Comment by smj-edison | Hacker News Reader

Comment by smj-edison | Hacker News Reader

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Honestly burning natural gas is much better than producing electricity with coal, and we can retrofit existing coal generation plants with natural gas and be like 85% cleaner. I'm kind of fed up with the absolutist takes of "don't use any fossil fuels," since that's just completely unreasonable in the next 10-20 years. Setting up power plants takes massive investment, and excluding AI-driven demand, there's not much money in power generation.

Solar has been making incredible progress, and works in sunny locations, but it's not a general purpose solution. Nuclear is getting there, but it's still too expensive and over regulated. I can't say much about wind as I haven't looked into it enough to say. Both thermal and hydro are location dependent, so good when it works but not a general purpose solution.

So that leaves coal and natural gas. We have a lot of both, but switching over to natural gas to coal by retrofitting existing power generation would make a massive difference imo.

At the end of the day, we want diversity in the power grid, not just one thing for every place, since every place is different/has its own history.

Gas produces about 40-50% less CO2 per unit of electricity produced, than coal. Not 85%.

As far as I'm concerned, a planet that is able to support human civilization ranks just a bit higher on the priority list than a diverse power grid and economic viability.

Economic viability is how we support human civilization, no? Economics is literally observing how humans interact and prioritize scarce resources like time and materials. So being not economically viable means it not happening.

Is your goal to reduce global temperatures? If so, it needs to be a sustainable effort. You don't get sustainable effort without economic viability.

If your goal is to dramatically reduce temperatures in the next 5 years, why not dump SiO2 in the atmosphere? That would bring the temperature down pretty fast by reflecting out sunlight in the upper atmosphere.

But if your goal is long-term change, we need an approach that works long-term.

Edit: sorry I forgot to mention your point on coal vs natural gas efficiency, I didn't realize it was not that much gain. I still think it's worth it though, since it's still making progress.

The problem is if you spend the next 5 years building new fossil fuel capabilities, the economic payoff won't be for at least 10 to 15 years more years. We absolutely should not be burning natural gas at that point. Not only would it cause continued havoc on our environment, zero emissions alternatives are already extremely cost competitive in most parts of the world. We should spend the next 5 years, instead, building for the future, not sinking our money into assets that will only cause further harm without providing any real cost savings.

Large scale battery storage, by the way, is already a mostly solved problem, and possible to do at a cost competitive price.

The only reason fossil fuels are "economically viable" is because we're ignoring the cost of the destruction they will bring in the future, and are already causing today. Nuclear is economically viable. We already have lots of nuclear power. Maybe it's a bit less profitable than fossil, maybe if we invested more into it it would be more profitable. Either way it seems entirely viable to me, except of course for all the trillions of dollars being made by extracting and selling fossil fuels to the detriment of all our futures. The only reason alternatives aren't "viable" is because they're priced out by fossil fuels. Take fossil fuels out of the equation and lots of new things become viable.

How is dumping SiO2 into the atmosphere economically viable? How do you make money doing that? If you're thinking that governments should pay private companies to do it, why can't governments simply pay private companies to produce clean power instead? Without having done any actual research on this topic, I suspect you might find that this would be far more "economically viable" than paying for the experimental climate engineering that might not even work, and might have devastating unintended consequences. For example I imagine shitloads of fine sand in the atmosphere would be a problem for aviation, and that's probably far from the only issue with it.

Excess atmospheric CO2 levels in and of itself are a health concern. Geoengineering will not help with the human toll of increasing CO2 and decreasing O2 levels

https://minimallysustained.com/blog/2026-01-11

Yes, your proposal would have been an acceptable approach in 1990. Instead, we have been happily increasing our CO₂ emissions every year since then*. No, we no longer want diversity in the power grid; "reasonable" solutions don't move the needle. Even if the entire world would go carbon zero overnight, the global temperature would continue to rise for decades before settling around a new steady state. It's not a matter of holding out a bit longer for tomorrow's magical solution: every piece of fossil fuel burned today makes the planet more unlivable tomorrow.

We are currently on track to reach the "climate-compatible" scenario of the Paris accords (+1.5°C climate increase by 2100) in 2030. We will exceed the "minor change" scenario (+2°C) in 2050. Those targets are already locked in, they are unavoidable because of the delay between CO₂ emissions and their full effect. Maintaining our current levels of emissions gets us to 3.5°C above historic averages in 2100, which is the lower end of the disaster scenario in the Paris accords.

https://royalsociety.org/news-resources/projects/climate-cha...

* except for a short drop in 2020 due to Covid. You may not like it, but that is what full climate change mitigation looks like today because we didn't act sooner.

It's become clear that when society suffers, they demand cheap fuel. There's no way around it. I don't see a path out of this: do you?

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