I guess you haven't really engaged with the climate change speech that people like Greta advocate for?
I don't think anyone that's serious about climate change really argues that people should become vegan, of course, it would help. But what is needed is not these sort of individual choices leading to systemic change but systemic change leading to change in individual choices. In other words, you don't become vegan because your heart changes but because suddenly a mostly vegetable-based diet becomes the cheapest alternative through different government programs. Of course there's a lot of complexity to this and price mechanisms don't always work, but prices + cultural changes can.
Our change in diets should be tackled the same way obesity and smoking have been tackled. We need information campaigns and price incentives. These as you might see are not individual choices but political, state-wide, and for climate change these need to be world-wide policy changes. That's what serious climate activists advocate for.
What's the main problem? Our political systems are not capable of properly solving these issues any longer. In a few words: things don't get done anymore. So personally I think a big part that's missing in the climate change debate is precisely the question of "what sort of political system we need to ensure these changes are made". And I think someone like Greta actually fails in this regard, in that although she points out the problem and the culprits there is very little work done beyond that.
> If it were true we wouldn't be as badly progressing with climate action as we are.
We are progressing poorly, but what you’re saying here is that fewer than a billion people believe that climate change is a problem?
> For instance, we would have already billions of vegan people.
Veganism is a factor in climate change, but the methane we could offset from going vegan globally is nowhere near as effective or meaningful as ending the burning of fossil fuels.
I didn't say "all things that are profitable are necessary" nor that "profitability" and "necessity" were synonyms. What I said was that the root cause of what makes this particular power plant profitable is the same root cause that makes it necessary.
Also, a lot of the new energy needs comes from "green steel", which would give massive reduction in the green house gas production required to produce steel.
But for that to make sense we need lots of clean energy.
The sarcastic tone of your response is annoying, given that it misses the point.
Yes, I do, and I use them. But when I'm amongst a group of, say, 9 other iPhone users, who happily all already use iMessage (and already have existing chats among different subgroups of the members), telling everyone they need to switch over to a different, unfamiliar messaging app doesn't go over very well. It's difficult enough to attempt this among adults; it's not surprising that teenagers would laugh in the face of another kid who attempted a "Hey guys, let's all use Signal!!" request
Nationalistic flamewar, and any flamewar, is not ok on HN. It's not what this site is for, and it destroys what it is for.
You've been breaking the site guidelines repeatedly, including elsewhere in this thread. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
Two options:
- everyone installs an app that can deal with multiple vendors (like 90% of the messengers)
- everyone that is not having a phone of vendor x gets a new phone from vendor x and throws away the old one (or keeps both lol)
The former is almost for free and the latter costs hundreds of dollars .
It's so much worse that you cannot even make out this difference
