11 ms·

I'm honestly at a loss as to why some people (and organizations) are hell-bent on hampering attempts to decarbonize, and amplifying whatever tiny negatives they

by weevil 3y ago

I'm honestly at a loss as to why some people (and organizations) are hell-bent on hampering attempts to decarbonize, and amplifying whatever tiny negatives they can whether they're real or not, as though nothing less than 100% perfect is worth replacing the awful status quo.

Gasp0de 3y ago
Because some people make billions by utilizing or selling "free" energy from fossil fuels? Companies extract these, they often don't pay for the energy (just the cost of extraction) and can sell them at huge profits. The cost of pollution is then also not paid by them.
- Muromec 3y ago
  There is that and then there is Greenpeace campaining against nuclear non-stop because Choronobyl'.
  - wkat4242 3y ago
    And three mile island and Fukushima. Nuclear has some serious concerns that are clearly not addressed enough. Usually this is when the low death toll is brought up but it's not just about deaths. It's about environmental destruction. And the potential to do so in the far future through its waste. I don't think we should move away from nuclear altogether but use it as a buffer only for the times when the real green sources are low (eg solar and wind). And we should find a permanent waste solution.
    - jacquesm 3y ago
      And Windscale (whitewashed to 'Sellafield') and an endless series of near-catastrophes.
      - wkat4242 3y ago
        Oh yeah totally, they had a meltdown too. Though it was an idiotic operation at that time, with such a cavalier attitude to safety that I should hope will not be repeated in this day and age. They even opposed the air filters that were introduced anyway and reduced a lot of the contamination during the meltdown. I didn't remember to mention it because it was not an energy generation installation that melted down but a military one for nuclear weapon manufacturing. About those filters, a quote from wikipedia: > They became known as "Cockcroft's Folly" as many regarded the delay they caused and their great expense to be a needless waste. During the fire the filters trapped about 95% of the radioactive dust and arguably saved much of northern England from becoming a nuclear wasteland. Terence Price said "the word folly did not seem appropriate after the accident"
        jacquesm 3y ago
        In NL we apparently almost had a major incident at Petten. https://www.trouw.nl/nieuws/bijna-meltdown-kernreactor-petten~b39ec894/ https://www.trouw.nl/nieuws/bijna-meltdown-kernreactor-pette... And that's the one that is public, there is at least one more that is still under wraps and possibly more than that. Nuclear is only as safe as the people running it and that is a major issue even before you bring in economics. You can't treat safety as a cost in installations like these and inevitably that's what happens. What I also find disingenuous is that in calculating the cost of electricity production from nuclear power capex required for the eventual dismantling isn't taken into account at all, and those costs are inevitably massive.
        wkat4242 3y ago
        Wow I had no idea of that one. I actually lived pretty close to there. Seems like the incidents happened in part because the operators couldn't see in the dark after a power outage, and the emergency torch had been taken by someone to fix their car... :X You can't make this stuff up.
        jacquesm 3y ago
  - pydry 3y ago
    Financial liability on nuclear plants for nuclear disasters is capped at ~0.5% of the cost of a cleanup like Fukushima/Chernobyl because sophisticated private insurers fully understand the risks and categorically refuse to shoulder them. Thats why the taxpayer is forced into providing free insurance for every nuclear power plant. The private sector would only ever build solar and wind and storage if externalities like this or CO2/coal pollution were fully priced in. Since the government has a vested (military) reason for wanting a thriving civilian nuclear industrial ecosystem, however, they provide lavish subsidies - some budgeted, while others (like this one) are not. There is a lot of PR sourced from profit driven pro nuclear lobbies telling us that "contrary to popular opinion" it's totally 110% safe now though - none of which acknowledge the private sector's categorical refusal to assume the financial risks, obviously. Presumably Greenpeace, who are apparently motivated purely by a desire to protect the environment and fully funded by donations from the environmentally conscious must be the ones who are misleading us. After all, "young climate activists" say it is being "old fashioned": https://www.cbc.ca/radio/asithappens/dear-greenpeace-nuclear-energy-1.6958765 https://www.cbc.ca/radio/asithappens/dear-greenpeace-nuclear...
- hannob 3y ago
  That is certainly true, but it's not a full explanation. I recently was at an information event from our local electricity provider about wind energy projects. And there are those people... There was a conversation going on like: "The people I talked to don't want these things." Event moderator: "What are the reasons?" Guy: "They simply don't want them." And I am pretty sure that was no fossil fuel lobbyist. It was just a guy who is against things. And there are plenty of those.
  - lynx23 3y ago
    Yeah, its called free will, you know. I dont have to like everything, period.
    - svnt 3y ago
      Most thinking people move beyond this position. An arbitrary position is no position at all.
      - hef19898 3y ago
        A weak opinion, strongly hold. Or some such.
  - throwaway60742 3y ago
    People don't want to pay for it. The cost of the wind/solar project itself is not the full story - you also need energy storage, and that's very expensive. You also need to rebuild the electrical grid to handle the peak power output to be able to store it. In EU countries, at least part of these very significant costs are paid for by everyone - not just the company operating the wind/solar projects who profit from it. Some people don't want to have higher taxes just so a business gets profit.
    - unglaublich 3y ago
      People pay billions in subsidies for the fossil fuel industry, so we can just move those and leave taxes as they are.
- unglaublich 3y ago
  The irony: we borrow money against our future selfs assuming endless economical growth. But when we extract finite natural resources and use up a finite pollution buffer, we do not pay our future selfs the opportunity costs.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- 0xDEF 3y ago
