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Comment by omegabravo | Hacker News Reader

Depriving people of energy can be just as catastrophic. While not digging it up would be effective, I'm not sure some people in developing* country would necessarily agree.

It's a complex topic, and Australia (where I live) has little excuse to still be using coal fired energy so much. Politics gets in the way of the obvious solutions.

I don't particularly like attributing CO2 to the source. Unless we're going to stop counting CO2 emission internally, because the oil has been extracted elsewhere.

edit: updated to developing, didn't realise the other was offensive. My apologies

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No, depriving people of energe now is only a temporary inconvenience. Depriving your children with a future is on a whole other level. And that is exactly where we are heading: climate catastrophe leading to famine, drought, flooding, unmanageable sea level rise etc.

People could do with a lot less energy 40 years ago, I'm sure we can get by just fine with a little less.

> depriving people of energe now is only a temporary inconvenience.

Where do you live?

I mean this rhetorically, because for a couple billion of people your definition of "minor inconvenience" is literally death.

Ask a Canadian how inconvenient it is to go without heat in the winter.

Ask an elderly Singaporean how inconvenient it is to go without AC in the summer.

As a rule of thumb, energy use by poor people is negligible with respect to the energy use of the rich. I'm sure Australia, the US and Europe could do just fine witb half their current energy usage. Take for example the situation in Europe : energy prices skyrocketed last winter and as a result 30% less natural gas was used. On a macro level this was only a minor inconvenience, nothing more.

If we want, we can buy less styff, fly less, reduce the temperature in our homes, eat less meat and spend less time commuting to a bullshit job. All without causing major inconvenience.

Remember how the entire world was effectively able to switch to lockdown+work from home overnight without coming to a standstill? Very inconvenient, but definitely not the end of the world

> No, depriving people of energe now is only a temporary inconvenience.

Wow. This is so incredibly out of touch. The world consists of more than just wealthy people driving large cars, living in large houses, flying for vacation and work.

Even poorer people in rich/developed countries people die due to lack of cheap energy through heatstroke or freezing. And that is just at a micro level. At a macro level a huge amount of the world's food production relies on cheap energy. Take it away and there will be disastrous consequences.

Inconvenience is a very poor guess. Energy restriction kills people.

More people than the climate, that’s for sure.

Energy production levels must increase profoundly, while costs must fall. This is already happening, and not even that slowly in the grand scheme of things. Personal energy generation and storage is already cheaper than the grid as long as you can finance the upfront investment at a reasonable rate.

I’ll say it until I’m, err, green in the face. Make clean energy cheaper and more abundant and it will be used. Make climate friendly products more compelling and cheaper than their dirtier substitutes, and the better products will win on the open market.

Climate austerity is not so much “saving the future” but rather “murdering the poor” and I find it morally indefensible.

No poor people will die from e.g. flying less, downsizing our cars or eating less meat. That is because the really poor (or perhaps half of all humans) don't fly, don't have cars and don't have a cheap meat based diet.

Roughly half the people alive today exist because of cheap energy. If you take that away, it will be more than inconvenient.

With respect to CO2 emissions, it is quite simple. The amount of CO2 released into the atmosphere is exactly correlated with the amount of fossil fuel dug up (modulo the proportion turned into plastics/whatever)

People will deforest their surroundings and burn wood to keep warm.

Which is probably less harmful than burning oil. At least that forest can regrow in 50 years, whereas the oil will take millions of years to reform.

According to The Guardian wood produces more CO2 than other combustible per unit of heat¹. It also produces as much if not more soot than burning coal and a quantity of NOx and SOx comparable to the combustion of natural gaz.² It also produces copious amount of creosote a substance known to cause cancer to workers in wood treatment facilities.³

Mature trees that have reached a slower growth phase are better used as construction material, that way the carbon is sequestered for a long time and younger faster growing trees that replace them can transform CO2 again.

1) https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/mar/01/pollutio...

2) https://wood-energy.extension.org/what-are-the-air-emissions...

