Hacker News Reader

Comment by moralestapia | Hacker News Reader

Not a lawyer, so no idea if this will get somewhere.

But on the moral side of this, yes, if the operation of oil companies incurs damages to other entities/people, they have to make them whole.

The "Netflix wouldn't exist without fossil fuels" argument is silly. The cost of restoring the environment should be factored in to the cost of producing oil, like any other liability. If that makes everything go up in price, well ... that's the actual cost of that product, consume accordingly.

View on HN

All human civilization (not just use of fossil fuels) is going to cause some level of environmental damage. This is inevitable. The cost of "restoring the environment" is infinity. So, it's really just a question of what level of damage we're willing to accept. Different people prefer different levels of damage on that spectrum.

If not for fossil fuels then we would be living in essentially an 18th century civilization. A lot more stuff then Netflix would never have been created without the safe and cheap energy supplied by fossil fuels.

> what level of damage we're willing to accept

Who is "we"? Why do you get to decide whether Africa's heatwave is 52C instead of 48C? Are you going to compensate them for that heatwave, and the resulting strain on their growth & development and political stability?

That's the crux of this case. There are significant negative externalities that are not being priced in by the market. The people doing most of the damage owe some compensation to the people who have to bear most of the consequences of their activity.

>The cost of "restoring the environment" is infinity.

It's not, actually.

And if it turns out that your business does something so expensive to repair that for all practical purposes could be considered "infinite damage", then your business shouldn't exist at all (e.g. the Sackler family and Oxycontin).

It is, actually. Completely restoring the environment means killing off 99% of humans and going back to a stone age existence. At which point our money would cease to have any value, hence the cost would be effectively infinite. We can maybe slightly reduce our environmental impact but keeping civilization means accepting a large amount of environmental damage. Anyone who believes otherwise is simply disconnected from objective reality and doesn't understand how the things we have are made.

That's absurd.

If I eat a bag of chips and throw it to the ground, "restoring the environment" does not mean going back to the stone age, it means picking it up and putting in on a trash can (plus whatever downstream actions that are involved). Anyone connected with objective reality understands that.

If oil companies (and any other company), by carrying out their operations, incur on some environmental damage, they have to be held liable for it.

That's absurd. Everything that civilized humans do, including producing renewable power, incurs non-zero environmental damage. It's just a question of how much damage we're willing to accept and what trade-offs we're willing to accept.

You write "we" but I've never been approached by any company to talk about the trade-offs I'm willing to accept. I don't think companies do that sort of thing, but has that been the case with you?

One could argue "well, vote with your wallet then", but there's overwhelming evidence showing that people choose cheap over any other quality of a product, also, sometimes there's not even the possibility of a choice to be made.

What solution would you propose, then, around this?

You don't have to "choose cheap". You can just choose not to buy things at all. As a solution I propose you live in a shack in the woods with no electronics or medicine, and hunt all your food.

That bag of chips on the ground represents way more than the garbage you're specifically talking about. People tend to think about what's right in front of them. It's so minuscule.

It's a comfort item, like your house. For it to exist there needs to be grocery stores. For that, there needs to be air conditioning. Otherwise the chips would be rancid from 100 degree heat, let alone the fact it would have been shipped to the "grocery store" on horseback, again making the cost very extreme.

Every damn thing you have for comfort not only depended on cheap oil, it would be impossible for our civilization to even have the internet without it. You can't expect TCP engineers to work in tents right? We wouldn't even have the ability to order up a 9 yard concrete truck in 30 minutes.

So yes, for that bag of chips to exist, literally cost trillions of dollars.

Hence why I wrote,

"(plus whatever downstream actions that are involved)"

>So yes, for that bag of chips to exist, literally cost trillions of dollars.

You're off by trillions of dollars. It's amortized cost is somewhere between zero and the dollar you paid for it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com