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Comment by antonvs | Hacker News Reader

“Pro-social” is a strange way to describe something that’s actively contributing to the death of our civilization.

Looked at another way, shale natural gas has largely displaced coal which emits more CO2 and can be burned in the same power plants. This base load allows for more wind and solar. Natural gas is a great bridge fuel.

> and can be burned in the same power plants

I don't believe nat gas is burned in the same plants as coal.

Most "closed coal plants" in the US are really plants that retrofitted to use nat gas.

here's a decent recap (now a couple years out of date)

https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=44636

Ah, cool.

It’s a straightforward retrofit.

If you could remove a gigaton of usable coal from the world and replace it with an equivalent amount of natural gas, that would be a nice improvement.

When the natural gas is displacing coal by being cheaper, that's pretty bad in the long run. We're still probably going to use that coal later, and cheaper fossil fuels reduce the price pressure to install renewables.

We probably won’t go back to coal, most of the cheap high quality surface level coal is gone and we have a lot of natural gas. We also may see a resurgence of nuclear power and a lot more solar of course.

If we were running out of cheap coal anyway then we would have been better off without the surge in natural gas.

Higher prices would promote a faster shift directly from coal to solar (or nuclear if the price works out). And there was already enough natural gas production to fill the gaps that solar, wind, and batteries can't fill.

This is some rhetorical thing people say, but you don't actually believe it, right? You're not that wildly delusional? You think that if the air is 4C warmer, we won't have laws, people, culture, or whatever else makes a civilization? And that in the mean time, people being able to heat their homes in winter and not freeze to death, and otherwise afford electricity, are not offsetting pro-social benefits?

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