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In some sense a clean environment and less dangerous future are "luxury goods" The people who can least afford to pay for clean energy etc are the ones who wil

by ip26 5y ago

In some sense a clean environment and less dangerous future are "luxury goods" The people who can least afford to pay for clean energy etc are the ones who will also be most impacted by heat waves, declining air quality, and natural disasters. So it's a similar "luxury good" as "functioning healthcare".

ajsnigrutin 5y ago
But you need to pay your electricity bill today,... ...and buy food to eat... ...global warming is something for future-you to care about.
- ip26 5y ago
  Yes, I understand the future-you aspect. You handle the most immediate costs first. But I don't think that qualifies "adequate dental care" or "maintaining a healthy weight" (two problems frequently prioritized below this month's rent) as luxuries. Not only are they something everyone should have, deferring attention to those things is a net cost for everyone in the end (sufferers are miserable, society pays). This is why health insurance has started subsidizing preventative care. Climate change is a similar can of worms.
  - ajsnigrutin 5y ago
    I mean... I agree that fixing your tooth now for 100eur (price of a filling here) will save you from an artificial tooth (1000+eur) in the long run,... but this doesn't help you a lot if you don't have 100eur now. If you have enough money, you can insulate your house, build geothermal heating, solar heating+power, and all that stuff. At that "richness level", a power bill increase is a negligable cost. If you're really poor, power bill increases mean choosing between freezing at home or eating. I pay ~45eur monthly for power (i get heat from elsewhere), and doubling that to 90eur would mean one less aliexpress toy for me. It would also mean around 10 days of cheap food for someone poor. Basically, rich can afford to be green, but forcing green policies impacts poor the most. Ban non-eco cars? Sure... someone rich already has a car with low exhausts to pass the bar, and they will replace the car for a new one, even cleaner in a few years... poor people have an old beater with a shitty engine, burning oil, and a new eco policy means, that they have no way to drive to work anymore.
PeterisP 5y ago
I agree that it's a similar "luxury good" as "functioning healthcare". And the poorer countries - especially a few decades earlier - were (and are) "choosing" not to buy functioning healthcare before they can afford it - they do devote their limited resources in a balanced manner to various other priorities as well despite paying a price literally with blood and the lives of their children instead of devoting all their resources to more healthcare. As the society grows wealthier, they can and do fix basic healthcare issues (e.g. child mortality) as soon as they can afford to, but simply saying "functioning healthcare needs X money, do that now" is not helpful. If a person can't afford adequate dental care, they usually don't sacrifice their rent and food to get it, they generally do without, even knowing that it would cause their future self much suffering. The same applies for global warming. As you say, the people who can least afford to pay for clean energy etc are the ones who will also be most impacted by heat waves, declining air quality, and natural disasters - and that's it, they will choose not to pay for clean energy despite the potential of being impacted by heat waves, declining air quality, and natural disasters some decades later. That's the choice they are going to make because that's the reasonable choice in their situation, they can't afford to sacrifice today for the sake of tomorrow.
- ip26 5y ago
  Yes; however, as with human-caused desertification, sacrificing tomorrow for today ultimately leads all of us to doom, so those of us who aren't in those circumstances have a moral imperative to figure this out :)
  - PeterisP 5y ago
    My perspective on this is that in some aspects we're asking some people to sacrifice their today in order to save some other people from doom tomorrow, which is a quite different tradeoff than general sacrificing tomorrow for today. My presumption is that "leads us all to doom" is a slight exaggeration and rather we would seeing "merely very bad" consequences (i.e. they're something for which we should be willing to pay a lot but not something to be prevented at literally any cost) that are furthermore very unequally distributed. And the result of this are populations who would suffer a lot but can't afford to fix the issue, and there are other populations who can afford to spend resources on a better tomorrow, but for those groups perhaps it might be more efficient to allocate that money to mitigating the local consequences (e.g. flooding protection, urban redesign, restructuring of agriculture and pest control) instead of slightly slowing down (since they can't prevent it) the global warming as such. And, crucially, there's no shared understanding of these choices and tradeoffs among the people who could/should/would allocate these resources. What I read in your comment is that the people who can afford to fund the changes ("who aren't in those circumstances") have a moral imperative to fix this for everyone. That seems desirable, but IMHO unrealistic; both because those people are a minority and can't fix the global issues if the developing world continues to develop and grow emissions; and also because those people (on average) won't be willing to sacrifice their own welfare (e.g. reducing it to global median) in order to fix the global issues; we're far from a post-scarcity world and every country, including the richest, still has a multitude of local problems that scream for funding.

