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Comment by YawningAngel | Hacker News Reader

Ditching fossil fuels substantially isn't hard, it's just expensive. If we'd been willing to take the economic hit (and able to co-ordinate doing so as a species) we could have kept emissions well below the current atmospheric level within the bounds of current technology. It would just have meant building a lot of nuclear power plants and using shitty batteries for a lot of stuff

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Sure, but ditching your 20-year old beater of a car for a new electric one is not viable for a large percentage of the population at the moment, even in the richest countries. Maybe when 20-year old beater EVs are a thing the tide will turn.

I agree about nuclear, though. We should have been doubling down on them years ago, if only as a stop-gap until the renewable power storage problem has been solved. Although I'm of the opinion that they should be a solid percentage of our power output until fusion plants are viable. Our energy needs are only going to go up in the future.

> Sure, but ditching your 20-year old beater of a car for a new electric one is not viable for a large percentage of the population at the moment, even in the richest countries. Maybe when 20-year old beater EVs are a thing the tide will turn.

That's part of the coordinating as a species problem.

If only there were alternatives to personal cars to go from place to place. Oh well.

Not where I live.

> Ditching fossil fuels substantially isn't hard, it's just expensive.

I can't think of anything that is both expensive and easy to do. If something is very easy, why would it ever be expensive?

Scale. It's easy to dig a small hole with a shovel. It's another thing to dig a Grand Canyon.

Ditching fossil fuels on an individual level is easy. Ditching fossil fuels on a civilization scale is difficult and expensive.

What makes ditching fossil fuels on a civilization scale difficult is that ditching fossil fuels on an individual level is only easy for a portion of the population - a portion very much over represented on HN. If it were easy for all individuals to ditch fossil fuels (sorta the level of easy it is for all individuals to use paper instead of plastic straws) we'd pass some laws and ordinances and get it done in the blink of the eye. There would be push back sure - there are always reactionaries for everything - but the problem with EVs (and the problem that increased battery production scale might solve for us soon) is that it's expensive to switch to an EV and if America has spent more than a hundred years struggling to try and actually keep a roof[1] over everyone's head - getting a car in their pocket isn't going to be any easier.

1. I know it might feel the opposite at first glance when you think of how much EVs cost compared to a house in SF - but bear in mind that houses can be built extremely inexpensively.

I didn't word this very well. What I mean is that there are/were no huge engineering challenges involved. We can't build a space elevator at any price, we can massively reduce our emissions by 'merely' spending a truly unfathomable amount of money

Do you have a source on it being such a large amount of money? My impression is that just like water rights we've priced the externality so low that a lot of things weren't done even though they were cheap. Here's a 2007 analysis putting the cost at less than 1% GDP:

https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/sustainability/o...

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