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Comment by jakelazaroff | Hacker News Reader

Sure, but we can walk and chew gum at the same time. It's easy for me to directly contribute to carbon removal, because of things like this. It's a little more difficult for me to help pump less carbon into the air — I can try to minimize my carbon footprint, but ultimately the thing we need is investment in clean energy and legislation forcing companies to limit their emissions.

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My point was that Stripe's massive resources are better spent lobbying/writing legislation/researching how to properly implement a carbon tax than this.

Why would Stripe write legislation to create a new tax? How does that help their bottom line or their customers' bottom line?

It helps about as much as this initiative does.

Presumably because the Collison brothers recognize that climate change poses an existential threat to the well being of their firm, their customers and their employees, and that because of their awesome entrepreneurial abilities their investors have granted them BDFL powers over Stripe.

Spending money lobbying for something that has no chance of passing would be incredibly stupid.

I'm glad people are taking direct action and not waiting around for some pie in the sky grand solution that simply isn't coming.

The fallacy here is that because most people intuitively understand the near-impossibility of coordinated legislative action, they assume that it must be MORE difficult than some sort of engineering solution (whose magnitude they do not intuitively understand).

They are wrong. Yes, coordinated action to reduce emissions is nearly impossible... but it's less impossible than the alternative. There's no negotiating with thermodynamics.

I don't think it's impossible. It just seems that way if your only experience with politics is neoliberal US politics over the last 40 years. At some point the dam breaks. In the US neoliberalism is at the same point Soviet communism was in the 80's. It's a complete failure and everyone knows it.

Part of our political system's fiction and ability to make no progress is deeply ingrained in lobbying and expenses that is more PR than impact. I think this is the parent post's point.

We think its a "grand pie in the sky", meanwhile some other countries are making real moves. Corporations meanwhile get to "do something" while in reality doing very little.

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