Comment by syshum | Hacker News Reader

Comment by syshum | Hacker News Reader

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None of these agreements are worth the paper they are printed on

The only realistic solution from global warming will not come from government action, or attempting to force nations into economic untenable positions that have the effect of lowering living standards for their populations.

The only realistic solution is via technological innovation where by coal, oil, etc are made obsolete by natural market forces, not artificial tax schemes, fines, or other such agreements.

People that continue down the path that making these fuels more expensive by artificial government actions will continue to be disappointed in the results, as people need to heat their home, move goods, etc and they will always want do to that by the cheapest means, injecting government policies that simply increase prices of those basic needs of society to make alternatives more attractive will never ever be popular with the majority citizens of any nation which is why nations look to water down the language.

This is a PR event with no substance, like most international agreements.

I have three counter points.

First, my concern with technical innovation is that it will simply be exploited for increased output. If the process for making widgets is made twice as efficient, people will make twice the widgets and pollute just as much.

Second, in your example of coal being made obsolete by market forces: governments are already skewing these forces with massive subsidies for fossil fuels. We need governments to stop doing that.

Third, bringing new technology to market requires huge investments and risks. We need governments to incentivize and support this development so that it can happen as quickly as possible. Free markets are not some efficient force that just always magically do the right thing when left to their own devices. They are marred by countless modes of failure.

The underlying social and political issues are almost intractable, but they cannot be ignored just because it's too difficult. I don't believe we can simply technology our way out of this.

>>Second, in your example of coal being made obsolete by market forces: governments are already skewing these forces with massive subsidies for fossil fuels. We need governments to stop doing that.

100% agree, my entire post is about government inaction... My ideal government does nothing ;) that that applies to both sides of this, they should neither subsidize nor fine technologies. It should be up purely to market forces.

>>Third, bringing new technology to market requires huge investments and risks. We need governments to incentivize and support this development so that it can happen as quickly as possible

This has never been true for any advancement, Governments are TERRIBLE at picking winner and losers from a technology standpoint (see Ethanol) , and often time they SLOW not accelerate advancement. It has been proven in many sectors, including energy production, that once the government gets out of the way real progress begins.

>I don't believe we can simply technology our way out of this.

All of human history proves you wrong, but this time is the one time we should ignore history right?

> All of human history proves you wrong, but this time is the one time we should ignore history right?

Except all the actual scientists are agreeing with GP.

The "tech will save us" mantra seems to come mostly from business types and libertarian pundits, not from the people actually working on those technologies.

> This has never been true for any advancement, Governments are TERRIBLE at picking winner and losers from a technology standpoint (see Ethanol) , and often time they SLOW not accelerate advancement. It has been proven in many sectors, including energy production, that once the government gets out of the way real progress begins.

You probably know this, but without government intervention we'd still have leaded petrol, and renewables wouldn't have been as developed without the massive subsidies.

Do we really know this? For decades various government agencies shielded many companies from liability, and continued to make public statements that leaded gas was "safe".

in the 70s' public pressure, and outcry became large enough that companies started phasing out leaded gas as customers were demanded alternatives, it is at this point that government, working with industry developed the phase out plan that the public was demanded.

This is often how regulations go, technology advances (in this case alternative anti-knock additives), public pressure builds, and at a critical junction industry allows (yes allows) government to "pass" regulation outlining something they were already going to do anyway based on public pressure.

Now often the question is well if they were going to do it anyway why would they have government pass regulation. That is easy to answer because there is always some fear that some company will buck the trend, large companies hate competition but they can not coordinate on their own as that would be anti-trust violations, Thus government provides a nice avenue to ensure no competition on some matters or topics

This is why facebook is currently asking the government for regulation. This is why Amazon supports a national sales tax, and why Walmart now supports increasing the minimum wage...

In Germany the government went out of the way when it came to digital technology Look where we ended up

To your first point, yes it will. The effect has a name: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebound_effect_(conservation)

This a good thing. The point of taming climate change isn't to inflict random punishment on people, it is to stop changing the climate. I drive an EV powered by carbon-free electricity. Political programs that are aimed at curbing how much I (and other people) move around aren't going to get voted in.

