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Comment by aksss | Hacker News Reader

You kidding me? We're all getting the coke. Just because you're not Scarface doesn't avoid the fact that all of us are awash in plastics, silicone, rare earth metals, concrete, steel, precious metals, alloys, goods from far flung lands, industrial agriculture and many assumptions about available services that rely on the same and ravenous upstream fossil fuel consumption. We (as human consumers) never had it so good, and if that luxury is unevenly distributed, the fact remains that the tide continues to lift all boats globally. You certainly benefit from the aggregate bounty society as a whole has reaped (enjoy that Starbucks!) and directly are living a better life today than someone of your station would have lived 300 years ago. I don't even know you in the least, but am comfortable making that statement categorically because the difference is global capabilities is that profound.

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generally one makes a distinction between Scarface and people who do an occasional line at a party though.

Americans and citizens of high GDP countries are totally the scarfaces in this scenario

I mean sure, except for the ones who aren't.

If the average citizen of the U.S is scarface what is a koch brother then? A monster made up of a thousand scarfaces all shouting say hello to my little friend in unison?

If the average citizen of the U.S is scarface what about someone who works at Greenpeace, doesn't have a car and lives frugally? Probably scarface in comparison to the average untouchable in India but I don't know enough to make that comparison.

I think folks are generally confusing three different topics here: per capita share of wealth, per capita material consumption, and per capita CO2 production.

Warren Buffet has roughly 100,000X the wealth of the average american (~700k), but Warren buffet does not produce 10^5 as much co2 or consume 10^5 as much iron.

Seph-reed posted: >Not usually a fan of us vs them mentality, but your use of "we" here feels bad. Surely, it's all of us that use these resources, nobody on HN is self sufficient (please be the exception). But at the same time, most of us aren't getting much of the "cocaine" here, at least relatively.

This begs the question of what the threshold is for when it stops being a collective "us" problem, and becomes a "them" problem because of "their" disproportionate contribution to the problem. This [1] suggests that the richest 20% of americans account for 30% of US carbon emissions, or about 1.5x the average. If the bottom 80% are still emitting 70% of the emissions, than I would say it is still a collective "us" problem. If you somehow reduced the emissions from the top 20% richest americans to 0, the average american would still emit 300% more than the global average.

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016041201...

This is a xomolete misinterpretation of today's economic and resource situation. The real tragedy is that all this is a conpletely unneccesary wanton destruction. Thrre is no coke, it serves no purpose.

Pick amy product on a supermarket shelf or on Amazon, and you wil find that raw materials account for maybe 20% of its final price tops. They are called commodities for a reason, and its production of those raw materials that does the lions share of pollution. You could replace all manufacturing with a combonation of nuclear power and reneables, and youd hardly change the price of the final product.

There is no spoon?

It's often said that most of the (developed world) economy depends on consumers. Rich people tend to have a greater proportion of financial assets compared to consumption. When people criticize the rich, it's pretty standard to say they're stingy, they hoard wealth etc. Conversely when the rich consume, they're at least "creating jobs".

So that seems to imply to me that ordinary people (in the rich countries) shouldn't be underestimated from an environmental perspective, and because our morality is pro-consumer it reinforces waste. I don't think that's brainwashing by the rich, I think that's just how people are, in Western society at least.

Sure, economic equality will lead to more direct consumption than inequality, all else equal. That said, I'd rather have equality plus appropriate Pigouvian taxation than have to rely on inequality to do the environmental rationing for us.

A more equal society would probably have a greater chance of enacting Pigouvian taxes anyway because political power and economic power would be less intertwined.

As you point out, cost has very little to do with the bulk consumption of natural materials, and seems tangential to the topic of discussion.

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