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Comment by diordiderot | Hacker News Reader

Your husband takes out a variable rate mortgage 120% of your homes value to spend on luxury goods, Buys a g-wagon, and starts embezzling from his company. Instead of paying for utilities you steal then from neighbors. To save on garbage collection you fly tip. The last 5 years have been wonderful for you quality of life.

You shouldn't question your situation because things are 'better'.

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What does this have to do with anything? Most of the West (let alone most of the rest of the world) is far better off than it was even just 50 years ago by almost every single metric you can conceive.

It's hard to believe it's due to financial games exclusively: people are better off in real terms.

Inequality is a problem because when members of your community are living in very different conditions, the cohesion of said community is undermined, but worrying about inequality is the archetypical first world problem: a problem nonetheless, but a problem that presumes you've come a long way.

it's not about financial games, but rather externalities. There are significant external costs of our way of life that are borne by others. That new car emits CO2 that contributes to global heating. The steaks we eat come from cows that have been fed with soy beans from cleared rainforests. etc etc.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality#Negative

It frankly still is a stretch to claim that living conditions would revert to even just 1950s levels if we reduced emissions to a sustainable level. Again, most of those improvements have been in real terms. We are simply more productive.

Do we have a good sense of how much of that increase in productivity can be sustained in a carbon neutral fashion?

is it? I think it's entirely possible that our civilisation would completely collapse.

the analogy of course assumes that there are a bunch of different problems that will come to the family when the cops, the IRS, the electric company, and their bank all come to talk to them at once.

Just as it is generally claimed by scientists that there are a bunch of different problems coming to humanity when ecosystems collapse, temperatures rise by 1.5 degrees celsius, there's not enough freshwater to go around...

it might be stretch to claim etc. etc. but nobody is making that claim, the claim is that humanity is not reducing emissions and not doing anything significant to handle when the bills come due for the last century of everything improving!

on edit: changed is a bunch to are a bunch - is a bunch is probably still correct but are a bunch sounds more correct to my ear.

The problem is not that we could not revert to even just 1950 levels.

The problem is that it's advantageous for everyone to continue to externalize the costs and let everyone else pay the bill[0].

Since everyone is doing the externalizing, no one is paying the bill. Since no one is paying the bill, the resource will be exhausted sooner or later.

The resource in question is the resilience of our own biological life support system; we're wrecking it, both by by our predatory over exploitation and by pollution. We're destroying the foundations of our own survival.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons

I love this analogy, and it's definitely a perspective to take seriously. "It's always okay, until it isn't" is something to consider, as is the idea that civilization is living on borrowed time, or borrowing from the future to pay the present.

I don't know if it's true, or if it's even something we can falsify at any moment in history, but stable civilizations have collapsed, and it's worth understanding that it could happen to ours too.

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