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Comment by gibolt | Hacker News Reader

The follow-up to this article would discuss the effects of falling costs on accelerating the transition.

Massive battery installations plus solar are already cheaper than operating an *existing* natural gas peaker plant in California. Batteries that are 50% cheaper will make that true across the U.S. That could happen by 2025 if Tesla's new battery process is successful.

Battery installations' faster response to grid demand also means they can quickly undercut remaining operating non-baseline usage, making the most polluting plants even less economically viable.

Excess storage in EVs and batteries will allow flattening the duck curve to rely even more on efficient baseload and shift renewable energy production to times of demand.

Things are going to go into overdrive faster than nearly all predictions... but still not fast enough for net zero :(

View on HN

People talk a lot about a lot of things when it comes to energy production, but in terms of what actually happens the largest factor is $/MW in terms of new capacity in the expected timeframe. That economic force dominates all.

As a provider I (they) want x GW of new capacity, and will chose whatever costs the lowest amount to get that capacity. Solar is getting so cheap now that overbuilding is an entirely viable option. This is why renewables are getting built over new coal plants, the environmental benefits are just a marketing bonus.

As Engineers/scientists our job is to innovate and get the costs of the "correct" decision low enough that the economic forces take over and steer humanity towards the best outcome.

There was a recent paper that discussed this and said the transition is now inevitable due to economics and maybe always has been, but lots of forecasts were linear in their assumptions.

https://www.inet.ox.ac.uk/files/energy_transition_paper-INET...

> Rapidly decarbonising the global energy system is critical for addressing climate change, but concerns about costs have been a barrier to implementation. Most energy-economy models have historically underestimated deployment rates for renewable energy tech- nologies and overestimated their costs1,2,3,4,5,6. The problems with these models have stimulated calls for better approaches7,8,9,10,11,12 and recent e↵orts have made progress in this direction13,14,15,16. Here we take a new approach based on probabilistic cost fore- casting methods that made reliable predictions when they were empirically tested on more than 50 technologies17,18. We use these methods to estimate future energy system costs and find that, compared to continuing with a fossil-fuel-based system, a rapid green energy transition will likely result in overall net savings of many trillions of dollars - even without accounting for climate damages or co-benefits of climate policy. We show that if solar photovoltaics, wind, batteries and hydrogen electrolyzers continue to follow their current exponentially increasing deployment trends for another decade, we achieve a near-net-zero emissions energy system within twenty-five years. In contrast, a slower transition (which involves deployment growth trends that are lower than current rates) is more expensive and a nuclear driven transition is far more expensive. If non-energy sources of carbon emissions such as agriculture are brought under control, our analysis indicates that a rapid green energy transition would likely generate considerable eco- nomic savings while also meeting the 1.5 degrees Paris Agreement target.

This is something a lot smart people even here on hackernews have been unable to get their head around. The speed of cost decrease in renewable based electricity and battery prices. Solar electricity is cheaper now than all fossil fuel based electricity in most of the world already. But its cost are still decreasing at about 10% a year. So electricity that costs $1 today will cost $0.25 or less in 10 years. Most of us have not seen this on our bills yet as renewable still are small percentage of the total as the percentage of renewable increases our bills should start decreasing as well. Currently Electric cars you can drive 18 miles compared ice cars 10 miles for a $1. It could be 40 miles in 5 years and 80 miles a $1 in 10. Without even any improvements in the electric car motors and lighter batteries which could push the mileage to 100~120 miles a $1. This is the reason I feel electric vehicles will be supply constrained rather than demand constrained in the next few years. And if current manufacturers are unwilling to sacrifice their ice vehicle cash cows now they will loose the market to the new entrants very very quickly. And with electric cars being less complex to manufacture we might see manufacturers outside of Japan, Eur and USA.

> Massive battery installations plus solar are already cheaper than operating an existing natural gas peaker plant in California

Aren't natural gas prices pretty high currently ? And with many countries moving away from gas in their electricity production, or at least moving it to peak-only, the price will go down.