  On social media it's the conspiracy theorists and "compulsive contrarians" who oppose photovoltaics and EVs. They might be the useful idiots of the oil/gas industry but their stupidity is organic.
- fodkodrasz 3y ago
  > utilizing or selling "free" energy from fossil fuels? Companies extract these, they often don't pay for the energy (just the cost of extraction) Is solar or wind energy not "free" in the same sense? Also: are the balancing costs of the network paid by those people selling the "free" renewable energy? As I see they often don't pay for that (not to mention the pollution that causes, which is still not paid by any energy producer)
hkwerf 3y ago
Regarding people, I'd guess that this is mostly caused by cognitive dissonance between the size of the own carbon footprint and the need to decarbonize. Resolving that dissonance would require either to accept that decarbonization is necessary and therefore a lifestyle change or that decarbonization is not necessary and therefore the current lifestyle is okay. Regarding organizations: They're probably either driven by the people above or money...
- aziaziazi 3y ago
  Agree. Also decarb/lifestyle shouldn’t be yes/no, maybe the target should be something like: lifestyle 70% ok and yo support that long term, decarb at scale X (which is not necessarily huge)
- lbriner 3y ago
  The problem that Western governments have is that everyone in the country has a vote and people don't like inconvenience. If you want to "do the right thing" and e.g. ban ICE vehicles, you get a massive backlash, so instead you water it down, kick the can down the road, pretend other less contraversial measures are just as effective or (in the case of the UK), "we are already ahead of other countries so we don't need to inconvenience ourselves too much". Sad really because the green economy could provides lots of jobs, great opportunities to export etc. It's not a coincidence that the UK imports a lot of high-efficiency building products from Germany and Scandinavia, it is because those countries have invested in the tech and are reaping the rewards.
  - unglaublich 3y ago
    People are more concerned about they car they drive tomorrow than the pollution and ecological effects they experience in the future; and not concerned at all by the issues they cause for future generations.
  - hef19898 3y ago
    That everybody has a vote is actually a strength, and not a weakness. And banning ICE vehicles is not up for discussion anymore, is it? Legislature or not, no company will be able to sell you a new one come 2035 anyway. A more general thought so, one that troubles me, is that both "sides" of the public opinion cobflicts we see in the west today seem to be totally fine with using authoritarian measures for the greater good, some more than others and the far right actively advocating for it. It will be liberals that loose with that approach, as the goals of the political liberals can easily be framed as "they want to take away things", hence the far right gets a huge opening.
littlestymaar 3y ago
I'll bite: the problem is that renewable in itself doesn't mean decarbonation: if you're importing solar panels built with Chinese coal and deploy them in Europe / Northern US, you're not actually decarboning anything, and instead you're increasing the carbon footprint but move it abroad. So there are things that are not just “not perfect” but actually harmful, and you can't just blindly deploy “not perfect” things. The main reason why people focus on renewable without getting into the details of whether or not it improves thing, is because it gives the impression of addressing the problem without changing the status quo (mass-consumption society, individual cars, disposable packaging, the search for endless growth…) The western world's energy and resource consumption isn't sustainable, no matter how you get the energy from, and “decarbonation”, like recycling, is just a fallacy that's been invented to avoid addressing this issue.
- hannob 3y ago
  > if you're importing solar panels built with Chinese coal and deploy them in Europe / Northern US, you're not actually decarboning anything, and instead you're increasing the carbon footprint but move it abroad. That is an urban legend and not supported by any evidence. Full solar lifecycle emissions are around an order of magnitude lower than fossil fuels.
  - throwaway60742 3y ago
    Does "full solar lifecycle emissions" include the gas and coal powerplant you use because you couldn't build energy storage and your electric grid can't handle the peak power? Does it include the reconstruction of the grid it necessitated?
    - kemotep 3y ago
      Are you saying that if we don’t build solar panels, we won’t have to use electricity generated by gas and coal?
      - throwaway60742 3y ago
mathieuh 3y ago
It's become a culture war issue. In the UK London introduced a so-called Ultra-Low Emissions Zone recently, and Wales has dropped 30 mph speed limits down to 20, which prompted the right-wing populist government to come out as being "on the side of drivers" and to call decarbonisation schemes "tyrannical". They've now gone full swivel-eyed loon and are rowing back many climate change commitments. It seems to me that, in the UK at least, as the two main parties align more and more on economic and social issues that they are needing to find new wedge issues to differentiate themselves. Not sure if this is also the case in countries with PR governments.
- robertlagrant 3y ago
  ULEZ isn't decarbonisation. It mostly targets diesel cars due to NO. And it doesn't ban them; it just costs £12/day to drive there. So suddenly millions of drivers, who bought diesel cars because that was the thing they were supposed to buy according to the government, now own cars that are worth -£2000/year. It might seem that everything is along political lines because you view it that way. There are non-political reasons to get annoyed at things.
  - tpm 3y ago
    Millions? The number of daily non-compliant cars entering the ULEZ zone went from 36k in March 2019 to 12k in December 2020 according to Wikipedia. I seriously doubt the expansion did hit millions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra_Low_Emission_Zone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra_Low_Emission_Zone
    - extraduder_ire 3y ago
      I think the implication is that wherever you have your car, it's worth less because it costs money to drive it in london, which directly affects its resale value. Pretty indirect though.
      - tpm 3y ago
        Sure, but that also applies only to pre-Euro 6 diesel cars, so pretty old anyway.
