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You clearly haven't actually looked at how the damages are modelled have you? You just in your head inveneted a naive way in which to estimate damages and then

You clearly haven't actually looked at how the damages are modelled have you? You just in your head inveneted a naive way in which to estimate damages and then argued that that doesn't work. There is a large and robust literature to assess these type of damages (search for Social Cost of Carbon). The methodological challenges are discussed really well in the paper actually. Much of the damages calculated here aren't even climate but direct air pollution, for which we have robust data and damage models. Insurance companies use these type of damage models at large scale for risk assessment all the time. The article looks fairly solid to me.

throwaway20875 6y ago
The article is undermined by its arbitrary focus on crypto. The premise is that crypto mining drives consumption for power, and power production results in "health and climate damage". Are we going to police consumers of power now? Will we invest our time and energy in determining the "good" and "bad" consumers of power. Or are we going to invest our time and resources in building out a sustainable, clean, and efficient power production infrastructure to replace the ancient one we have? Ctrl+f 'nuclear': 1/1 found.
- ufo 6y ago
  Yes, reducing energy waste is an important way to tackle the environmental externalities of energy production. For example, in cold countries one of the major efforts for helping with climate change is to encourage buildings to use better insulation, to waste less heat during winter.
- sadfinger 6y ago
  This is right. It is useful to know how much electricity production costs in health and environmental output. It is useful to know how much of bitcoins value is the electricity cost. We can put a value on environmental harm caused by total electricity usage. But, using these and suggesting that we can accurately measure the cost of cryptocurrency now and in the future compared to how the money/value would otherwise be spent is a distortion. The same reasoning can be used to make anything that stores value or does not have an obvious output look disproportionately harmful. It could be useful to compare cryptocurrencies with themselves. I am a little interested to see how they factored cryptocurrency's optimization to use the cheapest electricity possible. It disproportionately favors storing value from electricity that would otherwise be wasted.
- pwinnski 6y ago
  If you're not just reacting to the focus on crypto mining, but actually interested in the answer to your question, then the answer is yes. In fact, energy efficiency[0] is a large area of focus, especially with regard to ongoing climate change[1]. You might have noticed a shift in things like light bulbs building standards and so on. We've made progress[2], and so it is really hard for people celebrating that progress when they see a sudden boom in energy use to create wealth for a very tiny subset of people, a boom in use that threatens to undo all of our progress and then some. 0. https://www.energy.gov/science-innovation/energy-efficiency https://www.energy.gov/science-innovation/energy-efficiency 1. https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2019/09/why-investing-in-renewable-energy-is-good-for-the-environment-and-society/ https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2019/09/why-investing-in-rene... 2. https://www.nrdc.org/experts/sheryl-carter/ramping-energy-efficiency-key-address-climate-change https://www.nrdc.org/experts/sheryl-carter/ramping-energy-ef...
  - throwaway20875 6y ago
    >a boom in use that threatens to undo all of our progress and then some Then we're back to policing people's energy use. There will be little ROI in going down this path, and a huge opportunity cost. This is all not to mention the incentives driving crypto. We have many smart minds engaging in this realm - imagine if those same minds were allocated, via a better economic system, to improving our energy production and distribution. Addressing that dilemma is real policy. Unfortunately, in the West we play whack-a-mole and end up with policies to address the effects of prior policies.
- jf22 6y ago
  The worst kind of criticism about scientific papers is when people say "but the paper that didn't study this topic, didn't study this topic!" Would you expect a paper on COVID mortality also discuss heart disease and ALS? Of course not.
  - throwaway20875 6y ago
    >Would you expect a paper on COVID mortality also discuss heart disease and ALS? Of course not. Power consumption and power production are simply directly related. Your clumsy attempt at an analogy here really misses the mark. The root cause of this issue is our power production isn't clean enough, and therefore consumption drives pollution. What do you address first - the demand or the supply? It's quite simply amazing to see so little ability to grasp anything beyond immediate consequences of a problem, particularly on a site like this.
    - jf22 6y ago
      Perhaps you are extending the discussion far past the point I was trying to make in a single sentence. Discussing things with people on hacker news is frustrating because people like you extend the argument to way way way past the point at hand. All of a sudden we are talking about clean energy deployment, not that BitCoin mining is using a lot of power and resources.
  - effie 6y ago
