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What a great way to not answer what OP is asking. If you don’t like fracking, that’s alright, but sustaining ourselves without it it’s not really an option. Ri

• humaniania 5y ago
  Energy subsidies for vulnerable people are an option that negates your only argument against the most sane option of switching to renewable and nuclear ASAP, at least in extremely wealthy countries like the USA.
  • lazide 5y ago
    What do you think the odds of this occurring are?
  • xondono 5y ago
    My argument doesn’t care who’s pocket is funding the renewables. As a society, every extra dollar spent on pricier energy is an extra dollar that can’t go to social programs, or to new start up, or anywhere.
    • 8note 5y ago
      Every extra dollar saved on cheaper energy actually goes to lining some billionaire's pockets in some untaxed hole. And then eventually the people who would benefit from said social program will instead have to pay back a climate debt in the future.
      • xondono 5y ago
        If we are going to just made up magic pockets where infinite money lies, then we can justify whatever we please. The point of my comment is that it doesn't matter where the money is. Even if you were to pay it through massive taxes to the rich (assume no loopholes, no funny accounting tricks possible), the ones picking up the tab are the poor people of the future, because even if all millionaires are evil movie villains, taking their money will hurt growth, and growth compounds. Reducing growth now can be a catastrophe when compounded over 100, 200, 500 years.
        • mindslight 5y ago
          This growth fallacy is the main thing driving so much environmental destruction in the first place. Most effort is being wasted on churn rather than creating advancement, and this is increasing as time goes on (fake jobs). Until we reprioritize the economy to make efficiency gains translate into leisure gains, talking about "growth" is just cover for business as usual.
    • nomel 5y ago
      Many would claim that every extra dollar spent on renewables is reducing the environmental debt that we’ve accumulated, that we have to will pay for, with very real dollars, since we’ve subsidize our energy cost with future remediation costs. I think there’s some in-between here.
      • xondono 5y ago
        You can explain or justify the costs however you like. That's not the issue. I'm not making any claims as to the suitability of spending more or less into renewables, just pointing the obvious but often forgotten consequence, that every dollar spent here is a dollar you can't spend in another place. Swapping to renewables at once would have an impact that can very easily overshadow any remediation costs. Even tiny cost increases now will produce vast difference 100 years forward due to compounding. Just as a thought experiment, if the costs of switching to renewable energy are >0.72% of GDP, and the remedial costs are around 18T$ (in today's money) in 100 years, you're still better off not switching to renewables.
    • outworlder 5y ago
      > As a society, every extra dollar spent on pricier energy is an extra dollar that can’t go to social programs, or to new start up, or anywhere. If you are arguing to stop subsidies for fossil fuels, sure! Let's do it. Without any subsidies and with externalities accounted for, fossil fuels would be even more expensive than renewables.
      • xondono 5y ago
        > If you are arguing to stop subsidies for fossil fuels, sure! Let's do it. I'll be all in on that. That's not my point at all. > Without any subsidies and with externalities accounted for, fossil fuels would be even more expensive than renewables. Wow, slow down there. First, subsidies are a confounding factor. I don't care who signs the check, we're all paying for it in one way or another. Let's just assume we join all of the worlds wealth into a big pot somehow, and can magically distribute it as we desire. Externalities are important though, because we will pay them anyway, so that one counts. LCOE for solar and wind is lower, but we can't build a whole network with wind and solar because they're unreliable. The "popular" (hyped) solution is storage, but storage is so expensive that the LCOE for Solar/Wind + Storage blows us through the roof again! I'd love to have some real solution, a renewable and reliable source with LCOE similar to natural gas, but until we have one we need to accept the fact that natural gas is in our mixture of energy sources is a good thing.
        • pfdietz 5y ago
          > storage is so expensive that the LCOE for Solar/Wind + Storage blows us through the roof again! Except it's not more expensive, and likely cheaper, than nuclear. https://model.energy/ https://model.energy/
    • ClumsyPilot 5y ago
      "As a society, every extra dollar spent on pricier energy is an extra dollar that can’t go to social programs, or to new start up, or anywhere." I am not buying it, energy is cheap, so we waste it by shipping a pair of jeans three times across the world, to deliver fast fashion the consumer needs, so that on average they can wear some low quality bullshit made woth slave labour 7 times and then throw it away, to be shipped into some poor country for 'recycling' and have it end up in the ocean. Or catch shrimp near our shores, ship it to philipines to be peeled, and then shipping it back. Passivehaus standard was developed decades ago, it is several times better than the maximim energy efficiency rating in UK of 'A+'. The number of houses that meet either of these standard is a fucking 0%. Check newbuilds in Uk, half of then can't manage energy rating of C, its, disgracefull! Almost none of them have a heat recovery ventilation system or a heat pump. We waste 20-30% of energy we generate on heating leaky homes. My parents used to buy groceries at the market by weight, today a 300 g steak comes with 200g plastic packaging. 70% of my trash is plapackaging. The recycling rate is 9%. Efficient free market my ass. The only place I know that sells food without plastic us an hour travel away, it's a hipster place with organic-artisian authentic beans at 1,000% markup. There is nobody who sells milk in a container I could return to them when it's empty, mo matter how much I pay. What bancrupts an average consumer? Unaffordable housing, education and healthcare. None of these things are dictated by energy price.
