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Comment by eloff | Hacker News Reader

It doesn't matter if people like it or not, you just make it so companies or people have to pay for the negative externalities through taxes or regulation and the problem is solved. The market will naturally rebalance and innovate under the new constraints.

If only we had responsible, effective government with the balls to do what has to be done to protect the future. This business of short term thinking and to hell with the future is not only ruining things it is very literally current generations stealing from future generations.

I think we should make a law to compensate for that. Those social security obligations where the current working generations pay for past generations retirement? Let's reduce that considerably. Let's also raise estate taxes. It's fair, they created and benefited from this mess and then left it to us to bear.

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> It doesn't matter if people like it or not,

Does if you want it done by elected politicians in a properly functioning democracy.

I don't think that policies like carbon taxes are that terribly unpopular (depends on the location.)

But even then democratic governments do things that are unpopular all the time. I don't think it's untenable. But even if it cost politicians their re-election, it's still the right thing to do.

Gillet jaunes disagree very strongly. Even if an idea is popular in principle and is a good idea there can be tons of anger over whose particular ox is gored by it, regardless of how skewed the priorities may be in the grand scheme of things if it is perceived as "unfair".

From barely visible offshore wind turbine complaints in Martha's Vineyard, to reluctance of former coal miners to retrain to less lucrative industries to the original luddites solving problems can piss /a lot/ of people off.

It doesn't make them non-viable but it isn't as easy as you would think from superficial popularity.

But isn't the whole thing "now oil and oil-based-products are bad" kind of unfair to all the developing nations? We, the rich western countries, we're able to profit of the non-sustainable benefits we got from fossil fuels and their products, while a large part of the earth's population didn't profit nearly as much as we have. This is a line of thinking I've seen underrepresented in a lot of the discussions about the environment and the future of our planet and species in general.

They are also stuck for better or worse as "technological vassals" as not driving research and development. This isn't a slight on their intellectual capabilities at all but an acknowledgement of realities and scales - they are just as human as us. Third world nations don't develop their own novel weapons systems beyond guerilla repurposing like technical trucks - they don't have the budget for it. Clever individuals can still come up with something new but they lack the institutional support for it to be "big".

One silver lining they get is R&D of others can help them skip the step some steps compared to the past west's development paths. Cell phones connected the third world in absense of wires and individual autorouting compared to party lines and operator based dispatches. Something similar is happening to a degree with renewables.

Renewables are a nice fit to them in several ways, the storage and grid free unreliability is unfortunately nothing new to them. It is a bit of a situational dubious blessing like "We don't need to worry about chemo being carcogenic - you already have stage 3 cancer". Not ideal but few things are for the third world even if they are improving.

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