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Comment by hypefi | Hacker News Reader

The current environmental crisis is systemic. The economic system is rigged against Nature. Unless the economic system is fixed, the incentives to destroy Nature for quick profits will remain, at the expense of long term profits that come from having stable and thriving ecosystems.

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Humankind itself is the reason. Since bronze age, we mine, use the nature and lower diversity of species. There is nothing you can do about it. People cannot live without using scarce resources, if they aren't in "stone age" stage. People don't want back to stone age. It is nice we have drugs, energy, cars, etc. But it consumes things. There is no possible economic system that can fix it. We need either downgrade to the point of not even using tools made from metals, or we need to scale up and get other planets as a resources.

We use stuff, yes, but now we overuse stuff. There is a difference between using and overusing. If it is difficult to calculate how to find the sweet spot of consumption without destruction at huge scale. At a smaller scale, it is easier, everyone of us knows that if you are living in a forest, you should use the wood in an intelligent manner. And not cut big chunks of the forest for having the luxury to overheat and over-shelter. The economic system that solves it is the one that does not use Usury or in other modern words Interest. Lending with interest should be prohibited.

Any cutoff between use and overuse is artificial. It is still use. If it is use, and if it is with billions of people, one day, some resources will be consumed. Maybe sooner, maybe later, but on million-years-scale, it doesn't make any sense anyway.

Overheating, oversheltering, both seems very artificial to me. Ok, you can have a wood cabin in forests, but what's next? Are antibiotics use or overuse? Is internet use or overuse? And who is supposed to decide? Using nonrenevables/using renevables is nice in a thing it is black/white, it has no value component in it.

I don't know how removing interest could help except making some operations nonviable. Without interest, all ventures would have to use different sources of financing. I think a demand for risky lending (where risk is compensated in a form of interest) is natural and would exist in some way anyway.

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