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Comment by unpopular42 | Hacker News Reader

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Are you a Chinese troll? If not, you're doing a great job of advocating for China.

At this point it's inevitable that solar power and EV's are going to win. They don't need any subsidies to win. But without the subsidies China will take the entire market and we'll be much more dependent on China in the future than we are on Saudi Arabia now.

good thing you only have 1 voice

I'm not sure what this is supposed to mean. It's not like you have more than one

Could you elaborate on your world view or are you just trolling?

Progress and capitalism optimize for value or $, and have no attention for the environmental cost as long as those are not put into regulations. You don't agree with that?

See the thread below: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=unpopular42#37543571

And just to be clear, climate regulations are not the same as pollution laws

Given the contents of their bio, I suspect they’re trolling.

Capitalism could work, if the framework was setup to allocate the environmental impact to the company using that resource.

A 'credit' system worked to stop NOX and Acid Rain, no reason it couldn't be used to reduce CO2.

Have to separate "Capitalism" the concept, from the "I'm changing the rules just for me to profit".

"Capitalism" can work well with regulations. The people that are against regulations are not "pro-Capitalism", they are "pro-Greed". Nothing in capitalism says you can't have regulations to prevent things society doesn't wan to happen.

Just current interpretation of capitalism is wrong.

Don't know about everywhere, but in Europe acid rain got stopped by direct regulation, not a credit framework.

Both can work.

My understanding is that in US, they used Emissions Credits, and this allowed a 'market' for those credits. This was more palatable to the segment of the country that are against regulations of any kind. But once there is a market, then it is ok.

There are some good points to an emissions market, it does allow accountants and corporations to determine a 'cost' that can be used in budgeting, and they can then us that as justification to purchase equipment. And it does allow the shifting of the 'cost' to the worst polluting plants. So in some ways markets are good, they steer the allocation of funds. The anarcho-capitalist types just need to understand that capitalism can be guided in this way, we know it works.

Completely Agree, Capitalism combined with right boundary conditions ie. limits, regulations, credit systems, or whatever, have to be used. The current system rewards those that manage to make use of the 'commons', and by that way socializing the costs (pollution, waste, etc.) while privatizing gains.

why?

Because the current climate spending is extremely inefficient and stupid. For example, if we put all this effort into making more energy, e.g. making nuclear actually work, we could soon make the climate do what we want, not the other way around.

And of course anything the government gets involved in will get screwed up, so just stop screwing it up and let the bright people do what they are passionate about.

> we could soon make the climate do what we want

Can you expand on this? If it's geoengineering you're talking about we don't really need all the energy for it.

Imagine regulatory asphyxiation disappears. Imagine energy tech gets its own Moore's law. Imagine cheap abundant energy, say 10 orders of magnitude from now in a few decades. Heating up or cooling down the planet at will doesn't sound impossible then.

So we should just hope this all away? That's a deeply childish viewpoint, and hoping is not a reliable plan. It will require many things: Carbon regulation plus geo-engineering plus improved power systems plus personal sacrifice. But where that starts is legislation. This is how we solved acid raid, the ozone layer, lead-based fuels and paints, and oh so many other environmental externalities. Individuals cannot solve this problem themselves. I could convert my house to solar and buy electric cars tomorrow and the problem is not solved, because I account personally (through my own choices) of only 20% of the issue. https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emis...

> So we should just hope this all away?

No, absolutely not!

> But where that starts is legislation.

No, absolutely not! Where it starts is invention and invention is currently severely hindered by regulation, alarmism and skewed incentives. Why would a bright mind work on nuclear physics if you can make more money as a lawyer?

But that's not where we are. Without $$ incentive, nobody is going to build what is needed to remove the carbon or mitigate the effects of warming. The market is not magically going to solve anything if we simply remove regulation, that is a strawman. The market needs incentives, as well as restrictions. When we solved the ozone layer, we first restricted chloroflorocarbons to stop the bleeding, then we added incentives to create replacements. And it worked. It's not alarmism that's the issue here, it's heads in the sand.

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