People like the feeling of personal progress, mostly through accumulating material posessions, increasing social capital, and raising kids. Getting in the way of any of those is a good way to get thrown out of office. So any solution to the climate crisis has to work within these constraints. I don't understand why people don't grasp this.
I disagree. A solution to the climate crisis needs to face up to the fact that we simply can't continue to consume as we have, if we want a world that's livable for current, much less future generations. It's not that goddamn hard to see.
Stop consuming what exactly? Shelter, climate control, transportation, food? It is not like Starbucks and luxury handbags are causing the bulk of emissions.
Give me a better alternative that avoids 2 degrees of warming, then. Burden of proof is on you at this point. "Innovation" had 50 years to work, and did nothing to get us out of this.
That has nothing to do with the merits of the solution, i.e. whether it will work or not. Meanwhile no alternative exists that will stop us from reaching 2C of warming.
The ultimate conclusion then is that that political system will be broken on the wheel of physical reality. Adapt or die is a pretty blunt statement but it is nonetheless true.
I believed this too, until COVID. Millions weren't even willing to do so much as wear a tiny piece of cloth over their faces. If they can't even put up with that minuscule level of discomfort for the greater good, do you think they will ever make the sacrifices needed to slow climate change? No way!
No solution to climate change is politically viable if it means the general public needs to lift a finger. We know they just won't do anything, mandated or not. The ocean could be coming into their living room, and they will sit there, watching it, scowling about their political opponents.
We had millions of people literally willing to spread a deadly disease and die, just to irritate the other side. Not only will these people do nothing in the face of climate change, they will do whatever they can to accelerate it if they believe their ideological opponents want to stop it.
I think we're on the same page, I just meant 'die' in a slightly more literal sense than you probably took it.
And yes, it is incredibly sad. Somewhere in the last century we went completely off the rails to the point where we are now endangering our world and have no tools to do anything about it. It's like watching a slow motion train wreck, unfortunately both you and I are on the train and we can't get off.
The earth doesn't actually care about gas prices, recessions or elections and we either adapt or we will be adapted forcibly and with far less choice about the outcome.
Who’s “we” and what do you mean by “livable”? There’s no mainstream climate model that predicts the globe becoming uninhabitable for humanity. Even the worst case scenarios in well done models only show global growth slowing by a few percent without any climate mitigation. Meanwhile we have a carbon neutral technology, nuclear energy, that even with its problems can easily provide energy albeit at a higher cost than coal.
The predicted higher temperatures existed in the past and had some of the highest archeological rates of biodiversity. Thats not to say the outcome will be all positive; certainly some regions will encounter issues during the transition, but there’s also going to be a lot of opportunity opened up within the range of predicted outcomes by climate models. Increased agricultural production in northern regions, less cost of heating in many heavily populated areas, and of course new transport routes across the arctic. That’s not to mention all of the benefits fossil fuels are bringing to people much poorer than you in the global south.
You hardly need to go anywhere near "the globe becoming uninhabitable for humanity" before you run into pretty devastating consequences for significant percentages of the world's population. And even if we encouraged poorer countries to burn as much cheap fossil fuel as they possibly could to improve their standards of living, I very much doubt it would even come close to enabling them to mitigate against some of the worst sorts of natural disasters and weather extremes that are expected to be more severe and frequent as the planet continues to warm. Though realistically it won't be lack of cheap energy that continues to hold back economic development for much of the world anyway.
I didn't say "uninhabitable," although, yes, FYI, major climate models do predict certain areas becoming uninhabitable due to intolerable wet bulb temperatures. I said "liveable," as in "can sustain some modicum of semi-modern civilization." That's a far lower bar.
Meanwhile, we have a technology we literally cannot build enough of in the next 5 years to stop any of this from happening. And, if we continue to burn fossil fuels, once we exhaust them, we'll literally reach C02 levels not seen since the Cretaceous period, when temperatures were 10 C above the pre-industrial revolution era. How does that benefit the global south, or anybody?
I do not believe you have thought this through. You bring up so called "opportunities" forecast by climate change models, yet fail to consider that we're already looking at severe weather events such as floods, storms, and heat waves, that would normally be 1 in 100 or 1 in 1000 events, starting to happen on a multiple times a decade time scale. It's not possible to build in the face of that; even insurance companies are recognizing that today.
