Apple champions fighting climate change yet lobbies against its legislation | Hacker News Reader

Apple champions fighting climate change yet lobbies against its legislation

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36 pointssnvzz10 comments

Maybe I am Cynical here... But I guess I know why they do this.

You see, as long as there is no law forcing competitors to do what they themselves do, they can claim to be more green/planet concise then all the rest.

This chimes well with a certain cohorts of consumers. But if all competitors where forced to be equally “green” this advantage would fall away

I don't think you're being too cynical at all. People need to stop believing the myth that "the market" (aka ordinary customers) will solve the problem by just boycotting companies into submission. I can't think of any instances where this actually happened or the threat actually had any meaningful impact on companies that they didn't internally want to enact already.

As an addendum, the only powerful force outside of laws for moving a company's position, is its own high-value employees. It's not boycotts, but sometimes its enough employees internally who can get a company to change its ways, but often the execs or some groups will try to band-aid grievances or create illusory changes to try and calm the uproar but still keep doing what they want secretly.

Every corporation does this. It’s just another marketing angle.

Bingo. Corporations don't have morals, they have interests. Sometimes those interests can be served by championing this moral cause or that one, but it really doesn't go beyond that.

Apple isn't lobbying against the legislation, they are lobbying to change the funding mechanism.

Apple has already largely decarbonised their own energy supplies at their own expense. The current legislation is funded by an increase in corporation tax, which they would pay. I can see why they don't want to have to fund everyone else's decarbonisation as well as their own.

Carbon credits and related offset "products" are going to cost a whole lot more once they become mandated by legislation.

Same goes for supply chain costs and retail products downstream of companies subject to those mandates.

This is why they aren't going to be mandated in the US. There just isn't popular support for costly measures such as this[1], and this complaint (I wouldn't really call it "news") shows the cognitive dissonance that happens when you confuse agreement with a particular cause for commitment to that cause. Neither the US public nor the US government is sufficiently concerned about carbon output to hurt their bottom line, nor is there a willingness to do so. There is, however, great willingness to subsidize various businesses, give out loans, rebates, and other benefits. So knowing that the public has no interest in the stick but always wants carrots, you are better off advocating for research on energy breakthroughs rather than fantasizing about some strict regime of carbon mandates in the US.

[1]https://google.com/search?hl=en&q=households%20only%20willin...

I don't understand what people think they're saying when they use this weird factoid.

People don't want to spend much money dealing with climate change? Well, that seems reasonable, so we should use the most effective and efficient methods to deal with it, so we institute a carbon tax and use the full power of modern capitalism to generate solutions cheaply.

No wait, it seems we're actually arguing that people do want to spend more money than that on climate change, as long as you don't use it to apply price incentives but instead tax it in some non carbon related manner and hand it out as subsidies?

Though in this specific case, Apple is arguing to not fund it through corporate tax rises, which could be seen as a generic tax on everything, which I'd kind of agree with. I want the corporations releasing fossil carbon (equivalents) into the air to pay more, not some random company, because then they have an incentive to stop doing so.

> Well, that seems reasonable, so we should use the most effective and efficient methods to .. [do what people are strongly opposed to doing]

Not sure why this is so hard to understand, but people don't support these types of taxes and if you try to force them on people, you will be thrown out of power and all of your policies reversed by the blowblack, including the subsidies. In fact you will find even extra taxes piled onto "clean" power by the blowback.

You can't just unleash a personal inner-dictator and try to force people to do something they have no desire to do. In a democracy, that is quite difficult.

There is a reason why, despite 20 years of trying, the green movement has not been able to get this legislation passed. There is no reason to believe that merely with the passage of time, highly unpopular policies will become popular. What has gotten passed is subsidies for green energy. Subsidies are popular. And in a low IR environment, it's great opportunity to heavily invest in nuclear, hydro, and R&D for cheaper, cleaner energy sources that increase, rather than decrease, people's standard of living. The future is one of cheap, abundant power and increasing energy usage per capita, as has been the historical trend. Moreover historically power has always been subsidized, not taxed (on net). There is no future in an agenda of taxing or rationing energy.

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