7 ms·

At least in Europe, an order of magnitude (or two, depending on country) more people die from the cold than from the heat[0]. Going by the numbers, if green ene

At least in Europe, an order of magnitude (or two, depending on country) more people die from the cold than from the heat[0]. Going by the numbers, if green energy policy keeps summer temperatures down but makes energy more expensive[1], it will kill more people. [0]: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanplh/article/PIIS2542-5196(23)00023-2/fulltext https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanplh/article/PIIS2542-5... [1]: https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2021/10/26/lets-come-clean-the-renewable-energy-transition-will-be-expensive/ https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2021/10/26/lets-come-clean...

mistrial9 3y ago
energy efficiency makes the same amount of power, go further. Look into reducing outdoor lighting, wasteful uses of electricity, and improving efficiency for heavy applications, you might find more than enough savings to handle dire, life-and-death situations.
- MrBuddyCasino 3y ago
  The low-hanging fruit have mostly been picked by now, regulating demand-side is not a solution and will lead only to immiseration and state overreach. Unless you are fine with only flushing your toilet on Wednesdays, this is not a desirable future overall.
  - danudey 3y ago
    > regulating demand-side is not a solution I think it's more accurate to say that consumer-side regulation is not a solution. I'm willing to bet there are tons of industries out there that can significantly reduce their energy usage, but it's either undesirable from a profit perspective or infeasible from a cost perspective. That said, the "obvious" solution at this point seems to be larger supplies of non-carbon-releasing power generation (e.g. green or nuclear energy).
    - Earw0rm 3y ago
      The problem is that high-energy regimes can crowd out low-energy designs that actually produce better outcomes in terms of well-being. As with food calories: either for an individual or a population group, if you don't have enough, more is very, very much better. This is not the same as more being always better. Sometimes the same or less in a smarter implementation produces better outcomes, and sometimes it takes a regulatory shove to get there. Societies that require everyone to have a car just to have a basic acceptable level of mobility and participation, and which expect even moderately high performers to fly multiple times a year, case in point. Huge amounts of energy deployed for marginally better outcomes. The mistake is in observing a strong positive correlation on part of the curve, and extrapolating that to interpret it as a linear relationship. There are parts of the world which still need a lot more deployable energy. Getting household white goods to the majorities in poorer countries, etc. The same additional amount in the hands of the top 80% or so of Western hands would be frittered away to no noticeable benefit - we could get by with a lot less.
      - gottorf 3y ago
        > The same additional amount in the hands of the top 80% or so of Western hands would be frittered away to no noticeable benefit - we could get by with a lot less. We could, but getting by with less out of choice is much better than getting by with less out of deprivation (like you said, "if you don't have enough, more is very, very much better"). And if your solution involves a large group of people depriving themselves to benefit those on another side of the world, I'm afraid there's no historical evidence to suggest that it will work even a little bit. > sometimes it takes a regulatory shove to get there. Almost all the time, additional powers granted to the government for that regulatory shove are not relinquished. Virtually all the time, a government that is powerful enough eventually becomes tyrannical. We have to weigh that very real possibility against the cost of what appears to be inefficient outcomes.
        Earw0rm 3y ago
        By definition, if you have enough, it's not deprivation. And, at an individual level, deprivation isn't really something you can do to yourself (barring extreme circumstances, eating disorders, religious asceticism and suchlike). This does get more complicated when it's a societal level choice. You might feel subjectively energy-deprived at a very different point to me. At the same time though, a well-designed low-energy regime isn't perceived by its citizens as despotic. There's very little call (nowadays) to smash Houston-style freeways through Europe's semi-pedestrianised neighbourhoods. Curiously, this was not the case in lower-information times, but the intersection of high bandwidth/discoverability and walkability is a much bigger topic. Now I'm old enough to remember Eastern Bloc totalitarianism, and I find the current Gen Z fashion/fetish of all things DDR/Soviet vaguely tragic, but the outcome of the path we're on right now is at least equivalent to tyranny, at least for the three billion or so people at the pointy end of it all.
