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Comment by seszett | Hacker News Reader

> sometimes fossil fuels are a good fit

There is simply NO safe level of fossil fuel use.

Disagree, it's just that the safe level is around 0.1% of current use (though I don't just mean use of fossil fuels for electricity, I mean *everything*).

There’s applications that we still have no alternative for though - e.g. aviation - so we’ll have to accept the burning of hydrocarbons there.

Not fossil hydrocarbons forever, of course, but synthetic kerosene might be a thing soon enough.

Yes: the way we should think about that is that we do things like switch to trains and BEVs so we can afford to continue running airplanes while synthetic fuels are being put into production.

I don't know what you mean with "no safe level of fossil fuel use". It doesn't mean anything without contextualizing that statement.

There is already too much carbon in the atmosphere.

It's not going to reduce any time soon. Either way the reality is that sometimes fossil fuel power plants make sense, that's why they're still being built.

i thought it was pretty clear, personally.

It's unsafe so it's never a good fit? That kind of reasoning is just noise. Unsafe for what? Compared to what? What alternatives, given the constraints, exist?

Finding something ideologically inconvenient doesn’t make it noise. There is simply no level of new carbon emissions which isn’t guaranteed to cause expensive problems around the world. That doesn’t mean we can’t switch everything instantly but that means we shouldn’t be building anything new which has a safe alternative — and in the case of electric power generation or cars, that’s especially clear because burning fossil fuels for that is more expensive so you’re paying extra to pollute more.

I don't find it ideologically inconvenient, I just don't think it's a realistic take. There are situations for power generation where fossil fuels are the only viable alternatives hence why I mentioned them. Now if you had infinite resources and infinite money then that's probably not true, but we don't live in a world like that.

> There are situations for power generation where fossil fuels are the only viable alternatives

That doesn't make them safe. Eventually there situations will have to find a way to do without fossil fuels if we want to keep this planet habitable.

I don't see how that's relevant, my original post made no safety claims.

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