough we are busy grinding sand, but we are actively making things worse.
Republicans are the bad guys right now.
A single cow alone requires lots of crop, water, and produces tons of methane (which is 200 times more dangerous than carbon dioxide).
Fishing is another earth destroying endeavor. A single boat, a single one, practicing bottom trawling is more dangerous to the environment than the emissions of tens of thousands of cars. In a single day it can have the same impact of deforestation on an area big as a montain.
Seriously, stop believing the fossil fuels gaslighting. They are indeed a problem, but the cause for climate change is all of our toxic habits and our incapacity to say "enough", take the bus or eath healthier (for us and the planet).
Granted fossil fuels are much more ubiquitous than CFCs and comparatively more difficult to replace, but we have prior art for changing industrial practices in the interest of improving climate conditions.
We could have traditioned our grids off of fossil fuels but we also depend on them for fertilizer to feed the world and for transportation which, until very recently, didn't have a viable alternative.
The fertilizer thing is a perfect example. We don't need to extract, refine, and burn nearly as much fuel as we do to get the fertilizer we need. People make the same empty argument about the cheap plastic shit that dominates the economy as if the world didn't exist before cheap plastic shit and couldn't exist after.
The world is a lot bigger than the US and they've all followed pretty much the same trajectory the last two decades. A slow long term investment in R&D/manufacturing techniques, followed by increased adoption when it became economically competitive. Combined with varying levels of government incentives and measured regulation, to ease transitions so it doesn't destroy the economy which we still depend on for everything else.
These major shifts always happen slowly then start exponentially growing once it's demonstrated to be practical.
To be fair to past humans the deliberate lies and misinformation didn't really start until the 1970s, the oil crisis of that decade, the coming together of the UN to recognise the issue following the geophysics papers of the 1960s that nailed the CO2 problem against oil consumption, etc.
That's the period in which Koch money started flowing to think tanks and agencies that spun hard against smaller cars, public transport, integrated rail in cities, etc. The push for bigger cars as freedom.
Arrhenius' 1896 Model of the Greenhouse Effect didn't exactly have enough bite to kick of anti-prop in 1926, the world had other pressing issues.
Also worth noting that Three Mile Island was an earlier stain on public perception that kicked in a power station slow down well before Chernobyl.
Regarding the nuclear FUD, I'm not backing down. We'll never know how much the fear of nuclear was grassroots and how much was turf, but we can know for sure that someone didn't want Americans to have energy independence.
Didn't help that nukes didn't make good civil engineering tools or help conquer space by farting out tiny bombs.
Even Carl Sagan was pushing the nuclear should not be used primal back brain reaction by over hyping (?) nuclear winter for a disarmament argument.
105m range on nimh which rapidly degrades isn't a fully viable car and a maximum of 1000 people "loved" it considering that's all they made.
GM is in business to make money. They didn't cancel a car that was a viable product.
But if trusted leadership told everyone that we were roasting the planet instead of telling them we weren't and that roasting the planet is un-American, you can bet your sweet ass we'd have some green and nuclear energy going by now.
I can think of a lot of countries where it wasn't a factor, maybe because if you are a rational economic actor trying to decide to throw money and messing with what people believe you can concentrate on just the biggest country that everybody does what it says. I mean what would be the point in convincing a large part of the Danish population that climate change wasn't real? It seems like it would be inefficient.
on edit: rational in this context is just using money in a way that maximizes the result one gets while minimizing the expenditure, in case anyone was getting ready with a clever rebuttal.
This isn't even true at a local level, let alone at the global scale.
Look around the thread at how people are treating each other, and then keep in mind that HN is probably like 99th percentile for civility on the Internet in this regard.
Look at what happens in threads about any other politically charged issue, for that matter. Heck, look how far the discussion will veer into politically charged off-topic matters, whenever the OP is about some meta-level "how to be convincing" "how to argue fairly" etc. point.