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Comment by jrussino | Hacker News Reader

"What if it's a big hoax and we create a better world for nothing?"

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_if_it%27s_a_big_hoax_an...

I honestly feel that people have got away with one with this type of thinking. In my province (British Columbia), there's a few major issues that have all been attributed to climate change; forest fires, flooding & decline of the salmon populations. Since there's this big boogeyman that they can't solve themselves (climate change), they don't even have to look into their forest management practices (spraying round-up to kill Aspen - a firebreak species - to plant mono-culture round-up ready pine stands - a serotineous species), or their off-shore fish farms that are located at the mouth of some of the most important rivers for salmon (spread sea lice and disease) or power generation (almost exclusively hydro dams), or that they've drained lakes for farm land and when the levees can't keep up the land floods again.

Great Barrier Reef is another prime example, pollution is causing a lot of issues, but you only hear of coral bleaching because of climate change.

The government-imposed greenbelts around some major Canadian cities have also backfired.

The reduced supply of land drives up prices within the urban area surrounded by the greenbelt.

This in turn just encourages more sprawl on the outer edges of the greenbelt, where land can be cheaper.

Those living in these new developments often commute into the urban area for work or other reasons, and now have to drive much farther each day as they pass through the greenbelt two (or more) times.

Infrastructure development in and through the greenbelt becomes bureaucratically challenging, preventing public transit or more efficient road infrastructure from being built.

Environmental regulations can too often have unanticipated (or ignored) environmental impacts that negate many of the supposed benefits.

Ehh. The Agricultural Land Reserve really isn't the problem in Vancouver.

Cities already have a ton of land where they can+should be allowing more housing but aren't (ex: the vast majority of residential land in Vancouver bans townhouses+apartments+condos). With the exception of maybe some parts of Richmond, I don't think there's much a case that the ALR is the problem here.

Agree. Just drive down main once and look at all the 2 story buildings… not even talking about the neighborhoods that are primarily detached. Vancouver is so expensive yet nobody is allowed to create denser housing. Nimbyism at its finest

This assumes there is no cost to the change.

The real question is if the cost to change is less than the current or future costs of inaction. I find what you said a manipulate style of argument used frequently today.

"What about lithium mines" ignoring the various oil disasters and the effects of drilling

"What if the vaccine had a 2% chance of killing me" ignoring the probability of dying from covid (made up numbers here)

I'm not claiming which side is right but these are often framed as the choice between the cost of the change and no cost.

But the premise of the point made by @jrussino is that the avoided costs of mitigating climate change turn out to be less than anticipated. In that case, we will have spent a lot of money for little benefit. The snarky joke doesn’t make logical sense.

I replied to your comment of "This assumes there is no cost to the change." which is not nor is it ever the case.

Except it is the case in the joke I was replying to:

> "What if it's a big hoax and we create a better world for nothing?" https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_if_it%27s_a_big_hoax_an...

This joke asserts that climate change mitigation measures would be justified even if climate change was a hoax. And that joke only works if you assume that those measures are free, or at least very cheap.

That isn't necessarily true if the benefits unrelated to climate change are also high, which it seems to me that they are. If millions of premature deaths are prevented yearly the measures can actually be pretty darn costly and still worth taking. And that is just one of many upsides.

That's not a great argument.

There are limited resources. If we spend on X, it means we don't spend on Y.

If it turns out Y is the bigger problem? Well, we missed a massive opportunity to make the world even better.

That is my new favorite quote.

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