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Comment by bigbugbag | Hacker News Reader

Nuclear plants are a good example of this mentality, cheap power until you have to decommission the plant and suddenly costs goes through the roof.

But I would not say this is market failure, to me this is market working exactly as intended and expected: maximizing profit without caring for the rest.

On the other hand, it is not a question of subsidy/handout paid by future generation anymore, we're now at the point where it is a matter of going over the threshold effect where the consequence will be no human life possible on earth in a matter of decades.

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> ... the consequence will be no human life possible on earth in a matter of decades.

That is very unlikely. People could have survived just fine during the Eocene Optimum, ~50 Myr ago. When the entire planet was tropical. Assuming that they knew what to eat, anyway.

That is mere pedantry however. Clearly the main point was that the effects will be undesirable because they will come at the cost of a lot of human life. Whether humanity as a species will survive is, arguably, of lesser importance.

Trust me, predicting the extinction of the human race is going to backfire. Maybe "can't exclude the possibility that the human race will go extinct" is defensible. But still, it's not a useful thing to be saying.

I don't know... It can certainly backfire if even the claim "many humans will die or suffer greatly" is false, then sure. But otherwise, I don't see anyone claiming "well, technically, only 90% of humans will die" would dampen mitigating measures. But of course, I could be wrong.

Look, I get what you say. But consider how skeptics have used extreme predictions from Hanson, Gore and various NGOs to create doubt about the reality of anthropogenic climate change.

Mmm...if the effects are merely "undesirable" and not existential than I dare say that the status quo is unlikely to change. I'd go as far as saying that whatever efforts are being done now might simply be lip-service or at best token gestures. Perhaps it is the case that there is a considerable asymmetry in the impact of the effects...

"Undesirable" and "come at the cost of a lot of human life" is technically correct, but is also a pretty sterile description, that doesn't communicate the full picture.

The worst-case scenario is a collapse of civilization, which - with or without wars - means mass starvation (if you live in a large city, you'll die in the first week). Your grandchildren - or more likely, someone else's grandchildren - will be living in Mad Max hellscape, desperately trying to stave off reverting to pre-industrial levels of life and technology.

(And with all the easily accessible energy sources already mined out and gone, I suspect the next industrial revolution won't be possible for many, many millennia.)

Undesirable is here merely a mild manner of saying: "you and your family in are extremely likely to suffer devastating climate related loss of life and property damage".

It's not a question of whether humans could exist in a much hotter climate, clearly that's possible (although perhaps not in the same numbers as in the current era). The risk is how much damage we'll do to ecosystems in a world of dwindling resources. To take one example, when mass hunger is widespread can fishing quotas be enforced effectively?

Widespread ecosystem collapse is a plausible risk.

OK, perhaps. But what will mainly collapse is human civilization, and populations, and then ecosystems will more-or-less recover. Not the same, for sure. But that's not such a big deal, in the long term.

Well, you can take a gun and shoot schoolchildren and in the US and it will demonstrably not be a big deal in less than about two weeks. But I don't see that as a good argument in favour of ignoring school shootings.

I think it's the only deal. It's obviously not the planet that we should be protecting, as it'll be fine here with or without us. It's not also the habitability that we should worry about, because it would be really, really hard to damage the world to such an extent all humans would go extinct.

The thing that matters is keeping our current technological civilization together. If it collapses, it'll undo all the things humanity has achieved, and will prevent the next couple hundred generations from achieving them again. All the advancements in our understanding of the universe, our capabilities, our quality of life - and all the hopes of further advances, ending aging, leaving Earth - poof, gone, not coming back in a while.

(Yes, I'm of a view that there's little difference between humanity 500 years ago and 5000 years ago; everything that's interesting started happening with the printing press and industrial revolution.)

I'm all for "keeping our current technological civilization together". It's just that I'm not sure it's possible, given the cliff we've already walked off of. Actually, there's a reasonable chance that it's our "AI" (for lack of a better yet interpretable word) children that will endure. But it's impossible to predict.

> this is market working exactly as intended

This is why we regulate the market. The market will seek to maximize its profit within the bounds of the law. Make the above suggestion compulsory, and the market will adjust to it.

I believe GP was using "market failure" in the sense that the market is not allocating resources in a (Pareto) efficient manner, because of said externalities.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_failure

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