Furthermore, batteries with what capacity? I highly doubt they're of the size required to sustain multi-week storm/bad weather events, even for the rarity they'd be in sunny California, le alone the rest of the US.

And from a globally strategic point of view, isn't it better to focus battery capacity on decarbonising sectors such as transportation ( cars, trucks, even trains apparently ( i still think electrifying the network is a better idea overall, but i can see how it'd be cheaper upfront to just add a battery car)) instead of "wasting" TWhs of battery capacity for long term storage.

> And with many countries moving away from gas in their electricity production, or at least moving it to peak-only, the price will go down.

If there is less consumption I would imagine the price would rather go up.

This was my thought too. I hope OP responds with why they think lessened demand would lead to lower prices. That doesn’t make any sense.

It's a consequence of a demand curve: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demand_curve, an established concept in economics

It’s unclear to me if that accounts for second order effects? For example, lower demand leads to lower prices, sure. But then those lower prices lead to higher demand. This should quickly reach equilibrium if buying and selling were spur of the moment decisions with no long term consequence. But in the energy market that’s not the case. Building a power plant is a commitment to buying that product, which locks in that demand regardless of price. And so continued low prices could lead to more construction of gas plants, which leads to an increase in demand.

Basically what I’m saying is that the demand curve models a simple market with a fungible good, which can be bought and sold easily. We have to recognise that it’s like studying spherical, frictionless projectiles in physics. A good starting point, but not how the real world works.

>For example, lower demand leads to lower prices, sure. But then those lower prices lead to higher demand.

Supply curve is missing in these statements.

> Building a power plant is a commitment to buying that product, which locks in that demand regardless of price.

What? Is there some sort of law that requires buyers to buy all of the electricity a power plant can produces?

> And so continued low prices could lead to more construction of gas plants, which leads to an increase in demand.

This is backwards. An increase in demand for electricity might lead to construction of new gas plants, with a bet that even with the increased supply, electricity buyers are willing to pay at least x price for electricity for y duration sufficient to earn a z return on investment for building the new gas plant.

That would happen if supply goes down even more. Is this the case here ?

Normally if nothing else changed you'd expect prices to go down since the most expensive providers (= those with highest costs of doing their business) pulling the price up leave the market.

" I highly doubt they're of the size required to sustain multi-week storm/bad weather events"

Those bad weather events come usually with lots of wind - which you can harvest, too. So the solution might just be the often propagated energy mix.

And you can build batteries without any rare elements(natrium instead of lithium), so if you build enough of them and enough solar and co. then who cares if some of that energy gets lost, as long as the grid remains stable?

> Those bad weather events come usually with lots of wind - which you can harvest, too. So the solution might just be the often propagated energy mix.

As i have said a few times around here, there's a meteorological phenomenon across Europe now ( since September, and projected to go well into the winter), with bad weather ( clouds, low sunlight), low temperatures, and low wind speeds. Traditional hydro and tidal energy generation are still OK, but solar and wind are at historical lows. And again, this is ongoing for months.

Furthermore, a bad weather event like storms can have winds that are too fast for a wind generator to operate safely.

Well, I know that, because I have to sustain that lack of sun and wind here, too.

But the south(west) of europe still has lots of sun, like it almost always has. And a bit further south, there is always sun in the desert.

So yes, I would not deconstruct all the conventional power plants, just yet. And I think having some backup gas plants is not a bad idea, either.

At least for Germany, that's just not the case. Wind is going quite strong this quarter, so strong that it easily offsets the lower-than-average solar generation. And that's mostly due to the weather – expansion was massively stalled by conservative administrations in the last few years.

I hear a lot about replacing gas with hydrogen (completely doable with the existing infrastructure).