by ip26 5y ago

ajsnigrutin 5y ago

But you need to pay your electricity bill today,... ...and buy food to eat... ...global warming is something for future-you to care about.

ip26 5y ago
Yes, I understand the future-you aspect. You handle the most immediate costs first. But I don't think that qualifies "adequate dental care" or "maintaining a healthy weight" (two problems frequently prioritized below this month's rent) as luxuries. Not only are they something everyone should have, deferring attention to those things is a net cost for everyone in the end (sufferers are miserable, society pays). This is why health insurance has started subsidizing preventative care. Climate change is a similar can of worms.
- ajsnigrutin 5y ago
  I mean... I agree that fixing your tooth now for 100eur (price of a filling here) will save you from an artificial tooth (1000+eur) in the long run,... but this doesn't help you a lot if you don't have 100eur now. If you have enough money, you can insulate your house, build geothermal heating, solar heating+power, and all that stuff. At that "richness level", a power bill increase is a negligable cost. If you're really poor, power bill increases mean choosing between freezing at home or eating. I pay ~45eur monthly for power (i get heat from elsewhere), and doubling that to 90eur would mean one less aliexpress toy for me. It would also mean around 10 days of cheap food for someone poor. Basically, rich can afford to be green, but forcing green policies impacts poor the most. Ban non-eco cars? Sure... someone rich already has a car with low exhausts to pass the bar, and they will replace the car for a new one, even cleaner in a few years... poor people have an old beater with a shitty engine, burning oil, and a new eco policy means, that they have no way to drive to work anymore.

PeterisP 5y ago

I agree that it's a similar "luxury good" as "functioning healthcare". And the poorer countries - especially a few decades earlier - were (and are) "choosing" not to buy functioning healthcare before they can afford it - they do devote their limited resources in a balanced manner to various other priorities as well despite paying a price literally with blood and the lives of their children instead of devoting all their resources to more healthcare. As the society grows wealthier, they can and do fix basic healthcare issues (e.g. child mortality) as soon as they can afford to, but simply saying "functioning healthcare needs X money, do that now" is not helpful. If a person can't afford adequate dental care, they usually don't sacrifice their rent and food to get it, they generally do without, even knowing that it would cause their future self much suffering. The same applies for global warming. As you say, the people who can least afford to pay for clean energy etc are the ones who will also be most impacted by heat waves, declining air quality, and natural disasters - and that's it, they will choose not to pay for clean energy despite the potential of being impacted by heat waves, declining air quality, and natural disasters some decades later. That's the choice they are going to make because that's the reasonable choice in their situation, they can't afford to sacrifice today for the sake of tomorrow.

ip26 5y ago
Yes; however, as with human-caused desertification, sacrificing tomorrow for today ultimately leads all of us to doom, so those of us who aren't in those circumstances have a moral imperative to figure this out :)
- PeterisP 5y ago
  My perspective on this is that in some aspects we're asking some people to sacrifice their today in order to save some other people from doom tomorrow, which is a quite different tradeoff than general sacrificing tomorrow for today. My presumption is that "leads us all to doom" is a slight exaggeration and rather we would seeing "merely very bad" consequences (i.e. they're something for which we should be willing to pay a lot but not something to be prevented at literally any cost) that are furthermore very unequally distributed. And the result of this are populations who would suffer a lot but can't afford to fix the issue, and there are other populations who can afford to spend resources on a better tomorrow, but for those groups perhaps it might be more efficient to allocate that money to mitigating the local consequences (e.g. flooding protection, urban redesign, restructuring of agriculture and pest control) instead of slightly slowing down (since they can't prevent it) the global warming as such. And, crucially, there's no shared understanding of these choices and tradeoffs among the people who could/should/would allocate these resources. What I read in your comment is that the people who can afford to fund the changes ("who aren't in those circumstances") have a moral imperative to fix this for everyone. That seems desirable, but IMHO unrealistic; both because those people are a minority and can't fix the global issues if the developing world continues to develop and grow emissions; and also because those people (on average) won't be willing to sacrifice their own welfare (e.g. reducing it to global median) in order to fix the global issues; we're far from a post-scarcity world and every country, including the richest, still has a multitude of local problems that scream for funding.