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Comment by fersho311 | Hacker News Reader

If you increase production, wouldn’t that produce more air pollution?

If we scale up this mind set and suddenly produce 100x Increase in electric cars and nuclear plants, wouldn’t we see a massive spike in air pollution much more than if we simply had 0 production of these?

I’ve been very skeptical of “produce more green energy” solution because they seem to pile on more problems under the guise that it is better in the long run.

Isn’t the best ultimate solution to consume less? Fewer cars, fewer things.

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Consuming less is definitely a big part of climate plans I've seen. Consuming less doesn't have to mean a reduced standard of living. This article mentions heat pumps for example, which consume much less energy. Other plans I've seen also include supporting dense development (=consuming less land/resources for housing), supporting public transit (=consuming less energy for transportation), and upgrading efficiency in homes (=consuming less energy for housing). I think longer term, the cuts will have to be deeper due to population growth, but there is so much low-hanging fruit.

I think in general the environmental movement has been hurt by the association with austerity. Most people don't like being told their lives have to get worse for a benefit that's difficult to see. It needs to paint a positive vision of the future that people can get excited about.

Consuming less does not fix the bulk of energy demand, and this particulates in air. It helps with the trash side of the problem mostly.

Traveling less would do more, or using more public transport. Bulk transit of non-food goods is very energy efficient, the last mile is not.

See website Without Hot Air as a rough but thorough analysis.

I think anyone supportive of consuming less is including less individual travel and proximity trade/consumption as a fundamental part of the decrease. Other popular issues nowadays seem to be meat consumption and human breeding, but the key importance of transportation seems to be still more generally acknowledged by everyone I know with an outspoken opinion on the matter or a corporate agenda.

Air conditioning as a luxury to rethink, OTOH, rarely if ever comes into discussion around here (I'm writing from a Mediterranean perspective, obviously AC can quickly become a necessity elsewhere).

It actually costs way less energy to cool a house than it does to heat one so the net migration to the south from the US northeast has and will continue to actually lower US per capita use and as the US uses circa 24% of the worlds energy this will have an effect.

Counterintuitive though.

In dollar terms, heating is less than half the cost of cooling in my experience.

Air conditioning will become much less of a luxury as the climate warms. Even in the past decade, summer temperatures high enough (especially indoors) to pose a health threat have become an increasingly regular occurrence in many parts of the world. Worse, some places are approaching the point where the confluence of air temperature, humidity, wind, and sun intensity will raise temperatures above the 35 degrees C wet bulb limit for human survival. In these conditions, air conditioning will not be a luxury but rather an essential life support system. Plans for climate-compatible energy use will need to take increasing needs for AC into account.

Sourcing: https://www.sciencenews.org/article/climate-deadly-extreme-t...

I think in general the environmental movement has been hurt by the association with austerity.

This exactly. Most people respond better to carrots than sticks. We can consume less energy and material and still live more, through innovation.

Almost all of our problems are energy-cost constrained. If power were 100x+ less costly per kWh, for example, we'd be able to pull all the uranium, lithium, or any of a dozen other metals we need straight from the ocean, without having to run polluting, damaging mines. There are significant benefits to increases in production, if reasonably possible.

Well sure, production of anything takes energy. Question is if 5% of the cars need replaced a year (20 years average age seems about right) are you better off replacing 5% of cars with electric or gas? The studies I've seen show that gas cars are so inefficient (often 15-20%) that even natural gas produced electricity is better in an electric car than a gas car.

The story gets even better if any solar, wind, or hydro is used. Sure nuclear helps as well. Seems obvious to me that we should push on all green energies.

We're already consuming less. In California for example despite the growing population our electricity demand peaked in 2006. But we still need to replace our fossil inputs. After we have abundant peak generating capacity, we can use the excess to remove carbon from the atmosphere, which needs a large energy input.

> Isn’t the best ultimate solution to consume less?

How can we do that when overall population is still growing (even if the rate of growth is slowing). I mean, even if I cut my consumption by 25%, there are so many new people that it doesn’t seem like it would matter much?

The best solution is to consume less, and consume things that are made sustainably. Green energy is important to make things sustainably.

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