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Comment by rocknor | Hacker News Reader

> Yet China and India continue to build new coal-fired power stations. And the G7 - Canada, France, Germany, Japan, the UK and the US - won't give a date to phase them out.

The rich don't want to give up coal because they have gotten too comfortable with their overconsumption lifestyle, and the poor can't afford to not use coal because life in poverty is worse than life with climate change consequences.

Now is the time to invest big in renewable energy research and encourage our children to participate in it, otherwise we are screwed.

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We need nuclear to bridge the gap, and actually let us phase out coal. Yet there's so much fearmongering over it. It's killed far fewer people than coal per energy unit, but people still freak out about it. I'm Canadian, and the people I know who are the most anti-nuclear are the ones from the main fossil fuel province. Even if they don't live there anymore, are against fossil fuels, and have an engineering degree, they've had the fear of nuclear ingrained into them.

We don’t need to “bridge the gap” we need to radically alter all of our lives immediately. The pandemic has shown it’s possible. there’s no way to consume ourselves out of this crisis. At very least because if climate change doesn’t do us in, microplastics will.

And yet, because climate change isn’t as immediately scary to the average person as Covid19 was/is, we can’t even seem to agree on the easiest to implement solutions. We can’t even agree to the “wear a mask” equivalent, which isn’t surprising since we couldn’t agree to just wear masks!

I am generally an optimistic person, but I think we are completely and utterly screwed on climate change and I feel quite depressed and helpless about it.

You're right. Nuclear has come a long way... it's safer and can provide more power.

No, we need to invest more in solar and wind. They're already cheaper and safer than Nuclear, and will only continue to get cheaper.

You say that nuclear has killed fewer people. That's true, but this is not the main problem of Nuclear. The main problems are 1) that catastrophic events can and will happen in the future. That's why nobody wants to live next to a nuclear power plant. 2) Nuclear waste storage.

Why would even invest in nuclear power plants now that it's pretty clear that other alternatives are cheaper and safer? (I'm not saying abandon nuclear power research, there are definitey niche cases where it makes sense, like space exploration).

> The main problems are 1) that catastrophic events can and will happen in the future. That's why nobody wants to live next to a nuclear power plant.

The chances for such events are vanishingly low when it comes to modern reactors. Seriously, as hard as it is to believe, we've come so, so far from Chernobyl. Thorium-based reactors are meltdown-proof [0], and Thorium comes with the plus in that it's not as easily weaponizable [1].

> 2) Nuclear waste storage.

Thorium reactors also produce less dangerous waste [2], which is great! They're not a panacea by any means- it is still technically possible to make weapons using Thorium reactors even if it's more difficult, and fuel is harder to prepare, but I do think the upsides greatly overcome the downsides.

Solar and wind aren't viable everywhere, which is why we need nuclear. The sooner we get over our inveterate fear of it, as difficult as it may be, the better.

[0] https://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/200900...

[1] https://whatisnuclear.com/thorium.html#prolif

[2] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/257126696_Abundant_...

These arguments have been circular forever. There’s likely not enough materials for solar everywhere, or enough space for wind everywhere, but investing on all forms today is more valuable than continuing to argue

What material are we going to run out of for solar? Silicon (sand) is the main ingredient.

Running out of space for wind? Huh? Yes obviously we use the best places first but the entire Earth has wind, and almost every land usage can be co sited with wind towers.

More talking about solar+battery, and rare earth metals for battery. Wind can operate day/night

Most grid batteries are LiFePO4 which don't use rare earths. Lithium, Iron and Phosphorus are super abundant.

Solar panels are mostly sand. If you somehow run out of some of the trace elements in PV panels you can always build mirrors for solar-thermal. That has the added benefit that it produces power at night, but the drawback that it costs a bit more than PV.

> 2) Nuclear waste storage.

Coal ash is radioactive too and people don't mind to live nearby. There is a lot of irrational in the fear of nuclear power.

We are rolling out solar and wind much faster than any meaningful amount of nuclear can get through even a pre-planning phase.

The reason is simple: it's far cheaper and quicker. Fear has relatively little to do with this. You can roll out facilities with GW of capacity in under a year. The total capacity of nuclear in the US is something like 94 GW after about 7 decades of nuclear being a thing. Wind is 120 GW. 17 of that got installed last year. Over the next decade, that is likely to continue to grow to a couple of hundred GW of capacity.

In general, countries world wide are rolling out impressive amounts of wind and solar every year. Quite many countries have hit the point where it is double digit percentage of energy generation and generally the dominant form of energy.

