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Comment by rainbowmverse | Hacker News Reader

Imagine if we do all the work to prevent climate change, end up being wrong, and are left with a clean and sustainable economy.

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This sounds just like a religious argument. "What if we do the good things that some religious book says we should do, avoid the bad, be decent human beings, and help others, and there's no afterlife to be rewarded by?" I suspect it elicits exactly the same visceral responses by the target audience.

That analogy is too generic - it will apply to any action which has two distinct kinds of benefits. Pascal's wager has many issues which wont apply here. A:'This approach to programming improves memory safety', B:'Not interested', A:'It also makes code more modular/reusable', B:'Pascal's Wager!'

Also, if one is doing a cost benefit analysis - one has to include things like political instability caused by oil dependence(see Middle East politics), funding of extremist groups, and health benefits due to reduction of air pollution.

Sadly I think you're underestimating the appeal of religion. If this idea were as popular as religious ideas we'd have gone green a generation ago.

Religious ideas are only popular when you don't have to put much effort and only pay a token sum of money.

Once religion demands dedication most people will find paradigm where they skip working while still consider themself pious.

Well it's only a "religious argument" if you also assume that the fossil fuels our economy currently relies upon are somehow never going to run out. Renewable energy is the only long term solution to a number of energy problems, the climate change issue just makes the need for it that much more important.

It sounds like Pascal's wager: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal%27s_Wager

It is not a good sign if your worldview rests on reasoning like this...

The reason Pascal's wager is bullshit is that it rests on two assumptions to convince non-believers:

1. Infinite badness of hell;

2. Infinitesimal possibility of religious truth.

Reasoning about climate change doesn't really involve multiplying infinity by zero. There is more evidence to back up a non-zero chance of catastrophe, and we don't have to rely on inifinite badness to make action worthwhile. Finite badness does the trick just fine.

Unlike Pascal's wager, the question of climate change action is rooted in knowable quantities. Unfortunately, a lot of these are still unknowns to a degree, and a lot of misinformation exists, making it difficult for non-experts to keep up.

Assuming that ice core data is being interpreted correctly, there is an almost guaranteed chance of catastrophic climate change sometime in the "near" future regardless of human impact: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Vostok_Petit_data.svg

EDIT:

Looking at that a bit closer, I get peak temperatures at ~ 412.5k, 322.5k, 237.5k, 127.5k, and 7.5k years ago.

The other problem with Pascal's wager is widespread disagreement about what you really have to do to satisfy the alleged deity. Many religions claim that if you aren't a member of that particular religion, then you go to hell. Well, with all the different religions, that makes it pretty hard to choose the "correct" one, doesn't it? And if you're looking at the ways you have to limit your life and actions (e.g. not having premarital sex) to please this god, again, the different religions disagree hugely. Some religions say it's sinful to drink alcohol, others don't have this problem. Some say you can't eat pork or shellfish, again others disagree. Some religions say that you need to be completely celibate (I think the Shakers were like this), and not have any kids. So your odds of both choosing the "correct" religion and following its precepts acceptably are vanishingly small.

> "What if we do the good things that some religious book says we should do, avoid the bad, be decent human beings, and help others, and there's no afterlife to be rewarded by?"

> It is not a good sign if your worldview rests on reasoning like this...

Are you saying that it's not a good thing to have lived a good life and done good by your fellow humans?

Hmm, I'm having trouble figuring out your argument here. I see three premises:

Premise A: Pascal's wager is based on sound reasoning.

Premise B: People who live by pascals wager "live a good life", etc.

Premise C: "Living a good life" is a desirable thing.

Somehow you are arguing that if I reject premise A I must also reject premise C (if I were to act rationally), but I don't follow it.

>This sounds just like a religious argument. "What if we do the good things that some religious book says we should do, avoid the bad, be decent human beings, and help others, and there's no afterlife to be rewarded by?"

The problem is that the religious books want you to do a bunch of things that really are bad and awful. Aside from the bits about murdering unbelievers and apostates, and stoning your disobedient children, and not eating pork (which is actually good for the pigs I guess if you follow it), they'd also have you do things like forgo all contraception, leaving you with a bunch of children you're not prepared to take care of, or being celibate, which really isn't fun or healthy, and basically living like they did in Victorian times (see the other article here today about the "scandalous" behavior at Victorian beaches with some men and women actually swimming together--the horror!). If there isn't a really good reason to enjoy various human activities that really aren't harmful, then why shouldn't you?

