Hacker News Reader

In Germany the concept of "Ewigkeitskosten" ist factored in for coal and nuclear.

That is a fairly bold claim. There are laws around it, but it's far from clear whether all the costs are accounted for. There is for example continuous conflict over flooding old mines. That saves a lot of money, but it also risks contaminating ground water with e.g. PCBs.

Sorry, my comment was not meant to imply that _all_ future costs are covered by this. Just that there is a concept to factor in costs that would impact future generations.

This amount factored in will always be political in nature.

The concept exists but it’s not exactly transparent how those costs translate into actual energy prices because coal mining has been heavily subsidised.

There are estimates, however, saying that those costs will exceed the overall benefits in the next few years, i.e. in the end it‘ll have been a negative-sum game.

I am sure that you are right. Factoring _all_ costs is near impossible and as such the Ewigkeitskosten will not cover all the environmental impact ever.

What I meant is, that there is a concept to factor in such costs at all. Is it "complete" - surely not. Is it at least a concept that could be applied when talking about incurring costs for future generations? IMHO absolutely.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com