Quite a few of these countries are actually on track to be 100% renewable powered by the mid 2030s. Some are projected to hit their targets early. Nuclear is generally not a part of those plans in most of those countries. Mostly, no new plants are being built in these countries. No plants are being planned even. And actually, no plant could feasibly be planned and built until the mid 2030s in any case given how slow and expensive building such plants is and how politically sensitive that is.

Renewables outgrow everything else by no small margin almost everywhere on this planet. All we need to do is do more of that faster and at the same time figure out storage and long distance transport (i.e. cables) of energy.

The build turnaround is too long to be practical. Just getting plans for the hundreds of stations we'd need would take years.

Mandating that all newbuilds and planned extensions have PV roofs and local storage would be far more realistic to meet our power requirements.

It's not just fear. Building a nuclear power plant is a complicated, decades-long, tremendously expensive engineering prowess. Due to the catastrophic failure modes of nuclear reactors compared to other power plants, it requires a huge amount of safety and regulation (and it's why it has killed less people than other energy sources). It also requires a large and steady amount of water to work with current designs, so you can't build them just anywhere, and you need to extrapolate 50-100 years into the future to take into account droughs and rising sea levels.

I'm all for nuclear, I'm amazed at the power density of nuclear fuel (I saw recently that a few hundred grams of plutonium contain the same amount of energy as a fully fuelled Starship), but reducing the counter-argument to "fear" is not useful. Let's try and solve the real problems instead: the cost problems, the building time problems, the nuclear waste problems and the proliferation problems. The fear and political reluctance will then go away by itself.

In parallel, we should not waste time and enforce more energy-efficient housing, mandatory remote working whenever possible, promote better transportation options than cars, connect grids together, put solar/wing/biogas/geothermal plants everywhere, find more efficient ways to ship cargo across the planet, etc.

The current behaviour about climate change looks a lot like the behaviour we have seen about Covid-19 a year and a half ago: the changes today are not seen everywhere nor often, as was covid in the first months, only local in China, and everyone was like "it's gonna be ok". Then everyone started to panic when it got to their door. So when heatwaves, sea risings, ... will hit hard those big actors like China, US, Brazil, ... things may change. In the meantime, why would they care, it's somewhere else, someone else's problem. Why would they break their economy?

You're definitely right about the overconsumption lifestyle. This is a quote from a Bill Bryson book I was just reading called Notes from a Big country:

What is saddest about all this is that a good part of these goals to cut greenhouse emissions could be met without any cost at all if we merely modified our extravagance. It has been estimated that the nation as a whole wastes about $300 billion of energy a year. We are not talking here about energy that could be saved by investing in new technologies. We are talking about energy that could be saved just by switching things off or turning things down.

Take hot water. Nearly every household in Europe has a timer device on its hot water system. Since people clearly don't need hot water when they are at work or fast asleep, there isn't any need to keep the tank heated, so the system shuts down. Here in America I don't know how to switch off my hot water tank. I don't know that it is possible. There is piping hot water in our house twenty-four hours a day, even when we are far away on vacation. Doesn't seem to make much sense.

According to U. S. News World Report, the United States must maintain the equivalent of five nuclear power plants just to power equipment and appliances that are on but not being used-lights burning in rooms that are unoccupied, computers left on when people go to lunch or home for the night, all those mute, wall-mounted TVs that flicker unwatched in the corners of bars.

> We are talking about energy that could be saved just by switching things off or turning things down.

In order to do that you'll need to make energy much more expensive - artificially so.

You are correct and I agree very much with this statement:

>life in poverty is worse than life with climate change consequences

Nevertheless, let us not ignore that China is doing significant steps already. It is not enough, but it is a trend into the right direction:

- world-leading production of renewable energy with twice the output from solar, wind and water compared to the number 2, the US

- renewable sector is growing significantly faster than the fossil and nuclear sector combined

- largest manufacturer of solar/photovoltaic tech

- almost 50% of global investments into renewables are made in China

- largest electric-car market in the world

- Green Wall of China has created 4.000.000.000 tons of sustainable biomass since 2003 (increased tree cover rate in China by 15%)

Those are significant steps and must be further followed and even accelerated.

> Now is the time to invest big in renewable energy research and encourage our children to participate in it, otherwise we are screwed.

We need to look at getting our environmental footprint under control. Renewable energy may help with that in the short term, but switching to renewables at scale will also have a significant environmental footprint. Remember, climate change is the environmental issue of our generation. Prior generations had their environmental issues (ozone hole, acid rain, deforestation). Future generations will have their environmental issues, for as long as we don't take responsibility and curb our resource use.

