9 ms·

Still seems to be about twice as many dying from cold weather. https://www.epa.gov/climate-indicators/climate-change-indicators-heat-related-deaths https://www

• hitpointdrew 4y ago
  Yup. No one wants to talk about this though. We need to get cheap reliable energy to as many people as quickly as possible to help prevent this. Everything should be on the table, natural gas, fracking, nuclear.
  • hpkuarg 4y ago
    Similarly, a lot of people think it's inherently wasteful (at least in terms of climate change-related sensitivities) to live in the southern US where it's commonly accepted to run air conditioning for many months of the year, whereas nobody blinks twice at the number of oil-fired furnaces in New England.
    • spikej 4y ago
      That's the reason there's now a major push in a lot of places to replace those with heat pumps...
    • 1-6 4y ago
      We can’t let politics run the nation’s energy policies. The decision makers need to be a neutral body of elected officials.
      • PraetorianGourd 4y ago
        An elected official is by definition not neutral. I think representative government is as good as it gets, but it will never be neutral or bereft of politics.
      • hpkuarg 4y ago
        Neutral and elected are mutually exclusive. ;-)
        • 8note 4y ago
          Neutral and decisions are mutually exclusive, even
      • pessimizer 4y ago
        The usage of the word "politics" has somehow become so distorted that people are begging for non-political government.
    • galangalalgol 4y ago
      Keeping your house at 80F when its 115F outside would seem to use less energy than keeping your house at 60F when it is -1F out. Maybe humidity makes it closer to even? For me one bill was gas and one was electric, so harder to compare. I'll ask some coworkers with only a heat pump.
      • pdonis 4y ago
        > Maybe humidity makes it closer to even? If the humidity is high enough, it can take it past even. But you won't find that out by comparing summer and winter numbers in the same location, because there aren't a significant number of locations that have both summer and winter conditions severe enough to push the numbers. You would want to compare, say, Canada in winter with south Florida or south Texas in summer (or, for even more extreme, northern Scandinavia in winter with southeast Asia or equatorial Africa in summer).
        • galangalalgol 4y ago
          Scandinavia in winter won't usually be a heat pump to air though right? Don't they heatpump from geothermal? Even just locally here the 25 degree F differential with ~50% relative humidity in summer would be interesting to compare to the 60 degree F differential in winter. Maybe those ultra efficient hygroscopic dehumidifiers will finally enter production. And heat pumping to geothermal for summer might help too. I know some people locally do that. Big investment though.
        • yesbabyyes 4y ago
          Sweden can range from -25 to 35 °C. Heat pumps are common, both downhole heat exchangers (rock heat we call it) and air source heat pumps, among home owners. Central heating is also common and often heated by garbage.
      • deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
      • bombcar 4y ago
        Part of it is everything creates waste heat - so a well insulated house can take a looooong time to cool (my furnace died in the winter and I didn’t notice for over a week). And you can survive “unaided” quite low (sleeping bags rated to -30°?) but there is a heat point where you die if you cannot escape it somehow.
    • ricardobayes 4y ago
      Or wood-fired, surprisingly common still in parts of Europe. Related, but sad news is e.g. in Hungary, they removed protection from basically all forests to be used as firewood. We will pay dearly for this hubris. Can you imagine chopping up Redwood national park for firewood? This is what is happening currently in Europe.
      • ChuckNorris89 4y ago
        Same in rich Austria. I saw many apartments around the million euro ballpark in the older posh city center buildings, that are still heated by firewood stoves and many countryside houses are still heated by oil. Heat pumps? Ha! Never saw them anywhere around here. It all feels incredibly dirty and inefficient to me for such a rich country.
        • tpmx 4y ago
          Well, oil is cheaper than electricity now*. *) Depending on time and location of course, but it's the case surprisingly often. As a Swede, the more I learn about about how central Europe has been heating their homes the more disgusted I become. Like, the way e.g. Germany seems to think of burning gas as "clean". I mean, maybe compared to coal, but... you shut down nuclear plants with a plan to replace with (Russian) gas? You do understand burning this causes CO2 emissions, right? That was the many-billion-Euro German green energy revolution your environmentalists wouldn't stop talking about a decade ago? And now our electricity in southern Sweden (which is what we generally use to heat our houses, in contrast to most of Europe, since it used to be very cheap and clean here, just a year ago. Most use an air-to-air/water heat pump or three) is insane costly, because of a combination of idiotic leftist politicans/voters also shutting down nuclear plants while at the same time building export power connections to Europe. It's like everyone is doing the opposite of what's sane. /rant over
          • adrianN 4y ago
            Germany actually didn't plan to replace nuclear with gas, it wanted to replace nuclear with renewables+gas (later to be replaced by electrolysis). It was of course unfortunate for the climate to shut down the nuclear plants before shutting down the lignite plants.
