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Comment by edhelas | Hacker News Reader

Google, Microsoft and others are directly buying electricity from nuclear and renewable sources, doing some major greenwashing this way.

https://www.ans.org/news/article-5842/amazon-buys-nuclearpow...

By doing that they force all the others to rely on the "other" sources (gas, coal...) and not replace fast enough those ones with clean sources.

The production is physically limited, if you have the money and power to be green, the others are not and you can seriously slow down the transition.

I'd prefer that those nuclear plans and renewable farms are used for better purposes as hospitals, industries, homes...

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Why does it matter whether e.g. a hospital runs on renewable energy or not? Why is "industry" good but "data centers" are bad?

If some companies care enough about their image to pay extra to buy green energy, that's good! It makes that production more profitable, and encourages more such production to be built faster. Why are you trying to disincentivize that with "greenwashing" slurs?

Because the global goal of all that is the CO2 emissions that we emit __today__.

I'm perfectly fine that we start big plans to build many new nuclear and renewable plants, but __today__ we need to emit less CO2, now. CO2 just add up in the atmosphere and don't degrade in the time we have.

SO, in the quota we need to respect, I prefer to ensure that the today capacity we have of "clean energy" are used for a proper usage better than allocating the current clean, and upcoming clean ones to some Google servers that are used to generate AI images for fun.

If your house is on fire you don't use the water you have to fill up your pool, you actually need to turn off the fire, even if you will have more water soon.

> prefer to ensure that the today capacity we have of "clean energy" are used for a proper usage better than allocating the current clean, and upcoming clean ones to some Google servers that are used to generate AI images for fun

You’re proposing capping economic growth to save the planet. Admirable. But with tremendous, almost guaranteed, capacity for backlash.

Empirically, growing economies green faster because while we should treat climate change as an existential crisis, we don’t, we treat it as a luxury.

> If your house is on fire you don't use the water you have to fill up your pool, you actually need to turn off the fire, even if you will have more water soon

The house isn’t on fire. It’s settling wrong. It won’t burn us in minutes but bury us in decades. The analogy is in quitting your job to start repairs even though you don’t have the cash on hand to finish them.

Oh, so your objection isn't to them buying green energy, it's to them buying electricity at all?

Google and Microsoft are clearly more effective users of energy than many other commercial users, i.e. creating more value per watt spent. In a situation where you're going to snap your fingers and killing companies or entire industries by refusing to sell them electricity, you don't want to go for the efficient energy users. You want to go after the ones where the energy is adding the least marginal value.

> production is physically limited

By what? We could easily sustain higher production rates for solar, wind and nuclear. The constraints are mainly bureaucratic.

> prefer that those nuclear plans and renewable farms are used for better purposes as hospitals, industries, homes

How do you aim to pay for them?

>How do you aim to pay for them?

They should raise taxes, especially for large coorparations and in higher income brackets.

> should raise taxes, especially for large coorparations and in higher income brackets

Google and Microsoft are large corporations. Their employees and investors are high income. OP proposes curtailing their growth. That reduces those taxes. That’s why OP’s suggestion is a false economy.

Energy, in this context, isn’t a zero sum game. Tax Google and Microsoft more and use that to pay for more power.

This logic just doesn't hold up, regardless of where the intentions behind the decision land. All those energy consumers are going to use the energy one way or another. Prioritizing nuclear+renewables just means that those energy production receive a premium for their production, which hopefully encourages further investment in building out more in renewables, which in turn continuously brings down the cost of consumption until it returns to equilibrium.

Maybe there's an argument in there somewhere around the lossiness of transmission, but I have no idea what it would be.

> The production is physically limited, if you have the money and power to be green, the others are not and you can seriously slow down the transition.

This doesn't make sense. If big players are eating up all the renewable sources, then the renewable sources are making money hand over fist and are encouraged to expand. The market forces should speed up overall production of renewables, not slow it down.

Is this plan actually help decomittioning fossil fuel ? I have some doubts.

Adding more renewable on top help having... more renewable, that's great, but if you don't have a clear plan to remove the fossil fuel (meaning closing down coal, gas, oil sources) you don't change the emissions pathway.

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