4 ms·

This is the same thing Paul Ehrlich has been saying will happen in the next decade for 60 years. The average price of electricity per kWh has been trending down

by ch4s3 3y ago

This is the same thing Paul Ehrlich has been saying will happen in the next decade for 60 years. The average price of electricity per kWh has been trending down the whole time. Solar and wind are getting really cheap and lithium prices are dropping. In 20 years we might not even be worried about oil prices for most applications.

ethanbond 3y ago
Are you under the impression that prices adequately reflect all of the costs of a good? Because... that's not true.
- ch4s3 3y ago
  What do you propose in place of price?
  - ethanbond 3y ago
    Not sure I understand the question. The claim is: climate change is going to cause big problems in the United States. Your response was: energy is cheaper than ever. Energy being cheap does not mitigate the problems created by climate change, and there are many scenarios in which low prices make climate impact worse, such as oil prices falling and consumption increasing. It'd be nice to talk about this stuff in terms of prices because they're very convenient, but convenience does not necessarily make a good metric. The price shout-out is like an ancillary observation at best.
    - ch4s3 3y ago
      The claim was that among those problems, energy would become more expensive. My counter point is that energy is actually becoming cheaper and while we’re at it, less carbon intensive. Cheap energy is a great way to solve a lot of the other problems. And lower carbon energy can chip away at the root cause.
jgon 3y ago
Technology has allowed humanity to push back the frontier for a while now, but I can't believe that anyone could look around and think that the current regime is sustainable. Like a village that is feeling great about how full their bellies are now that they've eaten all their seed corn, I get the same feeling from proclamations like the one you've made above. Record levels of C02 in the atmosphere, each year with more and more devastating heat waves (my city just had several of the hottest days on record since records began in the 1880s), the green revolution allowing us to feed people by basically converting petroleum products into agricultural yield, crashing biodiversity all over, fish stocks disappearing, top soil depleting. Its just this cacophony in the background shouting "IT'S TOO MUCH" and its feels like our modern capitalist economy and government can't bear to face this so we just avert our eyes and keep chugging forward. I have some hope that we're starting to turn the corner as birth rates keep going down, and I am somewhat hopeful that things like renewables will keep pushing forward and contribute to helping us move in a better direction, but there's still a ton of stuff that won't be helped. You can't eat cheap electricity provided by solar panels, at least not in any sort of regime that feels believable (I don't think giant fields of green houses is a plausible replacement for modern intensive agriculture), and it still relies on all sorts of manufacturing processes that are in no way sustainable. That hope runs up against proclamations from people like Musk and my local government that WE MUST GROW at all costs. We need to triple our population by 2100 despite the fact that our infrastructure is already groaning at less that half the goal. I think its pretty clear that there is no sustainable QUALITY of life at 9 billion, and I can't see it being feasible anywhere over 5 billion, maybe. But the powers that be in society see that they could reign over a teeming mass of the impoverished and I truly get the feeling the sentiment is our billionaire class would rather reign over a ramshackle society of poverty where the gulf between them and everyone else is titanic instead of a sustainable society when the objective standard of living is higher but the gap is narrower, and so I'm not sure if we'll actually make any moves to improve things or just slowly work our way to a grinding cyberpunk dystopia. To summarize, it feels like people dunking on Malthus and Ehrlich are whistling past the graveyard, their stomach full of seed corn allowing them to put off thoughts of the future and all that matters in our society currently is the next quarter's results. Winter is coming and its not going to be pretty.
- 3y ago

by ch4s3 3y ago

ethanbond 3y ago

Are you under the impression that prices adequately reflect all of the costs of a good? Because... that's not true.

ch4s3 3y ago
What do you propose in place of price?
- ethanbond 3y ago
  Not sure I understand the question. The claim is: climate change is going to cause big problems in the United States. Your response was: energy is cheaper than ever. Energy being cheap does not mitigate the problems created by climate change, and there are many scenarios in which low prices make climate impact worse, such as oil prices falling and consumption increasing. It'd be nice to talk about this stuff in terms of prices because they're very convenient, but convenience does not necessarily make a good metric. The price shout-out is like an ancillary observation at best.
  - ch4s3 3y ago
    The claim was that among those problems, energy would become more expensive. My counter point is that energy is actually becoming cheaper and while we’re at it, less carbon intensive. Cheap energy is a great way to solve a lot of the other problems. And lower carbon energy can chip away at the root cause.

jgon 3y ago

Technology has allowed humanity to push back the frontier for a while now, but I can't believe that anyone could look around and think that the current regime is sustainable. Like a village that is feeling great about how full their bellies are now that they've eaten all their seed corn, I get the same feeling from proclamations like the one you've made above. Record levels of C02 in the atmosphere, each year with more and more devastating heat waves (my city just had several of the hottest days on record since records began in the 1880s), the green revolution allowing us to feed people by basically converting petroleum products into agricultural yield, crashing biodiversity all over, fish stocks disappearing, top soil depleting. Its just this cacophony in the background shouting "IT'S TOO MUCH" and its feels like our modern capitalist economy and government can't bear to face this so we just avert our eyes and keep chugging forward. I have some hope that we're starting to turn the corner as birth rates keep going down, and I am somewhat hopeful that things like renewables will keep pushing forward and contribute to helping us move in a better direction, but there's still a ton of stuff that won't be helped. You can't eat cheap electricity provided by solar panels, at least not in any sort of regime that feels believable (I don't think giant fields of green houses is a plausible replacement for modern intensive agriculture), and it still relies on all sorts of manufacturing processes that are in no way sustainable. That hope runs up against proclamations from people like Musk and my local government that WE MUST GROW at all costs. We need to triple our population by 2100 despite the fact that our infrastructure is already groaning at less that half the goal. I think its pretty clear that there is no sustainable QUALITY of life at 9 billion, and I can't see it being feasible anywhere over 5 billion, maybe. But the powers that be in society see that they could reign over a teeming mass of the impoverished and I truly get the feeling the sentiment is our billionaire class would rather reign over a ramshackle society of poverty where the gulf between them and everyone else is titanic instead of a sustainable society when the objective standard of living is higher but the gap is narrower, and so I'm not sure if we'll actually make any moves to improve things or just slowly work our way to a grinding cyberpunk dystopia. To summarize, it feels like people dunking on Malthus and Ehrlich are whistling past the graveyard, their stomach full of seed corn allowing them to put off thoughts of the future and all that matters in our society currently is the next quarter's results. Winter is coming and its not going to be pretty.

3y ago