Comment by nexuist | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nexuist | Hacker News Reader

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>Localizing our entire energy dependence has got to have some serious national security benefits

It would also cause extreme instability by shooting up unemployment, destroying large corporations that offered valuable careers with good benefits, and exacerbate polarization between those who believe in man made climate change and those who don't.

Don't get me wrong - I think energy independence is the way to go - but paying $4.5 trillion to effectively ruin the lives of millions of people is not a popular position, especially given that we have terrible safety nets to allow these people to find other jobs.

I think the much more likely, less rough path is to continue renewable research until it becomes cheaper than fossil fuels in almost all cases. At which point the market will do the rest. The vast majority of fossil fuel users do not actually care that they use fossil fuel - they just care about energy generation. If you can give them a cheaper means to achieve that, they will go for it.

I imagine that it would take a fair number of new workers to help burn that $4.5T. They wouldn't work for oil companies, but they might still be involved in energy production.

Besides, it's not like we have some choice here. We can either decarbonize our world economy or perish. I'm awful sick of the 'but the jobs' arguments. We don't need jobs in outdated, polluting industries. That is outright theft of healthy ecosystems from future generations for short term gain, if you can call it that.

>We don't need jobs in outdated, polluting industries

Man, we don't need jobs at all. I want to live in an all-renewable automated world. But I realize that's not realistic in the short term, and it will take decades - perhaps even another century - until that desire is realized. Hence my reservation.

Well we are definitely in agreement about the long term then. Cheers

Of course! I'm sorry my original post made it seem like I was disagreeing with the vision you were advocating. I just had a problem with the means :)

>but paying $4.5 trillion to effectively ruin the lives of millions of people is not a popular position, especially given that we have terrible safety nets to allow these people to find other jobs.

Do you have any inkling of how many jobs $4.5 trillion would create? And how many climate change will destroy?

I've got some bad news for you about what's going to happen to the economy when we have 3° C of warming because we didn't do this fast enough.

Not to mention how many people will no longer need jobs.

Automation will screw us all far before climate change does. We need to stop caring about GDP and focus on building a jobless society - one run by cheap renewables and widespread automation - that will allow all of us to have good, healthy, safe lives.

Renewables are already cheaper than most fossil fuels. No further research is needed. We can use current tech to displace everything except the more efficient LNG. Natural cost declines will eventually overtake LNG but for now we can replace coal and peakers quite economically, especially if fossil fuels weren't much more heavily subsidized than renewables.

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