Hacker News Reader

I’m skeptical of demand reduction. History shows that we keep finding more ways to use energy to improve our lives. We’re unlikely at a global scale to reduce lifestyle to reduce energy usage. We’ve got a big enough problem here with meat eating, where there isn’t a substantially lower carbon option and we’ll probably just have to move to more plant based diets.

For energy consumption it seems much easier to me for us to replace energy generation with green alternatives. I was skeptical of this 10 years ago, but we’ve since seen huge rollouts of wind and solar, the near phasing out of coal in many countries, and continually dropping prices for the necessary hardware. We need to accelerate these, but this feels feasible.

Sorry. I wasn’t clear enough. I meant demand reduction for specifically fossil fuels (to include indirect fossil fuels used for electricity generation), not for energy in general.

That includes making it economically advantageous to choose electricity as the local source while accelerating the greening of the grid. That is frequently not the most advantageous choice for consumers now, and we should not be surprised when they choose what’s most advantageous for them.

This is happening in the UK at the moment. I'm not an expert, but my undestanding is that there is an incentive plan to reduce the cost of install electical heatpumps, with the goal that the increased volume reduces the price over time. The sale of new gas/oil fired boilers will only be allowed for a few more years.

This means that as the grid is made greener there is an increased impact in terms of reduced emissions overall.

Even with the government grant taken into account it would cost me £3,000 to have a heat pump installed at my house. The running costs would be around £500-600 a year more than I'm paying to heat my home with gas at present, and that's with my gas bill having almost trebled over the last year and a bit. Financially, as things stand, it would be lunacy for me to scrap the gas boiler in favour of a heat pump.

GP's logic is exactly why I wanted to convert. Your findings are exactly why I didn't (only the up-front delta was about 5x worse in my case).

If we can't remove the skew in the economics, it's going to be very slow to make progress.

Ah yes in that case I completely agree!

To the dead comment that I think is worth discussing...

> Meat eating isn't a "problem" to be solved IMHO. Although I'm sure you'll see me as an eco terrorist for even wanting steak and chicken.

While this is a little inflammatory I basically agree, meat eating is not in isolation an environmental issue, it's arguably a moral issue, and one I have made my peace with. I eat meat and enjoy it.

However, rearing animals in any way (whether it's for meat, dairy, even pets) carries with it a lot of environmental cost – animal feed production, methane emissions from cows, carbon emissions from farming, water use, etc. Completely ignoring the moral part, there's a significant environmental cost that can't be replaced – we can't switch to non-methane-producing cows.

Unfortunately regardless of dietary preferences, this is something we're going to have to contend with as unlike electricity usage there isn't a like-for-like replacement.

Coal use in 2022 set a new record globally though. It is exemplary of how difficult this problem is.

This is mostly driven by a small number of countries. Many countries are dropping their usage and replacing it with renewables.

you can't save yourself rich.

> I think most people would agree that when I eat beef, I’m responsible for (part of) the slaughter of a cow.

> If I fuel my stove, boiler, or car from fossil fuels, the same argument applies.

To make this analogy work, you’d need the beef industry to have spent half a century pouring billions of dollars into campaigns denying that cows are being slaughtered (“they were just going to die of natural causes anyway!”).

I agree that the right fix is to start pricing externalities into things but the decades of denial mean that the easy gradual options are no longer feasible. If we’d acted 3-4 decades ago when the climate science consensus was settled we’d have had the option to decarbonize much less disruptively.

On the heat pump front, one big factor to consider is the relative efficiencies and switching costs. Power plants are professionally maintained and everything I’ve read says that you’ll almost always emit fewer greenhouse gases using electricity from the grid rather than burning fuel at home (or in your car), especially factoring in that things like natural gas leaks aren’t affected by efficiency improvements in equipment.

Each new fossil fuel device locks in pollution for multiple decades, whereas electricity is fungible so each new clean option coming online will increase the amount of time that your grid power is producing less emissions than it does now. Given the cost advantages in many markets, that trend is only going to accelerate.

> you’d need the beef industry to have spent half a century pouring billions of dollars into campaigns denying that cows are being slaughtered

Not quite half a century - they are a bit behind the times when in comes to climate lobbying - but they sure as hell spend. I've met a couple of farm lobbyists during my short time in local government, and they're not doing poorly on the financial front.

