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Comment by wmf | Hacker News Reader

Voluntary conservation was only working by accident and guilt tripping never works. The grid needs to become clean so that we can have new industries.

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Yep, this is the real answer. It's also the only answer. The big fiction was everyone getting hopped on the idea that "karma" was going to be real, and people's virtue would be correctly identified by overt environmentalism rather then action.

Fossil fuel companies won, and they won in about 1980s when BP paid an advertising firm to come up with "personal carbon footprint" as a meaningful metric. Basically destroyed environmentalism since...well I'll let you know when it stops.

I made a point in the post to say that it's better to mostly ignore your personal carbon footprint and focus on systematic change, but that I was writing the post for people who still wanted to reduce their consumption anyway

It's a false dichotomy to say "either systemic change or individual change" - both have always and will always go hand in hand, influencing each other in the process. To say only systemic change is required leaves out the individual responsibility for those who have the means to choose. To say it's just individual change required leaves out the fact that people can only choose within the reality of their situation, which clearly is defined by the outcome of the system they are in.

> for those who have the means to choose

interesting qualification.

maybe conservation should start with the masters of the universe who fly private jets all over the world etc. and emit more than the rest of us do all year in a matter of hours.

Emissions are a collective action problem. Guilt tripping works poorly directly on behaviour but it works on awareness&public discourse -> voting -> policy.

Cf how we addressed the ozone hole, acid rain, slavery, etc.

The grid being clean means not having any fossil power. We can only get there by shutting down all fossil fuel power plants.

We can not get there by adding new power generation.

Well you need the latter to replace the former. So you need to add new power generation to allow you to shut down fossil fuel plants.

And to be honest what we need to do is replace them with nuclear power stations to manages the base load of nations power requirements. Either that or much better power storage is required

> We can only get there by shutting down all fossil fuel power plants. We can not get there by adding new power generation.

https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/1433498-no-take-only-throw

"No add new power plants, only transform our grid to greener".

Even if grid the was 100% renewable, this does not mean that there's no environmental cost to producing electricity. As a society, we need to decide what is important and try to minize energy consumption for things that are not important.

And shoving LLMs into every nook and cranny of every application, so just tech giants who run the data centers can make more money and some middle managers get automatic summaries of their unnecessary video calls and emails is, I would argue, not important.

But once again, the fundamental issue is late-stage capitalism.

What's the upside of moralizing energy consumption, especially once it's 100% renewable. Why not just let the market decide? If I'm paying for it, why does anyone else get a say in how I use it?

I kind of agree with this sentiment , though we haven't reached 100% renewable ...

Isn't that kind of a non-sequitur? The claim made was that renewable energy would still be a finite resource to some degree. It's possible that the available energy surplus will be too big for any decisions about usage to matter, but that's a strong claim and you're doing nothing to make it here.

A lot of people believe in a higher power. If trusting in this supposed "market" brings you comfort and clarity in a complicated world, I do not begrudge you it. But invoking it doesn't address the claim it's answering

It's also clear that "the market" does not care enough about environmental impact to even do stuff like remove the current significant fossil fuel subsidies present in most government budgets, nor stop individuals or organizations from consuming or selling said fuels, natural gas, or plastic products at massive scales, so it's unclear why it would allocate energy in a way that didn't deprive crucial priorities.

Like the theodicy on the invisible hand's problem of environmental collapse ain't lookin' good is all I'm saying

> What's the upside of moralizing energy consumption, especially once it's 100% renewable.

Because of the reason I just explained above. 100% renewable energy does not mean that producing that energy does not have an environmental cost.

> Why not just let the market decide? If I'm paying for it, why does anyone else get a say in how I use it?

Because the "free market" does not internalize externalities (costs to shared resources like the environment, air quality, public health, etc.).

Focussing on pricing those externalities (tiny as they'll be in a 100% renewable world), through laws + policy, is a better strategy than trying to convince people not to use their electricity for <thing I personally don't value>.

Having LLMs everywhere haven't helped me much, it just gets in the way.

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