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Comment by ben7799 | Hacker News Reader

I wish they did a better job at educating the public about the energy cost & pollution cost of moving all this gas around in this process.

Climate deniers have done a great job of making the public aware of all the externalities of battery electric vehicles while making the public think gasoline magically appears at the gas station with no expensive/dirty/high energy supply chain to get it there.

This is another case where the deniers are so much better at PR & Messaging that they win even when they're wrong/lying. Similar to things like anti-vaxxers.

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And on the other side of that coin there is god knows how much residential and industrial diesel usage that could instead be nat-gas but isn't because no pipelines so it just gets wasted by flaring it at the well (which is downright terrible for the environment).

The perfect is the enemy of the "good enough for the next 5yr".

New gas connections aren't permitted in some municipalities, and many areas only have 30% to 40% uptake rates for Natural Gas. The best days for Natural Gas are behind it imo.

Regardless, it's borderline criminal that they just waste it due to lack of transportation infrastructure when those BTUs could have done useful work and the demand must instead be made up with potentially dirtier fuels.

IMO, natural gas lines to homes are no longer a necessity. Better overall efficiency can be achieved by burning the gas at a power plant, sending electricity to the home, and using a heat pump to heat the home.

Similarly, induction stove tops are more efficient than cooking with gas and have other benefits such as being easier to clean.

We could do better in a few circumstances, but the idea of piping natural gas from the remote places where a lot of NA oil is produced often doesn't make economic sense and it is literally impossible to get a pipeline built in the US and Canada. This means eastern consumers import tankers of oil from nice places like Saudi and we ship even more by rail at terrible costs and environmental risk.

It's only literally impossible because of politics. It's not a technology limitation.

> it just gets wasted by flaring it at the well

There's actually some companies that are making use of this "waste"! For example, you can take geo-agnostic computation (like crypto mining) with small bandwidth requirements and move it to literally be on-site. Then you power it with generators that are fed the natural gas instead of flaring it.

This can partially displace computation that otherwise would have used up higher-cost energy.

See [0] for the best example of this that I'm aware of. Section titled "How Bitcoin Uses Otherwise-Wasted Energy".

[0] https://www.lynalden.com/bitcoin-energy/

I would argue that this specific use-case is still energy wasted all the same. Maybe it is even net negative given that it increases the difficulty for other energy wasting miners, even before considering other externalities.

"Climate deniers" (whatever you put under that definition) don't think so, at least I never seen anyone stating that.

Climate change preachers though, tend to think "green energy" comes from the outlet magically appearing there. If we look at full cycle with making recycling the "green" vehicles, it may not be so green (or even green at all), but who would look that far - it doesn't make us feel so good about ourselves, does it?

And the anti-vaxx thing attached to your message left me a bit baffled how it is connected to context of the article.

> Climate deniers

> anti-vaxxers

Why is it necessary to add this religious stuff? You could have just made your point (which apparently is "somebody do something!!") It's pretty sad that this is the top comment

Yeah, I just flagged and moved on, at the time.

It's a fairly dumb comment intended purely for sneering and backslapping, but calling this sort of garbage out is against the rules despite the comment itself doing nothing to engender thoughtful discussion on the topic.

The most glaringly contradictory aspect of the comment is the suggestion that everyone-who-disagrees-with-me is an utter moron who thinks that gasoline "magically" arrives at gas stations, but somehow these mouth-breathing imbeciles who engage in such thinking would be swayed by more education from the government.

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