Not so much profit as a particular failure of accounting. Focus on privatization of profit with socialization of costs allows making staggering and possibly fatal costs someone else’s problem.
This is a common misconception. Commons are well maintained in healthy societies. Over extraction being punished by the group.
Moreover private owners optimize for wealth under capitalism, not preservation. Look at why oil companies want to do to the sea and arctic. Or the replacement of Amazonian forest with pasture for beef grazing.
African countries suffer under the poverty created by colonial extraction of both resources and people, followed by being charged for the privilege of having their resources taken, and saddled with unpayable loans. Those loans also placing them in a position where they are forced to allow western countries to continue to extract, and are prevented from protecting their national interests.
If Africa was allowed to own its wealth and develop without negative interference (assassinations, extraction, the world bank, foreign militaries) it would be the richest region on the planet.
Let's emulate world class leadership from the greatest country on earth, and immediately stop funding those alarmists doomsayers.
Anyway, I read on HN that AI was about to solve climate change any time now. I'm sure prompting LLMs the right way will harness the world knowledge to generatively hallucinate a way for trees to grow better.
Not directly because of climate change no. Some areas will be fairly unaffected or might even improve for human use (eg Siberia).
However it will cause ecosystem collapse which we rely on for food due to too rapid change which nature can't handle, and it will change which areas are viable for human habitation and agriculture. Meaning many many people will have to move.
And of course mass forced migration combined with shrinking resources is a recipe for global war. See how popular migrants are now in many countries, and consider half the world having to migrate to survive. Poor people living in areas that become uninhabitable (and who never caused the problem in the first place) will move to a better place where it's likely the current inhabitants will protest.
And a global war is very likely to lead to extinction with the WMD tech humanity has now.
All we need to do is stop trying to be richer than everyone else and to work together :(
> However it will cause ecosystem collapse which we rely on for food due to too rapid change
Citation absolutely required. This is not in the IPCC reports, which are already quite extreme in their projections.
The IPCC sixth assessment report has an entire section on ecosystem impacts, and while a number of changes are projected with varying degrees of confidence, the word “collapse” is nowhere to be found, except for the following sentence:
> It is not known at which level of global warming an abrupt permafrost collapse…compared to gradual thaw (Turetsky et al., 2020) would have to be considered an important additional risk.
Not so much profit as a particular failure of accounting. Focus on privatization of profit with socialization of costs allows making staggering and possibly fatal costs someone else’s problem.
We've turned the tragedy of the commons into an economic practice.
This is a common misconception. Commons are well maintained in healthy societies. Over extraction being punished by the group.
Moreover private owners optimize for wealth under capitalism, not preservation. Look at why oil companies want to do to the sea and arctic. Or the replacement of Amazonian forest with pasture for beef grazing.
African countries suffer under the poverty created by colonial extraction of both resources and people, followed by being charged for the privilege of having their resources taken, and saddled with unpayable loans. Those loans also placing them in a position where they are forced to allow western countries to continue to extract, and are prevented from protecting their national interests.
If Africa was allowed to own its wealth and develop without negative interference (assassinations, extraction, the world bank, foreign militaries) it would be the richest region on the planet.
AKA externalities.
Remind me of the fantastic line:
"The economy is a wholly owned subsidiary of the environment"
https://www.newyorker.com/cartoon/a16995
Let's emulate world class leadership from the greatest country on earth, and immediately stop funding those alarmists doomsayers.
Anyway, I read on HN that AI was about to solve climate change any time now. I'm sure prompting LLMs the right way will harness the world knowledge to generatively hallucinate a way for trees to grow better.
I think Elon is working towards colonizing Mars because once it's all worked out, that's what Earth's environment will be like.
Nope, it's Venus that we're racing towards.
See https://screenrant.com/far-side-gary-larson-dinosaur-extinct...
Humanity is not going extinct.
Not directly because of climate change no. Some areas will be fairly unaffected or might even improve for human use (eg Siberia).
However it will cause ecosystem collapse which we rely on for food due to too rapid change which nature can't handle, and it will change which areas are viable for human habitation and agriculture. Meaning many many people will have to move.
And of course mass forced migration combined with shrinking resources is a recipe for global war. See how popular migrants are now in many countries, and consider half the world having to migrate to survive. Poor people living in areas that become uninhabitable (and who never caused the problem in the first place) will move to a better place where it's likely the current inhabitants will protest.
And a global war is very likely to lead to extinction with the WMD tech humanity has now.
All we need to do is stop trying to be richer than everyone else and to work together :(
> However it will cause ecosystem collapse which we rely on for food due to too rapid change
Citation absolutely required. This is not in the IPCC reports, which are already quite extreme in their projections.
The IPCC sixth assessment report has an entire section on ecosystem impacts, and while a number of changes are projected with varying degrees of confidence, the word “collapse” is nowhere to be found, except for the following sentence:
> It is not known at which level of global warming an abrupt permafrost collapse…compared to gradual thaw (Turetsky et al., 2020) would have to be considered an important additional risk.
https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg2/chapter/chapter-2/