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Comment by schiffern | Hacker News Reader

Pioneering systems theorist Donella Meadows makes a highly salient point. The problem with BP isn't because there are "bad people" at the top, and the solution isn't to replace them with "good people." The problem is that the decision-makers are constrained to act a certain way. If they made different decisions then.... those people won't be the decision-makers anymore! The same is true for politicians, consumers, etc.

It's a systems problem requiring systems solutions, not a problem of (as movies simplistically tell us) "bad people."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMmChiLZZHg

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That saying that goes, we are the only species that will become extinct because survival wasn't profitable enough.

To the systems point we really, really really, really really need to stop subsidizing fossil fuels to 7 trillion a year globally. We have to stop making it profitable and encouraged by the system.

https://www.imf.org/en/Blogs/Articles/2023/08/24/fossil-fuel...

  >  we are the only species that will become extinct because survival wasn't profitable enough

This a very good quip, but I have to ponder: how could we know that for sure?

If some other species had a comparable concept used to organize themselves, I doubt humans would even be aware of that nuance.

Sometimes it's pretty visible. Some slime molds (dictyostelids) form multicellular bodies when food is scarce and they have to hunt, and then go back to single-celled life when conditions are more favorable.

Single celled organisms do it all the time, on a local scale.

If you fill a jar with some yeast and sugar water, they'll feast and multiply at an accelerating pace until they've turned their environment toxic.

Painfully analagous to humans.

Well because other species don't manage to break the barriers as efficiently as we do.

The way regulation works is that species are limited by their environment. If there are many antelopes, there can be many lions. But if there are two many lions, the population of antelopes goes down to the point where not all the lions can survive, right? This is simplistic, but that's the idea (the higher the population, the bigger the impact of a disease, etc).

Because we are really good at changing our environment in order to be more individuals who consume more resources, we escape those regulation mechanisms. By doing this, we destroy most species, including ours.

Now let's not pretend that ants would be better: if they somehow escaped those mechanisms, they wouldn't suddenly vote and stop growing (presumably). The fact is that they haven't escaped them, and we have. Well for a while. Now it's very likely that some kind of mechanism will end up regulating us. Maybe it will finish destroying most species, and it will take thousands of years to "recover" (with some definition of "recover").

What's interesting with us is that we do know we are destroying ourselves and the biodiversity (which is arguably one of the enjoyable things in life), but we can't seem to find a way to fix it.

Most of what you've said is true but what exactly does it mean to "break barriers"? We can not escape the laws of chemistry, physics, and thermodynamics because we live on a compact manifold with finite resources which must be recycled eventually by the surrounding ecology. This is why plastics are now found in all newborns, the chemicals produced by our factories are recycled back into the ecology and our internal biomes.

Totally. I just meant that those are less direct. Species usually don't reach a point where they change the climate because they are stopped by other mechanisms long before. Our cycle is slower, which gives us time to destroy more stuff before we "get regulated", I suppose.

I feel like we aren't actually unique in this respect, except in the sense that we are able to see our own doom but still not able to act on it.

In essence, our extinction (if it were to happen) would be because we were unable to solve the collective action problem... each individual choosing their own best course dooms the entire species.

When looked at it this way, lots of species go extinct for this reason; resource exhaustion due to uncapped expansion.

The difference is that we don't expect animals to be able to reason through the situation and realize that individuals would need to sacrifice for the greater good of the species.

>"...individuals would need to sacrifice for the greater good of the species."

This old song. I am all for a sacrifice... As long as it starts from the top. Wake me up when that happens.

I am not disagreeing with this statement, and don't think we can solve the collective action problem by just choosing as individuals to sacrifice (that is what makes is a collective action problem). It would take societal change to happen.

> subsidizing fossil fuels to 7 trillion a year globally

This is misleading. See https://www.slowboring.com/i/145942190/the-case-of-the-myste...

> The vast majority of the “subsidies” are “implicit subsidies,” which include “undercharging for environmental costs.” In other words, they are characterizing governments’ failure to impose a carbon tax as a “subsidy” for fossil fuel use.

Not paying for pollution we know they cause is an implicit subsidy, feels quite obvious.

Then the same "implicit subsidy" goes for literally every facet of human activity. Do builders of wind turbines and solar farms also pay commensurately for the pollution in the manufacturing and development process?

Everything is implicitly subsidized because every action that any living being takes affects some other living being and the ecosystem as a whole, because we all live on the same planet. It's a meaningless statement.

What an exercise in false equivalence. Does every facet of human activity have the same impact as CO2 emission from fossil fuel combustion?

Why focus on CO2 emissions? That's only one aspect of pollution.

Because of its enormous global impact.

Ok, where should we focus it then?

> Do builders of wind turbines and solar farms also pay commensurately for the pollution in the manufacturing and development process?

Sure, we can assign those costs to builders, why not? There's already lots of discussion about the true cost of EV batteries and how they're subsidized.

> Everything is implicitly subsidized because every action that any living being takes affects some other living being and the ecosystem as a whole, because we all live on the same planet.

Actions don't all have the same effect so I think it's totally fair to consider their true costs.

I think where it gets a little tricky is how you decide to assign costs to people that have children or are children. But that's really getting in the weeds.

Don't forget that the oil industry requires a lot of manufacturing and development too. They also cause stuff on top of that.

> Then the same "implicit subsidy" goes for literally every facet of human activity

No, we generally pay for pollution. If I litter I pay. If I have to throw stuff away I pay (via taxes). If I have to dump dangerous chemicals I pay.

Oil industry can dump whatever they want into the air and they don't pay. You, and I, pay. We don't actually know how profitable oil is because of this.

