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Comment by YetAnotherNick | Hacker News Reader

And how do you make developing countries pay carbon/pollution tax? There is a stage in country's development where the country don't care about environment and prioritise on development. All of the developed countries went through that phase from 1700s-1900s. Either we need, say USA, to coercively make country create less pollution(which we know that it generally doesn't work) with military control, or developed countries need to pay developing countries fees for keeping the rivers and air clean. The second option sounds wrong but it is less wrong than alternatives.

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The ideal solution is to "leap-frog" fossil fuels and go straight to renewables. This is an indirect way for developed countries to "pay developing countries fees for keeping the rivers and air clean"; those "fees" take the form of massive research and development investment to create renewable tech, and massive subsidies to price it below the fossil fuel alternatives.

This doesn't need to be charity either; the maintenance cost of renewables can be much lower than the cost of fossil fuels, so they can end up cheaper over the long-term (obviously dependent on the situation). Hence it can be a straighforward loan/investment to set up this renewable tech. When talking about national policy, there are also factors like reducing dependence on oil imports, which can make renewables even more attractive.

> The ideal solution is to "leap-frog" fossil fuels and go straight to renewables. This is an indirect way for developed countries to "pay developing countries fees for keeping the rivers and air clean"; those "fees" take the form of massive research and development investment to create renewable tech, and massive subsidies to price it below the fossil fuel alternatives.

That takes time. Meanwhile coal plants and concrete manufacture will continue as the developing countries grow. Even China has to operate a lot of coal plants to meet its current energy needs. Global C02 emissions likely won't peak for several years, before starting to decline.

CO2 emissions need to peak no later than 2025 in order to avoid more than 1.5 degrees of warming, according to the IPCC report.

you cant leapfrog fossil fuels. Wind and solar require backup from either gas, oil, coal or nuclear or it wont be able to provide energy all the time. All you are doing is creating a much more expensive system and you are not getting rid of fossil fuel. Furthermore do you knoe how much fossil fuels goes into building windmills and solar cells? Both from a material and manufacturing perspective.

We are not getting of fossil fuels anytime soon.

https://spectrum.ieee.org/to-get-wind-power-you-need-oil?fbc...

The electricity is also generally unreliable in developing countries, so it might be just good enough.

Yet, it's fairly reliable in most developed countries. So how will a developing country, well, develop, if it can't build a consistent, reliable power grid?

The rich countries should emulate China's Belt and Road initiative, but instead of building ports and highways they should build electric grids and renewables in developing nations. Ideally without predatory balloon financing that results in sticky situations down the line.

electric grid based on renewables require fossil fuels to be both made and as backup to be reliable. Electricity is not going to solve the 80% of the energy needs, its not going to allow them to do manufacturing and agriculture at large scale either. Its the wrong approach to turn developing nations into developed nations. I know most people dont like to hear it but that is the reality.

It being unreliable is a hinderance to it's development. Furthermore you cant't even do any of this without heavy use of fossil fuel.

> Furthermore do you knoe how much fossil fuels goes into building windmills and solar cells? Both from a material and manufacturing perspective.

You're just describing a feedback cycle: the more we transition to renewables, the less fossil fuels will go into wind turbines and solar cells.

From your link:

> Large trucks bring steel and other raw materials to the site, earth-moving equipment beats a path to otherwise inaccessible high ground, large cranes erect the structures, and all these machines burn diesel fuel. So do the freight trains and cargo ships that convey the materials needed for the production of cement, steel, and plastics.

In other words, we should transition our vehicles to renewable power. Electric motors are already preferable when it comes to heavy machinery (bucket-wheel excavators and conveyor bridges, the largest machines ever made, being the most extreme examples). Wind/solar farms generate electricity, so they can start charging batteries or electrolysing water to hydrogen as soon as the first turbines/panels are installed; they'll eventually need hefty grid connections, so installing those early-on can also power the construction.

