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Comment by mathieuh | Hacker News Reader

As Locke said: "I have always thought the actions of men the best interpreters of their thoughts."

What organisations say are their principles and what their actions reveal them to be are often very different.

Even at my own job the CEO claims to be a big environmentalist yet the company is spending huge amounts of money on LLM tokens and the "leadership" team is jetting off around the world for "off-sites" constantly.

Seems to me that the vast majority (I leave off saying "all" simply as I have not surveyed all of them) of these claims are nothing more than greenwashing.

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Yes, there's a lot of bullshitting. I've recently changed banks, because the old one was just lip service. There are orgs that track how banks perform, at least here.

Unless you oppose our economic system in a fundamental way, you always accept that wealthy people get to consume more resources than poor people. That goes for shared resources like "acceptable impact on climate and the natural world" too. As long as they pay for the privilege in a comparable scheme to what they want (carbon taxes, tradable quotas etc.), and aren't some sort of anticapitalists, they aren't hypocrites.

> As long as they pay for the privilege in a comparable scheme to what they want (carbon taxes, tradable quotas etc.) ... they aren't hypocrites.

I don't agree. The hypocrisy is from the intent versus the behavior. eg Whaling on the weekends while heading an anti-whaling charity. You can't stop something you're actively working against at the same time. This has nothing to do with capitalism per se, but the qualities of "our economic system".

Capitalism is a foundational philosophy to global economics, to be sure. Systems have bounds that are philosophical (legal is included) and practical. That's where the hypocrisy tends to lie.

People who are anti-whaling generally think whaling is morally wrong, that no one should be doing whaling, ever.

People who are environmentalists don't think having an impact on the environment is morally wrong. We have to have some impact on the environment in order to live, and nature can take quite a lot of impact, just not all of it from all of us.

All environmentalists believe there's an acceptable human footprint. How big, varies.

A wealthy environmentalist merely believes they're entitled to a bigger share of the acceptable total human footprint because they can pay for it - and my point, the logic of that is not at all controversial in our society.

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