Hacker News Reader

Comment by BLanen | Hacker News Reader

I've been hearing this for 20 years.

I assume nothing will happen while this "news" will be used by fossil fuel companies to virtue signal "technological progress" in the plastic problem.

View on HN

Yes, I came across this recently and almost submitted, but it seemed like a minor development by the same team on news (discussed here) a couple of years ago, and searching around there was similarly titled stuff from mainstream news going back years.

Seems to be one of those things where, if you're not in the field, all the news is the same and sounds like a breakthrough, but it'll be 20y out from actual adoption for a while.

Agreed. I generally assume that any headline with the structure "X new thing could solve Y," where Y is a massive problem that everyone wants a silver bullet for, is clickbait. I've seen too many of them at this point.

Everyone wants a quick fix for climate change and pollution because it will absolve us of doing the hard work that the problem really requires. By all means, we should pursue such moonshot ideas - but like you said, it will be used to virtue signal some false idea of "progress" while the problem gets worse.

This is a bit of a cynical take, if a solution is 1% likely it seems natural that 99% of the time the solutions aren't viable. Implies the 1% is still possible.

Cynicism is warranted for the reason that the other commenter pointed out: the fossil fuel industry (and by extension, any Big Industry) will use moonshot ideas like this as ammo for their PR machine. "Don't worry about our lobbying against viable solutions right now - soon we'll have this new silver bullet idea." That sort of thing.

But it's definitely worth exploring those moonshot ideas, so I'm not shutting that idea down. It's just good to be aware of how these sorts of headlines are used in the service of greenwashing.

yep.. this and regrowing tooth.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com