8 ms·

One should expect monstrous amounts of FUD about anything that replaces fossil fuels.

by api 4y ago

monero-xmr 4y ago
On HN I find it precisely the opposite - if you point out flaws with solar, electric cars, wind, self driving cars, etc. you take a lot of downvotes
- nopenopenopeno 4y ago
  Sounds exactly the same as what parent is warning about to me
- throwaway894345 4y ago
  Only when the “flaws” are in the form of “lol what do you think your electric car is charged with?! (mic drop)”.
- googlryas 4y ago
  It may also be because those flaws are trite comments with clear answers that just get repeated in a meme-like fashion. I cannot tell you how many people I say that are worried about ranging anxiety, for example, but go on maybe one long trip per year.
- ajuc 4y ago
  One of the reasons is that a lot of these downsides are overplayed, based on long-obsolete data or false altogether. For some examples: - electric cars are still burning fossil fuels cause powerplants burn fossil fuels (yeah, but electric cars go ~2 times further on 1 liter of fuel even if all our power came from fossil fuels which it doesn't) - rare earth minerals are limited which means we can't have everybody drive electric cars (rare earth minerals aren't THAT rare, for example lithium is more common than lead on Earth, the current availability is a function of past investment which is based on past demand - when demand grows quickly the infrastructure lags and you get temporary price hikes, also there are alternatives) - batteries/solar cells can't be recycled (they can, there's just not enough demand right now because we're at the exponential growth phase so the used batteries/solar panels are very small percentage of the currently-in-use batteries/solar panels) - you cannot have 100% renewable power grid because unpredictable production (you can, some countries do - for example Costarica and many countries are very close - for example Portugal and Norway - but it creates different problems than the traditional powerplants - but there are ways to solve this which are getting ever more economically viable - citing data from 10 years ago is about as sensible as citing CPU transitor counts from 1990s when talking about designing a new graphic card)
  - tpxl 4y ago
    > lithium is more common than lead on Earth Lithium isn't a rare earth mineral.
    - ajuc 4y ago
      It was about cobalt before, now that batteries switched to LFP without cobalt the naysayers switched to complaining about lack of lithium :)
    - hwillis 4y ago
      I'll note that neodymium is, and is used in very small amounts (much less even than lithium) in most EV electric motors (specifically, the reluctance types that are currently most popular). It's not essential, but it does increase range by a few percent. Neodymium is also one of the most abundant REEs- there are basically two groups of REEs, some of which are rare and some of which are >10x more abundant. Neodymium is in the latter. It's also not that supply is restricted (eg, how it all comes from china)- the demand is so low that the cost means it is not mined even where it is easy to harvest. There are large mines in the US and elsewhere that are shut down because China just does it cheaper.
  - thrown_22 4y ago
    >- electric cars are still burning fossil fuels cause powerplants burn fossil fuels (yeah, but electric cars go ~2 times further on 1 liter of fuel even if all our power came from fossil fuels which it doesn't) No they don't. When you add the efficiency of the grid, the charging station, charging the battery and discharging the battery burning a lump of coal to power your Tesla has _no_ advantage over burning a bottle of petrol for your non SUV. This is a lot like the meme that solar is cheap - the part that's always left out: "At noon".
    - da768 4y ago
      Of course, on the other side, there's never any pollution involved bringing fuel to the gas pump.
- kodah 4y ago