  - Earw0rm 3y ago
    I'm surprised to hear this on HN. Making energy efficiency a priority concern often leads to overall better systems. Smaller, quieter, doing more with less and doing it better. (Otherwise we'd all be posting on Presler Pentium D's.. dual Netburst all the way /s)
  - mistrial9 3y ago
    > low-hanging fruit have mostly been picked by now really? lighting alone is a huge sector for unrealized power savings, in all categories.
    - gottorf 3y ago
      > lighting alone is a huge sector for unrealized power savings, in all categories. Do you have some sources I can read about this? I find it hard to believe that large consumers of light haven't already switched to LEDs given the financial incentive to do so, and on the consumer side, the transition has already been made in most of the world that has lighting.
BatFastard 3y ago
Keep in mind global warming also makes winters colder.
- briantakita 3y ago
  Does global warming cause summer hail storms & record cold temperatures in large regions as well?
  - megaman821 3y ago
    Yeah, global warming isn't the greatest name. If I crank up the wave generator in a wave pool, I would get both taller waves and shallower water. Cranking up the heat retaining gases in the atmosphere is going to make both weather extremes more likely.
- adamrezich 3y ago
  and directly causes wildfires, and tornadoes, and hurricanes... those accursed cows, and their farts! guess I'd better not have any children.
pengaru 3y ago
Desertification of previously farmed arable land is going to result in significant migrations and food supply instability. I think it goes without saying that will result in lost lives from myriad direct causes. This is the sort of thing wars are made of.
- MrBuddyCasino 3y ago
  A lot more land will become arable, too. It might as well be a net plus, who knows. Africa already imports > 80% of its calories anyway.
  - pengaru 3y ago
    Even if in another hundred years there were a net plus, the interim rebalancing process doesn't occur without prolonged conflict and suffering.
  - vkou 3y ago
    Redistributing the world's wealth by killing all the rich, and taking all their stuff, might[1], just like your opinion of climate change, also turn out to be a 'net plus', yet these kinds of ideas don't currently seem to be in vogue. [1] I say might, because there's uncertainty around this. I do know, with absolute certainty that redistributing - say - your organs to multiple people who need transplants would definitely be a 'net plus', but you don't see me making such bloodless utilitarian arguments.
    - gottorf 3y ago
      The difference is that there's a lot of historical precedent against what you described, so we can reasonably expect the outcome of such an idea. Could explain why it's not in vogue, though it does appear more and more popular among the young.
      - deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
      - 3y ago
14u2c 3y ago
[flagged]
- pixelpoet 3y ago
  If internet discussion is demographically and geographically skewed, I promise you it's not towards Europe... try being a non-American on the internet someday, while people are speaking about miles and states and seasons etc.
- SideburnsOfDoom 3y ago
  > Temperatures in Europe have increased at more than twice the global average over the past 30 years – the highest of any continent in the world. https://public.wmo.int/en/media/press-release/temperatures-europe-increase-more-twice-global-average https://public.wmo.int/en/media/press-release/temperatures-e... And since, then https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/wildfires-greece-burn-fifth-day-another-heatwave-hits-2023-07-21/ https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/wildfires-greece-burn-f... So, no, Europe is not least affected or best off.
  - EgregiousCube 3y ago
    The Greek wildfires may be a poor example here, as arson is suspected: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/corfu-wildfires-greece-rhodes-b2381320.html https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/corfu-wildfi... . It's too early to ascribe a cause.
    - ndsipa_pomu 3y ago
      From that article: > However once ignited, wildfires are being driven to larger and more intense extremes due to rising global heat and drought conditions caused by the climate crisis.
    - anigbrowl 3y ago
      Arson is always 'suspected'. You can't burn an entire forest if it isn't already catastrophically dried out.