To quote a favored WP article of mine on the subject:

"The North American Meat Institute, insisting that there is “much uncertainty” about climate change, publishes “fact sheets” that selectively count only manure management and animal digestion byproducts as contributors to emissions. The National Cattlemen’s Beef Association website includes an animated explainer, “Tough questions about beef sustainability,” that minimizes the industry’s role in environmental problems, from water use to carbon emissions. In response to congressional plans to address climate issues or reports calling for dietary changes, these groups contend that the beef supply chain has environmental benefits, such as cultivating soil for carbon storage. They also point to data showing that farmers and ranchers have become more efficient, producing meat and poultry using fewer resources. Changing food consumption, they contend, is not a “silver bullet.”....

... Sara Place, a scientist who worked for the National Cattleman’s Beef Association, preemptively wrote an article on “Why Taxing Beef Isn’t the Answer.”

What unfolded with fossil fuels suggests at least one path for meat and dairy. Instead of clean coal, the industry might tout carbon-neutral beef, regenerative agriculture and responsible grazing. Just as natural gas from fracking was presented as a “bridge fuel,” we might expect marketing to encourage consumers to switch to “bridge meats” like chicken or salmon (which, like natural gas, have their own significant environmental impacts). The agricultural industry will also invest in technological solutions — such as an algae diet to reduce methane in cattle — to avoid making more substantial changes that would hurt its bottom line."

Same shit with a different coat of greenwashing paint.

See article here: https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/the-meat-industry-is-...

The meat industry is a huge contributor to climate change, no doubt, but in this case I was referring only to the narrower comparison between someone buying either beef or gas and therefore being a knowing participant in the negatives of that decision. In the case of buying a hamburger, almost all adults are aware that required slaughtering a cow (even if we choose not to think about it in detail over dinner) but I think a much greater number of people either don't think that climate change is real or substantially under-value its impact due entirely to the fossil fuel industry's propaganda campaign.

Your last paragraph is spot-on! That's why it's so tragic that the economics are so unfavorable for air-to-water heat pumps in the US right now. I have a new combi boiler on the wall now (which was eligible for a rebate from my local utility company!). Hopefully when it comes time to replace it (in about 2042), the economics will have shifted to make an A2W competitive as its replacement.

I believe it's just a water heat exchanger hooked up to the same tech used for air conditioning all over the world, including third world, fine tuned and adjsuted to operate the flows correctly?

It's not hard nor inherently expensive tech. The difficulty for adoption in the US is that it's positioned as a premium product, with very few vendors of equipment, very few qualified installers, low market adoption (with all the resulting service and parts availability and latency concerns that come with that). In a location with $0.25/kWh electricity, $1.91/therm gas, and ~9%/yr cost of capital, the payback period is literally never.

> Maybe that means taxing fossil fuels more and increasing that over time

This is infeasible, there are already millions who are struggling to get by with existing energy bills, and without enough cash to upgrade to more eco-friendly systems. These people are stuck on fossil fuels, increasing taxes for it across the board is just going to cause more pain, suffering, and homelessness.

A better idea would be progressive taxation built into income tax. The higher-earners also tend to be bigger polluters, so it makes sense in that regard as well.

There’s no (non-political) reason that we couldn’t issue a refundable tax credit of $1000/yr (or another amount) to every full-year resident and increase taxes on fossil fuels by an amount such that a median consumer of fossil fuels would break even.

The purpose of the tax is to better align choices with consequences, not to raise revenue. It can be revenue-neutral or even cost money for administrative overhead.

You need a carbon tax, and one that also imposes itself on imports so that other countries can’t cheat.

Canadians have a system similar to this. Everyone pays a carbon tax. 10% of the total pool is skimmed and used by the government for climate related things, and only climate related things. Then the rest of the money is split evenly among everyone.

The poorer people come out ahead since they use less (e.g. can’t afford a car and take public transit) and thus paid less than the average but receive the average amount back.

IMO it's better to call it "fee and dividend", "carbon tax" has a lot of baggage associated with it. I'm a strong supporter of it, but if you say "tax" you'll immediately get people (people who would benefit from such a system regardless of climate effects) insisting it will all go to the government.

> there are already millions who are struggling to get by with existing energy bills

Most carbon-tax proposals I've seen are revenue-neutral, meaning the carbon taxes collected are returned to people, everyone getting the same amount. The intention is to incentivize reducing carbon emissions but not destroy the poor.

It’s hard to compete exonomically with a business that is allowed to dispose of their waste (Greenhouse gasses) for free.

The waste isn't just greenhouse gasses.

Its literally anything you can dig up from the Earth so it also includes radioactive elements. I really think that would've been the better angle to attack coal power plants with.

I agree, but that’s a rhetorically more dangerous path. If you start emphasizing the dangers of radiation, the fossil fuel industry will double down on scare mongering about nuclear energy.