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Comment by oblio | Hacker News Reader

I know it's a sign of prosperity and my perspective is probably lucky.

However, I find it SUPER SAD that... in developed countries people are living less comfortably during the winter than the middle class in Romania, a developing country.

It makes no sense. In Romania, everyone who's at least middle class sets the thermostat to 22-23 degrees and basically only wears t-shirts and shorts indoors.

So a German making €40k net per year lives worse from this point of view compared to a Romanian making €20k net per year.

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I am an energy-guzzling American and even for me 24.5C seems crazy in the winter time. That's 76F! My elderly grandmother (who has circulation issues and so is always cold) keeps her heat at 72F. Why would anyone want to wear shorts indoors when they will have to change them anyway to leave the house while it's 10F (-12C) outside? Seems like you're just wasting energy to inconvenience yourself?

Shorts are comfortable and I'm not OP, 22-23 is enough for me.

The first thing when I come home is to change out of jeans and co and into more comfortable clothes.

There are few clothes more comfortable than a t-shirt and shorts.

Wearing shorts is a bit declasse.

24.5 is my target point. Considering hysteresis, the actual temperature varies between 23.5 and 25.5.

It's actually not a sign of relative poverty but of education in my experience. Most people do it because they understand climate change.

Thank you for calling me uneducated :-)

Also https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yiw6_JakZFc

Isn’t gas one of the cleaner sources of energy?

It's the least bad of the fossil fuels, but it's still a fossil fuel.

The majority of natural gas is extracted along with oil. However, methane is a product of anaerobic decomposition. It can be produced from municipal waste. Natural gas produced from waste is net zero carbon.

In the US, and I assume elsewhere, the single greatest reduction is carbon emissions was achieved by switching from coal plants to natural gas plants. Thats a win in my book. No fossil fuels at any cost is a losing proposition. Incremental progress to sustainable energy is how we get to sustainability.

I'm not opposed to gas as a transitional technology. Same with nuclear. They're both significantly better than coal and oil, and if using them helps us get rid of coal and oil, then that's great and we should do it.

But I don't see them as the end goal; that's still 100% renewable to me.

What's wrong with nuclear climate-wise?..

It's fine on CO2, but it has other risks, not to mention its own pretty long-term waste problem.

But for the short term, I think that's preferable to the much bigger disaster of global warming and climate change.

Energy that isn't consumed is the easiest way to reduce carbon emissions. Obviously no one demands we switch of gas power plants and let coal power plants run instead, but climate change has reached a point where we need to act on all fronts at the same time. So switch to renewables, switch to cleaner solutions and conserve as much energy as possible.

Nope. There is C in CH4, and that C makes CO2. There is no C in U, though. Nuclear energy is good for climate.

What does it matter? I wear t-shirts a jumper and soft pants indoors, it's a bit odd to me that anyone finds that problematic

I'd happily wear a jacket, if that can help with shutting down a coal power plant

What an attitude.

Apart from that, Romania's energy consumption comes 75% from coal, oil and gas. THAT is something that does not makes sense and something that is SUPER SAD. And to walk around in shorts and t-shirt in the winter when you are heating with those sources is just plain stupid.

It's unfortunately these kind of attitudes which will make it hard to reduce climate change.

1. Source?

2. That's just dumb. Romania reduced its energy usage a ton since 1989 plus its per capita usage is super low, if someone needs to look in the mirror it's the US, Australia, Canada, Germany, China (China for the industrial pollution primarily), etc.

3. Also: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yiw6_JakZFc

If we really care about climate change we would take care of the major offenders first. And when we come to domestic heating we would run reasonable insulation programs and heat pump installation programs instead of the laughable "grants", ban OFCH, etc. I think that if I generate 25% of my winter electricity consumption on my own, I may increase my in-house temperature without killing the damn planet. Also don't forget that the total footprint of a heat pump is nothing against a typical OFCH system.

Why would you take care of major offenders first, instead of taking care of all offenders at once? It's not as if you shutting down your heating means the coal power plant next door looks at your chimney and goes "Hey lads, this sucker switched of the heating, add an extra shovel of coals!".

Because my personal contribution won't change anything on the global scale but it would significantly impair my quality of life. Also because I've taken reasonable actions to reduce my footprint. Also because if we take care of the major offenders responsible for 70%-80% of the emissions there might be no need to care about the rest.

I even doubt that anything would change if everyone in the developed world switches to this extreme economy. E.g. Russia burns coal and wastes hundreds of gigawatt hours to heat the atmosphere because of how their heating systems are designed. But of course it's lot easier to force me, a person who works from home, drives a hybrid car with 52MPG on average (and I rarely do more than a couple of hundreds km per month), travels couple of times per year and who installed a heat pump and a solar PV, to live with 19 degrees than to deal with Russia. It's equally easier to force me going full vegan instead of applying seemingly working solutions to reduce meat industry emissions (toilet training, seaweed diet, artificial meat in the end).

> Why would you take care of major offenders first, instead of taking care of all offenders at once?

For the same reason that if you had two jobs with the exact same conditions, but one paid twice as much as the other, you would probably pick the one that pays more. Efficiency matters. Resources are limited. Oil is a resource. The capacity to take care of offenders is another.

> I find it SUPER SAD that... in developed countries people are living less comfortably

In my country, we say that the bedroom should not be warmer than 19, because that's bad for sleeping :-). So it's really a choice. If I go to bed and the temperature is 24.5, I open the window.

Also I don't find it less comfortable to wear more clothes in the winter than in the summer. Ok, working from home on a computer at 19 degrees is a little bit cold, so I tend to use a warm water bottle. But honestly that's really fine.

OTOH, why sad? I would have found the info sad if Romanians including the middle class could not afford enough heating and had to shiver in winter, whereas people in Germany lived in overheated apartments. According to what you say, many people are happy: Many Romanians are warm, many Germans save money / energy / CO₂ or so (I am happy to have done that myself by hardly ever heating this winter).

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