    The paper has no perspective on electric energy consumption of other activities, there are many more with similar or bigger consumption (ad industry, MIC, etc.) and still advocates regulating specifically cryptocurrencies. The window of opportunity, attention span and resource for effective regulating economic activity is limited. We should focus on the (few!) important polluting classes such as transport and power production, not hundreds of minor consumer classes such as cryptocurrencies or aluminum producers. Focusing on minor issue, cherry-picking contorted arguments and advocating targeted policy is not how respectable scientific paper should look like.
    - 6y ago
aww_dang 6y ago
Are there parties that benefit disproportionately by establishing a cost for carbon and the definition thereof? Is this all an altruistic exercise in saving the planet? If so, it sounds very nice. We are lucky to have the concern of such well funded saviors.
- jf22 6y ago
  Ah yes, the "this is obviously a conspiracy" defense despite offering no evidence of such a conspiracy at all.
  - aww_dang 6y ago
    I've posed questions about incentives. In lieu of engaging in a discussion, you've dismissed the possibility. You've provided no rationale (or evidence for that matter) for this flippant dismissal. Instead, you offer the 'conspiracy theory' pejorative. It is not a starting point for a conversation.
    - jf22 6y ago
      I have not dismissed the possibility there is a conspiracy. I'm only calling out that asking a leading question like this doesn't add to the conversation at all. There is an incredible irony to accuse me of providing no rational when this whole thing is about somebody alluding to a conspiracy with no rational at all. The starting point to a conversation should be "hey, there is a conspiracy here, this is why."
      - aww_dang 6y ago
        >Are there parties that benefit disproportionately by establishing a cost for carbon and the definition thereof? Asking about incentives, thinking critically about conflicts of interest doesn't add to the discussion because that might "allude to a conspiracy"? I don't know if I agree with that. For me it makes sense to first ask "Cui bono". Establish a motive and then search for evidence to prove a hypothesis. Posing the question is simply the beginning of the process. If you're closed minded about opening the door, my (reasonable or unreasonable, open for debate) expectation would be that you would dismiss anything within as "conspiracy theories". Hence the discussion becomes futile. I read your reply as skipping over the possibility of a conflict of interest in research rationalizing a carbon credit trading regime.
kryogen1c 6y ago
> There is a large and robust literature to assess these type of damages even granting you that we have a robust model to assess damage (which on its face seems to be a wildly improbably claim) we do not have an accurate model that predicts WHAT damage will be done due to humanity's impact on weather change, so the resultant-cost benefit analysis still propagates that uncertainty forward. > (search for Social Cost of Carbon) i havent read it all because i just looked it up[0], but it directly contradicts your claim of our "robust data and damage models". section 5.1 "damage functions" is about how previous damage models are all incorrect. side note: one of the paper authors is in references 30 times. idk if this is common or not, but it seems suspicious. > The methodological challenges are discussed really well in the paper actually. Much of the damages calculated here aren't even climate but direct air pollution wouldnt know, dont have access to anything but the abstract. look, im not well read into the field of future predictive damage modeling. you may be right that the field has some definition, however i stand by my smell test. even ignoring everything relevent about health, damage, and climate, the start of the sentence "$1 of BTC" is enough to give pause. BTC price is up 30% in the last month and 470% in the last year. not exactly rigorous scientific measure. [0] https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w28472/w28472.pdf https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w28472/w284...
- DennisP 6y ago
  Bitcoin mining effort is proportional to the cost per bitcoin times the number of bitcoins awarded per block. Since the number per block is constant over each four-year period, it makes sense to talk about the cost per $1 of BTC.
  - kryogen1c 6y ago
    BTC proof of work doesnt determine the BTC/$ conversion. the price is non-scientific, highly speculative, and highly volatile.
    - DennisP 6y ago
      The causation works in the other direction, due to the difficulty adjustment.
dang 6y ago
Please omit personal swipes from your HN comments, no matter how wrong someone else is or you feel they are. Your comment would be just fine without the first paragraph. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- Certhas 6y ago
  Unfortunately I am to late to edit my post. I understand the intent here, but these threads are full of what are, in the end, drastic accusations of scientific misconduct (or raging incompetence) against the authors, made with confidence from a place of proud ignorance. I believe it is important to point out when arguments are not made in good faith. Responding to them as if they were honest attempts at debate is problematic in the sense of a false balance.
  - dang 6y ago
    That's actually against the site guidelines, which ask you to "Assume good faith." The reason is that it's hard if not impossible to accurately assess other commenters' intent, and there's a strong default on the internet to assume bad faith. We all need to consciously counteract that if we're to have substantive, thoughtful discussion. It's true that some commenters behave abusively in ways that make assuming good faith impossible, but (a) I doubt that was the case here, and (b) the guidelines ask you not to reply in such cases, but rather to flag the comment and/or email hn@ycombinator.com. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

