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Comment by jmclnx | Hacker News Reader

>The screen on my phone showed that the alarm I had set was in the process of ringing, but for some reason, the phone wasn’t vibrating or making any sound.

And this is kind of an example of why it will be impossible to mitigate Climate Change.

When I was young, clocks did not requite any power from the grid. It wound them, set the alarm and you heard it. Now we have faucets, toilets that use power to turn on/off and flush. Almost everything that was manual (mechanical) is now powered. That power needs to come from somewhere. In these examples, there is no real reason to have faucets, toilets and alarm clocks connected to the grid.

Yes, I know in the case of the Cell Phone Alarm, it is probably a wash, but a mechanical clock in your house is probably a good thing to have.

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It's most likely to me that many more people have overslept because they forgot to wind their clock than have overslept because their iPhone hit a weird bug where the alarm sound didn't play. Simply because mechanical clocks have been around much longer.

Also at a certain time in my teenage years I could sleep through a ringing alarm clock with absolutely no awareness of it. The spring for the bell-ringing mechanism would unwind after maybe 30 seconds or so, and the ringing would stop, and I'd sleep completely through it.

Not sure the powered alarms would have done any better, but maybe after 10 minutes of ringing it might have woken me up.

> And this is kind of an example of why it will be impossible to mitigate Climate Change.

I find it very interesting (genuinely!) that your reaction to the linked article was to conclude (I think?) that it will be impossible to mitigate climate change.

Is your position, broadly stated, something like "because these days many more things require electricity than at some point in the past, our demand for electricity will be too high, and this will prevent us from mitigating climate change"?

>our demand for electricity will be too high

In a way, but I am pointing out how many new things now require electricity/power where in the past they did not. There are many items that were manual, another example(s) are kitchen items, like powered can openers, knife sharpeners, food processors, etc. Moving back to manual items for these is like getting low hanging fruit. Will help a bit when matched against the number of people using them.

For climate change we need to change our habits, but many people cannot even walk/bike to the store that is a half a mile (~1km) away, instead they drive.

Based upon that alone, unless we are forced to change, we never will until cities are under water.

I think one way to force a change is to get gas prices high. But even doing that, with high rents in the cities, many people cannot afford to live in a walkable area. So in essence, our children, grandchildren are pretty much screwed.

But at least there are some easy changes people can make.

> a mechanical clock in your house is probably a good thing to have.

There are much better and more reliable options. Solar powered watches that can run months without recharging, some digital watches run a decade with a single battery. A mechanical watch, on the other hand, has to be wound regularly and is usually far less accurate.

I like automatic mechanical watches but I don't think they can compete in any technical aspect, that's not the reason one would use them nowadays.

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