Having debunked the Tragedy of the Commons, they were trying to turn our attention to the tragedy of the time horizon. Meaning we can’t imagined the suffering of the people of the future, so nothing much gets done on their behalf. What we do know creates damage which hits decades later, so we don’t charge ourselves for it and the standard approach has been that future generations will be richer and stronger than us and they’ll find solutions to their problems but by the time they get here, these problems will have become too big to solve. That’s the tragedy of the time horizon, that we don’t look more than a few a years ahead, or in many cases as with high speed trading, a few microseconds ahead. The tragedy of the time horizon is a true tragedy, because many of the climate impacts will be irreversible. Exctinctions and ocean warming can’t be fixed, no matter how much money future people have. So economics as practised misses a fundamental aspect of reality. Mary glanced at Dick, and he nodded. He said, it’s another way to describe the damage of a high discount rate. A high discount rate is an index of this larger dismissal of the future that J.A is describing. Agreed to that, and this jetline of thought solves that? Mary asked. It extends the time horizon further out, replied. Yes it tries to do that, explained how the proposal for carbon coin was time dependant, like a budget with fixed amounts of time included in its contract, as in bonds. New carbon coins backed by 100 year bonds with guaranteed rates of return guaranteed, underwritten by all the central banks working together. This investments would be safer than any other and provide to go long on the biosphere, so to speak. Mary shook her head, why would people care about a payoff 100 years in the future?
The Tragedy of the Commons and White Supremacy, Jevons Paradox, the History of Energy, the Children of Shiva, the Global Internet Cooperative Union