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Comment by ethbro | Hacker News Reader

> have "safety of environment" as a clear and unambiguous incentive

That's non-trivial to do in practice.

It's already incentivized, via inspections and fines. What you're presumably talking about is prioritizing it above other incentives.

Which gets into how much risk is acceptable and how much risk mitigation is reasonable to pay for. Hint: never enough that risk approaches zero.

I absolutely think fines (and especially inspections, or likelihood of catching violations) should be increased, but the world economy is still transitioning off oil.

It's easy to forget that we can absolutely put such a premium on risk that energy prices spike, that suppresses downstream consumers and economic activity, that causes worse outcomes.

IMHO, accelerating the shift to clean renewables, while simultaneously continuing to raise fines and regulation on oil pipelines as the actual energy mix shifts is the optimal choice.

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> That's non-trivial to do in practice.

$1M fine for every gallon spilled. Any attempts to falsify data will lead to imprisonment and 5x fines per gallon. Boom, properly incentivized.

And what effect does that have on energy prices?

Slightly more expensive to the energy companies, cheaper for the countries the pipeline travels through and the people who live there.

I'm not seeing a downside.

Who cares? The market will adapt.

Billions of people care. The market is you and your family as you deal with increased costs of living or lack of power and other goods.

> It's easy to forget that we can absolutely put such a premium on risk that energy prices spike, that suppresses downstream consumers and economic activity, that causes worse outcomes.

This kind of undermines the validity of your point, as it carries an assumption of wanting to churn through as many natural resources as possible.

If you care about environmental sustainability, every time you hear "reduced economic activity" you should think "sounds great!". We've figured out how to produce so much stuff that our homes are full and we throw things away every several years to get new ones.

Economic priests want to keep the machine running full tilt under a misguided idea that sustainability can somehow be priced in. But compare the general time to fix (or simply maintain!) something at your general hourly rate to the cost of buying a shiny new one. Thinking that this harsh dynamic can be abstracted and then recouped somewhere else is simply more unsustainable bubble thinking.

It's a straw man to cast all concerns about economy sustainability as "exploit natural resources as quickly as we can."

There are serious, life-threatening concerns about reorienting the world to a lower-growth, lower-carbon model.

And to substitute fervor for fact is just as much of a fallacy as the global free trade crowd committed, before recently admitting that maybe they should have thought harder about the dislocating side effects and funding strategic workforce reskilling programs.

We don't get to a brighter future by ignoring the hard questions and consequences of proposed paths.

Sure, any sort of abrupt change has serious (possibly life threatening) concerns. But there is a difference in arguing for caution, and perpetuating the same assumptions that have lead to the current state of affairs. Drawing attention to one of those assumptions rather than letting it continue in the background does not make for a straw man.

"Economic activity" directly translates into "use natural resources". The overwhelming fallacy seems to be this idea that sustainability will somehow eventually, not today, but some day soon, be priced into the economy such that we can have large sums sloshing back and forth but the externalities will be fully captured. This seems like an economically convenient myth, analogous to the free trade crowd's handwaving about comparative advantage.

Sorry I did not see how to succinctly express the overall arc of what I said with less "fervor". If two people are having a casual conversation about say baseball, but you think it is harmful and destructive, it's impossible to express without sounding like a looney. (I used baseball because I think it's innocuous. Whereas any real example would inherently be polarizing).

It seemed like you were characterizing alternative approaches in a way in which you could more easily refute their concerns.

I'd be pleased as punch if we moved to a post-resource economy, but I also think it's going to be the hardest thing we've ever attempted (in an international sense).

The Paris climate agreements are a minor skirmish on the scale of what needs to be done.

Because, ultimately, we're talking about some wealthy countries having less (compared to business as usual) in order to strike agreement with poorer countries not to run their growth at full tilt.

So when we say things like "stricter environmental regulations," we're really saying "stricter environmental regulations worldwide." Otherwise we're just offloading pollution to the current poorest country with a labor force.

And it's going to take some serious financial and developmental persuasion (and ugly enforcement) to get someone to not do something that would make them better off.

... It is heartening to see the debate being reframed in justice terms. Because that seems to have a better chance of winning hearts and minds to the extent necessary.

> It's already incentivized, via inspections and fines.

Well, the inspections aren't happening - since major leaks are happening. And the fines are very small, otherwise a bunch of these companies would have gone under.

More importantly - no criminal charges against the management of these companies and the engineers who signed off on the thing.

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