Except, it's often not even caused by "people" (i.e. consumers) but by businesses and the general growth-above-all-else mindset: If we could produce a widget at half the resource cost and even if there were no demand for twice as many widgets, companies would try to drive up demand for widgets, then produce twice as many widgets - because this is the only way growth can be realized.

I'm curious how you're sourcing carbon free electricity - would you mind elaborating.

But at this point you don't actually need to subsidize solar with respect to coal you just have to discontinue all coal and oil subsidies and the free market does this organically.

There are places where nuclear makes more sense but now that solar has dropped in price by 10x it is incredibly competitive. Can't we just let the free market work this out?

What are the consequences to the poor of removing these subsidies in the short term? It reminds me of Chesterton’s fence. It doesn’t feel like a problem of markets, it seems like a problem of will from people in power. What’s the guarantee that the free market will move in a favourable direction with regards to the environment?

Because people are cheap and they don't like spending money and as soon as coal and oil are expensive they'll stop using it just like when you tell them they're fired if they don't get vaccinated most of them get vaccinated but please more downvotes because you want the world to work differently even though it doesn't.

And by people I mean the 0.1 percenters who provide electricity and love those dividends they got off the backs of the rest of us not upgrading their systems and then whined about bankruptcy the minute anyone tried to hold them accountable.

We're talking the same people who now want to put a tax on going off grid and installing solar because reasons and racism and s___

https://calcoastnews.com/2021/11/pge-claims-home-solar-is-ra...

I mean if coal is such a great solution why isn't it competitive and why do you hate free markets? Starting to think you might actually hate freedom and America. What could be more freedom(tm) than an open level playing field competition for our future?

>>Because people are cheap and they don't like spending money and as soon as coal and oil are expensive they'll stop using it just like when you tell them they're fired if they don't get vaccinated most of them get vaccinated

While true, it does not make these actions ethical. Using threats of violence( and yes the mandates are threats of violence) to obtain a result you desire is unethical no matter how much you believe that action to be necessary. Once you use coercion via state violence to get your way you have lost all moral and ethical authority.

>>And by people I mean the 0.1 percenters

The problem here is the comment you were replying to asked about the poor, who if their heat bill goes up by 20% will have to choose between food and heat, will have to tell their kids "no Christmas for you this year" etc.

You seemly have no concern for these people.

To be clear, I am on your side when it comes to ending subsidies, though all subsidies including though on "green" energy as well

I just do not think your argumentation is valid or going to win the hearts and minds of anyone

So 130,000 households in the United States, mostly in Pennsylvania, heated their houses with coal in 2019.

https://www.npr.org/2019/03/03/699325560/for-the-few-who-hea...

And for those 130,000 households you would prefer to screw over the remaining 127.9 million so they can keep doing so. If you bothered to read the article some of those houses are 2400 square feet so I don't think the guy's poor at least in that case.

Or for $6.5B we could implement cash for coal and subsidized adding solar to their house and an electric heat pump or heater. And for those are solar isn't feasible we could just subsidize the electricity and give them the heating for a lot less. Compare and contrast with the $1.7T budget for the f-35 stealth fighter and this is chump change. And before you whine about jobs and other canned talking points to keep doing exactly what we're doing, we can early retire the entire 42,000 coal industry workforce for $12B. Now for the 2.4 million houses heating their homes with wood, those are bigger numbers but at least it's not coal.

As for the vaccine mandates any violence perpetrated on those who won't get vaccinated is vastly exceeded by the violence they are inflicting on spreading this pandemic and murdering Americans and destroying our economy and geopolitical competitiveness. The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. Get used to it. Or move to Pennsylvania and build a house heated by coal in a town that hates vaccines. There's a whole bunch of them there I used to live there.

And yes remove all the energy subsidies and stop getting in the way of nuclear power as well. We're long overdue to disrupt the energy industry and it's just not that expensive to do it.

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