Donating $1B to help accelerate land and ocean conservation | Hacker News Reader

Donating $1B to help accelerate land and ocean conservation

nytimes.com

61 pointsyazr26 comments

Cool. If we had a working tax code, we wouldn't need billionaires' charity and could actually regulate carbon in the atmosphere instead of these sort of band-aids and PR stunts.

Band-aid? Yes, probably. PR Stunt? I highly doubt that. This is way too cynical. Hansjörg Wyss has always been quietly philanthropic. He's old and he's extremely rich. He stands to gain little with a "PR stunt" now. I read this more as a billionaire trying to set an example for other members of the wealthy community.

Right, but I doubt Congress would spend that money helping the environment. Look at what they spend money on right now:

* $1,280 per coffee cup: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation-now/2018/10/22/ai...

* $1.2 trillion to “modernize” the US nuclear arsenal and production facilities: https://billmoyers.com/story/the-trillion-dollar-question-th...

* $38 billion in "defense aid" to a foreign country: https://www.sun-sentinel.com/florida-jewish-journal/fl-jj-us...

The US nuclear arsenal should be modernized and maintained. China and Russia have no plans to stand still as it pertains to their weapons. It would be remarkably foolish for the US to not properly maintain its nuclear deterrent. Nuclear weapons are the most cost effective means that exist to deter large-scale wars between major military powers.

$40 billion per year for 30 years would be an amazing bargain to help to continue to maintain peace between the US, China, Russia, UK, France, India, etc. Outside of the fantasy scenario where everyone simultaneously gets rid of their nukes and nobody else ever develops them.

Suppose we agree. In fact, I think I can agree with that...

Why is it $40 billion a year? I'm not a Musk fan per say but it is the closest analog... you can buy almost 2 SpaceX's (the entire company) a year for that and I highly doubt modernizing the nuclear infrastructure is that much more complicated than R&D on a brand new space company.

Some of us don't necessarily disagree we need to spend money on defense. But we think the amount being spent is way more than should be reasonably necessary to get the job done.

People like to criticize people who want to cut military budgets never asking if maybe we should just fire a bunch of people at the top who are inflating all the costs and replace them with people incentivized to get us more for less money.

Because if you don't spend all your budget, you won't get more next year. How are you going to spend all your budget if you're paying fair price for things?

This is a totally reasonable way to run government budgets and not insane at all! /s

And how would that tax code work? the super rich generally own stock often of their own company are you proposing to tax holding stocks?

It really shows the hypocrisy of the business community and pro-business politicians around the world.

You have a solution for climate change which is a price on carbon i.e. a pure market driven mechanism.

But in this case they universally hate it and instead prefer the government hand out subsidies and bonuses.

The problem isn't the business community in general so much as specific businesses. In Washington State we're voting on an initiative to put a price on emissions. It's supported by Microsoft, REI, Ben and Jerry's, and a bunch of smaller businesses and business alliances. Its business opposition is one generic business organization (Association of Washington Business) plus the Western States Petroleum Association.

The problem is "concentrated pain, diffuse benefits." Putting a price on emissions is an existential threat to businesses based on fossil fuel extraction or combustion. It's a nice-to-have for businesses that provide alternatives to fossil energy, like solar installers. For most other businesses it's not a key issue either way. This is similar to how most American businesses would be happy-to-indifferent about the existence of municipal broadband services, but private providers of broadband services fiercely oppose that option.

https://ballotpedia.org/Washington_Initiative_1631,_Carbon_E...

I'm on board with the idea that of all the ways to implement an anti-carbon system a trading system would be the best. It creates a real market.

But calling businesses hypocrites is being unfair - there is already a hypothetical market for carbon emissions where the price is $0. The government is going to drive the price up to something high enough that it will change business behavior, by extension causing businesses losses.

They aren't doing anything unreasonable, government steps in, value disappears. They're being completely reasonable by venting and asking for some sort of compensation. Asking for that compensation in the form of a subsidy is selfish, but once the government gets involved all bets are off, so why not aim for the stars and see what they can wrangle?

