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Comment by twoodfin | Hacker News Reader

In which the real incomes of billions of the poorest people are significantly lower thanks to decades of compounded lower economic growth?

TANSTAAFL.

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We are not even at a place where we have seriously tried the low hanging options, like a major serious worldwide effort at building better energy technologies(there has been a lot of great work, but not great relative to what we can do), reducing tariffs on solar, giving cheap access to green technologies to poorer countries, or researching and publicizing mitigating steps which can reduce damage when natural disasters occur.

Also, there are plenty of costs for the default option which should be included in the analysis. These are severe especially for low lying countries with a big coastline. But even for other countries, public health suffers due to burning fossil fuels, and political instability in oil rich countries has a big effect on the world.

This wreaks of fear-mongering. How can you claim that only the poorest would be affected? Income as a number of dollars is irrelevant, only purchasing power matters. i.e. the gap between rich and poor in real purchasing terms.

I didn't say "only", but generally the poor in the developing world spend a much larger fraction of their income on energy. They are also the most dependent on significant economic growth to see qualitative improvements in their lives and well-being.

Seems like jobs installing and maintaining solar and wind farms could solve both problems. There are probably already local projects going on all over the developing world that don't get much press. Something Facebook discovered when they tried to parachute in with their perfect, locked down internet solution and discovered people were already working on the access problem.

So we put taxes on the things we need to stop doing and distribute the revenue to the poor (or everyone for simplicity) who would then spend the money on the now cheaper things we need to start doing.

thanks to global economic growth those people no longer have to live in huts but are allowed to sew bags - they can buy Nikes and Coke!

As the economist Bjorn Lomborg has been quite vocal about, we have lots of global problems and fixing climate change isn't the biggest problem.

https://youtu.be/pQSGuC9GF70

He does argue that we should be spending a lot more on research to find cheaper solutions, however.

[Update]

While you're downvoting me, you should understand that I'm simply passing along one of main arguments made by the Republican party. You live in your echo chamber and they live in their's.

Can anyone guess why we are moving backwards in addressing the problem?

Bjørn Lomborg is well known for a bait and switch strategy to climate change. He recognises the problem and often gives reasonable recommendations, but then throws in a lot of other problems together with misleading/discredited statistics to explain why we shouldn't actually do anything near term about climate change.

For example, he argues that fixing poverty with cheap energy has bigger economic impact than fixing climate change. He then puts up a statistic connecting expansion of coal energy in China with a fall in extreme poverty. However he doesn't mention that the fall in poverty can mostly be attributed to improved agriculture and happened a decade before the coal expansion. Further, if you really wanted to get energy to rural areas far away from the power grid, distributed energy production from subsidised solar would be much cheaper as well as environmentally reasonable.

Bjørn is not the worst denier, but he is also not intellectually honest and you get a strong feeling that he intentionally tries to make preventing climate change seem at odds with fighting poverty, when it is really to sides of the same problem.

> Bjørn is not the worst denier

Do you believe it's possible for intelligent, informed, people of good will to look at a set of facts and come to different policy proposals?

Public policy is informed by science, but it is grounded in values. It seems to me that you call Bjorn Lomborg intellectually dishonest simply because he disagrees with you on policy.

Why do you assume people call Bjorn Lomborg intellectually dishonest simply because he disagrees with them. It is more likley that they are calling him intellectually dishonest because he is intellectually dishonest. Occam's razor applies.

I assume good faith on the part of Bjorn Lomborg. I also assume good faith on the part of the parent. I am trying to point out that well informed, well intentioned people can disagree without being intellectually dishonest.

Also Occam's razor really doesn't apply: a) Bjorn Lomborg makes arguments in good faith and the parent is wrong b) Bjorn Lomborg makes arguments in bad faith and the parent is right

To my eye, a & b are equivalently parsimonious in their assumptions.

> distributed energy production from subsidised solar would be much cheaper as well as environmentally reasonable

How can you claim that energy production subsidised with public money is cheaper than the same energy produced with no subsidies? The Chinese government could spend the money saved from solar subsidies in unemployment salaries or hospitals and free health care.

What energy source is unsubsidized? It's definitely not fossil fuels.

This comment is often made without providing any detail. Can you provide some numbers, with references, for more discussion?

For the US: https://www.eia.gov/analysis/requests/subsidy/

The numbers are a bit out of date. All I could find other than that is a reference to a study in 2015 on Wikipedia, but it links to a page that's missing the data the reference was pointing to.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_subsidies

It's a long and complicated document, but from a quick scan it seems that most of the subsidies listed are directed towards either renewable energies and alternative fuels (ethanol, alcohol) or the distribution grid, so proportionally equal for all sources.

Hey, I'm just reporting back one of the common responses that I get when discussing climate change with people. If you've got something of substance (e.g. a few links) that address why he's wrong, that would help.

Btw, I got downvoted because people don't like my comment?

I really wish HN readers would get out of their echo chamber and understand the other side. The controlling Republican party really does believe that it's not worth investing the money into fixing climate change because of arguments like Bjorn's.

Pick ANY article on the WSJ that discusses solar, climate change, or even Tesla, and it degenerates into bashing subsidizing solar, climate change bashing, etc

Here's today's article: https://www.wsj.com/articles/solar-company-sunrun-was-manipu...

By the way, can you provide references for your claims?

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