Comment by nsporillo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nsporillo | Hacker News Reader

I see the problem to be that any investment in greenhouse gas reduction now takes away from present consumption or other investments so that future generations can benefit, but it is generally considered that as time goes on people get more wealthy. Furthermore, it'd take significant emissions reductions commitments from the US and China in an international climate agreement to make any progress, while countries like Maldives, Turkey, etc benefit greatly.

Basically the incentives arent necessarily aligned because not all countries will be impacted the same by climate damages. Although, economists consider climate damages to be externalities which are market failures that cause economic inefficiency. I believe that with the right carbon tax, unpaid externalities can be resolved by correcting the price of energy such that the future damages are accounted for. The issue again is no nation can agree to anything on an international scale and steps to decarbonizing must start from the bottom up.

You recognize the real problem. It's the incentives and time horizon that dooms us. It has never been the case that we don't have a solution. There is always a technical solution but it does not matter. We had several solutions decades ago, we have several solutions now, we have even more in the future.

Our incentive structure means that we can only modulate the intensity of hell for the future generations with our electric cars, next 30-50 years is already locked in.

We are not willing to invest enough. Economic analysis puts the current cost of timely and sufficient corrective action around 0.5 to 1 percent of global GDP. That would be a real cost and money out of other things. Even concerned voters don't want to hear that. They want to hear green jobs and green growth. You can't sell actions as a net cost and sacrifice.

When the effects really hit it's too late. The idea that people take an action when it really hurts does not apply to climate change. If the global GDP stats decrease and we are constantly in recession and conflicts survival values take precedence. Investments go to military, food security and welfare and climate actions get little or no attention. Many developed countries will be at least 'okayish'. If the price of wheat and rice increases 500% they still make it. It's the others who die. We could develop carbon capture and suck the CO2 out of air but nobody wants to invest trillions into something extra that has noticeable effect 30-40 years from now when there is constant downturn.

Unaccounted externalities aren't a 'market failure', they are exactly what the market is optimizing for. even if you could ever get support for the accounting you propose (you wouldn't, as no popular politician will truly sacrifice for it), you'd still be fighting the 'creativity' of the market to find exploitable loopholes in ever escalating ways.

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