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Even with the recent rise in prices, energy prices are still way to low to actually influence choices most people make. Trains are still more expensive than car

• jjoonathan 5y ago
  The problem with inelastic demand is that the severity of the problem goes from 0 to 100 very quickly as supply falls past the inelastic threshold. Lead times are years in the energy space, so if we don't react to forecasts and instead wait to feel the pain we will be signing up for years of severe pain.
  • fny 5y ago
    This a thousand times. This is a manufactured energy crisis. We've divested from the fossil fuel space of so aggressively capital that there's no way out without a /lot/ of pain. It also doesn't help that nuclear is being phased out.
• jtbayly 5y ago
  It is in part the push to reduce CO2 that has caused these prices to rise. The obvious solution is to increase CO2 production (ie burn more coal and oil) to get the price back down. That's the opposite of it making "economical sense to reduce CO2 output."
• fsslrisrchr 5y ago
  Let me guess, You work from home and/or you make much more than an average person your age. Maybe you're a programmer. Ok let's make energy more expensive. I think it's only fair that the pain is distributed equitably, so let's put a $0.1/Gb tax on bandwidth [1], the cloud being one of the largest growing emitters of CO2. Frankly, I liked the 90s low bandwidth internet more than today's, everything valuable we can do today the 90s had enough bandwidth for. Everything that is unhealthy about the internet today typically takes bandwidth. So, I think $0.1/Gb is not enough. Do you agree? [1] $0.1/Gb for data flowing to the end user and $0.2/Gb for data crossing country borders. So the cloud folks don't syphon off all the personal data of my citizens. [EDIT] I think only unethical_ban understood the point of this post. That's it's easy to propose a tax for the poor for their poor behavior. Tax yourself first! I disagree with unethical_ban that it's a bad example - its purposely a glib and capricious indirect carbon tax.
  • swsieber 5y ago
    That makes no sense to me. I would think you'd impose a carbon tax or something and let the consumer prices sort themselves out.
  • paulsutter 5y ago
    Much more direct to put a carbon tax on the energy used to power the datacenters. Some datacenters are on hydro power, and some are on coal. Penalize the coal Charging for bandwidth doesn't align incentives to solve the problem
    • tombert 5y ago
      I agree, it seems like an energy tax would be more directly addressing the environmental impact, and the cloud services would in turn be forced to raise their prices to a something more accurately reflecting the cost of cleanup.
  • tomp 5y ago
    This is the reason why people hate “green solutions”. You blame the cloud but you want to tax bandwidth. As if I can’t upload a tiny bit of code that uses tons of compute. And again to “protect privacy” - as if exporting personal data takes a non-negligible amount of traffic compared to Netflix/BitTorrent. The only way that taxing externalities makes sense, is taxing at the source. If cloud “takes too much energy” then tax energy! And make it revenue neutral otherwise you’re just incentivising the government to increase taxes and waste even more money/resources.
    • iso1210 5y ago
      Yup, tax carbon use of energy on the way into the data centre, let microsoft, google, amazon etc work out how they want to charge it. Data centers in say south island new zealand powered by hydro will have near-zero carbon cost and thus be cheaper The biggest issue with a carbon tax and data centre usage is how to charge tax on the 'import' of services.
      • 5y ago
• hbrav 5y ago
  > I'm happy it finally makes economical sense to reduce CO2 output. I'd be happy with this too. What concerns me is that some people will look at this and say "It makes economical sense to burn more coal".
  • rafale 5y ago
    It wouldn't make more economical sense if we taxed the externalities. Right now, the coal plants are "using" (read destroying) resources (air, water, ...) for free. A tax should price in the cost of that harm in a way that make green alternatives more competitive.
