"Companies have been pumping and dumping for years, buoyed by cheap labor, and have not been intelligent enough to invest long term. And now, they're sad."
Rich countries have had very myopic development strategies for the past thirty to forty years. I could blame incompetence but I think it’s mostly because it allowed some happy few to make good money and they don’t really care about the citizenry at large.
My own country in Europe decided they were going to bet everything on high-end services and R&D while outsourcing all production. Apparently it wasn’t obvious to them that when you don’t produce you lose the culture and knowledge base necessary to do good R&D and that the countries they were outsourcing to would develop and stop relying on us.
This is because we've decided short term local optimization is somehow optimal. Just let every business maximize profits and everything will be good. Mention externalities and people will deny they exist, or try to tell you they're already accounted for.
> Just let every business maximize profits and everything will be good
Not quite right. You should have said maximize short-term profits.
As an example from forestry. If you manage sustainably, such that cutting resembles natural loss, your forest produces high-quality wood for centuries and also provides revenue from i.e. lodges, salmon, and carbon offsets.
So profit from that land over 100 years is X
Or you clear-cut it, and realized 1/10th of X in 5 years. And make the land very low value for the remaining 95.
The issue is short-term local optimization, as you claim.
What bothers me is someone will claim that cutting the whole forest is the best thing to do, because if it wasn't, the market would have done something else, like run it sustainably.
Nobody points out that management does what it is incentivezed to do, and that those incentives ought to be fair game for negotiation. Or at least for commentary.
I’ve been in meetings where rich elders openly admit to ageism; who cares about the problems this will create, they said, they’ll be dead by then!
This was back in the 00s before the last decade plus of expanded info awareness.
Scientific measure of fossil fuels impact on environment was achieved in 1860s. How long the runway is before catastrophe has been modeled and then hidden away over and over.
There is absolutely no reason to bequeath immense influence on human agency to the aristocrats. One small time polluter in the middle of BFE has nothing on Intel and Apple.
Rich countries have had very myopic development strategies for the past thirty to forty years. I could blame incompetence but I think it’s mostly because it allowed some happy few to make good money and they don’t really care about the citizenry at large.
My own country in Europe decided they were going to bet everything on high-end services and R&D while outsourcing all production. Apparently it wasn’t obvious to them that when you don’t produce you lose the culture and knowledge base necessary to do good R&D and that the countries they were outsourcing to would develop and stop relying on us.