This talking point really only works as long as "we do all this work" is vague.

If it's replaced by what alarmists actually claim is necessary, it becomes very clear why it's not that simple.

There's also the bonus that if we switch to renewables before sucking every drop of chemical energy out of the earth's crust, the leftovers will be a nice gift to our great great grandchildren if we accidentally destroy civilization and they have to bootstrap it from scratch.

> end up being wrong, and are left with a clean and sustainable economy

Transformation has costs, it's not a free ride. The investment that you do there is not being done somewhere else.

We're still reaping benefits of the Apollo project almost half a century later, and it cost less than what governments have spent pushing advances in clean energy that are already paying off in real economic terms. There is quite a bit of money flowing around the world, and it tends to produce more when spent. There's no shortage of money.

> We're still reaping benefits of the Apollo project almost half a century later,

Care to elaborate about the benefits of the Apollo project?

NASA has helpfully provided pages on this exact subject under spinoff.nasa.gov.

For Apollo in particular: https://spinoff.nasa.gov/flyers/apollo.htm

Good search query for finding more detailed analyses (not in a snarky LMGTFY way, there's just so much to list either as a direct benefit or as something made possible by those early innovations): apollo spin off technologies

very good point! just think about it - all the panic and then nothing - but then we are stuck with solar power, more vegetarians, less pollution in the ocean and on and on ... terrible! waiting until the very last moment is the only feasible strategy

This is essentially Pascal's wager and comes with all the problems associated with it. Another way to put your statement would be 'Imagine if we pay tens of trillions of dollars for something which only costs 500 billion dollars'

This statement is getting closer... but the numbers are still off... At this point green solutions are probably only about 30% more expensive than non-green(and getting cheaper every year).

And that's the thing.. if they're getting cheaper every day, eventually they'll become the rational alternative.

I look forward to home solar and the supporting technology. The prices aren't quite there for me but I think they will be in the next five years.

In the meantime, I grew up being told "turn off the lights to save electricity!" and now with more efficient bulbs, power consumption is down about 80-90% to where energy for lighting is rounding error.

The pros and cons are rarely made clear: imagine if removing cheap sources of energy makes our standard of living much worse.

This should be of interest: http://industrialprogress.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/MCF...

The unmet need for cheap, plentiful, reliable energy:

There are 7 billion people in the world who need cheap, plentiful, reliable energy to flourish. Some 3 billion have virtually no energy by our standards, which means we need vastly more energy.

It is extremely difficult to produce cheap, plentiful, reliable energy. In the entire history of humanity, only three industries have achieved this on any scale: the hydrocarbon (fossil fuel) industry, the nuclear industry, and the hydroelectric power industry.

The root page is not making me optimistic about this organization's bias-checking capacity:

>> For the last 40 years, so-called environmentalists have held back industrial progress around the world. That's why we're helping industry fight for its freedom, with new ideas, arguments, and policies that will improve our economy and our environment.

Look at his actual arguments and data. He cites sources thoroughly IIRC.

Alex Epstein unfortunately is well known for being heavily biased in the climate-change denial direction.

I don't think anyone would argue against the idea that fossil fuels have helped technological progress over the last century and a half, which seems like the core of his thrust.

The problem is the almost dismissive attitude about the future prediction consensus. Generally, the scientific consensus is against his statement: "The [future] warming impact of CO2 is mild and quite possibly positive".

From there, it seems like he is selectively framing his arguments. For instance, higher CO2 concentrations does increase crop yields (as stated), but scientists believe this will be offset by higher temperatures and drier conditions. (https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2016/nasa-study-rising-...). Statements like "Warming is almost universally desired among civilizations" seem to ignore that there is such a thing as too hot for the human body, let alone for other things such as food or having a reliable water supply (http://www.fao.org/3/a-i5188e.pdf).

It seems like a strange bias to think that there is zero room to improve our energy pattern and sources compared to what we have now. Or that only three industries (hydro, fossil fuel, nuclear) will possibly ever exist to provide cheap, plentiful energy. (For a start, I'll ding him an additional point for forgetting about the original cheap, plentiful energy source humans used: "traditional biomass". EG: wood, crop waste, dung, etc.)

