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That's a great idea, maybe we should also make murder illegal so people won't do that either! Climate change is a wicked problem - we can't just legislate it a

That's a great idea, maybe we should also make murder illegal so people won't do that either! Climate change is a wicked problem - we can't just legislate it away. We need to solve many many problems like reducing our reliance on fossil fuels, allowing/helping nature to rebound from centuries of industrialisation, and probably numerous other things, on a global scale without losing out to unscrupulous international competitors (both national and business). All without giving up too much of our present lifestyle (because people will resist such efforts). [edit]: Wicked problems, for those of you who don't know what I'm talking about: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wicked_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wicked_problem

frereubu 5y ago
Your first sentence implies that we shouldn't have laws against murder because it happens anyway, which isn't a great argument.
- beaconstudios 5y ago
  That wasn't my argument, but I say see how it would come across that way. My point is that you can't just legislate away complex misaligned incentives. You decrease murder by attacking the causes of murder. Murder has been illegal for a long time but murder hasn't gone away. We need ecocide to go away, and fast. A more effective approach is needed.
teawrecks 5y ago
We don't have a rampant murder problem, though. There are exactly two ways to address climate change: * wait for a natural feedback loop to kick in, i.e. wait for people to start dying. Necessity is the mother of invention, etc. * artificially stimulate the feedback loop early through legislation, taxes, and real penalties. One way or the other, the goal is to disincentivize unsustainable behavior such that the people who would be willing to resort said behavior no longer find it worth the risk/expected cost vs the estimated payoff. Yeah, people still murder, but they are a small exception. The goal is to get to that point for ecological damage too. Personally though, I think it should already be considered a Crime Against Humanity.
- beaconstudios 5y ago
  Making things illegal is one of the most ineffective counterincentives though - we need systems-aware interventions if we want to change our course in time. A good example would Tesla making electric cars desirable, massively accelerating the transition to electric cars from other automakers. Or SolarCity making solar panels widely available. My only two examples are from Elon Musk because he's the only person I've seen to actually attempt any systems solutions so far, which is depressing. Just making things illegal is painfully easy to work around for the wealthy and well connected, this should be obvious by now.
  - teawrecks 5y ago
    This sounds like a very romanticized view of capitalism. I like the free market as much as the next guy, but in the real world corporations will employ children in coal mines, sell you random chemicals as panaceas, and dump nuclear waste in the neighborhood river unless we agree as a society to punish people who do that. In other words: laws absolutely work. What you're describing is in the realm of a natural feedback loop. And yeah, it would be great if that were good enough. But what happens when it's not? The ONLY reason Tesla is where it is today is due to massive govt subsidies in its early years. So it's only a natural feedback in so much as it's an attempt at artificial stimulated natural feedback.
    - beaconstudios 5y ago
      I don't think you understand what I'm saying; I know that businesses will do awful things because they are incentivised to do so. I have a pretty poor image of people who think the market will fix everything, almost as poor as that of people who think the government can fix everything. My point is that creating laws is only one incentive-change option, and historically it hasn't worked very well. There's a whole discipline called complexity science dedicated to (among other things) understanding how we can intervene in complex things like the economy or the environment, when they're going wrong, in order to move towards a more favourable outcome. What happens if we make a law saying "ruining the environment is now illegal", and it continues to happen? We just sit back and say "ah well, we did the best we could"? It's simply not good enough; you could give out the death sentence for ecocide and it will still happen because it's not happening out of malice, it's a side-effect of the current state of our world and economy.

frereubu 5y ago

Your first sentence implies that we shouldn't have laws against murder because it happens anyway, which isn't a great argument.

beaconstudios 5y ago
That wasn't my argument, but I say see how it would come across that way. My point is that you can't just legislate away complex misaligned incentives. You decrease murder by attacking the causes of murder. Murder has been illegal for a long time but murder hasn't gone away. We need ecocide to go away, and fast. A more effective approach is needed.

teawrecks 5y ago

We don't have a rampant murder problem, though. There are exactly two ways to address climate change: * wait for a natural feedback loop to kick in, i.e. wait for people to start dying. Necessity is the mother of invention, etc. * artificially stimulate the feedback loop early through legislation, taxes, and real penalties. One way or the other, the goal is to disincentivize unsustainable behavior such that the people who would be willing to resort said behavior no longer find it worth the risk/expected cost vs the estimated payoff. Yeah, people still murder, but they are a small exception. The goal is to get to that point for ecological damage too. Personally though, I think it should already be considered a Crime Against Humanity.

beaconstudios 5y ago
Making things illegal is one of the most ineffective counterincentives though - we need systems-aware interventions if we want to change our course in time. A good example would Tesla making electric cars desirable, massively accelerating the transition to electric cars from other automakers. Or SolarCity making solar panels widely available. My only two examples are from Elon Musk because he's the only person I've seen to actually attempt any systems solutions so far, which is depressing. Just making things illegal is painfully easy to work around for the wealthy and well connected, this should be obvious by now.
- teawrecks 5y ago
  This sounds like a very romanticized view of capitalism. I like the free market as much as the next guy, but in the real world corporations will employ children in coal mines, sell you random chemicals as panaceas, and dump nuclear waste in the neighborhood river unless we agree as a society to punish people who do that. In other words: laws absolutely work. What you're describing is in the realm of a natural feedback loop. And yeah, it would be great if that were good enough. But what happens when it's not? The ONLY reason Tesla is where it is today is due to massive govt subsidies in its early years. So it's only a natural feedback in so much as it's an attempt at artificial stimulated natural feedback.
  - beaconstudios 5y ago
    I don't think you understand what I'm saying; I know that businesses will do awful things because they are incentivised to do so. I have a pretty poor image of people who think the market will fix everything, almost as poor as that of people who think the government can fix everything. My point is that creating laws is only one incentive-change option, and historically it hasn't worked very well. There's a whole discipline called complexity science dedicated to (among other things) understanding how we can intervene in complex things like the economy or the environment, when they're going wrong, in order to move towards a more favourable outcome. What happens if we make a law saying "ruining the environment is now illegal", and it continues to happen? We just sit back and say "ah well, we did the best we could"? It's simply not good enough; you could give out the death sentence for ecocide and it will still happen because it's not happening out of malice, it's a side-effect of the current state of our world and economy.