  Personally, I think both ends of these conversations could see improvement. A lot of people on here are rich and well-to-do so if you tell them the thing they bought for $45-$90k is more of a luxury than an environmental benefit or investment they'll get upset. Likewise, when rich people tell everyone their flatulents don't stink but others do, it'll make people upset, especially if the price tag to non-stinking-flatulents is high. Civility and mutual respect tend to go a lot farther than "just facts".
- acdha 4y ago
  Extending from ajuc's spot-on answer, a lot of those downvotes also come from how this works: 1. Fossil fuel companies are desperate to prolong profitability and avoid legal penalties. They fund unqualified people (e.g. Stephen Milloy) to come up with ways to claim the science isn't settled or to attack the motives of environmentalists. “These people aren't as green as they should be” is a popular approach since humans love to roast hypocrites. 2. Those people are basically constantly A/B testing random brain-farts to see which ones get some traction. 3. The ideas which work well early on start moving from the promoter's personal Twitter/Facebook/blog to Reason.com or Watts Up With That and, if successful, move up to Fox News or The Wall Street Journal. By numbers, most people hear about this in the latter stages of step 3. That means that when someone gets all fired up about the hot scientific news they got from Tucker and starts repeating it, anyone who cares about the subject has not only heard about it before but has seen it debunked repeatedly, too. That tends to get instant downvotes, just as people do not read spam. You can see a contrast here: when someone posts something original and shows that they've done some homework, they get plenty of engagement.
- epistasis 4y ago
  It's really hard to find downsides to these that are not just pure FUD. They really are better than the alternatives in all ways. We will look back at the days of gas powered engines like we do at steam powered locomotives.
- TedShiller 4y ago
  My favorite is the guy that's 100% for nuclear, until you ask him if we can store the nuclear waste in his backyard. Then he looks all confused and starts calling you names.
googlryas 4y ago
Honestly, at this point in our hyperpartisan world, I expect monsterous FUD about pretty much anything. There was just a small scale war in my city about a proposal to slightly modify the way our library is funded. If that gets people riled up, then one can only imagine what multi trillion dollar industries can stir up.
- thechao 4y ago
  That's probably just a yellow bike shed, though?
  - lazide 4y ago
    Near as I can tell, a lot of people are just mad. Not about anything in particular, just mad. So really it doesn’t matter, they’ll pick a fight over anything.
    - chadcmulligan 4y ago
      As an older fairly conservative friend of mine said when I was trying to talk him into some new tech thing - I just don't want anything to change. Seems a lot of people are like that, and just knee jerk to any change.
      - lazide 4y ago
        Yup. IMO, it’s a sign of being overwhelmed. When folks get older, a lot of things stop working as well as they did, including old learned behaviors and physical things too, so it happens more easily and more often. But this isn’t just an old person thing right now.
        prawn 4y ago
        I've long figured that a lot of political tensions stem from the perceived pace of change: in technology, social norms, etc. It must be hard going from feeling like the master of your domain to frustrated that you don't know how to watch streaming TV or might put your foot in it saying something that was unremarkable 20 years ago (e.g., joke books in the 80s were full of stereotypes).
macspoofing 4y ago
Solar does not replace fossil fuels.
- PaulHoule 4y ago
  It replaces some of them but not all of them. A cynical take on Amory Lovins' "Soft Energy Path" was that it talked about wind and solar but really delivered gas turbines fueled by methane because ① that was the real "least cost energy" and ② it could easily fill the gaps in intermittent renewables.

