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Comment by titzer | Hacker News Reader

We are going over the cliff with both eyes open.

It's depressing. The US still has a chance for transformation, but just think of the "megaproject" of the past 20 years and what could have been.

$6-12 trillion dollars spent on killing millions in middle eastern wars with nothing to show for it. An amount that could have rebuilt this country.

https://www.csis.org/analysis/us-military-spending-cost-wars https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/

Imagine if the response to 9/11 was energy independence from oil through decarbnonization and renewables research. Where would we be today?

Don't let anyone tell you we can't afford a version of a "Green New Deal".

Don't let anyone cram a "government jobs for all" program into a climate-preserving Green New Deal. That provision took my support from nearly-unwavering to nearly-non-existent.

So, given the option of:

1. An economic plan that you disagree with, that would avoid catastrophic climate change.

2. An economic plan that you agree with, that leads to catastrophic climate change.

You prefer #1?

3. A climate change management plan that doesn't have an unrelated jobs giveaway embedded within.

I'm willing to hold my nose and tolerate #2 in the meantime.

Why not hold your nose and tolerate #1? At least if it goes wrong, you merely inherit a local economic disaster, as opposed to a global, planet-scale, food-security disaster.

In my judgment, #2 is far more reliably likely to end up in #3 and represents the lower total summed weighted risk of disaster.

This is an extremely irresponsible and selfish choice given the stakes, and probably most would prefer not sharing a planet with others with that mindset; thus the downvotes.

Most of us are not in a position of power, and a lot of these issues can only be fixed at the top-down systemic level.

So it's more like the bus is going over the cliff, and the people in the driver's seat are refusing to change course.

Because a very noisy section in the back insists that there's no cliff. It's only the few in the front rows that see the cliff, the rest are too busy with their spitballs.

Seems to be letting "us" off a little lightly. At least in the US the passengers (or I guess the passengers sitting in half of the bus seats) voted for the bus driver who said the problem was all a hoax.

I know of no party anywhere in the world that has a solid plan to limit global warming to below two degrees. Who should I vote for?

pro nuclear democrats

Building reactors takes too long and is too expensive. It's too late to go all-in on nuclear.

compared to what?

This is alarmist thinking that's not really based in anything other than politics and nimbyism.

If you truly believe the world is going to end because of climate change, nuclear is literally the only path to massively decrease carbon output and still meet the world's energy needs. Is it expensive? Of course. Is it going to take years? Of course. But you're never going to get there with solar or wind -- they simply cannot meet the requirements -- ever.

We stopped essentially all research and design of nuclear power plants after TMI, solely because of nimbyism -- had we not done that, we would probably be 90+% nuclear and there would be no more coal plants.

I'm pro nuclear. But just the construction time for a new plant is fairly close to a decade. That doesn't include planning. I'd also assume that we simply don't have the capacity to build thousands of reactors in a decade, for example because the manufacturing of pressure vessels is a fairly specialized industry.

We have about ten years to cut our emissions by at least 40% compared to 2010 and twenty more years to become completely carbon neutral. We need to invest massively into solar, wind, and storage. We need to insulate our homes. We need to ban cars from cities. We need immense reforestation projects. If we have the resources to also build nuclear plants while we're doing all the other things, great, but it can't be the option with the highest priority because they're expensive and take forever until they're done.

I think your belief that those other options would be tenable in the time frame you believe in is misled. They generate tiny fractions of the energy most people believe, and they generally never pay for themselves over their entire lifetimes.

Where do you think the batteries come from? There's a finite supply of lithium. "Ban cars from cities" is a pipe dream in north america -- it's like talking about colonizing Neptune. Not going to happen in our lifetimes, probably not in two hundred years -- maybe not ever. The entire infrastructure of the american continents and huge amounts of Europe and Asia as well is built around vehicular transport.

You argue those things are necessary, but then argue against the only thing that could make even a dent in the issue because it's expensive and takes time.

We don't need thousands of reactors, and we don't necessarily need the ones we do build to be like the ones we use today. Had the environmentalist nimbys not stopped all R&D and construction in the 70s, we would have fixed this problem by now. There are multiple reactor designs that are safe and effective and inexpensive to run -- but nobody's building them because they think solar is going to save the world and nuclear is scary. That's what needs to be fixed.

I see that Bill Gates is lobbying for new reactor designs and construction -- I really hope he's successful.

It takes far, far more resources to build out wind and solar than nuclear. The obstacles to nuclear are primarily political, regulatory, and psychological. There actually isn't a hell of a lot of money to be made in nuclear. The real reason that wind and solar are taking off is a successful market intervention from governments to spur investments there and make it profitable. But make no mistake, wind and solar are a massive ecological boondoggle. They do more environmental damage than good, and they simply do not displace fossil fuel sources of energy, just add. Hell, the data is right in the first set of charts in the article--gas is displacing everything else, but still growing faster than coal is shrinking. This basically means that renewables are just additional build-out. Which is where people move the goalposts and talk about how they supposedly displaced new coal or gas--which they clearly did not.

No, we should have invested in nuclear power in the 1950s. We'd be probably fine today.

Our choice now is: do we reduce the energy intensity of our economies and completely displace all of our fossil fuels with nuclear, or do we go over the cliff?

As I said in my OP, we're going over the cliff.

You said it significantly better than I did. Absolutely correct in almost everything you said from my perspective.

The only caveat I would make is that I think we're farther from the cliff than people tend to say -- that's not to say we shouldn't do things to mitigate our impact on the environment, I absolutely believe we should, but only that I don't see it as dire as some make it out to be.

I'm trying to do my part. I live in NYC, I don't own a car, and I very rarely take any method of transport that isn't walking, biking, or subway. Even my heating in winter comes from the steam system, which is co-generated with electricity (i.e. it uses the waste heat from power generation).

A huge part of my CO2 footprint is thus probably eating meat and airplanes.

"The real problem is that [we] spent far too much time worrying about efficiency in the wrong places and at the wrong times"

How much money do you spend per year? The money you spend eventually goes into the hands of someone whose lifestyle is much less green than yours, and will get spent accordingly.

This analysis doesn't make sense to me. It matters greatly what you do spend your money on. And if you don't spend it, then someone else will (e.g. your bank will loan it out). Are you suggesting attempting to remove value from the economy entirely?

No, I'm suggesting that significantly reducing the world's energy consumption is intractable: at an individual level, our choices don't matter, because the slack created by a single person's efforts will eventually be picked up by someone else. At a national level, the slack created by one nation's efforts will eventually get picked up by another country. At the global level, well, good luck getting the entire world to agree to severe GHG emission reductions. We can't even get the highly developed nations to agree to that, let alone the developing nations. In short, I'm convinced that we're screwed.

Yeah, we're screwed. No technofix is going to save us this time.

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