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Comment by tomp | Hacker News Reader

Silly question, but: what have you done? Have you stopped flying & driving a car? Do you not use iPhone and eat bananas to minimize global transport emissions? What’s your energy usage compared to 1, 5, 10 years ago?

The “climate industry” is full of people loudly proclaiming they’re holier than thou, but realistically there are few serious global solution except basically going back to pre-industrial world. Thanks but no thanks, I’d rather bet on technological breakthroughs in the next few decades.

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What I've done:

- designed and built a house on renewable energy

- designed and built a windmill

Unfortunately both of these I have had to abandon, the former because it is on the wrong continent compared to where I am today, the latter because of permitting hassles.

- I do have the maximum surface of the roof covered in solar panels, a good 2500W peak.

- transport myself everywhere I can using bicycle / e-bike (< 30 km, sometimes much more than that if I'm not in a hurry)

- eat very little - hardly any, actually - meat / poultry / fish

That still leaves a ton of room for improvement but as long as I'm living in my current situation I personally can't do a whole lot more for a variety of reasons, and I would if I could.

I have fortunately been able to stop flying completely, all of our work is now remote and we are pushing hard to keep it that way (when before our customers demanded on site visits all over europe).

Compared to 1 year ago my energy usage is probably about half, compared to 10 years ago it is probably less than 25% because this is a much more temperate climate.

So, what have you done?

The only thing that would actually make a difference is going full nuclear.

But the greens put a stop to that, so I find it hard to take them - and anyone else who, like you, writes paragraphs about things that in reality do not matter - seriously.

This is a very naive view of things, which given your comment history (inane one-liners without even a short moment to compose something more substantial and with more thought about it) seems to be your model.

Going 'full nuclear' without capping the per-capita energy budget is still going to release a very large amount of energy. Besides that heating in many places is based on natural gas. Then there is the per kilo-watt hour cost of nuclear energy which is way higher than solar or wind when taken over the full lifetime of the installation including the eventual cleanup / disposal.

Nuclear energy is an option but it isn't the only option and it has serious drawbacks, just like every other option on the table today.

The best thing we can do is to limit our consumption. But that's easy to say from the point of view of the developed world, where consumption is excessive. It will be more than offset by the developing countries gains leaving us with a situation that is net worse than things are today even if we do our best. This is not a simple problem and naive one sentence solutions are not going to get us to a sustainable situation.

Sorry.

> Then there is the per kilo-watt hour cost of nuclear energy which is way higher than solar or wind when taken over the full lifetime of the installation including the eventual cleanup / disposal.

If we went full nuclear the cost per kWh would go down a lot. Costs are high because of minimal investment in the last several decades, western countries have not been building NPP and therefore aren't good (i.e. efficient) at it.

> The best thing we can do is to limit our consumption. But that's easy to say from the point of view of the developed world, where consumption is excessive. It will be more than offset by the developing countries gains leaving us with a situation that is net worse than things are today even if we do our best.

The cognitive dissonance is jarring. For the reasons you yourself state, clearly limiting consumption is NOT the solution.

As opposed to you who has the insight of a child ?

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