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Comment by bryanlarsen | Hacker News Reader

Anybody with a good credit rating can increase their standard of living by buying an EV, putting solar panels on their roof and switching to using a heat pump for heating. All three of these pay off their premium in under a decade in most jurisdictions.

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Probably not a great time for most people to take out huge loans ($80-100k?) for nonessential purchases right as we're entering a recession. Also, the things you listed are "green" but they're substitutions and not significantly increasing standard of living above their alternatives. So to the average person this is a big ask.

Of course, any action taken by the government would have much more impact and would be way more effective than individuals trying to tackle this problem.

This is only true in your country. Most people in the world do not have the luxury of affording this, and for many that do it's not worthwhile.

I live in Ontario, Canada. Almost all of my electricity comes from nuclear, hydroelectric and wind. Solar panels are not particularly efficient so far up north and they are covered in snow five months of the year anyway. Solar is mostly a waste of money here. (I still see the occasional house with solar panels but I mostly interpret it as a protest against nuclear power.)

Electric cars also don't fare particularly well in our winters. It's pretty hard to go visit family out of town when your car has half its stated range. I'm of the opinion that pervasive plug-in hybrid vehicles would do far more to reduce our collective carbon emissions and buy us time to get plug-in hybrids with renewable fuel (biodiesel, ethanol, hydrogen, etc.)

Heat pumps I agree would help. Unfortunately my country has huge amounts of cheap natural gas. Until carbon taxes start ramping up and heat pumps are subsidized I don't think most people will willingly increase their heating costs.

I live in Ontario. I drive an EV, which works fabulously in the winter. Solar panels are viable, with 10 year payback periods since we still have full net metering.

You've already excluded a huge segment of the population with your very first line. Regardless, all that does very little to stop the worst sources of the problem: industry. In fact, this obsession with mainting a lifestyle that only exists because of fossil fuels and environmentally damaging industry is part of the problem in my opinion.

I'm responding to a comment about rich people. Also, anything that reduces TCO benefits poor people more than rich people, so if they don't have the capital for an up-front investment governments should be providing cheap loans or grants.

IMO the obsession with requiring sacrifice is alienating, counter-productive and unnecessary.

Why? Because people don't want to live life as if they were back in the 19th century? You go first.

Yeah, exactly my point. World going to shit around us as a direct consequence of our lifestyles and nobody is going to do anything about it because they feel entitled to said lifestyle. We could do something, we choose not to.

Future generations will revile us, as we deserve that.

"the world going to shit" carries a lot of assumptions. It's not just about amassing money. It's a bout survival for many people. Getting enough food to eat. Up to 100 million people (mostly Africans) could be facing starvation from not being able to import grain from the Ukraine. A crisis which is about the availability of energy. A little humility in realizing we don't know what's going to happen. There are consequences to any choice we make here.

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