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Comment by adrianN | Hacker News Reader

The important part remains internalizing emission costs into the price of electricity. Fussing over individual users seems like a distraction to me. Rapid decarbonization of electricity is necessary regardless of who uses it. Demand will soar anyway as we electrify transportation, heating, and industry.

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I agree but reducing consumption or increase of efficiency are still very important aspects of the energy transition. What is not consumed does not need to be generated.

If you internalize emissions costs into the price of electricity, reduced consumption will happen naturally. Precisely nobody likes higher energy bills, so there's a natural incentive to reduce consumption as long as you're paying for it.

"internalizing emissions" is the kind of thing that's really easy to say, even conceptualize, but really difficult to implement.

You could do it better than we are doing now, but you'll always have people saying: "that's unfair, why are you picking on me"

Even pricing CO2 output from burning fossil gas, plus a % for upstream leaks, and the same for car combustion will go a long way.

Mind you people won't like that since we're so used to using the atmosphere as a free sewer. The idea of having to pay for our pollution isn't palatable since the gasses are mostly invisible.

Though it's sad that we're talking about market solutions rather than outright bans for the majority of applications like we did for leaded gas.

Outright bans are a non-starter because it requires an infrastructure transition. You couldn't possibly replace every car with an electric one overnight, we can't make them that fast. But if you price carbon then it would cause every new car to be electric, or at least a plug-in hybrid that runs in electric mode 95% of the time. And the people who drive a lot of miles would switch to electric first, which would make a big difference right away.

Meanwhile the people with a 10 year old car they drive 5000 miles a year will keep it until it's a 20 year old car, at which point they'll buy another 10 year old car, but by then that one will run on electricity.

Then you could theoretically ban it, but by then do you even need to?

Nobody is talking about replacing all cars overnight.

You don't have to ban existing cars, they will phase themselves out. Give every X years and ban the sales of any non-hybrids for all but a few niche applications. Then in X+Y years ban all combustion engines other than niche applications.

But ultimately, we need to be serious about this, and half the population and the governments of most western countries are not serious. Many people still believe that climate change is a hoax, and ridiculous ideas like hydrogen cars and ammonia burning ships are still getting funding.

I should probably clarify that I'm not against CO2 emissions taxes. What I am saying is that we shouldn't get bogged down with the discussion of "fairness" and "paying for a shared resource" rhetoric. Down that road lies an infinite discussion.

What we should do instead is start at the other end. Envision a world that would be sustainable, that we would want to live in, and decide which incentives have to exists for us to get there, fairness be damned.

It would incentivise energy production that avoids those costs.

I wonder how much households can really save here. Most "luxury" items using electricity don't really use much e.g. a modern laptop or modern smartphone. The stuff that does use a lot of electricity are things like your AC unit or your electric heater and electric stove. Seems there is little wiggle room there to me, people might end up just getting saddled with higher bills especially if slightly more efficient home appliances are out of reach (or not purchased by the renter at all). And for people who might get strongly affected out of their budget by these things for lack of income there are usually subsidies to help pay for their energy usage, which might further stymie market forces from changing behavior. Seems most high energy use consumers are high enough income where they won't be much affected by increased power costs like how we see them unaffected by water restrictions and higher fees for high water usage already.

Maybe that says the fees aren't yet high enough for high income people to change behavior, but I'm willing to bet they never truly will be due to the influence this subset of the population holds over politics.

Carbon taxes could be phased in over time, to give people a chance to make that decision over the course of natural appliances update lifecycles.

Even if rich people don’t consume much more energy than poor people (I have no idea, just engaging with your idea as stated), they must be buying something with their money… carbon taxes should raise the price of goods with lots of embodied carbon.

If they aren’t consuming much energy and am they aren’t buying stuff with much embodied carbon… I dunno, I guess that’s the goal, right?

All the big wins at a household level involve electrification (EV, heat pumps, induction stoves) so involve using more electricity and less fossil fuel.

It's not about households anyway, it's about transportation and industrial usage. Larger companies have enough scale that they can afford to invest in efficiency.

Some of these would benefit from changes (e.g. electric heating -> heat pump). Others would be better off with other changes. E.g. too much cooling? Consider better awnings, stronger blinds, or even IR rejecting films.

As for the stove, how much it uses is directly related to the kind of cooking you do, and for how long.

Sometimes I see chatter about using solar or nuclear or whatever power for data centers, thereby making them "clean," and it's frustrating that there isn't always the acknowledgement that the clean energy could displace other dirty generation.

Even with things like orphaned natural gas that gets flared otherwise - rescuing the energy is great but we could use it for many things, not just LLMs or bitcoin mining!

> the clean energy could displace other dirty generation.

If you would have built 10GW of solar or nuclear to replace other generation and instead the data center operators provide funding to build 20GW so that 10GW can go to data centers, the alternative wasn't replacing any of the other dirty generation. And the economies of scale may give the non-carbon alternatives a better cost advantage so you can build even more.

If this scenario relies on DC operators to give away money, I doubt it could ever seriously represent the bulk of what the industry is doing.

Who is giving away money? They're paying to build power plants because it's cheaper than buying power from the grid.

True, but if data centers were exclusively built along places like the Columbia River, as an example, that energy, even excess energy, is practically free once you have the hydro-electric plant. I guess the same is true for solar, wind — any power generated that does not require consumables.

Rivers gotta run, suns gotta shine, winds gotta blow.

Yeah, but pricing signals are a good way of reaching those goals.

Businesses will only start doing that in significant amounts when carbon emissions are priced according to their environmental impact.

In some markets this might be right but in others it isn't. For instance, if you have CO2 certificates associated with a product then not buying it won't change emissions. It will make the price of certificates cheaper for everyone else and lead to other consumption elsewhere.

Pricing is a good way to steer in this direction. We would have more salad waste if salad was free to bring home from the supermarket I’m sure.

I don't think it a given that reducing energy consumption is a required part of the transition.

Increasing demand can lead to stimulus of green energy production.

There’s no rule that increased demand will necessarily stimulate green energy production, only that it will stimulate energy production. And getting people to care about climate gets tougher, not easier, when energy demand goes up.

To do that we would need society to agree about what the emission cost is.

Making electricity so abundant and efficient is probably more solvable. You can’t solve stu… society

Indeed. However the problem with LLMs is that vast amounts of VC money are being thrown at them, in the [misplaced] hope of great returns. This results in a resource mis-allocation of biblical proportions, of which unnecessary carbon emissions are a part.

Agreed, that always been the key question for sustainability. Price is a fantastic mechanism, but negative externalities remain.

especially when you consider that most of these models are trained/running on contracts for exclusively renewable energy.

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