> It seems we will do anything to avoid the obvious - we need to reduce energy use and transition to green generation.
Most of the world is doing just that.
It's much, much easier said than done.
Most of the world is doing just that.
It's much, much easier said than done.
Therefore, the hard part is changing the structure of society so that people's lives don't suck.
In some cases micro-gassifier rocket heater/stoves (just because you can make one out of mud doesn't mean it's not high technology!) & coppicing and pollarding will make more sense. In other cases clean atomic power and induction heaters/stoves will be the way to go.
Some times willow bark tea, and sometimes morphine.
Fossil fuels have - at the same time as the pollution - caused a huge improvement of living standards. A substantial part of the human population tripling in size comes from that, and huge number of people would die if fossil fuels magically disappeared.
How many megatons of meat do you think Musk eats a month? Does Bezos put a billion burgers into his belly? The vast majority of meat is consumed by people in that bottom 99%. For that matter, how many fast-fashion trendy patterned stockings do you think these men wear? It's really disingenuous to act like you're against luxuries for the 1% and then use meat and cheap clothing as your examples of great evils to be eliminated. Who would be sacrificing if large scale production of these cheap goods were banned? Not the 1%. What you are proposing is not to tear down the 1%, but to suppress the standard of living for the 99%.
Maybe you just chose bad examples by accident though, do you have any proposals that would actually limit emissions from the 1% instead of capping the quality of life for the other 99%?
Even if he was your examples are disingenuous. Musk and Bezos aren’t representative of even the richest 1% of Americans.
Get a napkin and sanity check yourself. 1% of 8 billion people is 80 million. There are 330 million people in America. If all of the global 1% are in America and not also in Europe and Asia, which is obvious bullshit, then only 24% of Americans are in that 1% and the remaining 76% are in the lower 99%.
And do you really think only Americans eat meat and wear cheap clothing? Get real.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37708114 (Sept 2023)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36792165 (July 2023)
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
The very wealthy are able to afford to not go through the same public channels as the rest of us, and so their emissions don't get amortized over vast numbers of users. This is on top of the fact that they can already consume more anyway, which is to say, I have one car, but the very wealthy might collect them (buying new! another thing I've never done), and just the process of manufacturing a new car releases more CO2 than I could produce in several years of driving.
Also the studies I've seen to this effect use a questionable form of attribution when it comes to the "1%". Specifically they include emissions from companies that they invest in.
There is middleground that saves most of people. We're not doing that because we value our comfort now more than other people's lives later.
In many parts of the world, even places you've heard of, people walk or bike everywhere they need to go and spend their free time sitting around chatting with neighbors.
No one's arguing to delete fossil fuels, but it makes sense to minimize usage to freight and public transit.
Do you have a source for that? It didn't sound right and my quick Googling suggests that it's off by around a factor of 20 or more. (Some put datacenters as low as 1% of total electricity consumption, which is a subset of all energy consumption.)
And before that we used Whale oil, which we got through a global slaughter of whales and we nearly drove them to extinction. Then it was time to move on.
Maybe the solutions we have on how to cut on emissions is canned.
Dig deep enough into any initiative that claims to be doing that and you'll find that it has far reaching consequences that negate whatever positive impact it has on the planet, and dealing with them would reduce profits.
I tried to make a heat pump make sense for heating here. I couldn't make it economically pencil out. I hope I'm around and I hope the economics are different in 20 years when it comes time to replace the heat source in my house again.
If you change the rules of the game, you change the winning strategies. By extension, you're changing which industries may be in competition with each other (or end up being completely obsolete), and which companies may end up having an advantage. If you ban (say) natural gas water heating, the losers will be gas supplier companies, perhaps all the peripheral industry dedicated to creating gas pipes and fittings, the pipe fitters, companies that specialize / have IP around efficient gas heat exchangers, etc.
On the other hand, the winners may now be companies that have IP / manufacturing capabilities for heat-pump technology, electricity producers, copper mines (increased load on the grid), etc etc.
Each rule change may have a net positive or negative on the greater economy in general both in the near term and far term.
In my example, heat pump water heaters are $$$ compared with conventional ones and would increase the demand on electricity (increasing its price). These hit people's pocket books, and reduce discretionary income to spend on other stuff.
On the other hand, the significant increases in complexity might result in a higher-skilled workforce requirement (with increased wages), fewer deaths due to carbon monoxide / gas explosions, fewer nitrous oxide related illnesses (decrease in healthcare costs), and maybe a hundred other knock-on effects.
Why does this sound like a suicide cult?
Capitalism by itself won't allow us to change course.