5 ms·

> A slow train wreck that was avoidable. Avoidable? Yes, but for which price? Our economy, and thus wellbeing, depend on having huge quantities of cheap energy

• consumer451 4y ago
  > Avoidable? Yes, but for which price? Our economy, and thus wellbeing, depend on having huge quantities of cheap energy available. The world may gain an estimated $78 trillion over coming decades by making this energy transition. https://www.imf.org/en/Blogs/Articles/2022/06/08/how-replacing-coal-with-renewable-energy-could-pay-for-itself https://www.imf.org/en/Blogs/Articles/2022/06/08/how-replaci...
  • pif 4y ago
    Sure, now it may. But 50 years ago? No way!
    • te_chris 4y ago
      Yes, nothing to be gained if we’d switched anytime sooner in the last 50 years. Very smart observation. Apart from a liveable planet.
      • animitronix 4y ago
        I think the point is that the tech wasn't ready yet 50 years ago
        • TomSwirly 4y ago
          It takes no technology to consume less.
• Entinel 4y ago
  > When our technology will let us stop polluting without giving up comfort, that will be the right time to stop polluting. Technology has reached this point a long time ago. Politics have not.
  • pif 4y ago
    > Technology has reached this point a long time ago. Your sources and mine must differ. As far as I know, renewable energy sources cannot yet guarantee a steady energy flow, to source big industry, when it's cloudy and not windy for a week. I hope we'll get there soon, I really hope.
• coenhyde 4y ago
  Energy is life. But we've had commercial nuclear for over half a century. We as a society just chose to pollute instead of dealing with the real / not real risks associated with nuclear.
  • pif 4y ago
    On this point, I agree with you. We were too scared to talk rationally about nuclear, and we chose to burn coal instead.
    • omniglottal 4y ago
      Rational discourse about nuclear energy might eventually have to come around to the fact that all the states want to store their waste in one state which least needs nuclear energy. And that storage facility... yeah, it caught fire a few years back.
• ceejayoz 4y ago
  > Avoidable? Yes, but for which price? Our economy, and thus wellbeing, depend on having huge quantities of cheap energy available. We've deliberately made choices to not prioritize better sources of that cheap energy over the years. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/carter-white-house-solar-panel-array/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/carter-white-hous... "By 1986, the Reagan administration had gutted the research and development budgets for renewable energy at the then-fledgling U.S. Department of Energy (DoE) and eliminated tax breaks for the deployment of wind turbines and solar technologies—recommitting the nation to reliance on cheap but polluting fossil fuels, often from foreign suppliers. 'The Department of Energy has a multibillion-dollar budget, in excess of $10 billion,' Reagan said during an election debate with Carter, justifying his opposition to the latter's energy policies. 'It hasn't produced a quart of oil or a lump of coal or anything else in the line of energy.'" > You think pollution is bad? Ask the hundreds of million of people who chose to move from the pristine country to a polluted city along the last centuries! This was not because they loved pollution, but because the other options were also bad. Ask people who live in LA if they preferred the smog from the 1970s, or the people of Cleveland if they prefered the burning river.
  • pif 4y ago
    > Ask people who live in LA if they preferred the smog from the 1970s, or the people of Cleveland if they prefered the burning river. If I ask the people who lost their manufacturing job to China, what do you expect as an average answer?
    • sieabahlpark 4y ago
      [dead]
    • ceejayoz 4y ago
      I suspect they'd correctly identify the respective cost of labor as the key reason. No amount of polluting LA is gonna make American labor cheaper than China's.
  • psadauskas 4y ago
    America's new slogan should be "Reagan made everything worse"
• Retric 4y ago
  About 1-2% of GDP each year could have cut global warming in half over the last 50 years. That’s a monumental amount of resources but wouldn’t have had a particularly noticeable lifestyle impact. We would likely have had more nuclear accidents, but those are really local events. The path was basically eliminating coal, home heating oil, plus drastically reducing oil use by adding in road electrical power delivery for cars. The specific implementation would have depended on massive R&D plus either carbon taxes/banning coal, or larger nuclear subsidies.
  • pif 4y ago
    > About 1-2% of GDP In economic terms, 1-2% of GDP is the difference between a year worth celebrating and a shitty one. OK, I exaggerated a bit, but it is absolutely not negligible over a couple of years, and a catastrophe over 50 years.
    • Retric 4y ago
      You lose 1% GDP not 1% GDP growth rate per year. Basically you get one bad year, and every year after that you don’t notice the difference. Much like how our military spending is a lot of money but you only notice when it changes. The economy might even be larger today if we had gone down that path because of increased efficiency and cleaner air.
