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Comment by ianai | Hacker News Reader

Especially when the incumbent, fossil fuel energy, has been propped up by subsidies and unpaid externalities for centuries.

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Please don’t fall for the villianization that the media adopt to push an agenda.

Energy is a fundamental need for society to flourish.

Fossil fuels have one of the highest energy densities and hence have been used for ages. We have much to be thankful for thanks to fossil fuels being around.

We are in a position today to bring change and I’m all for that. Losing sight of the benefits of energy simply because some sources have a negative connotation attached sets us up for failure.

Which part of the statement that fossil fuels have been subsidized directly and by not paying for their externalities is wrong?

I didn’t say it’s wrong. I said it villianizes those fuels.

We needed fuels as a society for those 3000 mile flights over the pacific that ships your iPhone here.

Energy “subsidies” are a strategic investment in securing your lifestyle. Just look at Europe right now as they head into winter with sky high natural gas prices. They’d go ahead an strike any deal that secures their supplies so they do t freeze half to death like they did with Russia.

Energy is a strategic asset and simply saying “it gets subsidized” makes it sound like charity.

> I said it villianizes those fuels.

Oh no, heavily polluting (and not only CO2) energy sources are being villanized...

Yes, yes, I am going to villanize Coal, which spews more radioactivity than nuclear.

Natural Gas, Gasoline, Oil, are "ok"ish. Not coal.

I think you've somehow missed the vital part: our lifestyle is not sustainable. We shouldn't aim to sustain something that simply cannot continue.

Oh, i didn't miss that part, i think you may have missed my assertion that Energy is crucial to flourish. One may see a society "Flourish" by innovating their way out of an unsustainable path.

Everything we consider advanced tech today is built on an economy made possible by vast, cheap and accessible energy sources such as the ones we're dissing.

I agree that we need to stop using energy sources in a way that threatens our existence. But i assert that there are massive benefits we have to be thankful for as well.

Okay, you first.

I'd much rather find a way to maintain people's lifestyles, reduce emissions (and make it even better in the process).

It's not "you first". There are perfectly good replacements available, we just need governments to invest heavily on replacing them instead of using that money to maintain the status quo.

I've already substantially changed my lifestyle to be more sustainable.

I don't own a car, I don't eat meat, I consume very little and try to buy used things instead, I repair all my things as much as possible, I try to steer my investments away from anything close to fossil fuels.

Now you.

I do everything you just listed. But that was by choice, and I know people who won't want to e.g. ever give up eating meat.

We have to accommodate these lifestyles (and build tech to make it more sustainable) - people generally don't want to go 'backwards', even if you or I don't perceive that as a problem.

Ultimately it's irrelevant, because both of our lifestyles are still heavily carbon negative without offsets. We both own a computer or live in a house I assume? That's why I'm sceptical of the "just live more sustainable" movement.

Our lifestyle is sustainable. It just doesn't scale for 10 billion people. The only problem what we have is the amount of people. We can do something against it, but we won't.

Why can't it be both?

what both? Any existing prediction says that the Earth won't support more than 10 billion people. Our life is much more "sustainable" now than before. Yes we still have a lot to do, we will always have, but gosh, we are simply too many. I can't believe in a COPXX if birth control isn't part of the solution.

Both population control and a sustainable lifestyle.

you are right. Was Population control a topic on COP26? Is population control a topic when we talk about CO2 emission?

You don't need coal for those flights.

Comparing to gas burning power stations coal is very inefficient in terms of energy produced per per ton of CO2 emitted.

>Energy is a fundamental need for society to flourish.

Energy is needed for basic modern services.

Humans have survived a long time without electricity. It could be simpler to 'go without' or 'find a workaround' for a lot of conveniences if we were serious at combating climate change.

Not for eight billion people. Just look at what happens when we stop loading trucks for a little while. Now imagine if you expanded all that "going without" to everything that uses energy. You'd have days at most before mass chaos.

Can we engineer a human backbone behind these services to be resistant to corruption and complacency for security sake?

We did an ok job with nuclear weapons but only just.

In what condition? Without the energy of the fossil fuel, lots of the energy came from human labor. Without it, we wouldn't have gotten rid of slavery. Most people were doing a manual labor, which is also more discriminatory to the weaker ones (e.g. woman)

So your just suggesting we go back to the middle ages? No, thank you.

>In what condition?

Well that's the question right? Without nuclear there may not be a middle ground as an option for a lot of people.

>So your just suggesting we go back to the middle ages? No, thank you.

I'm not suggesting anything, simply declaring it an option.

Before electricity we would burn wood to not die in winter. We don’t have any forests left to do that.

Luckily nowadays we have clean sources of energy, so there is no need to go back to burning wood.

> Fossil fuels have one of the highest energy densities and hence have been used for ages. We have much to be thankful for thanks to fossil fuels being around.

far lower than nuclear

> Fossil fuels have one of the highest energy densities

What? The energy density of primordial fuels is six orders of magnitude higher!

A century, I could maybe see. A century and maybe a plural amount of decades, perhaps. Gonna need you to cite that plural centuries though.

Coal was already in reasonably widespread use in industrial processes 200 years ago, and produced unpaid-for externalities then just as it does now (actually worse ones, presumably, given that air quality was not yet regulated in any meaningful way).

But was it being "propped up" two centuries ago?

Unpaid externalities is a fancy way of saying propped up.

Where’s my citation I asked for?

I’m not saying the parent is necessarily wrong, but given the recency of the industrial revolution and the length of time between which it “began” and when many of the most useful industrial applications for coal were discovered, I can’t take it at face value “centuries” is correct. It might be close to correct, it might be technically correct, but it’s not merely an pedantic point: his comment reads as hyperbole because of the vagueness of what centuries even means here. Even if it has been technically two centuries, century plural technically, that’s overstating his case. Overstating your case is a good way to get people to turn off to what you are saying if they perceive it that way.

It is very easy to look up the history of coal use and see that it had metallurgical applications in antiquity: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal#History

A lot of the coal used in Swedish metal-working (up to relatively late, but I don't actually have dates, here, gut feel is 18050s) was charcoal, rather than mined coal. With quite advanced cooperatives[1] producing the charcoal for the mining/refining cooperatives[1].

[1] Somewhat loose translation of "kolare" and "bergslag", here.

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