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0 pointsgwn76y ago0 comments

I... agree with you. Everything you say is making sense. Thank you for the insights.

It's just that I couldn't help but feel that these guys are among the "good guys", and telling them to "cease operations immediately" is a bit harsh, for just being not good enough. They are probably not doing any harm.

> I think this company is just going to be away for those individuals with a little disposable income, that believe in climate change and feel guilty about driving their car and flying everywhere for vacations, to buy themselves a little 'feel good' or a little peace of mind.

On the other hand, maybe this is harm. Those individuals who buy themselves a little "feel good" may believe that they are actually doing everything they can, and that they really are offsetting their carbon footprint so what they are doing will be sufficient. This can prevent them from realizing the real nature of the threat. This I don't like very much.

> This is Silicon Valley being clueless and/or overly optimistic as usual with these sorts of markets/challenges

Haha. Agreed.

> We need to present the facts, as unbiased as possible, to the masses and get people to start questioning the topic. We need people to start going "oh, wow, we did that?" we need them to start thinking "well how can I minimize my impact myself".

So how do you think we can do this? Masses won't listen to people like you who are talking too much about numbers and then doing this in a very pedantic way (as you did in your first comment). Even if you have the facts.

Or, maybe even arming masses with unbiased facts won't be enough. Maybe it's only people like Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk who can save us. What do you think?

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ryanmercer6y ago

>So how do you think we can do this? Masses won't listen to people like you who are talking too much about numbers and then doing this in a very pedantic way (as you did in your first comment). Even if you have the facts.

The giving pledge has more than a trillion dollars pledged as of right now, certainly at least one of those individuals or couples has interest in climate change. With an incredibly small amount of that trillion dollars of pledges we could gather data and educate people.

- Ask a healthy sampling of random people if they know what global warming is, do they believe in it, have they seen signs of it, is it affecting their life (talk to farmers, ranchers, amusement park operators and owners of tourist destinations, wildfire firefighters, etc as well as random people).

Then find out what misconceptions there are, what fears there are, what falsehoods people believe.

- Talk to experts: climatologists, entomologists, financial market experts, marine and wildlife, biologists, agricultural sciences types. Find out what effects are being seen right now, ge the data from all the fields, get video interviews with them saying who they are - what they do - what they see happening - why it concerns them - if the changes continue what are the probable outcomes in the next 5/10/15 years. Start a campaign, edit this stuff and start putting it on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram as short clips.

You do this to build awareness. You create plenty of resources that people can use to educate themselves and you drive interest by raising awareness. The only way we are EVER going to tackle climate change, other than just struggling to adapt to the changes, is by educating people and getting them personally interested.

Go ask 50 random people you know "So, what do you think about global warming", you're probably going to be surprised when several flat out think it's made up and others are along the lines of "I don't know, it might be true, but I can't do anything about it".

We're not going to make changes by paying to protect Amazon rainforest. We're going to make changes by convincing people they really don't need to take their 4th international vacation in as many years, nor do they need their 3rd iPhone in 5 years, that their year and a half old MacBook is perfectly fine and they don't need the newest model just because it now has ultra hologrpahic flurm instead of super hologrpahic flurm because all they do is watch YouTube and write emails with the damn thing.

People can make small changes that add up to significant changes when you get widespread adoption.

People will illegally harvest lumber as long as there are trees, there are people literally stealing entire BEACHES [1][2], lumber (especially exotic hardwoods) sell for way more money than sand. But what if we can convince people to make some small changes:

- Do you like meat? Eat chicken instead of beef, it's an order of magnitude better per pound of meat as far as greenhouse gas emissions, not to mention land use

- 71F is a wonderful temperature for that AC but is 72F so bad?

- So, you want to fly a bunch of founders out to the Bay Area for in-person interviews for your tech accelerator batch? Seriously, can't you just use skype? Sure it's slightly annoying with the delay but it'll save a couple of tons of CO2 per person.

- You live alone, do you really need 4 lights on in the kitchen and your bedroom when you've been in the living room for the past 6 hours? And why is your tv and soundbar on, you've had headphones on listening to classical music while you stare at your laptop screen playing GorkaMorka 27 or trying to finish some code.

You have to educate the masses if you want to make change. Just because you, or me, or that guy over there recognize climate change at varying levels, does NOT mean that the majority of people do.

And you know what happens when you start to get the masses interested? You actually stand a chance out getting legislation passed that can begin to put pressure on companies. Lobbyists carry a lot of weight, but if you can sway enough voters to acknowledge climate change is an issue, then you stand a much better chance of putting pressure one existing politicians, or removing them during voting cycles and installing politicians that do care and start to create a legal framework to force change. Change in community planning, change in tax incentives, change in legal requirements, make it illegal for HOAs to tell homeowners they can't have PV panels 'because they hurt property values and ruin visual appeal'.

You know encouraging people to eat locally grown food, instead of eating exotic fruit like, bananas and coffee and oranges, year-round that get shipped from halfway around the world will have more impact than giving 20$ a month to 'protect the amazon'. Yes, we should protect rainforests because of the incredible biodiversity, but ehhhh a subscription service to wash the guilt from your conscience (not unlike the Medieval Indulgence system) just is not a realistic solution, at any meaningful level anyway.

[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2018/07/13/628894815/epis...

[2] https://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?stor...

gwn7OP6y ago

Thank you.

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