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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

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.

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