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Comment by nivenkos | Hacker News Reader

Strange that it proposes buying "climate-friendly" stuff at the end - the best approach is to not buy new things at all, and focus on reducing electronics waste, planned obsolescence, etc. - where FOSS can have a critical role.

The real "solution" will come from increasing sales tax to 25% like Sweden, increasing gasoline tax to $5 per gallon like the UK, energy tax, carbon emissions tax, fuel duty, etc. - people can't consume when they can't afford it. And necessity is the mother of all inventions afterall.

And then we can all struggle in poverty with high taxes and interest rates, whilst a few rich Americans live in luxury with their private jets and multiple SUVs, etc.

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Tax everything the amount it costs to clean up the pollution it causes, and if a country isn't signed up to this, tax all their imports the same amount, overestimate.

Then use that tax money to clean up the pollution.

Side effects: people will invent cheaper ways to clean up pollution

Also side effects: people will invent less polluting ways to produce goods and services.

It's shocking how environmental impact and taxation are completely disconnected at the moment.

The question is how to measure the environmental impact of companies and their supply chains in a global and traceable way. Here there are first exciting approaches like Geospatial ESG Geospatical Finance. Here are more links on the topic: https://www.cgfi.ac.uk/ https://www.wwf.org.uk/what-we-do/projects/nature-and-spatia...

real side effect: countries stop importing, instead they start producing their own stuff inefficiently leading up to more pollution.

don't think so.

- producing concrete, steel, (including mining) etc is no more polluting in other countries - producing vegetables, bananas and other stuff is interesting because you want to have them in countries that don't have them => eat local stuff - water is the same in every country - clothes are not less difficult to produce efficiently etc.

so yes, we could stop importing and building stuff right here.

Now this would have two very educational effects: - mining stuff makes your nice countryside, well, not nice. Lesson learned: yeah, you do have some footprint and you must accept it. - building stuff paying workers at your country's rate may make things more expensive to you. Lesson learned: you must value work.

We're talking about future generations here. If it means changing our core values, then, we'll have to change them.

Do you have a source for that claim? Outsourcing doesn't seem to have to led to less pollution. Most heavy industry that has been outsourced has been outsourced to companies with looser environmental regulations and labor protections and most reporting conveniently ignores a lot of the offshore pollution (which is often hidden behind several layers of indirection to avoid accountability) when measuring the pollution caused by domestic companies.

I also wouldn't call the shredding and landfilling of consumer goods efficient and those practices seem to have largely arisen from the ability to mass produce goods cheaply making discounting them further less profitable than simply destroying them.

This also ignores the inefficiencies promoted by global manufacturing that involves shipping half-finished products around the world many times over because shipping is effectively free compared to paying for all the manufacturing to happen in one place (and handling the finishing touches domestically allows marketing the product as domestically made).

There doesn't seem to be a one-to-one correlation between efficiency (which literally just measures cost reduction, as externalities don't factor into it unless they have a price tag) and less pollution (unless you handwave carbon capture and offsetting as magic and ignore the real world effects to only focus on numbers on paper).

I think the one argument you can make is that cutting down on outsourcing will tank the post-colonial economies that are dependent on having their resources extracted and using their cheap labor to create margins for foreign markets. But that's really more telling of how exploitative supposed economic development aid has been for them by failing to restore any level of self-sustainability they had prior to colonialism.

Child labor in arsenic mines (to use a graphic but not entirely hyperbolic example) may be contributing to GDP but that doesn't mean it's desirable or that the countries doing it are better off than they would be if it weren't.

The elites will carve out exemptions to avoid degrading their lifestyles.

No please. Taxing doesn't work when government is corrupt. And, many countries in this world are very corrupt.

As opposed to most large corporations of the world? Corporations are literally self-serving by definition, so even moderately corrupt governments would seem altruistic by contrast.

Real side effect: poor people get poorer and rich people don't care.

That's how most taxes work.

Isn't this the effect of ignoring the externalities anyway? Except delayed until some potentially irreversible, acute threshold like the wet bubble or flooding low lying areas?

This doesn't seem viable in practice, determining how much polution a product causes for every product you tax is impractical and although not guaranteed I would think it likely that you'll simply export less when you start imposing the same taxes on the exported products.

I'd bet it would increase inequality as well, given that people with low incomes proportionally pay more taxes on bought goods and services than people with higher incomes (I'm quite certain that's the case but economics really isn't my strong suit).

You haven't weighed the consequences enough: I can afford a modern home, I built one, well insulated, with a proper VMC+heat-pump, p.v. since here is a good enough option, all-electric for cooking and heating etc so yes, I can consume without produce extra pollution and potentially publish that like that very text here. Is exactly USELESS for the humanity because those who can afford are a small percentage of all humans, and such cohort below a certain age is mostly interesting in doing so or have already done that in the recent past while an older fraction is simply not interested due to their life expectancy. MOST other humans can't, wanting or not.

