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Comment by jessriedel | Hacker News Reader

You're making a general argument that we should impose injuries to people in order to incentivize them to not produce a negative externality. Not a transfer from them to someone else (like the government) in order to align their incentives, but literally a dead-weight loss, as if the government smashed your windshield in every 10k miles you drove in order to incentivize you to drive less.

Actually, it would be more like the government randomly picked a thousand motorist on the road each day and executed them in order to disincentivize driving. Literally half a million people per year die of smog in India.

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

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The way I see it is that you've got a garbage fire in your backyard and it smells bad and is making breathing difficult, so the government steps in with a giant fan to blow the bad smell away from you instead of working on finding a real solution.

Maybe this will work in the short term, but I'm a bit worried that it will cause complacency with the current situation. If they said that they were moving away from coal-fired plants to look for better energy solutions in addition to this, I doubt anyone would have any complaints. This feels like a band-aid fix when they should be amputating the arm.

Smog is different than carbon. Traffic deaths are different than carbon. We don't give up on reducing traffic deaths in order to disincentivize carbon.

You're seriously suggesting allowing half a million people to die per year unnecessarily in order to incentivize them to adopt cleaner power plants.

Why are you putting words in my mouth? I'm not suggesting anything like that. I'm suggesting that the government look into different solutions in addition to this. The CO2/kwh of coal is the highest of any modern energy source. If they're willing to spend money powering jet engines to shoot the smog higher into the atmosphere, why won't they transition to using a cleaner energy source that requires less money to maintain?

> I'm not suggesting anything like that. I'm suggesting that the government look into different solutions in addition to this.

OK, then I am happy to withdraw my characterization of your comment. Your comment just adds nothing substantive to the discussion.

> If they're willing to spend money powering jet engines to shoot the smog higher into the atmosphere, why won't they transition to using a cleaner energy source that requires less money to maintain?

Because one is orders of magnitude more expensive than the other. It's as unrelated as bringing up carbon emissions by cars when people are discussing highway safety.

I was saying that if they were making any effort to clean up their energy source, there would be no backlash. You're trying to make this into a dichotomy where either you're for or against the deaths of people from smog. So, if I'm not participating in your flamewar, I'm not adding anything substantive?

It is reminiscent of the "clean-coal" marketing scheme that already exists in the United States and that's what most people in this thread are discussing.

You're not adding anything substantive because your reply to my comment introduces a completely distinct issues from what's discussed in my comment, and you do not appear to have a grasp of their relative effect size. You said "This feels like a band-aid fix when they should be amputating the arm." But the ill effect of the smog produced by a given plant in India is dramatically worse, and easier to fix, than the ill effects of the carbon.

Do you even know just how much it costs to run a power plant?

You need a few hundred (400-600) tons of coal per hour per one decently sized BLOCK (few hundred MW), usually power plants have several of those, sometimes a dozen or more, a few jet engines running at full blast its a big deal compared with a FUCKING POWER PLANT /rant

Also, none of the renewable energy sources are cheaper than coal, especially when you look at the bigger picture (mostly unutilised capacity, grid overbuild requirements, volatility)

They could transition to a combined cycle plant if they wanted to increase efficiency. I'm obviously not an expert, just like 99% of people here. If you look at the basic sentiment here it is that this seems like a fake solution to the problem of coal power plants and I somewhat agree. I think that it would help to know that they are at least attempting to move away from coal towards nuclear or renewable sources. It seems like there are a lot of solutions that could be pursued.

The problem is smog.

>They could transition to a combined cycle plant if they wanted to increase efficiency.

And who is going to pay for that? How do they fuel them? They already have to import a sizable part of their natural gas consumption. Do they spend even more and add coal gassification?

India is building out nuclear, obviously after Fukushima retards made sure to obstruct as much as they could

Again, the issue is smog, that is killing right fucking now. Should they just ignore the problem and develop a massive program so you feel better?

You can use coal and avoid smog. It's an incentive problem without enforcement pollution is slightly cheaper. So, really the core problem is corruption not technology.

Considering many people can save money by installing solar power without incentives that's not actually true.

The problem with coal is not power production, it's the infrastructure of power distribution that makes going off grid so viable.

If you actually manage to go off grid then yes, maybe you are able to save. Good luck doing it without either massive lifestyle change or tons of capital for storage in most of the world.

Once you take the feed-in away the benefit is not so clear cut. Also, many people dump the externalities of home solar on everyone else (the negative spot electricity price) and then use cheap power from the grid for most of the 24h cycle

Where do you think going off grid is so viable?

For people like me that use less than 600kwh / month or 20kwh/day just about anywhere in the US works as long as you are not in an apartment. In the northern US you will want a solar hot water heater, but that's got a 2-5 year ROI.

Granted, my electric would only be 50-60$ a month so the savings is also not huge, but that still adds up to 9-11k in 15 years and panels last well past that.

PS: Solar quietly got really cheap, installation is often one of the major costs.

"Ecology" extremists are becoming crazy as of late.

Sure, let's let them suffocate, starve or have their society collapse, as long as they are not burning coal!

Wouldn't cleaner power plants = less pollution = less deaths?

Except that this isn't the Government doing anything - it's an externality of industry operating in the area. The Government would have to do something to prevent people from seeing the issue, which is the moral opposite of what you're suggesting - it's the Government tricking people into failing to see the results of industry.

Are you really trying to exploit the distinction between government action vs. inaction here? It's trivial to modify my example: just replace "executing 1,000 people per day" with "purposefully not pursue safety standards that would save 1,000 lives per day". The position is insane.

Except that they're not implementing safety standards - they're just making the problem less visible. It's like if, instead of implementing a reasonable Health & Safety organisation with teeth, they forced companies to hire people not related to the local community to kill by negligence instead, making the deaths less hurtful as they're mostly happening to "somebody else".

"Blow the deadly smog away from people who are dying" is the safety standard, which we can implement or not implement. This isn't just people's ability to notice, this is a huge, deadly, quality-of-life destroying phenomenon.

The deaths don't happen to someone else! As discussed elsewhere in this thread, the number of death reduced by this policy is greater by many orders of magnitude than the number of deaths caused.

I don't see where elsewhere in the thread this is stated, especially not with references to studies on similar ideas. Destroying the atmosphere by messing with it on a large scale kills people over time - implementing a solution to the problem of creating smog in the first place kills nobody.

Perhaps this could be useful short term to prevent deaths now long enough to implement a better solution - but the fear is that it's not going to be short term at all.

You're conflating smog and CO2! CO2 is invisible and a free molecular gas. Smog is mesoscopic particulate matter.

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