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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" n

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.

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.