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Comment by esotericn | Hacker News Reader

Good.

Look, ultimately, beyond a certain point, this stuff is point scoring.

After you have some amount - say a few hundred grand, a million - the actual number doesn't really matter - you're waving your metaphorical dick around.

And that's fine. If we can convert that dick waving into serious change - if we can get the metric by which intelligent beings compete to be something good, like carbon captured or species saved or ICE cars avoided or _whatever_ - we are well on the way to winning.

You built an enormous solar farm? Adonis DNA.

If we hack it so that it just slots in to the Natural Way of Things - e.g. with a carbon tax or similar - such that investing and buying and doing good things is simply logical - even better.

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If you want all of our productivity and competition to go towards something good you have to decide what good means. Is is it the total sum of all the wants and needs of society being matched up with our resources as efficiently as possible? Or is good something chosen by a small group of people using their superior knowledge and wisdom?

That's a false dichotomy. We don't need your technocratic oligarchy.

Most people already do agree on what's "good" and what isn't, and yet they (rationally) choose to put their money elsewhere, because they have no guarantee that everyone else won't freeload off of their contribution. If I invest $100 in protecting a public good (like the climate), I only get one seven-billionth of the benefit; the rest goes to all of the other people on the planet. So I'll only invest if everyone else chips in, too.

The easiest solution to force cooperation like that is called ... taxation. The more difficult, but perhaps closer-to-ideal solution involves more math, see e.g. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3243656

> If I invest $100 in protecting a public good (like the climate), I only get one seven-billionth of the benefit; the rest goes to all of the other people on the planet. So I'll only invest if everyone else chips in, too.

I used to think like this, but I'm fed up of taking "economic maxims" that I read on the Internet as being actually true.

I don't believe this to be the case. I think that taking action, being public about taking action, and ultimately standing behind what you think is right, taxes and others be damned, is the way to go.

Yes, there will be free riders. That's inevitable in anything you do. People "free ride" on software I write all the time. I can shoulder it.

Oh I agree, it absolutely is the way to go! If you haven't heard of it, take a look at the Giving What We Can pledge [0].

But most people aren't like you and me. I've had conversations about this with many others, and the most prevalent attitude is the one I described: ask them to buy the more expensive, environmentally friendly product, and they'll decline; ask them whether they would support a law that would require all products to be environmentally friendly, and they'll enthusiastically agree.

If that's how people work, then that's how we have to make policy.

My.....technocratic oligarchy? Sure, yeah.

Notice you have to assume that most people agree on what's good and that you know what that is. It's a solved problem, it's just a matter of implementing it.

> If I invest $100 in protecting a public good....So I'll only invest if everyone else chips in, too.

Public goods are non-rivalrous, another person consuming the good has no effect on you. So out of spite you're going to go against your own best interest because you think it's better to punish other people than to purchase a good that you would purchase if you could just figure out how to exclude them from using it. That's valuing the suffering of others over your own well-being. Going back to how hard it is to figure out what people think is "good".....

This is a false assumption as well.

If people decide to not invest to clean energy/climate-neutrality/reducing waste, it might be fear of freeloading, but it can be billions of other reasons. But most reasons will have something in common.

And it is not fear of freeloading.

It is a list of priorities. When something is really important for people, they do it, they invest time and money into it.

If people don't invest their time nor money, it is in fact not important for them.

So why tax something that isn't important for people (because if it was important, they everybody would buy clean energy, would stop using plastic & other things)?

It wasn’t important for people in medieval cities to have a working sewer. Nobody would invest in such a thing. But the benefits are obvious.

It wasn’t clear to people that putting on a seatbelt saves their lives. Maybe, because there was no seatbelt in the first place.

What’s important to people is sometimes a matter of marketing.

What’s important to people requires that "the right stuff" is offered.

People want to save the environment, but also want to save money. Only way this can work is if products get the damage they cause taxed in. Because right now, the environmentally friendly products are more expensive. It should be the other way around.

> Look, ultimately, beyond a certain point, this stuff is point scoring.

Larger amounts of capital means you can do larger things with it. Like SpaceX. If I had $zillions, I'd probably finance a probe to every object in the solar system that's moon size or larger, and landers to the ones that can be landed on.

Why would you do this before tackling the climate crisis?

The "why work on X before y is solved" approach has no legs.

Why work on climate change while poverty, cancer or illiteracy still exists?

By that logic, we should have never have had space exploration at all (and never should). I seriously doubt this would have improved our progress on the "bigger issues "

Well in this case to a certain extent, it certainly does have legs. Because the way climate change is going it looks like we won’t be around to capture the results of those probes landing.