Which is effectively a battery! Hydrogen production is energy intensive, but if you produce it with excess energy capacity and then use it when it's needed, it's a decent energy storage method. Though mobile applications (air travel, trains, etc) are more likely to dominate in the shorter terms as it's lighter than batteries in high power applications

Any particular sources? From a quick web search, it sounds like hydrogen has a very different energy density (Joules/cu. m., or BTU/cu. ft., or whatever), very different combustion and leak safety characteristics, and can either leak through or embrittle many parts of the existing (natural gas) distribution infrastructure.

If that's anything resembling correct...then the change-over would be more like replacing all-diesel fuel & engine infrastructure with gasoline.

This is the oil/gas industry trying to keep themselves relevant. Thats why we keep hearing abouti it.

Hydrogen can be cheap (extracted from natural gas) or green (electrolysis). It can't be both.

Hydrogen is also a monumental PITA to store.

Green hydrogen can be cheap if electricity is cheap. With the falling prices of renewables, that is quite likely to happen soon.

But green hydrogen is only useful if electricity is cheap but batteries are expensive. The original article indicates why batteries aren't expensive and are likely to get dramatically cheaper over the next decade. That's why hydrogen is likely to stay irrelevant except for niche use cases.

Green Hydrogen is also good if you absolutely need Hydrogen. In this case, Green Hydrogen at twice the cost of getting it from Natural Gas is still a win.

e.g. steel manufacturing can use Green Hydrogen for the Reduction reaction, as part of the alternate pathway without coal.

Oh certainly. I added the "niche use case" modifier. Compared to transportation and power generation, steel manufacturing is a "niche use case". It's a massive use case, but compared to the transportation and power generation use cases people usually hype hydrogen for...

> But green hydrogen is only useful if electricity is cheap but batteries are expensive

That is absolutely not true. How exactly will cheap batteries for example allow you to make ammonia for agriculture, the chemical industry, etc.? Current global ammonia production alone is worth something like two hundred gigawatts of power continuously pumped into electrolyzers. That's like ten percent of global electric generation at the moment.

Compared to the cost of large-scale hydrogen storage batteries will always be expensive. This is why grids will use hydrogen for long-duration energy storage instead of batteries.

Electrolytic hydrogen can be cheap as long as 1) electricity for electrolysis is cheap and 2) electrolyzers are cheap. 1) is reasonably easily assured by shaving off overgeneration of electricity from renewable power plants. 2) is a matter of electrolyzer R&D, although it's true that it's slightly complicated by the former solution of 1) by decreasing their duty cycle. Nevertheless, 1) is the dominant problem.

As for storage, it's true that storing hydrogen is problematic but once I calculated that even existing facilities for natural gas in, say, Germany would be sufficient for a whole month of the whole country's grid running off of hydrogen. This is less than the several months provided by using the same storage for natural gas, but since in the following decades, the demand for this gas is going to shrink severely as German buildings are going to be replaced by low-energy buildings (pursuant to the 2010/31/EU Energy Performance of Buildings Directive and the 2012/27/EU Energy Efficiency Directive, as well as presumably future regulations), this capacity might be freed up, and in any case it's a much larger capacity than is predicted to be required (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S001429211...) for a 100% renewable grid in Germany.

One interesting idea I don't know the feasibility of but is tempting anyway is ultra-large-scale liquid hydrogen storage. Considering the square-cube law and low density of liquid hydrogen stressing the structure (just 70 kg per cubic metre of liquid hydrogen tank, as opposed to 1000 kg per cubic metre of a water tank, for example), ultra-large-scale storage of hydrogen could be feasible in principle -- certainly much more than for example liquid hydrogen storage for a car, and in industrial settings to boot (as opposed to cars handled by ordinary citizens).

>even existing facilities for natural gas in, say, Germany would be sufficient for a whole month of the whole country's grid running off of hydrogen.

As I understood it natgas storage facilities wouldnt keep hydrogen. It'd leak.

