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Comment by fsloth | Hacker News Reader

It's a mess.

Energy companies are both huge part of the problem - and at the same time the only reason modern civilization exists.

Hydrocarbons are primary input still to most of the processes we have to exist above ... well, actually exist, because the alternative with this amount of people to hydrocarbon driven economy is mass starvation.

The energy companies should be taken to court for the damage they have done to planet via their anti-climate-action PR.

But, at the same time we need their product to live.

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> But, at the same time we need their product to live.

This isn’t a binary choice. Imagine how much better off we’d be now if they’d accepted their own scientists’ reports in the 1970s and tried to get in on greening the economy instead of funding decades of obstruction? Jimmy Carter could have gotten his nuclear power plants, the remaining ICE vehicles would use a fraction of the fuel as the average vehicle purchased in the United States today, and we’d be saving our carbon emissions for things which are harder to replace like industrial chemistry rather than literally heating the outdoors so someone doesn’t need to wear long sleeves to dinner.

I think the more consistent counterfactual scenario without mass hydrocarbon extraction would be to consider that population would not have grown to the current level (instead of imagining the current population and a sudden disappearance of hydrocarbons).

Large energy companies should be nationalized and run rationally, i.e. in a way that acknowledges the extreme scarcity of waste absorption capacity we are faced with.

Nationalization is not a guaranteed solution because of the dangers of populism.

Venezuela sheds a tear.

I think proponents of this should move to some of the beautiful utopias where the energy companies are already nationalized and through the magic of socialism, emissions will no doubt cease any day now: Venezuela, Colombia, Saudi Arabia, Brazil, Russia, Kuwait, Nigeria, or China.

My point here is that nationalization has nothing to do with climate change.

Norway did it

Nationalized industry sucks. Every time we try it, ultimately we get worse off. But if you're saying that we need to have a carbon trading market or some other such strong regulation that includes externalities, yes we definitely should. In the US, conservatives used to believe in market-based approaches to solving big problems. Now they just deny the problems exist. This is the mindset of a child, not an adult. Grown ups own their mistakes and solve the problems, they don't point fingers and deny they exist.

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