Ask HN: What's your willingness to pay for climate change? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What's your willingness to pay for climate change?

3 pointskite_and_code4 comments

I often hear people say that they would like politicians to do more against climate change. As the next question, I ask them: "what's your individual willingness to pay for that problem" (on a monthly basis). This question often hits them hard and the typical first objection is: "if it's only me, I am not willing to do this." That's a fair point and exactly the kind of problem that kickstarter was made for.

So, then I am asking them: "how much would you be willing to spend per month as a climate change subscription if 1,000 or 100,000 or even 10,000,000 million people would join you and the subscription only starts if enough people joined".

Would love to hear your thoughts on this!

PS: For now, let's not focus on how we spend the money. There are enough potential alternatives and we can figure out the best allocation after we solved the initial funding problem. In the end, this is more about starting a movement where politicians and other decision makers can see that there is a large and growing number of people who are willing to spend their hard-earned money on that problem! This is very different from just lip-service because it's easy to say "I would like the climate to change" but then not put your money where your mouth is.

It’s cost benefit analysis. Anthropogenic Climate Change will make the world more expensive in the future by reducing agricultural output, submerging major cities, and causing large migrations of people. Putting carbon in the atmosphere for economic growth was like borrowing money at a high interest rate and now that interest is coming due. Do we pay down the principal today or pay the interest later? What will happen, like any debt society accrues, is that the children will pay for the debt their parents decided to create.

I do not agree with wanting to pay before a solution if I don’t know what it is because the US has enough government corruption to dissuade me from wanting to contribute to a “general fund” at the mercy of elected officials and bureaucrats. I don’t care what politicians think. Politicians always find ways to pay for things they want regardless of funding sources (ex: Iraq War) and they do not want to act on climate.

Politicians are supposed to be “leaders” they should act like “leaders”, if they are not leading, they will never listen to you. For a political answer, best thing citizens can do in a democracy is stop electing incumbents and start electing people who take climate seriously.

Maybe the premise is flawed...it may cost less to fight climate change. For example, looking just at greenhouse gas emissions, transportation, electricity generation, and agriculture account for roughly 2/3 of emissions. I have solar panels on my roof that generate 100% of my electricity, and it saves me money over what I was paying before. I have worked from home since 2015, and have averaged half the miles driven per year versus when I worked in an office. This saves on gas and wear and tear on my car. I also eat vegetarian one day a week for both health reasons and to cut down on the impact to the environment. This depends on what meat you swap out and what vegetables and fruit you swap in, but for me it is a savings. The total savings for all of these isn't huge, but it is about $400-$500 monthly

The climate has always changed. Nothing in the universe is ever not changing, so "climate change" is not the real name of this issue. Maybe the concern is actually CO2 emissions. Humans have added about 100 ppm of CO2 to the atmosphere over about a century. It's unknown and unknowable what effect this is having, because we live in the most complex of complex systems. People often try to simulate it via "models", aka garbage closed-source programs, but they're toys and cannot possibly tell us much, because complex systems are fundamentally not amenable to simulation. But if we look at Earth's history, 400 ppm of CO2 is not much. Not long ago, CO2 ppm was twice what it is today, and there was no disaster. Stepping back and trying to analyze the situation more fundamentally, we know that the planet has encased itself in ice and then thawed itself multiple times, all without human intervention.

But climate change is a perfect bogeyman for the left. It invokes primal fear, guilt about our decadent living standards, etc. And most importantly, it happens so slowly that by the time the predictions are shown to be false, everyone's forgotten about them, or it's been so long that it's easy to suggest that the predictions weren't serious. There's a vast graveyard of false predictions that the MSM doesn't want to talk about, because "Things are actually OK, there is no crisis" is not going to get anyone to click.

Point being, someone near you is actually suffering, and you have the power to help them. The problem is happening now, it's verifiable with your own eyes, and you can improve the situation with your own hands, in a reasonable amount of time, and witness the aftermath yourself. IMO, that's a much better thing to work on than an alleged crisis that, twenty years hence, will still not have arrived. Doomsday will have been postponed, and nobody will believe you when you tell them about the false predictions that were made about the poor polar bears, or the walruses, or the penguins, or the glaciers, or snow in general, or sea levels, or the coral reefs, etc.

None. I don't believe climate is changing because of humans. Climate has always changed and always will.

Now don't get me wrong, I don't overlook pollution which is the serious problem here imho.

There's already a CO2 tax on everything you consume. What do they do with the money?

> we can figure out the best allocation after we solved the initial funding problem

Right... this is the best way to get your money stolen by some con artist. The fact is the problem isn't money (look at central banks printing like there's no tomorrow) but what to do with it.

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