Most of humanity already lives in conditions you would consider “semi-modern”. I understand that change can be scary and that yes you personally will either need to adapt your expectations to live a comfortable semi-modern lifestyle. Or perhaps decide to seize the situation and make life better for yourself and others by providing goods and services that assist the transition and maintain your current luxurious lifestyle.
It’s funny to me when people point to weather events and blame climate change. Yes there will always be some place in the world experiencing extreme weather events, and climate change will change the distribution of extreme weather events so that some places become more extreme and others become more mild. I wouldn’t want to live in California ;-)
IMHO we need a cure that isn't worse than the disease. I think we need to embrace capitalism, up to a point. That is, maximize profit until you hit a certain point, then stop. I call it the policy of "Enough". Make the threshold generous, or even self-declared. I don't think the ideology of capitalism suffers all that much from this adjustment. Once you succeed to a certain point, you leave the game and enjoy your life.
Plus, we don't have to be too draconian about solutions. For example, we can and should mandate that no new vehicles above a certain weight, and no new small jets, should be produced. The ones in existence we leave alone, and let decay take its course. The same with billionaires: leave them alone, and limit the next generation.
I'm happy to hear criticism, but bear in mind that I'm rather attached to this idea. It's novel, as far as I know, and I think it could satisfy both hard-core capitalists AND environmentalists, which is a rare thing. So please, try to offer ideas to improve it. As for the right Enough number, I think for me it's about 10M 2023 USD. I'd like to get to a point in human history where everyone can get there.
You realize that $10M can throw off about $400K/yr for a very, very long time, right? To describe that as “making [do]” seems a little disingenuous to me.
It's better than nothing and you can't please everyone. Read this thread; people are coming out of the woodwork to protest this limit as Marxism. Besides, the actual number isn't really important - acknowledging an upper bound to wealth exists is the key idea. It's an idea I've never even heard discussed.
Why this rather than a tax to achieve your desired externalities? The problem with this kind of policy is it's very arbitrary - some bureaucracy decides what is and isn't allowed. It also usually comes with a subtext of attacking a particular segment of society that you aren't part of.
If we can remove carbon from the atmosphere or offset it, than a tax equal to that expense during production and used to offset should achieve the outcomes you want. (Ignoring how many programs are poorly built for correctly achieving this real offset).
Taxes are unpopular. The policy of Enough can be done voluntarily. In fact, I've toyed with the idea of starting a company who's employment agreement requires agreeing to the conditions of Enough. I think it would even be useful for individuals, in private, to consider what their own Enough number is.
Also, taxes don't try to curb unbounded greed and growth. The Enough policy acknowledges unbounded growth is actually the biggest problem.
It doesn't work, because "enough" here would have to be something like, maybe everyone lives in a small apartment in a city, is vegan, and doesn't travel much or at all.
Ten mil is way higher than that. It's probably more like a 50k or lower income with no wealth.
For me and for a lot of people I know, this would be a significant downgrade and I'd rather compete to maintain or improve my quality of life.
I don't have ten mil, but if everyone lived like me, we would be buggered.
You don't know that. It hasn't been tried, and I daresay you don't even understand what I'm proposing.
One neoliberal capitalist way to implement the Enough system is to make agreement to it a condition of your employment, and also a condition of your investment. You agree to retire and divest as soon as you earn a certain amount. At work, you vacate the role and let someone else try it out. With your investments, you sell and let someone else be a stakeholder.
That sounds terrible. Instead of having surgeon with decades of experience they retire after 10 years because they have enough. Instead building bridges with experience engineers and construction workers, we can let some kid out of college do it.
How many engineers or surgeons make it to $10M of wealth AT ALL, let alone in a period of time short enough to make expertise itself in short supply? The answer is approximately zero.
i'm an engineer in a neighborhood mostly filled with lawyers and surgeons, i can tell you these people easily have 10M of wealth, and these are all people currently still in family building stages of life. Also adding..if this area lost these people as experienced surgeons there would definitely be issues!