    • toomuchtodo 5y ago
      I disagree. You must enact a ban with a firm deadline, otherwise you end up in cryptoland where you're using country-level amounts of energy because someone, somewhere is willing to burn up fiat on it. This is of course expected in late stage capitalism where trillions of dollars are chasing returns, physical realm consequences be damned. Countries are already enacting deadlines for banning combustion vehicle sales [1], it is straightforward to enact fossil combustion electrical generation bans in similar fashion. The communicates to the market to no longer fund or implement combustion generation facilities, and investment will flow away from existing facilities towards renewables and energy storage (whether that's batteries, green hydrogen and/or ammonia, pumped hydro storage, etc). Most new generation is already renewables (due to cost, see Lazard's LCOE [2]) [3] [4] [5], what I discuss in this comment rapidly pulls forward fossil generation retirement (from 2030-2050 to something more reasonable, such as no latter than 2030). In short, outlaw fossil combustion, and investment will flow into clean alternatives. The planet doesn't care about your fiat and economic system. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase-out_of_fossil_fuel_vehicles#Places_with_planned_fossil-fuel_vehicle_bans https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase-out_of_fossil_fuel_vehic... [2] https://www.lazard.com/media/451419/lazards-levelized-cost-of-energy-version-140.pdf https://www.lazard.com/media/451419/lazards-levelized-cost-o... [3] https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=48896 https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=48896 [4] https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=46416 https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=46416 [5] https://www.irena.org/newsroom/pressreleases/2021/Apr/World-Adds-Record-New-Renewable-Energy-Capacity-in-2020 https://www.irena.org/newsroom/pressreleases/2021/Apr/World-...
• zthrowaway 5y ago
  You’re unhappy people aren’t forced to live like it’s 1850? How about we have alternative energy that can satisfy CO2 concerns and provide the current standards of living we all enjoy first.
  • jacobolus 5y ago
    No, people are not unhappy that energy is cheap, but rather that externalities are not priced in. The result is that activities and goods that seem trivially cheap (so people consume them far in excess of their needs without worrying about the expense) turn out to have disastrous large-scale consequences. Our economic system has no affordances for making choices based on true costs – only sticker prices. When these are systematically distorted, it causes a huge collective problem.
    • thedrbrian 5y ago
      Can we price in the carbon cost of raising a child to the age of 18? If we’re going after all the fun stuff I don’t want the parents to get away scott free.
      • greenonions 5y ago
        Future people will likely be carbon negative. Shall I give you my Venmo?
        • newt_slowly 5y ago
          Since you didn't go into detail, I'm going to guess that you are referring to atmospheric CCS being widely deployed in the future. Unfortunately CCS is not and will not be practical. [1] [2] I can explain my critiques in more detail if you clarify exactly what your argument is. [1] https://manuelgarciajr.com/2020/08/09/the-improbability-of-co2-removal-from-the-atmosphere/ https://manuelgarciajr.com/2020/08/09/the-improbability-of-c... [2] Comical, but fact-based take: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MSZgoFyuHC8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MSZgoFyuHC8
      • 5y ago
• choeger 5y ago
  Think again. These rails you seem to favor need energy to be built: Steel needs to be made, a track has to be cleared, machines need to operate, workers need to get to the construction site and so on and so forth. Unless you propose to decide top-down which projects deserve cheap energy and which don't, you cannot avoid the fact that building roads and allowing car ownership is under certain circumstances more economical than building lots of railroads. On top of that, imagine how commuting 10km by train vs. car work out: By car it's a 10min ride, assuming no congestion. Whereas the door-to-door train trip will take the better part of an hour. There is a similar advantage for flying. Yes, kerosene is comparatively cheap. But flying has an even more important advantage over trains and that is flexibility. The network of airports multiplies the number of potential connections whereas train stations can only lead you along railroads. In a region with fixed, medium-range traveling routes, say France or Japan, the train wins, otherwise the plane is just more efficient.
  • jltsiren 5y ago
    If there is no congestion, there is no railway connection, because the number of commuters is too low to support one. A 10 km commute by train typically takes 30-40 minutes door-to-door. For driving, the normal time might be 20-30 minutes, but the variance is often much higher than by train. If driving is consistently faster or slower than that, people tend to switch between train and car or otherwise change their commuting habits until congestion is back to "normal".
    • choeger 5y ago
      Where I live a car makes an average of 60km/h, outside of a city. It's often faster, and does no in-between stops. So it's 10min. And I do commute by train. 8km. And it takes 45min door to door. These are real-world numbers. Living in the city and using the train costs me more than one hour of additional commute each day. For comparison: It takes 25-30 min to ride by bike, depending on effort, weather, etc.
