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Comment by pydry | Hacker News Reader

>At no point does the article claim "war is good because it's spurring green energy spending"

Instead it pretends it has significant upsides that are based upon a spurious theory.

Realistically renewables require an intense amount of capital that this war has suddenly made a lot more expensive. This will hamper green energy investment - older plants will be kept running for longer, new green energy plants won't get built. This will not be good for green energy.

The article is just a slightly less crass form of war cheerleading that they probably hope will age better than their 2003 Iraq war cheerleading.

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> spurious evidence

Why are IEA forecasts spurious?

> less crass form of war cheerleading

Would the article be better if it just commented on the acceleration of investment in renewables, leaving unsaid the cause of said acceleration because some readers find it distasteful?

This is one of the more surprisingly anti-intellectual threads I’ve seen on HN.

>Why are IEA forecasts spurious?

What do they have to do with the war? Renewable energy was projected to grow anyway in spite of the war because of the declining costs of renewables.

However, since they are capital intense and war made capital expensive... that'll be a drag on investment, won't it?

>Would the article be better if it just commented on the acceleration of investment in renewables, leaving unsaid the cause of said acceleration

It would be better if they were honest about the cause.

>This is one of the more surprisingly anti-intellectual threads I’ve seen on HN.

If you say so.

> Renewable energy was projected to grow anyway in spite of the war because of the declining costs of renewables

And now it's growing faster. Because fossil fuel prices went up. That's the article's thesis.

Faster than what? This articles cites nothing more than a hunch and trends that existed pre war.

If an article about investment in swimming classes that was boosted by a series of drowned children, and praises those classes for how they also increase overall health and fitness, the article is pro-drowning?

There have been some Russian articles indicating that the Ukraine war gave a boost to the Russian economy, which is why it grew this year.

They were exhibiting nothing more than a purely objective opinion based upon the purest of evidence of course.

Many Russians would believe that the idea that an article like that used spurious evidence to push a pro war agenda absurd. Like being pro drowning, as you put it.

> the Russian economy, which is why it grew this year

This is basement-level trolling. The Russian economy shrank last year. Its central bank just forecast between a 1% contraction and 1% growth for 2023 [1].

[1] https://www.reuters.com/markets/europe/russian-central-bank-...

I’m sure you’re familiar with supply and demand. The investment in green tech is driven by price of renewables compared to price of fossil fuels.

A big decline in supply of fossil fuels (which is what has happened in Europe due to the war) shifts the trade-off significantly in favor of green energy. This shift can be so dramatic that it drives up the short term cost of green energy. That’s a good problem to have because it just means demand is really high, which can be solved by more investment in the supply side.

Your thesis that this would somehow reduce investment is completely backwards. You sell pickaxes during a gold rush, not before or after.

>I’m sure you’re familiar with supply and demand.

Yes, that's precisely why I said that the cost of capital going up due to war (higher interest rates) would have a dampening effect on green energy which is very capital intensive.

That's called "supply and demand in action".

The pro war argument (the Economist's) would *ignore* this facet, arguing only "fossil fuels are more expensive -> green energy will definitely be more popular".

It was quite a simple point.

The cost of capital didn’t go up due to war.

> why I said that the cost of capital going up due to war (higher interest rates) would have a dampening effect on green energy which is very capital intensive

If only someone looked at the rate of new and projected investment into green energy after a period of both (a) Russia invading Ukraine and (b) rising interest rates. They could write an article about it and clear up the confusion.

> It would be better if they were honest about the cause.

Which is what? What should they say about it?

That their evidence says actually that renewables were trending down in price before the war rather than trying to attribute it to a war they happen to like.

> renewables were trending down in price before the war rather than trying to attribute it to a war

You didn’t read the article because it never makes this claim. In particular, you got a foundational fact incorrect inasmuch as renewable prices are not going down. Nobody’s energy prices are. But relative to fossil fuels, on a real basis, they’ve become more competitive.

> Why are IEA forecasts spurious?

While I don't agree with the post you're replying to, the IEA has a long history of terrible predictions with renewable energy. Not sure if they've improved recently, but for the better part of two decades, they predicted negligible growth in the solar market, even after being contradicted every single year:

https://maartensteinbuch.com/2017/06/12/photovoltaic-growth-...

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