The idea that capitalism should go to a point and then be stopped is a pretty standard one from Marx. He greatly admired capitalism but believed once it made people rich it would no longer be needed and the workers would naturally take over through revolution. That’s not to say you’re wrong just because you agree with Marx, but rather you should consider why you are so attached to this idea. Marx’s ideas are a type of religion dressed up to look scientific via “historical materialism”. It’s appealing to believe that time is under humanity’s control rather than something outside of humanity, but there’s strong reasons to believe that is false (the universe will last much longer than humans will).
I think you need to re-read Marx, then. I'm not a Marxist, at all, mainly because of the empirical evidence that hardcore redistribution of wealth goes very, very poorly. Frankly it annoys me and worries me that some people associate literally any limit on capitalism with socialism. Adam Smith's invisible hand was driven not by self-interest, but enlightened self-interest.
Putting a hard, generous upper limit on wealth accumulation is not even close to Marxism.
Admittedly Marx is more generous than you- he didn’t want a hard upper limit in wealth and rather thought wealth would increase further after the transition. So yes you do differ from Marx in that you’re a bit harder on people.
You're arguing in favor of unbounded personal greed. You're arguing in favor of cancer, which is any cell that ceases to regulate it's own growth to the detriment of the organism. The unreasonable effectiveness of tools means that the old days of "natural regulation" of human growth has been eliminated, and something needs to replace it. Asking people to stop once they have Enough is just about the least bad option we have to stem the tide.
That works as long as there are no limits to the system in which you are working. But the real world is very much a closed system and you can't externalize the results of unbounded growth of wealth within that system. There is nothing to externalize to! So unbounded growth equals unbounded pollution, unbounded resource depletion and ultimately the crash when the boundaries of the system start making themselves be noticed.
Resource intensity of gdp in developed economies has been decreasing over time. That’s because wealth is not a zero sum game that necessarily requires an exterior to take the negative side of the equation. Rather wealth is created when better options are made available- when actors within the system have superior choices to what they had before. That’s why you see some entertainment media produce outsize returns while others end up failing; it’s not a matter of how much resources are consumed but rather how they’re put together to make a better story (better from the consumer perspective versus their alternatives).
That's true but it's a quantitative element that won't make a qualitative difference in the long run, in other words the outcome will be exactly the same, but maybe a bit later.
> IMHO we need a cure that isn't worse than the disease.
Agreed, but you need to realize that one of the symptoms of the disease is the destruction of global civilization as we know it. That's not something we're going to see tomorrow, or in 5 years, but in 10-20 years, if we continue on with the status quo, I would say it's quite likely.
> I think it could satisfy both hard-core capitalists AND environmentalists
Unfortunately not. All the things you mention (air travel, billionaires, etc.) are things that are literally responsible for accelerating the destruction right now.
As far as "draconian" goes, we had 50 years to get something done. We're down to about 5 years before we start seeing the first tier of real consequences now. Draconian is pretty much where it's at for the next several decades, if we're thinking realistically.
My “walk away” number is also $10M (in 2018 dollars, based on when I concluded that target).
Trouble with climate is my carbon footprint would likely go up in retirement rather than down, from the time and resources available to travel. Walking around my town and puttering around waiting to die isn’t my ideal retirement; doing that while having the money to do 10x more fun things is worse not better.
(Side note: I don’t expect to ever retire with $10M in even then-current dollars unless we quickly go Weimar in inflation terms.)
> Trouble with climate is my carbon footprint would likely go up in retirement rather than down
This is also one of my pet peeves with the "degrowth" movement's solution to climate change. Essentially they want to alleviate the problems not by innovating to do more with less, but to have people do less. This would mean less work for everyone, but obviously less work means more leisure time. Unless every decides to take up meditating, they're going to consume more during their leisure time, creating not only more work, but also more of every type of negative externality.
It is worth pointing out that alleviating the problem by having people do less (as you put it) is far less of a gamble than betting it all on innovation. Innovation kicks the can down the road. Innovation means relying on a very select few capable of the innovation required, and an even more restricted set of people to finance it.
Also curious is that these compromises are almost never framed as a temporary adjustment to humanity's consumption until the innovation catches up. Would think that's more palatable, but instead it usually seems like "we need to stop consuming like this, forever".
I’m past the halfway point in my life. A temporary adjustment of just say 30 years is forever for me. A temporary adjustment of 70 years is forever for my kids.