    • TomSwirly 4y ago
      Your argument is this: "Rather than give up 2% of our income, we should condemn all our descendants for the rest of time to a blighted ecosystem." > a catastrophe over 50 years. It is a palpable obscenity for you to use the word "catastrophe" to refer to a 2% decrease in the GDP but not for the complete devastation of our biosphere. I heard a theory once that only a certain number of human souls were ever created, and after that, a lot of people got born with partial souls or no souls at all. I found it charming but unconvincing, but sometimes I wonder...
• SketchySeaBeast 4y ago
  > When our technology will let us stop polluting without giving up comfort Given we have entire industries devoted to providing us constantly new levels of comfort without considering energy consumption that's a goal that can't be reached.
• jrochkind1 4y ago
  Climate change is going to involve the involuntary giving up a lot of comfort for a lot of people.
  • melling 4y ago
    Yes, giving up coal generated electricity for anything else for the past half century would have been difficult? Now we go around asking people not to eat meat, fly, etc. Pay now, pay later usually works out to be more painful when addressed later.
    • jrochkind1 4y ago
      At some point it's going to beyond anyone "asking" people to do anything. It already is, for some people. Nobody is "asking" you to become a refugee when the place you lived is underwater, or has too much wet-bulb temp for human life; nobody "asks" anyone to starve when they don't have enough food. Pretty uncomfortable things that will occur to people who did not volunteer for it. The "asking" to give up comfort is an attempt to avoid the later worse consequences that will not be voluntary.
• kzrdude 4y ago
  How do you balance other factors? How many people area allowed into this convenience and comfort? This goes directly into how many people the world can comfortably support.
• nathan_compton 4y ago
  "Our economy, and thus wellbeing," there is a lot of glib oversimplification here. I'm into my middle age now and I can say pretty confidently that the only real technology I think is indispensable and worth the energy we use on it is in food production and in medicine and if there were some way to actually restrict population growth, maintaining the high (frankly unsustainable) level of food production wouldn't be a big priority. I generally believe that on a day to day basis medieval peasants were about as happy as your average person now (perhaps more so). I'd probably trade places with one if I could still get access to the medicine which ensures that my kids don't die in childhood. My point isn't to say that modern technology is bad or doesn't provide value but that "the economy" as a single entity is almost pointless to try and evaluate with respect to a problem like climate change. It is not all or nothing. It never has been. The complexity of our lives and our happiness and flourishing doesn't come down to a glib one to one identification with the current economic order. We can and must (and should have been) thinking and speaking about this issue with more nuance.
  • throwway120385 4y ago
    The economy has become the state religion of the United States.
• MSFT_Edging 4y ago
  > Yes, but for what price? How can you be this short sighted. How is a dead world in exchange for a few decades of obscene comfort worth while in the slightest? How can someone honestly say "what about the economy!" when we will be seeing droughts, storms, heatwaves, etc that will cripple said precious economy while sending the quality of life down the gutter? Was all the plastic treats worth it? Were the wars waged all over the world worth it for the "economy"? Sure you got to structure your entire society around little moving couches and lived in absolute comfort while the lowest were ground down by your little economy. We have optimized out all that makes us Human for the sake of this god damn ponzie scheme. We outsource child care to afford dignity, outsource art to computers so we can sell trinkets for our bosses more efficiently. We built walled gardens on every block, destroying any kind of commons for shared experience so that each and every person has to buy into silly little monetization devices to even get to know others in their community. Absolutely inhuman.
  • nerdponx 4y ago
    Some people do actually seem to be that shortsighted. looking at peoples life and financial decisions, sometimes I get the sense that people have a hard time planning more than five years ahead, let alone for the next generation. that, and people have a strong tendency to engage in wishful thinking and generally underestimating the probability of unpleasant outcomes that could result from their own actions.
• izzydata 4y ago
  The economy is not even real. In theory humans could live in a perfect 1:1 birth to death ratio instead of this infinite growth. The whole economy is one big pyramid scheme that is going to catch up to us some day.
• greenie_beans 4y ago
  people don't choose to move from rural areas. they're forced due to mechanization making their labor obsolete so they can't farm anymore. it's an economic necessity to relocate to a city. other factors play into that too, like drought. but largely in the 20th america everybody migrated away from rural areas because of machines.
• TomSwirly 4y ago
  > What price? Our economy, You appear to be arguing that it is too expensive to save the biosphere from destruction. I'm curious what sort of value you think money will have in a ruined ecosystem. > When our technology will let us stop polluting without giving up comfort, On one side you have a livable planet for our descendants; on the other, your own personal comfort; and you pick the second. Humans really horrify me.
  • kevviiinn 4y ago
    It's the constant capitalistic brainwashing we get from the media telling us how important how economy is while focusing on tiny short term gains