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Comment by jliptzin | Hacker News Reader

You said yourself it’s not well understood, don’t you think it’s wise to err on the side of caution? What’s the downside of getting off fossil fuels anyway, besides some people needing to switch careers from coal mining to solar panel installation, for example?

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It's wise to care about the climate. It's wise to investigate human behavior's effect on climate. It's also wise to question investigations, their results, and especially their conclusions.

I don't know what a downside to getting off fossil fuels would be but its not hard to imagine some. Take this article for example : https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2016-06-15/what-is-an-ic... I seriously doubt the scientific basis for the statement "The Earth is due for another ice age now but climate change makes it very unlikely" but it's one idea.

The downside is not having heat in the winter in Sweden. There is a pretty significant downside there.

Electric heating is a thing, and so is nuclear power.

Nuclear power is great. Unfortunately the environmental groups that lobbied for renewable energy, also lobbied against nuclear power. So much less available nuclear power for Sweden in the winter, than there should have been.

The false dichotomy is very damaging. It’s not nuclear or renewables. We need both, and as much of either as we possibly can. Neither nuclear or renewables would be enough to get rid of enough fossil fuels on their own.

But it doesn't make much sense to combine them. Wind and Solar, as well as nuclear have similar cost characteristics. The cost of an additional unit of energy produced is very low, almost all of the cost is in building them & keeping them running. It almost never makes (financial) sense to throttle them. Thus nuclear being a so-called baseload. It doesn't make much sense to use it in any other way (for example, like a peaker-plant).

Both are best served with a complement that has low(er) capital cost but higher cost per unit of energy produced like storage or gas plants (maybe with P2G) for periods of high demand or when generation falls flat (mostly for renewables, but as we're seeing in france some nuclear reactors are having trouble as well in high-temp environments).

It does make sense to combine them. Manufacturing renewable energy sources requires lots of cheap energy, and can be done in remote places, and currently uses fossil fuels. Use nuclear instead as the base of the energy pyramid (like food pyramid).

> But it doesn't make much sense to combine them.

On the contrary, it makes a lot of sense.

They have complementary production profiles, with nuclear providing near/constant levels for time scales from days to years. This mechanically reduces the amount of energy storage needed (storage at the required scale is still very much not solved).

They have complementary risk profiles. Wind and PV rely on weather and are likely to fail us when the weather gets really bad, i.e. when we’re already in crisis mode. Nuclear failure modes are very different and combining them makes the grid much more resilient overall.

There is no realistic scenario in the short to mid term future where we can have 100% wind and solar without either a massive overproduction capacity, or overly-large storage capabilities. The rise in wind+PV is accompanied by a rise in gas and charcoal use.

Nuclear also has the advantage of taking way less land for the same energy output. Yes, this is important if we want at the same time to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels used in agriculture, which will reduce yields and thus require more land for the same amount of food produced, and keep our forests as carbon sinks (expand them, actually).

> Wind and Solar, as well as nuclear have similar cost characteristics.

Cost is only part of the story. If we follow the path of the smallest costs, we’ll just burn oil until we hit a wall.

Nuclear power is not great and environmental groups were and remain correct to lobby against it.

The precautionary principle is attractive, but it ignores the possibility that lost opportunity costs can exceed those of the risk being avoided. Turning on the lhc was considered by some to have a miniscule risk of turning earth into a tiny black hole that would last a moment before evaporating. My particle physics friends laughed and agreed there was a non zero risk. The notion that an action with a tiny yet finite risk of an event with infinite cost should itself have infinite cost would preclude most everyday activities. Not that climate change or emissions fit that category I think the risks aren't that small, just saying be careful with the precautionary principle.

Some amount of climate change would probably be beneficial to some nations. Russia would vome to mind with more arable land potentially becoming available, but some models show it being borderline too dry to grow on. Those same models show a net benefit to agriculture in Midwestern US. I wonder if xkcd or 538 could whip us up a map of climate change winner/losers and areas that support co2 policies?

> What’s the downside of getting off fossil fuels anyway,

Poverty?

The sooner we transition, the sooner we’ll be able to become vastly wealthier: the GDP growth rate is highly correlated with the growth rate of energy consumption. The growth rate of energy consumption has been declining since around 1970, hence the decline in the GDP growth rate. This is because it’s ever more difficult to extract ever more energy from fossil sources. Once we transition to renewables, the GDP growth rate will rise as our ability to increase energy consumption rises, until some point of saturation far in the future.

One way to think about this is to consider that a hypothetical objector might ask the same question of an advocate of a planned, civilization wide transition from wood burning to coal burning. And the coal advocate would be right to make the same argument as above.

Getting off fossil fuels is a necessity. Don't kid yourself what the result of that really means.

"Transitioning to renewables" what does that even mean? Like it's so simple?

Solar panels aren't going to ship you cheap iPhones and mountains of plastic trash from china for pennies, nor will it fertalize your crops or maintain USD as the reserve currency.

Look I don't mean to be rude. I'm not a climate denier. I'm not even arguing against transitioning off fossil fuels. I'm just not naive about it. Poverty, starvation and mass death is the only way we transition off fossil fuels. That's if we're lucky.

Is your argument that renewables aren’t usable for liquid fuels in ocean shipping, therefore we can’t use purely renewable energy sources? Because solar panels (or wind turbines, or geothermal, or hydro, etc.) can generate electricity to use for electrolysis to generate hydrogen (or better, ammonia). The options aren’t only oil or batteries… there are many use cases where fuel energy density doesn’t matter that much, but where it does (transport), hydrogen is a viable option that we can do today.

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20201127-how-hydrogen-fue...

Yes, it is that simple, and yes, solar panels can be used to ship iPhones from China and fertilize crops and so on. And no, poverty, starvation, and mass death are not required to transition.

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