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Comment by codingdave | Hacker News Reader

Affordable is the trick, though - while I totally understand why that is important, sometimes it seems like we're going to end up saying: "Sorry we are going extinct... staying alive wasn't profitable."

I know that is both an idealistic and hyperbolic take on things. The bigger point is that when people say "affordable", they often really mean "profitable". But we cannot afford not to fix the problems.

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"Affordable" could also be taken as "doable". Which broadens the scope largely but misses the main problem: sustainability. This take is not just not helpful but, i would argue, actively harmful to the debate.

By definition, sustainability is a waste management, that allows recycling rates of 90% or higher. CO2 is just one of our waste products we totally didnt care about.

The United States spent 6% of its GDP putting human beings on the moon. And this was done during a time that historians don't generally consider to be a time of vast deprivation for the populace; it turns out investing in and inventing rocketry and aerospace technologies the likes of which humanity has never seen before is great for job creation.

How much of the GDP should we be willing to spend to actively replace pollution generating energy plants with lower polluting alternatives?

No we didn't. Not even close.

Pollution will be in every path we choose, managing the waste is the quest and i dont think that direct government intervention is the best or most practical way here. IMO regulations and sanctions would be better. Eg. imagine the EU or US enforcing fully repairable or recyclable products in their markets. What would china do?

> imagine the EU or US enforcing fully repairable or recyclable products in their markets. What would china do?

What, you mean like the existing WEEE directive which requires all electronics to be lead-free and recyclable? China would, obviously, start selling repairable and recyclable products into those markets.

> The United States spent 6% of its GDP putting human beings on the moon.

Sorry, wrong. The Apollo program cost about $25B in 1960's dollars. That's over the entire period, not just one year.

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190712-apollo-in-50-num...

"In 1965, Nasa funding peaked at some 5% of government spending,"

But government spending != GDP.

According to this,

https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/gdp-...

GDP in 1965 was $743B

My mistake. Amortizing the numbers, it comes out to more like 2.5% annually. https://www.herkulesprojekt.de/en/is-there-a-master-plan/the...

... so the question stands. How much are we willing to spend, and do we think it will actually damage either the economy or people's quality-of-life (when having a major industrial project in fact creates job and business opportunities, historically speaking)?

Clever of you to acknowledge but then glide over the wild exaggeration there. Still wrong, though:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1022937/history-nasa-bud...

1965 NASA budget in billions: $5.25 (the peak year)

1965 GDP: $743 billion

giving us a NASA budget of 0.007 of GDP, or 0.7%

Apollo project is generally considered to have cost $25 billion, not $5 billion. Still, if we consider 0.007 of GDP in modern numbers, that's 2.65 trillion (2023) * 0.007 --> $18 billion.

The fossil fuel industry receives $760 billion in subsidy. We're already spending more on energy; we're just spending it on the wrong energy.

You need to just admit error, not pivot.

5B is for 1965 alone, the peak year. As I said.

25B is the total over all years.

Error admitted.

Now about the point, which is "How much should we be willing to spend on something that may be life-or-death for much of humanity?"

Because, again, $760 billion in fossil fuel subsidy. A tenth of that for renewables.

OK, thanks.

It was pretty easy to look up NASA budgets and GDP's. I haven't studied energy subsidies, though, so maybe someone else wants to jump in.

I get where you're coming from but in 2024, solar is the cheapest source of power on earth, and wind is second-cheapest. Economics and survival are aligned for once, we just gotta actually build the new system and deprecate the old

Solar and wind are pretty expensive a lot of the time, e.g. on windless nights.

you can either fall back to natural gas peaker plants or grid-battery. Batteries keep getting cheaper, too

It seems to me that nuclear and fossil energy is heavily subsidized almost everywhere. So affordability is kind of a tricky metric.

To be fair, though: wind power is cheap as dirt, which is why we're building it out like crazy basically everywhere with real estate for the turbines. Which is also why it's being opposed with weird canards like "But Birds!" and not practical arguments about power grid management.

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