Ask HN: Just saw a video of a young woman from Just Stop Oil. How serious is it?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33504232

by helij • 4 years ago

2 11 4 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

Watched a video of a young woman standing on gantry above M25 (London, UK) and she had a really emotional speech that deeply affected me.

I am an optimist and even though I know that global warming is real I am still betting on someone, somewhere figuring it out. For us to cut off oil, gas and other energy solutions from our lives would in my opinion damage humanity in ways I can't comprehend. People would starve in the short and mid-term but on the other hand long term we just destroy our planet and ourselves.

I never saw it presented in clear what the actual consequences of global warming are or how us cutting oil today would prevent a disaster. I can't really find anything that 'clicks' in my brain to understand what is going on and how much time we have on this earth. Will my children suffer? When and how? Will we all just cook? Will we have to go and live underground? Will we freeze due to currents changing and oncoming ice age?

What I am saying here is that I don't understand any of it. I just feel something is wrong but can't really pinpoint it. I am asking for help from HN collective to guide me to the right path of finding information that will explain in a concise way what the consequences will be and when. Something tangiable and not just we have to be within 1.5 degrees Celsuis or else....

dark-star• 4 years ago

In the long term, people will just migrate away from the badly-affected areas, towards areas that are positively affected by global warming, i.e. more northern parts that are currently too cold to farm/live/...

It's not something that will happen overnight, but neither is global warming. At the end of the day (or century rather), it'll just be a couple million people migrating, same as what happened in the last ice ages, just on a massively larger scale.

wsgeorge2• 4 years ago

I never saw it presented in clear what the actual consequences of global warming are or how us cutting oil today would prevent a disaster.

I'm a bit surprised by this. I've always considered that today's world is so inundated with information about global warming, a lot of people will have a fair idea of its predicted consequences.

On the other hand, this sort of phrasing you have here, "guide me to the right path...", "When and how?", "what the consequences will be and when" etc betray a need for absolute and complete understanding of complex natural and social phenomena that, IMO, does not exist out there. So I'll advice that you don't look for certain answers. You should instead grasp the fundamentals and reason out how they will affect us.

Either way, I'll give it a shot:

1. Our global civilization is a very complex system that requires millions of well-coordinated activities and optimal conditions to work.

2. Climate is such a fundamental factor in all of this, so if it changes too quickly before we can adapt, a lot of things that make #1 true will cause a lot of problems.

(Case in point: Putin's war in Ukraine has doubled the price of bread in Ghana, West Africa, inconveniencing thousands of people who could not point Ukraine on a map. Now what will happen if a change in climate causes massive wheat failures in not only Ukraine, but other wheat producing countries? You tell me!)

3. There's also the fact that, AFAIK, oil and gas are finite resources, and someday they will run out. Longtermist thinking tells us to not get too hooked on these. We need to keep finding good alternatives to help us sustain what we have in #1 for much longer. This sort of concern drives everything from more efficient use of oil and gas, electric cars and nuclear power to planetary colonisation.

superchroma• 4 years ago

If the climate changes too quickly before nature can adapt, we can kiss a lot of the animals and plants we like goodbye as well. And then we can kiss a lot of ourselves goodbye as well. Some people handwave and say things will adapt, but then they also reflexively underestimate the complexity of vast systems, and generally, are not to be trusted.

Climate aside, the ocean is also full of plastic. There's microplastics in every sacred, hidden place on this planet now. That was also a gargantuan own-goal and we should definitely eliminate the vast majority of disposable plastics from consumer and industrial applications.

helij2• 4 years ago

I actually think that Putin's war in Ukraine is just a scapegoat. Price increases started mid year 2021. War certainly didn't help though.

Have to admit that I am even more confused now after your answer. It's another one of those that I consider too broad and philosophical for me to understand. I absolutely agree that we need to find a solution and optimise for more efficient use of finite resources. We had warm water from solar cells in 1980's and I am pro nuclear energy and optimistic about the future.

I think I grasp the fundamentals but I still can't visualise what will actually happen if we continue as is. That's the path I am searching. Some missing piece of information that will make my brain 'click'. Maybe I already know but just can't accept it yet.

wsgeorge2• 4 years ago

I actually think that Putin's war in Ukraine is just a scapegoat. Price increases started mid year 2021. War certainly didn't help though.

