7 ms·

No one wants to pay the cost of tackling this problem. Especially not the for-profit corporations that are responsible for some of the worst pollution in the w

No one wants to pay the cost of tackling this problem. Especially not the for-profit corporations that are responsible for some of the worst pollution in the world. Ironically, they own the biggest capital and resources to be able to tackle the problem that they are creating.

agent008t 7y ago
Why? Are there reasons to believe that the shareholders/board members of these companies would not be negatively affected by climate change? Or are they ignorant?
- tonyedgecombe 7y ago
  Presumably they think they are rich enough to buy themselves out of any problems.
  - franky47 7y ago
    The sad reality is that they probably are able to buy their way of of this. I was visiting Tito's bunker in Bosnia last week, and to think it was ok to build a multi-billion dollar facility to hold only 350 politicians and VIPs in case of global nuclear wipeout seems crazy, but when the need arises, people with power will always try and find a quick way out, often at the expense of others.
    - selimthegrim 7y ago
      Was this the aerodrome in the mountain near the Croatian border?
      - franky47 7y ago
        No it's located in a mountain near Konjic, between Mostar and Sarajevo. It now serves as a modern art gallery and a museum to the cold war. The place is very well preserved, as the bunker's HVAC unit has been running since the 60's.
    - kiliantics 7y ago
      There is already a thriving economy of building climate change bunkers for billionaires.
    - DennisP 7y ago
      The fact that they don't already live in their bunker suggests it would be a downgrade to their lifestyle. So why wouldn't they want to avoid it?
- hcurtiss 7y ago
  There is abundant incentive to not act unilaterally in a manner that hurts the bottom line in a competitive environment (i.e., most business environments). There is very little incentive in that environment to act collectively.
  - DennisP 7y ago
    That's why voluntary unilateral actions won't be sufficient, but it doesn't explain why we're not taking collective action, like enacting a price on carbon.
    - RubenSandwich 7y ago
      That has quite a bit due to the fact that lobbying works and has an amazing ROI. It only cost about $1 million to divide voters enough to fail to pass a carbon tax in Washington State: https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/rival-partisans-in-climate-debate-chip-in-against-i-732/ https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/rival-par.... (I understand it wasn’t just lobbying, but I think it played a major role.) I hate to be cynical but the ROI of lobbying against climate change is super cheap. How can we switch this equation?
      - Dumblydorr 7y ago
        Get money out of politics, that is the one lens through which all issues are focused these days. The greater Good is out of focus while corporations focus the lens exactly where they want
- nestedcaveats 7y ago
  It's a tragedy of the commons situation. Any individual company could bankrupt itself with climate action and not make a dent in emissions. Worse, any progress they did make would be an excuse for other actors to lessen their own efforts. Little serious progress will be made until nation states start putting the screws to corporations and each other.
  - Dumblydorr 7y ago
    Except that climate change response is the best wealth generation mechanism for the 21st century. No company will bankrupt themselves by being more efficient, using more renewable, buying some batteries, EVs. These are already good investments. The problem is corporate greed driving down investment and morality in exchange for buybacks and CEO compensation.
    - mbrumlow 7y ago
      > No company will bankrupt themselves by being more efficient, using more renewable, buying some batteries, EVs. All those things cost money... More money than they are spending today. Even if they just replaced things as they retired, say a work vehicle -- there is still a non zero cost of owning two different types of vehicle. > These are already good investments. All the things you listed would normally be listed as a liability and deprecate fairly fast. > exchange for buybacks and CEO compensation This is such a small dent in the entire system that it would not make any difference if they spent all the excess cash on the problem. There was a article once about some big CEO of a airline getting some bonus of 12 million. Everybody was freaking out, and demanded it be given to the workers. I did the math on that one, it would have been about 19 cents a hour more for every worker (who were already making $12 + a hour, a 1.6% pay increase or less in most cases) I am on your side, but just wanting it to happen and calling those who say the money math don't work as greedy is not going to solve the problem. I think people vastly under estimate how much it cost to run some of these large companies, and how thin the profit margin actually is. Paying even slightly more than your competitor can make our break you.
- ryanmercer 7y ago