PartiallyTyped 3y ago
Climate change affects both variance and mean of the weather. Which means both colder and hotter weather, and worse large scale events.
- gottorf 3y ago
  Abundant and reliable energy sources will let us deal with the higher variance; notably, deaths related to climate have decreased to one-third over the fifty years from 1970 to 2019[0], even as the human population more than doubled. That isn't one-third the rate, it's one-third in absolute number. [0]: https://library.wmo.int/doc_num.php?explnum_id=10989 https://library.wmo.int/doc_num.php?explnum_id=10989
  - PartiallyTyped 3y ago
    Even a perfect engine is not 100% efficient, if we don’t find a way to expel more energy or reduce the energy we use, we will only create more heat and will need even more energy to deal with it. It is also the case that a large part of the world is simply not built to withstand such temperatures, and using more energy to accommodate that means putting more heat into the atmosphere.
    - gottorf 3y ago
      > we will only create more heat and will need even more energy to deal with it Yes, that's a thermodynamic certainty. But the moment Homo sapiens left the year-round pleasant high plains of East Africa, we were going to need energy; you can't blame the caveman for lighting a stick on fire to keep himself warm. > a large part of the world is simply not built to withstand such temperatures People live in some truly inhospitable places, some cold, some hot, and have done so since before modern conveniences. Unless the plan is to make sure everyone in the world lives in places where you naturally don't need (or want) heat or air conditioning, the extra heat in the atmosphere is the price we must pay.
      - PartiallyTyped 3y ago
mdgrech23 3y ago
The amount of ignorance in this comment is baffling.
- esalman 3y ago
  Yeah. smh.
- flooow 3y ago
  It may be ignorant or even insane, but this sort of thinking is also taken seriously in certain places, and even highly rewarded. William Nordhaus won the Nobel Prize for a model which predicts that if the planet warms by 6C - an extinction level event!! - GDP will only be reduced by 8.5%. Why? Because most high-value production happens indoors, where we have aircon. [1] [1] https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/2020/sep/nobel-prize-winning-economics-climate-change-misleading-and-dangerous-heres-why https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/2020/sep/nobel-prize-winning-econ...
  - esalman 3y ago
    I didn't know we have large scale agriculture happening indoors. It's a relief knowing we won't lose our high value productivity due to starvation /s
  - gottorf 3y ago
    Why did such a flawed research win him a Nobel Prize? It's not like the Nobel Committee is made up of conservative politicians.
    - flooow 3y ago
      At first I thought this comment was a joke, but I see you made the GP comment so maybe serious (or just a good troll?). In any case, yes, the Nobel Prize committee for Economics is made up of eminent economists, who are indeed probably best thought of as small-c conservative small-p politicians, rather than academics in the tradtional sense.
      - 3y ago
bryanlarsen 3y ago
Green energy policy in Europe has people replacing gas heat with heat pumps. And since heat pumps are also air conditioning, many European homes are getting air conditioning for the first time. One of those rare "have your cake and eat it too" moments.
- wouldbecouldbe 3y ago
  Yeah it’s weird, but now suddenly everyone running air conditioning here. Doesn’t that nullify the savings?
  - megaman821 3y ago
    No, they were using more BTUs of energy just heating with gas and wood than heating and cooling with an electric heat pump. Also the carbon intensity per BTU is going to be lower on almost every European grid than directly burning any fuel.
- gottorf 3y ago
  Believe me, I'm all in favor of using heat pumps. I think it's silly the degree to which Europe as a whole relies on combustion heating, in a part of the world that doesn't get all that cold. I just want to ensure that the electricity that powers those heat pumps doesn't get more expensive as a result of the shift away from nuclear and fossil fuels. There's some preliminary research to indicate that more renewable power in the grid results in lower wholesale prices[0], but the relationship isn't very strong, and it's likely that Europe soon will (if not already) meet the point of diminishing returns. After all, there are only so many places you can put wind turbines, solar panels, or dams. [0]: https://www.imf.org/-/media/Files/Publications/WP/2022/English/wpiea2022220-print-pdf.ashx https://www.imf.org/-/media/Files/Publications/WP/2022/Engli...