That means you suggest to push more and more people to poverty, generating unrest, repressions, dictatorships "to keep the society up", witch end up like in the first part of the '900 in nazi-fascist regimes the same polluter and criminals against humanity who fund them in the past fund the same move now.

A very simple example: WFH means I can work on a desktop. A desktop means a computer that can last 10+ years in relative comfort for 99% of jobs and be destined to such jobs when not enough anymore for more demanding activities like a new desktop for a child out of the parent now-dismissed "workstation-desktop". If I have a less wealthy life probably I can't use a desktop, I might get just a craptop able to last two years maximum from some company. An EV for me might be nice: not using it every days I can mostly recharge from solar so it might be cheap enough and protect against fuel shortage around my homes if/when they'll happen. Someone who use a car daily because he/she need can't. Those who cook with gas mostly do that because that's are the tools they have and can't afford buying new ones.

FLOSS is a must not for the Earth but for us humans, to preserve Democracy, to avoid a day being locked out of our home, having lost our third-private-party provided IDs, locked out from our car etc. FLOSS principles of development, witch means public research and public money, public code, are a must to evolve in a socially sustainable manner instead of funding very few humans interests against all others BUT no, increasing prices of polluting things people's depend on is NOT at ALL a solution, it's just a way to lend in a dictatorship with a polite justification.

If we want made a genocide of so many people to save the human species we need to be loud and clear, because we need to preserve "background noise" that made natural selection and evolution possible. The idea of classical eugenics is not less harmful nor a-scientific than the classic cross marriages between nobles not only for short-term political reasons but also to preserve the lineage "purity". We can't substitute nature effectively so we need to preserve diversity and natural selection, trying to generate and artificial one with various basis is a recipe to end up in a disaster large enough to have enough potential to crash our spaces.

So you claim that increasing taxes increases civil unrest? What do you base this claim on? The countries with high taxes do not tend to be the countries that have a lot of civil unrest, low tax countries on the other hand... While that does not imply causation, it is food for thought I would say.

No, I claim increasing prices without increasing wages provoke unrest, and you can see that everywhere in the very present world. Taxes MUST BE a means to redistribute richness to avoid deepening too much the fork between richest and poorest, but for that money MUST BE a public value-less unit of measure of almost any substrate while actual money are private game, substrate of anything, and so taxes are ways to fund states that actually are just slaves of private central banks, that until some politicians decide that enough is enough and instead to play the right way organize a coup to arrest and devastate such privates criminals overnight manu militari publishing a small advise in the early morning: "anyone still fee can confess publicly it's crime against humanity in the next days or face revenge simply knowing a thing: Democracy does bring human rights, and such rights does not serve only to protect poor against riches but to protect any human being against anyone else, without substantial democracy there are no human rights so the old sword way still apply when used, against anyone, mercyless". Not something likely to happen in short times anyway.

About taxes no, Sweden have high taxes and a deep social fracture with very relevant unrest, with crimes, bombs and shooting on the streets not much differently than certain parts of the USA or Sri Lanka these days. Swiss or France or Russia (the state, not the federation) so far have far less deep fracture while have less fiscal pressure. The issue with taxes is in their meaning.

> I claim increasing prices without increasing wages provoke unrest, and you can see that everywhere in the very present world.

If it increases too much that could happen, but there is nothing that says taxes have to be increased too much.

> About taxes no, Sweden have high taxes and a deep social fracture with very relevant unrest, with crimes, bombs and shooting on the streets not much differently than certain parts of the USA or Sri Lanka these days. Swiss or France or Russia (the state, not the federation) so far have far less deep fracture while have less fiscal pressure. The issue with taxes is in their meaning.

You don't seriously think Sweden has a similar crime rate with bombs and shootings as certain parts of the US... You're watching too much propaganda if you believe that.

> If it increases too much that could happen, but there is nothing that says taxes have to be increased too much.

Let me correcting you: it's happening NOW, almost all other the world. We have already violent unrest in poorest countries and we start to have mass protests in less poor but still with not much developed social systems countries. And not due to tax increases but to mere price increase MOSTLY artificial using covid and Ukraine as excuses but partially NOT artificial due to real shortage and supply chains issues...

> You don't seriously think Sweden has a similar crime rate with bombs and shootings as certain parts of the US...

I do not think, I know, having lived in Sweden with some friends still there and having some friends in USA, surely I'm not in both places right now (I'm in France) BUT hearing their stories that's essentially the same, only handled in different ways and advertised in different ways.

> You're watching too much propaganda if you believe that.

We all do, I try my best to collect feeds for generic news to have different propaganda's to be compared and hear people from different places in general but that's is...

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