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Comment by beders | Hacker News Reader

If we would charge the fossil fuel industry for the cost of destroying the environment, the millions of lives lost due to pollution, it would become infeasible to pump or mine more stuff out of the ground.

We don't need technological solutions, we need political solutions. Now

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Well, well, well…

The political solution were nuclear plants in the 70’s. They were damned by the Ecologists (at least in Europe). We are reaping what we sowed.

Where do you want the energy to come from?

Not building more nuclear in the seventies probably was a bad decision. But today it is not at all clear that nuclear is the cheapest solution for carbon-free energy. Neither is it clear whether we can scale nuclear quickly enough.

If I waited for the clearest, best solution to become apparent to me every time I went to get something done I would still be deciding what food to buy at the grocery store. Sometimes it makes sense to run with a "good enough" solution until something better can be found because the alternative is doing the shitty thing you've always done, or worse, doing nothing at all.

Renewables could also be the "good enough" solution, at least until 70% penetration or so where you want to start building storage. Starting with those has the benefit that you don't need to sink a couple of billions into a big construction site and then wait 10-15 years before the first kWh comes out. That buys you more time to figure out what the actual best solution is.

> They were damned by the Ecologists (at least in Europe)

This is controversial

No, you and I kept up the demand on the fossil fuel industry without which it would not exist and all of us went along with it and now you want them to pay for your and my indulgence. How sweetly ironic! It's never our fault, is it?

This is a classic case of victim blaming. You and I didn't "keep up demand" because we wanted to, we "kept up demand" because it was the only option available to heat our homes.

It's not our fault the industry didn't provide us with alternatives.

Whether you blame the fossil fuel industry or not, they don't have the cure to their destruction in their back pocket or something.

Even if you seized all the stocks and bonds of the fossil fuel industry, you wouldn't have the money required to solve this problem and you wouldn't have a plan to solve the problem.

It's not our fault the industry didn't provide us with alternatives.

It's not really the job of a given industry to provide alternatives. That job, in a modern democratic society, devolves to the state. The US state certainly failed there and was corrupted by private industry (auto and petroleum certainly). But the only way out is the state stepping up and moreover, the state stepping up with statist solutions - building things (public transit), requiring things (electric cars), prohibiting things (CO2 generating production processes) and requiring things (Non-CO2 generating things and possibly/eventually sequestering). Honestly, I'd see anyone thinking taxes or credits could be the solution as part of the problem.

They might not have the cure in their back pocket, but they sure hid evidence of the consequences of their actions for decades. [1]

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97...

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