I was thinking about this in the context of wealth inequality and the "existence of billionaires". I don't think that the common refrain of simply attempting to "tax billionaires out of existence" is functional or reasonable. People work hard, then they hit a really good idea and their company sky rockets in value. The notion that there is no ethical way to become a billionaire and that somehow all billionaires are inherently evil is, to me, very naive.
However, Elon Musk shouldn't exist. So how do we stop that? My proposal is a cap on revenue per employee before a company must go public, and a cap on individual ownership of any company. So for example maximum $5m per employee revenue before you have to list, then a single person or entity can own at most 10% of a company.
This means once you hit that figure, you have to list the company and cash out, and let other people step in and take not only responsibility but also share the revenue and ownership more equitably.
> maximize profit until you hit a certain point, then stop
This was explicitly the goal of early capitalist philosophy. Adam Smith envisioned a world where growth came to an end as societies expanded to fill their "economic space".
Smith misinterpreted human desires and motivations; enough is never enough as long as our potential future adversary is also accumulating wealth. Economic arms races ensure there will never be enough.
I like it. One way to do this is to create a personal consumption budget based on what a normal life would look like if the resources were equally shared and everything was done in a sustainable way. The rich would have to come down many steps of the ladder (and pretty much everybody reading this would be classified as rich) and the poor would be able to go up a bit. I don't think it could be done with 8 billion people though, but doing the math on this is super complex and probably would be years worth of work.
The church has been questioning greed for quite a while. If trends in the west continue the church is going to go away before the instinct to be greedy does. I think this is a fundamental problem for all of the current solutions to our climate crisis. Any strategy which requires everyone to stop being greedy and consider others is most likely going to fail. I think that a lot of people are under the impression that all that needs to happen is things just need to get bad enough and then eventually people will see the error of their ways. Self delusion is such a powerful force in both directions I think it’s unlikely to happen.
A ridiculous and uninformed article. This is a great example of the type of magical thinking we often see when it comes to issues like this. The reality is that changing the behavior of superemitters is not nearly enough to make a difference, compared to the sum total of the emissions of ordinary people.
Let’s redo the headline:
- People driving their kids to school is driving the climate crisis
- People having enough to eat is driving the climate crisis
- People taking nice vacations with their families and friends is driving the climate crisis
The problem doesn’t seem too easy to solve now.
Just as we can’t fund a robust welfare state by taxing the rich alone (everyone must pay high taxes for it to be enough), we will do nothing about climate change by focusing only on superemitters (most aspects of life must be decarbonized if we’re going to stop climate change).
Edit: we just had to ask you the other day to stop posting unsubstantive and/or flamebait comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36857356. I don't want to ban you but if this keeps up, we're going to have to—so please fix this.
> - People driving their kids to school is driving the climate crisis - People having enough to eat is driving the climate crisis - People taking nice vacations with their families and friends is driving the climate crisis
By my count, two out of the three are reasonably considered “excess” and are seemingly not being questioned as claimed by the headline.
It does seem to be the conclusion that people arrive at but don’t really want to say out loud. If we really want to save the climate we should all just kill ourselves.
"...if the top 10% of global emitters were to cut their carbon footprint to that of the typical EU citizen... that alone would cut global emissions by around one third." - p.208 The Climate Book (Greta Thunberg)
For better or worse, the wealthy are the thought leaders of society. Their values trickle down to the middle and lower classes. When we see them consume at a high rate (per capita), it sends a message that “what I can afford to consume is ok to consume”. So the masses end up throwing away hoards of cheap single use plastics because it’s convenient and not expensive.
The issue with mass consumption by the wealthy is how it influences the behavior of the more impactful middle and lower classes.
In the Steve Jobs biography I was originally shocked that he and his wife had hours long debates about whether or not to use a drying machine (vs hanging laundry outside). For a long time I never saw what he was fighting for, but now it makes sense to me.
> Let’s redo the headline: - People driving their kids to school is driving the climate crisis - People having enough to eat is driving the climate crisis
There is huge range between excess and shortage.
There are people in developed world who do not drive their kids in SUVs.
There are people in developed world who walk their kids to school. Good urban design / spatial planning is better for live and environment.
