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Comment by annexrichmond | Hacker News Reader

That will disproportionately affect lower income households who can't as easily withstand these rising costs, which further drives income inequality.

> Rising oil prices makes the market naturally move away

This is trivialization of the transition as the worlds depends oil in many ways: development of cars (electric or otherwise), airplanes, solar panels, vaccines, acetaminophen, etc. -- these are all petroleum-derived products.

I recommend this article on the difficulty of the transition https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2021/11/en...

Given this dependence, axing our production just means we have to rely more on other countries and given that climate change is a global problem -- what's the difference? If we do it here, perhaps we innovate on making its extraction more eco friendly (which has been the case for the last 20 years)

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> That will disproportionately affect lower income households who can't as easily withstand these rising costs, which further drives income inequality.

I see your compassion, but income inequality isn't driven by prices, it's driven by the employers not paying enough to their employees. Prices can't fix that.

> This is trivialization of the transition

Is it? I read it more as this being an important step toward addressing the climate crisis.

> as the worlds depends oil in many ways

How much oil is used in making acetaminophen? Why even bring it up? Nobody is saying "no oil," they're saying "stop polluting so much".

> perhaps we innovate on making its extraction more eco friendly

The extraction is a small problem. The global warming it causes is the large problem. Less pumped oil means less burned oil which means fewer greenhouse gases.

> I see your compassion, but income inequality isn't driven by prices, it's driven by the employers not paying enough to their employees. Prices can't fix that.

The two are intertwined. Every big-ticket item costs at least $1000 round numbers these days. If you halved that threshold to $500, you would put more valuable goods in reach to more people without adjusting wages.

You can do the same by increasing wages, but that threshold might go up in response to $2000.

It’s all about prices relative to wages, not either in isolation

this is why focusing on the wage part of inequality is the wrong approach.

Figure out how to make products cost less and cheaper -> more can enjoy them and everyone becomes richer.

Print more money to give to people to fight inequality? If you don't invest to make supply more efficient, all you'll get is inflation.

Rich people don't buy the same products as poor people. In fact, most rich people (Elon) own capital that is being invested in part to make production more efficient.

If you were to tax all of Elon's wealth and give it to the poor, it's just not the case that everyone could suddenly afford a Tesla. What would happen is that nobody could afford it, even people that can afford it today, because you are moving capital away from investment and into consumption.

"Welfare spending doesn't help poor people due to inflation" sounds pretty dubious to me...

it does, but you also have to tax some people so that they spend less.

Recent narratives is that you can do welfare for 'free', either by printing money and not worry about inflation or default, or by taxing 'billionaires' so nobody feels it except 100 people.

> I see your compassion, but income inequality isn't driven by prices, it's driven by the employers not paying enough to their employees.

Not exactly, it's also driven by price increases. If employers give their employees a 50% pay increase, but prices increase by 50% then that pay raise is rolled back by inflation. Wealthier people more often have their money in assets, with values that increase alongside inflation. This is largely the dynamic we're seeing in the US: labor shortage means people get paid more, but those increased wages are getting eaten by higher prices.

Very low income people frequently have more debt than assets. They also see their net worth increase from inflation.

Also the sources I see show nominal wages growing faster than inflation for low income households, meaning that their real wages are actually increasing.

Climate change will also disproportionately lower income households.

> perhaps we innovate on making its extraction more eco friendly

Wait what? Fossil fuels will never be eco friendly. The best thing for renewable energy is to be more economical than their competitors, which is far more achievable when oil is expensive. It should be obvious that oil prices doubling do not cause electric cars or solar panels to double in price, even if they do become slightly more expensive.

Well that's just false. As of 2020 US reduced its emissions by over 20% below 2005 levels which was mostly due to fracking natural gas instead of coal.

Not saying that's all rainbows either but you're suggesting there can't possibly be any improvement here. Sounds like a bad bet.

You claimed that the best way to make oil consumption more eco friendly was by reducing the environmental impact of extracting it, rather than letting high cost motivate consumers to switch to renewables. Now you've backtracked to supporting natural gas to replace coal. It is true that switching from coal to natural gas is a big win for CO2 emissions, but there are clear diminishing returns on that. Since 2005, the US has already gone from 50% coal power to 20%. The problem is that our current levels of oil and natural gas consumption are incompatible with hitting emissions targets. The mere act of burning those fuels at the current rate already puts those targets out of reach -- before even considering the cost of extracting them.

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