throwaway20875 6y ago

The article is undermined by its arbitrary focus on crypto. The premise is that crypto mining drives consumption for power, and power production results in "health and climate damage". Are we going to police consumers of power now? Will we invest our time and energy in determining the "good" and "bad" consumers of power. Or are we going to invest our time and resources in building out a sustainable, clean, and efficient power production infrastructure to replace the ancient one we have? Ctrl+f 'nuclear': 1/1 found.

ufo 6y ago
Yes, reducing energy waste is an important way to tackle the environmental externalities of energy production. For example, in cold countries one of the major efforts for helping with climate change is to encourage buildings to use better insulation, to waste less heat during winter.
sadfinger 6y ago
This is right. It is useful to know how much electricity production costs in health and environmental output. It is useful to know how much of bitcoins value is the electricity cost. We can put a value on environmental harm caused by total electricity usage. But, using these and suggesting that we can accurately measure the cost of cryptocurrency now and in the future compared to how the money/value would otherwise be spent is a distortion. The same reasoning can be used to make anything that stores value or does not have an obvious output look disproportionately harmful. It could be useful to compare cryptocurrencies with themselves. I am a little interested to see how they factored cryptocurrency's optimization to use the cheapest electricity possible. It disproportionately favors storing value from electricity that would otherwise be wasted.
pwinnski 6y ago
If you're not just reacting to the focus on crypto mining, but actually interested in the answer to your question, then the answer is yes. In fact, energy efficiency[0] is a large area of focus, especially with regard to ongoing climate change[1]. You might have noticed a shift in things like light bulbs building standards and so on. We've made progress[2], and so it is really hard for people celebrating that progress when they see a sudden boom in energy use to create wealth for a very tiny subset of people, a boom in use that threatens to undo all of our progress and then some. 0. https://www.energy.gov/science-innovation/energy-efficiency https://www.energy.gov/science-innovation/energy-efficiency 1. https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2019/09/why-investing-in-renewable-energy-is-good-for-the-environment-and-society/ https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2019/09/why-investing-in-rene... 2. https://www.nrdc.org/experts/sheryl-carter/ramping-energy-efficiency-key-address-climate-change https://www.nrdc.org/experts/sheryl-carter/ramping-energy-ef...
- throwaway20875 6y ago
  >a boom in use that threatens to undo all of our progress and then some Then we're back to policing people's energy use. There will be little ROI in going down this path, and a huge opportunity cost. This is all not to mention the incentives driving crypto. We have many smart minds engaging in this realm - imagine if those same minds were allocated, via a better economic system, to improving our energy production and distribution. Addressing that dilemma is real policy. Unfortunately, in the West we play whack-a-mole and end up with policies to address the effects of prior policies.
jf22 6y ago
The worst kind of criticism about scientific papers is when people say "but the paper that didn't study this topic, didn't study this topic!" Would you expect a paper on COVID mortality also discuss heart disease and ALS? Of course not.
- throwaway20875 6y ago
  >Would you expect a paper on COVID mortality also discuss heart disease and ALS? Of course not. Power consumption and power production are simply directly related. Your clumsy attempt at an analogy here really misses the mark. The root cause of this issue is our power production isn't clean enough, and therefore consumption drives pollution. What do you address first - the demand or the supply? It's quite simply amazing to see so little ability to grasp anything beyond immediate consequences of a problem, particularly on a site like this.
  - jf22 6y ago
    Perhaps you are extending the discussion far past the point I was trying to make in a single sentence. Discussing things with people on hacker news is frustrating because people like you extend the argument to way way way past the point at hand. All of a sudden we are talking about clean energy deployment, not that BitCoin mining is using a lot of power and resources.
- effie 6y ago
  The paper has no perspective on electric energy consumption of other activities, there are many more with similar or bigger consumption (ad industry, MIC, etc.) and still advocates regulating specifically cryptocurrencies. The window of opportunity, attention span and resource for effective regulating economic activity is limited. We should focus on the (few!) important polluting classes such as transport and power production, not hundreds of minor consumer classes such as cryptocurrencies or aluminum producers. Focusing on minor issue, cherry-picking contorted arguments and advocating targeted policy is not how respectable scientific paper should look like.
  - 6y ago

aww_dang 6y ago

Are there parties that benefit disproportionately by establishing a cost for carbon and the definition thereof? Is this all an altruistic exercise in saving the planet? If so, it sounds very nice. We are lucky to have the concern of such well funded saviors.