> we will do nothing about climate change
We will do nothing. This attitude is just looking for excuses. CO2 emissions per capita in Austria are half of those in USA.
Life is sane. People are living longer than they ever did in history, most live better than kings of the past. Must of history lived in horrid conditions, so I don't think this outcome is all that bad.
Yet sane life here with flushable toilets, antibiotics, and global communications, is something we should avoid...
None of these can be had without the infrastructure we have built. None of the advances in the human collective knowledge could have happened. We know this because we can look back in history and see how long humans clanked rocks together and yelled at the sky above for rain.
Only a fool would suggest we should have avoided this outcome, all while typing on a keyboard connected to the most advanced thing humans had ever made.
It's flawed and naive to point fingers at those with relatively no power. This issue is not new. It's been on the radar of those with power for *decades*.
But it easy to shun responsibly and accountability when you're redirecting the narrative from your yacht.
Wow. Another story teller. There was no finger pointing, I did not blame anybody. I simply pointed out the hat the target complaint, if resolved would not change anything.
If you took every yacht away. Nothing about climate would change.
Your response reeks of emotional bias. Please try again.
Okay neo-matrix post modernist. Nobody is talking about power. The fact you have even brought a power dynamic into this shows exactly who you are. What is worse is you don’t even properly understand the power manic beteeen the masses and the world.
The masses are the post poweful group in the world. They set the pace for everybody else.
In the US 85% of emissions are transportation (which people don’t have a mundane choice generally on how they travel - low emission options come from regulatory and policy choices), energy production (again, not mundane), industrial processes (again not by people) and agriculture.
If you’re argument is that people consume the things provided to them and they could vote with their wallet ignores going to the root of the emissions and tackling the issue there.
My particular beef is disposable/ short-lived goods -- the impact on the Earth of a product that lasts for 30 years is far less than one designed to need replacement after 5.
Yet weenie product managers & vulturous MBAs are constantly engineering things weaker & less repairable.
Sometimes to make the unit cost 0.5 cents cheaper, but perhaps more often to force earlier replacement and another revenue opportunity.
Good luck telling to the billions
of people living in poverty in South America, Africa, and Asia that they have to give up on the dreams for a more affluent life. While we (The West, the rich countries etc call it whatever you want) enjoyed the high living standards for decades.
It's more accurate to say, good luck telling the faux affluent they need to cut back on the mindless and excessive consumption.
For example, we know the negative impact of factory farming. We're also aware that too much animal protein has health consequences. And yet The West- as unhealthy as ever - can't help itself.
How exactly was that dream going to happen with the global north constantly exploiting the global south anyway? (Asia seems to be doing just fine these days, so I don't know what you're talking about there.)
Greed and excess are at the core of our economies which are based on infinite growth. It just doesn’t add up to a healthy society or healthy environment.
We need to embrace degrowth and radically change our economic system.
But we won’t, at least not in time, so I hope the survivors of our post-capitalist meltdown are able to craft something better.
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[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 210 ms ] threadYes, those seem like some good things to work on reducing the impact of.
No solution to climate change is politically viable if it means the general public needs to lift a finger. We know they just won't do anything, mandated or not. The ocean could be coming into their living room, and they will sit there, watching it, scowling about their political opponents.
We had millions of people literally willing to spread a deadly disease and die, just to irritate the other side. Not only will these people do nothing in the face of climate change, they will do whatever they can to accelerate it if they believe their ideological opponents want to stop it.
And yes, it is incredibly sad. Somewhere in the last century we went completely off the rails to the point where we are now endangering our world and have no tools to do anything about it. It's like watching a slow motion train wreck, unfortunately both you and I are on the train and we can't get off.
The predicted higher temperatures existed in the past and had some of the highest archeological rates of biodiversity. Thats not to say the outcome will be all positive; certainly some regions will encounter issues during the transition, but there’s also going to be a lot of opportunity opened up within the range of predicted outcomes by climate models. Increased agricultural production in northern regions, less cost of heating in many heavily populated areas, and of course new transport routes across the arctic. That’s not to mention all of the benefits fossil fuels are bringing to people much poorer than you in the global south.
