Comment by tgsovlerkhgsel

Comment by tgsovlerkhgsel 6 months ago

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My theory: The forces of Line Must Go Up are going to keep winning. Mitigating the impact of climate change will be part of Line Goes Up. Whether it will be cheaper or more expensive than avoiding it in the first place will remain to be seen (but won't really matter in the end), but we will be facing whatever impacts we will be facing, and we will face them, and we will deal with them.

If you have any doubt, look at how the Netherlands dealt with storm surge.

recursivecaveat 6 months ago

For the Netherlands, the entity that pays the cost is the same that benefits from preparedness. For climate change, the plastic doohickey plant in misc country who would have to pay the cost of losing their asset, is entirely divorced from the entities who will benefit from CO2 reduction: everyone in the world. It's a prisoner's dilemma played at every level from the individual to the corporation to the region, and country. I'm not optimistic about our ability to coordinate the entire species to all suddenly start spending a bunch of money on each other instead of our own groups. Especially when basically every existing business in the world will fight it tooth and nail. We got lucky with solar that its naturally cheaper than coal power, but there's no law that has to be the case with anything else.

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  • lotsofpulp 6 months ago

    > I'm not optimistic about our ability to coordinate the entire species to all suddenly start spending a bunch of money on each other instead of our own groups

    The opposite needs to happen. Less consumption needed, overall. Less spending. It kind of already is, via lower and lower total fertility rates. Might not be declining quickly enough to cause sufficient decline in consumption.

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  • ainiriand 6 months ago

    Exactly, we cannot expect to bring individual responsibility to a global problem. There will always be individual entities not puling their weight. The train of climate agreements and collective effort has left the station, the climate accords were aiming for under 1,5C and we are very much into 2,5-3C territory.

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  • tgsovlerkhgsel 6 months ago

    I'm not talking about CO2 reduction, I'm talking about living with the result that the emissions have caused. And for that, the entity that pays the cost and benefits will again be the same.

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arp242 6 months ago

Entire companies have been wrecked by "line must go up" thinking. I see no reason why it should preserve the planet when it can't even preserve its own livelihood. Never underestimate the complete destructive nihilism some are willing to engage just to earn some status and/or dollars. The feedback mechanism from climate change is far too slow. This kind of "ah it'll be grand like" attitude is completely naïve.

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ropable 6 months ago

Relying on market forces to mitigate/address the impact of climate change will require us to collectively impose actual market pressure (i.e. regulation, constraints) to do so. Not seeing much sign of that among the major contributors of emissions right at the moment.

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  • GoatInGrey 6 months ago

    That's because very few people are being meaningfully affected right now. For most, climate change exists as an abstract idea and not an immediate, physical problem. It doesn't help that claims like those made by Al Gore about the polar ice caps being gone by 2016 turned out to be untrue.

    I wouldn't expect society to transform itself if told that an asteroid may impact Earth in eighty years, for similar reasons.

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    • pyrale 6 months ago

      > That's because very few people are being meaningfully affected right now.

      Once we're all at the edge of extinction, the markets will provide?

      If that's your point, your idea of capitalism is a cargo cult.

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    • netsharc 6 months ago

      Heck, faced with a rapidly spreading virus that can kill in 2 weeks (for the general public at a very low percentage, for our elderly neighbors a lot higher), a large majority of humans turned to angry denials and conspiracy theories to justify to themselves that "it's not that dangerous!".

      We are so fucking dead.

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      • somenameforme 6 months ago

        When somebody says something isn't that dangerous it always comes with an unstated post-text of 'for an average person of average health.' Each year the flu kills hundreds of thousands of people. As the population ages, and thus has more individuals in senescence where your body is basically just breaking down, that will increase into the millions. But yet it's still not unreasonable to say that the flu isn't that dangerous.

        And you might think I'm being disingenuous with these facts and perhaps e.g. all those deaths from the flu are just in Africa or wherever. Whereas in reality it's the exact opposite! Places like the US have a substantially higher than average mortality rate from the flu. Globally deaths are around 700k and in the US it's around 50k. We have 4% of the world's population, but 7% of the world's flu deaths. The reason is because it's not about healthcare, vaccines, or whatever else. It's about the amount of people in senescence.

        At a certain age, and the subsequent state of health it entails, lots of things that indeed 'aren't that dangerous' turn into life-ending threats. For some contrast that most aren't aware of, the average age of mortality of the Spanish Flu was 28 - which made it a completely terrifying freak outlier in terms of viruses, which generally affect the very young and very old most severely. Nobody would be saying that the Spanish Flu is not that dangerous in modern times.

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  • tgsovlerkhgsel 6 months ago

    Market pressure is required to avoid climate change by keeping companies from externalizing climate impacts.

    Market pressure is not required for a city to decide that having the city flooded is bad, and start a tender for building a sea wall. This makes the line go up for the sea wall companies.

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gorbachev 6 months ago

This is not what's going to happen planetwide.

What's going to happen instead is that the rich will mitigate the effects only for themselves.

They will spend a small percentage of their wealth to protect themselves and their property from all the ill effects of climate change.

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elktown 6 months ago

- “Yes, the patient might die, but we’re confident that given enough resources, we’ll bring him back to life.”

Well, to be fair, it’s basically what’s happening with LLMs atm. So, maybe feathering up Mammon and aiming for the sun will be the tech industry’s most lasting legacy.

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