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Comment by londons_explore | Hacker News Reader

There is a risk of policymakers reading documents like this and using it to make conclusions about which types of energy generation are 'best'.

That's a bad thing to do, because no analysis like this can truly capture all the upsides and downsides of any particular plant in a specific location.

You know one thing that can? It's profitability.

The profits of a power plant are directly impacted by the cost of land - and a power plant competes for the same land as farms and houses.

As long as our markets correctly price in externalities (for example a per-acre-per-year tax for any land not left untouched), then the market makes far better decisions about what to build where than any policymaker ever could.

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> As long as our markets correctly price in externalities

This is a little like saying "if unicorns ate hay..."

It sounds reasonable on the surface, but it's also never happened and probably never will.

It's a reasonable 'spherical cow in a vacuum' type thing to work towards and compare things with, as long as you remember that it's not the default state of the universe or that we live in the best of all possible worlds and there's no room for improvement.

Right, the definition of externality is literally a cost that isn't priced into the market.

Policymakers, anyway, are used to being lied to, so mostly know better than to be swayed by tendentious material like TFA.

Solar and wind, uniquely, do not compete for land, as they coexist neatly with other uses. This is part of why they are the cheapest power generation that has ever been fielded.

I'm firmly in favor of markets, myself, but I think there are other notable caveats.

You mention pricing externalities being important; it's also important that corporations don't have undue influence in their own regulation, or externalities will become chronically underpriced.

I also think "just profitability" isn't quite correct. Profitability is sometimes antithetical to efficiency and sustainability; take artifical scarcity or planned premature obsolescence, for example.

[On that topic: I've wondered before whether corporations are darwinian. They are large, amoral machines that have a life their own, and presumably the corporations that survive (and that are around today) are the corporations that act in the interest of their own self-preservation, not in the interests of people or life on earth. I have no idea whether the time scales involved are sufficient for the evolution of corporate strategy, but it's fun armchair philosophy.]

Fortunately, "markets" is not synonymous with "capitalism" – markets feature in many economic systems, so we have options.

Most AI apocalypse scenarios can be easily recast with "corporations" in the place of AI and then actually just sound like recorded history.

AI taking over a country so that it could use their vital resources?

AI murdering people who stand in the way of their plans?

AI destroying the natural world?

AI creating a ficticous world that people believe in while being exploited?

AI enslaving nations of humans and using them as slaves.

That puts a lot of trust into the government correctly pricing in externalities. Otherwise, coal would steamroll everything since it is very cheap and abundant.

How do you ever factor in all the externalities? The pollution of coal, the storage of nukes, the offshore child labor mining of battery materials, the everything-is-built-in-China-and-dumped-in-even-poorer-places of everything we touch every part in every part of the supply chain...

And what about the externalities of subsidized farmland? Of different states' property tax schemes? Of humans displaced due to lack of housing development, of habitat loss from any sort of development... there are a million variables to look at and no easy model.

Globalized capitalism IS the story of externalizing costs to further profit, isn't it? Our markets cannot price in all the externalities, and when they do, they end up commoditizing essential things like energy and healthcare and subject basic needs to capital manipulation and financial markets that just skim off the top. We shouldn't be gambling with basic infrastructure on the off-chance that it might allow the rich to get even richer. Not everything is fixed by market forces, and some things can be made worse once you introduce perverse financial incentives to game the system.

>As long as our markets correctly price in externalities

If we assume a spherical cow ...

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