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As someone who works at a utility, I respectfully disagree. From the wholesale energy market perspective, demand must be met. Sure, you can slowly switch out o
by probablypower 4y ago
As someone who works at a utility, I respectfully disagree. From the wholesale energy market perspective, demand must be met.
Sure, you can slowly switch out old production for new cleaner sources of energy. The fastest way to reduce carbon footprints (and cheapest) is to reduce demand.
Growing consumer awareness over their over-consumption, to change their behaviour, is one of the most powerful and direct solutions we have.
- hn_throwaway_99 4y ago> Growing consumer awareness over their over-consumption, to change their behaviour, is one of the most powerful and direct solutions we have. Actually, that has been shown time and time again to be false. Asking consumers to change their behavior to lower energy consumption is about as effective as telling people to diet and exercise to lose weight: it may work on an individual level, but it is a complete failure at a societal level, and when it comes to decarbonizing the economy, the societal level is all that matters. If we want to lower people's energy consumption, we need to make policy and economic changes, e.g. raising the cost of certain types of energy use so that it causes people to reconsider their use of it, or redesigning spaces so that less energy use is needed (e.g. making public transportation, or human-powered transportation, a more viable alternative to driving).
- leach 4y agoWhy not just use energy that actually is pretty clean? No reason we can’t use nuclear for the majority of energy, and it’s waste is far more manageable than C02 in the air.