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Comment by 08-15 | Hacker News Reader

All right, we had an ecological crisis in the 19th century, and the collectivist attempt to fix it (i.e. state intervention) gave us wars, inhuman labor conditions, another ecological crisis at the other side of the world, and no solution. The actual solution came from technology (Haber-Bosch a hundred years ago, and phosphorus reclamation from sewage today).

Now we're facing an even bigger crisis, but this time, the proper solution for sure is to have an even bigger collective (all the states) prescribe a solution. So far, it's actually given us expensive and unreliable electricity, useless ethanol fuel that competes with food for arable land, trade in carbon indulgences, and again no solution. Yeah, sounds legit.

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The article talks about the period "between 1830 and 1870". Karl Marx was born in 1818, socialism as an idea only began around the 1850s, and actual stable governments on socialist principles didn't happen till the twentieth century.

Attempting to frame this as a socialist vs libertarian issue, as you appear to do, is seriously ahistorical. Furthermore, I'm not sure how a solution arising half a century after the period being talked about it supposed to be useful to the people living during that time. Similarly, if a solution to climate change follows the same timeline and is discovered 50 years after we cross the tipping point, how will that be of any use? The point the article is making is one of short-term vs long-term thinking.

Huh? What's anything I wrote got to do with Marx? I see collectives constantly failing to deliver everywhere. Yes, that includes every single socialist country that ever existed (they were not stable), but also many current capitalist governments (German energy policy comes to mind), the many public-private-partnership projects that always go over budget, and any meeting in a sufficiently big corporation.

Now please don't try to tell me that "collective" applies exclusively to socialism and that I'm reading things that aren't there. I took the word straight out of the article:

> These futures are avoidable, but only if collective international action... happens.

I think the confusion arises from the difference between the words "collectivist" and "collective".

Collectivism is the name of a political philosophy closely related to socialism communism, and a term popular with libertarians. In this context, writing "collectivist attempt to fix it" reads like 1) a suggestion that the British Empire's actions were motivated by a collectivist government and 2) that you're trying to tie failure to tackle global warming into a larger libertarian worldview.

I think it's a valid argument that collective action for long term gain against short-term self interest is very difficult to achieve.

That's a good point, but if you took out the snark and ideological rantiness, your comment would be 10x better. I suspect that's what the downvoters are reacting to.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html

If you read the article a little more closely you can see that the author is showing that the issues arose from attempting to prolong the status quo instead of fixing the root cause. I'm not certain how you reached the collectivist approach causing problems narrative.

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