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by randalluk
1592 days ago
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There surely are positive externalities, but the very useful things we burn fossil fuels for are reflected in the price - cheap or no. Those primary reasons for burning fuel will have all sorts of externalities, positive and negative. And one would expect similar externalities from the work done by renewable energy. If your position is simply that we are fortunate our planet was/is abundant in fossil fuels, I don't disagree (ideally there wouldn't have been enough to completely wreck the climate we depend on, but...). But the issue is whether we should trust the market in respect to cryptocurrency mining specifically. The history of human civilisation seems a bit beyond the scope. |
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If we imagine a counterfactual where there were no fossil fuels, double-digit percentages of the world's population wouldn't exist.
There is no way that the oil and gas producing companies have made money on the same scale as the value they've created by enabling billions of humans to exist. No way at all. There is obviously something very powerful happening that is more than offsetting the notional damage that they will theoretically do at some point in the future to a relatively small percentage of humans.
If we balance out the harms and benefits that the coal and petroleum miners have caused to the rest of humanity, the ledger is overwhelmingly in their favour. I can't even estimate the numbers involved but based on the fact that I'm not slaving away for a fossil fuel company double digit percentages of my life I can tell it isn't close.