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Comment by AnaSpelunker | Hacker News Reader

So, the devil comes to Davos and says: "You can enjoy cheap energy, but some poor people in the global south will suffer and die" And after a long silence the US president says: "I feel like there is a catch there, but I just can't figure out what it is"

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Except it's not cheaper. 70% of the world import fossil fuels. Many changes are happening because it is cheaper to not do that and use renewables instead. US Presidents are getting involved to stop cheaper energy getting built.

Offshore wind, which is more expensive than onshore wind, is cheaper than new coal in China. New solar and onshore wind competes with fuel costs for existing coal plants.

If anything, Trump fucking around in Iran is helping the switch more than anything, such irony.

Like Putin in Ukraine. But decoupling from Russian gas is still slow going and controversial in Europe, and the "moderate" right is more and more inclined to collaborate with Putin’s little fringe-right helper parties, likely partly because they’re massively bleeding votes and partly out of real sympathies for fringe policies that just used to be unmentionable in polite company.

It's controversial because it's not just about changing gas provider, but paying way more for gas as well.

Americans keep strong arming us into buying their LNG, but we also pay 5 times as much for it as we paid for Russian gas.

And Norway, Algeria, etc and all the other providers know very well that our biggest provider has been cut off, so they can all ask much more.

So it's very easy and convenient to say "why don't you do differently Europeans", but it has a terrible effect on our manufacturing and export bound economies.

The point is, obviously, that we should be decoupling from all gas. The past four years have made it very clear how risky it is to depend on foreign fossil fuels, economically and geopolitically.

In a long run - maybe but in a short run high oil/gas/diesel prices push CPI up, as a reaction central banks are rising rates, bonds yields are rising even faster in anticipation of future rate hikes - this makes credit expensive and most green energy project depend on credit so investments into green energy going down too AFAIK. At least clean energy stock indexes are falling for the last few months because of high credit interest rates. So paradoxically Iran war is slowing energy transition.

He might be shown to be one of the greatest climate change activists in human history.

Except emissions are up under Trump. The US is puking new emissions right now.

I was just joking, and also largely meant for other countries to move away from fossil fuels.

The key difference is that it is easier to control and extract profits for a narrow set of people from fossil fuel.

I think the difference is that the renewable infrastructure requires new capital investment, whereas the fossil fuel infrastructure is already in place and amortized, even for importing countries (distribution networks, electricity generation plants, etc.) And so you've got to get someone to pay for the up-front costs which on the short term are greater than the long term costs.

I guess the fossil fuel infrastructure is actually more expensive? (Drilling, refining, shipping of the fuel: all not needed for wind and solar.) But this infrastructure has already been built and paid for, and now someone with a lot of money wants a return on their investment over the next 25 years. Which is not going to happen in a world where we prevent the worst climate change.

(Also, investment to decarbonize things like cement are not going to happen if fossils stay cheap.)

Why is it the US President?

US emissions are down 9-10% and China emissions are up by 23-25%.[1]

China represents ~32% of global emissions.

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions

And then you have Indonesian fires releasing more than the US does in a year..

Cause and effect though; the fires are natural / annual reoccurrences, but more intense this year due to climate change.

This is one reason why they tried to limit emissions and climate change, because it triggers runaway effects like in this case forest fires, droughts, floods, melting of glaciers, polar caps and permafrost, ocean flows, etc. These are all climate change effects.

I'm a pessimist and think it was already too late when the Paris Agreement was put in place. Already too late when Al Gore did his thing in the 2000s.

Forest fires are carbon-neutral, as trees grow back and re-capture the carbon.

US is down from no.1 per capita to no.1 per capita. Nice

Being the main blocker for coordinated global rampdown of oil use production (and China being the renewables enabler).

The US blocked China from ramping down its use of oil?

If global climate change is a problem, you can't just have some countries deindustrializing and reducing CO2 while others go full bore on scale manufacturing with any form of cheap energy including coal being used.

Be a tech maximalist- use tech and will power to pull ahead with green energy. Go hard on batteries and energy storage. I do not even care that I may sound delusional - the contrary doomer viewpoint is deluded in a far worse manner. The things we need either are or are not within our abilities- you will never know unless you try. Resigning with *it’s too hard* ensures we will know that we cannot.

Well the rich western nations need to sacrifice.

Luckily that works well with democracy...

Government: "We need to sacrifice"

Populists: "No one will take/tax our gas-guzzling trucks and our beef! Make this country great again!"

Voters: "Fuck off government, put the populists in power instead!"

"Things are expensive! Vote for short term price decreases at the expense of the next generation!"

Plus ironically all of the batteries and solar panels for the West's climate mission will be made in China who didn't deindustrialize, has far lower energy prices, and less aggressive local rules around things like air pollution that let them be manufactured at all.

Meanwhile they are also rapidly going green by adopting this tech domestically since it's highly price competitive due to their manufacturing investments. They also invested heavily in Nuclear (which the government there openly welcomed).

Agreed! If we can’t try and save the Earth perfectly, we shouldn’t try at all.

Yes you can. China has barely emitted half the lifetimes emissions of the US because it didn't go through decades of inefficent and polluting technologies. The ozone hole wasn't caused by China.

Same thing applies to those up and coming countries: they immediately have more efficient technologies.

> you can't just have some countries deindustrializing and reducing CO2 while others go full bore on scale manufacturing with any form of cheap energy including coal being used.

Well... that's what we did in the Industrial Revolution too. Only the countries were reversed.

I don't see why not. It's obviously not as good as getting all countries working together, but it's certainly not practical to wait until all countries are united before starting.

Stop making things, its so dirty.

Buy all the things from me, don't worry about my dirty powered factories.

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