The climate change issue is mostly a political problem, as sustainable ways of modern living have been known for decades, created by society and politicians not caring about the global impacts of local decisions. The almost-dystopian socialmedia/pervasive-ads/misinformation/compromised-democracy internet landscape is mostly a technological problem, an outcome of computer scientists and engineers just building things without thinking of the ethics of their technology. Nobody campaigned to build facebook, like they campaigned to build another coal power plant or another highway. The nerds and politicians alike are on their way to destroy the world - one compromising our minds, the other poisoning our air.
The failure of our times has been just this. Not realizing that when what you are doing has global impact you need to think hard about its effects and be crystal clear on the ethics of it all. Perhaps the original sin was not pushing for more hands-on ethics training for every child and college student.
Climate change is as much a social problem as any. While I do think the constant focus on individual responsibility and small changes within domestic households is largely a misdirect to divert attention from real systemic & political/corporate causes of climate change, those large political/corporate entities are still ultimately sustained by societal behaviour; we would literally need to change everything (at the very least in the western world) to avert climate change, which is very much a social challenge.
> Climate change is a slow process
This may have been true in the 50s or 60s. It sounds like that's the last time you took an interest in this topic.
> Technology is fast enough to catch up with it and solve it
Is this satire?
> Automation is too(And my guess in the near future, it would be a much bigger problem)
People have been saying this since ancient Rome or before (see Vespasian), but it hasn't happened nor will it ever. This (unlike privacy) is a phantom problem.
The problem with climate change is that the average person can't see the effects until long past the point when the problem can be easily solved. It's not at all comparable to social media.
Your argument is a different one already, yes we're definitely not doing much against climate change, and yes some moral responsibility to fight this global issue is badly needed.
But that does not validate the pseudo-moral arguments blaming technology & industry like the one above, this is guaranteed to fail.
The majority of people is fine living their lives as to ensure to destruction of all organized human life on the planet, just when it comes to the climate. Thinking of history, all the darkest hours of it involve a majority thinking they're right automatically, by virtue of being the majority, and persecuting minorities, or doing all sorts of stuff that in hindsight is just evil, embarrassing and gross.
> Free thought requires free media. Free media requires free technology. We require ethical treatment when we go to read, to write, to listen and to watch. Those are the hallmarks of our politics. We need to keep those politics until we die. Because if we don’t, something else will die. Something so precious that many, many of our fathers and mothers gave their life for it. Something so precious, that we understood it to define what it meant to be human; it will die.
-- Eben Moglen
If people don't understand that it takes away from them, not from the importance of the issue.
I really feel that climate change is totally irrelevant. There is so much other pollution out there and it's all a symptom of massive over consumption, planned obsolescence, negligent/unplanned obsolescence and consumerism.
The quest for things, the newest things, the newest non-upgradable things, is leading us into disaster. We can't keep throwing away phones after two years or purchasing new laptops instead of fixing what we have. We don't have the raw materials to replace the millions of gas cars on the roads with electric/hybrids.
Things like rail, consuming less, paying more for longer lasting devices, smaller factories that produce fewer yet higher quality goods, etc. etc. will fix the underlying problems. Things like CO2 emissions, the massive plastic patches in the oceans, heavy metal in our water supplies, toxic waste--these are all symptoms and not the root problem itself.
It requires a massive change in thinking, advertising and economies. For example, Intel should be happy when it has a massive growth reduction because it means they created something that lasts a long time, is still valuable and is non-disposable. Companies need to be rewarded for things that simply last longer or can be upgraded, recycled or refurbished. The fundamental role of money and its representation of resources has to change. Our values about what is valuable needs to change.
Climate change is just a runny nose out there that people try to plug up with pseudoephedrine when the real problem is the virus that's killing your body.
Most people here can avoid the impact of climate change - do you think we shouldn't talk about that either?
These are societal problems. It's good to care about people beyond yourself, and to talk about the professional ethical responsibilities of software engineers with regards to corporate mass-surveillance.
Making this a moral issue is completely counter productive. People inventing the internal combustion engine and the amazing improvements to the quality of human life enabled by fossil fuels, did not set out to bake the planet.
Climate change is a technical problem in need of technical solutions, along with the economic insights and political will to make it happen.
We are all in this together now. Figuring out who to blame accomplishes nothing.
I'm not the parent commenter, but you seem smart and passionate enough that I want you to engage with my points.
"Climate change" is a misnomer in that it is a stand-in for a larger set of environmental issues that all have their root in cheap, subsidized consumption. If you become too narrow minded and focus on a small set of factors, say transport emissions and crypto mining costs, you end up losing sight of the interrelationships which actually carry the causal weight of ecological collapse (with or without temperature changes.)
For instance, the most cost-effective carbon sinks we have control over are forests. Rather than doing forest farming to coexist with existing resources, and allowing more variance in our diet even if its caloric volume will have to decrease (something we already have too much of and waste too much food with anyway), we would rather destroy this land for monocropping purposes, which also leads to climate change problems which further feeds ecological collapse. It's a backward set of expectations and it's rooted in our greed.
If the technological means are available like you say they are, and I don't disagree with this, then social coordination problems are what's leftover. You can't use tech to evade them, but you discount them here by saying it's "a different thing". Yet if it's the limiting factor because the technology is already available, then it's the only thing that could matter.
