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>if you have definitive arguments that agreements like the recent one in Paris will hurt the poor more than climate change will You missed the whole point of m
by hueving 11y ago
>if you have definitive arguments that agreements like the recent one in Paris will hurt the poor more than climate change will
You missed the whole point of my argument (or just didn't read it) and did the same thing I criticized skeptical science for. The side effects of climate change being terrible do nothing to dispute that fact that in terms of cost per KwH, energy prices will increase. We need to admit that and address it rather than constantly bring up the benefits of slowing climate change down instead.
Here is an analogy to illustrate the point in a different subject.
Alice: "We are tripling the cost of bread because it's unhealthy to eat too much bread."
Bob: "I eat lots of bread because I can't afford the other food."
Alice: "But this is much healthier for you because you won't be eating so much bread. There have been many studies showing that bread is unhealthy."
Bob: "If I can't eat bread, I don't think I will get enough calories."
Alice: "You will have to eat something else, because bread is unhealthy."
Bob: "But I can't get anything else for the same cost."
Alice: "Bread is unhealthy. What aren't you understanding? Here is are links to more studies."
Do you see how Alice is failing to address Bob's concern or really even acknowledge it?
>Coal was cheap but isn't really the cheap fuel anymore.
That's only because natural gas got even cheaper than coal. Both are still cheaper per KwH than renewals without subsidies or externalities calculated in.
>Also, in developing areas, it may be cheaper to use distributed renewable than to build out the grid.
If they are fine with unstable power, sure. However, this still doesn't take into account the massive populations in China and India that have electricity from a grid already based on dirty energy.
- epistasis 11y agoI guess I'm still not seeing your point, but you're also not acknowledging mine. Based on your hypothetical conversation, you seem to be saying that it is beyond doubt that these agreements will overall increase the cost of a certain standard of living. Since you haven't offered to provide any evidence to back up your claim, I'm forced to make some assumptions about your assumptions: that you're assuming that a certain standard of living has a fixed energy requirement (it doesn't), and that the current prices for energy will remain the same as they get adopted around the world (they won't). For example, renewables are intermittent, but storage is getting incredible cheap, and the grid in these areas can also be quite intermittent and unreliable. For example, current lithium ion batteries cost ~$0.20/kWh stored, which may be massively under the cost of building out the grid. And that price is getting much cheaper faster than any of the experts predicted. So, if somebody has a full economic analysis that supports your claim of bread costing three times as much but no other cheaper alternatives being available, I'd like to hear it. I'd also like to hear why you're certain that coal will be the cheapest even after building out energy infrastructures. These are assumptions that might be true, but don't seem very true to me, and definitely don't seem firm enough to discount skepticalscience's answer.
- hueving 11y agoOk, let me make it more clear: Skepticalscience's answer did not address the concern at all. They did not try to argue that energy will be cheaper/the same after we impose taxes. All they implied was that climate change was bad for the poor, which does nothing to address the concern. Your point about renewable energy being cheaper seems to ignore all of the current cost per KwH measurements available, so I chose not to argue with that because it's not based on anything but opinions about what might happen in the energy market.