  The vast majority of people, at best, think climate channge is something that'll be a problem for their grandchildren or great grandchildren. Many still believe it is a made up thing the news/politicians created. Many people don't care about long-term stuff either. Look at how many people have no qualms throwing trash out their car window. Look at how many people have no qualms about taking vacations flying all over the place racking up tons of CO2 personally. Even YC created http://carbon.ycombinator.com http://carbon.ycombinator.com as they acknowledge it's an issue (to some extent anyway) yet they still fly hundreds of people out to the Bay Area for in-person interviews each year to select founders for funding, which could instead be done via video chat and used kilograms of CO2 at worst instead of many tons (on average, a plane produces a little over 53 pounds of CO2 per mile. This can be somewhat higher or lower depending upon the type of aviation fuel). And then take people that truly realize how much of a problem is like I do. - I have to go to work, it is not practical for me to walk to work so I have to drive a car to work. - It is not practical for me to not use electricity, living in an apartment I have to use it to cook, to dry my clothes even if I chose to wash them by hand, to run the air conditioning a good chunk of the year to keep the humidity down to prevent mold, to run the heat in the winter because it gets down to -12F/-24C a few days of the year - I can't walk around naked and both natural fibers and synthetic fibers rely heavily on oil to manufacture - I can't go buy food from my neighbor or grow my own in a garden, so my food is trucked across the country or even shipped from halfway around the world So people like me go "nothing I do on a personal level is going to make a damn bit of difference, why bother" and you sit there watching Netflix knowing that every gigabyte you stream is probably another 100-300 grams of CO2 into the atmosphere. And you sit there depressed - knowing you are breathing in microplastics, knowing you are eating and drinking microplastics, knowing those microplastics and other air pollutants are likely increasing your risk of cancer considerably, knowing that 30 something cities with populations over 1 million people have run out of clean water (or water entirely) including India's 6th largest city by population, knowing that it's probably unwise to have children because sooner or later in their life the world is going to become a largely shitty and miserable place when food/water wars start, knowing that global insect biomass has considerably reduced in your short 34 years on earth, knowing because you are barely in the lower middle class you're probably going to be one of the ones to starve at some point because you'll lose your job and have a hard time finding another and a crop failure or three will cause food prices to go up 200%, 300%, 1000% or more in your lifetime and you'll get to experience what life is like for people in North Korea when you're eating whatever you can get your hands on. The shareholders, the C-level employees, don't care because they aren't feeling the impacts already. They have fancy houses, fancy cars, take fancy vacations, they wear nice clothes and have more money than they need. The bulk of them have never filed bankruptcy or worried regularly how they're going to put food on the table, the majority of them have never known real struggle. They aren't concerned about climate change because they think the money will always be flowing in and they'll always have stuff. Look at the articles over the past few years about the rich buying land in New Zealand like Peter Thiel did.
- ptah 7y ago
  companies only plan 3 months ahead so it is not really on their horizon
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - anticensor 7y ago
    They do plan well ahead but most investors consider each term to be an independent target.
jajag 7y ago
It's a time value of money problem; there's been plenty of investigation into the future costs of climate change (most notably the Stern Report [1]) but people prefer to have money now, rather than pay now to defer future cost. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stern_Review https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stern_Review
ryanmercer 7y ago
>No one wants to pay the cost of tackling this problem. No one can afford to. The most practical (wildly impractical and at present completely impossible) known method would be something akin to what YC proposes on http://carbon.ycombinator.com/desert-flooding/ http://carbon.ycombinator.com/desert-flooding/ They want to create 'pools' in the Sahara. Incredible amounts of desalination and pump the water into these pools to grow algae and then store the algae under anoxic conditions to effectively sequester the carbon. Problems with this: - The cost simply to construct the pools, bring the desalination plants online, deploy pipes would be the single most expensive things humans have ever done, and may ever do. - The power required to do this would exceed what humans already produce - The amount of brine created would kill all life in coastal waters, we area already seeing this in the coastal waters of areas that currently heavily use desalination to provide freshwater to their populations. This would be on a scale several orders of magnitude larger. - The amount of mining that would need to be done to provide the algae with what they need to grow beyond sunlight and atmospheric carbon - The problem of actually sequestering thousands of gigatons of desiccated algae. Especially for the decades to centuries that would be required. - The massive change in global weather patterns that could likely be catastrophic, that much evaporation over such a wide area would absolutely change weather patterns globally and would be extremely difficult to even remotely accurately model. - Doing this in the Sahara would negatively impact the Amazon, the Sahara heavily fertilizes the Amazon as winds carry fine particles from the sand across the ocean. [1] - The amount of clay, concrete, etc to create these 1 square kilometer reservoirs would alone likely make the project unworkable at the scale needed - The cost of upkeep at the desalination plants, salt water is extremely corrosive, would cost unimaginable amounts of money. Maintaining pipes leading out to the reservoirs