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Comment by crowcroft | Hacker News Reader

Are environmental externalities accounted for? How do we accurately measure the 'benefit' of something when it's still largely speculative (ie. AI is not providing as much value RIGHT NOW, but we think it will in the future).

Economic problems are rarely just economic problems, and saying that it will resolve itself in the long term is dismissive and offers no value to the discussion.

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That's why high-carbon sources like coal and oil should be subject to carbon taxes: to price in externalities.

I 100% agree. A carbon tax is a purely capitalist thing to do, and by not having one you incentivize bad outcomes.

Not a carbon tax as such, but the supreme court in the UK recently ruled in favour of an activist lead challenge to stop Surrey County Council from ignoring the environmental cost, when granting permission to dig four new oil wells, in what is seen as a landmark case.

Emissions from burning the fuel had been ignored but will now need to be taken into account.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/jun/2...

We're too late for this to be the main model, we need to ramp down fossils usage way faster than can have carbon taxes happen in most of the world. (Eg when would USA realistically stop/decimate oil and gas production?)

The environmental externality of new energy in the US is likely ~0, potentially even net positive, because approximately all new energy in the US is renewable, and displacement effects are likely to dominate the small-single-digit percentage of nonrenewables and the marginal environmental cost of the renewables themselves.

Lithium extraction to build millions of solar panels, batteries etc is not a 0 impact operation.

This is a straw man usually used by anti electric car people.

There’s always an impact. If you had a sandwich for lunch, the wheat in the bread destroyed a grassland somewhere.

Usually in context of energy, we’re talking about carbon impact.

Hence why I said “displacement effects are likely to dominate [...] the marginal environmental cost of the renewables themselves.”...

Well good news you don't need lithium to build solar panels.

Solar panel production doesn't use lithium. They're made from sand and a lot of energy. A bit like silicon wafers.

You might mean the storage to keep those data centers running throughout the night though and yeah. But this problem is not very big in the scope of other battery challenges like transportation. Because for data centers you don't need the best energy per weight or volume which you do need in a car.

And there's other sources of renewable energy too.

Even if that's true, why would we only price in the externalities of new energy?

If we have a coal plant and add one wind farm we still have one coal plant.

Because the article is in context of new demand.

I'm just not sure if that's a helpful way to look at it though because we don't know the counterfactual. If we didn't generate new demand would we still have created more renewable energy and shut down non-renewable energy sources.

I suppose it's fair to say energy demand will always go up, and if all new energy creation is renewable then when you extrapolate to a limit the amount of energy from non-renewable sources is an infinitely small percentage of all energy production? I don't know if that is a fair way to model the future though.

The price of renewables scale down as demand rises, and the capacity we have building them is growing at an exponential rate at least somewhat capped by demand. It follows that if you want to displace existing power sources, you're probably better off driving demand up, because that lowers their price and makes replacement more economically attractive.

As long as you're not driving demand up faster than the industry is able to increase its rate of scaling (which doesn't yet seem the case with AI, though that's not to say it couldn't be at some point), this should help a renewable transition.

Another effect is that you push issues that arise in transition earlier. For example, the sooner you have a lot of solar on the grid, the sooner grid-scale batteries are incentivized, and the sooner battery production scales. This feeds back into the feasibility and profitability of replacing existing nonrenewable sources.

A simple example where this effect is very clear is synthetic fuels. Synthetics don't compete on a dollar-for-dollar basis yet, but from an energy basis they're getting close. There's an obvious demand phase change once you hit that price point, and the sooner you hit it the better. If you believe the scaling trends, and I think you broadly should, more solar brings that point forward and so is clearly environmentally beneficial.

Appreciate the insight here. It's not an obvious way to think about this to me, but it does make a lot of sense, especially as you think about the trend over time.

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