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Comment by Yizahi | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, that the key problem - all current "green" or "zero" tech is simply a trick, with shuffling emissions to other countries, selling-buying quotas, maybe reducing emissions a little in the best case. Until we have a working industrial scale CO2 sequestration factories we are essentially doing nothing, or close to nothing.

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A lot of replies to this comment are saying a version of "how is solar/wind/etc a trick?"

And the answer is that no, they are not a trick...they legitimately produce energy.

But the goal isn't "make more clean energy", the goal is "keep coal and oil and gas underground"!

And yet coal(!!) production is at basically all time highs, with oil not far behind.

Unless we start making oil, coal and gas artificially expensive to produce, "clean" sources just add to global energy usage, instead of displacing it.

https://yearbook.enerdata.net/coal-lignite/coal-production-d...

https://yearbook.enerdata.net/crude-oil/world-production-sta...

Yes, the Russia aggression threw a wrench into every replacement project out there.

But there are always two options to speed-up the process, you can make fossil fuels artificially expensive, or renewables artificially cheap.

I admittedly haven't looked very hard, but the current push towards overall reduction and renewable sources (solar, wind) and long-timescale sources (nuclear) feels like much less of a trick than CO2 sequestration. Last time I checked, most sequestration efforts involve some kind of logistical sleight of hand (like ignoring the energy required to crush and spread out rocks, or the fact that most seedlings don't grow into mature trees).

How is it a 'trick'?

Building a wind turbine isn't shuffling emissions anywhere.

Neither is solar. Or a more efficient boiler, or....

It's not replacing fossil fuels, merely freeing them for other uses. In fact it's even common now to build wind turbines around coal mines to produce power to extract coal...

We must reduce our fossil fuel consumption in absolute numbers. So far we're merely adding more energy resources; that way political and corporate PR representative can make triumphal announces about how we're reducing the part of fossil in our energy mix... But we need to reduce our fossil use overall, and REALLY REALLY FAST.

I'll link a page with a chart on it, the web page relies on Javascript to actually render charts, the chart we care about here is "Electricity generation mix by quarter and fuel source".

https://www.ofgem.gov.uk/energy-data-and-research/data-porta...

Now, on the left is 1998, on the right is this year. There are a few noteworthy differences

1. The UK actually produces less electricity, partly from efficiencies and partly de-industrialisation in some areas.

2. Coal went from over 30 TWh in 1998 to 2.24 TWh today. Are we instead burning that coal in homes? Nope. Steam locomotives? A handful of quaint examples. Coal mining largely stopped in the UK.

3. Gas went from almost 30 TWh in 1998 to slightly less today. We are still burning gas to heat homes and businesses but I doubt it's more than in 1998.

4. Wind and solar went from negligible to almost 25 TWh today. It's about a third of today's electricity generation.

I don't see a way to read this which doesn't have us significantly replacing fossil fuels. Those coal mines are shut. Does the UK still have petrol stations and gas boilers? Yes, but it doesn't have many more of them than in 1998. That displacement shown is a real improvement.

It just isn't enough.

UK has massively de-industrialised, as has most of Europe (but Germany). However global industrial production, energy consumption in general and fossil fuels in particular all enormously increased since 1998.

Global numbers are all that counts, climate-wise. Plus I'm pretty sure that including imported emissions would annihilate (or even worsen) the apparent reduction for countries such as UK, France, etc.

If I go on a diet and lose weight, is that also a trick because the average weight of the population goes up?

Just because someone else does something else to negate the net effect of something doesn't mean you haven't done the thing.

If we hadn't done anything emissions would be even higher. It isn't as if we have to burn a certain quota of coal and gas.

This isn't an argument for doing less, it's an argument for doing more.

> If I go on a diet and lose weight, is that also a trick because the average weight of the population goes up?

The keyword here is "imported emissions". When you reduce your consumption because you're closing a factory to import the same stuff made in worse (environmental, social) conditions elsewhere, the gain is only apparent.

So following your analogy, if what you're after is the global population health, if you lose weight but everyone else gains more than what you lost, than the result is indeed a net loss overall.

I'll repeat my metaphor.

If I go on a diet...

In the metaphor 'I' mirrors green technologies. 'global population health' mirrors total global emissions.

If I go on a diet and lost weight, that is no trick. I have lost weight.

That isn't invalidated by the rest of the world getting fatter.

If I put solar panels on my roof I will lower my co2 emissions. That isn't invalidated by you rolling coal.

I agree it's bad that co2 emissions are increasing but that doesn't mean that the proposed solution is a trick.

"It's common" is not a statistic. At least in the US, coal use for power generation has dropped precipitously over the past 40 years. If whatever coal we do still extract is extracted using wind or solar, that seems like a net win (even if not a net positive, for the reason you mentioned).

But we need a net positive. We must stop pumping CO2 in the atmosphere, and we're merely pumping it a slightly slower rate, and the quantity still goes up.

The US has replaced lots of coal with gas, and that's most of the reduction. But we're not gonna make it this way. Remember: we're heading towards +2.5°C in 2100, but northern continents heat much faster than the average (oceans are cooler and represent 70% of Earth's surface): it could be from +4 and up to +6°C in Canada, Europe, etc. The situation is going to be absolutely catastrophic much sooner than 2100. Arguably we may have catastrophic, repeated crop failures this decade for instance.

Neither is hydroelectric dam.

How are solar panels or windmills a trick?

I don't think solar panels or windmills are a trick, but I think OP was referring to "net zero" initiatives, which are not much more than accounting scams. Most carbon credits, if even verifiable, don't involve reductions but rather promises to not cut down existing forests for X years. Western countries are trying to do what they do best: buy their way out of a problem that takes actual effort.

They're not removing co2 from the atmosphere. So they help reduce new emissions, but they don't help with the existing ones.

because we use them additionally to existing sources, not as a replacement:

https://www.cleanenergywire.org/sites/default/files/styles/g...

Less energy = less growth = recession = bad, we're stuck in that

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