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Comment by tekstar | Hacker News Reader

(This is all a rough idea in my head, with no sources to back up claims, but putting it out there nonetheless)

Over the course of history, how we evaluate companies and value them has changed. The concept of valuing companies based on quarterly earnings growth, is a relatively new concept and is not a necessary attribute of capitalism. So let's change how we evaluate companies.

What if we evaluated companies based on their environmental benefit or impact again? Tax break their environmental impact, tax break their environmental benefit?

I want to see "Ford company announces third quarter results, sequestering 100b tons more than expected".

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> The concept of valuing companies based on quarterly earnings growth

Maybe not quarterly earnings but there was always some sort of financial metric.

Because financial metrics cut through the BS. If you read HN and reddit you'd think Zuckerberg is some sort of terrorist hiding in the mountains of Pakistan, conspiring 24/7 to compromise the mental health of Americans, whereas in reality if Facebook is ubiquitous in our lives, there's a clear reason for it.

And even if Zuck mandated a maximum Facebook time per day per user, you'd have people creating burner accounts to circumvent that.

That's how people love Facebook, and it shows on quarterly earnings, nothing but perfection ever since they went public.

Same goes for Google and Microsoft.

The market for techno-utopianism is alive and well even without laws which mandate things such as forceful carbon sequestration, all you have to do is look at the price action of Tesla and Bitcoin.

Plus once you make a law it's very hard to remove it, just look at the Patriot Act.

Americans don't care about terrorism the same way they did back in October 2001, but still the Patriot Act is as harmful to privacy as it was back then.

There is no guarantee that Americans will care about climate change, 10 years down the road...matter of fact it's more likely that people will forget about it altogether once they'd start losing their parents to heart disease, cancer, alzheimer and not glamorous climate change

> financial metrics cut through the BS

Negative externalities are not 'BS' though, and may well eventually get internalized at some point, which would then be quite pertinent to the financials.

An example would be a company that has high profits because it eliminates waste by dumping it in the river. Their financials are good, but they don't tell you the whole picture, because sooner or later, something is likely to be done about the waste dumping.

You're making a point about the permanence of laws by citing the Patriot Act, which started to expire in 2006 and expired completely in 2020.

Permanence of the status quo adjusting would make more sense. Even if the Patriot Act technically expired, I would think a lot of the extra powers granted have had staying power. I’m not saying I’m right about this for sure.

I think of Homeland Security and the Patriot Act together. They were both reactions. Homeland Security isn’t going any where. It’s likely Space Force isn’t going any where even while it is still considered a punch line

I'm not sure if I'm misunderstanding, but wouldn't introducing tax breaks simply be reducing the problem back to financial metrics?

I think what you're talking about most closely aligns with charities, and how charities talk about their societal impact they're able to have. Even then, the discussion seems to generally come back to impact per dollar.

I'm not sure how we can replace thinking of incentives in a financial sense with their societal impact, but it would be great if we could.

I would perhaps put forth the idea of a "hours/years saved" metric vs. some next best alternative? Good luck to the accountants on this one.

I'm trying to say the market would judge Ford, primarily, by its quarterly environmental impact instead of its quarterly finances. Stock goes up when they've sequestered carbon, stock goes down when they're burning carbon.

And the preface was attempting to say that judging a company by it's quarterly finances is already arbitrary, and flawed, and a relatively new concept. I can't find the link but I think it was suggested and socially adopted only in the last 40 years as the True Metric to evaluate companies.

Or, suppose the government charged a fee to emit CO2, and paid the money to companies who pulled the CO2 back out of the atmosphere?

Then everyone is paying the direct cost of fixing the damage they do, and the money is going to people who fix the damage.

I think we're making baby steps in that direction. I don't know the details as much as I like, but Certified B-Corporations are a thing https://bcorporation.net/

Companies will be evaluated that way if the government intervenes in the carbon market and fixes the price. But profits will still be the metric, as it should be. You'll just get much better alignment between profits and the environment.

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