Hacker News Reader

Comment by Sivart13 | Hacker News Reader

The solution to most of these problems lies in policy, not in new tech advancements.

Maybe if our biggest companies did something other than suck up to science denying wackos, some progress could be made in these areas.

View on HN

> The solution to most of these problems lies in policy, not in new tech advancements.

That is not mutually exclusive. If technological advances result in a given technology becoming cheaper, more scalable, and easier to deploy, they also make it easier to advocate for and implement the relevant policies.

You can think of it like this: our "political technology" is not good enough to use solar energy at its current prices to replace fossil fuels as fast as we would like. Well, what about if we cut the price of solar by a factor of five? Perhaps it will be good enough then.

That sounds like just playing further and further into the game of the corrupt leaders. Who do you think would profit off that 5x margin? Would that margin come more likely from a scientific breakthrough of via some new exploitation of natural resources or human labor?

It's yearsss past time that our leaders should have changed policy.

> If technological advances result in a given technology becoming cheaper, more scalable, and easier to deploy, they also make it easier to advocate for and implement the relevant policies.

Your thinking reminds me of this https://xkcd.com/538/

I don't think that's the way I'd describe it though. It's more like "our political technology is not good enough to reliably do good things instead of bad things". Working around it by lowering prices of this or that is like if you're bad at darts so you just make the board bigger and bigger. Okay, maybe you'll hit it more often, but you didn't fix the problem that you're bad at darts, so everyone still at risk of having their eye put out by an errant throw. Moreover, I don't think I'm the only who finds it a bit perverse to accommodate to failures in that way rather than trying to actually make things better.

It can indeed feel perverse, but we have to do what is realistic, not what is unrealistic, especially with climate change where we are on a clock. Fixing our politics is probably much, much harder than lowering the price of solar to such low values that the market would simply have no choice but to adopt it, or developing other technological solutions.

Fixing the politics is still necessary, and rather urgent. (Yes, I don't see how.)

Otherwise we are in for a great societal upheaval that might make low price of solar irrelevant.

> Fixing the politics is still necessary, and rather urgent.

I agree. It's just wishful thinking to say that oh if we just lower the price of solar then it'll be okay. There are innumerable issues which are blocked by politics and we will never solve them all without fixing politics.

> Otherwise we are in for a great societal upheaval that might make low price of solar irrelevant.

These days I think a great societal upheaval may be the only way to fix politics.

Policy and funding. One of which will be sucked up by this venture.

I do not see how the second sentence follows from the first.

I would think the claim in the second sentence would only be relevant in case of the inverse of the claim in the first sentence.

> I do not see how the second sentence follows from the first.

Point 1 on the list is "Make Solar Energy Economical".

Solar is economical today - mostly due to China investing (and heavily subsidising) in solar for the past couple of decades; but compare to the US where certain particular big-businesses (oil companies, mostly) were instead cynically funding disinformation efforts and getting into bed with the Republican party (which dovetailed with the GOP's allying with other science-denying movements of the Bush Jr era like creationism and public-health matters with abstinence-only sex-ed and defunding gun safety research efforts) - means we're decades behind where we could have been...

Consider an alternative past, where the GOP had the backbone to resist the oil industry's corruptive influence and instead made a big bet on American Solar; it's entirely possible that instead of MAGA today we'd instead have a right-wing coalition strongly supporting solar and wind energy because they align nicely with American rugged individualism - whereas the current situation on the right is an unprincipled farce with inconsistencies in policy positions at every turn.

This is not a particularly new struggle: Jimmy Carter installed American-made solar water panels on the White House in 1979, then Reagan tore them out.

Solar is not (yet) economical for reliable, year-round electricity because of storage costs. China coal use is growing again this year.

Solar is profitable to install at both industrial and home scale in most areas. You're moving the goalposts.

It would be even better if it had ROI in 2 years instead of 10 for northern installs.

It's a lot more complicated than that -- Solar is great for discretionary, opportunistic, and time-shiftable additive demand, but not for replacing all-day baseline load. Using solar to dip into baseline demand sometimes is catastrophic, because the "profit" is exploiting its failure to provide consistent, reliable power but charging "default" prices that have an implicy assumption that power is consistent and reliable.

Nobody suggests moving to 100% solar. Some off-grid homes do it, but generally there are multiple complementary power sources available. There is no assumption that any single power source always provides consistent output and it wouldn't make sense, because production needs to match consumption, which is variable.

There is also no default price on energy markets, it fluctuates with supply and demand. Dynamic pricing by itself is enough of a reason for industrial users to build up their own power storage, which allows them to time-shift consumption from the grid.

Time-shifting is definitely going to increase, but it's not a bad thing. Look at how battery storage has made electricity cheaper and more reliable in California.

Where do you find the information for 2026?

Improving panels or batteries (e.g. through automated material discovery) would make solar energy economical in a lot more regions.

We do have that, now that Tesla has been abandoned by the Left and pretty much all of the big Oil and Gas companies have heavily invested in solar and wind. Ironically, it's the unions and support of keeping old jobs alive that is hindering the solar in the USA- which in my day used to be leftist type ideals.

Making progress requires first not dismissing your ideological outgroup along such lines, and instead trying to understand what actually motivates them.

I was not expecting such a high level of maturity and sophistication here. Bravo, sir.

It's a total delusion to think that the key to reverse-engineering the brain or producing energy from fusion is policy.

It also happens to be the favorite pretext for people to seize more political power and launder more money through nonprofits though.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com