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Comment by birdyrooster | Hacker News Reader

Well now it’s like if I spend my money it’s almost necessarily creating carbon and fucking the world more. So it’s like I don’t even feel like I can spend my money if that makes any sense. What is the point of all this money when you can’t use it ethically?

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My usual response to these types of concerns is "touch grass", but if one has the means & concern, theres many organizations to fund, green improvements one can make to their home (solar, energy storage, heat pumps, efficient appliances, insulation, better windows, etc), transport (switch to an EV, take trains, stop flying places), plant a tree, etc.

I do find in my circles though that the loudest voices are also the ones who scoffed at my switch to an EV, but fly on vacations 3x/year, so some of it is clearly fashion & posturing.

And some of it is counterintuitive as we see Germany shut down nuclear plants for "green" reasons, only to have to spin back up some coal.

> counterintuitive as we see Germany shut down nuclear plants for "green" reasons, only to have to spin back up some coal

I've read that Poland is having issues where the grid will only support so much, so they need to disable or dial back the renewable energy sources because it's impossible to turn down or off a coal firing plant.

In the states a lot of left-coded "environmental review" stuff gets used by NIMBYs to block grid improvements / new transmission lines.. which ends up being a bigger blocker of renewables than the permits for the generation itself.

So you end up with multi-year backlogs just to get grid connected with new clean energy generation.

Right, everybody wants the change, but nobody wants it to affect them. As is tradition.

Yeah, you have to exactly match electric output to demand or things get very bad. Until we have a few more breakthroughs in battery technology, we're going to be stuck with fossil fuels to make up the gap for variable demand. Nuclear can't be ramped up and down quickly, and solar and wind just do whatever they want.

As I understand it, a typical strategy for a power company is:

- nuclear or similar for the base load that's always required

- solar and wind as available

- weather forecasting to determine how much solar and wind will be available

- demand forecasting to determine how much power will be required at any given time

- natural gas to meet predicted solar and wind shortfalls

- RICE engines and battery storage to handle unexpected fluctuations

- contracts to buy and sell power with other nearby power companies

> Until we have a few more breakthroughs in battery technology, we're going to be stuck with fossil fuels to make up the gap for variable demand.

I think we are there. We don't need new breakthroughs we need more manufacturing capacity.

LFPs are both cheap and work great for a grid storage and now CATL is announcing new sodium batteries which are pretty ideal for grid storage (cheap and long life).

It does sound like that, honestly, just needs more investment and maybe engineering into mode distributed storage for the whole renewable stuff.

I'm guessing sweet spot would be something like "big, economically efficient battery per street of houses + solar on every house", but as it would be shared it needs investment and power company have very little incentive for it

Your existence, and mine, is intrinsically harmful to the world. But you have the opportunity to also do good, to heal systems. What you can do with your time, money, and energy is to shift the balance more toward healing than harm. So don't waste your money on plastic or flights, but try to purchase more ethical/sustainable goods (which quickly becomes very expensive). Donate to well regarded charities. Etc.

We are a part of the world, not a foreign entity. From the point of view of evolution, if our existence eliminates a bunch of other species, that's how natural selection works. This misanthropic view of us as intruders in nature is just a throwback to weird ancient cults, it is just basically religion, not reason.

What is the point of saying that? Are you trying to get people to give up and accept ecological collapse?

Nowhere did I say humans are a foreign entity. I said our existence does harm to ecosystems all over the globe. That is a fact. We also, uniquely, have the ability to choose* whether or not we do that harm, which oxygenating bacteria did not. So here I am, advising someone to do less harm because doing harm causes them pain, and you're saying... what? That choosing to counteract the harm we've done is foolish and illogical? That makes no sense.

Buying better, more durable things that won't break after a year or two is one way to spend more money for less environmental impact. Tho the maths on that is kinda iffy, as it is hard to tell how much of the "more expensive" is "longer, harder production process that generates more emissions" and how much is "we put actual good engineering into it".

Why not just buy carbon offsets?

Because they are mostly a scam. If offsetting the carbon was so cheap we wouldn’t need to fret about it much.

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