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Comment by simonh | Hacker News Reader

Greenpeace have done in depth investigations and analysis of the environmental impact of tech companies. If anyone cares about real environmental impact and does something about it, it's Greenpeace. They have given Apple the highest rating for environmental responsibility for any of the big tech companies. In fact the only tech company at all they are behind is Fairphone. They're ahead of Microsoft, Sony, Google, and a very long way ahead of Samsung and Amazon.

How are we supposed to distinguish between virtue signalling moves and real, practical steps to address sustainability. Are you suggesting Greenpeace doesn't know how to distinguish in this way?

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Pretty sure that an organization that pushes the idea that Gas is renewable and Nuclear is bad for the environment really isn't something we can trust in any issues relating to the environment.

If you're talking about the wind to gas project, you do know the gas involved in hydrogen right?

Yes that is produced mostly by Natural gas. During 2020 the mix was ~99.2% Naturalgas and 0.8% wind. Producing hydrogren from naturalgas puts the CO2 footprint at around the same as coal since per kwh hydrogen you need to input double the amount of energy.

But this is such a straw man. Nobody at Greenpeace is suggesting we use natural gas to hydrogen at scale. It's part of diversifying the energy economy in ways that _can_ be sustainable in future. This is a way of pump priming an infrastructure that can make (even) more sense of renewables and solve distribution headaches.

It'd be better if they'd start an energy company that produces hydrogen only from nuclear and wind instead. That way it would be sustainable and promote important sustainable energy sources.

> If anyone cares about real environmental impact and does something about it, it's Greenpeace

Given Greenpeace's actions against Nuclear they're only helping the oil/coal industries for all I care

That says more about your attitude towards nuclear than about Greenpeace though.

Nuclear power is a hot button topic for sure, but while I am somewhat pro nuclear myself, I have to admit there are plenty of perfectly reasonable objections to it. "On a par with Exxon" is wing-nut level cranky though.

> "On a par with Exxon" is wing-nut level cranky though.

It's a hyperbole for sure. But how much CO2 have the nuclear closures put in the atmosphere

Some, but CO2 is not the only concern here. Greenpeace is a broad-spectrum environmental campaign group. As I've commented elsewhere, I'm not inherently anti-nuclear, but cost is not the only issue. The political and institutional demands nuclear places on societies are substantial — and I don't see much evidence anyone has risen to them yet. Even big pro nuke places like France don't have fully funded schemes to decommission old nuclear plants. And in the US money taxed from generators has been corruptly spent on other things... Whether it's "fair" or not, this is a strike against nuclear because until we can safely decommission plants and store waste it's unproven tech and the costs (including externalities) are not fully known.

Mainly the problem is phasing out nuclear power before coal.

By doing doing so, we are losing 20 years in a race against climate change.

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