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Comment by scoofy | Hacker News Reader

Third-parties are generally full of eccentrics (remember that the UK is still FPTP, even if they're a multi-party system). Eccentrics typically aren't the "very serious" types looking at tradeoffs.

The large portion of the environmentalist left are degrowthers who literally want people to just live with less, which means "less energy" is actually good. It will never be a politically viable position, but again, we're talking about a party that until recently has never come close to wielding power.

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Degrowthers just believed climate scientists that there is a problem and then believed climate deniers when they said none of the solutions work.

If you accept both of these then like Vaclav Smil, you'll conclude that you need to use less fossil fuels and nothing else will replace them. And if you care about fairness globally then 1st world nations need to really use less.

It all makes perfect sense if you believe all the lies told about renewables.

Most of the people mocking it helped spread those lies, which makes attacking the people who believe them a bit rude.

The solution was, and still is, urbanism and electrification… not living with less.

Literally the leftist dense cities have been the ones pushing back hardest against high rises, sustainable transportation alternatives, and in large part, electrification through overly restrictive environmental laws designed in the 70s.

That’s over now. Climate change is here, and you still can’t convert a house to a duplex in LA without jumping through a thousand hoops.

The solution was, is and always will be nuclear power. Electrification is a misdirection so you won't support actual solutions. For example, you can't make ammonia from electricity but you can from heat generated by either fossil fuels or nuclear. And without ammonia in industrial quantities we can't feed everyone because its used to make fertilizer. This is one of several things we get from fossil fuels (and could get from nuclear) but we can't get from electricity alone. Then there is the extra inefficiencies from electricity for things we do with power that aren't kinetic.

Basically, converting from one form of energy to another usually can be done at 50%. The lone exception is voltage potential (electricity) where we can get 90% for motion but 10% for anything else. And when you use motion for transport you have all the problems of a heavy battery reducing efficiency. This is why we can make an EV but not an electric plane. Then there are the problems to do with storage (remember 2 conversions so 25% efficiency there unless you use a battery). Finally, remember that capitalism is really good at efficiency. When people started trying to find energy uses to cut, this was easy in less developed places but in the US it was nearly impossible. Every cut caused problems elsewhere (even for something as minor as an HVAC fan). Ironically we learned this during COVID when the older "inefficient" buildings were healthier than the newer ones because they moved less air.

Nuclear power is inherently part of the electric spectrum. I really hope you're not arguing with me on that. Solar and wind are as well, but we will need plants and physical batteries, and nuclear is a big part of that base power to pull from.

I was talking more about general decarbonization.

> For example, you can't make ammonia from electricity but you can from heat generated by either fossil fuels or nuclear.

This is wrong for two reasons.

One: you can make heat with electricity from renewables sources, if that were necessary.

Two: you don't need heat because you can make ammonia with green hydrogen from electrolysis then follow the standard Haber-Bosch process. The normal fossil route does this too but gets the hydrogen by splitting fossil gas and vents the waste CO2.

Orange hydrogen is the new green is a recent thing also, for those that have an interest.

* (2022) https://www.nature.com/articles/s41561-022-01043-9

* (2026) https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S036031992...

soon to be piloted .. with results expected to take a while.

You say "degrowthers who literally want people to just live with less" like it's a bad thing

It doesn't matter if it's "good" or "bad" if it's not a politically viable position.

That I think it's an idiotic position is beside the point. Things and prosperity generally are not the problem, and can grow pretty much indefinitely for the foreseeable future if it's done in a reasonable and sustainable way.

> if it's done in a reasonable and sustainable way.

There are a lot of things that would work fine if done in a reasonable and safe way but we have plenty of examples of people making unreasonable and unsafe decisions.

Nuclear power for example

I completely agree. That still doesn’t make degrowth a sensible position.

Yes this is an extremely bad thing. Degrowthers who literally want people to just live with less are enemies of human progress and flourishing. I do not want people like that to have any political power.

Yeah you drank it baby!

Less doesn't have to mean less comfort. There's a lot of unnecessary consumption these days. People buying stuff they never use. Stuff that breaks and can't be repaired even though the owner would prefer that.

And most of these things have impact much bigger than just the climate. They pollute in a lot more ways than that. Resource extraction, manufacturing pollution, transport, waste disposal.

It's stuff like forcing repairability that allows us to do with much less impact on the environment.

> Less doesn't have to mean less comfort.

In a perfect world, perhaps. In the real world, it very often does.

"Less doesn't have to mean less comfort."

It really does. You can live without clothes, that's less. You can live on 1500 kcals a day. You would be at the brink of starving all the time but you would be alive. I could lock you in a cage and just give you the bear minimum of bread and water. Just enough heat so you don't freeze and never let you out. That's certainly less. Just how much less do you want?

PS Young people almost always use more resources than the old. When my kid isn't here, our trash and recycling containers are pretty empty. When he is here, they overflow. And he is only a 50% increase in the house's population.

It's not objectively bad, but so unpopular that it would require tyranny to implement. Living fully cleanly and like a monk makes a few people very happy with a sense of purpose, but it gets in the way of everyone else's priorities, which is to survive day-to-day.

Living without AC in a warm summer is one example. It feels like a first world inconvenience to the Green types, that we should all learn to accept. Good luck with democratically convincing everyone else - you'd need authoritarian for a true success in keeping everyone "living with less."

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