jf22 6y ago
Ah yes, the "this is obviously a conspiracy" defense despite offering no evidence of such a conspiracy at all.
- aww_dang 6y ago
  I've posed questions about incentives. In lieu of engaging in a discussion, you've dismissed the possibility. You've provided no rationale (or evidence for that matter) for this flippant dismissal. Instead, you offer the 'conspiracy theory' pejorative. It is not a starting point for a conversation.
  - jf22 6y ago
    I have not dismissed the possibility there is a conspiracy. I'm only calling out that asking a leading question like this doesn't add to the conversation at all. There is an incredible irony to accuse me of providing no rational when this whole thing is about somebody alluding to a conspiracy with no rational at all. The starting point to a conversation should be "hey, there is a conspiracy here, this is why."
    - aww_dang 6y ago
      >Are there parties that benefit disproportionately by establishing a cost for carbon and the definition thereof? Asking about incentives, thinking critically about conflicts of interest doesn't add to the discussion because that might "allude to a conspiracy"? I don't know if I agree with that. For me it makes sense to first ask "Cui bono". Establish a motive and then search for evidence to prove a hypothesis. Posing the question is simply the beginning of the process. If you're closed minded about opening the door, my (reasonable or unreasonable, open for debate) expectation would be that you would dismiss anything within as "conspiracy theories". Hence the discussion becomes futile. I read your reply as skipping over the possibility of a conflict of interest in research rationalizing a carbon credit trading regime.

kryogen1c 6y ago

> There is a large and robust literature to assess these type of damages even granting you that we have a robust model to assess damage (which on its face seems to be a wildly improbably claim) we do not have an accurate model that predicts WHAT damage will be done due to humanity's impact on weather change, so the resultant-cost benefit analysis still propagates that uncertainty forward. > (search for Social Cost of Carbon) i havent read it all because i just looked it up[0], but it directly contradicts your claim of our "robust data and damage models". section 5.1 "damage functions" is about how previous damage models are all incorrect. side note: one of the paper authors is in references 30 times. idk if this is common or not, but it seems suspicious. > The methodological challenges are discussed really well in the paper actually. Much of the damages calculated here aren't even climate but direct air pollution wouldnt know, dont have access to anything but the abstract. look, im not well read into the field of future predictive damage modeling. you may be right that the field has some definition, however i stand by my smell test. even ignoring everything relevent about health, damage, and climate, the start of the sentence "$1 of BTC" is enough to give pause. BTC price is up 30% in the last month and 470% in the last year. not exactly rigorous scientific measure. [0] https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w28472/w28472.pdf https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w28472/w284...

DennisP 6y ago
Bitcoin mining effort is proportional to the cost per bitcoin times the number of bitcoins awarded per block. Since the number per block is constant over each four-year period, it makes sense to talk about the cost per $1 of BTC.
- kryogen1c 6y ago
  BTC proof of work doesnt determine the BTC/$ conversion. the price is non-scientific, highly speculative, and highly volatile.
  - DennisP 6y ago
    The causation works in the other direction, due to the difficulty adjustment.

dang 6y ago

Please omit personal swipes from your HN comments, no matter how wrong someone else is or you feel they are. Your comment would be just fine without the first paragraph. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Certhas 6y ago
Unfortunately I am to late to edit my post. I understand the intent here, but these threads are full of what are, in the end, drastic accusations of scientific misconduct (or raging incompetence) against the authors, made with confidence from a place of proud ignorance. I believe it is important to point out when arguments are not made in good faith. Responding to them as if they were honest attempts at debate is problematic in the sense of a false balance.
- dang 6y ago
  That's actually against the site guidelines, which ask you to "Assume good faith." The reason is that it's hard if not impossible to accurately assess other commenters' intent, and there's a strong default on the internet to assume bad faith. We all need to consciously counteract that if we're to have substantive, thoughtful discussion. It's true that some commenters behave abusively in ways that make assuming good faith impossible, but (a) I doubt that was the case here, and (b) the guidelines ask you not to reply in such cases, but rather to flag the comment and/or email hn@ycombinator.com. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html