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Comment by noobermin | Hacker News Reader

The thing that drives climate change is the burning of fossil fuels needed produce electricity in the first place. Keeping the rate of electric production constant will not help us. The fact that electric energy usage is dropping is a good thing and we should keep a negative derivative, not increase it! There needs to be a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, keeping it constant (or even worse, increasing it) will not help this.

I really think everyone needs to take a step back from the HN ideology and think this through. Here climate change has a chance to essentially kill our grand children or at the very least leave them with a much more barren of a planet and a life. But somehow, the issue of a single institution's profit is somehow more important than actual people, children.

The free market is a tool, it shouldn't be more important than human lives.

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I think your points are important separately, but the crucial missing part is that electric energy production is rapidly becoming decoupled from greenhouse gas production. It is no longer an either/or situation.

Exactly! Well over 90 percent of new generation coming online is renewables, and the cost decline of renewables shows no signs of stopping [1].

Fancy real time viz: https://www.electricitymap.org/

[1] https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2018/1/16/1689559...

Worldwide, most of the energy that comes from wind and solar is a tiny fraction of the primary energy supply mix. Where it's growing it's mostly used for additional energy, not to replace the exisiting fossil-fuel consumption. This does not help one bit for climate change.

First graph at the top left (which is actually energy consumption, close enough): https://www.bp.com/en/global/corporate/energy-economics/stat...

The important thing in this grap is the absolute values of each source, not their relative importance. You'll note that despite renewable growth (of which solar and wind is only a fraction, there's also biomass and various other stuff), fossil-fuel consumption is still growing faster. Indeed, historically, new energy sources have never really replaced 'older' ones. Each time, the new sources just provide additional power on top of the old ones.

So much for 'decoupling'.

Edit : the US energy article on Wikipedia has an interesting graph that shows something similar (except for a partial switch from coal to NG): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_the_United_States#/m...

> Indeed, historically, new energy sources have never really replaced 'older' ones.

We don't use whale oil anymore.

You are constraining your history in a single century, and "older energy sources" in a single set of mostly equivalent ones.

The volume of whale oil used back in the 19th century is laughably anecdotic compared to petroleum.

When we talk about our energy needs, scale matters a lot. So yes, when it comes to climate change and energy use, you can ignore the rest of human history completely.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/fossil_fuel?wasredirected=tr...

You mean that whale (and vegetal) oil wasn't replaced?

No, I mean that the scale of whale oil use was very very small compared to the scale of fossil fuels. So small, in fact, that if whale oil was on the graph I've linked above, you would barely see it moving above 0 in the 19th century.

Also, whale oil was not really used as an energy source anyway, except in lamps.

So it's completely irrelevant to my original point, which is that by and large, until now, in the thermo-industrial civilization, new energy sources have not been used to replace exisiting ones. They have been used to 'grow' the economy (more machines, more people, more production).

Maybe this graph can convince you: https://ourworldindata.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/global...

For sure, fossil fuels will still be around for a while. But renewable sources are absolutely going to replace existing fossil-fuel consumption. The economics of it make it an inevitability. Aside from a few niche applications (industrial heating perhaps), there's nothing better about fossil fuels. They've just been the best we had for a long time. Some of this will be sooner (because you decide to buy an EV next month), and some later (because a coal plant gets decommissioned 10 years from now), but the writing is on the wall.

If only HN had a remind-me bot, I'd like to set a notice: oil demand will plateau within 5 years.

> If only HN had a remind-me bot, I'd like to set a notice: oil demand will plateau within 5 years.

http://longbets.org/

This is why we need a government imposed carbon tax to price in the externality of carbon emissions. Then we can let the free market loose to do its thing without the perverse incentives that encourage carbon-emitting energy sources today.

It is a lot easier to decrease CO2 from electricity then from heat.

It is possible to decrease the actual consumption of heating, though. Insulation in many houses across the frigid Midwest and northern plains is pretty bad. Trailers in trailer parks often have almost none and draughts besides. Unfortunately the free market already hands people a big monthly incentive to insulate their properties; the problem is education and technology adoption, which can take a while for markets to correct without a centralized "nudge", and the people who need it the most are precisely those most resistant to government intervention.

Most of the people who own poorly insulated buildings do not just have thousands of dollars laying around to insulate them, regardless of how good the ROI is. It is far more a lack of money than lack of education, many poor people are fully aware of the money-saving opportunities afforded to people with access to more capital. And of course many people live in rental properties where the landlord would pay for the insulation to save the tenant's money on HVAC bills- the economic incentives are not aligned at all.

You can provide low cost or free insulation (including fitting) to poor people.

This is one way to make welfare payments more effective. People are spending their money on food, and not as much on heating.

If you live in a country with denationalised utility companies you can get them to pay for this from the profits they're getting after denationalisation.

But, even when you do this you find people have different reasons for not accepting the offer.

The UK "Nudge Unit" found that the thing that drove more signups to loft insulation wasn't just free insulation, but offering a free loft clearance service too.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2013/may/02/nudge-unit-...

> For years, by offering financial help to insulate people's lofts, thereby reducing their energy consumption and their bills, successive governments had been trying to give money away – and failing. But in 2011, the nudge unit realised that money wasn't the problem. What held people back was all the clutter that they knew was stored up there.

> So in a trial, people were offered not subsidised insulation, but subsidised loft clearance – with unwanted items being taken to local charity shops – on the condition that they got the space insulated afterwards. The scheme cost people more, but they loved it, and uptake rates tripled. If the insulation was subsidised as well, it became a fivefold increase. Another approach was less successful, but equally revealing. When offered a still greater discount for every friend or neighbour they roped in, people took no interest. You cannot put a price, it appears, on being seen to be a loft-botherer.

This is exactly what I was thinking of, thank you for dredging up the source. Interesting that cleaning the attic is the real barrier at the end of the day.

Not everywhere burns fossil fuels to produce electricity though.

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