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Comment by frgtpsswrdlame | Hacker News Reader

>If I have to choose between losing a species of beetle and people freezing in winter, the beetle is in trouble.

Yes but which mine is it that's 'keeping people from freezing' exactly? I would totally support a mine if it kept people from freezing to death, I just don't see any evidence that one or two or three new mines are actually going to do that. Commodities becoming cheaper is good, but it's not infinitely good and other things, like preserving just one weird beetle species, are important as well.

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Why do you think we mine things? Do you imagine the 1% have basements full of oil that they swim in and laugh about? We don't stockpile this stuff, we use it. :)

These resources are for people to live their lives in comfort. I know a woman who doesn't turn her heating on in the winter because she can't afford to; there will be a lot more I don't know, and some of them are going to get very sick. Cheaper oil will help these people on the margins. Similar stories can be made for any commodity, these are literal building blocks of modern society.

Sure cheaper commodities aren't an infinite good, but the marginal utility of some creature that is so rare it is almost extinct isn't going to exist for anyone but the keenest nature goer. They are by definition rare. Cheaper commodities will probably be more good to more people than that.

Not all uses are equal. Are we NOT going to build something valuable because the output of a few mines are missing? I think the price of the material would go up, some of the least economically valuable things might not get built ... or we'd figure out how to build things more efficiently.

I'd love to see estimates for how significant the price impacts are of the ESA for key raw materials. I'd be surprised if it is truly significant on a global scale.

> Are we NOT going to build something valuable because the output of a few mines are missing?

Actually, yes. Instead of producing 2000 widgets, we produce only 1800 and fire one worker. That worker who was already living at the fringe of survival, now suffers far more than you'd expect. Perhaps they survive, but their 2 month old child dies of malnutrition as the family scrounges for food.

Minor bits of economic disadvantage can have great cost to people.

Now, of course, it'd be better to simply subsidize people so they won't die regardless of if a mine is built or not. That's the solution that I support, as I'd err on the side of caution when it comes to ecological damage as it is hard to fix, and susceptible to being a classic tragedy of the commons since no one owns it.

> Instead of producing 2000 widgets, we produce only 1800 and fire one worker.

Do we?

As we're seeing with oil extraction, the actual thing we do seems to be "hire scientists, come up with new ways to extract, and start a brand new sector of the industry".

You're arguing the broken windows fallacy. Every economic inefficiency --- every forced deviation from what people would prefer to produce --- has a cost. Those scientists, if not working around misguided resource extraction bans, could have worked on something even more beneficial.

> Every economic inefficiency --- every forced deviation from what people would prefer to produce --- has a cost.

It's not always that clear.

Replacing coal with solar was an economic inefficiency, until enough investment into solar happened. It's now cheaper to produce a MW/h via solar than via coal.

And that's before you factor in the pollution externalities.

We're all better off now because we did the temporarily inefficient thing via (in part) government intervention.

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