Gas infrastructure used to deal with coal gas which contained ~50% of hydrogen. Somehow it worked back then. Doesn't seem like an unsolvable problem to me.

The only feasible way to do that is to use the hydrogen at the source of production to make methane, using direct air capture and reduction of CO2 (Sabatier process) as the carbon source. This is because existing methane pipelines would be embrittled by hydrogen and would soon fail, with disastrous consequences.

Hydrogen from electrolysis is best viewed as an intermediate feedstock for further chemical synthesis, as with ammonia production, methane production, jet fuel production, etc. There is perhaps potential for dumping excess grid electricity into hydrogen storage tanks at power plants as a temporary storage system, i.e. converting the hydrogen back to electricity via fuels cells (not turbines!) to meet electrical demand later.

Hydrogen storage requires special alloys to avoid steel embrittlement however, so it's fairly expensive.

What is the efficiency of the hydrogen, air capture, methane, burn cycle?

34-44% for hydrogen and 30-38% for methane [0].

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power-to-gas#Efficiency

Ah, great. So the incremental loss of going from crazy-talk to actually-reusable-infrastructure is not groundbreaking.

Natural gas prices in California are dominated by transport costs, not production costs.

To survive a multi-week storm/bad weather event with a grid containing only solar and wind, you need a 3x overbuild of solar+wind in an optimal mix, along with a continental grid and 3 hours worth of batteries is all you need for 99.99% reliability: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-26355-z

> containing only solar and wind

Conveniently leaving out hydro and nuclear… [Edit: which only makes this easier.]

Nuclear isn't sustainable, extremely slow to build and astronomically expensive. It's not an option.

Hydropower is sustainable but has a very limited potential,and its impact on the environment is much, much higher than comparable wind/solar installations.

The big advantage of nuclear is that it is reliable. However, the paper I linked above says wind and solar can be reliable, so nuclear no longer has any redeeming qualities.

The abstract for the paper (thanks for that link!) says:

> Yet even in systems which meet >90% of demand, hundreds of hours of unmet demand may occur annually.

... and the low end of the range is 72%, which leaves many more hours unaccounted for. Some amount of reliable, clean power is needed on top of the renewables.

Yes, the abstract sucks. Those are the numbers without batteries or over-building. To get to 99.99% you have to add all the mitigations: 3x overbuild, 3 hours of batteries and a continent wide grid.

A continent wide grid is easier said than done.

A reliable grid of nuclear + renewables is significantly cheaper than without the nuclear, according to the EU study that has been circulated here a couple months back.

There’s already a lot of nuclear and hydro built!

It's a paper, not a plan. It's not saying you should switch to only wind and solar, it's that you can.

This is a proper plan: https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/electrify

It has a role for existing hydro and nuclear.

Oh sorry, I misread your original comment as saying that plan wouldn't work because it required too much overbuilding, when actually you were saying that it would work! Yes, our existing hydro and nuclear just makes it even easier to switch.

Nuclear is very sustainable. With enrichment, the world's known uranium supplies (5.5 million tons) would last about 30,000 years at present usage rates, if used with fast breeder reactors. The NEA estimates that's a sixth of what's out there. Obviously this doesn't go as far if you scale it up 10-100x, but in addition, there's about 4.5 billion tons dissolved in seawater.

This is just the uranium, not even touching the thorium. And once we get to this point, there is uranium on the Moon and Mars. The waste-management problem is harder in the political sense than the engineering sense.

> With enrichment, the world's known uranium supplies (5.5 million tons) would last about 30,000 years at present usage rates

How does it matter if you enrich or you use a natural uranium reactor? The amount of fissile material is exactly the same.

> if used with fast breeder reactors

But that's breeding, not enrichment.

> but in addition, there's about 4.5 billion tons dissolved in seawater.

...aaaand there goes your requirement for a breeder. Breeders may very well turn out not to be worth the bother.

Burning down the existing nuclear waste is a nice ability of breeders.

