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Comment by orf | Hacker News Reader

You can see that they where successful in their mission to spread FUD about climate change in these very comments.

Pretty scary for a supposedly educated crowd.

The strange part is that even if all climate change scientists are completely wrong, what do we really stand to lose by switching to renewable sources and just polluting less?

If you could replace a coal guzzling, smoke spilling power plant with a silent solar panel field, why wouldn't you?

> what do we really stand to lose by switching to renewable sources and just polluting less?

Except that if we really knew about climate change in the 1980’s we should have been building Nuclear Power Plants at a massive rate. However, a lot of environmental groups were against that, and actively were anti-nuclear. In fact, some countries and states are decommissioning active working nuclear power plants. There is no room for anti-nuclear sentiment if you really believe that climate change is the biggest threat to civilization.

Or should we hold environmental groups accountable for being anti-nuclear when surely they knew that nuclear would have resulted in less CO2, yet they openly opposed it.

At this point, nuclear power needs to be rebranded to be viable. The tech is fantastic but 50 years of apolcalypse porn has ensured people see mushroom clouds as soon as they hear "nuclear". A name change should be the first priority.

Once there was a good association when it was called atomic power. That was before 80s.

We could call it rock power, but the bad association will persist and get boosted by alarmists anyway.

Electricity and heat generation is a lot but still just 25% of emissions. It's probably the easiest part to fix and it's still hard.

The harder part of the pie would be agriculture and industry.

> what do we really stand to lose by switching to renewable sources and just polluting less?

Hundreds of millions of human lifetimes of effort? Extreme social unrest? See what's going on in France, Holland, and Chile for a taste.

Lawrence Livermore National Labs publishes a great chart of US energy sources and consumption. In 2018 we used over 101 quadrillion British Thermal Units of energy. Renewables are a tiny fraction, mostly hydro and biomass.

https://www.llnl.gov/news/us-energy-use-rises-highest-level-...

I am reminded of the comic, "What if it's a big hoax and we create a better world for nothing?"

I wouldn’t doubt that hacker news has its share of fake accounts, shills, and propagandist. Just like the rest of social media, people are being manipulated by special interests with lots of money.

Because anyone who disagrees with my pov must either be fake or a paid-off shrill.

That’s a logical fallacy. Fake accounts and misinformation/propaganda campaigns can (and do) exist outside of mine or your behavior or feelings.

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