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Comment by moosey | Hacker News Reader

Michael Schennenberger runs the BTI, or the "Breakthrough Institute", which is against taxing carbon, against fossil fuel reduction, and pro-geoengineering. It is ultimately a think-tank, which is just another name for a professional propaganda unit, IMO.

This is an article encouraging you to calm down and sit down. It's a careful cherry-pick of data, something that the IPCC report is not, and something that is extremely common in contemporary opinion pieces.

We should not be rosy about climate change or other pollution related issues. There exists massive quantities of evidence that can be covered at hacker news, and seeing this disinformation here when we have access to actual scientific information about climate change shocks me.

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He's also a registered lobbyist, founded and runs Environmental Progress - essentially a pro nuclear lobby group, and is rabidly anti-renewables - inventing "facts" to make them look bad.

He does far more damage than good, and you basically can't trust a word he says or cites.

Pro nuclear is a good thing though no? It seems like the solution to climate change and energy production. I know I'm very skeptical of people who claim to be pro-environment then rally against nuclear power.

Nuclear is a solution in countries such as India and China where it can be constructed for cheaper, but in the west it is dying due to the high cost. If nuclear only compared unfavorablely to fossil fuels the externalities could be addressed by a carbon tax. But because it compares unfavorably to renewables it is really dying.

Except renewables cannot deliver a whole network on their own ever, so there is no competition. The cost is a fake issue, because nuclear competes against coal and gas power plants and not renewables.

You need a base load capability for smoothing in an electrical grid. Most renewables are the exactly opposite. The exception is biogas or other gasification plants a these cannot handle the required load at all. Not even hydropower.

Look at what happens in Australia if you push too much solar energy (same with wind) on the network.

> Except renewables cannot deliver a whole network, so it does not.

Solar and wind need to be paired peaker plants. Conventional nuclear doesn't provide peaking ability.

Battery powered peakers are quite expensive, but the need for them can be reduced drastically through over-provisioning and interconnection.

If we could overprovision solar and wind, we wouldn't have the problem now? I find that hard to believe. What happens when you need extra load at night or during a country wide lull in wind speed?

Nuclear reduces the need for peakers exactly because it can overprovision reliably.

You could also make nuclear peakers if you wanted reasonably easily too. Nuclear plants have tunable output to a point, they're just slow and hard to fully stop, so you would make a design optimized for very tunable output and high peak power. (0)

Solar and wind cannot suddenly overprovision. The sources either exist or not, you can at most ground them instead of collecting power.

0) IAEA - Non-baseload operation of nuclear power plants: https://www.iaea.org/publications/11104/non-baseload-operati...

IIRC It's only 2 or 3 years ago (Not certain, but astonishingly recent) Australia was getting over 70% of power from coal, including a good proportion of lignite. Right down there with the worst, such as Poland. They've under-funded the grid for years, and belatedly rushed into solar at extreme speed.

Not surprising it brought consequences, they seem intent on approaching it really chaotically. :)

Who is approaching it less chaotically?

Everyone is already behind the schedule with making the energy grid zero emission.

UK has been quietly and steadily adding wind over a longer time, and modernising the grid without so much as a hiccough, reaching around 35% (ignoring biomass). The grid is still underfunded and lacking in some respects though. The Nordics have progressed similarly, but further, though I think Denmark had a couple of missteps. Sweden is over half renewables by now, Finland not far behind, Norway and Iceland (OK, they have their geothermal advantage) up near 70%.

All over the last 15 or 20 years.

Sure, I'd like everyone to go that fast, or faster, but trying for the speed of Australia's solar rollout seems to be asking for trouble. Don't know enough to say if there was anything unavoidable, or unique to Australia in their problems...

The real issue in Australia, as I imagine it is in most countries, is the fossil fuel industries lobbying the government. Oh and because of lies and misinformation told to voters (thanks Facebook), the country voted in a creationist-level PM, who believes that if the whole world burns, it's a punishment from god.

>dying due to the high cost

But if you want to fight climate change, surely any cost is worth it? Otherwise you're not serious about it. Subsidize it, do whatever it takes to save the planet. Renewables are a false solution, they're quicker to build but cannot produce energy reliably, need to be replaced often, take too much space etc. If they could replace coal, surely Germany would've done so already.

Nobody needs to use coal. Gas turbines are better in every way. Germany's addiction to coal is political not technological.

Renewables are part of the solutions but what makes up the rest will depend on where you live. The solution for Sweden won't be the same as the solution for Hawaii. It's hard to talk generally on the internet about this because it only makes sense to discuss power generation in a particular place.

So we're not allowed to criticize nuclear due to it's cost, but you're allowed to dismiss renewables because of their cost?

