Comment by sceew | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sceew | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

So what is the solution?

What do you do about the expansion of populations (http://www.nzdl.org/gsdl/collect/fnl2.2/archives/HASH8cd2.di...) in developing countries that are still waiting for rapid growth? Intuitively, as they transition to developed economies that will come with greater CO2 emissions. Do you force them to adapt less economically viable sources of energy consumption? Natural gas may be the best bet there. I am not holding my breath for solar power and wind turbines to be adopted by countries that still face widespread malnutrition.

I don't think democracy and liberal capitalism will have any consequential solution to global warming, people are too inherently motivated by short-term and local gain. Unfortunately, any massive change will probably have to be dictatorial/authoritarian/militant, what are the byproducts of that?

The cost of solar is dropping fast, and for the time being the largest emitters per capita are developed economies. So we should start in developed economies, were we can spare the effort and then work on developing economies.

On the poorest economies, quite a few of them are close to the equator were solar looks very good, plus a rather nice thing about solar is, that it scales very well. In countries were malnutrition is still a wide spread problem, a solar powered lamp enables people to work outside of daylight hours, and a solar oven prevents them from sitting in kerosene fumes while cooking. This are small appliances with a rather minimal footprint, but improves their lives in ways it is hard to imagine for us, who are just used to always having electricity.

Plus, there is not reason to assume that they have to take the same development path as the developed economies. They have the second mover advantage, that is developing economies can avoid the problems western industrialization did create, simply because they can see these problems in the west.

> Do you force them to adapt less economically viable sources of energy consumption?

How about: Voting for policies of boosting the development of renewable energies in the US, putting to work all the unemployed of the coal mines, so it's American companies (instead of, say, Chinese) that make them more economically viable than non-renewable sources. So when these countries transition to developed economies, they become consumers of American manufacturing.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com