lbriner 3y ago
My guess is that it is 2 things. Firstly, as stated by others, accepting these things requires us to accept that our lifestyles are not sustainable, even if we can afford them financially, so we make excuses. Secondly, I think there probably is an amount of ego involved where the armchair experts honestly think that they have thought of something that "the politicians" or the "experts" have missed. You see people on forums/TV saying with no irony or doubt that "Electric cars are not environmentally friendly because of Lithium batteries", or whatever, without actually having any figures to back this up. I agree that doing something, even if not perfect, is better than nothing but I did a Penn and Teller show where their logic was "do nothing now because it is expensive. Wait until we have better/cheaper technology and do it later". Again, seems illogical but people do believe that.
- newyankee 3y ago
  The cheap and better technology only happens because people invest and buy the expensive and novel technology upfront. If Tesla Roadster and Model S didn't have a market, getting a model 3 out would've been quite difficult. It is more like a side effect of equally treating all voices as important and not giving weight to peer review scientific literature or critically analyzing the talking points.
- pydry 3y ago
  Those armchair experts are typically being fed by carbon lobby or pro nuclear propaganda. The propaganda is motivated by profit (carbon lobby, nuclear lobby) and the demands of the military (the nuclear-military industrial complex needs a civilian nuclear-industrial ecosystem to keep a lid on costs). The propaganda tries to tap into that innate ego you referenced though. "Well, actually, the sun doesn't shine at night", "what do we do when the sun isn't shining and the wind isn't blowing? Not use power?", "but geography for pumped storage is very rare isn't it?", "wind farms are very bad for birds!", "nuclear power may be expensive but it's very stable!", "enough batteries to cover solar/wind would be prohibitively expensive", "germany is trying to decarbonize completely the wrong way it's so stupid!" etc. All of these things are in line with the above money flows, are quite wrong, but plausible. They are carefully positioned as being the smart person's take on a complex issue. There are 30-40 regular talking points, many of which appear regularly on hacker news. I think I've had to post the same academic study about how pumped storage geography is actually very common at least 15 times, for instance. You don't get such specific mass misconceptions on such a large scale without some level of money behind the message. It typically filters through from lobby group -> mass media -> average citizen -> hacker news comments.
jacquesm 3y ago
In a single word: money. A bit longer: there are a ton of vested interests that couldn't care less about destroying the world for future generations as long as they get theirs now. This sort of selfishness is institutionalized to a degree that I'm not sure if we'll be able to deal with it short of a total system collapse and even then it might be resurrected.
orwell_bruh 3y ago
If I did see CO2 as a problem I'd still be against wind and solar and all the other harebrained schemes that are mathematically proven to be unable to even make a dent in climate change. However, they are guranteed to lower our standard of living substantially. And a prediction that you'll be able to observe in the coming decades: a lot of those "minor" and "invented" concerns will be front and center once we all have EVs and solar in order to nudge us onto the next thousands of dollars spending or to tax us or simply to keep the eco spirituality of "humans bad" alive. Technological solutions simply aren't wanted by "your" side and so, eventually, all technology will be attacked just as fossil fuel based ones are now.
- svnt 3y ago
  Let it out. Let the last pieces of your clinging to an identity in crude oil products fall away. Gaia still loves you. Hydrocarbon technology never cared in the first place. No one blames you for being deceived.
  - orwell_bruh 3y ago
    Yes, I identify as someone with reliable heating and power who eats real food, has many children and like to go on vacation from time to time. Btw, it's not me being deceived but eventually you'll figure that out, I am sure.
    - svnt 3y ago
      > Yes, I identify as someone with reliable heating and power who eats real food, has many children and like to go on vacation from time to time. Is this false dichotomy you’ve communicated something you’ve cultivated because you are afraid of what would happen without these things, or because without consideration for other viewpoints you chose to value your comfort and tiny world-view over a clearer understanding of reality? Having written it out, there is no need for you to respond, really. It is just fear either way.
Lanolderen 3y ago
Corpos: Profits and desire for less regulation People: Corpo greenwashing, energy source disagreements between nuclear, multiple inconsistent sources, "I don't wanna pay 2-3* more for green electricity while in some third world country not a single car has a cat and they burn tires for metal+heating while dumping acid in the nearby river from the outsourced chrome keychain factory"
inglor_cz 3y ago
The not-so-tiny negative that some professionals here in CZ mention is disreputable Chinese vendors. "Oh yeah, we will give you 10 years warranty for your panels, buy! Cheap!" Only the necessary seals are shoddy and the panel dies much sooner from water incursion. At which moment you find out that the producer has gone out of business, so no recourse. This is not a fault of the technology per se, rather of humanity as usual, but I can see why several such incidents in your proximity will cause distrust. The solution would be "buy from reputable vendors only", but IDK how many Chinese vendors are reputable and if they didn't decide to entshittify their products right now.
- hef19898 3y ago
  The list of top ten solar pnel vendors / brands is one online search away, e.g. here: https://solarpowernerd.com/top-solar-panel-manufacturers/ https://solarpowernerd.com/top-solar-panel-manufacturers/ Buy from a "bankable" brand, and you are good to go. Bankable, as in bank are willing ot finance GWp sized utility projects using modules from those manufacturers. And as you see, those big ones are around for quite a while. Sure, I have never seen an industry as plagued by shady people and practices as solar module importers in the EU (they literally smuggled them at scale sometimes to circumvent import tariffs and taxes), but the big mabufacturers are, and have to be, serious and reliable. Otherwise they'd be out of the GW scale project market, which is where they make their money and sales volumes.
