Comment by mlazos | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mlazos | Hacker News Reader

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> It’s sad I can make this prediction about your opinion, but I’m assuming you are probably not an advocate of fracking or nuclear power or hydro. Please correct me if I’m wrong.

Lol yeah you’re wrong. We’re on HN after all, everyone loves nuclear. Fracking is also horrible for the environment and for climate change. Most wells leak methane which is a 6x worse greenhouse gas than CO2. Hydro and nuclear are fantastic, although we’ve dammed most places we can in the US already. Anyway I’m against coal, the climate is a cost of coal, it isn’t cheap for society. I’m for investing in doubling the nuclear capacity of this country to eliminate coal completely. Or spend the trillion dollars we’ve dumped on wars to build a superconducting power grid and save the transmission waste. Also as others have said your argument is a ridiculous straw man. Nobody is talking about going back to the Stone Age. Just talking about how to build cleaner sources of energy. If the weather of the past year hasn’t convinced you of the necessity of this, I’m afraid for the future of the world.

I’m glad you are willing to invest in other forms of clean energy.

That argument is not a straw man. I know very few want to go back to the stone age (some radicals do), that’s not my argument. A lot of people vastly overestimate the ease of transitioning and are making laws and goals and plans that are wildly optimistic and out of touch that will in effect lead to unstable grids and more people without power. No one sane wants that, but that’s already happening because a lot of places that have been aggressive about transitioning have done it poorly and without proper backup power generation options.

If COVID hasn’t convinced you rushed and panicked centralized interventions make things worse, and you’re willing to engage in even more of the kind of massive disruptions that we’ve only begun to see the full effects of because of a heatwave, you’re likely to kill more people with rushed intervention: https://nypost.com/2017/07/10/heat-death-hysteria-the-wrong-...

I meet a lot of people that are dogmatic about wind and solar and think it’ll work by itself and that the whole world needs to transition to that alone right now. In combination with other sources, in the US and rich countries we can afford to build all the clean energy we need, if all options are actually on the table. But doing that globally and doing it too fast will kill people.

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