Basically

This is by Hansjörg Wyss the founder of biotech company Synthes. His focus is on nature conservation.

But i do feel this is treating the symptoms rather than the disease e.g. excessive population growth, extraction rather than recycling, free externalities.

The US, EU & Japan are still on an urbanizing uptrend, and nature areas (e.g. forests) actually growing.

I think the disease is actually political systems which dramatically misalign the well-being of the rich and the rest of us. If you fix that, everything else will fix itself through much more long-term political decision making.

You have to align well-being of "the rest of us" for us, against the will of most of us, though. Say "carbon tax" out loud, and most regular people will shout you down, because it'll make their gas prices go up.

> the idea that wild lands and waters are best conserved not in private hands, locked behind gates, but as public national parks, wildlife refuges and marine reserves, forever open for everyone to experience and explore.

This has not been my experience. I happen to live in a area that has seen a handful of new sequestrations in the last 20 years--3 or so in the last 5 years. The result has been to lock the public out. Locations that my family have enjoyed for decades are now off limits.

This is distinct from the military land grabs in Nevada. But it's interesting to see the contrast. After evicting families from their own land to expand Air Force testing grounds, the government has decided they still don't have enough control of Nevada public lands. So they are annexing[0] more than 270,000 acres of wildlife refuge for military use. That's right, "forever open for everyone to experience and explore."

[0] https://www.reviewjournal.com/news/military/air-force-finali...

$1B? This guy gets my respect. He's putting his money where his mouth is.

Talking heads like Matt Damon (who rents luxury yachts for solo use and flies jets across the ocean for convenience) earn my total contempt.

For a guy like me, hearing about Mr. Wyss's efforts move the needle. My thanks go to him.

there are some interesting articles about modern philanthropy and how many billionaires are finding it harder to give their money away than it is to make the money in the first place.

says a lot about how broken our society is.

> Matt Damon (who rents luxury yachts for solo use and flies jets across the ocean for convenience

To be fair, someone like Matt Damon would not get any privacy if he traveled with other people.

Is the environment being ruined because environmental advocacy groups or research institutions are starved for cash?

It really seems the only answer is consuming less...which is free.

$100 billion in donated wealth won't matter if people won't consume less.

“If people won’t consume less” - people will never consume less. With current population growth picture of the future becomes even more colorful.

And in some under-developed countries an average birth rate was 7 children per woman not so long ago. And we are currently de-funding Planned Parenthood. Awesome move! And due to the “selfish-gene”, human-farming is the life goal of almost every single individual. Is it sustainable? We can argue.

Kudos to Musk for looking at the Mars.

Maybe not so during our lifetime but shit will hit the fan realatively soon here on Earth.

and I will dutifully accept emotional down-votes (as it is perfectly and naturally average to want to have a cake and eat it too, in relation to my sustainability question), as well as constructive criticism.

Excessive population growth runs straight into the third rail of today's culture war: privilege.

Africa and Islamic cultures are projected to be the Lions share of pop growth the next 30 years.

Western culture pretty much guarantees curbing population growth is a non starter.

Not entirely clear what you're saying. Could you elaborate?

I think this person means it's very controversial to try to suggest population control especially when the majority of the growth will come from a population that is potentially discriminated against. Another common pushback point is that we like to point at developing countries as polluting the planet but forget that developed countries had no problem polluting for a long time until they got to their current state. Telling some countries that they should curb their industrial aspirations in the name of global benefit seems a bit selfish.

First I'll note that I'm not agreeing with what they're saying.

They're saying that in today's Western culture, it's impossible to make an argument for controlling global population expansion because of where that expansion is occuring. Places such as sub-sahara Africa, the Middle East, India. Muslim countries, black countries, for example. That for Western culture today, the view that the wealthy first world is privileged (and should act a certain way accordingly), makes it impossible to confront excessive population growth in less privileged parts of the world, because of guilt, political correctness, or similar.

We've banned this account for racial/national/religious/whatever flamewar. HN is for thoughtful conversation, not angry noise, which is what those produce.

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

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