Comment by pksdjfikkkkdsff | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pksdjfikkkkdsff | Hacker News Reader

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pksdjfikkkkdsff

Here in Germany we have an airport that has so far cost 5 Billion to build, and it doesn't even work yet.

So you are saying, for just the cost of 200 of those airports, climate change could be halted?

I find that extremely unlikely. I mean for the price, you could basically only build 200 things that are the size of that airport (granted, you can build them cheaper, but apparently it is not a given that it works out).

I think you need to change far more things than just 200 airports to halt climate change.

New power plants or solar energy thingies or whatever. New cities so that people don't have to commute with energy sucking cars. New cars, so that people don't need to burn fossil fuels for driving (and we are talking millions of cars). New factories, new farming methods, and so on and so on. And not just in one country, but world wide.

It's not the absolute cost, it's the incremental cost. For example, the world has about a billion vehicles; just replacing those with electric vehicles would cost tens of trillions. But you don't count the whole cost of the car, you count the price differential between an ICE vehicle and equivalent electric one. And that differential is dropping rapidly -- the most shocking thing about the Tesla Cybertruck announcement wasn't it's ugliness, it's that it is at price parity with a comparable ICE truck even without a subsidy. Similarly wind power is now cheaper than gas.

But that would not halting climate change now, but in a few decades when all the current vehicles have been replaced? Also afaik the CO2 difference between electric vehicles and fuel based vehicles is not even that great?

The scary part is that I think many things climate activists propose actually produce a lot more CO2 in the short term. Factories to build those new cars. Building housing to shorten the commutes. Many other things. Wouldn't it be better to use the existing infrastructure for as long as possible, rather than build new things to replace it?

I wonder how much of a proxy for CO2 output the cost of things is, anyway (since oil price affects so many things). If "cleaner" new products cost more, it makes me suspect they actually consume more CO2 in production. Of course you have to factor in CO2 production in use (fossil fuels vs battery powered cars for example). But often the advantage is not so clear cut. If the new things were better, there would be no need for political intervention to make people use them.

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