Comment by anon7000 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by anon7000 | Hacker News Reader

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Look, I think you made some good points, but at the same time, humans have become better at handling the climate because we’ve been able to predict it and have found solutions to certain known issues. What happens when it gets less predictable, like when certain regions get much less water for an extended period, is very much unknown.

Your last claim makes no sense. Is there actually a widespread political effort to ban air conditioning or make it hard to get in Europe? That certainly isn’t the case in the US. And yet hot summers are still killer in cities which aren’t accustomed to them: that’s climate change doing the killing.

Solar is just about the most abundant source of energy on the planet, and easily decentralized. Plugin solar is becoming increasingly popular and cheap, for example.

I think energy production would be much more abundant and directly in control of the people if governments stopped subsidizing energy sources that need massive amounts of resources just to keep running. Why not give solar an advantage when every watt installed can just… work by itself for the next three decades? Every watt of a gas plant needs you to figure out who to buy gas from forever.

Regarding air conditioning in Europe, I suspect that there are other interests at play given that there has been zero pushback against air conditioning in cars.

Air conditioning in buildings is likely viewed as a threat to gas providers as most modern cooling devices also have a heating mode that competes directly with gas heating.

At least here in the UK, recent revisions to the default planning rules around heat pumps (“Permitted Development” legislation) removed the restriction that an install be “used solely for heating purposes” and revised this to “not be used solely for the purpose of cooling”.

The Boiler Upgrade Scheme grant also permits cooling - it’s based on the heating credentials of a unit only.

So in Britain at least, installing cooling systems in private residences seems to be getting easier.

> Air conditioning in buildings is likely viewed as a threat to gas providers as most modern cooling devices also have a heating mode that competes directly with gas heating.

Not sure it makes sense, most of those countries are already phasing out fuel/gas boilers.

IMO it's just cultural shift is slow to adjust (in those countries, a few decades ago AC would have been a wasteful luxury, summer temperature would be well below 30 except for a few days).

Reality is much of Europe hasn’t needed air con until recently

mMy phone tells me that the temperature this week has been 15°C above the long term average for this time of year.

Don’t really need air con when the peak temperature in the past has been 20–25°C

Europe is a big place. Domestic air con is ubiquitous in Italy, rare in the UK. But even in the UK, places like shops and offices will usually have air con.

It’s a cultural issue, nothing to do with industry interests

People often forget that architecture in (central and northern) Europe is build under the assumption that the climate has more cold extremes than hot extremes. Thus, buildings were constructed to both retain and collect as much heat as possible to save on heating in the winter. Now, if you just slap an AC onto that it will have to fight all of the passive heat collection. In other words, you would have to also close off all south facing and roof windows for it to work.

Furthermore, the way the last mile distribution of power works is often underground (with the cables directly in the sand, no hose or tube around it) which makes it expensive to upgrade to handle a much higher peak consumption. Only lucky thing is that you mostly need AC when the sun is shining, thus local production via photovoltaic cells is a good solution that sidesteps the power grid problem.

You can buy natural gas powered chillers and heat pumps, there are many ways to run a compressor pump.

> I think energy production would be much more abundant and directly in control of the people if governments stopped...

Lots of people pat themselves on the back for (correctly) believing that climate change is real. Why is it so hard for people to also believe that regulatory capture and oligarchy are real, and directly responsible for the lack of action against climate change?

Think of all the for-profit power utility companies in the US. Why are they for-profit? For that matter, why are ISPs for-profit and not run as non-profits with heavy government assistance? Answer, basically: Because the existing people that make lots of money off them have been lobbying heavily to make it so. Similarly, it is no coincidence the current leadership in the US is actively against renewable energy.

A lot of the existing wealth, especially in North America and Europe was built on top of fossil fuels directly or indirectly (cars, power plants, industries, maintaining diplomatic relations with oil-rich nations). That dependence is hard to unwind and is going to take 50 years or more unless the US electorate can start electing people that believe in climate change. And for this reason, actually addressing climate change is going to come from unintuitive social actions, like making smaller housing more fashionable, moving to urban areas, possibly cracking down heavily on crime in those areas, and financially rewarding the use of public transport and bikes.

I'm pretty sure that GP agrees with you on this point? You just cut off the rest of their quote where they point that out.

Do they?

Unless stuff like "Why not give solar an advantage..." is a rhetorical question with the answer of "Because lots of current billionaires would make less money", I don't think they are pointing out the same stuff I said.

Climate change is science: there is evidence, prediction, measurement, all of that.

Oligarchy and regulatory capture are undeniably real, but they are not scientific. They’re social phenomena, and much harder to theorize about and model than e.g. what happens to rainfall in Northern Europe with a 1.5c El Niño.

Worse, while oligarchy is absolutely real and causing great harm, its amorphous nature means some people blame it the way people used to blame demons, or humours. Flat tire? The oligarchs! Sprained ankle? The oligarchs!

So while both climate change and oligarchy are real problems, I don’t see them as the same class of problem at all, and the tools to address are different. They’re entangled (oligarchs who will never feel discomfort short of defenestration are unlikely to allow disruption of their wealth just for feeding people), but different.

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