Hacker News Reader

Comment by ppf | Hacker News Reader

And that might be the biggest plot twist - a government-mandated switch from something that works, to something badly thought out with large unintended consequences.

View on HN

Fossil fuels work if you want a big chunk of life on earth, and possibly humanity, to join them.

I suppose it depends what you think is the bigger calamity - CO2 emission, or energy scarcity.

There's no energy scarcity, only a choice of whether, and how, to produce or obtain it.

For example, open-cast coal mines, and coal-fired power stations fed by them, are among the cheapest (and most environmentally damaging) ways to generate electricity from fossil fuel.

it's now actually cheaper, over the lifetime of the installation, to cover that land with solar panels, than to dig it up and burn it.

Fossil fuel, as the name suggests, is dead.

The only way that it's possible for energy-containing raw materials to be more expensive than complex, manufactured sources of energy generation, is government interference (and the corresponding lack of in the places that the solar panels and the like are actually manufactured, as well as an abundant source of fossil fuels to power that manufacture).

The last I checked, the sun was rather abundant in stored energy, and quite good at releasing some of it.

It's 'simply' a case of capturing it.

Many panels are made in China. Not a place really known for it's uninvolved government, from what I hear.

The whole 'it's all powered by fossil fuels' argument is a bit old now, and was only really valid becuase so much of the energy mix was in fact fossil. As we switch, the argument increasingly no longer holds.

Indeed, which is why a careful examination needs to be made of the energy and resource cycles involved. It'll be interesting if we ever switch to an energy economy fuelled entirely by PV (or similar), and seeing how the energy economics plays out. This is aside from the various minerals needed to continually replenish our new green energy sources, and what we do with the complex and poisonous wastes produced.

As for your comments on China - they certainly don't have any issues allowing widespread pollution and industrial poisoning of their people and land.

>The whole 'it's all powered by fossil fuels' argument is a bit old now

It'll only be "old" when China reduces the amount of coal (and mostly brown coal) that it uses to manufacture all this stuff for us. They have enormous reserves, it won't happen any time soon.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com