I don't think anyone would argue against the idea that fossil fuels have helped technological progress

But many implicitly ignore the benefits of fossil fuels. I hear many variations of the comment I originally replied to, i.e., "even if there's no climate change, reducing fossil fuel use is pure win". I think many imagine we could keep roughly the same quality of life with the majority of our power coming from solar panels and wind farms. Smarter environmentalists realise this is not true, but the general public is very confused on the issue, especially as the more rational greens get lumped in with the activist crazies.

(One very important point in to explain Alex's context: many greens (not all, granted) are opposed on moral grounds to nuclear, and even to hydro, which floods valleys and messes with nature. The root of this is the desire to minimise human impact, but "minimising human impact" is ultimately at odds with "maximising human flourishing").

to think that there is zero room to improve our energy pattern and sources compared to what we have now

He doesn't think this. Obviously improved nuclear power, ultimately fusion power, is the real long-term solution. However, hopes that we can significantly improve solar or wind power are doomed to crash into reality -- there's fundamental limits to how much energy you can extract from the wind (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betz%27s_law) or from photons (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shockley%E2%80%93Queisser_limi...). Burning wood and dung works for poor countries that lack infrastructure, but it's more expensive that fossil fuels, and more polluting, even more polluting than coal.

Ultimately, from a very long term perspective, one has to recognize that fossil fuels are not going to last forever -- at least in an economically viable form. The exact nature of when we (for all practical purposes) fossil fuels become economically too costly has been hotly debated over the years (it will be a while, sure) but since our economy is so dependent on them, I would view exploration of practical fossil fuel reduction as a win for this reason alone -- perhaps it is a matter less urgent than climate change, but it still is something to consider.

Yes, there are limits to extraction, but solar and wind power's advantage is that, location wise, it is viable in far more places than something like hyrdo power; it also can be set up in a more decentralized fashion which can be advantageous for some scenarios (remote areas with little existing infrastructure for instance). I've always thought that solar and wind's biggest challenge to overcome is more the non-continuous nature of that power source. At any rate at this time I don't think it's safe to predict what a long term solution might be or might not be. There probably is (as like now) no single solution that is right for every location.

I have to use heuristics to sort through the enormous volume of information trying to make its way into my head these days. Such blatant bias is enough to send anything from this organization to the mental blocklist.

The thing is if we're successfully at avoiding a cataclysm, we won't know we were right.

In this specific situation, I'd rather not know we were wrong that know for a fact we were right.

Same issue occurred with Y2K. Dire threats, nothing occurred on actual date. Fact is there was an immense effort to update millions of lines of code throughout our infrastructure -- apparently successfully. Do recall several cases of old systems being kept running "to see what would happen" and they did demonstrate the failure.

Just because we averted disaster doesn't mean it wasn't going to happen.

Let me tell you about the five major car accidents I narrowly avoided on the way to work this morning. They didn't happen but they would have!

Just because it didn't happen doesn't mean we "averted disaster." It's entirely possible that much (or even all) of the build up was normal media fear mongering and loosely based on reality.

It's like the Y2K bug. People still act like it was made-up. We can't prove the bug would have caused all the predicted problems because we fixed the bug. All we know is we got a lot of updated, modern systems and huge R&D budgets from all the money that flooded into fixing it. How much of the tech we take for granted today is because of all that investment?

We're in the same position with climate change. All we've gotten out of it so far is affordable renewable energy, better tech for power monitoring and distribution, and a lot of new jobs. So far, solving a maybe is proving to be a good investment, and may save us all if the worst case scenarios are realistic.

We can try again on January 19th 2038 if we're inclined when the unix 32-bit timestamp runs out.

In which the real incomes of billions of the poorest people are significantly lower thanks to decades of compounded lower economic growth?

TANSTAAFL.

We are not even at a place where we have seriously tried the low hanging options, like a major serious worldwide effort at building better energy technologies(there has been a lot of great work, but not great relative to what we can do), reducing tariffs on solar, giving cheap access to green technologies to poorer countries, or researching and publicizing mitigating steps which can reduce damage when natural disasters occur.

Also, there are plenty of costs for the default option which should be included in the analysis. These are severe especially for low lying countries with a big coastline. But even for other countries, public health suffers due to burning fossil fuels, and political instability in oil rich countries has a big effect on the world.

This wreaks of fear-mongering. How can you claim that only the poorest would be affected? Income as a number of dollars is irrelevant, only purchasing power matters. i.e. the gap between rich and poor in real purchasing terms.