  - inglor_cz 3y ago
    Thank you. I have been considering solar for my home too, but this problem is making me hesitate; the investment is still considerable, at least for me at this moment.
    - hef19898 3y ago
      Yeah, I know. Guess why we din't have it yet. With larger projects, the labor costs decrease per Wp installed, making larger projects cheaper per Wp, and thus the ROI is much better. One should not save money on cheap panels so. Neither shoupd you import yourself, only buy from brands that have an EU legal presence, import themselves and are in the business for decades (JA, Jinko, Trina and Canadian Solar come to mind). If the brand has some large utility projects runnning (either their own as suppliers, doesn't really matter) even better, that means they have contractual agreents with large, repeat customers, basically assuring support for guarantee cases down the road. Be mindful so, not all are very customer friendly when it comes to claims, so take one with a solid startegy for the roof top / consumer market. I spent some time at one of those mentioned, years ago. The ROI for private installation gets better all the time so, Wp prices fall, panel capacity increases, resulting in cheaper and larger installations on the same surface. No idea whwre labour is nowadays, propably through the roof with availability in 2030s or so.
thelastgallon 3y ago
We don't find it surprising that there is a huge ecosystem of fake reviews for 2 dollar trinkets on Amazon. Fossil fuels are wealth extraction from everyone on the planet to fossil fuel overlords. This game must go on. First, fossil fuels are not viable without massive subsidies but we almost never this statistic in the news. This is trillions of dollars in subsidies and growing! Last year, fuels that drive climate change and pollute the air were underpriced to the tune of $7 trillion. [1]. We will see so much news of how land is being used for solar, but nobody talks about 40 million acres for ethanol, which is a small additive to fossil fuels and the agricultural subsidies. Worldwide, this is 100 million acres. So much talk about food inflation, these 100 million acres could be used to grow food instead. but "news" don't want to talk about an easy win of stopping fossil fuel subsidies, which will also bring the prices. Facts like fossil fuel shipping account for 40% of global shipping, account for the largest water withdrawals[3], account for 10 million pollution deaths (but we do see 1.5 birds killed by wind turbines, lets never talk about the billions of birds killed by cats or buildings), these are never part of the conversation. Lets also never talk about the easiest metrics to use is deaths per TWH, renewables and nuclear are 2000x better.[4] I put together a comparison worksheet for kids [5] (fossils vs renewables), any 10+ year old can work through this sheet and figure out that fossil fuels are a horrible idea. Lastly, and more importantly, lets never talk about price-fixing Oil, a commodity doesn't behave like most commodities do, Eg: Salt (and lots of industrial products manufactured at scale - millions of tons) which is so incredibly cheap that no one thinks or budgets for buying salt[6]. OPEC has a monopoly and pricing power and they destroy demand to keep prices up. Nobody has a problem with this! And, lets spend trillions of dollars on military budgets to protect oil supply. Why don't we let the oil companies pay for defense of their own infrastructure? This is not factored into any of the subsidies. [1] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-10-16/climate-change-why-are-governments-still-subsidizing-fossil-fuels#xj4y7vzkg https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-10-16/climat... [2] https://qz.com/2113243/forty-percent-of-all-shipping-cargo-consists-of-fossil-fuels#:~:text=But%20the%20real%20damage%20is,derived%20directly%20from%20fossil%20fuels https://qz.com/2113243/forty-percent-of-all-shipping-cargo-c.... [3] U.S. thermoelectric plants are the largest source of U.S. water withdrawals, accounting for more than 40% of total U.S. water withdrawals in 2015: https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=50698#:~:text=U.S.%20thermoelectric%20plants%20are%20the,U.S.%20water%20withdrawals%20in%202015 https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=50698#:~:tex.... [4] https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldwide-by-energy-source/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldw... [5] https://docs.google.com/document/d/1y_VFQC5qMuLYKoqLg0ooKIgV93hyRKxvDW3aDwgpMeU/edit?usp=sharing https://docs.google.com/document/d/1y_VFQC5qMuLYKoqLg0ooKIgV... [6] https://www.amazon.com/Turning-Oil-Into-Salt-Independence/dp/1439248478 https://www.amazon.com/Turning-Oil-Into-Salt-Independence/dp...
winter_blue 3y ago
> I'm honestly at a loss as to why some people (and organizations) are hell-bent on hampering attempts to decarbonize, and amplifying whatever tiny negatives they can whether they're real or not, as though nothing less than 100% perfect is worth replacing the awful status quo. Thank you for pointing this out. It is indeed quite puzzling. What's even more puzzling is: I felt exactly the same way about anti-vaxxer movement. Although, the anti-vax movement is far worse in the sense that there's literally no human who benefits from it. With climate change, there's a huge fossil fuels lobby that benefits financially from the lies/misinformation around climate change. But, I don't know who benefits from this anti-vax nonsense. Anti-vax lies literally killed people. In the US, it ironically, even with the party that championed anti-vax lies (i.e. the Republican Party), the only effect these lies had was that they literally caused additional unneeded deaths of GOP voters. Not sure why a rational GOP would champion that, but yea I have no idea. It's insanity and madness. It's evil too, in a sense. To have some sane/rational explanation of these things would be amazing.....
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
petre 3y ago
They get funding from Big Oil, Russia etc. https://www.axios.com/2017/12/15/big-oils-electric-fight-against-coal-and-nuclear-1513304200 https://www.axios.com/2017/12/15/big-oils-electric-fight-aga... https://www.greenpeace.org/eu-unit/issues/climate-energy/46227/russian-doll-gas-nuclear-lobbying-taxonomy-eu/ https://www.greenpeace.org/eu-unit/issues/climate-energy/462...

