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Comment by klipt | Hacker News Reader

It's a question of risk mitigation. Would you say that a 5% risk of humans going extinct it worth it, for an oil company to collect an extra $50 billion in profits?

I would say no. An oil CEO might say yes.

Who should have a bigger say in public policy, the civilians facing the 5% possibility of human extinction and no extra paycheck, or the oil CEO weighing their paycheck against possible human extinction?

The current head of the EPA clearly thinks oil industry profits are more important. Trump clearly thinks oil industry profits are more important.

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It's _not_ just about an oil CEO. It's about everyone who uses energy. Gas tends to be a high percentage of poor people's cost-of-living, and cheap oil tends to act as a progressive reverse-tax. In cold climates, heating one's house is also closely linked to energy prices.

When you hamper the economy, everyone loses a little. It weakens wealth creation slightly.

We're at a moment in history where we're pulling people out of poverty, through economic growth. So any actions that limit economic growth need to be judged with a high bar. https://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21578665-nearly-1-bil...

I'm not saying that we shouldn't do it, and if it is actually a 5% catastrophic risk then I think it would be prudent to take action at the cost of leaving millions of people in extreme poverty. But there is a trade-off, and it needs to be examined.

Your worries about the economy are purely hypothetical, and most likely wrong. Infrastructure spending generally stimulates economies and there is no reason to suspect that building clean energy infrastructure will be any different. Additionally, clean energy prices will most likely be cheaper and more stable in the long term due to decreased maintenance costs and lack of dependency on energy inputs from politically volatile regions.

And even if energy prices rise slightly, the reduction of externalities will more than make up for those increased costs. It is well known that pollution from fossil fuels causes a variety of health issues. I would gladly pay a few more cents per kwh if it reduces my chances of getting cancer or heart disease.

The chance that anthropogenic climate change will lead to human extinction is much less than 5%. There just isn't any plausible mechanism for this. The one exception is extinction due to climate change triggering a war in which extinction-causing biological weapons are used. Unfortunately for risk mitigators, the chances are about equal that such a war would be cause by an economic collapse resulting from attempts to prevent climate change.

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