mistrial9 3y ago

energy efficiency makes the same amount of power, go further. Look into reducing outdoor lighting, wasteful uses of electricity, and improving efficiency for heavy applications, you might find more than enough savings to handle dire, life-and-death situations.

MrBuddyCasino 3y ago
The low-hanging fruit have mostly been picked by now, regulating demand-side is not a solution and will lead only to immiseration and state overreach. Unless you are fine with only flushing your toilet on Wednesdays, this is not a desirable future overall.
- danudey 3y ago
  > regulating demand-side is not a solution I think it's more accurate to say that consumer-side regulation is not a solution. I'm willing to bet there are tons of industries out there that can significantly reduce their energy usage, but it's either undesirable from a profit perspective or infeasible from a cost perspective. That said, the "obvious" solution at this point seems to be larger supplies of non-carbon-releasing power generation (e.g. green or nuclear energy).
  - Earw0rm 3y ago
    The problem is that high-energy regimes can crowd out low-energy designs that actually produce better outcomes in terms of well-being. As with food calories: either for an individual or a population group, if you don't have enough, more is very, very much better. This is not the same as more being always better. Sometimes the same or less in a smarter implementation produces better outcomes, and sometimes it takes a regulatory shove to get there. Societies that require everyone to have a car just to have a basic acceptable level of mobility and participation, and which expect even moderately high performers to fly multiple times a year, case in point. Huge amounts of energy deployed for marginally better outcomes. The mistake is in observing a strong positive correlation on part of the curve, and extrapolating that to interpret it as a linear relationship. There are parts of the world which still need a lot more deployable energy. Getting household white goods to the majorities in poorer countries, etc. The same additional amount in the hands of the top 80% or so of Western hands would be frittered away to no noticeable benefit - we could get by with a lot less.
    - gottorf 3y ago
      > The same additional amount in the hands of the top 80% or so of Western hands would be frittered away to no noticeable benefit - we could get by with a lot less. We could, but getting by with less out of choice is much better than getting by with less out of deprivation (like you said, "if you don't have enough, more is very, very much better"). And if your solution involves a large group of people depriving themselves to benefit those on another side of the world, I'm afraid there's no historical evidence to suggest that it will work even a little bit. > sometimes it takes a regulatory shove to get there. Almost all the time, additional powers granted to the government for that regulatory shove are not relinquished. Virtually all the time, a government that is powerful enough eventually becomes tyrannical. We have to weigh that very real possibility against the cost of what appears to be inefficient outcomes.
      - Earw0rm 3y ago
        By definition, if you have enough, it's not deprivation. And, at an individual level, deprivation isn't really something you can do to yourself (barring extreme circumstances, eating disorders, religious asceticism and suchlike). This does get more complicated when it's a societal level choice. You might feel subjectively energy-deprived at a very different point to me. At the same time though, a well-designed low-energy regime isn't perceived by its citizens as despotic. There's very little call (nowadays) to smash Houston-style freeways through Europe's semi-pedestrianised neighbourhoods. Curiously, this was not the case in lower-information times, but the intersection of high bandwidth/discoverability and walkability is a much bigger topic. Now I'm old enough to remember Eastern Bloc totalitarianism, and I find the current Gen Z fashion/fetish of all things DDR/Soviet vaguely tragic, but the outcome of the path we're on right now is at least equivalent to tyranny, at least for the three billion or so people at the pointy end of it all.
- Earw0rm 3y ago
  I'm surprised to hear this on HN. Making energy efficiency a priority concern often leads to overall better systems. Smaller, quieter, doing more with less and doing it better. (Otherwise we'd all be posting on Presler Pentium D's.. dual Netburst all the way /s)
- mistrial9 3y ago
  > low-hanging fruit have mostly been picked by now really? lighting alone is a huge sector for unrealized power savings, in all categories.
  - gottorf 3y ago
    > lighting alone is a huge sector for unrealized power savings, in all categories. Do you have some sources I can read about this? I find it hard to believe that large consumers of light haven't already switched to LEDs given the financial incentive to do so, and on the consumer side, the transition has already been made in most of the world that has lighting.

BatFastard 3y ago

Keep in mind global warming also makes winters colder.

briantakita 3y ago
Does global warming cause summer hail storms & record cold temperatures in large regions as well?
- megaman821 3y ago
  Yeah, global warming isn't the greatest name. If I crank up the wave generator in a wave pool, I would get both taller waves and shallower water. Cranking up the heat retaining gases in the atmosphere is going to make both weather extremes more likely.
adamrezich 3y ago
and directly causes wildfires, and tornadoes, and hurricanes... those accursed cows, and their farts! guess I'd better not have any children.

pengaru 3y ago

Desertification of previously farmed arable land is going to result in significant migrations and food supply instability. I think it goes without saying that will result in lost lives from myriad direct causes. This is the sort of thing wars are made of.

MrBuddyCasino 3y ago
A lot more land will become arable, too. It might as well be a net plus, who knows. Africa already imports > 80% of its calories anyway.
- pengaru 3y ago
  Even if in another hundred years there were a net plus, the interim rebalancing process doesn't occur without prolonged conflict and suffering.
- vkou 3y ago
  Redistributing the world's wealth by killing all the rich, and taking all their stuff, might[1], just like your opinion of climate change, also turn out to be a 'net plus', yet these kinds of ideas don't currently seem to be in vogue. [1] I say might, because there's uncertainty around this. I do know, with absolute certainty that redistributing - say - your organs to multiple people who need transplants would definitely be a 'net plus', but you don't see me making such bloodless utilitarian arguments.
  - gottorf 3y ago
    The difference is that there's a lot of historical precedent against what you described, so we can reasonably expect the outcome of such an idea. Could explain why it's not in vogue, though it does appear more and more popular among the young.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - 3y ago

14u2c 3y ago

[flagged]

pixelpoet 3y ago
If internet discussion is demographically and geographically skewed, I promise you it's not towards Europe... try being a non-American on the internet someday, while people are speaking about miles and states and seasons etc.
SideburnsOfDoom 3y ago
> Temperatures in Europe have increased at more than twice the global average over the past 30 years – the highest of any continent in the world. https://public.wmo.int/en/media/press-release/temperatures-europe-increase-more-twice-global-average https://public.wmo.int/en/media/press-release/temperatures-e... And since, then https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/wildfires-greece-burn-fifth-day-another-heatwave-hits-2023-07-21/ https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/wildfires-greece-burn-f... So, no, Europe is not least affected or best off.
- EgregiousCube 3y ago
  The Greek wildfires may be a poor example here, as arson is suspected: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/corfu-wildfires-greece-rhodes-b2381320.html https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/corfu-wildfi... . It's too early to ascribe a cause.
  - ndsipa_pomu 3y ago
    From that article: > However once ignited, wildfires are being driven to larger and more intense extremes due to rising global heat and drought conditions caused by the climate crisis.
  - anigbrowl 3y ago
    Arson is always 'suspected'. You can't burn an entire forest if it isn't already catastrophically dried out.

