Money Is the Oxygen on Which the Fire of Global Warming Burns | Hacker News Reader

Money Is the Oxygen on Which the Fire of Global Warming Burns

newyorker.com

34 pointsdredmorbius14 comments

So close... It's the money driving demand for continued overproduction that is the main problem.

Think about a Lime Scooter in the river. Someone paid for the energy to have that scooter produced and shipped across the ocean, but yet didn't actually care enough to keep it from being vandalized. Because the scooter was not bought by someone investing in a cheaper/quicker way to get around that may pay off over a year or two, but rather a startup hoping to saturate the market to eventually control it. Wild preemptive bets look financially reasonable because there is so much investment capital with nowhere else to go, as interest rates are being held low to stimulate the economy so that there are "enough" jobs!

It’s broken capital allocation and central bank policy, for sure. But the only way to fix that is with government regulation.

Either find ways to drive capital and monetary policy towards carbon friendly economics, or destroy investment dollars with taxes to do the same.

Lets overproduce some low cost education, and free health care. Let’s overproduce free lunch for school kids. Let’s overpay public school teachers.

McKibben's essay is an obvious counterpoint to Bill Gates' assertion that financial divestments are impotent as a greenhouse-gas containment measure.

> in the three years since the signing of the Paris climate accord, which was designed to help the world shift away from fossil fuels, the banks’ lending to the industry has increased every year

I guess the idea is that if you could somehow get passive investors not to default to investing in the S&P 500 (or similar) then it could be pretty powerful?

What are some other indexes that could use more publicity?

Title should be changed to global heating.

This is painfully ignorant. Yeah those companies also rely on gravity for there day to day operations. So is gravity responsible for global warming? Should we outlaw both of them?

What is more subject to human control, gravity, or access to financial markets?

We actually don't know if a modern economy can give up on using fossil fuels. It's a hypothesis we're currently testing and hoping it will hold.

"We actually don't know if a modern economy can give up on using horses."

-- Somebody from the beginning of the 20th century.

Argubly, there are still economies that rely on horses. Havasupai still gets all their mail by mule, in the USA. Its a matter of scale. There will always be use cases for electric, ICE, and even beasts of burden.

Our choices are adapt and survive or don't. If a modern economy can't give up on using fossil fuels then a modern economy is not a survivable one.

We know that it can't not.

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