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Comment by DennisP | Hacker News Reader

Historically speaking, the best time to own Bitcoin was back in January. Things always look great at the top of a bubble.

CO2 is higher than in the past several million years and we're still adding more at our usual pace. We've killed 60% of wild vertebrate life since 1970, wiped out a large percentage of the insect population, and we're continuing the practices that caused that as well. None of this can go on forever.

Almost everybody misses the main finding of the Club of Rome study: if you model a simple assumption that resources get more expensive to extract over time and environmental destruction gets more expensive to deal with, you don't get a gradual decline. You get continued improvement up to a peak, and then it suddenly crashes down.

What's really toxic: enjoying that run up to the peak and assuming everything's fine, instead of buckling down and fixing the problems before it's too late.

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The root cause of all of this: an economic system predicated on the notion of growth. Unrestrained greed, sole focus on maximization of profit, and unlimited growth. It's not enough to sell as many mobile phones as you did last year, no, you must sell 10% more each quarter, or whatever. Doesn't matter if you're mining the earth bare, generating millions of tons of garbage, optimising for inferior products that break sooner, treating workers like slaves in a race to the bottom... in other words making the world objectively worse. All social considerations, moral, ecological, of welfare, of justice, all those considerations don't enter the calculations. All that matters is the quarterly shareholder report.

Like some guy said, "the only people who believe in infinite growth on a finite planet are madmen and economists".

""" It's not enough to sell as many mobile phones as you did last year, no, you must sell 10% more each quarter, or whatever. """

But if the next gen of phones use 30% less resources, it's still possible to grow without increasing the rate of resource consumption. GDP growth has been driven much more by innovation than added resource consumption for years.

I think you're missing his point.

However with Jevon's Paradox, we get the opposite consequence and people consume even more. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

If you don't produce more than you consume (i.e. grow), how do you sustain yourself?

Sustenance is not the same thing as unrestrained growth.

There's a difference between growing enough food to have enough to eat plus some reserves and buying a new smartphone every year, a new car every few years, new clothes every month, etc.

So are you going to stop accumulating wealth in your own life and just sustain at your current level based on your basic bodily needs?

I don't know about you but my current level covers a lot more than my basic bodily needs. I'd love to trade any future wealth increases for a healthy planet.

So you're saying this is a tragedy of the commons, principal-agent scenario then?

You will continue to accumulate unless everyone else stops accumulating.

Absolutely it's a tragedy of the commons. That's why it's such a hard problem to solve.

But one way we often solve these problems is with taxes. We pay for all sorts of public goods with taxes and it works pretty well. So I completely support a high tax on carbon, even if it significantly impacts my personal wealth.

I think that's overly simplistic. There are systemic forces beyond our individual control that pretty much force us to consume at irresponsibly unsustainable rates. Planned obsolescence is an obvious one when it comes to technology products. Fast fashion is another.

There are also many ways in which artificial scarcity forces us to consume more than we otherwise would. If things like handtools were "common" property, then not everyone would have to buy a hammer or drill for each house which they then only use once or twice a year. There are many ways this could be different but they are just not profitable so our current system won't allow it. In the past, for instance, even things like ovens were common property, fired up once a week for everyone in the community to bake their loaves in.

I don't think seeking growth is the root cause. We all want things to be better tomorrow than today, and a large part of the way we experience "better" is captured in economic notions of value. And as Jesse Ausubel points out [1], use of many resources has been decoupled from economic growth. Take video games as an example. It's a $100bn/year industry. At worst its resource usage is modest. But I suspect it's net negative: every hour people are driving in-game vehicles is an hour they aren't driving ones that burn fossil fuels; virtual purchases replace goods that get shipped or bought in stores.

I think you're more on target with the shortsightedness that relates purposefully wrong accounting and unchecked drives for dominance and greed. But I don't think ending that is incompatible with creating a system where we keep improving the amount of value we create for each other.

[1] http://longnow.org/seminars/02015/jan/13/nature-rebounding-l...

I love the animations of Steve Cutts that demonstrate some of this quite well, like:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MTTr7RGH37c

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uG8bNDw6Ftc

http://www.stevecutts.com/

>"the only people who believe in infinite growth on a finite planet are madmen and economists"

There are 10 more planets in the neighbourhood. And even more some lightyears away..

I used to base a lot of hope on things like asteroid mining and solar power satellites, but we frittered away the decades and now I'm worried it's too late for that stuff to save us.

Well put.

The ironic thing about all numbers-oriented folks in extractive enterprises (regardless of whether they're extracting natural resources, capital, or labor), is their blind spot to the fact that ALL resources are finite. There's no "free-refill" when the big-gulp runs out.

I can only speak to the minerals extraction industry (oil & gas, specifically), but they (we) are well aware that hydrocarbons are a finite resource. The industry as a whole is arguably short sighted, but it’s not because they think the supply of oil is endless.

Really a bigger issue is that huge amounts of hydrocarbons still exist to be tapped. Which then get turned into atmospheric CO2.

Coal is particularly problematic. Oil may peak soon... Australia alone has like 400 years worth of coal in known reserves alone. We won't run out of it anytime soon - we absolutely should not dig it all up and burn it though.

> ALL resources are finite

Not in a world where matter/energy is conserved over time.

The Second Law of Thermodynamics would like a word with you...

> if you model a simple assumption that resources get more expensive to extract over time

Why would you make this assumption? Resources get cheaper to extract over time as technology improves...

Technology improves but resources get more scarce. Oil is getting more expensive to extract, for example. The same is true of many mineral resources, as we're forced to move to lower-grade ores.

But your point is a good one. I basically see us as being in a race between technological improvement and environmental catastrophe. I'm not at all sure which side will win. It'd be nice if policy makers would help weight the race in our favor.

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