would similarly be extremely expensive. - Running all of this pipe, in a desert you are suddenly introducing obscene amounts of humidity too via evaporation... you're probably going to generate some pretty incredible storms and it would not surprise me at all if you have regular failures/ruptures from lightning strikes on the pipes, the flash flooding (deserts can not handle even minimal amounts of rain well) would regularly cause massive damage to infrastructure as well - Etc etc. Sadly, the only realistic solution to the scenario is a fleet of alien ships showing up with exotic-to-us technology, gifting us clean power generation to meet our needs several times over and giving us some sort of widget to pull carbon straight out of the air and create carbon bricks out of it in exchange for IP rights to all of our tv shows and music for sale to the Galactic Hegemony. The next most realistic solution would be to agree as an entire planet to safely shut down all fossil fuel processing operations and nuclear reactors, then EMP the entire planet and hope we can survive the next several decades of destabilizing weather while we learn how to be a pre-industrial revolution society again and wait a few centuries for the Earth to start to deal with the carbon on its own. [1] https://www.nasa.gov/content/goddard/nasa-satellite-reveals-how-much-saharan-dust-feeds-amazon-s-plants/ https://www.nasa.gov/content/goddard/nasa-satellite-reveals-...
goodcanadian 7y ago
It's a classic tragedy of the commons. It is in everyone's best interest for everyone to act, but it is in hardly anyone's individual interest to act alone if no one else does.
kingkawn 7y ago
waiting for business people to solve this problem is silly. We need an institution that represents a broad cross section of the population. Something like...government
- KnightOfWords 7y ago
  And on top of that, inter-government cooperation to tackle a global problem. Like we had to address CFCs pollution. With the political will to sanction countries that deny the evidence and won't play ball.
  - rficcaglia 7y ago
    Is that (CFCs) even solved? https://www.cnn.com/2019/05/22/health/china-cfc-pollution-environment-intl-scn/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2019/05/22/health/china-cfc-pollution-en...
    - wcoenen 7y ago
      It's still being solved, in the sense that CFCs in the atmosphere aren't zero but they are decreasing. The new emissions were only a minor setback. From the article you linked: > Atmospheric chlorine levels are still decreasing but more slowly than expected The Chinese government tracked down the emitters: https://nationalpost.com/news/world/china-makes-arrests-shuts-down-rogue-chemical-factories-that-spewed-banned-ozone-depleting-gas https://nationalpost.com/news/world/china-makes-arrests-shut...
- rficcaglia 7y ago
  If one country can’t get its stuff together across religious, educational, socioeconomic and cultural barriers....how can a planet scale coordinated governmental effort by committee work? Ask Al Gore how that worked. Or the Paris Treaty folks.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
rayiner 7y ago
Geez, I didn’t know that “for-profit corporations” where out there releases GHGs into the atmosphere just for funsies. Also, fun fact: “not for profit corporations” in the Soviet Union were massively more polluting per unit of output: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/the-grim-pollution-pictur_b_9266764 https://www.huffpost.com/entry/the-grim-pollution-pictur_b_9.... GHG emissions scale with energy efficiency, and in a socialist state that subsidized energy as an essential need, they had no incentive to be efficient. GHGs are the result of the stuff people want—food, transportation, next day Amazon delivery, etc. for-profit corporations are a way to deliver that level of stuff as efficiently as possible.
- orthecreedence 7y ago
  You're right. The problem isn't the corporations, it's the system that allows them to exist. We need a system that prices items based on actual costs: scarcity of raw materials, labor, pollution, and difficulty of recycling/reuse. Currently capitalism only prices in scarcity of raw materials and labor, and even those it does a pretty shitty job of. Whether the state controls industry or not is ancillary to the need for pricing actual costs into things, which capitalism is completely incapable of. What's really needed is complete transparency in primary production, such that if I buy a TV, I can see all the manufacturers/shippers, all the inputs to production, and all the workers and what they are paid in order to make that TV. Then the individual can decide between the TV that takes a liter of oil to produce or a TV that used solar energy for 60% of its production. I'm sick of people pretending that capitalism is "democracy through spending." We don't have the information needed to make it democracy through spending. The market pricing system obscures all useful information and aggregates it into a completely useless number.
turk73 7y ago
"Tackling this problem" means killing off 4 billion or so people. You decide who and when. I'll wait.
mbostleman 7y ago
By they, you mean collectively? In the US the government annually diverts more than 25% of GDP, which is about 650 times what the largest private company diverts annually as profit and 100 times more than what that company has on it's balance sheet. So if we want to find the single entity that "own[s] the biggest capital and resources to be able to tackle the problem", it's the government. I think it might be more effective if we, being in a democracy, would tell the government to change its priorities for all that resource. But then that would mean it's our fault which means we wouldn't be able to point fingers at others.