Where did I dismiss renewables due to cost? I'm dismissing them due to inconvenience. For example consider how many solar panels need to be installed to replace a nuclear station, how much area will they cover, how many of them will need to be replaced every day, how a few non-sunny days in a row would render it useless, etc.

Nothing is "inconvenient" for a corporation. All "inconvenient" means is that they have to pay people to do it or put up with it. IOW, a cost.

Sure if done by actual facts and economic or climate advantages. Using it as a basis to spin against hydro or wind - i.e. to prove they are unviable just makes a complete mockery of his claims. TL;DR He lies about it and makes shit up, repeatedly, in all his pieces. What's he afraid of?

Nuclear should stand on the reality of the proposition, and indeed should have a place in any low carbon solution if done properly.

You basically can't trust a word he says or cites.

He mostly cites the IPCC and climate scientists. Or are you saying those sources aren't trustworthy?

I read the article. Every word of it is true. It can be summed up as:

Lots of people, especially teenagers, are starting to suffer mental health problems because they think the world is about to end. The world isn't about to end, this is a lie. The people claiming it is are mostly making it up, or misquoting other people, or in one case a journalist misheard "eight billion" as "a billion" and other comedies of errors. It's important that people understand what climate science really says before a teenager does something they can't come back from.

> Lots of people, especially teenagers, are starting to suffer mental health problems because they think the world is about to end

Can you source this?

> It's important that people understand what climate science really says before a teenager does something they can't come back from.

Are you saying that climate change is so widely accepted and feared that it's causing the rate of suicides to increase? Wouldn't a better indicator of the acknowledgement of (supposedly-overblown) effects of climate change be, you know, individuals and governments taking action to curtail those effects instead of walking out of global accords [1], or actively contributing to the acceleration of those effects [2]?

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-40127326 [2] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/18/world/americas/brazil-ama...

Can you source this?

The first paragraphs of the article give both direct quotes from people saying they had that experience, and then cites a report from British psychologists saying they'd observed this effect at scale. Did you read the article?

Are you saying that climate change is so widely accepted and feared that it's causing the rate of suicides to increase.

It risks doing exactly that:

"Studies from around the world document growing anxiety and depression, particularly among children, about climate change."

People aren't scared of climate change as actually observed, they're scared of what they're being fed by people like Greta Thunberg, who is lying about the expected scale of the impact. The fact that journalists, politicians and even a few scientists are saying this despite it being false is what the article is about.

Do you have a source for your claim that that BTI is "against fossil fuel reduction"?

And why do you include "pro-geoengineering" in that list of "bad things BTI believes"? If we aren't going to significantly reduce emissions (and after 40 years of political inaction that should be obvious to everyone), geoengineering may be our best response to climate change.

I'm not against geoengineering, and it will be part of the actions that posterity will have to do in order to deal with climate change, but why leave the major changes in lifestyle that will be required to fight it for future generations? We must accept that we need to massively increase energy efficiency, and a huge part of that is abandoning the "everyone gets a car and a McMansion".

We should not default to geoengineering. We should default to reduction of carbon pollution, obviously, then when it isn't enough, start geoengineering, which will probably also be necessary.

The start with geoengineering faction is just a few steps away from the "it isn't happening" crowd.

So glad to see this comment here. The entire time I was reading that I kept thinking, "I need to google this guy, he's clearly got skin in the game."

He is trying to counter claims of "4 billion casualties".

And similar claims like "the world is going to end in 12 years".

No one has made those claims, can you cite an instance?

That was a quote from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

And the article contains something similar:

“One of my friends was convinced there would be a collapse of society in 2030 and ‘near term human extinction’ in 2050,” said Jeffrey. “She concluded that we’ve got ten years left to live.”

It is in the article.

No, it very much isn't. "Adults tell children the end of the world is coming" and someone's random unnamed teen friend concludes they have ten years left to live are.

Which is significant of nothing at all - mere hyperbole. The only claims based on 12 years I have heard are based on reality of the IPCC reports and their assorted scenarios to track particular temperature changes by 2100. On that there have been claims we have 12 years to get on track - very different to the world ending in 2031. On a Tuesday at 14;00.

> On that there have been claims we have 12 years to get on track

In order to meet an arbitrary mark chosen primarily because people like round numbers. Nonetheless, the IPCC report was reasonable, and didn't conclude with "we're all going to die".

But then celebrities and social media oversimplified that and people who get most of their information from celebrities or social media came to believe that they're going to die, soon.

That's alarmism.

And the author called out alarmism, not the IPCC, so pointing out that the IPCC aren't alarmists isn't relevant.

Multiple claims from XR and "He told me that the Guardian reporter had misunderstood him and that he had said, “It’s difficult to see how we could accommodate eight billion people or even half of that,” not “a billion people.”".

So XR + The Guardian. So it is very much in the article.

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