by weevil 3y ago

Gasp0de 3y ago

Because some people make billions by utilizing or selling "free" energy from fossil fuels? Companies extract these, they often don't pay for the energy (just the cost of extraction) and can sell them at huge profits. The cost of pollution is then also not paid by them.

Muromec 3y ago
There is that and then there is Greenpeace campaining against nuclear non-stop because Choronobyl'.
- wkat4242 3y ago
  And three mile island and Fukushima. Nuclear has some serious concerns that are clearly not addressed enough. Usually this is when the low death toll is brought up but it's not just about deaths. It's about environmental destruction. And the potential to do so in the far future through its waste. I don't think we should move away from nuclear altogether but use it as a buffer only for the times when the real green sources are low (eg solar and wind). And we should find a permanent waste solution.
  - jacquesm 3y ago
    And Windscale (whitewashed to 'Sellafield') and an endless series of near-catastrophes.
    - wkat4242 3y ago
      Oh yeah totally, they had a meltdown too. Though it was an idiotic operation at that time, with such a cavalier attitude to safety that I should hope will not be repeated in this day and age. They even opposed the air filters that were introduced anyway and reduced a lot of the contamination during the meltdown. I didn't remember to mention it because it was not an energy generation installation that melted down but a military one for nuclear weapon manufacturing. About those filters, a quote from wikipedia: > They became known as "Cockcroft's Folly" as many regarded the delay they caused and their great expense to be a needless waste. During the fire the filters trapped about 95% of the radioactive dust and arguably saved much of northern England from becoming a nuclear wasteland. Terence Price said "the word folly did not seem appropriate after the accident"
      - jacquesm 3y ago
        In NL we apparently almost had a major incident at Petten. https://www.trouw.nl/nieuws/bijna-meltdown-kernreactor-petten~b39ec894/ https://www.trouw.nl/nieuws/bijna-meltdown-kernreactor-pette... And that's the one that is public, there is at least one more that is still under wraps and possibly more than that. Nuclear is only as safe as the people running it and that is a major issue even before you bring in economics. You can't treat safety as a cost in installations like these and inevitably that's what happens. What I also find disingenuous is that in calculating the cost of electricity production from nuclear power capex required for the eventual dismantling isn't taken into account at all, and those costs are inevitably massive.
        wkat4242 3y ago
        Wow I had no idea of that one. I actually lived pretty close to there. Seems like the incidents happened in part because the operators couldn't see in the dark after a power outage, and the emergency torch had been taken by someone to fix their car... :X You can't make this stuff up.
        jacquesm 3y ago
- pydry 3y ago
  Financial liability on nuclear plants for nuclear disasters is capped at ~0.5% of the cost of a cleanup like Fukushima/Chernobyl because sophisticated private insurers fully understand the risks and categorically refuse to shoulder them. Thats why the taxpayer is forced into providing free insurance for every nuclear power plant. The private sector would only ever build solar and wind and storage if externalities like this or CO2/coal pollution were fully priced in. Since the government has a vested (military) reason for wanting a thriving civilian nuclear industrial ecosystem, however, they provide lavish subsidies - some budgeted, while others (like this one) are not. There is a lot of PR sourced from profit driven pro nuclear lobbies telling us that "contrary to popular opinion" it's totally 110% safe now though - none of which acknowledge the private sector's categorical refusal to assume the financial risks, obviously. Presumably Greenpeace, who are apparently motivated purely by a desire to protect the environment and fully funded by donations from the environmentally conscious must be the ones who are misleading us. After all, "young climate activists" say it is being "old fashioned": https://www.cbc.ca/radio/asithappens/dear-greenpeace-nuclear-energy-1.6958765 https://www.cbc.ca/radio/asithappens/dear-greenpeace-nuclear...
hannob 3y ago
That is certainly true, but it's not a full explanation. I recently was at an information event from our local electricity provider about wind energy projects. And there are those people... There was a conversation going on like: "The people I talked to don't want these things." Event moderator: "What are the reasons?" Guy: "They simply don't want them." And I am pretty sure that was no fossil fuel lobbyist. It was just a guy who is against things. And there are plenty of those.
- lynx23 3y ago
  Yeah, its called free will, you know. I dont have to like everything, period.
  - svnt 3y ago
    Most thinking people move beyond this position. An arbitrary position is no position at all.
    - hef19898 3y ago
      A weak opinion, strongly hold. Or some such.
- throwaway60742 3y ago
  People don't want to pay for it. The cost of the wind/solar project itself is not the full story - you also need energy storage, and that's very expensive. You also need to rebuild the electrical grid to handle the peak power output to be able to store it. In EU countries, at least part of these very significant costs are paid for by everyone - not just the company operating the wind/solar projects who profit from it. Some people don't want to have higher taxes just so a business gets profit.
  - unglaublich 3y ago
    People pay billions in subsidies for the fossil fuel industry, so we can just move those and leave taxes as they are.
unglaublich 3y ago
The irony: we borrow money against our future selfs assuming endless economical growth. But when we extract finite natural resources and use up a finite pollution buffer, we do not pay our future selfs the opportunity costs.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
0xDEF 3y ago
On social media it's the conspiracy theorists and "compulsive contrarians" who oppose photovoltaics and EVs. They might be the useful idiots of the oil/gas industry but their stupidity is organic.
fodkodrasz 3y ago
> utilizing or selling "free" energy from fossil fuels? Companies extract these, they often don't pay for the energy (just the cost of extraction) Is solar or wind energy not "free" in the same sense? Also: are the balancing costs of the network paid by those people selling the "free" renewable energy? As I see they often don't pay for that (not to mention the pollution that causes, which is still not paid by any energy producer)

hkwerf 3y ago

Regarding people, I'd guess that this is mostly caused by cognitive dissonance between the size of the own carbon footprint and the need to decarbonize. Resolving that dissonance would require either to accept that decarbonization is necessary and therefore a lifestyle change or that decarbonization is not necessary and therefore the current lifestyle is okay. Regarding organizations: They're probably either driven by the people above or money...