agent008t 7y ago

Why? Are there reasons to believe that the shareholders/board members of these companies would not be negatively affected by climate change? Or are they ignorant?

tonyedgecombe 7y ago
Presumably they think they are rich enough to buy themselves out of any problems.
- franky47 7y ago
  The sad reality is that they probably are able to buy their way of of this. I was visiting Tito's bunker in Bosnia last week, and to think it was ok to build a multi-billion dollar facility to hold only 350 politicians and VIPs in case of global nuclear wipeout seems crazy, but when the need arises, people with power will always try and find a quick way out, often at the expense of others.
  - selimthegrim 7y ago
    Was this the aerodrome in the mountain near the Croatian border?
    - franky47 7y ago
      No it's located in a mountain near Konjic, between Mostar and Sarajevo. It now serves as a modern art gallery and a museum to the cold war. The place is very well preserved, as the bunker's HVAC unit has been running since the 60's.
  - kiliantics 7y ago
    There is already a thriving economy of building climate change bunkers for billionaires.
  - DennisP 7y ago
    The fact that they don't already live in their bunker suggests it would be a downgrade to their lifestyle. So why wouldn't they want to avoid it?
hcurtiss 7y ago
There is abundant incentive to not act unilaterally in a manner that hurts the bottom line in a competitive environment (i.e., most business environments). There is very little incentive in that environment to act collectively.
- DennisP 7y ago
  That's why voluntary unilateral actions won't be sufficient, but it doesn't explain why we're not taking collective action, like enacting a price on carbon.
  - RubenSandwich 7y ago
    That has quite a bit due to the fact that lobbying works and has an amazing ROI. It only cost about $1 million to divide voters enough to fail to pass a carbon tax in Washington State: https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/rival-partisans-in-climate-debate-chip-in-against-i-732/ https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/rival-par.... (I understand it wasn’t just lobbying, but I think it played a major role.) I hate to be cynical but the ROI of lobbying against climate change is super cheap. How can we switch this equation?
    - Dumblydorr 7y ago
      Get money out of politics, that is the one lens through which all issues are focused these days. The greater Good is out of focus while corporations focus the lens exactly where they want
nestedcaveats 7y ago
It's a tragedy of the commons situation. Any individual company could bankrupt itself with climate action and not make a dent in emissions. Worse, any progress they did make would be an excuse for other actors to lessen their own efforts. Little serious progress will be made until nation states start putting the screws to corporations and each other.
- Dumblydorr 7y ago
  Except that climate change response is the best wealth generation mechanism for the 21st century. No company will bankrupt themselves by being more efficient, using more renewable, buying some batteries, EVs. These are already good investments. The problem is corporate greed driving down investment and morality in exchange for buybacks and CEO compensation.
  - mbrumlow 7y ago
    > No company will bankrupt themselves by being more efficient, using more renewable, buying some batteries, EVs. All those things cost money... More money than they are spending today. Even if they just replaced things as they retired, say a work vehicle -- there is still a non zero cost of owning two different types of vehicle. > These are already good investments. All the things you listed would normally be listed as a liability and deprecate fairly fast. > exchange for buybacks and CEO compensation This is such a small dent in the entire system that it would not make any difference if they spent all the excess cash on the problem. There was a article once about some big CEO of a airline getting some bonus of 12 million. Everybody was freaking out, and demanded it be given to the workers. I did the math on that one, it would have been about 19 cents a hour more for every worker (who were already making $12 + a hour, a 1.6% pay increase or less in most cases) I am on your side, but just wanting it to happen and calling those who say the money math don't work as greedy is not going to solve the problem. I think people vastly under estimate how much it cost to run some of these large companies, and how thin the profit margin actually is. Paying even slightly more than your competitor can make our break you.