If I have to pay to clean up your mess to live in a world the way it was before you polluted it, it’s a subsidy

But you don’t know the cleanup cost yet, so how can you put a dollar amount on the subsidy?

There are estimates for the social cost of carbon. It isn't super exact.

Before fossil fuels our cities were ankle-deep in horse shit, and when a horse died the owner dumped the carcass in the river. Some level of pollution is in inescapable price of civilization. We shouldn't be reckless or wanton about it but it's unreasonable and uneconomic to ever clean up all of the mess.

All or nothing fallacy. The argument is not to eliminate pollution, the argument is to stop generating greenhouse gases. You can already see the effects of climate change and it's guaranteed to get worse.

I don't understand why you're making excuses for carbon pollution.

I'm reading "The Unthinkable". It's a great book about diaster response at the personal and policy level.

One thing that stands out is that well intentioned policies often cause diaster if they don't simply trust the ability of humans (and by extension communities) to adapt and incorporate new information as it comes.

I believe that these subsidies are a prime example. They intend to help by alleviating the shock of world events, and it's only through an increase in trust/courage at all levels that we can overcome this tendency.

> stop subsidizing fossil fuels to 7 trillion a year globally

We need to stop bandying about this $7T figure. 80% of it is "implicit subsidies", meaning made-up numbers based on carbon pricing and environmental impacts and whatnot. It's like saying we implicitly subsidize solar power by not accounting for the environmental impacts of covering up square miles of land under panels, or of the pollution from the production of panels. If you go back far enough, it's like telling the caveman not to light sticks on fire to keep himself warm, because of the carbon emissions that aren't being priced in.

Fossil fuels are, with present-day technology, the best source of energy for humanity to develop and maintain high living standards. It's easy to stop using them if we're OK with dialing back our living standards two hundred years. It will be easy to stop using them at some point in the future when we have abundant, clean, cheap energy from a proliferation of nuclear power, or some battery technology breakthrough that will let us economically harness wind and solar energy. However, currently, it's not easy. Oil and gas is profitable because it makes us all richer, let's not forget that.

Other species don't call it profit because they don't have language, but if you broaden this to "We are the only species that will become extinct because short-term individualistic concerns trump ecological stability" ... it isn't true. Predator/prey dynamics and ecosystem collapse are common to a lot of ecosystems; I remember studying them in calculus at the same time as exponential growth and logistic curves. Locusts are a very familiar example where they act like common grasshoppers when food is abundant, but then start a swarming behavior that destroys whole ecosystems and kills off the vast majority of locusts once they detect that there isn't enough food to go around.

The internet you use to transmit this message wouldn't exist without fossil fuels - and I am not talking about energy, but computer and networking materials.

Ditto the fertilizer and many other things that keep you alive to type on here too.

It's very hard to maintain modern civilization without oil/gas products. Unless you want to be Amish.

I’d rather be Amish than dead!

And while I agree it's hard, I think that keeping an industrial society should be possible. (although it means reworking almost all the production apparel to be carbon neutral (concrete/steel/fertilizer production, transports, agriculture, ...). Not going to happen in the short-term without an extremely strong political push and more research, on the world scale)

Actual production may become lower than today, but I'd like to believe we don't have to go full Amish.

I think reducing fossil fuel use is separate from petroleum product use. We can have petroleum products without burning fossil fuels. Costs of petroleum extraction might go up, though, I imagine.

I think you have to take the owner or investor view on this. Say you own a big portion of an oil company, and you decide renewable energy is the future. What do you do? Probably sell your shares and invest elsewhere.

Oil companies are full of oil experts. There's no reason to think they'll do well competing with companies full of renewable energy experts.

The word "required" is not exactly wrong, but not exactly right either. Corporate governance is complicated and CEO's have a lot of room to maneuver. Some more than others.

Incentives are not destiny, though they are often persuasive. Peoples' decisions do matter, which is why there are people in the system and it's not just some idiot algorithm.

Also true of consumers and politicians.

I agree with this, and what is amazing is that one particular layer in our systems with the biggest impact is electoral systems. Most people are blind to the fact that we live in the side effects of bad math that leads to less accountability. Electoral reform has trouble getting traction in some places. (Canada, USA, UK, and all these other fantastic "democracies" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-past-the-post_voting)

If we all had better representation, maybe we could have some accountability in governments to help enact policy that we actually want.

> It's a systems problem requiring systems solutions

It's a people problem requiring people to coordinate their actions for the net good of all people, instead of coordinating their abdication of responsibility for the good of the corporation.

>those people won't be the decision-makers anymore! The same is true for politicians, consumers, etc.

Is that another way of saying the "Market" will dictate everything?

I never thought about it this way in terms of politics. But may be some food for thought.

Accelerating this thought, the linked video is basically a primer on Systems Theory as applies to this problem. Use >1x speed if needed, but IMO it's worth it. Her talk is highly enlightening, and concept-dense.

Direct timecode to the start: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMmChiLZZHg#t=419

A great point.

What examples do we have of publicly-traded megacorps that have successfully made shifts at the scale which we see oil companies trying to make? (With extrinsic motivation being a primary driver?)

Cigarette companies?

The libertarians constantly spouting that CEOs have a fiduciary obligation to shareholders are making the best argument for increased government regulation possible.

A reasonable libertarian however would require that all externalities be paid for (under the principle of doing no harm). If the price per unit of oil includes the cost of all the negative externalities (e.g. selling that unit comes with a requirement to remove the air pollutants and CO2) then it isn't really a problem (at least for the purpose of this discussion) if CEOs have to seek profit for shareholders.

Who is it that decides what these externalities are and who enforces this?

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