aziaziazi 3y ago
Agree. Also decarb/lifestyle shouldn’t be yes/no, maybe the target should be something like: lifestyle 70% ok and yo support that long term, decarb at scale X (which is not necessarily huge)
lbriner 3y ago
The problem that Western governments have is that everyone in the country has a vote and people don't like inconvenience. If you want to "do the right thing" and e.g. ban ICE vehicles, you get a massive backlash, so instead you water it down, kick the can down the road, pretend other less contraversial measures are just as effective or (in the case of the UK), "we are already ahead of other countries so we don't need to inconvenience ourselves too much". Sad really because the green economy could provides lots of jobs, great opportunities to export etc. It's not a coincidence that the UK imports a lot of high-efficiency building products from Germany and Scandinavia, it is because those countries have invested in the tech and are reaping the rewards.
- unglaublich 3y ago
  People are more concerned about they car they drive tomorrow than the pollution and ecological effects they experience in the future; and not concerned at all by the issues they cause for future generations.
- hef19898 3y ago
  That everybody has a vote is actually a strength, and not a weakness. And banning ICE vehicles is not up for discussion anymore, is it? Legislature or not, no company will be able to sell you a new one come 2035 anyway. A more general thought so, one that troubles me, is that both "sides" of the public opinion cobflicts we see in the west today seem to be totally fine with using authoritarian measures for the greater good, some more than others and the far right actively advocating for it. It will be liberals that loose with that approach, as the goals of the political liberals can easily be framed as "they want to take away things", hence the far right gets a huge opening.

littlestymaar 3y ago

I'll bite: the problem is that renewable in itself doesn't mean decarbonation: if you're importing solar panels built with Chinese coal and deploy them in Europe / Northern US, you're not actually decarboning anything, and instead you're increasing the carbon footprint but move it abroad. So there are things that are not just “not perfect” but actually harmful, and you can't just blindly deploy “not perfect” things. The main reason why people focus on renewable without getting into the details of whether or not it improves thing, is because it gives the impression of addressing the problem without changing the status quo (mass-consumption society, individual cars, disposable packaging, the search for endless growth…) The western world's energy and resource consumption isn't sustainable, no matter how you get the energy from, and “decarbonation”, like recycling, is just a fallacy that's been invented to avoid addressing this issue.

hannob 3y ago
> if you're importing solar panels built with Chinese coal and deploy them in Europe / Northern US, you're not actually decarboning anything, and instead you're increasing the carbon footprint but move it abroad. That is an urban legend and not supported by any evidence. Full solar lifecycle emissions are around an order of magnitude lower than fossil fuels.
- throwaway60742 3y ago
  Does "full solar lifecycle emissions" include the gas and coal powerplant you use because you couldn't build energy storage and your electric grid can't handle the peak power? Does it include the reconstruction of the grid it necessitated?
  - kemotep 3y ago
    Are you saying that if we don’t build solar panels, we won’t have to use electricity generated by gas and coal?
    - throwaway60742 3y ago

mathieuh 3y ago

It's become a culture war issue. In the UK London introduced a so-called Ultra-Low Emissions Zone recently, and Wales has dropped 30 mph speed limits down to 20, which prompted the right-wing populist government to come out as being "on the side of drivers" and to call decarbonisation schemes "tyrannical". They've now gone full swivel-eyed loon and are rowing back many climate change commitments. It seems to me that, in the UK at least, as the two main parties align more and more on economic and social issues that they are needing to find new wedge issues to differentiate themselves. Not sure if this is also the case in countries with PR governments.

robertlagrant 3y ago
ULEZ isn't decarbonisation. It mostly targets diesel cars due to NO. And it doesn't ban them; it just costs £12/day to drive there. So suddenly millions of drivers, who bought diesel cars because that was the thing they were supposed to buy according to the government, now own cars that are worth -£2000/year. It might seem that everything is along political lines because you view it that way. There are non-political reasons to get annoyed at things.
- tpm 3y ago
  Millions? The number of daily non-compliant cars entering the ULEZ zone went from 36k in March 2019 to 12k in December 2020 according to Wikipedia. I seriously doubt the expansion did hit millions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra_Low_Emission_Zone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra_Low_Emission_Zone
  - extraduder_ire 3y ago
    I think the implication is that wherever you have your car, it's worth less because it costs money to drive it in london, which directly affects its resale value. Pretty indirect though.
    - tpm 3y ago
      Sure, but that also applies only to pre-Euro 6 diesel cars, so pretty old anyway.

