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Comment by Expez | Hacker News Reader

I recently finished Enlightenment Now by Steven Pinker and this exact point was made in that book. I'll paraphrase a salient quote from the book: poverty is the greatest polluter.

Intuitively this makes great sense: when you're eking out a subsistence living you're not going to care about the environment, but when resources are plenty you can afford to consider other living things too.

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That's just not true. The US emits 16 tons of CO2 per capita. For many African countries, that number is 1-2.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_...

The greatest polluter is everybody living in large single family homes full of things manufactured on other continents, with AC, multiple cars, eating red meat every day.

The greatest polluter is the economy where the only profitable business model is planned depreciation to make people buy new stuff. Nobody makes durable razors because it's a financial suicide. Nobody makes reliable cars, laptops, toothbrushes. People don't have a choice but to keep replacing things that break. Manufacturing these things wastes oil, coal and pollutes the environment. The businesses don't care because disposing the junk is not their problem. Change rules to make businesses accountable for stuff they sell: the recycling facility needs to do something with a mountain of broken fridges? Let it send an invoice to manufacturer. Many companies will go bankrupt. We'll see how reliable things replace the junk. The economy will slow down because people won't need to spend so much. There won't be much progress either if you drive the grandfathered car: no money for R&D, so engineers become repairmen. No more demand for STEM because the market for making new things is tiny. The big tech will collapse because its paid by ads and there will be nothing to advertise. Stagnation, deflation, unemployment, good stamps. As you see, the solution exists and it's called stagnation. TBH, I'm not sure if it's bad because currently the world is rapidly consolidating 99% of resources in the 1% people s hands (and make no mistake, they will survive any global warming that may come). P.S. Single family houses aren't the problem. They actually store CO2 in the form of wood, which is an easily replaceble resource. If houses were built from aluminium, I'd agree with you, but they are made from wood in the US.

I actually disagree that we'd no longer perform R&D or build new things. Rather, there would be a significant increase in retrofits to existing equipment. For example even cars from 30 years ago used standard DIN slots with DIN rails to mount their stereo equipment. You could easily build something to replace that equipment and retrofit in-dash GPS. And replacing the HVAC and retrofitting AC onto old engines is also possible by modifying the serpentine belt routing and cutting holes in the firewall.

Almost certainly what would happen is manufacturers would build more robust things and there would be more "ships of theseus" where you're running a 30-year old cabinet but with modern materials and components. People would generally have to be more technical and develop more one-off solutions.

That's nonsense: you have to look at the whole economy as an ecology of different waste streams.

The $X money you saved on non-disposable goods would instead be $Y spent on consumable goods (e.g. some wine or steak - both near 100% "pollution") or $Z spend on services (e.g. travel - near 100% pollution too) or other permanent goods $U (an expensive jacket that could last 300 years except it got thrown out because it looks ugly and smells of Uncle Jack).

If you want to save the world, you need to directly do something that saves it e.g. protect some native forest, or buy some farm land and let it revert to wilderness.

Anything else where you are participating in the economy is virtually guaranteed to have a high degree of waste (buy some eco-friendly meat, but 50% is retail markup, and the the hippy producer uses the money on a "wasteful" overseas holiday).

Very few people calculate the total ecological footprint of their actions: e.g. buying an electric car can easily be far worse for the planet (depending on cost, location, usage, and other factors).

Permanent goods cost more, so there will be less money for travel and food. If your point is that in the long run permanent goods cost less and people will have more disposable income, then I can't agree with that. Who's going to pay that income? Companies that no longer have money?

Asking people to do something for the greater good won't lead you anywhere. People are driven by greed that capitalism wisely directs into something productive. This powerful stream of greed won't disappear anywhere, but it's possible to redirect it somewhere else.

Regarding houses: I was referring more to the size of the housing than its materials. Larger housing correlates directly with higher energy use, probably in the form of heating and air conditioning.

"The greatest polluter is the economy where the only profitable business model is planned depreciation to make people buy new stuff."

Cite please, or is this just your opinion?

That's both untrue and ethically disgusting, by pretending that some poor people toiling in some remote countries, using no pesticide and no machinery, eating mostly rice or yam, harm the planet more than MIT professors flying around the world from conference to conference with their macbooks under their arm. This is so wrong...

The MIT professor is a lot more productive though - per unit of production he pollutes a fraction of what a poor farmer does.

The ratio doesn't count for the planet. Only the total impact. Having "less impact per unit of resource" doesn't help when resources are exhausted.

This seems to contradict the simple observation that, by and large, the poorer a country the more biodiversity it has.

Not necessarily- a poor country with high biodiversity or other natural resources are a known phenomenon [0]. Also, another known issue is that the most polluted rivers are often from developing countries, partially because developed countries are sending their trash there.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_curse

Resource curse is an interesting phenomenon, but I think biodiversity (~ the healthiness/robustness of the remaining natural environment) and e.g. the amount of accessible oil/gas a country has are fundamentally different aspects.

Pinker is an over-the-top neoliberal who specializes in motivated reasoning.

Simple Maslow is all this is.

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