I didn't say "uninhabitable," although, yes, FYI, major climate models do predict certain areas becoming uninhabitable due to intolerable wet bulb temperatures. I said "liveable," as in "can sustain some modicum of semi-modern civilization." That's a far lower bar.
Meanwhile, we have a technology we literally cannot build enough of in the next 5 years to stop any of this from happening. And, if we continue to burn fossil fuels, once we exhaust them, we'll literally reach C02 levels not seen since the Cretaceous period, when temperatures were 10 C above the pre-industrial revolution era. How does that benefit the global south, or anybody?
I do not believe you have thought this through. You bring up so called "opportunities" forecast by climate change models, yet fail to consider that we're already looking at severe weather events such as floods, storms, and heat waves, that would normally be 1 in 100 or 1 in 1000 events, starting to happen on a multiple times a decade time scale. It's not possible to build in the face of that; even insurance companies are recognizing that today.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cretaceous_Thermal_Maximum
It’s funny to me when people point to weather events and blame climate change. Yes there will always be some place in the world experiencing extreme weather events, and climate change will change the distribution of extreme weather events so that some places become more extreme and others become more mild. I wouldn’t want to live in California ;-)
Plus, we don't have to be too draconian about solutions. For example, we can and should mandate that no new vehicles above a certain weight, and no new small jets, should be produced. The ones in existence we leave alone, and let decay take its course. The same with billionaires: leave them alone, and limit the next generation.
I'm happy to hear criticism, but bear in mind that I'm rather attached to this idea. It's novel, as far as I know, and I think it could satisfy both hard-core capitalists AND environmentalists, which is a rare thing. So please, try to offer ideas to improve it. As for the right Enough number, I think for me it's about 10M 2023 USD. I'd like to get to a point in human history where everyone can get there.
If we can remove carbon from the atmosphere or offset it, than a tax equal to that expense during production and used to offset should achieve the outcomes you want. (Ignoring how many programs are poorly built for correctly achieving this real offset).
Taxes are unpopular. The policy of Enough can be done voluntarily. In fact, I've toyed with the idea of starting a company who's employment agreement requires agreeing to the conditions of Enough. I think it would even be useful for individuals, in private, to consider what their own Enough number is.
Also, taxes don't try to curb unbounded greed and growth. The Enough policy acknowledges unbounded growth is actually the biggest problem.
Ten mil is way higher than that. It's probably more like a 50k or lower income with no wealth.
For me and for a lot of people I know, this would be a significant downgrade and I'd rather compete to maintain or improve my quality of life.
I don't have ten mil, but if everyone lived like me, we would be buggered.
You don't know that. It hasn't been tried, and I daresay you don't even understand what I'm proposing.
One neoliberal capitalist way to implement the Enough system is to make agreement to it a condition of your employment, and also a condition of your investment. You agree to retire and divest as soon as you earn a certain amount. At work, you vacate the role and let someone else try it out. With your investments, you sell and let someone else be a stakeholder.
Putting a hard, generous upper limit on wealth accumulation is not even close to Marxism.
Agreed, but you need to realize that one of the symptoms of the disease is the destruction of global civilization as we know it. That's not something we're going to see tomorrow, or in 5 years, but in 10-20 years, if we continue on with the status quo, I would say it's quite likely.
> I think it could satisfy both hard-core capitalists AND environmentalists
Unfortunately not. All the things you mention (air travel, billionaires, etc.) are things that are literally responsible for accelerating the destruction right now.
As far as "draconian" goes, we had 50 years to get something done. We're down to about 5 years before we start seeing the first tier of real consequences now. Draconian is pretty much where it's at for the next several decades, if we're thinking realistically.
Trouble with climate is my carbon footprint would likely go up in retirement rather than down, from the time and resources available to travel. Walking around my town and puttering around waiting to die isn’t my ideal retirement; doing that while having the money to do 10x more fun things is worse not better.
(Side note: I don’t expect to ever retire with $10M in even then-current dollars unless we quickly go Weimar in inflation terms.)
This is also one of my pet peeves with the "degrowth" movement's solution to climate change. Essentially they want to alleviate the problems not by innovating to do more with less, but to have people do less. This would mean less work for everyone, but obviously less work means more leisure time. Unless every decides to take up meditating, they're going to consume more during their leisure time, creating not only more work, but also more of every type of negative externality.