There's not a lot of waste to be burned anyway. If you separate U238 from the spent fuel, you don't have lot of mass left.

I would be interested in seeing a detailed analysis that came to the same conclusion as your assertion regarding solar+storage being cheaper than gas plant in California.

Here is a pretty detailed analysis indicating that the storage costs make that combination infeasible at this point:

http://euanmearns.com/the-cost-of-wind-solar-power-batteries...

The California scenario in that report suggests over $5 trillion needed to switch to solar+batteries.

That report is already too old to be relevant. It took battery prices at $200 they are around $100-120 now it took solar cost at around $50 per MWH it is now around $35~40 in the US $20~30 in India and China etc. And prices for both are still falling approximately 10~15% annually.

So only $2.5 trillion?

I get the fact that battery prices are going down. That doesn't mean that grid-scale battery systems are feasible and deployable any time soon.

I know nothing, but what stops us from just using more energy overall such that we still depend on large amounts of fossil fuel? Even if we bring on more solace, how do we know it will replace fossil fuel rather than enabling more iverall consumption?

This is my expectation. In absolute terms, we burn more coal and biomass than ever. We’ve never reduced (in absolute terms) the amount of an energy source we consume. Replacements have served to aid an increase in over all energy consumption. Source: a podcast, so no idea if it checks out.

USA electricity use over the past 20 years has been flat.

In general, people aren't sitting around wishing they had more electricity. If they wanted to use more it's right there and available.

There are quite a few billion people around the world who are wishing they had more electricity aspiring to USA living standards who will pick up the slack in demand.

They will leapfrog fossil fuels though and go straight to renewables, micro grids, battery storage, etc.

Ideally, but even in the US, I feel like any reduction in fossil fuel prices will be offset by increased usage such as purchase of bigger cars or flying more as history has shown.

The population of the US has increased by 40 million in the past 20 years. If the country isn't using more electricity, that's pretty remarkable.

People don't directly consume very much energy; most of our energy footprint is derived from the processes to manufacture the things we consume. Much of that has been outsourced in the last several decades.

Moreover, looking at overall energy isn't particularly informative without also analyzing energy costs--according to https://www.statista.com/statistics/183700/us-average-retail..., the energy costs have increased 60% in the last 20 years which would obviously suppress consumption.

We're talking about the opposite--how does our energy use change if prices fall dramatically. Are we really going to replace fossil fuels or do we just find other uses for this new electricity? For one, we're going to be electrifying other applications--all of these new electric cars are going to place new demand on the electrical grid (previously they were energized by gasoline and as such didn't burden the grid). But beyond that, are we going to actually use any excess energy capacity well, or are our applications just going to get less efficient (why should a factory invest in a more efficient machine if energy prices drop precipitously? economics favor the less efficient solution in the same way the economics of plummeting data storage and transfer prices favor bulky electron apps over streamlined native apps).

> If they wanted to use more it's right there and available.

But they'd have to pay more. We're postulating a scenario in which electricity prices fall precipitously. As far as I'm aware, any time the prices fall for any resource, society consumes it with increasing inefficiency. For example, broadband Internet becomes readily available and people start streaming cat videos, CPU clock speeds skyrocket and Microsoft releases Windows Vista. If renewable energy prices decline thus driving down costs for all energy prices, I suspect we'll find something equally stupid (e.g., mining more bitcoins) to do with the extra capacity rather than decommissioning fossil fuels.

Ultimately we have to choose to decommission fossil fuel plants at the expense of our frivolities, but at least in America we seem to be disappointingly bad at this kind of impulse control (in aggregate).

It has name

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

They don't want to use more at current prices[1], but if a MWh costs an average of $5 instead of $50, I would expect behaviour to start to change significantly. For example, at some point I would expect (perhaps naively) that things like desalination and long-distance water redistribution become a lot more viable.

