Comment by myrmidon | Hacker News Reader

Comment by myrmidon | Hacker News Reader

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> Sure, but people's rent and bills are due now and if they can't pay up, you can't gaslighting them with "your sacrifice is necessary for the future of the environment" which is a luxury belief.

My point of view is that "we have to curb emissions now before consequences grow too dire" is not a "luxury belief": the actual luxury is/was consuming fuel and fossil products without ever paying for the externalities. It was a luxury we could not actually afford at any point, basically just got it on credit in the past, and all that credit is coming due within the century.

> Why haven't shareholders of energy companies also made sacrifices to save the environment? How come only the consumers have to?

Because overall most of the benefit did go to consumers. People basically got a gallon of gas for 30 cents in 1960 when it probably needed to be a dollar or more, but companies like Shell only ever saw a small fraction of that retail price, and there is absolutely no way you could claw back that difference (or anything close, really) from them.

> Do you understand why people are pissed off with the switch?

I do understand the feeling of getting things denied that you took for granted, but I have little sympathy for selfishness.

>the actual luxury is/was consuming fuel and fossil products without ever paying for the externalities.

Then why do current generations have to pay for the profits that the previous generations have banked?

>but companies like Shell only ever saw a small fraction of that retail price, and there is absolutely no way you could claw back that difference

YES, nothing we can do about the corporate overlords who screwed us, let's instead claw it back from the current generation of people instead of from Shell shareholders, that's will go down well politically for sure and not cause extremist rise to power. How is this not a luxury belief?

>I do understand the feeling of getting things denied that you took for granted, but I have little sympathy for selfishness.

It's not selfishness to afford necessities for a decent life especially when more and more of your paycheck goes towards taxes and necessities.

>Then why do current generations have to pay for the profits that the previous generations have banked?

Life isn't fair and time travel doesn't exist. We are stuck with the world we have now and have to deal with the realities, including suffering the consequences for things not your fault. It isn't fair that a son gets cancer because his mother smoked around him all his life, but he is still the one that has to go through chemo.

>Life isn't fair

This argument can be used to justify whatever actions you want. You know that, right?

For example, I'm gonna take your house and when you ask why, it's because "life isn't fair".

However, various forms of fairness to balance out past wrong doings can always be achieved if desired, but it usually requires force or democratically if over 50% of people can unite on it.

>This argument can be used to justify whatever actions you want

Yes, which is why I wrote more than 3 words. It is why I used the cancer analogy. This generation is left holding the bag, and it has to be dealt with. Stomping your foot and saying it's not fair does nothing to cancer, nor does it do anything to climate change. I’m not saying a specific policy decision is right or wrong. I’m saying this generation has to deal with it, regardless of fairness.

> Then why do current generations have to pay for the profits that the previous generations have banked?

Because the vast majority of "profits" (externalities that were not paid for) were not banked, they were simply not paid.

Even if every person that enjoyed cheap fossil products in the past had the price difference on some separate bank account, taking that to fund environmental policies would be very difficult in western countries because of democracy and demographics (very difficult to get majorities when working against the interests of elderly voters).

> YES, nothing we can do about the corporate overlords who screwed us, let's instead claw it back from the current generation of people instead of from Shell shareholders, that's will go down well politically for sure and not cause extremist rise to power. How is this not a luxury belief?

Again, the Shell corporate overlords only siphoned off a very small fraction of the gains, even taking the whole corporation would be completely insufficient. The main beneficiaries in the past were not Shell and BP, but the end consumers instead.

Just heaping blame on corporations or past generations is not helping anything. You could certainly nationalize the whole petroleum industry and confiscate pension funds, but approaches like that have very detrimental side effects.

> It's not selfishness to afford necessities for a decent life especially when more and more of your paycheck goes towards taxes and necessities.

I would argue that if you discover that a past lifestyle was financed by unsustainably pushing the hidden costs of energy elsewhere (and into the future), then still refusing to pay those hidden costs after the discovery is the very definition of selfish.

It's cheaper for the current generation to deal with climate change than to ignore it.

You're effectively advocating for some small subset of that generation to try to disadvantage another larger subset, at a net loss to society, and hope they don't damage themselves in the process.

While complaining about selfishness of previous generations.

Depends on the country, but overall I'll say the opposite is true: cheaper is to ignore it. Climate change will not stop even if Germany switched to 100% renewables. And globally it is also not a top priority.

Basically this. But he is probably rich enough to not care because the effort that will be asked of him will be small relative to his purchasing power.

So, he can pretend to be "good" for doing the right thing, while more unfortunate people will pay the real cost without any guarantee that the climate situation will improve and that their children will have a chance at a "better life". Not that they care that much because children are becoming unaffordable for much of the lower class.

The problem with the green ideology is that it's a global problem and clearly global fossil fuel use reduction isn't happening. And the countries using it don't care because not using it is much worse than the promise of a better world in the future. If your life is shit right now (compared to the rich world) the promise of a better world far out in the future is just propaganda.

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