PartiallyTyped 3y ago

Climate change affects both variance and mean of the weather. Which means both colder and hotter weather, and worse large scale events.

gottorf 3y ago
Abundant and reliable energy sources will let us deal with the higher variance; notably, deaths related to climate have decreased to one-third over the fifty years from 1970 to 2019[0], even as the human population more than doubled. That isn't one-third the rate, it's one-third in absolute number. [0]: https://library.wmo.int/doc_num.php?explnum_id=10989 https://library.wmo.int/doc_num.php?explnum_id=10989
- PartiallyTyped 3y ago
  Even a perfect engine is not 100% efficient, if we don’t find a way to expel more energy or reduce the energy we use, we will only create more heat and will need even more energy to deal with it. It is also the case that a large part of the world is simply not built to withstand such temperatures, and using more energy to accommodate that means putting more heat into the atmosphere.
  - gottorf 3y ago
    > we will only create more heat and will need even more energy to deal with it Yes, that's a thermodynamic certainty. But the moment Homo sapiens left the year-round pleasant high plains of East Africa, we were going to need energy; you can't blame the caveman for lighting a stick on fire to keep himself warm. > a large part of the world is simply not built to withstand such temperatures People live in some truly inhospitable places, some cold, some hot, and have done so since before modern conveniences. Unless the plan is to make sure everyone in the world lives in places where you naturally don't need (or want) heat or air conditioning, the extra heat in the atmosphere is the price we must pay.
    - PartiallyTyped 3y ago

mdgrech23 3y ago

The amount of ignorance in this comment is baffling.

esalman 3y ago
Yeah. smh.
flooow 3y ago
It may be ignorant or even insane, but this sort of thinking is also taken seriously in certain places, and even highly rewarded. William Nordhaus won the Nobel Prize for a model which predicts that if the planet warms by 6C - an extinction level event!! - GDP will only be reduced by 8.5%. Why? Because most high-value production happens indoors, where we have aircon. [1] [1] https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/2020/sep/nobel-prize-winning-economics-climate-change-misleading-and-dangerous-heres-why https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/2020/sep/nobel-prize-winning-econ...
- esalman 3y ago
  I didn't know we have large scale agriculture happening indoors. It's a relief knowing we won't lose our high value productivity due to starvation /s
- gottorf 3y ago
  Why did such a flawed research win him a Nobel Prize? It's not like the Nobel Committee is made up of conservative politicians.
  - flooow 3y ago
    At first I thought this comment was a joke, but I see you made the GP comment so maybe serious (or just a good troll?). In any case, yes, the Nobel Prize committee for Economics is made up of eminent economists, who are indeed probably best thought of as small-c conservative small-p politicians, rather than academics in the tradtional sense.
    - 3y ago

bryanlarsen 3y ago

Green energy policy in Europe has people replacing gas heat with heat pumps. And since heat pumps are also air conditioning, many European homes are getting air conditioning for the first time. One of those rare "have your cake and eat it too" moments.

wouldbecouldbe 3y ago
Yeah it’s weird, but now suddenly everyone running air conditioning here. Doesn’t that nullify the savings?
- megaman821 3y ago
  No, they were using more BTUs of energy just heating with gas and wood than heating and cooling with an electric heat pump. Also the carbon intensity per BTU is going to be lower on almost every European grid than directly burning any fuel.
gottorf 3y ago
Believe me, I'm all in favor of using heat pumps. I think it's silly the degree to which Europe as a whole relies on combustion heating, in a part of the world that doesn't get all that cold. I just want to ensure that the electricity that powers those heat pumps doesn't get more expensive as a result of the shift away from nuclear and fossil fuels. There's some preliminary research to indicate that more renewable power in the grid results in lower wholesale prices[0], but the relationship isn't very strong, and it's likely that Europe soon will (if not already) meet the point of diminishing returns. After all, there are only so many places you can put wind turbines, solar panels, or dams. [0]: https://www.imf.org/-/media/Files/Publications/WP/2022/English/wpiea2022220-print-pdf.ashx https://www.imf.org/-/media/Files/Publications/WP/2022/Engli...