Hacker News Reader

Wow, this is the most hopeful thing I've read about renewable energy in ... years, maybe ever?

Even ignoring whether the fuel-from-air thing will pan out, the idea posed here that solar will get so cheap that excess energy can be used for stuff like this is insane.

Not only did they explain the implications, but the author does a decent job at showing the math behind all of the insanely optimistic graphs. Thank you for sharing this OP! This is why I come to HN

View on HN

I agree it's hopeful. Creating more renewable energy is part of the path forward. But this doesn't solve all of our problems. We still have many other resource and pollution problems that this doesn't solve. Our houses, cars and planes and all the infrastructure supporting these things require materials which are damaging our climate from their extraction and production. This won't go away even if energy was limitless.

Sounds grim, but I think we can still be optimistic because we have a solution that addresses pretty much all of that: cut back excessive consumption. I'm optimistic that we have so much more than we need that we could cut back to sustainable levels and still live really good lives compared to what humans have lived for most of history.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com