alt Hacker NewsHot take on HN, but techno-optimism sounds so stupid when it comes to climate change... You can't engineer macro climate/ecology, since capital has no interest in human and it's surrounding environment balanced cohabitation.
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The forest where the community hikes has no value unless the trees are turned into paper.
All to say, Capital at large seeks out the profit. Until climate change effects the profit considerably, mitigation will be the path less traveled.
The only real way to approach this problem is to reduce consumption across the board which as you might guess, isn't profitable.
The singular input for every plausible avenue for mitigating and addressing climate change is energy. And an astronomical amount of energy at that if you want to make a measurable dent over the next 100 years. You can't cheat thermodynamics.
Energy absolutely is something that you can engineer. It is one of the most fundamental things engineering is about. Nothing we can do will make a difference without serious investment in carbon-free power systems. There is a lot of money being invested in energy technology, the real question is if we will build enough of it.
> capital has no interest
Selfish humans. "Capital" is a mental model, it's not some force of nature or hand of god.
I don't get the impression of much techno-optimism here lately, it's mostly just incessant whining about how they think everything's AI generated.
Techno optimism is bullshit created by power hungry VCs to ostracize anyone who argues against their myopic world view and further fill their own coffers at the expense of others. Anyone want to argue against that? I’ve yet to see a compelling counter.
Climate also doesn't change in macro over a lifetime.
It's very real, but the notion that it's changing over a 5 year period is nonsense.
things aren't "shutting off".
Techno optimist here who expects the following to make a big contribution to reducing human made future climate change: better batteries+solar/wind, nuclear fusion, self driving cars (we'll need to manufacture less cars for the same amount of miles humanity drives), AI helping with better resource allocation in general (hopefully).
The answer can't be, let's just consume 10x less. We have to engineer our way out of it.