lbriner 3y ago

My guess is that it is 2 things. Firstly, as stated by others, accepting these things requires us to accept that our lifestyles are not sustainable, even if we can afford them financially, so we make excuses. Secondly, I think there probably is an amount of ego involved where the armchair experts honestly think that they have thought of something that "the politicians" or the "experts" have missed. You see people on forums/TV saying with no irony or doubt that "Electric cars are not environmentally friendly because of Lithium batteries", or whatever, without actually having any figures to back this up. I agree that doing something, even if not perfect, is better than nothing but I did a Penn and Teller show where their logic was "do nothing now because it is expensive. Wait until we have better/cheaper technology and do it later". Again, seems illogical but people do believe that.

newyankee 3y ago
The cheap and better technology only happens because people invest and buy the expensive and novel technology upfront. If Tesla Roadster and Model S didn't have a market, getting a model 3 out would've been quite difficult. It is more like a side effect of equally treating all voices as important and not giving weight to peer review scientific literature or critically analyzing the talking points.
pydry 3y ago
Those armchair experts are typically being fed by carbon lobby or pro nuclear propaganda. The propaganda is motivated by profit (carbon lobby, nuclear lobby) and the demands of the military (the nuclear-military industrial complex needs a civilian nuclear-industrial ecosystem to keep a lid on costs). The propaganda tries to tap into that innate ego you referenced though. "Well, actually, the sun doesn't shine at night", "what do we do when the sun isn't shining and the wind isn't blowing? Not use power?", "but geography for pumped storage is very rare isn't it?", "wind farms are very bad for birds!", "nuclear power may be expensive but it's very stable!", "enough batteries to cover solar/wind would be prohibitively expensive", "germany is trying to decarbonize completely the wrong way it's so stupid!" etc. All of these things are in line with the above money flows, are quite wrong, but plausible. They are carefully positioned as being the smart person's take on a complex issue. There are 30-40 regular talking points, many of which appear regularly on hacker news. I think I've had to post the same academic study about how pumped storage geography is actually very common at least 15 times, for instance. You don't get such specific mass misconceptions on such a large scale without some level of money behind the message. It typically filters through from lobby group -> mass media -> average citizen -> hacker news comments.

jacquesm 3y ago

In a single word: money. A bit longer: there are a ton of vested interests that couldn't care less about destroying the world for future generations as long as they get theirs now. This sort of selfishness is institutionalized to a degree that I'm not sure if we'll be able to deal with it short of a total system collapse and even then it might be resurrected.

orwell_bruh 3y ago

If I did see CO2 as a problem I'd still be against wind and solar and all the other harebrained schemes that are mathematically proven to be unable to even make a dent in climate change. However, they are guranteed to lower our standard of living substantially. And a prediction that you'll be able to observe in the coming decades: a lot of those "minor" and "invented" concerns will be front and center once we all have EVs and solar in order to nudge us onto the next thousands of dollars spending or to tax us or simply to keep the eco spirituality of "humans bad" alive. Technological solutions simply aren't wanted by "your" side and so, eventually, all technology will be attacked just as fossil fuel based ones are now.

svnt 3y ago
Let it out. Let the last pieces of your clinging to an identity in crude oil products fall away. Gaia still loves you. Hydrocarbon technology never cared in the first place. No one blames you for being deceived.
- orwell_bruh 3y ago
  Yes, I identify as someone with reliable heating and power who eats real food, has many children and like to go on vacation from time to time. Btw, it's not me being deceived but eventually you'll figure that out, I am sure.
  - svnt 3y ago
    > Yes, I identify as someone with reliable heating and power who eats real food, has many children and like to go on vacation from time to time. Is this false dichotomy you’ve communicated something you’ve cultivated because you are afraid of what would happen without these things, or because without consideration for other viewpoints you chose to value your comfort and tiny world-view over a clearer understanding of reality? Having written it out, there is no need for you to respond, really. It is just fear either way.

Lanolderen 3y ago

Corpos: Profits and desire for less regulation People: Corpo greenwashing, energy source disagreements between nuclear, multiple inconsistent sources, "I don't wanna pay 2-3* more for green electricity while in some third world country not a single car has a cat and they burn tires for metal+heating while dumping acid in the nearby river from the outsourced chrome keychain factory"

inglor_cz 3y ago

The not-so-tiny negative that some professionals here in CZ mention is disreputable Chinese vendors. "Oh yeah, we will give you 10 years warranty for your panels, buy! Cheap!" Only the necessary seals are shoddy and the panel dies much sooner from water incursion. At which moment you find out that the producer has gone out of business, so no recourse. This is not a fault of the technology per se, rather of humanity as usual, but I can see why several such incidents in your proximity will cause distrust. The solution would be "buy from reputable vendors only", but IDK how many Chinese vendors are reputable and if they didn't decide to entshittify their products right now.