[1] Not strictly flat, but not exactly a short-term precipitous drop either:

https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/inflation/electricity-...

I would like to research this, I imagine the death of American heavy industry must be a significant reason for the stability despite population growth.

There is no lack of materials for creating PV and batteries. The more we consume them, the cheaper they will become for the near future.

Fossil fuels are on the exact opposite situation. The more we consume the more expensive they get, and quickly so. That "quickly so" part is actually bad news, but this means that we will almost certainly not increase their usage.

Why should this be the case? There’s a whole lot of oil in the ground, so we certainly aren’t limited there (no more so than we are for lithium, cobalt, etc anyway), and just like we can scale battery production capacity to meet demand, we could presumably also scale fossil fuel production capacity.

> There’s a whole lot of oil in the ground

I do really recommend you to look into this.

In short, no, we can't scale fossil fuel production without increasing its costs.

Worth noting that people misunderstand baseline (baseload) requirements too. Solar+batteries and some pump storage and wind are very nearly statistically able to meet baseload in most places.

Small gas plants might be needed to fill the gap for a period of time but there's no gap for large scale non renewable power sources (coal, oil, nuclear or large gas) that's big enough to make economic sense.

> Solar+batteries and some pump storage and wind are very nearly statistically able to meet baseload in most places

Most places? As I've mentioned a few times here, there's an ongoing meteorological phenomenon across Europe with bad weather ( clouds and stuff), low wind speeds and cold temperatures. It started around September and is projected to continue well into the winter. Electricity produced by wind is at historical lows, and of course solar is of limited help as well. It's among the contributing factors for the high gas prices.

You'd need a whole lot of batteries and pumped up hydro ( which can't just be put anywhere) to cover for such events.

Not to mention a daily phenomena where demand increases while sunlight decreases, the impact increases or decreases by time of year.

Why can't we just have cross-continent UHVDC cables to counteract that issue?

Because shit happens and there's resistance ( electrical). There are cables between the UK and France, and UK and Norway, and there was a fire at one of the UK-France cables, rendering it inoperable for months.

And depending on faraway places for energy is dangerous, as for instance Germany is discovering now with Russia. Do you imagine Europe depending on Algeria and Morocco solar, for instance, and France pissing them off with some (neo/ex-)colonial matters ( like for instance, France recently lowered quotas for Algerian citizens entering the country, and Algeria was (rightfully) pissed), and them cutting the cables.

> ... and there's resistance ( electrical).

Aren't the UHVDC losses just 1,5% per 1000 km? 16% for 10000 km, though, but that might still be economical in some cases.

Sure, shit does happen. Like with everything. Perhaps it could be mitigated with an insurance or multipath?

Political risk is another matter, of course. But we do have gas pipelines crossing such boundaries as well, so surely it's doable?

Europe has repeated political issues with Russian gas pipelines used by Russia as a political threat.

It doesn't seem accurate to describe nuclear as a non renewable energy source.

It uses a consumable.

It does, but that consumable releases no CO2 or other greenhouse gas into the atmosphere. That seems to be the clear and present danger that "renewables" are trying to limit. Nuclear accomplishes this, and has the possibility that we could use it to sequester carbon if enough capacity was built.

Would one call geothermal power non-renewable because the radioactive decay in the earth that heats the interior isn't replaceable by a human?

How about all of the hydrogen atoms that irreversibly fuse into helium in the sun, not to mention the materials to make the solar panels and wind turbines to harness that power?

Green/renewable/sustainable aren't complete synonyms. As a shorthand people consider huge natural sources like the Sun that is already outputting whether we tap into it or not (same with geothermal) differently than more limited ones like oil or uranium deposits. We'll probably change the language if we ever get into megastructure or solar-system scale engineering that blurs that distinction.

You are neglecting winter. Winter solar and wind production is terrible.

Only for the west coast. For the rest of the country, wind actually peaks in the winter: https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=20112

Deep down, I think we're pretty much all fucked. We've gone too far and there's no way back. And I think you agree.

