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Comment by lvl155 | Hacker News Reader

China is far more incentivized to champion renewable considering that they do not have the same access as the US. US is also on a path to quite literally invading other countries to extract crude and other resources. I don’t think China is in a position to do this, yet. If China invades Brunei or arrests Bolkiah, they will face irreversible repercussions.

All that said, I don’t think wind and solar are the answers. Geothermal and fusion will need to be the solution.

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I think China is incentivised due to health effects of coal. "China's reliance on coal reduces life expectancy by 5.5 years" https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/jul/08/northern... etc.

I think it's a bit better now. I don't think invasions change that much.

>All that said, I don’t think wind and solar are the answers

Found the Oil & Gas lobbyist / apologist.

China might not have oil, but at least they are trying to figure something else out. Credit to them. Say what you want about The Party (I certainly have) but gotta give credit where and when its due. They have an interest in pushing alternative fuels, and by god they are doing it.

> Geothermal and fusion will need to be the solution.

China needs power NOW though.

What is the question to which fusion and geothermal is the answer? From a climate perspective those will come too late to aid our planet much until decades of further change, if fusion even comes at all.

Seems to me like wind solar batteries and nuclear are the answer, what’s actually being built now in a big way, not pie in the sky like fusion.

Fusion is the answer to "how can we extract R&D money for decades without ever actually delivering anything." There is little prospect it's going to be competitive, particularly DT fusion. The engineering/economic obstacles are profound even if all the plasma physics problems are solved. Most of the efforts being touted are obvious nonstarters.

That is what they say about self driving cars, and there are services which are commercially available right now.

So, no technology is impossible? Every dream can come true? That's what I'm getting from the logic of the argument you're making there.

Sometimes technologies really do have showstoppers. There are fundamental reasons to think fusion is not going to be competitive. I know of no fundamental reason self driving cars would be impossible. The analogy doesn't work.

You can get a lot of stationary batteries for a couple of trillion dollars.

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