3) https://www.epa.gov/ingredients-used-pesticide-products/creo...

Yes, burning wood may be more sustainable in that lens. Whether it is less harmful is orthogonal. Heat pumps are efficient in ways that wood fires cannot be, for example, so oil -> electricity -> heat pump may well be far better for the atmosphere than "burn some wood".

It is not. Heating and cooking with wood is absolutely deadly, particularly because by definition it’s done, on average, by the poorest households in structures without proper ventilation.

This has the same energy as saying, "If we ban nukes, then people will just TNT each other."

You think? People have to keep warm; they don't have to bomb each other.

Anyway Europe is trying this wood instead of coal thing right now:

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/09/07/world/europe/...

Or, more directly, it’s proportional to energy needs, with the means of production that are currently economical.

If you care about third-world countries, at least be polite enough to call them developing countries.

'Third World' was coined - I believe, by Alfred Sauvy in 1952 (following Pascal Boniface) - as an expression to literally mean "non aligned in the dichotomy of NATO vs Warsaw pact affiliance".

Stereotypes about qualities frequent in Countries of such /political/ quality (such as said alleged "need for development", following the poster) are not implied.

'Third' is proper for "non-aligned"; 'developing' when noting such state makes sense (special sense, since growth seems to be a shared goal); some other term for other cases - such as "rich in raw materials", etc.

I can come up with list of words that were coined with some intention and gained another. Why a term was created has nothing to do with how it is used and the gp comment wasn't in the context of the cold war history.

So you are aware that the word has multiple connotations, yet you chose to focus on the connotation that paints the GP in the worst light... why, exactly?

An inherent need to be offended on behalf of others, in order to add some purpose to ones life.

> yet you chose to focus on the connotation that paints the GP in the worst light...

Process of elimination.

There are two main connotations. The political one wasn't being used, therefore it must be the other one.

"worst" out of two is not exactly a stretch...

Or I interpret it in the context it is used, referring to poor countries as third world.

All this outrage about my remark is triggering my sense of irony. Too bad I'm social drinker only.

PS: congrats to the gp who edited his comment.

> Or I interpret it

You declaredly interpreted it as «[im]polite» - different from "poorly chosen", if the readers do not have enough grounds to assume your irony to be triggered before the «outrage».

In analytical terms, "Contries seeking independence may easily be reliant on key economic sources" makes sense.

At this point you are just looking for reasons for me to be deserving of your righteousness. I can't take part in your inner struggles, so please don't feel obliged to include me in the discussion.

If you have points, present /them/. If something is not clear, clarify it.

This is the second post in which you are presenting no content.

...And this whole branch started by you stating that an expression would be «[im]polite», and another acceptable, without the /content/, again, founding the statement. We are the ones trying to make some sense of your riddles (or stubs).

If someone says "Hey, you shouldn't use that term, it's impolite." what more //content// is there to give? And what "irony" are you talking about?

And this post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35083720 is not even remotely a riddle. You said the origin of the term. They pointed out that the term has changed, and the person using the term wasn't using that definition anyway.

Even with it being the proper term for "non-aligned [in the cold war]", the person using the term wasn't saying non-aligned [in the cold war].

> list of words

No need because that is the normal process, involving meaning and use - you could present the whole dictionary.

But it is none of our business if suddenly one individual or a multitude start using 'mangrove' for something they decide, and it gives no toss of credential to those who after that decide that 'mangrove' does not mean "mangrove".

Developing into what?

Exploitation machines just like big daddy united states. Unless they have resources we want ofc, then the CIA simply puts in a complicit dictator!

The third in "third-world" has the same meaning as the third in "third-party cookies". They were the countries that aligned themselves with neither the liberal (first) or communist (second) worlds who were the principal parties to the cold war. I wish people would stop getting offended at things they don't understand.

> I wish people would stop getting offended at things they don't understand.

What wasn't understood?

If the term third-world was being used to talk about cold war political alignment, they wouldn't have objected. But that's not how it was being used. The objection was completely valid.

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