Hacker News Reader

Comment by aeleos | Hacker News Reader

As much as people like to hate on Apple and all the other stuff they do wrong, this is how its going to have to continue if we still want to be living on earth in 50 years. Companies like Apple have massive global influence, and if what they want is some free marketing and press in return for investing in renewables, that is a price I will gladly pay. Governments and companies are the only real force large enough to enact the kind of change that needs to happen, and if what they want in return is good press than that is fine by me.

View on HN

I share your respect for corporations that help make the world a better place but I want to pick at the tone of your comment. It implies that businesses can’t do good for good’s sake, that there has to be some greedy motive behind every action. What if the leaders at Apple are actually good people and they’re honest when they say they want te leave the Earth a better place?

Then it'd go down in the history books as the first time a large public company had done so. We all run on Capitalism, meaning we've picked the generation and acquisition of Capital to be the one metric we've decided as a society to optimise for. This is why it's so important for governments to legislate carbon requirements, because that's the designed escape hatch for capitalism causing people to doing stuff which is very bad for society by optimising for capital.

> What if the leaders at Apple are actually good people and they’re honest when they say they want te leave the Earth a better place?

There's a concept called first mover disadvantage where for example a well intentioned CEO can push for a positive action by the company like reducing pollution, improving worker welfare. These nearly always incur a cost and push down shareholder value in the short term.

Furthermore if your competitors aren't making the same moves they're gaining in the short term over you.

A CEO like that is not going to last very long and most CEOs don't have the kind of power to tell shareholders to settle down.

That's what makes Apple's approach here pretty unique. Now if they'd only refresh their Mac lineup a little more often that'd be something...

> There's a concept called first mover disadvantage

A failed concept that has been proven wrong again and again. At this point it's a cliché coming out of people who got MBA's from bad schools.

>if your competitors aren't making the same moves they're gaining in the short term over you

This assumes your target market doesn't differentiate between your product and competitor's products on anything other than price. Apple, and others, have repeatedly proven this wrong.

> most CEOs don't have the kind of power to tell shareholders to settle down

Tim Cook is already on record saying that Apple is committed to doing what it sees as the right thing, and the investors can pound sand if they're not on board.

There are a number of other very large companies that are also run this way. The notion of a corporate board that only listens to its shareholders is a gross oversimplification and not based in a thorough study of modern business.

Even if that's all true, there are still other incentives that aren't going away that can have a tremendous influence (fiduciary obligations to shareholders, for example). Which is just to say that there are some significant structural aspects at play here.

Businesses don't have this type of intentionality in my opinion. They're like forces of nature (with smaller lifespans) primarily acting in the economic realm. Even non-profits must manage input and output economically correctly in order to survive.

True forces of nature are like a graph. Companies are like trees with a root. There is some control in targeting the root but the end result is similar to the graph in that it can't be predicted. Thus good/bad must be taken as is without looking too much into the intentionality.

A focus on intentionality may actually create "bad" because it rewards focus on the packaging over the content. CEOs may just be the main story teller to manage the packaging of the company as an individual (vs PR branch which is faceless/just-a-job)

> ...this is how its going to have to continue if we still want to be living on earth in 50 years

Climate change is a cluster-f-bomb that will evolve into blatant seriousness over tens of decades. It won't directly ruin civilization, either, so if we avoid any major wars based on scarcity or refugee crises we're likely just looking at a major remodeling of humanities day-to-day and some intense population events moreso than annihilation.

From that perspective, I'm gonna say "kiiiiiiiinda".

It's not like what Apple is doing is _bad_, but let's get real: they're stating above the fold that their green investments are no solution for their massive 24/7 computing needs. They're investing in fungable offsets, but the underlying energy production is still carbon intensive. Their approach doesn't cover their own needs, and can't scale to any industrially challenging or civilization-scale needs. We want to transition a lot of industry over to clean electrical processes that require more energy and we want to lift a few Billion out of poverty, too...

If we look at total energy usage on this planet and future demands we see that funging some minor percentage of electricity production (not energy!), is just moving around some lipstick on a pig and making sure the brand is "eco friendly"...

Fundamentally we need to be looking at technologies that eliminate the need for the coal plant to keep the datacenter open, the peaker gas plants that handle bursty loads, and for burning oil to get the workers/supplies in and out of the building. We don't need electrical tech that's "green" on top of existing infrastructure, we need green tech that displaces and eliminates existing energy infrastructure.

Bluntly, if you care about that 50 year picture: the answer is fission, with a vague and slight possibility of fusion (maybe).

Too bad all these efforts are ruined by a dozen BTC mining farms.

Jevons paradox -- as it applies to energy -- is that efficiency gives us more and better ways to make money wasting energy.

From a humanitarian and ecological standpoint we want civilization to be using as much electricity as possible. If only we could make lots of energy with very little carbon we might be able to get rich mining BTC and keep drinking cheap coffee ;)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com