One should expect monstrous amounts of FUD about anything that replaces fossil fuels.

by api 4y ago

One should expect monstrous amounts of FUD about anything that replaces fossil fuels.

On HN I find it precisely the opposite - if you point out flaws with solar, electric cars, wind, self driving cars, etc. you take a lot of downvotes

nopenopenopeno 4y ago
Sounds exactly the same as what parent is warning about to me
throwaway894345 4y ago
Only when the “flaws” are in the form of “lol what do you think your electric car is charged with?! (mic drop)”.
googlryas 4y ago
It may also be because those flaws are trite comments with clear answers that just get repeated in a meme-like fashion. I cannot tell you how many people I say that are worried about ranging anxiety, for example, but go on maybe one long trip per year.
ajuc 4y ago
One of the reasons is that a lot of these downsides are overplayed, based on long-obsolete data or false altogether. For some examples: - electric cars are still burning fossil fuels cause powerplants burn fossil fuels (yeah, but electric cars go ~2 times further on 1 liter of fuel even if all our power came from fossil fuels which it doesn't) - rare earth minerals are limited which means we can't have everybody drive electric cars (rare earth minerals aren't THAT rare, for example lithium is more common than lead on Earth, the current availability is a function of past investment which is based on past demand - when demand grows quickly the infrastructure lags and you get temporary price hikes, also there are alternatives) - batteries/solar cells can't be recycled (they can, there's just not enough demand right now because we're at the exponential growth phase so the used batteries/solar panels are very small percentage of the currently-in-use batteries/solar panels) - you cannot have 100% renewable power grid because unpredictable production (you can, some countries do - for example Costarica and many countries are very close - for example Portugal and Norway - but it creates different problems than the traditional powerplants - but there are ways to solve this which are getting ever more economically viable - citing data from 10 years ago is about as sensible as citing CPU transitor counts from 1990s when talking about designing a new graphic card)
- tpxl 4y ago
  > lithium is more common than lead on Earth Lithium isn't a rare earth mineral.
  - ajuc 4y ago
    It was about cobalt before, now that batteries switched to LFP without cobalt the naysayers switched to complaining about lack of lithium :)
  - hwillis 4y ago
    I'll note that neodymium is, and is used in very small amounts (much less even than lithium) in most EV electric motors (specifically, the reluctance types that are currently most popular). It's not essential, but it does increase range by a few percent. Neodymium is also one of the most abundant REEs- there are basically two groups of REEs, some of which are rare and some of which are >10x more abundant. Neodymium is in the latter. It's also not that supply is restricted (eg, how it all comes from china)- the demand is so low that the cost means it is not mined even where it is easy to harvest. There are large mines in the US and elsewhere that are shut down because China just does it cheaper.
- thrown_22 4y ago
  >- electric cars are still burning fossil fuels cause powerplants burn fossil fuels (yeah, but electric cars go ~2 times further on 1 liter of fuel even if all our power came from fossil fuels which it doesn't) No they don't. When you add the efficiency of the grid, the charging station, charging the battery and discharging the battery burning a lump of coal to power your Tesla has _no_ advantage over burning a bottle of petrol for your non SUV. This is a lot like the meme that solar is cheap - the part that's always left out: "At noon".
  - da768 4y ago
    Of course, on the other side, there's never any pollution involved bringing fuel to the gas pump.
kodah 4y ago
Personally, I think both ends of these conversations could see improvement. A lot of people on here are rich and well-to-do so if you tell them the thing they bought for $45-$90k is more of a luxury than an environmental benefit or investment they'll get upset. Likewise, when rich people tell everyone their flatulents don't stink but others do, it'll make people upset, especially if the price tag to non-stinking-flatulents is high. Civility and mutual respect tend to go a lot farther than "just facts".
acdha 4y ago
Extending from ajuc's spot-on answer, a lot of those downvotes also come from how this works: 1. Fossil fuel companies are desperate to prolong profitability and avoid legal penalties. They fund unqualified people (e.g. Stephen Milloy) to come up with ways to claim the science isn't settled or to attack the motives of environmentalists. “These people aren't as green as they should be” is a popular approach since humans love to roast hypocrites. 2. Those people are basically constantly A/B testing random brain-farts to see which ones get some traction. 3. The ideas which work well early on start moving from the promoter's personal Twitter/Facebook/blog to Reason.com or Watts Up With That and, if successful, move up to Fox News or The Wall Street Journal. By numbers, most people hear about this in the latter stages of step 3. That means that when someone gets all fired up about the hot scientific news they got from Tucker and starts repeating it, anyone who cares about the subject has not only heard about it before but has seen it debunked repeatedly, too. That tends to get instant downvotes, just as people do not read spam. You can see a contrast here: when someone posts something original and shows that they've done some homework, they get plenty of engagement.
epistasis 4y ago
It's really hard to find downsides to these that are not just pure FUD. They really are better than the alternatives in all ways. We will look back at the days of gas powered engines like we do at steam powered locomotives.
TedShiller 4y ago
My favorite is the guy that's 100% for nuclear, until you ask him if we can store the nuclear waste in his backyard. Then he looks all confused and starts calling you names.

googlryas 4y ago

Honestly, at this point in our hyperpartisan world, I expect monsterous FUD about pretty much anything. There was just a small scale war in my city about a proposal to slightly modify the way our library is funded. If that gets people riled up, then one can only imagine what multi trillion dollar industries can stir up.

thechao 4y ago
That's probably just a yellow bike shed, though?
- lazide 4y ago
  Near as I can tell, a lot of people are just mad. Not about anything in particular, just mad. So really it doesn’t matter, they’ll pick a fight over anything.
  - chadcmulligan 4y ago
    As an older fairly conservative friend of mine said when I was trying to talk him into some new tech thing - I just don't want anything to change. Seems a lot of people are like that, and just knee jerk to any change.
    - lazide 4y ago
      Yup. IMO, it’s a sign of being overwhelmed. When folks get older, a lot of things stop working as well as they did, including old learned behaviors and physical things too, so it happens more easily and more often. But this isn’t just an old person thing right now.
      - prawn 4y ago
        I've long figured that a lot of political tensions stem from the perceived pace of change: in technology, social norms, etc. It must be hard going from feeling like the master of your domain to frustrated that you don't know how to watch streaming TV or might put your foot in it saying something that was unremarkable 20 years ago (e.g., joke books in the 80s were full of stereotypes).

macspoofing 4y ago

Solar does not replace fossil fuels.

PaulHoule 4y ago
It replaces some of them but not all of them. A cynical take on Amory Lovins' "Soft Energy Path" was that it talked about wind and solar but really delivered gas turbines fueled by methane because ① that was the real "least cost energy" and ② it could easily fill the gaps in intermittent renewables.