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Comment by Guthur | Hacker News Reader

This is not just gdp or some fat guy getting rich, the fact is that industrialisation has raised millions out of food poverty and allowed us to support a population never before dreamed of.

Robbing billions of that to theoretical gain 2 more years (calculated in a strategic vacuum) is foolhardy in the extreme.

I don't think anyone quite grasps what potentially going backwards really means for humanity. Without industrialisation there will be significantly large portion of population being made unsustainable.

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This is a strawman.

You don't need to reduce energy to reduce air pollution.

You do need to increase costs though.

That's not even true now, even if you set aside $100Ms to bribe Manchin, etc.

While I don't disagree, it's educational to visit a place like Delhi, India or Jakarta, Indonesia, which have terrible air pollution but are not particularly industrialized. The main culprits in both appear to be farmers burning their fields and emissions from vehicles, not factories.

And those places are where we should focus our efforts - an electric car in the USA may reduce carbon emissions/air pollution a bit, but that same amount of batteries used in vehicles in India would offset a much greater amount.

That's true, but the main reason is the lack of cadillac converters on their vehicles. Which generally only cost $1,000-3,000 per vehicle. Which is much less than a full electric car. So if they can't afford cadillac converters, how are they going to afford 40k+ electric cars?

Then perhaps we should buy catalytic converters for them - there are 300 million vehicles in India, so that would be about 900 billion dollars - is it worth it? Would the pollution reduction be that great? Probably a better use of a trillion dollars than the war on terror, at least from a pollution standpoint.

Buy catalytic converters for them? Buy them for ourselves first - park a Prius in any big city overnight and you’ll observe the scarcity first hand.

Ah yeah, like in the article where it says China went "backwards" and cut their pm2.5 pollution gaining an average 2 years lifespan. All those Chinese are now poor and starving.

Very few serious people suggest "going backwards". Clean energy and clean transportation are a step forward.

> This is not just gdp or some fat guy getting rich

And yet:

- 100 companies responsible for 71% of global emissions (1)

- most of them belong to less that 30 billionaires

- many of them have been caught multiple times lobbying to reduce emission regulations

- many of them have been caught manipulating public opinion with advertising, research etc to deflect responsibility

(1) https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2017/jul/10...

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