Also curious is that these compromises are almost never framed as a temporary adjustment to humanity's consumption until the innovation catches up. Would think that's more palatable, but instead it usually seems like "we need to stop consuming like this, forever".
However, Elon Musk shouldn't exist. So how do we stop that? My proposal is a cap on revenue per employee before a company must go public, and a cap on individual ownership of any company. So for example maximum $5m per employee revenue before you have to list, then a single person or entity can own at most 10% of a company.
This means once you hit that figure, you have to list the company and cash out, and let other people step in and take not only responsibility but also share the revenue and ownership more equitably.
This was explicitly the goal of early capitalist philosophy. Adam Smith envisioned a world where growth came to an end as societies expanded to fill their "economic space".
Smith misinterpreted human desires and motivations; enough is never enough as long as our potential future adversary is also accumulating wealth. Economic arms races ensure there will never be enough.
Let’s redo the headline: - People driving their kids to school is driving the climate crisis - People having enough to eat is driving the climate crisis - People taking nice vacations with their families and friends is driving the climate crisis
The problem doesn’t seem too easy to solve now.
Just as we can’t fund a robust welfare state by taxing the rich alone (everyone must pay high taxes for it to be enough), we will do nothing about climate change by focusing only on superemitters (most aspects of life must be decarbonized if we’re going to stop climate change).
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Edit: we just had to ask you the other day to stop posting unsubstantive and/or flamebait comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36857356. I don't want to ban you but if this keeps up, we're going to have to—so please fix this.
By my count, two out of the three are reasonably considered “excess” and are seemingly not being questioned as claimed by the headline.
The issue with mass consumption by the wealthy is how it influences the behavior of the more impactful middle and lower classes.
In the Steve Jobs biography I was originally shocked that he and his wife had hours long debates about whether or not to use a drying machine (vs hanging laundry outside). For a long time I never saw what he was fighting for, but now it makes sense to me.
There is huge range between excess and shortage. There are people in developed world who do not drive their kids in SUVs. There are people in developed world who walk their kids to school. Good urban design / spatial planning is better for live and environment.
> we will do nothing about climate change
We will do nothing. This attitude is just looking for excuses. CO2 emissions per capita in Austria are half of those in USA.
Perhaps we could have avoided this outcome, and perhaps there's still a way to return to a sane life.
Yet sane life here with flushable toilets, antibiotics, and global communications, is something we should avoid...
None of these can be had without the infrastructure we have built. None of the advances in the human collective knowledge could have happened. We know this because we can look back in history and see how long humans clanked rocks together and yelled at the sky above for rain.
Only a fool would suggest we should have avoided this outcome, all while typing on a keyboard connected to the most advanced thing humans had ever made.
It's flawed and naive to point fingers at those with relatively no power. This issue is not new. It's been on the radar of those with power for *decades*.
But it easy to shun responsibly and accountability when you're redirecting the narrative from your yacht.
If you took every yacht away. Nothing about climate would change.
Your response reeks of emotional bias. Please try again.
But you seem to have forgotten saying:
"It’s much more mundane. Normal everyday actions by the un-wealthy masses are what drive carbon emissions."
Before we continue, why do you say what you mean instead of saying what you thought you said?
The fact remains...the power-less are merely "following orders", while the power-having reap the spoils.
The masses are the post poweful group in the world. They set the pace for everybody else.
If you’re argument is that people consume the things provided to them and they could vote with their wallet ignores going to the root of the emissions and tackling the issue there.
https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emis...
My particular beef is disposable/ short-lived goods -- the impact on the Earth of a product that lasts for 30 years is far less than one designed to need replacement after 5.
Yet weenie product managers & vulturous MBAs are constantly engineering things weaker & less repairable.
Sometimes to make the unit cost 0.5 cents cheaper, but perhaps more often to force earlier replacement and another revenue opportunity.
For example, we know the negative impact of factory farming. We're also aware that too much animal protein has health consequences. And yet The West- as unhealthy as ever - can't help itself.
We need to embrace degrowth and radically change our economic system.
But we won’t, at least not in time, so I hope the survivors of our post-capitalist meltdown are able to craft something better.