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erelong • today at 5:33 PM • 0 replies • view on HN

The impression I get on this discussion is that (man-made) "climate change" is a nebulous distraction from concrete environmental problems we do agree on (like pollution, which may directly cause certain diseases), and on what we could do about such problems

as, for example when I've tried to look up what remedies are proposed for things like excess "carbon emissions", the ideas seem inconsistent and all over the place, suggesting there is not really direct proof of man changing the climate by human actions (for example, planting "1 trillion trees" was suggested; now people aren't sure if that will solve the problem or not)

I could also see corporations and government creating environmental problems (like "man-made climate change", if it's real) and then offering solutions they design, for their own profit (as it's often the same groups of people running these operations in practice; although, this position is somewhat irrational as the leaders of such entities would be effectively poisoning themselves)

Also, I gather the HN consensus position is that non-renewables are harmful and that we can simply switch to renewables to solve issues related to (man-made) climate change. While I do like renewables in theory, and they could possibly cut down on a pollution (?), other more dramatic environmentalists point out that even renewables are probably not sustainable at some point as we will have more people than we have resources to supply them with. Alternatively, many people defensive of non-renewables point out that a lot of catastrophic environmental predictions did not remotely come to fruition.

So to recap: "climate change" is kind of vague and probably a distraction from tangible environmental issues we do agree on, and renewables either are not a sufficient solution to the problem of scarce resources running out or alternatively are not necessary to adopt to solve different environmental problems (although the economics are there and they will probably be adopted for a lot of their affordable benefits in coming years).

(Lastly, it's ironic that the tech community here which is against the over-use of non-renewables is probably passively accepting of AI datacenters which have amped up their consumption of even non-renewables to fuel their operations.)

I welcome discussion on the topic as I take somewhat of an uncommitted neutral view of if climate change is a "thing" or not (I rather would like to see discussion of more concrete solvable environmental issues).