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Comment by efitz | Hacker News Reader

I don’t know if it was the same in the UK, but growing up in the 70s and 80s here in the US it always felt like the future was going to be plentiful - think “The Jetsons”. I always figured that electricity would be cheap and ubiquitous. Weird that didn’t turn out.

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In that time the world population has increased from 3 billion to 8 billion. Things like energy, food and construction are our most basic needs. In the past, production of these were limited by available labor. Today that's not the case. So the same resources (eg. productive land and mining resources) have to be divided between more people.

This is what everyone consistently misses. Many people seem to approach shortage and price increases as if we're suddenly running out of something. What no one really addresses is population has more than doubled in the same time period and that consumption of goods and resources has increased per person as well.

I'll ignore cheap as its subjective but where do you live that electricity isn't ubiquitous? are you atill waiting for that new fangled indoor plumbing yoo?

I have completely no authority in this, but my guess it's some sort of path-dependence. I think the problem is that we modelled our economy to rely on fossil fuels instead of trying to diversify way earlier. A finite resource under increased demand (the total population increased and the living standard increased rapidly in the last decades) quickly turns from abundant to contested.

It is cheap and ubiquitous, and getting cheaper.

> and getting cheaper.

Ahh, my electricity bill in Germany must be lying then. Good to know!

Same here in Canada. There may be some reduction in rate here and there, but the overall trend is always up.

To be fair we could generate a lot more power a lot cheaper with circa 1962 (year The Jetsons began) environmental legislation.

I mean you would have to compromise on the environment a bit but it's by no means impossible to generate a ton of cheap electricity. It's not some lost art like Greek fire or Damascus steel.

That's the mindset that let people in the US to buy giant trucks and SUVs that do 20mpg on a good day and now you see them at the gas pump being mad gas is at $6 because it wrecks their budget. Pretty sad that people don't plan for prices to get higher.

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

>Weird that didn’t turn out. Decades of a green energy policy being developed by what are, apparently, human-shaped ostriches have led us to being partially dependent on an autocratic regime. Other things such as pipeline (US) and fracking (UK) projects being shutdown by a bizzaro left-green lobby mean a real difficulty in substituting the energy input that our entire economy runs on.

Bizzaro because the left desperately wants to redistribute the very thing it's attempting to shut down, as they probably haven't considered that energy underpins all the wealth we have. And the greenies - who are nearly universally left wing also - probably will shout loudly when people are shivering in their homes and not getting enough to eat. And never blame themselves.

But the real blame for this lies at the feet of politicans, blue and red, who have allowed these loud eejits to dictate energy policy: shutting down nuclear plants, subsidising intermittent energy without (the necessary and) even more significant investments in energy storage. Using green credentailism as a vote winner and nothing more.

Uh, this seems incoherent. You're calling the group that's calling for avoiding the worst consequences of climate change "ostriches". Aren't the ostriches the people who advocate keeping current emissions trajectories while ignoring the consequences that'll have on the lives of billions of people?

The _politicians_ are the ostriches. The group calling for "avoiding the worst consequences of climate change" are, through ignorance, calling for war and mass starvation.

The politicians who want to avoid the worst consequence of climate change are ostriches, and the politicians who advocate in favor of worsening climate change are the non-ostriches?

We know that climate change is threatening to make massive areas of land uninhabitable, change weather patterns in ways which will massively increase water scarcity in large parts of the world, cause droughts which will be devastating for food production, put coastal regions under water, etc. don't you think that these effects would cause war and mass starvation?

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