I actually agree with this. The only reason I brought it up as an example is that I had no idea Russia and Ukraine were such significant exporters of wheat, so that had a direct connection to the cost of breakfast in my country.

Truth is, the twin pressures of COVID-19 and this war is causing a lot of inconvenience. That, and other factors I'm not aware of.

It's another one of those that I consider too broad and philosophical for me to understand.

I guess the simplest way I could put it is this: a disruption in the supply of wheat from two countries has caused the cost of breakfast to almost double in mine.

Relating it to climate change: if a small rise in temperature causes crops to fail (because they cannot survive in such temperatures), food will become expensive everywhere. What happens when many people cannot afford to buy food? They riot.

If you're American, you might remember the chaos of the George Floyd protests. That kind of instability is not good. No one wants it.

What I feel I need to add is the obvious: burning fossil fuels is not the only way climate can change. It also happens naturally, and other natural forces like volcanic eruptions or comet strikes can destabilize a region's climate.

So we burning fossil fuels is not the only thing we should care about. Sustainability thinking must go beyond that.

The only other thing I can say is this: too much change too quickly has a lot of negatives we want to avoid. Uncertainty is expensive. Climate change causes a lot of things to change too quickly for comfort, and no one wants that.

Most conversations around climate change come down to that fact.

thanatos519• 4 years ago

I think I grasp the fundamentals but I still can't visualise what will actually happen if we continue as is.

I wish I knew where to start. It was frustrating for me to know that we could have fixed it, but we didn't. It might be more upsetting to learn about it now that it's too late. In any case, I'm sorry to hear what you are about to learn, if you are willing to seek the truth. Even if you aren't, the future is coming, sooner than expected.

wellthatsawrap1• 4 years ago

Congratulations! That dissonance you are experiencing is your psyche's natural response to propaganda. Don't supress it!

Remember that fear is the most powerful emotion, it hits the hardest and stays with us even when the source is gone or proved to be a lie.

Just like COVID, when all the news papers and experts agree, and you cannot even question the facts without being attacked, you can be pretty sure you are being lied too.

ZeroGravitas2• 4 years ago

Someone did figure it out, 4 decades ago. The answer was to stop burning fossil fuels.

The people who got rich and powerful from fossil fuels didn't like this answer.

We could have just phased them out over 4 decades, but instead we spent 4 decades undermining politics, society, capitalism, expertise and starting a few wars to maintain the status quo.

Luckily, they didn't stop all progress and we now have great, cheap alternatives for basically all use cases that previously required burning fossil fuels.

Now we just have to roll them out.

We're still being delayed by people who benefit from that delay, but it's at least possible they've not doomed us all. Which is nice.

ZeroGravitas2• 4 years ago

Presumably this is the video:

https://youtu.be/-8CQ0QHbUG4

helij2• 4 years ago

Yes.

jfengel• 4 years ago

You could just go watch the 15-year-old movie An Inconvenient Truth. It's not perfect, but it gives a pretty good overall view of the consequences of climate change.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Inconvenient_Truth

We won't "all" have to do anything -- much of humanity will merely find it awkward. It's the poorest people who will suffer most: they can't afford to relocate, or rebuild infrastructure, or switch to cheaper foods when crops fail because they're already buying the cheapest things.

Western nations will likely buy their way out of it, outside of the occasional hundred-year-flood becoming decadal. The real pain will just be hundreds of millions of deaths and many hundreds of millions more people displaced. It's not an apocalypse. It's merely intense misery on a vast scale.

Nobody is expecting us to cut off fossil fuels entirely, or immediately. Any decent plan will require decades. We could have been well on our way, if we'd started decades ago when this became obvious. The basic physics of climate change are really very, very straightforward: carbon dioxide is opaque to infrared, and if you double the concentration you will increase the temperature. The economics of it are less straightforward, but it's clear that it's a vast amount of energy being pumped into a system, which will cause damage somewhere.

Ask HN: Just saw a video of a young woman from Just Stop Oil. How serious is it?

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