Comment by Throwaway197401 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Throwaway197401 | Hacker News Reader

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Throwaway197401

I don't care about models either exactly because there IS variance and because the climate is a dynamic system.

We also know that to be true historically.

Climate itself varies over time. So to the extent that permafrost is time specific speculation it's not really useful for anything.

The only thing I worry about is to which extent the current hysteria ends up pushing catastrophic political decisions which will kill millions of people not in 80 years but today. Trying to push for alternatives to oil, gas and coal when there is no real contender besides nuclear is going to make everything much more expensive.

When everything becomes more expensive it means people can afford less. This will especially hit the poorest. So when faced with that kind of choice I choose.

Combustion was done in the way it was because it solved a problem which was much bigger than the ones it created. The problem of how to make combustion engines cleaner is a much better problem to have than coming up with a reliable, clean and plentiful energy resource.

You most certainly wouldn't be around and the internet certainly wouldn't if it wasn't for combustion engine freeing up time for humans to focus on other things than just surviving.

So again. I am unconvinced by the revisionist historical logic at display here. The world is like it is for a reason the combusting engine have saved many many many many more lives than it's taken.

To me it sounds like:

1. anything humans decide to do should be accepted because of invisible positive outcomes (who could have predicted Internet from oil combustion),

2. the moment negative outcomes become visible, let's wait until it becomes a problem, any attempts at prediction when it will become a problem are futile and fearmongering,

3. humans can solve any problem they encounter.

All three can be used to create an argument for solar/wind. Who knows what kind of positive stuff will solar/wind create (let's see), whatever happens (due to inherent volatility and energy storage problem of solar/wind) let's wait until it happens and then see, we are entirely capable of solving the issue.

I am not sure why you think it does but let me then be more precise.

1. All choices have consequences. The choice to not use combustion engines would have meant that most of us would not be alive, we wouldn't have the internet or 99% of all the things we take for granted today. The use of combustion engines have positive and negative externalities. The positive far outweighs the negatives. The problems we have to deal with because of our use of combustion engine are better problems to have than those we had before the combustion engine was invented.

2. Said no one ever. Coming up with better alternatives that pollute less is an ongoing project humans have been involved with since the combustion engine was invented.

The issue is when there is no better alternatives and inferior solutions like wind and solar (which btw cannot be created without fossile fuels) is pushed as a better solution even though it means less reliable energy supply. It's one thing to solve with something like fusion or nuclear but what we are seeing currently is creating worse not better problems because it's trying to solve something it can't solve.

3. Humans have the potential of solving any problem they encounter with enough knowledge. There is no guarantee though and the history of the world is that 99.9999% of all species went extinct, but the fact that we can come up with something like a combustion engine makes us able to potentially solve the problems the climate have always presented us with.

With regards to wind and solar. No, just know, even in principle it can't be a better solution. It's simply a question of physics and energy density.

For some things it's great but it's unreliable and completely depending on the weather which means that we have to create backup systems of coal, gas, oil and nuclear to deal with it just as we are doing today which only makes the entire sytem more complex, less reliable and more expensive.

So lets get alternatives to fossil fuels as fast as possible, but they have to be better not worse in terms of reliability, price and scale.

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