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Comment by marliechiller | Hacker News Reader

not sure youre being sarcastic or not... of course the disruption due global warming will be vastly greater than the disruption caused by trying to prevent it, that much is a given

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The wealthier will be disrupted relatively more by mitigating climate change as they consume more and have the means to invest. The poor will be disproportionately affected by climate change and are less able to adapt. So even if everyone is worse off overall without mitigation measures against climate change now, the rich would be relatively stronger and so may consider later adaptation preferable to present mitigation.

How is that different from saying that wealthier people are better off, and that this will continue to be the case?

Without climate change inequalities might well increase, but with it they will increase more. I’m also saying that the wealthy may not actually be better off, but they may be relatively better off compared to the less wealthy (e.g. absolute wealth might decrease but relative inequality might increase). For example poorer people may lose land to flooding and go from subsistence to poverty.

Edit: lots of articles about this online, but e.g. http://time.com/5575523/climate-change-inequality/ has some sobering statistics on the likely impact of climate change: e.g. "A 2015 study in the journal Nature projected that the average income in the poorest countries will decline 75% by 2100 compared to a world without warming".

I don't think this is true, unless when you say "the rich" you mean "90% of the population of the West".

Resource consumption happens by a person. There's only so many resources a person will use while being rich. A rich person might consume far more resources than a poor person, but rich people collectively have a much smaller impact than the poor, because there are far fewer of them. This means that if you start tackling climate change and the impact is that food becomes more expensive, then poor people will be far more affected by this than rich people.

I think this probably needs a proper analysis either way, but Oxfam (I realise not a source everyone agrees with) claims 50% of emissions come from the top 10% (this wouldn't just be the "West" - Middle East oil states, rich Asian countries, and rich people worldwide generally all contribute and some in the West probably maintain relatively low carbon lifestyles).

https://theconversation.com/emissions-inequality-there-is-a-... has the Oxfam discussion.

There would be an impact on poor people as you say, but this depends on the exact policies adopted. A study such as the one summarised and linked here: http://bruegel.org/2018/11/distributional-effects-of-climate... would be needed to confirm either way - their conclusion is that climate change mitigation efforts are potentially but not necessarily regressive with respect to wealth distribution.

I don't know any simulations of either scenarios, so I can't tell if the disruptions are comparable or not. It was just my thought at the pretty harrowing and grand scale list of sacrifices we would need to make to stop global warming. Maybe the alternative is worse, I don't know.

Even if the actual disruption was the same magnitude - if you have control over the disruption, it is much more pleasant one than the one you don't have any control over.

Is it though? Because if humans have control over it, then you can be sure that humans will fight over it. How would the US tell Russia to pollute less?

> How would the US tell Russia to pollute less?

Easy. This has actually been done many times during Cold War.

You do it yourself, and so well, that their citizens will demand it too.

There were many social advances in the West that were imported (usually in a crippled way, but still) to the communist countries (I was born in one). Things like 5-day work week, education improvements, recycling, ecological laws, nuclear proliferation treaties... usually it's very small things, but they do make difference.

But these aren't advances. We're talking about a reduction in quality of life. If we want to reduce the amount of meat people eat because it's a major contributor to climate change, then we'll have to do this through taxes or other such means. If Russia doesn't want to go along with it and has their people eat as much meat as they want then the US would be powerless.

What you suggest only works if you're talking about improving quality of life.

That's not true. Things like ecological or workplace safety regulations are improvements to quality of life at the expense of economic production. Averting global warming also does increase quality of life.

> has their people eat as much meat as they want

It's not healthy to eat that much meat anyway.

> then the US would be powerless

And you shouldn't panic. The US is far from powerless. There are many countries in Europe that for example do not have nuclear weapons. Does it make them dead? No, they continue to live, in fact often with high quality of life.

This worry that you somehow "lose the race", it's such a nonsense (reminds me of "mineshaft gaps" from Dr. Strangelove).

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