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Comment by taurknaut | Hacker News Reader

> Burning stuff for grid energy should stop ASAP.

Sadly I think the only viable route to this is wealthy countries paying poor countries to dismantle these power plants (and presumably replace them with something equivalent).

This has two nice benefits. One, wealthy countries show they act in good faith. Two, this will greatly reduce wealth disparity.

Of course, there's the chance some people will threaten to emit gas to acquire disproportionate power. This is true, but still preferable to the west just roasting the planet and then blaming china. Like grow tf up.

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This might be less of a problem than you would expect.

Pakistan, for example, is currently experiencing a massive solar boom. Their electricity grid has been notoriously unreliable in the past, so the moment solar panels and batteries became cheap enough just about everyone chose distributed solar. It is now the world's sixth-largest solar market, despite having the world's 42nd-largest GDP.

The goal in poor countries isn't dismantling fossil fuel plants - those never grew beyond a rounding error. The goal is to avoid building new fossil fuel plants as their economies grow, and that's a lot easier now that solar has become the cheapest source of electricity. Their old power plants will eventually close down, but it's not a priority on a global scale.

>wealthy countries paying poor countries to dismantle these power plants (and presumably replace them with something equivalent)

And what about wealthy countries, that using those power plants? I mean there aren't many of them now, but have you been communicating with Europeans recently? Not with the privileged elites in the universities, but with the working class Europeans? There are so many complaints about energy prices that I'm afraid even there democracy can't be thwarted anymore and we'll see burners all over Europe in like 10 years from now.

The working class should complain, that's their role in liberal democracy. Better complain about energy prices than armies of invading muslim rapists.

This is putting the cart before the horses. These wealthy countries haven’t even stopped burning fossil fuels. Let’s focus on that first.

Why not both? We've been claiming to want to reduce carbon emissions since before I was born. It's not even a hard pitch—if we're insanely wealthy and have the capacity to discuss greening our grid and still can't or won't, why would you reasonably expect countries with basically no capacity to do this to forget about centuries of globalization, colonization, and exploitation? We burned the globe; if we want to heal this, the most reasonable approach is good-faith reconciliation and remediation.

But the way conversation is now we're headed straight towards ecofascism. A healthy globe for me but not for thee (as if this even makes much sense).

You're right.

It's convenient for the US to blame "developing economies" (especially China) for the problem. Solutions like "buying off other countries" make sense. (And in itself is not a bad idea.) But it's a deflection from the bigger issue which is consumption at home.

But as long as we can make it a "them " problem, our population doesn't have to feel guilt, or understand they are the people who need to change.

Sounds good I'm theory but tough to put into practice. Regardless of the environmental consequences there is no way that voters in wealthy countries will agree to subsidize hostile regimes. And many of those countries are so deeply corrupt that the majority of funding tends to be stolen by corrupt politicians or building contractors.

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