Or at least not in a worthwhile sense (+5c and up).

what models are you using to make these guesses?

In my view for humanity to exist long term we need to become a interplanetary species. An impact like the one that killed the dinosaurs can certainly happen again and the sun has a expiration date.

Ultimately what is purposed isn't even a solution to the problem. Small reductions here and there that in total only manage to delay the inevitable. The only solution is mass scale terraforming projects and genetic modification of existing species to increase resiliency. If the coral reefs are dying we need to build reefs that are more resilient. If polar bears are overheating we need to breed ones who are more temperature tolerant. If the fish of the sea do not breed quickly enough for us to consume them at the rate that we currently do, we need to increase yields.

We probably won’t tackle the climate crisis. The time to act was 25 years ago and we’ve done virtually nothing that’s had an impact.

Even if we completely mess up the climate then Earth is still more inhabitable than some other planet in the Solar system.

Arguably we’re staving off an ice age which would make things _more_ habitable for humans.

Check your sources on that claim: it’s been widely circulated by fossil fuel lobbyists as a way to discourage action.

Surely I shouldn’t be discouraged from saying scientific facts?

Can you cite those alleged facts with something based on peer-reviewed research?

https://skepticalscience.com/heading-into-new-little-ice-age...

I don’t think I ever meant “there will be an imminent ice age” rather “normal ice age cycles will stop with current CO2 levels.”

https://theconversation.com/climate-explained-why-we-wont-be...

Because studying the planetology of the various other bodies in our solar system may spark novel ideas about how to successfully manage our own planet.

We don’t need novel ideas — the problems are well recognized and the solutions are ready to go at lower cost than inaction. The problem is that a few specific companies need to become much less profitable after decades of being able to avoid paying for externalities.

Talking about terraforming Earth is a common way of distracting from the real problem — and I say that as someone who loves the idea of exporting the solar system.

Some solutions are ready to go on a technical level but are struggling to gain enough social traction to be implemented; We should absolutely be pressuring the political sphere to move those projects forward.

There’s no guarantee that they’re even in the catchment area of the ideal solution, however, so we should be continuing to look for better ideas in parallel with implementing the best ones we have at the moment— there’s always the possibility that a Norman Borlaug will come along with a better solution than the common wisdom.

Spreading into the solar system is a long term solution.

A slightly shorter term solution: going underground.

Earth is huge, we have barely scratched the surface. There is a lot of space and resources underground. And we don't have to go anywhere, we are already here.

Exactly, seasteading and 'terraforming' deserts are other short term solutions, but for any of that to get more investment we need growing population in rich parts of the world, that would need this and would have money for this. But unfortunately we do not have that.

I think we need better marketing and just a handful of very wealthy and highly visible people to invest in those alternatives instead of going into space.

In any case, what really makes space exploration possible today, is military spending. Which means that for the alternatives to become viable, they need to have strategic military applications. Unfortunately.

Only for the select few that were allowed to leave the planet.

Except that's not what happens. What happens is people line up at the trough of government directed funding and distort the market, often negatively for a long period of time.

For example, people who are against meat consumption for climate purposes are linked through various entities to companies like BYND. So they begin to work on legislation that will profit BYND.

For another example, the solar funding debacle under Obama.

Otherwise I have no qualms with what you're saying.

> solar funding debacle

Sometimes you have to crack a few eggs. What % of startups do you expect to succeed, 100%?

The issue (as I understand it) was not that any one company failed, but that people lied about or ignored warning signs that failure was imminent for specific companies (edit: and that this may have been done due to conflict of interests). The actual policy issues and implication are hidden behind the partisan wrangling and spin that surrounded this topic.

There are legitimate concerns about conflicts on interest for people who have large investments in green companies while also lobbying strongly for particular "green" public policies. The risk is that if we uncritically accept these people at their word, we may end up with policies that do less to protect the environment and climate and more to line the pockets of the advocates.

Of course, these issues are endemic to our current political/economic systems and don't just apply to investment in climate friendly companies.

I would be much more inclined to trust the motivations of environment advocates with large investments in environmental companies if those investments were purchased and administered through some sort of blind trust to alleviate conflict on interest concerns.

What about all the coal-funded coal lobbyists?

Hence why I called it "endemic".

That solar "debacle" was ONE company failing out of over a dozen. The program itself turned a profit for Uncle Sam.

Link?

Doesn't look like that program accomplished its objectives: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/fredgraph.png?g=lMDT

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