  • Karrot_Kream 5y ago
    You're not making a coherent argument here. If you want to get a holistic picture of what these systems actually cost, it comes down to up-front investment vs ongoing costs. Rail needs to pay high costs initially in purchasing cars, acquiring land, and laying down track, but from there it just becomes about maintenance costs. When it comes to roads, it's usually a smaller one-time cost to acquire land and lay down road, then ongoing maintenance on the road itself (which is worse than track wear-and-tear since there's more surface to fix, hiring crews to come into the area is more complicated, and because conditions of usage on a road aren't as tightly controlled.) To make matters complicated in practice, gas in the US (since that's where this argument makes sense) has long been considered the holy grail of the economy, and gas taxes have not been raised to account for inflation since 1990. Since the 1980s, the US has politically favored cars and airplanes over trains and buses. Roads are never expected to make a profit, though most transit in the US is. Aviation has had things like the Essential Air Service that offer subsidies for rural air routes and carriers that serve rural airports, whereas the closest thing that transit has to this is Amtrak mandates to service cities; these are hamfisted mandates that Congressmen stuff into spending bills to make their constituents happy but don't actually create the kind of healthy market you would need to offer quality service. Moreover Amtrak track is often leased from freight carriers _because_ America apportions less money to rail than it does to roads and transit, so Amtrak trains often must yield and wait for freight trains to go first. That and the fact that externalities from emissions aren't accounted for mean any alternatives to the plane and the car in the US are at a heavy disadvantage.
• Pick-A-Hill2019 5y ago
  There exists a world beyond your experience. A world in which people on low incomes have to chose between heating and eating. Sure - there are those that fly to meetings but there is also a world less represented/vocal here on HN for whom this could be (probably will be) a crisis. Yes, Global Warming is a problem but the people trying to keep themselves from freezing contribute a much smaller amount than Big-Tech and industry as a whole. Trying to shift the blame from corporations on to people just trying to survive the winter is a tale of corporate white-washing/green-washing/hand-waving/lobbying.
  • the8472 5y ago
    How about not letting high income people use the baseline needs of low income people to deflect responsibility for their freely made choices? Especially when they're responsible for a much larger fraction of the carbon footprint. It's not only on corporations.
    • throwawaylinux 5y ago
      It's pretty sickening when hundreds of billionaires and celebrities and rulers fly their private jets to these secretive conferences where they decide exactly how horrible and greedy Joe Coalminer is, and what penance he must pay for his sins. I can't believe people try to shrug it off as no big deal because the absolute carbon output is small, or postulating that they must have offset it. If there are two things people react badly to, it is injustice / unfairness, and hypocrisy. The ruling class has done more to turn the average person against their climate change proposals than just about anything else, in my opinion. Quite probably by design, such is the blatant audacity of their double standards.
      • LargoLasskhyfv 5y ago
        What else is new? https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wasser_predigen_und_Wein_trinken https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wasser_predigen_und_Wein_trin...
      • Lammy 5y ago
• mrfusion 5y ago
  Yay poverty?
• lambdasquirrel 5y ago
  The problem with this idea is that it was cheap energy that gave rise to the middle class during the industrial revolution. Energy acts as a force multiplier on human labor. Without it, you need many more humans to accomplish tasks like farming and construction. And many things just become physically insurmountable. We just wouldn’t have professions like software engineering or even yoga teachers (the way they exist today) without cheap abundant energy. Remember that it was cheap energy that allowed people to migrate and settle in the city of their choice and thus free themselves from the landowning class. With housing costs the way they are in certain cities, this is still relevant today. The solution isn’t to make energy more expensive, but to make things more efficient, and to change where we get our energy from.
  • bserge 5y ago
    On that note, these days even a few lead acid batteries and a few solar panels at home are enough for a lot of things. LED lights, battery power tools, laptops, these are very efficient compared to just 20 years ago. Don't really need expensive Li-Ion when you have the space for big and heavy, but cheap SLA batteries.
    • empiricus 5y ago
      but far from enough during the winter, when you need much more energy. for 70% of the year, yeah, a few solar panels are enough.