  • bequanna 4y ago
    Thanks for the sanity. The key word in your post being reliable. There are 1001 ways to generate electricity but with no good storage options we need to prize reliability over all other attributes when considering what we invest in.
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
  • zibby8 4y ago
    Is it really preventable though? Isn’t it pretty much a basic law of nature that resources will be consumed maximally? If you increase the amount of available energy, it too will be used up until a point where people on the fringes are left wanting. Not sure how you solve that short of some version of population control.
    • delecti 4y ago
      That is often true, but isn't necessarily always true, and certainly not always true for every resource. Total electricity use in the US has been fairly flat for the past 20 years, and that's despite increasing in population by about 50million over the same period.
      • QuarterReptile 4y ago
        Sources for anyone else who wanted to upgrade this from 'internet stranger fact' to 'thing I would repeat to my acquaintances': https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/us-energy-facts/ https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/us-energy-facts/ https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/dec/popchange-data-text.html https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/dec/popchange...
      • nradov 4y ago
        Electricity use has only stayed flat in the US because we have outsourced much of our heavy industry to China and other countries. If you properly account for the electricity we are effectively importing in the form of manufactured goods then the curve goes way up.
    • Retric 4y ago
      No, often very small subset of resources become the limit not every single resource. Irrigation can work on land, but kelp don’t have that problem. Conversely on land iron is abundant but at sea it’s a limited resource. Prey population density declines predictors need to expend more energy to get a meal, this space is frequently the limiting factor for prey species not the availability of food or water.
  • ClumsyPilot 4y ago
    > We need to get cheap reliable energy We nees to address social problems too. You energy policy won't help a homeless person
  • vincnetas 4y ago
    I would prefer that we consider power efficient housing first. Use more insulation and less energy to keep comfortable temperatures inside never-mind if it's too cold or too hot outside.
    • QuarterReptile 4y ago
      At least in the US, this could be helped by getting rid of SFH zoning so that buildings would occasionally replaced rather than continually remodeled in ways that mostly dress up the underlying building.
    • nradov 4y ago
      Modern building codes in most developed countries already require good power efficiency in terms of insulation and climate control systems. However, we have a huge stock of less efficient buildings that will take decades to replace or update. Stricter building codes and other mandates to improve efficiency will also increase housing costs at a time when many people are struggling to afford a home at all. Efficiency pays back in the long term but the capital expenses are painful in the short term.
  • ajross 4y ago
    > Everything should be on the table, natural gas, fracking, nuclear. That's a misinterpretation. Those are global numbers. Those people dying are dying primarily from exposure due to housing shortfalls, it's not an energy distribution problem. And it's absolutely not a problem due to (as you seem to imply) inappropriate regulation of fuels, which isn't happening anywhere anyway. If you want to keep these people alive then cut a check to a global housing construction NGO. Letting GE build a reactor or BP dill a well does nothing.
    • SamPatt 4y ago
      Building reactors and drilling wells increases supply which decreases cost. Saying this wouldn't help is just false. Of course increased supply helps with shortages.
      • ajross 4y ago
        Cheap electricity doesn't help someone who doesn't have a house to heat. There is no electricity shortage in this scenario.
        • SamPatt 4y ago
          A society in which energy is cheap is better able to help the homeless than one in which it is expensive. Same with food or any other necessity. Also, the mere existence of housing problems doesn't negate the point that cheap energy is immensely beneficial to human flourishing in general.
        • Spooky23 4y ago
          Two different problems that you need to separate to have a cogent argument. The fact that one person cannot heat their home has nothing to do with a person with no home.
  • ljw1001 4y ago
    People have always died from cold weather, but now it’s an emergency that justifies accelerating the ruin of the planet through fracking? If people freeze to death because they’re homeless or get lost hiking no amount of cheap energy is going to help.
• baybal2 4y ago
• tpmx 4y ago
  Globally: About 4x more dying from cold than from warm weather. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(22)00179-9/fulltext https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6... (March 2022) Global mortality burden attributable to non-optimal temperatures They report that 2.98% of deaths globally could be attributed to non-optimal temperatures in 2019; 2.37% of deaths from low temperatures and 0.63% of deaths from high temperatures.
• legulere 4y ago
  part of that are infectious diseases which is more an indirect effect of staying more inside and not having enough fresh air inside compared to with warmer temperatures.