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Comment by cybervegan | Hacker News Reader

It's his kind that got us into the climate mess we are currently in.

Very easy to judge remotely via a powered home.

"his kind" just gave us what we asked (and paid good money) for

we never pay for the environmental cost. when we buy stuff, we basically always pay only part of the cost, the immediately visible cost, the intrinsic value of a product. the other costs they basically steal from us in the form of a destroyed future. the fallacy of consumerism.

All I can say is both of you are right.

"They" steal from "us" or "us" get a discount?

It's stolen from your kids. And mine.

How is it a discount when "we" still have to pay, just future generations?

"We" get a discount today and "we" will pay back tomorrow. It's definitely not "they" making a profit on that discount. If they acted more responsibly it's "we" who'd cover extracts. At the end of the day, "their" profit would be the same.

If you tax to cover externalities then consumption goes down and producers make lower profits. The magnitude of these differences are debatable, but their direction is not.

But the tax doesn't disappear into thin air. People will be hired to fix externalities (e.g. plant trees) or get incentives to buy other stuff that has less externalities. It's not like those money will vanish from the economy.

There is some interest involved in that payment, and not all of it can be paid back because the cost was not monetary.

If we have to pay it eventually, then it's not "a discount".

I don’t think anyone in the modern era asked for the energy system we have.

IDK, it's pretty cool to have electricity, heating and whatnot

I think the argument was against the significant environmental problems and the lobbying (e.g. against climate laws) coming from the big players in the energy industry, rather than against electricity and central heating. We can still have the latter without the former.

But the dirty episode was required to reach this stage when we can move onto next thing. And some time later today's "clean" likely will be seen as dangerous in some way. Just like today's "dirty" didn't seem that dirty when it came out. E.g. cars helped to relieve cities from horse shit.

This attitude is amazingly shortsighted and revisionist. Presumably you also take issue with Edison, Westinghouse, and Tesla? Why didn't those idiots choose renewables like wind and solar when commercializing electricity?

How about Ford and Sloan? Those boneheads should've gone with lithium ion!

Could he have known better when he started his career in 1951?

Arguably yes. We had people thinking about the issue of carbon emissions in the early 1900s. Arrhenius talked about the greenhouse effect in 1890 or so.

By 1960 we had clear evidence CO2 in the atmosphere was rising, and we had fairly clear evidence it influences the climate.

In 1965, the presidential science advisory committee warned of the problem in an official report.

By 1970, the American Petroleum Institute had a study from Stanford that they commissioned, confirming the problem. From then on, the oil industry actively engaged in propaganda to discredit that science.

So, even if he didn't get it right when he started, he knew by mid-career. And he happily continued selling out.

since you kept it brief too: I think it's way more complicated than that.

He asks: "What's my legacy".

It's a world which will be uninhabitable for us unless we take some drastic action now. Drastic action which his industry is throwing everything into opposing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pickens_Plan

He was one of the major voices in the industry to switch to wind, and why we have some much windpower in the midwest today.

No he wasn't. He was just playing for money and for name recognition. He did absolutely nothing in the wind industry except attach his name to it. He built nothing. He developed nothing. He achieved nothing.

It's worth noting that the newest generations in developed nations (XYZ) are the most carbon intensive creatures this planet has had to date, in 300+ million years of vertebrate life.

You can't really blame his legacy without accepting some personal responsibility at the same time.

Either take the cross off or put the knickers back on as they say.

I at least am! Since the scale of the problem became clear around 2012:

First the big one:

* Politically support the Greens (GroenLinks), switching from the center-center/right parties (D66 or VVD if you google).

Then the smaller things:

* I've rejected a number of contracts the last two years which required significant travel or were for the fossil industry. I'd be $200k richer if I accepted one or two of them. Climate wasn't the only reason (young kids and father in law with cancer/stroke who needed my help played a part too).

* I haven't flown in 5-6 years (I live in the NL, my family in UK so this is a sacrifice). This is hard because travel is a passion of mine.

* I cycle everywhere whenever possible.

* I drive a tiny car and haven't upgraded it yet for environmental reasons.

* I've drastically cut my meat intake especially of beef.

* I'm spending $100k on my new house making it as close to 0 carbon as possible.

* Generally repairing instead of replacing stuff as much as possible.

Once I'm back to billing hours I'll be repaying my and my partner's climate debt by funding projects which remove carbon from the atmosphere. Only the "gold standard" projects, not the $10 clearly fraudulent "offsets" that the airlines try to sell you.

What are you doing?

I was growing up in poverty for the first 50% of my life.

Yet here you are on the internet. Do you realize how much fossil fuel was burnt so you could make a stupid comment?

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