• lumost 5y ago
  Energy is cheap in that most sources have low marginal cost and high CapEx. Building energy capacity is largely an exercise of capital formation and deployment. These capital expenditures have fixed capacity, and lifetimes. If the capital formation and deployment process breaks down for some reason, then there will be an energy crises as demand outstrips supply. The cost of energy in such a market is not the marginal cost of an extra kWh but instead the marginal ability for energy purchasers ability to pay which for many use cases is orders of magnitude higher than the former number.
• esalman 5y ago
  We used to have one hour of electricity supply followed by one hour of blackout during the day in Summer. I'm talking about 10 years back in the Indian subcontinent- halfway around the world from US where I live now. Sometimes 1 hour blackout would turn into two. A large part of the time we had supply was spent pumping and storing water. Come to think of it, we made sure that every drop of that water and every minute of that electricity supply was used efficiently. I am sometimes reminded of this memory these days when I let my standard-size SUV idle with the AC running while waiting for a latte.
  • cm2187 5y ago
    Or when you talk to someone in California
    • mint2 5y ago
      It wasn’t California that had its utility execs patting themselves on the back during testimony that they were so fast in getting the power back on to the 95% of customers at the 7 day mark as if a whole week without power is good and the fact that means 1 in 20 ppl took more than a week. Oh and if you’re thinking I’m talking about Texas, I’m not. My point is why do people think these issues are just California? Global warming and extreme weather is causing power issues in your backyard too. Why do people love bashing california over issues in their own back yard?
    • esalman 5y ago
      Is it that bad in California? The other reply mentioned TX, I was actually in the heart of the snowstorm last winter. We were saved from days of outage only because we were in a hospital block. So I also think it is not just California. For me the best/worst part of the winter storm happened a while later when I went to an IEEE webinar on the incident. We asked the panel whether they should concentrate more on the robustness of the grid and infrastructure given extreme weather events are going to be more common. The BiG oIl ExeC in the panel replied "ask me in 1000 years, the scientists are divided on that one." But not all of the panelists were as heartless.. towards the end one of them mentioned that when designing infrastructure we should keep in mind the weak and the vulnerable- those in the hospitals and such, not just the ones with backup generators and firewood stocks.
• Gravityloss 5y ago
  Yeah. There's so many subsidies and tax laws etc as well. It seems it's really hard to refactor so the incentives would make sense, while still keeping all groups even relatively content. Mass air travel will resume now that the pandemic is subsiding. Saw plenty of airplanes on sunday already... That's a massive fuel sink, and as far as I understand, with very low tax rate and fuel cost.
• phkahler 5y ago
  >> Energy is so important, yet so cheap. If you want a good economy you have to make the inputs flow unimpeded. People need food, and everything else runs on energy. It has to be a commodity.
• estaseuropano 5y ago
  While I fully agree on substance the market mechanisms mean that if oil and gas are pricey all prices go up. So in a country like Spain or Romania they are already seeing a risk of 'energy poverty' for winter heating. Not to mention all the far more numerous poor people who won't be able to go to work, drive the bus that earns their living, etc.
• throwaway20875 5y ago
  >Even with the recent rise in prices, energy prices are still way to low to actually influence choices most people make. No revolution was ever made with silk gloves kind of mentality right here.
• maccolgan 5y ago
  Yes, make things so prohibitively expensive that people can't choose what they want to do anymore, that's 100% fair, right?
• dougmwne 5y ago
  When you look at the history of human technical achievement, it's a story of harnessing more and more energy. I don't think reducing energy use is any kind of solution and making energy more expressive is just going to greatly diminish the services we can provide and limit who we can provide them to. Viewed another way, solving global warming would be easy if we had a near infinite supply of extremely cheap energy. The most important thing we could do for the human race would be to invent 10x cheaper energy with 10x lower externalities.
• raxxorrax 5y ago
  I do not think this is a way to improve our ecological footprint. We will not ever use less energy tomorrow than we use today, that will simply not be happening. If something is important, it is a good that it is also cheap. Every form energy production has some disadvantages, but we must improve here if we want to reduce our influence on climate. Your proposal to increase prices will not make people drive or heat less, it will just put another burden on their shoulders. The well off would not change anything, poorer people will have trouble. This is not an idea I would support.