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Comment by ThomPete | Hacker News Reader

It is a good thing on the long run but 3-4 trillion debt is tied up in fossile fuel economy. If that transition happens too fast thsts not a good thing.

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Not good only for a small subset of people on global scale, good for the rest of humankind and future generations.

$3-4 trillion debt effect the entire humankind. Where are you going to get the money to fix the climate issues if the entire economy collapses?

Debt balances with assets across humanity - that number doesn't mean we owe $3trn to aliens.

Some of the $3trn shows up as assets in pension funds and SWFs, but much of it is hiding in the balance sheets of oligarchs and middle eastern monarchs.

Not if the value of those assets declines, as when technology advances obsolete those assets.

Very interesting. Do you have a source for this?

The idea is that carbon fuel dependent industries, which is a lot of industries and infrastructure, have issued vast amounts of debt to fund investment and medium to long term expansion and operations. If the transition to e.g. electric vehicles and solar power generation happens rapidly many of those investments will become massive liabilities and the debt will go bad. This would also lead to a crash in oil prices, so only the cheapest producers would be viable, leaving the rest sitting there on huge oil production infrastructure rusting away, with even more bad debt it will never be able to repay.

I'm not sure how likely/unlikely this is, but that's the theory.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/mar/06/could-fo...

This does frighten me. It seems that a great example of one of the many risks of this kind of problem is Donald Trump or the like.

You're arguing that the problem with Donald Trump is that he's too green and/or too into creative destruction, and will cause the oil industry to implode?

Hm.

No, I think the implication is that if oil workers lose their jobs, while Trump promises to "make oil great again" (he's certainly threatened to cut funding for green energy), oil workers might vote for Trump.

There is a very high likelihood that this has already happened, and the voting will follow in the next day or so.

I meant only that when the structure of the economy changes to quickly, reactions like Donald Trump occur. If the US had been better about integrating all the people employed by manufacturing into the "new" economy I don't think they'd be so desperate for the kind change they think Donald Trump represents.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-10-18/batteries-...

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