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I'm not sold that this would happen. It seems to me the plan in the US is to add green energy, and then slowly replace the dirty energy with more green. I admit

I'm not sold that this would happen. It seems to me the plan in the US is to add green energy, and then slowly replace the dirty energy with more green. I admit I am ignorant of the plans of other nations, but from where I am sitting I don't see any reason to believe there will ever be a reduction in available energy.

deleted 4y ago
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cryptonector 4y ago
Well, that can't be "rapid". TFA is about a "rapid" transition. I'm saying that's just politically infeasible unless you define "rapid" as "as fast as we can without impoverishing people" or unless you define it as "damn the consequences, just do it". That's pretty obviously true. If you take the first alternative, however, you have to consider how long these touted savings will take to materialize and the opportunity cost of the investment needed to get there. For example if you install grid-tied solar panels for your house it will take some number of years for that investment (and upkeep) to pay for itself -- if the lifetime of the installation is 30 years and it pays for itself in 10, it might be worth it, but whether it is worth it will depend not just on the 20 years' worth of savings you'll get, but also on the opportunity cost of the capital needed to fund that solar installation. Opportunity costs are often hard to gauge, so it's easy to con people with analyses that fail to take opportunity costs into account. The opportunity cost of an investment that will yield "trillions" in savings must be substantial because the investment itself must be substantial (if it was free, we'd have done it already, so it must be substantial!).
- cryptonector 4y ago
  Also, all these savings have to be premised on "climate change will cost something comparable", but so far all we have is models that encode the scare function and whose predictions have been consistently failing since their inception. I.e., the savings are probably not real, but the costs of the transition needed to obtain those savings are real.
  - TaylorAlexander 4y ago
    My understanding is that the predictions have been reasonably accurate. It's just that they have been saying for 50 years that things will be a disaster for us in 50-100 years and people who did not notice any problem after 20 years have declared that all the predictions were false. But recent scientific papers that do a meta-analysis of past scientific papers have found that the original predictions got pretty good by about 1970, accurately predicting the change we have subsequently observed. See here: "Even 50-year-old climate models correctly predicted global warming" https://www.science.org/content/article/even-50-year-old-climate-models-correctly-predicted-global-warming https://www.science.org/content/article/even-50-year-old-cli...
    - cryptonector 4y ago
      They have have not been accurate in the least. I remember when they predicted ridiculous warming of like 7C/century. I remember when they failed to predict the Pause.
      - TaylorAlexander 4y ago
        According to the article, of the 17 scientific papers they studied from 1970 to 2001, 10 of them were completely accurate and the other 7 were only slightly off, but that error was due to the fact that human emissions did not follow the predicted patterns - when correcting for actual emissions using the original calculations, those models were accurate too. Are you remembering scientific research papers? Or TV news reporting that claims to cover what the scientists are saying? Because the news often lies about science, but that’s not the scientists fault.
        cryptonector 4y ago
        I'm referring to the various IPCC reports from the 00s and teens. They have wildly wrong models.
        4y ago

deleted 4y ago

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cryptonector 4y ago

Well, that can't be "rapid". TFA is about a "rapid" transition. I'm saying that's just politically infeasible unless you define "rapid" as "as fast as we can without impoverishing people" or unless you define it as "damn the consequences, just do it". That's pretty obviously true. If you take the first alternative, however, you have to consider how long these touted savings will take to materialize and the opportunity cost of the investment needed to get there. For example if you install grid-tied solar panels for your house it will take some number of years for that investment (and upkeep) to pay for itself -- if the lifetime of the installation is 30 years and it pays for itself in 10, it might be worth it, but whether it is worth it will depend not just on the 20 years' worth of savings you'll get, but also on the opportunity cost of the capital needed to fund that solar installation. Opportunity costs are often hard to gauge, so it's easy to con people with analyses that fail to take opportunity costs into account. The opportunity cost of an investment that will yield "trillions" in savings must be substantial because the investment itself must be substantial (if it was free, we'd have done it already, so it must be substantial!).

cryptonector 4y ago
Also, all these savings have to be premised on "climate change will cost something comparable", but so far all we have is models that encode the scare function and whose predictions have been consistently failing since their inception. I.e., the savings are probably not real, but the costs of the transition needed to obtain those savings are real.
- TaylorAlexander 4y ago
  My understanding is that the predictions have been reasonably accurate. It's just that they have been saying for 50 years that things will be a disaster for us in 50-100 years and people who did not notice any problem after 20 years have declared that all the predictions were false. But recent scientific papers that do a meta-analysis of past scientific papers have found that the original predictions got pretty good by about 1970, accurately predicting the change we have subsequently observed. See here: "Even 50-year-old climate models correctly predicted global warming" https://www.science.org/content/article/even-50-year-old-climate-models-correctly-predicted-global-warming https://www.science.org/content/article/even-50-year-old-cli...
  - cryptonector 4y ago
    They have have not been accurate in the least. I remember when they predicted ridiculous warming of like 7C/century. I remember when they failed to predict the Pause.
    - TaylorAlexander 4y ago
      According to the article, of the 17 scientific papers they studied from 1970 to 2001, 10 of them were completely accurate and the other 7 were only slightly off, but that error was due to the fact that human emissions did not follow the predicted patterns - when correcting for actual emissions using the original calculations, those models were accurate too. Are you remembering scientific research papers? Or TV news reporting that claims to cover what the scientists are saying? Because the news often lies about science, but that’s not the scientists fault.
      - cryptonector 4y ago
        I'm referring to the various IPCC reports from the 00s and teens. They have wildly wrong models.
        4y ago