ryanmercer 7y ago
The vast majority of people, at best, think climate channge is something that'll be a problem for their grandchildren or great grandchildren. Many still believe it is a made up thing the news/politicians created. Many people don't care about long-term stuff either. Look at how many people have no qualms throwing trash out their car window. Look at how many people have no qualms about taking vacations flying all over the place racking up tons of CO2 personally. Even YC created http://carbon.ycombinator.com http://carbon.ycombinator.com as they acknowledge it's an issue (to some extent anyway) yet they still fly hundreds of people out to the Bay Area for in-person interviews each year to select founders for funding, which could instead be done via video chat and used kilograms of CO2 at worst instead of many tons (on average, a plane produces a little over 53 pounds of CO2 per mile. This can be somewhat higher or lower depending upon the type of aviation fuel). And then take people that truly realize how much of a problem is like I do. - I have to go to work, it is not practical for me to walk to work so I have to drive a car to work. - It is not practical for me to not use electricity, living in an apartment I have to use it to cook, to dry my clothes even if I chose to wash them by hand, to run the air conditioning a good chunk of the year to keep the humidity down to prevent mold, to run the heat in the winter because it gets down to -12F/-24C a few days of the year - I can't walk around naked and both natural fibers and synthetic fibers rely heavily on oil to manufacture - I can't go buy food from my neighbor or grow my own in a garden, so my food is trucked across the country or even shipped from halfway around the world So people like me go "nothing I do on a personal level is going to make a damn bit of difference, why bother" and you sit there watching Netflix knowing that every gigabyte you stream is probably another 100-300 grams of CO2 into the atmosphere. And you sit there depressed - knowing you are breathing in microplastics, knowing you are eating and drinking microplastics, knowing those microplastics and other air pollutants are likely increasing your risk of cancer considerably, knowing that 30 something cities with populations over 1 million people have run out of clean water (or water entirely) including India's 6th largest city by population, knowing that it's probably unwise to have children because sooner or later in their life the world is going to become a largely shitty and miserable place when food/water wars start, knowing that global insect biomass has considerably reduced in your short 34 years on earth, knowing because you are barely in the lower middle class you're probably going to be one of the ones to starve at some point because you'll lose your job and have a hard time finding another and a crop failure or three will cause food prices to go up 200%, 300%, 1000% or more in your lifetime and you'll get to experience what life is like for people in North Korea when you're eating whatever you can get your hands on. The shareholders, the C-level employees, don't care because they aren't feeling the impacts already. They have fancy houses, fancy cars, take fancy vacations, they wear nice clothes and have more money than they need. The bulk of them have never filed bankruptcy or worried regularly how they're going to put food on the table, the majority of them have never known real struggle. They aren't concerned about climate change because they think the money will always be flowing in and they'll always have stuff. Look at the articles over the past few years about the rich buying land in New Zealand like Peter Thiel did.
ptah 7y ago
companies only plan 3 months ahead so it is not really on their horizon
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- anticensor 7y ago
  They do plan well ahead but most investors consider each term to be an independent target.

