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Comment by chmod775 | Hacker News Reader

This comes to mind: https://streamable.com/i9scnl

If you're going to put a dollar cost on irreversibly damaging the ecosystem, it's going to be one you can't afford. Not in a thousand years.

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> If you're going to put a dollar cost on irreversibly damaging the ecosystem, it's going to be one you can't afford. Not in a thousand years.

Doesn't work. You're essentially saying to assign the value of infinity. Then if there is a one in a trillion chance of ecosystem damage, you have to refuse even if the alternate is to definitely lose a billion lives. Can't be infinity.

At this point you're at the old joke. Man asks a woman if she would have sex with him for a hundred billion dollars. She thinks about it a while and then concedes that yes, she would. The man then asks the woman if she would have sex with him for five dollars. She's offended. She says, what kind of woman do you think I am? The man replies that they've already established that and now they're just negotiating on the price.

You can't just use an astronomical number. It has to be as accurate as possible because it's being traded off against other real things of significant importance. If the number is too low, bad things happen. But if the number is too high, different bad things happen.

Are you doing the reflexive disagreement thing?

"Astronomical" is the cost of putting ecosystems on an irreversible, downward spiral.

"Astronomical" isn't an actual number. You still have to decide if it's a billion dollars or a trillion dollars or a billion trillion dollars. It's possible, and harmful, to choose a number which is too large.

Have you considered that, maybe, economy is simply not the right tool to consider the problem?

Your question is like asking "How hard do I need to hit with the hammer on this puzzle to have the pieces fall in place?"

I find myself agreeing with you and at the same time thinking that your position is absurd. Let me try to put this into words. I might be missing parts of your point.

If we measure out the cost of avoiding total environmental collapse - which also implies human extinction - and we put a finite number on it, we've said 'the survival of human life on earth is worth this much and not more'.

It's really hard for me to get my head around the idea that we would find a dollar value that has any meaning that would properly describe the limit of how much humans value their own survival. I wouldn't know where to start, what to measure, or what to exclude. I'd personally be loath to excluding anything, as a fan of existence.

I'm not convinced I'm right to think putting a dollar value on existence is folly -- but I can't conceptualize what it would mean.

if you can't put a real cost on something you can't actually weigh it, what happens if you say ecosystem damage is astronomical in cost and the loss of jobs if we don't build this dam costs 1.5 million dollars is the dam gets built because nobody has put any sort of measurable cost on what happens if the dam gets built.

to win a game you have to play that game.

Not disagreeing with you exactly, but given the global ecosystem predates money, is it really outside the realm of possibility that money can't be used to accurately describe or measure it?

Lacking the ability to understand a problem doesn't mean the problem doesn't exist.

Species went extinct before money was invented.

And what if the cost of not doing that is also "astronomical"? Billions of people need to eat, work, raise their families. Somewhere between mass starvation/war and environmental destruction is a cost less than "astronomical" which people are willing to pay. It has to be realistic or it won't happen.

It seems like you might be missing part of this discussion: with widespread environmental collapse as described -- irreversible decline -- humanity faces extinction, regardless of the number of jobs in the economy.

Yes, but unrealistic measures won't motivate people to make the necessary changes. There are costs people will pay and ones they won't. You're not going to care much about the future if your kids go hungry now because there are no jobs. Particularly when it's based on a future prediction that might turn out differently.

> You have to refuse even if the alternate is to definitely lose a billion lives. Can't be infinity.

Well, if the entire ecosystem collapses humanity is guaranteed to die - unless we figure out how to eat acid and breathe toxic air. That's 7-8 billion lives.

It might be safer for biodiversity if economists don't think too much about it :P The biggest source of damage might well be "optimizing" with a badly-framed/biased model... while the short-term "value" can be easily argued for, the long-term costs will typically be underestimated/externalized.

Not in a thousand years, yes. But eventually all ecosystems on earth will end in a few billion years when the sun enters its red giant phase. So irreversible damage is coming absent some intervention.

With that happening, "pricing" things will also have to account for whether the actions will lead to some sort of ecosystems lasting longer. The really long term will do amazing things with compounding...

You could account for billions of years in terms of money. Where as destroying things in a thousand because that is our business horizon is much more likely, and actually it's more like a year or two from current business practices, maybe a decade for long term thinking. If our business horizon was a billion years, then all the money and economic wealth in the world and quality of life indicators, and jobs would be so minuscule as to be a rounding error.

> If you're going to put a dollar cost on irreversibly damaging the ecosystem, it's going to be one you can't afford. Not in a thousand years.

Is there such a thing as a change that can't be reversed in a thousand year ? Just think of a scenario in which we stop consuming carbon and plastic overnight for a thousand year.

Extinction

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