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Comment by barney54 | Hacker News Reader

Along with a heaping dose of hypocrisy. If the co2 from coal is bad, then the same is true for the coal from oil and natural gas.

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Hey, I know this is silly because the fund isn't event taking these actions explicitly for environmental reasons, BUT if they were, your comment would be a great example of an Internet debate fallacy that I try and fight.

If an entity is doing something 'bad', reducing the scope or amount of that behavior is neither hypocritical nor pointless. It doesn't matter if it's a big company that pollutes, or an individual trying to reduce a bad habit. Movement in the right direction is an essential part of things getting better.

According to that standard then if you got rich selling illegal drugs so long as you then start doing "good" things with your illicit gains after that, nobody can criticize you? Sure, I guess...

Of course they can criticize you for selling illegal drugs in the same way you can criticize Norway for getting rich off oil. He's saying that praising that person for doing something like giving money to charity or anti-drug efforts isn't completely inconsistent.

I disagree that it can't be hypocritical. If Norway was doing this for environmental reasons I think it'd be quite hypocritical. That doesn't mean it's not a good thing to do though.

If these are good actions, then do more. What's the point of half measures?

Relevant read https://blog.jaibot.com/the-copenhagen-interpretation-of-eth...

Well, for one, they make about 50% of full measures, give or take.

That's not how the chemistry works. Most of the energy's in the hydrogen bonds, and the ratio of carbon to hydrogen is much higher in coal. The same amount of energy produced by coal produces much more CO2 than oil or gas. That's not even touching on higher heavy metal contamination and fly ash.

However, methane is a greenhouse gas in its own right, and 100x worse [1] than CO₂. And some unknown amount, I guess 2% to 10%, of methane leaks into atmosphere during the mining and transport and use of natural gas. Depending on the exact amount of this leaking, natural gas might even be the worst offender, per unit energy produced.

[1] 100x worse on a 20 years time scale, 30x worse on a 100 years time scale.

Only, but only a little gas gets out. It's ok. Coal is the enemy mainly because you can see it. Natural Gas requires infrared camera to detect. No this isn't snark/cynicism: we regulate the opacity of a scrubbed coal plant's output.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/20...

Even if only 1% leaks, but because methane is a 100x more potent greenhouse gas, this 1% leak doubles the climate impact of natural gas.

here are some images for you to meditate on

https://youtube.com/watch?v=HrtQUEgYjKs

http://media.mlive.com/saginawnews_impact/photo/12375884-lar...

https://youtube.com/watch?v=ECqpbqbT3UA

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