I didn't say "only", but generally the poor in the developing world spend a much larger fraction of their income on energy. They are also the most dependent on significant economic growth to see qualitative improvements in their lives and well-being.

Seems like jobs installing and maintaining solar and wind farms could solve both problems. There are probably already local projects going on all over the developing world that don't get much press. Something Facebook discovered when they tried to parachute in with their perfect, locked down internet solution and discovered people were already working on the access problem.

So we put taxes on the things we need to stop doing and distribute the revenue to the poor (or everyone for simplicity) who would then spend the money on the now cheaper things we need to start doing.

thanks to global economic growth those people no longer have to live in huts but are allowed to sew bags - they can buy Nikes and Coke!

As the economist Bjorn Lomborg has been quite vocal about, we have lots of global problems and fixing climate change isn't the biggest problem.

https://youtu.be/pQSGuC9GF70

He does argue that we should be spending a lot more on research to find cheaper solutions, however.

[Update]

While you're downvoting me, you should understand that I'm simply passing along one of main arguments made by the Republican party. You live in your echo chamber and they live in their's.

Can anyone guess why we are moving backwards in addressing the problem?

Bjørn Lomborg is well known for a bait and switch strategy to climate change. He recognises the problem and often gives reasonable recommendations, but then throws in a lot of other problems together with misleading/discredited statistics to explain why we shouldn't actually do anything near term about climate change.

For example, he argues that fixing poverty with cheap energy has bigger economic impact than fixing climate change. He then puts up a statistic connecting expansion of coal energy in China with a fall in extreme poverty. However he doesn't mention that the fall in poverty can mostly be attributed to improved agriculture and happened a decade before the coal expansion. Further, if you really wanted to get energy to rural areas far away from the power grid, distributed energy production from subsidised solar would be much cheaper as well as environmentally reasonable.

Bjørn is not the worst denier, but he is also not intellectually honest and you get a strong feeling that he intentionally tries to make preventing climate change seem at odds with fighting poverty, when it is really to sides of the same problem.

> Bjørn is not the worst denier

Do you believe it's possible for intelligent, informed, people of good will to look at a set of facts and come to different policy proposals?

Public policy is informed by science, but it is grounded in values. It seems to me that you call Bjorn Lomborg intellectually dishonest simply because he disagrees with you on policy.

Why do you assume people call Bjorn Lomborg intellectually dishonest simply because he disagrees with them. It is more likley that they are calling him intellectually dishonest because he is intellectually dishonest. Occam's razor applies.

I assume good faith on the part of Bjorn Lomborg. I also assume good faith on the part of the parent. I am trying to point out that well informed, well intentioned people can disagree without being intellectually dishonest.

Also Occam's razor really doesn't apply: a) Bjorn Lomborg makes arguments in good faith and the parent is wrong b) Bjorn Lomborg makes arguments in bad faith and the parent is right

To my eye, a & b are equivalently parsimonious in their assumptions.

> distributed energy production from subsidised solar would be much cheaper as well as environmentally reasonable

How can you claim that energy production subsidised with public money is cheaper than the same energy produced with no subsidies? The Chinese government could spend the money saved from solar subsidies in unemployment salaries or hospitals and free health care.

What energy source is unsubsidized? It's definitely not fossil fuels.

This comment is often made without providing any detail. Can you provide some numbers, with references, for more discussion?

For the US: https://www.eia.gov/analysis/requests/subsidy/

The numbers are a bit out of date. All I could find other than that is a reference to a study in 2015 on Wikipedia, but it links to a page that's missing the data the reference was pointing to.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_subsidies

It's a long and complicated document, but from a quick scan it seems that most of the subsidies listed are directed towards either renewable energies and alternative fuels (ethanol, alcohol) or the distribution grid, so proportionally equal for all sources.

Hey, I'm just reporting back one of the common responses that I get when discussing climate change with people. If you've got something of substance (e.g. a few links) that address why he's wrong, that would help.

Btw, I got downvoted because people don't like my comment?

I really wish HN readers would get out of their echo chamber and understand the other side. The controlling Republican party really does believe that it's not worth investing the money into fixing climate change because of arguments like Bjorn's.

Pick ANY article on the WSJ that discusses solar, climate change, or even Tesla, and it degenerates into bashing subsidizing solar, climate change bashing, etc

Here's today's article: https://www.wsj.com/articles/solar-company-sunrun-was-manipu...

By the way, can you provide references for your claims?

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