And you can't just process these issues in terms of utilitarian calculus because if you think like a utilitarian, and you aren't in a position of influence, you will weigh out your individual contribution to collective problems as being marginally irrelevant.
This is why some environmentalist moralizing is necessary. Because if individuals don't take satisfaction in just doing the right and virtuous thing, even if it's a sacrifice, even a small one, they won't see a point to contributing to the commons at all.
Technology can stave off the need to make these sacrifices but it can't go on indefinitely. And even if it could, innovation takes time, which as I outlined in my comment to the grandparent post is what makes the difference between delivering energy just in time to turn the climate around, or overshooting until you can't even do that. Slowing down helps.
There's an interesting movie called Don't Look Up[0] which is a metaphor for climate change politics.
> The impact event is an allegory for climate change, and the film is a satire of government, political, celebrity, and media indifference to the climate crisis.[6][7]
After watching, I agreed that when the world eventually burns, people will be live streaming and tweeting about it instead of going out and actually doing something about it. We all have a part to play in this, and armchair activism behind the comfort of social media will do jack shit to solve this problem. Addressing climate change head on will be the biggest amount of cooperation humanity will ever have to do. After we address it, it will not be as hard to maintain decent temps. We can sail on this rock for millennia once we get out there and make shit happen.
I'm not arguing against the point that phones and social media is part of the problem. I'm arguing against the idea that climate doomerism has no or a negligible effect.
I strongly disagree about climate change. It's nothing but a technology problem. The people addressing it are people like Gates with his funding of advanced nuclear and Musk with his driving of EVs, solar power, and grid scale storage.
One of the major reasons we've failed at tackling climate change to date is that we've been treating it as a political, economic, or ultimately moral problem and trying to solve it by moralizing.
I call this approach "abstinence based environmentalism," making a direct analogy to abstinence based sex-ed. It works about as well. Trying to shame people into using less energy or pursuing less economic activity is going to be about as successful as shaming teens into not having sex.
If we try to push abstinence based environmentalism really really hard by legislating it and trying to force people to down-size, we'll get a populist counter-reaction and we'll see the election of explicitly anti-environmentalist candidates. That's worse than nothing. That's going backward. We've already seen some of this.
We've been approaching environmental problems as moral and political issues for decades and what do we have to show for it?
The morality-based "don't create technology to fight climate change since it would allow us to continue current behaviors" position is definitely one of the more infuriating ones.
The damage is the big problem here, not the behavioral causes.
That suggests that climate change is primarily an intellectual challenge. That if we were less stupid it would have all been ok. Maybe we need more anger and passion to actually pursuade people on moral grounds. That that environment is a matter of basic human rights. And poisoning our planet and fellow humans is sinful.
The global warming argument is pretty tired. I don't see the same commentators applying their concern for global warming over wasteful pointless """""AI"""" or virtually any other kind of computer work. This essay also reeks of producing a surface level argument without diving in further to actual use cases. Many criticized the early internet for its original uses without seeing the bigger picture. You can sit back on twitter and laugh at people who by all means seem to be having a lot of fun and call them stupid for investing in NFTs but part of the price they are paying is inclusion. Similar to people that blow large amounts of money no beanie babies, magic cards, hello kitty goods and whatever else.
Fixing climate change is a much more important problem than either spam or search. I don't care if Google goes bankrupt; I do care if my grandchildren inherit a liveable Earth.
The issue with this site is its total belief in tech as a solution. You will have plenty of people here saying "there's no need to change your lifestyle, some tech billionaire will solve it".
I also think the wealth of most people here means they think they will be insulated from the problems caused by climate change.
This is precisely why climate change policy is so difficult to enact. Folks don’t understand the urgency until they experience it themselves, and by that point it’s gotten really bad.
There’s an analogy with tech debt or old software here somewhere.
Especially this part:
“The green future has to be a welcoming one, even a thrilling one. If people cannot see themselves in it, they will fight to stop it. If the cost of caring about climate is to forgo having a family, that cost will be too high. A climate movement that embraces sacrifice as its answer or even as its temperament might do more harm than good. It may accidentally sacrifice the political appeal needed to make the net-zero emissions world real.”
I think this is a big issue in the climate movement, We see dumb stuff like Shutting Nuclear Plants while firing up Coal plans[1] and people calling to shoot anyone who supports nuclear power[2] or calls to ban meat.
It's just Virtue signaling, Picking things that are the most visible, Like not eating meat or not having children, things that affect peoples life much more than they have an impact on the climate.
Replacing one Coal plant with a nuclear one will do much more to stop climate change than you or thousands not having children and not eating meat or any individual act you, or they can do.
This focus on picking the most visible thing is driving many people away from caring about climate change.
It's now just a race about who sacrifices their lives more for the climate, which is absolutely what you don't tell people to get them to care about something.
I think it's a natural result of Social media, it has its benefits like how fast Climate change went mainstream and downsides like this.
The failure of our times has been just this. Not realizing that when what you are doing has global impact you need to think hard about its effects and be crystal clear on the ethics of it all. Perhaps the original sin was not pushing for more hands-on ethics training for every child and college student.
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