I live in North India in Uttarakhand and the summer has been pleasantly cool this year in whole decade atleast.

Otherwise north India has severe heatwaves

The US has been reducing its use of coal power pretty significantly. In 2016 Coal accounted for 30% of all power generation. This has now been reduced to 19%. It’s been replaced by renewables and natural gas plants.

It’s not rich nations that are the problem. They have and continue to drastically reduce their CO2 output (China not withstanding). The problem is poorer countries that are just now coming online with electricity. Coal is the cheapest way to do that.

The uncomfortable truth here is that if we want to stop this, we need to stop these undeveloped countries from…well…developing. Which we aren’t going to do because we aren’t monsters. So what now?

Carbon sequestration.

It is rich nations that are the problem.

For any given limit we wish to hold on warming, there is a total acceptable amount of CO2 emissions we can allow for the world.

Once emitted, CO2 stays in the atmosphere for a few hundred to a thousand years. Rich nations have emitted more than their fair share for a couple hundred years--that's a large part of how they got rich. Of the CO2 now in the atmosphere, over 60% came from North America and Europe and 47% from the US and the EU+UK.

Emitting more than your fair share to get rich is fine, if:

1. Once rich you use part of that wealth to switch to low or zero emissions, and

2. Either do something to take the CO2 you emitted out of the atmosphere so that there is room in the global CO2 budget for someone else to become rich the same way, or help them become rich by subsidizing them so they can skip the high emissions stage and go straight to the low/zero emissions rich stage.

The current rich nations aren't doing well on either of these.

And the climate "czars" (e.g. Kerry in Biden administration) take private jets to climate conference

I don't know, but I have a hard time buying the private jets as the problem. How many of them are flying, in comparison to normal airliners?

It's like saying that the 3 Ferraris in the city are the problem, not the million Volkswagens (or whatever).

Heck, if this helps those folks focus on the problem at hand, I'd rather have them fly private than go through the stress of flying regular (which in my view is mostly horrible).

They are not a big problem per se, but the message that sends is pretty bad. I think many people are worried about "green" policies exacerbating inequality, with the rich flying and doing what they want while the poor aren't allowed cars.

I agree w/ you about the message they send (ie. it's pretty much hypocrisy).

But the inequalities were already there. It's not like if they stop flying private, they'll all of a sudden be less wealthy. At least they spend their money, instead of hoarding blindly (not that flying private changes this by much, I have to admit).

The inequalities may be there, but even rather poor people (in the US) are quite rich in an absolute sense, at the moment. Radical green policies would cause real, tangible changes to people's lives; if you actually wanted to reach realistic climate targets, many people wouldn't have cars due to carbon taxes, electricity costs would be much higher, etc.

Someone indirectly advocating for such things while flying in a private jet is a pretty bad look. It reminds me of a medieval king gorging himself on food while telling the population to slim down.

It's a matter of perception. It'd be like having an obese personal trainer lecturing you on proper diet and exercise. Everything they're saying might be true, but at best it comes off as hypocritical, at worst that they're getting paid to lie to you.

This is public relation 101. Don’t ask anyone to make sacrifices you are willing to make yourself.

It’s really easy to claim “every one should do X” but then exempt yourself from it. It just looks hypocritical.

This is one of the reasons it's such a big problem that the US government is a gerontocracy. Old people don't care about climate change because it won't affect them.

> Old people don't care about climate change because it won't affect them.

Old people discovered climate change and tried to warn us.

And now they're doing everything they can to stop any progress:

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/22/climate/feinstein-sunrise...

Conservatives in government don't believe in climate change and liberals in government say they believe in it right up until they actually have to do anything. The common pattern is that they're all in their 60s, 70s, and 80s and will be dead before the most dire consequences arrive.

If they don't care what will happen after they die and they're already successful people... why would they be working at all? Surely they'll be at home burning through all their money and not worrying about anything?

That's an excellent question and I think it's some combination of hunger for power (eternally unquenchable) and using staffers/aides as elder care workers, like Robert Byrd did.

I think they like staying in power, and enjoying making money as a habit.

A minority of the old people, sure. But the majority of the voting old people don't believe in climate change.

Most old people, yes. Most young people don't care about climate change (regardless of what they say) because doing something about it will affect them.

I regret the initial wording of my comment and I would like to follow up with evidence of my point:

https://news.gallup.com/poll/234314/global-warming-age-gap-y...

>The second-largest age gap comes with the belief that global warming is caused by human activities.

Denying the human nature of climate change hinders any action we can take. We need to be honest about the cause in order to work on a solution.

Another good link with similar findings:

https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/05/26/key-finding...

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