Comment by shrumm | Hacker News Reader

Comment by shrumm | Hacker News Reader

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THIS.

20m is a drop in the ocean (sorry!) compared to what other projects get funded with. To me, climate change is like the white walker threat in the Game of Thrones series. Everyone's squabbling over petty politics while the real threat gets increasingly worse.

I'm actually annoyed that they only got 20m. A few weeks ago, I sat in as a judge for a university startup challenge. The students were given all semester to build a product and present their attempts in commercializing it. I was seated next to another startup founder and we both came to the same conclusion. The projects that had a social good / environmentally positive objective were the ones we WANTED to support but the least attractive investment wise. Social good has little intrinsic market value. Investors want to invest $1 and make $10 - that's grossly incompatible with these kind of projects. Ironically, it's probably where we need the best minds and investment focused on.

Props to to this guy for trying something, and inspiring others to contribute to the project. I hope there's more like him...

Fun (or actually not fun at all) fact „winter is coming“ and the endless game of thrones is actually George Martins metapher for climate change and our reaction to it.

This kinda makes me hope there's not a good ending and everyone dies because they couldn't get their shit together. I didn't like the last season (which advances beyond the books) because it was getting all too idk, tropey.

Glad it's not positioned as a warning - 1984 and Brave New World are both happening as we speak despite the warnings.

But people gotta have their Alexas and their Google Maps man. Their webcam & mic enabled smart TVs and their cloud connected thermostat. I mean, c'mon, how could anybody live without it?

/s

( Not a vegan, just sick of picking up the check for the meat industrial complex )

Don't forget the massive amount of subsidies we give to the meat industrial complex so they can develop antibiotic-resistant bacteria, destroy the earth, make people work in reprehensible conditions, and make our people sick and overweight!

I've heard that before but is it confirmed anywhere?

If so it doesn't seem like a very good analogy. In GoT the characters almost all ignore the white walker threat because they don't believe it exists. But most people do agree that climate change is real and will get worse. The apparent lack of action is not due to lack of belief but rather, lack of any obvious options for how to address it that aren't as bad or worse than the effects of climate change itself, i.e. massive shutdowns of industry and transport that would just as apocalyptic in impact as a rise in sea levels would.

If Martin wanted his story to be a metaphor for climate change (which I personally doubt, maybe he retconned that later), then he should have been depicting his characters as mostly believers in the threat even when they couldn't see it, because books told them it'd happen, and the arguments would all be about how to defend the kingdoms. Instead he wrote a story where the game of thrones continues so long because they don't really believe the white walkers exist at all until they literally turn up at the wall. Speaking of which, what's the wall meant to be a metaphor for, if it's about climate change? I can't think of anything we've built that's meant to stop climate change but which turns out to be ineffective.

> But most people do agree that climate change is real and will get worse.

President Trump does not believe that burning fossil fuels contributes to climate change. He may not be "most people" (in fact most US voters voted against him) but he is the one setting policy, and his efforts right now are on combating the Democrats, not climate change.

I can’t answer as to Game of Thrones, but with regard to people believing in climate change, it is useful to consider what changes they have made to their lives or compromises they have made to see whether they really believe it.

So for example, some friends who are big believers in climate change, tell people that they make the sacrifice of buying a Tesla and a Prius, and bought their “retirement” house directly in the middle of an area that is directly in an area that is likely to have flooding issues in the 30y timeframe. They are both late thirties.

Do they believe in climate change? Or do they say they do?

> The projects that had a social good / environmentally positive objective were the ones we WANTED to support but the least attractive investment wise.

It seems that we need governments to incentivize the private sector, or fund these projects directly.

Arguably this is where the Billionaires and others that have "made it" should be spending their wealth. Trying to fund these social and environmental projects.

I was just thinking that this would be a great way for Zuckerberg to garner some positive press for a change.

A hospital with his name on it springs to mind.

Why not setup a foundation so that the money is not an investment, but a contribution. People with that kind of money are always looking for ways to not pay taxes on it. Set up a charitable foundation where the 1% look to lower their tax liability can donate. The foundation can specialize in hiring crews to go collect ocean trash. How is it not a win-win. I know I'm over simplifying, but seriously, how is this not a thing?

Yes, running trash removal from the ocean is not profitable, so nobody will want to invest. So solve the problem by coming at it the other way. Even if it only gets enough money for a couple of years worth of operation, to an early comment's point, isn't that better than nothing?

One underappreciated point about this is that there’s no reason to think billionaires would be good at this.

Billionaires who made their fortune through their own invention or business acumen are exceptionally good at making money and protecting wealth. That doesn’t mean they are good at producing a different instrument of value, like some measure of environmental health or social well-being. You pretty much have to convert those social problems into a format where it’s an inescapable wealth problem if they don’t solve it. But if you leave it up to their discretion, they’ll either lack focus because they are focused on making or protecting wealth, or they’ll be out of their depth trying to generate non-profit outcomes which is a skill they don’t have.

Imagine if we put an earned wealth cap of $1 billion dollars of total worldwide assets, and then we said that to exceed that wealth cap, youhave to reach specific societal level social and environmental wellness milestones. Kind of like Elon Musk’s current Tesla compensation, but applied to all billionaires.

No family businesses, no offshore accounts, no shell companies, no way to leave wealth in non-cash assets. You hit 1 billion, any increase of wealth beyond it from any source is immediately seized by the government and held in untouchable escrow until you demonstrate hitting societal wellness outcomes.

You could spend a lot of money lobbying for those laws to go away before you hit $1bn...

Of course it’s an unrealistic proposal. I’m just saying if we couldn’t enforce something like that, then asking billionaires to solve world crises is like asking a professional basketball team to win the gold in synchronized swimming.

Apparently it'd cost $4.7tn [1] to deploy enoug low-carbon tech worldwide to keep us within 2 degrees, and the top 1% collectively have $127tn [2], $26.5tn of which is hidden in offshore tax havens [3].

Presumably that $4.7tn estimate will now have to go up since it was from 2015, but still.

If billionaires were that bothered they would have addressed the problem by now. They're not coming to help us, they're building spaceships so they can leave.

Sources here:

[1] World bank article - http://www.worldbank.org/en/news/feature/2015/04/18/raising-... [2] Credit Suisse Global Wealth Report - https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/11/2014-global-wea... [3] Tax Justice Network - https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/07/super-rich-tril...

Billionaires have pittance wealth in comparison to nation-states who should be funding these efforts.

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