But, hey, there is a glimmer of hope. It's not going to do a damn thing, but cycling instead of driving is still a bit of defiance, even if it's only symbolic.

Realistically, we do have power and control over where and how we work. There is some real muscle in smart people working on hard problems. May not a win. I'm sure you understand the consequences of that. At least, I can go down swinging. As you say, things are going into overdrive.

I'm not going to tell you how to live your life. I am going to encourage you to hold off on that heroin experiment for a while, maybe don't move to a tent in a national park just yet. Things are changing. We don't get a free pass. Some things are going to be real ugly. Maybe, MAYBE, things will be ok.

The iceberg is out there. We're probably going to hit it. We all still have some agency (I hope). If you have to rearrange deck chairs, go for it. Give it a minute. We aren't sunk yet. It doesn't have to be an apocolypse just yet.

You know whats worse than people who say climate change doesnt exist? People like you who spout off unsubstantiated defeatist nonsense about "why it's too late" and "it doesn't matter". Because people like you trick others into thinking the same, and not giving a damn.

Agreed. We live in a world with many grave challenges—and yet the correct response is still hope.

No, the correct response is action.

not mutually exclusive

True, yet Action is impossible to coordinate without hope.

There's a lot of pessimism and cynicism in the world these days. I think movies make that clear. There are so many movies about dystopian futures where everything is hopeless and everything is inevitably going to shit. The general mood is very different from what you saw in movies from the 1980s.

Personally, I think that any action we can take towards making things better will pay off. Action is better than inaction. There will be negative consequences to climate change, but acting sooner could save millions, even hundreds of millions of lives, so don't give up now. We're just finally starting to see real adoption of electric cars and grid-scale batteries, those industries are set to boom. The solution is at our doorstep, now is not the time to just go "ah, fuck it, why bother?".

I don't feel tricked into not caring when threatened with living on a barely livable planet. I don't know if he or she is right but if anything, when I read it, it rather made me think about what would ecological armed struggle against the biggest polluters would look like.

If the biggest polluters petrol/oil, then you'll be fighting people with working vehicles.

What a boring anti-science trope. At least the anti-science denialists aren’t so negative.

Since you’re unsurprisingly taking a beating here in HN, let me reframe your general mood.

The planet is and will be fine, it’s our way of living and society that will go, and that will not happen in your lifetime. So there’s no need for you to suffer with that gloom.

Another even more practical reason: it’s unproductive.

Most of that anxiety is offloaded from those in true power and resold by “the media”. It’s obviously a serious problem but they are feeding you mostly bullshit in order to meet their revenue targets or agendas.

Don’t be a victim of them before being a victim of climate change.

> The planet is and will be fine,

You can't know that. Rising temperatures, acidity and water levels in oceans, deforestation, overfishing, drastic temperature amplitudes and higher frequency of natural disasters can all be devastating for whole ecosystems, which could have cascading effects. Nobody can reliably predict how all of that will turn out, but it could turn out really bad. Will the planet "be fine" if a big portion of ocean life is extinct and huge swaths of land are uninhabitable? Depends on your definition of fine i guess.

Huge amounts of life and species have died out in the past and will continue to happen. This time we have an hand in it, but you don't see any other species aware or preoccupied by it, so it's also morality issue.

My response was in order to address this generalized anxiety and guilt that's mostly unproductive and in some cases quite maquiavelic.

So yes, "the planet" will be fine. Our coddled asses attached to our infantilized minds probably not, so instead of this schizophrenic attitude ranging from "We're doomed!" to "I want to talk to the manager", maybe we should be more productive and do our best while understanding we might not get what we want and that's "fine".

The ecosphere has been around for billions of years. It's been through much much, MUCH worse. It'll be fine. Maybe some hairless apes might suffer a bit, and a few thousand species might be replaced by something else, but in the long run the planet is going to thrive.

