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Comment by Aachen | Hacker News Reader

Why present an opinion as a fact ("simple reality that we're unable")?

I agree if you opine that the high income countries won't adequately do it, and the low/middle income countries have bigger problems, but it is a choice (and mainly our choice, if I'm not mistaken about HN's predominant NA+EU demographic)

I'm not sure most high-income people (globally speaking, so like the richest ~billion) are consciously making that choice, or at minimum aren't aware of the cost-benefit situation. Pretending there is no choice doesn't seem like the right way to go about this, considering that every euro spent on prevention significantly outweighs adaptation options

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It's not the high income countries choice.

If you reduce your consumption the cost of oil will fall towards the cost of production and middle/low income countries would consume it.

The only way someone in a high income country can prevent this is to buy oil and permanently bury it.

Cost of fuel is not the whole picture if they don't have the infrastructure to consume it

Maybe they'll do decades-long investments to set up new oil infrastructure after we've moved away from it, but even then: it isn't a 1:1 exchange. What we reduce doesn't simply pop back up elsewhere because, evidenced by our moving away in this scenario, there's economical alternatives. Even if it came back 100% in another country a few decades later, buying time really does help us here because we can take more and more preventative and adaptative measures. It won't prevent any and all issues, but a +3°C world in 2200 is still vastly better (and more predictable) than a +5°C world from accelerated oil use

Rather than buying and re-burying oil, you're probably getting a higher ROI (lower climate change adaptation costs) by spending those euros (that you'd otherwise spend on burying oil) on helping everyone (including oneself) not produce greenhouse gasses

>The only way someone in a high income country can prevent this is to buy oil and permanently bury it.

This is needlessly roundabout (especially considering that the oil starts buried). One could simply scale down production (by regulation).

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