Hacker News Reader

Comment by marze | Hacker News Reader

Putting particulate mitigation gear on all existing coal plants that aren’t so equipped would be a good start. No tech dev required for that.

View on HN

There's a strategy in politics of opting for the impossible futuristic solution that's "right around the corner" instead of doing boring (and sometimes unpopular) things today. It gives the illusion of progress without having to actually make the hard decisions. See also: Hyperloop vs. regular high speed rail.

It also allows the government to "encourage entrepreneurialism" or "stimulate the economy" by subsidizing private research (which, if successful, we would then turn around and sell to the globe—as if this would somehow be more attractive than ignoring the west and building another coal plant at lowest cost possible)

I've said this again and again—the only rational step is to directly subsidize poorer countries to not build coal plants and, in fact, replace them with more expensive but less destructive generation (inlcluding, say, battery farms, nuclear power, hydro, etc, that can properly address off-hour usage).

How are they not then incentivized to build even more coal plants than they need to get free investment?

They could, but presumably further subsidizes would stop. This only works by continually and voluntarily applying flattening pressure to a power dynamic (which some might even call justice), and only to some extent. This is, however, a problem far easier to manage and deal with than the collectively suicidal tendencies we're stuck with now.

And of course the devil would be in the details, and it'd probably look messy and ugly. But I just cannot conceive of it being messier and uglier than the future we're staring down the barrel of.

I think the biggest barrier to this is not any rational problem that might be individually addressed but America's embarrassment at likely losing hegemony in the event we collectively manage to survive this catastrophe without mass death and the four horsemen. Really, refusing to stop global warming is a path towards retaining hegemony by taking advantage of future chaos as we have of past chaos. Everyone knows we have massive farmlands and water sources, enough to support our own people probably many many times over, and others do not have this luxury.

The economic forces that caused global coal consumption to be flat is what’s preventing people from building more coal plants.

Excluding China global coal consumption would be down significantly, and they are quickly bringing alternatives online.

China is not the biggest issue, though they may be today—most of the coal plants coming online are in South Asia and Southeast Asia. Whereas China has a pretty healthy "green industry" sector domestically and similar incentives to the west to decarbonize, most countries currently building do not. Furthermore the coal provider in the region, Australia, makes a lot of money with this export. It's not going to be easy to control all these variables while also forcing countries to not develop a strong energy base (which correlates with, roughly, the size of your economy) and also not providing any subsidies. Meaning, it won't work, though you will certainly piss people off if you try.

Southeast Asia is relatively poor for PV due to all the rain, but that just means it’s a few years behind the curve. That same hockey stick growth has kicked off in all the countries Australia is exporting to.

Exported coal meanwhile is fighting heavy transportation costs which only go up as demand starts to fall off. So, while they had very slow growth over the last decade that’s balanced on an economic knife edge. Most industry experts are just trying to decide how quickly things drop off not if they will.

coal is getting phased out pretty fast in most countries

Reply on news.ycombinator.com