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Comment by overcast | Hacker News Reader

Let's focus more on the worthless wastes of energy like cryptocurrency, and less on life saving ones like air conditioning. The latter does FAR more right than wrong. Should we have more energy efficient machines, and less harmful chemicals? Of course. But out of ALL of the technology to write about, air conditioning contributing to environmental destruction should be on the bottom of the list. When it's 120F inside a tin can house in India, you go tell those people they should be laying off the harmful AC while you're trading imaginary internet coins.

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> Let's focus more on the worthless wastes of energy like cryptocurrency

AC is one of the ways crypto currency wastes energy.

> But out of ALL of the technology to write about, air conditioning contributing to environmental destruction should be on the bottom of the list

It shouldn't be at the bottom, because there are easy environmental wins through efficiency without abandoning it, e.g., use of geothermal rather than air-source heat pumps. But there is a greater up-front costs, so even though it is both environmentally superior and cheaper on current market conditions in the long run, the reality of the way people make decisions means that mass adoption over air-source heat pumps will probably need a public policy push or take a very long time.

We can do both, making air conditioning more efficient requires time so we should start now.

Indeed. Simply keep providing feed in tarrifs for renewables, thereby ensuring cryptomining and AC are both paying their "fair share" for receiving clean energy. Not that regulation isn't important (ie Energy Star), but market signals are important as well.

In a perfect world, a refundable carbon tax fixes all of this, but we don't live in a perfect world.

ACs have improved leaps and bounds over the last 20 years. I don't think we need any extra effort into this. The nature of the beast is to lower cost while providing a good product. It is simply what customers will demand.

On the other hand, bitcoin is an issue, and it is only going to get worse. No need to split focus until that beast is tamed.

No need to split focus until that beast is tamed.

What do you mean by that? Are we as a society not able to do more than one thing at a time?

I don't have numbers at hand, but I'm willing to bet the energy spent on air conditioning dwarfs crypto by at least an order of magnitude. Focusing on the biggest areas first is usually the most efficient.

I don't agree. It's like reducing your debt. Focusing on paying off the smallest debts first is most efficient. Always start with low hanging fruit. Knock those out, and you see real progress.

There's tons of low-hanging fruit in regards to air-conditioning. Even a simple thing like relaxing dress codes so that people could dress appropriately for the weather, so the set point for the air conditioning moved up a few degrees, could be a huge savings if everybody did it. Nobody should be wearing a wool suit in the middle of summer.

Meanwhile something like "stop using cryptocurrency" is not feasible. Are we supposed to have every country enact laws to ban it? Who's going to enforce that? Let me guess, a bunch of people wearing wool suits sitting in an air conditioned office...

So, don't focus on the biggest areas first then? Make up your mind. Are we supposed to have every country enact laws to enforce weather appropriate dress codes? Who is going to be the fashion police?

I don't agree that just "biggest" is the best place to concentrate on to the exclusion of other things. Taking into account the usefulness to society of the activities and the difficulty in acting would definitely both be appropriate.

Secondly, what sense does it make to refuse to do anything about small problems until they become bigger problems?

And of course, there's no reason we can only do one thing instead of many things.

Why can't we focus on both? At very least A/C should be used during the summer to make indoor temperature merely "warm" instead of chilly. Acclimating to winter temperatures during the summer just makes the outdoors that much more unbearable.

“What happens when humans treat themselves like dairy products chilled behind glass? Civilization declines.” http://www.printmag.com/article/a_cold_day_in_hell/

Of course we can, but I prefer taking out the easy tasks first. Changing the AC habits of billions of people is a bit more work, than turning off crypto nonsense.

The people who use large amounts of energy to farm bitcoin make up <1% of humankind. Basically everyone eats meat.

this entire line of reasoning is a new form of denialism. the specific keywords here don't matter, its the "whataboutism" formulation that does. the answer to which of these things we need to do about climate change is "basically 95% of them so enough of the 'well-actually' crap already".

Yeah, but crypto is a hobby, air conditioning is a medical need in extreme weather. We can literally just stop crypto mining forever and very little of value is lost.

> We can literally just stop crypto mining forever and very little of value is lost.

Not if you have any crypto assets/positions :-)

Tell me about the tangible, useful things (like groceries, vehicles, living spaces) these assets/positions have bought for Bitcoin owners.

You'll lose them anyways ;)

Most of mining is being done using power that has no other buyers, with very preferential prices per KwpH in exchange for promise of taking all available power during particular hours. Also, mining is being done far far away from places where weather is hot. It is simply less efficient there.

Besides the denialism in the comment that the siblings mention, there's also the issue that ACs tend to get _overused_ a lot. Going from 35C & 100% humidity to 26C & 50% humidity is quite reasonable, going to 18C & 20% humidity is not. And there are a lot more low hanging fruits when it comes to conserving ernergy surrounding AC usage: bad insulation, stores keeping their doors open etc. etc.

If someone enjoys keeping their house cooler than absolutely necessary, long showers, driving instead of walking short distances, etc. then I don't feel like this is "overusing" or "wasting" anything - technology is supposed to make our lives better, and the solution should focus on working around these use cases existing instead of trying to alter people's behavior such that they're getting less personal value in their lives.

So I'm pointing out that AC gets overused a lot, and that there is a lot of unnecessary waste, and your response is that you don't view waste as waste as long as you "enjoy" it, and that's what technology is for? That strikes me as incredibly short-sighted. Global warming is a very big issue that is already making it more difficult for many people to enjoy their lives.

And what's your solution - not let people use AC in their houses as they see fit? Good luck with that. Even Californians balked on that idea.

Indeed. There does seem to be a lot of people who take a lot of pride in unnecessary waste. Even among the supposedly smart people here, just the suggestion that we should reduce waste results in angry backlash.

And how do propose to enact and enforce that law when we don't want that? Do you think because someone writes something on a piece of paper that says you can only use so much AC that people are just going to say, "oh, ok..someone wrote something on a piece of paper...that's it".

At some point you have to think about are the serious repercussions (most likely lots of violence) worth what I'm proposing.

I'm confused. Are you arguing against the idea that we should reduce waste by proposing a possible measure and then arguing against that same measure?

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