This is normalcy bias. Since it’s worked out well so far, it’ll work out well in future. But there is a point of no return - if the concentration of atmospheric carbon exceeds a certain level, it will melt the ice caps, which will increase the temperature further, which will cause dissolved CO2 in the oceans to enter the atmosphere, which will … you get the idea. There’s a potential feedback loop at the end of which the planet becomes like Venus.

Not saying there won’t be life left on the planet even if it looks like Venus. Life is adaptable. But it wouldn’t flourish like it does today.

Is there any credible science indicating that "Earth turns into Venus" is even remotely possible if we were to deliberately put all our efforts into triggering it?

I've never heard this scenario from anyone who has spent any time reading the science. Unless you can give some details of why this is something that's worth having on the radar, I'm going to dismiss that scenario as a fear-mongering doomsday prediction.

> It's been through much much, MUCH worse

The ecosphere, yes, but I'm concerned about humanity specifically.

Also, it might be possible the same argument could hold for Venus. It probably thrived (at reasonable temperatures) for billions of years before it didn't.

I mean, I’m pretty concerned about the magnitude of suffering of those hairless apes. That seems like a sufficiently bad outcome to warrant a change in behavior and even doomsday rhetoric.

As Carlin so eloquently put it, "The planet is fine. The people are fucked".

Any way, it won't happen in a day, and as with any pandemic humans are great at finding solutions, (see covid). Sure some people will die along the way as they don't get with the program, but that's expected.

Unless our energy sources become useless (ie. sun blackout AND depleted oil AND no wind) we will have a way to keep warm, produce oxygen and grow food.

The worst case would be we'd have to move into underground bunkers.

> and as with any pandemic humans are great at finding solutions, (see covid)

My takeaway is the opposite: COVID is a lot simpler on a problem solving scale than climate change and we're not exactly doing well with COVID.

Organizing billions of people is not a simple problem in either case.

Do you have any criterion by which you would accept the planet as "not fine"? If the entire biosphere were eliminated by supernova, would that be "fine"?

Conversations about what we should and should not do cannot be held on a basis of nihilism. I respectfully suggest that people with the view of "fuck the planet, I'll be dead anyway" should not be permitted a voice at the public policy table.

> If the entire biosphere were eliminated by supernova, would that be "fine"?

Yes, because it's out of our control.

> Conversations about what we should and should not do cannot be held on a basis of nihilism.

100% agree, just as they shouldn't be held on the basis of fear, panic and self-righteous superficial knowledge based on the arrogance that "we" are so precious and "can do anything", a kind of celestial exceptionalism "we" use to point out the flaws in others but not in ourselves.

> I respectfully suggest that people with the view of "fuck the planet, I'll be dead anyway" should not be permitted a voice at the public policy table.

I 100% respectfully disagree, mostly because it's not practical and will backfire. Also the assumption that others are dumb and shouldn't be listened can only come from people who are very narrow minded to the point they themselves are "dumb".

To put things in perspective

We've already warmed up the planet by about 1C from pre-industrial times, and...well, pretty much nothing consequential happened

Based on the most likely temperature impacts of the most realistic emission scenarios, we're looking at an additional 0.8C (optimistic) to 1.5C (pessimistic) on top of that by the end of the century, with the temperatures plateauing shortly afterwards. No, Earth will not become the next Venus, nor will Greenland and Antarctic melt (it's -30C there right now)

You assume linear relationships between temperature and "bad things happening", but the climate system is not linear at all.

Greenland is literally melting. Google it.

looks around Yep, yeah, nothing consequential happening around the world. No widespread unprecedented flash floods in multiple areas of the globe simultaneously. No megafires burning on multiple continents. No temperature records being broken and re-broken by wide margins multiple times a year every single year. Nothing really at all. I don't know what they're talking about.

...is "Greenland and the Antarctic are still cold" really your hot take on climate change?

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