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> I see a lot of cynicism around renewable energy and electric cars and I frankly don't get it So far, we have never globally replaced fossil fuels with renewa

> I see a lot of cynicism around renewable energy and electric cars and I frankly don't get it So far, we have never globally replaced fossil fuels with renewable energy, only supplemented their usage (meaning you can't point to a single drop of oil that is designated to never be extracted due to the creation of renewables). The energy required to build an electric car is massive and results in a lot of CO2 production and takes a fairly long time to balance out. Here's the really important part: despite lots of progress in electric cars and more importantly tremendous (seriously very impressive) growth in renewables CO2 in the atmosphere is not only not decreasing, it is accelerating. Ultimately massive renewables infrastructure projects and large scale adoption of electric vehicles are capitalist friendly ways of deluding yourself into thinking you're making change while actively making things much worse. The only surefire way to slow climate change is degrowth but this is literally a forbidden topic. Most of the comments mentioning this on HN or anywhere else on the web are immediately downvoted into oblivion. Even though we know for a fact that economic contraction leads to decreased fossil fuel consumption and have no evidence that on a system level increased renewables reduces CO2. And it's not just that capitalists don't like it, but nobody really wants to seriously consider degrowth. But here's the rub: climate change will bring massive degrowth either way, and in a much worse way. The cynicism is because the optimism around renewables allows people to pretend the problem isn't getting worse, and silences any discussion about hard but real solutions. It doesn't matter much either way, we've chosen violence and are going to play this out the hard way. If you want to pretend it's otherwise, I've given up on bothering to convince other people awhile ago. Have fun in your fantasy and let me know when the rate of atmospheric CO2 starts to even stop accelerating (forget actually dropping).

svara 4y ago
How would you get to CO2 neutrality if degrowth is going to be the strategy? If you go back to the world of 50 years ago, you reduce emissions but you don't solve the problem, and you make it impossible to go to an entirely carbon neutral economy since you won't be able to produce the required tech anymore. Unless the plan is to actually go back to a preindustrial lifestyle. Massive investment in renewables at least is a theoretically possible strategy for going to carbon neutrality without a total destruction of people's quality of life. You're right about electric cars et al being energy intensive to produce right now, but this gets better and better with increasing electrification and CO2 reduction in power generation.
wyager 4y ago
> The only surefire way to slow climate change is degrowth but this is literally a forbidden topic It's not a forbidden topic - most people just understand that it's in some sense treasonous to human civilization (at least in the forms generally espoused by its proponents), so don't bother entertaining it. > climate change will bring massive degrowth either way, and in a much worse way. This is a fantastically unrealistic economic model.

svara 4y ago

How would you get to CO2 neutrality if degrowth is going to be the strategy? If you go back to the world of 50 years ago, you reduce emissions but you don't solve the problem, and you make it impossible to go to an entirely carbon neutral economy since you won't be able to produce the required tech anymore. Unless the plan is to actually go back to a preindustrial lifestyle. Massive investment in renewables at least is a theoretically possible strategy for going to carbon neutrality without a total destruction of people's quality of life. You're right about electric cars et al being energy intensive to produce right now, but this gets better and better with increasing electrification and CO2 reduction in power generation.

wyager 4y ago

> The only surefire way to slow climate change is degrowth but this is literally a forbidden topic It's not a forbidden topic - most people just understand that it's in some sense treasonous to human civilization (at least in the forms generally espoused by its proponents), so don't bother entertaining it. > climate change will bring massive degrowth either way, and in a much worse way. This is a fantastically unrealistic economic model.