hef19898 3y ago
The list of top ten solar pnel vendors / brands is one online search away, e.g. here: https://solarpowernerd.com/top-solar-panel-manufacturers/ https://solarpowernerd.com/top-solar-panel-manufacturers/ Buy from a "bankable" brand, and you are good to go. Bankable, as in bank are willing ot finance GWp sized utility projects using modules from those manufacturers. And as you see, those big ones are around for quite a while. Sure, I have never seen an industry as plagued by shady people and practices as solar module importers in the EU (they literally smuggled them at scale sometimes to circumvent import tariffs and taxes), but the big mabufacturers are, and have to be, serious and reliable. Otherwise they'd be out of the GW scale project market, which is where they make their money and sales volumes.
- inglor_cz 3y ago
  Thank you. I have been considering solar for my home too, but this problem is making me hesitate; the investment is still considerable, at least for me at this moment.
  - hef19898 3y ago
    Yeah, I know. Guess why we din't have it yet. With larger projects, the labor costs decrease per Wp installed, making larger projects cheaper per Wp, and thus the ROI is much better. One should not save money on cheap panels so. Neither shoupd you import yourself, only buy from brands that have an EU legal presence, import themselves and are in the business for decades (JA, Jinko, Trina and Canadian Solar come to mind). If the brand has some large utility projects runnning (either their own as suppliers, doesn't really matter) even better, that means they have contractual agreents with large, repeat customers, basically assuring support for guarantee cases down the road. Be mindful so, not all are very customer friendly when it comes to claims, so take one with a solid startegy for the roof top / consumer market. I spent some time at one of those mentioned, years ago. The ROI for private installation gets better all the time so, Wp prices fall, panel capacity increases, resulting in cheaper and larger installations on the same surface. No idea whwre labour is nowadays, propably through the roof with availability in 2030s or so.

thelastgallon 3y ago

We don't find it surprising that there is a huge ecosystem of fake reviews for 2 dollar trinkets on Amazon. Fossil fuels are wealth extraction from everyone on the planet to fossil fuel overlords. This game must go on. First, fossil fuels are not viable without massive subsidies but we almost never this statistic in the news. This is trillions of dollars in subsidies and growing! Last year, fuels that drive climate change and pollute the air were underpriced to the tune of $7 trillion. [1]. We will see so much news of how land is being used for solar, but nobody talks about 40 million acres for ethanol, which is a small additive to fossil fuels and the agricultural subsidies. Worldwide, this is 100 million acres. So much talk about food inflation, these 100 million acres could be used to grow food instead. but "news" don't want to talk about an easy win of stopping fossil fuel subsidies, which will also bring the prices. Facts like fossil fuel shipping account for 40% of global shipping, account for the largest water withdrawals[3], account for 10 million pollution deaths (but we do see 1.5 birds killed by wind turbines, lets never talk about the billions of birds killed by cats or buildings), these are never part of the conversation. Lets also never talk about the easiest metrics to use is deaths per TWH, renewables and nuclear are 2000x better.[4] I put together a comparison worksheet for kids [5] (fossils vs renewables), any 10+ year old can work through this sheet and figure out that fossil fuels are a horrible idea. Lastly, and more importantly, lets never talk about price-fixing Oil, a commodity doesn't behave like most commodities do, Eg: Salt (and lots of industrial products manufactured at scale - millions of tons) which is so incredibly cheap that no one thinks or budgets for buying salt[6]. OPEC has a monopoly and pricing power and they destroy demand to keep prices up. Nobody has a problem with this! And, lets spend trillions of dollars on military budgets to protect oil supply. Why don't we let the oil companies pay for defense of their own infrastructure? This is not factored into any of the subsidies. [1] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-10-16/climate-change-why-are-governments-still-subsidizing-fossil-fuels#xj4y7vzkg https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-10-16/climat... [2] https://qz.com/2113243/forty-percent-of-all-shipping-cargo-consists-of-fossil-fuels#:~:text=But%20the%20real%20damage%20is,derived%20directly%20from%20fossil%20fuels https://qz.com/2113243/forty-percent-of-all-shipping-cargo-c.... [3] U.S. thermoelectric plants are the largest source of U.S. water withdrawals, accounting for more than 40% of total U.S. water withdrawals in 2015: https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=50698#:~:text=U.S.%20thermoelectric%20plants%20are%20the,U.S.%20water%20withdrawals%20in%202015 https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=50698#:~:tex.... [4] https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldwide-by-energy-source/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldw... [5] https://docs.google.com/document/d/1y_VFQC5qMuLYKoqLg0ooKIgV93hyRKxvDW3aDwgpMeU/edit?usp=sharing https://docs.google.com/document/d/1y_VFQC5qMuLYKoqLg0ooKIgV... [6] https://www.amazon.com/Turning-Oil-Into-Salt-Independence/dp/1439248478 https://www.amazon.com/Turning-Oil-Into-Salt-Independence/dp...

winter_blue 3y ago

> I'm honestly at a loss as to why some people (and organizations) are hell-bent on hampering attempts to decarbonize, and amplifying whatever tiny negatives they can whether they're real or not, as though nothing less than 100% perfect is worth replacing the awful status quo. Thank you for pointing this out. It is indeed quite puzzling. What's even more puzzling is: I felt exactly the same way about anti-vaxxer movement. Although, the anti-vax movement is far worse in the sense that there's literally no human who benefits from it. With climate change, there's a huge fossil fuels lobby that benefits financially from the lies/misinformation around climate change. But, I don't know who benefits from this anti-vax nonsense. Anti-vax lies literally killed people. In the US, it ironically, even with the party that championed anti-vax lies (i.e. the Republican Party), the only effect these lies had was that they literally caused additional unneeded deaths of GOP voters. Not sure why a rational GOP would champion that, but yea I have no idea. It's insanity and madness. It's evil too, in a sense. To have some sane/rational explanation of these things would be amazing.....

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petre 3y ago

They get funding from Big Oil, Russia etc. https://www.axios.com/2017/12/15/big-oils-electric-fight-against-coal-and-nuclear-1513304200 https://www.axios.com/2017/12/15/big-oils-electric-fight-aga... https://www.greenpeace.org/eu-unit/issues/climate-energy/46227/russian-doll-gas-nuclear-lobbying-taxonomy-eu/ https://www.greenpeace.org/eu-unit/issues/climate-energy/462...