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Comment by Marha01 | Hacker News Reader

> The solution to most of these problems lies in policy, not in new tech advancements.

That is not mutually exclusive. If technological advances result in a given technology becoming cheaper, more scalable, and easier to deploy, they also make it easier to advocate for and implement the relevant policies.

You can think of it like this: our "political technology" is not good enough to use solar energy at its current prices to replace fossil fuels as fast as we would like. Well, what about if we cut the price of solar by a factor of five? Perhaps it will be good enough then.

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I don't think that's the way I'd describe it though. It's more like "our political technology is not good enough to reliably do good things instead of bad things". Working around it by lowering prices of this or that is like if you're bad at darts so you just make the board bigger and bigger. Okay, maybe you'll hit it more often, but you didn't fix the problem that you're bad at darts, so everyone still at risk of having their eye put out by an errant throw. Moreover, I don't think I'm the only who finds it a bit perverse to accommodate to failures in that way rather than trying to actually make things better.

It can indeed feel perverse, but we have to do what is realistic, not what is unrealistic, especially with climate change where we are on a clock. Fixing our politics is probably much, much harder than lowering the price of solar to such low values that the market would simply have no choice but to adopt it, or developing other technological solutions.

Fixing the politics is still necessary, and rather urgent. (Yes, I don't see how.)

Otherwise we are in for a great societal upheaval that might make low price of solar irrelevant.

> Fixing the politics is still necessary, and rather urgent.

I agree. It's just wishful thinking to say that oh if we just lower the price of solar then it'll be okay. There are innumerable issues which are blocked by politics and we will never solve them all without fixing politics.

> Otherwise we are in for a great societal upheaval that might make low price of solar irrelevant.

These days I think a great societal upheaval may be the only way to fix politics.

> If technological advances result in a given technology becoming cheaper, more scalable, and easier to deploy, they also make it easier to advocate for and implement the relevant policies.

Your thinking reminds me of this https://xkcd.com/538/

That sounds like just playing further and further into the game of the corrupt leaders. Who do you think would profit off that 5x margin? Would that margin come more likely from a scientific breakthrough of via some new exploitation of natural resources or human labor?

It's yearsss past time that our leaders should have changed policy.

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