    • tsimionescu 5y ago
      If trillions weren't being spent on useless military purposes, you would have a point. Also, a good amount of money in the economy is wasted on stuff like new iPhones every year, bigger cars, plastic crap, Bitcoin GPUs, huge data centers for better ads, etc. There's plenty of room for a reduction in consumption with minimal impact on lifestyle in the developed world.
• micromacrofoot 5y ago
  > Switch to renewables and drastically increase energy costs, which will trap millions of people into poverty, and put millions more in risk This feels like a bad faith take out of the gate (whether or not it's intended)... are there no mechanisms for subsidies to abate these issues? are renewables more likely to increase wealth gaps than other fuels?
  • lazide 5y ago
    Renewables as currently implemented have significant effective capacity issues - wind not blowing, or sun not shining, or whatever - and overbuilding them still won’t solve that. Storage is currently very expensive, and this is not likely to meaningfully (as in decrease by an order of magnitude or more in cost) change anytime soon. That means that you need to buy and maintain more equipment for the same kwh at the plug than you would with a typical power plant. Fossil Fuels are incredibly energy dense and really cheap to extract, even with the nutty new technologies required in many places.
  • xondono 5y ago
    It’s just simple arithmetic, however you want to subsidize or socialize the cost, the fact is that renewables have higher cost per MW. Every dollar spent on higher energy costs is a dollar not spent in other things. This will impact growth.
    • micromacrofoot 5y ago
      Sure, but aren't fossil fuels also subsidized? Haven't the costs been reduced due to the economies of scale and time? Are the environmental downsides not considered part of the cost? I get it, renewables are still more expensive, but are they really doomed to trap more people in poverty? Couldn't one argue that the unbalanced economic systems are the primary thing that traps people in poverty and the cost of energy is simply a minor factor? There are certainly countries with low energy costs and high poverty rates.
      • xondono 5y ago
• throwaway894345 5y ago
  Of course, the consequences of climate change are billions cast into abject poverty, wars over resources and land, and so on. Moreover, if we do away with carbon subsidies (i.e., implement carbon pricing and border adjustments), then yes the cost of fossil fuel energy goes up, the consequence is the society adapts to using power more efficiently. We make less disposable shit, our industrial processes improve to keep costs down, etc. Further still, nuclear fission is still a perfectly good option, and we have reactor designs that are dramatically smaller, safer, and cheaper than previous generations (with projections for the levelized cost of energy comparing favorably with that of fossil fuels today).
  • ransom1538 5y ago
    "Of course, the consequences of climate change are billions cast into abject poverty" The only way to end climate change is to have a serious debate about population control. But no one wants difficult debates (at least people that matter). Nuclear fission once pulled off will make things much much worse. I foresee a population explosion into areas once uninhabitable.
    • throwaway894345 5y ago
      You can either cull billions of people or transition to clean energy, and yeah, people are rightly fixated on the latter. > Nuclear fission once pulled off will make things much much worse. What a foolish thing to say.
      • ransom1538 5y ago
        > Nuclear fission once pulled off will make things much much worse. Doubling the population will make things worse in 40 years. How is this hard? Double chickens? Double cows? Double coal plants? wtf? lol. You are the fool. Trying googling "when does population double".
        • throwaway894345 5y ago
          > Doubling the population will make things worse in 40 years. How is this hard? Double chickens? Double cows? Double coal plants? wtf? lol. You are the fool. Trying googling "when does population double". Ooooff. 1. The population isn't projected to double even in the next century much less the next 40 years. In the next eighty years, the population is expected to increase by only 40%. If you took your own advice ("Google") then you'd know this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Projections_of_population_growth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Projections_of_population_grow... 2. You're incorrectly assuming that the greenhouse gas emissions scales linearly with the population size *even as the emissions per MWh approaches zero. The demand for energy does indeed scale with population (probably sublinearly, but not going to pick that nit right now), but the goal is to drive down the emissions per unit energy to nearly zero much faster than population grows. Better luck in the future.
• CuriouslyC 5y ago
  Option 4, use a mixture of modern nuclear and renewables. Power prices go up slightly, environmental footprint goes down a lot.
  • xondono 5y ago
    I'd love for the world to see that Option 4 would be great (I'd chose that one too!), but it's not a politically viable option. I was limiting the options to the "realistic" ones, given our current constraints.
  • pfdietz 5y ago
    Nuclear and renewables do not mix well. If you optimize for a minimum cost grid, one or the other dominates. Mixed solution s have higher cost.