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Comment by ck2 | Hacker News Reader

well they are finding forever-chemical and micro-plastics in all freshwater in the USA now and even in ALL mother's milk

so safe bet that cancer rates are never going to be lower than they are today

remember US also just deregulated all pollution from power plants, funded re-starting coal plants and dropped car engine efficiency requirements

oh they are also trying to double oil-fracking output which toxifies groundwater and air for miles around it with offgassing

every rocket launch and deorbit by starlink et all also put toxic pollution into the atmosphere

so next decade should end well for cancer rates

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> every rocket launch and deorbit by starlink et all also put toxic pollution into the atmosphere

Bringing up Starship launches in the same discussion with car emissions is like bringing up skateboards when talking about traffic jams.

One big help for car emissions would be to make them electric.

You can't be worried about fracking and coal at the same time in the US. The former is the reason for the latter's demise

wow that's the most repeat fallacy, I even see in political commercials now

we don't use domestic oil, we sell it overseas

and oil until pop-up "ai" datacenters was not used for power production

you are thinking about solar and wind power for coal's demise

which now they are also defunding, even worse reusing the funds for coal investment

No, but we get so much natural gas as a side effect of the fracking that we literally can't distribute it all, it's effectively free. Which is why natural gas plants have been displacing coal plants for the last 20 years.

You... really need to read more before forming your opinions

No, really, when the fracking boom hit, it was so much cheaper than coal that it made a large dent in the coal industry for energy production. Solar and wind expansion have been far slower to roll out nationwide, but fracking was an almost overnight expansion of gas power production at that time.

Solar and wind subsidies have been illegally halted, and are the subject of ongoing litigation.

Solar and wind are commercially viable and provide about 30% of the electrical energy in Texas. Around 50% of California's daytime electrical energy is provided by solar and wind power. New projects are typically hamstrung by transmission permitting constraints.

While subsidies would help substantially, they aren't a necessary condition for continued adoption of renewable energy sources. Storage is probably the next big hurdle to displace fossil fuels once there's sufficient progress with transmission.

You can. It's not because fracking has displaced coal that it's overall a net benefit (I know it is somewhat true for climate change, I don't have an informed opinion concerning environmental pollution) and it's what should have happenned.

For example either renewables + batteries or nuclear could have displaced coal. Just because there wasn't enough money/political support for it doesn't mean that we shouldn't worry about both fracking and coal usage consequences.

Yeah, on a long enough timeline we should be moving away from fossil fuels as much as possible, but in the meantime fracking has allowed us to substantially lower carbon emissions without massive societal upheaval. It's like equating hybrid cars with traditional ICE vehicles. Sure they both have problems, but one has a lot fewer.

And no, renewables + batteries and nuclear couldn't have displaced coal precisely due to a lack of money and political support. Why are those constraints any less important? The goal isn't just to build renewable tech, the goal is to build a functional society that uses renewable tech. There also is a technological constraint here, fracking became viable in the early 2000s before modern battery and solar tech existed at its current price point.

Why shouldn’t one be able to worry about 2 bad things at the same time?

US is an outlier, globally we are making great progress in using renewables and cutting down carbon emissions (still a long way to go)

Humans are making progress figuring out how to make space use sustainable as well! There are multiple companies out there working in de-orbiting satellites that have reached end of life. A single launch can possibly de-orbit 3-6 satellites. The capacity of a single one of these companies is enough to stabilize the number of space junk today

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