If you have $100k left to pay on your mortgage, and somebody offers you $5k towards the mortgage are you going to tell them they're offering you a "false hope because you'd still have $95k left to pay"?
EDIT: This is also known as the "nirvana fallacy": because the solution is not perfect - that means it is worthless.
If you could move an entire country from being car dependent to being largely car free, by pushing rapid urbanisation and transit and you put 20 car drivers onto a train or a bus, then we're starting to talk about measures that actually have some effect.
Or if we eliminate meat consumption altogether rather than promising people magic lab meat every five years, that would have an effect. Or if we put some significant money into a manhattan project for carbon capture, that at least gives us a statistical shot.
But buying a tesla or a linen bag at the supermarket or paying 50 cents for a biodegradable cup at starbucks isn't saving the planet, it's the modern version of paying the catholic church for absolution.
And in the long and infamous history of bad references to fallacies, this isn't one either. If you need to go from 100 to 10 and you're spending billions on something that gets you from 100 to 99.9 you're wasting time and energy that you don't have.
> spending billions on something that gets you from 100 to 99.9 you're wasting time and energy that you don't have.
Of course those numbers are just made up but they are also very far from reality. Solutions to climate change have actually been ranked in terms of total cost and total amount of CO2 reductions and electric cars come in at the 26th most cost-effective solution to climate change:
https://www.drawdown.org/solutions/transport/electric-vehicl...
I really don't know why climate change seems to inspire so many people's inner contrarian where they just want to deride any attempt at preventing it because they haven't solved the whole thing in one go. There is no perfect solution, we are not going to fundamentally transform the world to a car-less society, or eliminate meat consumption.
Its like if you buy an electric car, somebody tells you "BUT you still fly!".
If you stop flying, somebody tells you "BUT you still eat meat!".
If you stop eating meat somebody tells you "BUT you still heat your home with gas!"
If you switch to electric heating based of clean energy sources somebody tells you "BUT you still buy avacados imported from across the world!"
It never ends.
This isn't true. No one is arguing we should sit around and wait for a perfect solution, and that's a really dishonest framing of this article.
The argument is that electric cars are over-weighted as a solution, and it's one I see all the time. Not only that, but it directly conflicts with other goals. In the US, cities and states are still investing in expanding highway and car-based infrastructure at a time when we desperately need to be moving away from car-centric cities. Infrastructure is expensive and time-consuming to build, so putting resources into car-centric infrastructure means that a) we will be stuck with car-centric cities for a long time, and b) there will be less money for non-car infrastructure. If instead, we stopped building new car infrastructure and poured our efforts into non-car infrastructure, we'd be much better off.
Nothing else even comes close. It’s a simple fact. It’s easy to do. But nobody wants to do that.
It’s far less painful to pretend that we can keep the Titanic from sinking by making sure we sip our boat drinks from metal straws.
The point of the post is that we’re trying to consume our way out of a consumption problem, but predictably, a group of technology people want desperately to believe that if we just make the stuff we’re consuming better — with technology! — we’re helping.
To this end, it’s worth pointing out that the only item on that list that relates to family size is midway down, where it talks about family planning for the third world...something other people can do, so that you don’t have to change your life.
The author acknowledges electric cars are a modest improvement.
And who is working on the better solution?
People are different, your idea of the best tradeoff and how to spend your carbon budget is likely to be different to mine, neither budget is more right or wrong so why not allow both.
While these are the “right” solutions, they occur over decades. Planning for any rail line, then constructing, takes over a decade. Even in the environmentalist San Francisco Bay Area. Even bus lines. Try a google of “Van Ness BRT” to get a sense for how slow infrastructure projects work.
You can buy a Tesla or a Leaf or an e-Golf and have significant personal emission reductions today.
It is akin to saying 'I recycle my meagre household waste, I am doing my best!' while that's addressing probably 1% of the actual problem (most recycling ends up in garbage and corporations are bigger polluters than individual consumers).
If I am to put words into OPs mouth, we should be pushing for real changes at a society level. This would mean a bigger and more intrusive governance which will come in the form of things like no meat, 2 children per family, all electric cars, no 2 day shipping and so on. I am sure there one in there that will hurt everyone, which is where people should be willing to put their energy into.
FWIW at a macro level, I do see the point. I can put money on the fact that people won't elect or push for societal changes that actually affects them though. These are the reasons why giant systems pretty much never completely overhaul themselves: They might course correct a little, but unless aliens invade or a giant conflict happens - we are kinda set. (Do you see my cynical side yet :)
That's a uniquely American problem. Maybe America should fix itself so it doesn't take so long to build infrastructure.
Anyone who has been to Tokyo knows that you can survive without a car.
Sure, electric cars and other consumer decisions could maybe make a 10% contribution in solving the problem, but these individualist approaches are getting the bulk of the attention.
I feel there should be a name for this phenomenon: When the solution that has a ~10% effect gets ~99% of the attention, whereas solutions that solve ~90% of the problem get ~1% of the attention.
It's like a Pareto law of inversion of contribution versus attention.
It should go without saying that this effect is everywhere in technology, especially software development. You're going to encounter it today at work.
Second, we can do both moonshots and paper straws. Why not encourage people finally pulling their head out of the sand?
With this I don't agree. People need meat for a healthy diet. Completely eliminating meat is just as fantastical as magical lab meat and indeed requires some magical unicorn technological solution (like giving everyone B12 supplements or whatnot).
Reducing meat consumption, of course is another matter. However, we are going to have to live with at least some greenhous gas emissions and the ones from the animals we farm for their meat are the ones we will be forced to keep until last.
Because, ultimately, we need to eat meat, but we don't need to drive cars, fly in planes, have each our personal communications device, etc etc.
This isn't necessarily true. Depending on how you put "20 drivers onto a bus" in a dense rapid urbanization, you are often generating more CO2 than the drivers were previously. Building an entire nations worth of new train lines generates a lot of extra CO2. "Rapidly urbanizing" everyone generates a ton of extra CO2 (and will instantly price out nearly all of the residents you want to 'urbanize', something EVs never do)
In the US, most EV drivers with a renewable energy source are already emitting less CO2 per trip than the equivalent bus ride would emit (even after factoring in per-rider numbers for the bus). Depending on your area, the "largely car free" option is semi-regularly worse for the environment once an EV is factored in.
> Or if we put some significant money into a manhattan project for carbon capture, that at least gives us a statistical shot.
We already are? https://carbonengineering.com/ and https://www.climeworks.com/
That doesn't discount the work people are doing on EVs. Its still usually better to prevent emissions than to attempt to recapture them later.
He’s claiming that sure, take the 5k, but don’t let that fool you into believing you’re done. You still have to plan on finding the other 95k.
Specifically, from reading through the rest of the site, the author seems to be arguing that we need to give up technology and go back to farming with our neighbors. Oh and no entertainment either, just working on sustaining your existence.
Edit: Someone downvoted me, but in another article one of the things the author states we must do is quit any job where you are paid and start working locally to help your community directly. Which means just about anyone reading Hacker News needs to leave their job right this moment.
Change marketing in a way that muscle cars are uncool much the way smoking is uncool these days.
This would pave the way for SEVs which are the best solution to start the change but are comparativelly weak in power.