Managing an electric/hydrogen construction site is mostly logistics rather than engineering: we don't need new battery tech or fuel cell membranes when vehicles are operating on a single site, centrally coordinated, centrally owned/rented, etc. Battery swaps make more sense when a single entity controls all the batteries (no fear of losing a good battery for a worn-out dud). Even if you want to be incredibly pessimistic about battery/hydrogen usage: with a bit more coordination and training, construction vehicles could just be wired!

Similarly, electric trains are a thing; electric and hydrogen trucks are already available and getting better; we can sail cargo ships, for a price (time + money).

The only place which seems to require new science and engineering in all this is steel and concrete production, but (a) there are a bunch of companies bringing improvements to market already, and (b) that's no reason to avoid all the other improvements. Again, worst-case pessimism: we might need to plug excess renewables into some vastly-inefficient air capture system to offset jet aircraft, rockets (except hydrogen burners), concrete and steel; that's still easier than trying to offset all those things plus electricity and land transport and shipping and construction etc.

The only direct barriers are economic; and those are indirectly political.

This is where you are wrong these are fundamental problems of physics, materials, chemistry and engineering before the even become economic issues

What is happening now is, for example, USA/Canada building oil extraction platforms, possibly with fracking, in Botswana. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/jun/20/new-oilf...

Maybe the more developed countries should build or invest in power plants from renewable sources, or maybe nuclear, in less developed countries.

that require fossil fuels.

Ever seen what goes into building a windmill?

https://spectrum.ieee.org/to-get-wind-power-you-need-oil?fbc...

We are not even theoretically close to getting off oil, gas or coal.

Is nuclear a better option then?

If it can be built without the draconian regulation you see in the west perhaps. Fossil fuel is still required though.

If it is safety regulation you're talking about, that is not exactly a plus for the local population. Sure, it is a non-renewable source of power, but it doesn't produce CO2 after it starts to operate. Ideally, it could be even used to capture carbon from air.

i am a big proponent of nuclear but less than 20% of any country’s energy needs are electricity.

If there is ever a good excuse to use fossil fuels its to build something which will deprecate them.

I love nuclear but we are not going to deprecate fossil fuels. You can't build neither nuclear nor wind or solar without huge amounts of fossil fuels and again electricity is less than 20% of a country's energy consumption.

You start with developed countries, and go from there. It's only fair. They've created the most (by far, on a per-capita basis) unpaid negative externalities over the last 200 years, so they should be the first to start paying for it.

This concept of fairness seems to go against efficiency. As far as any pollution goes, you want to reduce creation and release of new pollutants as well. The old baggage is bad enough. Adding more of it means making the situation worse.

So you need to address currently polluting countries as well, because they are very much an important part of the problem. This set partly overlaps with the set of developed countries, partly not.

Happily this concern largely moot because most emissions are either directly by developed countries or paid for by them in the form of export goods from other countries.

It's only a real concern if you are very insistant about calling China and India "developing" countries.

Developed countries would need to add import emissions taxes for countries that aren't part of the global emissions trading system. It wouldn't be perfect, but the total amount taxed should roughly correspond to their estimated emissions. We should do the same with international shipping emissions.

I'm guessing this would require a change at the WTO level however, making it relatively unlikely.

Import taxes like the EU is looking at to charge a carbon tax look interesting…

> There is a stage in country's development where the country don't care about environment and prioritise on development.

OTOH renewable energy sources are getting economically competitive so development doesn't have to mean more carbon. For instance, wind power already accounts for 20% of Brazil's energy generation (and most of it was built recently with private capital, as the government has been broke for a few decades already).

Unless you count china in they group it may not be such a problem.

If businesses in developed countries had to simply pay the cost of cleanup when importing from countries without their own laws in place, it would still be a massive improvement.

> Either we need, say USA, to coercively...

Carbon credits will be enforced with coercion, just as the petrodollar has been. At the end of the day they are both schemes where technocrats print permission slips to consume energy.

Putting aside the fear mongering rationalizations for both schemes, I hope posters here can appreciate the inherent moral hazards.

You can enforce it using trade bans, don't need military for that. Also, if this would be a global policy then the costs would go globally for everyone making it much easier to cope with since all the competition (on company but also state level) would have the same obligations.

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