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Comment by softwaredoug | Hacker News Reader

It used to be the big worry among climate activists that you'd never get every country organize and move in one direction. Like you'd need some global body to clean everything up.

That's very fragile.

Luckily, we're moving to a world where a disjoint, self-interested response can be an advantage. Countries decide, for their own selfish reasons, to adopt green energy. For energy independence, affordability, clean air, etc.

So when one country politically rotates out for dumb reasons, other countries pick up the slack and make a bit of progress.

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There's also the case in Australia where, despite successive governments that were (likely monetarily* ) opposed to solar and wind, people power kinda took over to get the unexpectedly high penetration of home solar panel installations, going back beyond a decade, and currently home battery installations.

Both were due to government incentives, I'm not sure if both parties may have initiated parts of these incentives, but only one party significantly and constantly talked down solar and renewables (and still would, although they don't currently have the platform)

* I have to assume the reason is money (read: lobbying) for any political party to downplay Australia's potential to lead the world in solar power generation given our natural massive, otherwise mostly useless land mass and beyond plentiful sunshine. Also, Australia's dependence on petrol / oil from overseas should be treated as a national security issue. Australia does have plentiful coal reserves, however, which is where I believe the lobbyists (and therefore unimaginable amounts of money) come from.

> despite successive governments that were (likely monetarily* ) opposed to solar and wind,

What are you talking about?

> Both were due to government incentives,

How can the government be opposed to it, while also providing rebates to rooftop solar?

Anyway, it was all a big bait and switch manoeuvre, as the solar feed in tariff per kWh is only a fraction of what you pay, but it didn’t start out that way.

That continued existence of any incentive to add rooftop solar is dependent on continued electricity price hikes that out pace general inflation.

That’s how intelligent Australian voters are.

We have the world’s largest known uranium deposit, which we’re happy for others to use, but instead we voted for this shit.

Rooftop solar is a scam.

What it does is shifts the long term maintenance costs from the industrial sector, or government if you’re a socialist, to the owner of the roof owner, the residential / business customer. All the while leaving the affordability of the entire fiasco up to whichever bunch of wankers are in Canberra this week deciding the feed-in tariff.

Why would anyone think any of that is a good idea.

And I say that as someone who recently installed solar.

> What are you talking about?

The (now twice dissolved) Coalition of the Liberal Party and the National Party

> How can the government be opposed to it, while also providing rebates to rooftop solar?

I'm pretty sure one government put the incentives in place, whilst another didn't roll them back, but also significantly talked down anything renewable, whilst pulling stunts like bringing a lump of coal into parliament. (from memory, not entirely sure of facts).

> Rooftop solar is a scam.

I beg to differ. I beg to differ even further when rooftop solar is coupled with a battery.

Where I may agree with you, is that solar should have been a much earlier priority for any Australian government due to Australia's abundance of space and sunshine and (confusingly, since we have so much coal) our globally quite high-priced electricity. A better strategy should have been in place for Australia's overall electrification.

I think rooftop solar is great because it's saved me a lot of money in electricity that would have otherwise been sourced from an expensive grid.

I think rooftop solar overall could be considered a scam because it advantages those who already have enough money to afford it and the ownership of their dwelling to be allowed to install it, and disadvantages those who are not in the overlap between those two venn diagrams.

Self Fact check: Australia is around the global average for electricity costs, not as expensive as I thought.

The subsidies given to private individuals and business for roof top solar would have been better off used to build grid scale solar. You get more solar per dollar spent.

Australia silent have around global average electricity costs, we should be a case study in providing the cheapest electricity, given we have the worlds largest known solar reserves (ha!), the worlds largest known deposit of uranium, and we export about the same volume of LNG as Qatar. And there’s the iron ore, the zinc, lead, aluminium, copper, gold.

Why settle for average.

No.

Every Australian citizen should receiver a cheque every quarter for their share of the revenue generated from the proper management of our natural resources.

100% agree.

Scroll about halfway down to the billboard picture: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-02-04/engaging-young-austra...

Oil the west doesn't use isn't magically staying in the ground.

Middle and low income countries (most notably China) increased consumption is more than offsetting reductions from high income countries.

More than 50% of cars sold in China now come with a plug, on top of the most of the buses and 2 wheelers. Most analysts say they have plateaued and will begin declining in the next few years. They also are beginning to ramp up EV exports to other developing economies.

Middle and low income countries can't print dollars to buy oil. They'll happily take free energy from the sky.

Free*

* Conditions apply, nothing if free

Although it looks like bad news in the short term, China is building even more renewables than they are coal stations, with the result that the fraction of fossil power consumption in China is actually decreasing: https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-coal-power-drops-in-chi...

Your just lying with statistics.

Fraction goes down but total fossil fuel consumption is at an all time high in China.

They now use more fossil fuels than the entire western world combined.

> They now use more fossil fuels than the entire western world combined.

No idea what "more fossil fuels" is because how do you compare a bag of coal to a barrel of oil.

Also what about all the years that they didn't? Which is nearly all of the years before the Industrial Revolution.

And if they continue electrifying at their current pace, soon they'll be emitting less carbon than everyone else. What'll you talk about then?

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