jajag 7y ago

It's a time value of money problem; there's been plenty of investigation into the future costs of climate change (most notably the Stern Report [1]) but people prefer to have money now, rather than pay now to defer future cost. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stern_Review https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stern_Review

ryanmercer 7y ago

>No one wants to pay the cost of tackling this problem. No one can afford to. The most practical (wildly impractical and at present completely impossible) known method would be something akin to what YC proposes on http://carbon.ycombinator.com/desert-flooding/ http://carbon.ycombinator.com/desert-flooding/ They want to create 'pools' in the Sahara. Incredible amounts of desalination and pump the water into these pools to grow algae and then store the algae under anoxic conditions to effectively sequester the carbon. Problems with this: - The cost simply to construct the pools, bring the desalination plants online, deploy pipes would be the single most expensive things humans have ever done, and may ever do. - The power required to do this would exceed what humans already produce - The amount of brine created would kill all life in coastal waters, we area already seeing this in the coastal waters of areas that currently heavily use desalination to provide freshwater to their populations. This would be on a scale several orders of magnitude larger. - The amount of mining that would need to be done to provide the algae with what they need to grow beyond sunlight and atmospheric carbon - The problem of actually sequestering thousands of gigatons of desiccated algae. Especially for the decades to centuries that would be required. - The massive change in global weather patterns that could likely be catastrophic, that much evaporation over such a wide area would absolutely change weather patterns globally and would be extremely difficult to even remotely accurately model. - Doing this in the Sahara would negatively impact the Amazon, the Sahara heavily fertilizes the Amazon as winds carry fine particles from the sand across the ocean. [1] - The amount of clay, concrete, etc to create these 1 square kilometer reservoirs would alone likely make the project unworkable at the scale needed - The cost of upkeep at the desalination plants, salt water is extremely corrosive, would cost unimaginable amounts of money. Maintaining pipes leading out to the reservoirs would similarly be extremely expensive. - Running all of this pipe, in a desert you are suddenly introducing obscene amounts of humidity too via evaporation... you're probably going to generate some pretty incredible storms and it would not surprise me at all if you have regular failures/ruptures from lightning strikes on the pipes, the flash flooding (deserts can not handle even minimal amounts of rain well) would regularly cause massive damage to infrastructure as well - Etc etc. Sadly, the only realistic solution to the scenario is a fleet of alien ships showing up with exotic-to-us technology, gifting us clean power generation to meet our needs several times over and giving us some sort of widget to pull carbon straight out of the air and create carbon bricks out of it in exchange for IP rights to all of our tv shows and music for sale to the Galactic Hegemony. The next most realistic solution would be to agree as an entire planet to safely shut down all fossil fuel processing operations and nuclear reactors, then EMP the entire planet and hope we can survive the next several decades of destabilizing weather while we learn how to be a pre-industrial revolution society again and wait a few centuries for the Earth to start to deal with the carbon on its own. [1] https://www.nasa.gov/content/goddard/nasa-satellite-reveals-how-much-saharan-dust-feeds-amazon-s-plants/ https://www.nasa.gov/content/goddard/nasa-satellite-reveals-...

goodcanadian 7y ago

It's a classic tragedy of the commons. It is in everyone's best interest for everyone to act, but it is in hardly anyone's individual interest to act alone if no one else does.

kingkawn 7y ago

waiting for business people to solve this problem is silly. We need an institution that represents a broad cross section of the population. Something like...government

KnightOfWords 7y ago
And on top of that, inter-government cooperation to tackle a global problem. Like we had to address CFCs pollution. With the political will to sanction countries that deny the evidence and won't play ball.
- rficcaglia 7y ago
  Is that (CFCs) even solved? https://www.cnn.com/2019/05/22/health/china-cfc-pollution-environment-intl-scn/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2019/05/22/health/china-cfc-pollution-en...
  - wcoenen 7y ago
    It's still being solved, in the sense that CFCs in the atmosphere aren't zero but they are decreasing. The new emissions were only a minor setback. From the article you linked: > Atmospheric chlorine levels are still decreasing but more slowly than expected The Chinese government tracked down the emitters: https://nationalpost.com/news/world/china-makes-arrests-shuts-down-rogue-chemical-factories-that-spewed-banned-ozone-depleting-gas https://nationalpost.com/news/world/china-makes-arrests-shut...
rficcaglia 7y ago
If one country can’t get its stuff together across religious, educational, socioeconomic and cultural barriers....how can a planet scale coordinated governmental effort by committee work? Ask Al Gore how that worked. Or the Paris Treaty folks.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]

rayiner 7y ago

Geez, I didn’t know that “for-profit corporations” where out there releases GHGs into the atmosphere just for funsies. Also, fun fact: “not for profit corporations” in the Soviet Union were massively more polluting per unit of output: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/the-grim-pollution-pictur_b_9266764 https://www.huffpost.com/entry/the-grim-pollution-pictur_b_9.... GHG emissions scale with energy efficiency, and in a socialist state that subsidized energy as an essential need, they had no incentive to be efficient. GHGs are the result of the stuff people want—food, transportation, next day Amazon delivery, etc. for-profit corporations are a way to deliver that level of stuff as efficiently as possible.

orthecreedence 7y ago
You're right. The problem isn't the corporations, it's the system that allows them to exist. We need a system that prices items based on actual costs: scarcity of raw materials, labor, pollution, and difficulty of recycling/reuse. Currently capitalism only prices in scarcity of raw materials and labor, and even those it does a pretty shitty job of. Whether the state controls industry or not is ancillary to the need for pricing actual costs into things, which capitalism is completely incapable of. What's really needed is complete transparency in primary production, such that if I buy a TV, I can see all the manufacturers/shippers, all the inputs to production, and all the workers and what they are paid in order to make that TV. Then the individual can decide between the TV that takes a liter of oil to produce or a TV that used solar energy for 60% of its production. I'm sick of people pretending that capitalism is "democracy through spending." We don't have the information needed to make it democracy through spending. The market pricing system obscures all useful information and aggregates it into a completely useless number.

turk73 7y ago

"Tackling this problem" means killing off 4 billion or so people. You decide who and when. I'll wait.

mbostleman 7y ago

By they, you mean collectively? In the US the government annually diverts more than 25% of GDP, which is about 650 times what the largest private company diverts annually as profit and 100 times more than what that company has on it's balance sheet. So if we want to find the single entity that "own[s] the biggest capital and resources to be able to tackle the problem", it's the government. I think it might be more effective if we, being in a democracy, would tell the government to change its priorities for all that resource. But then that would mean it's our fault which means we wouldn't be able to point fingers at others.