[Barrin92]

if you talk about preserving energy, reducing consumption and using social and cultural means to reduce the impact on the planet these days you're pretty much immediately labeled as some kind of anti-growth luddite, in particular by the 'green tech' crowd, looking at Ramez Naam among others.

VC's, 'entrepreneurs' and green energy journalism seems to have a vested interest to in a sense consume 'green innovation' rather than just treating it as technology.

[kjksf]

I don't have problems with people advocating reducing consumption to reduce the impact on the planet. Personally I think it's about as effective as telling people to not watch porn but you do you and advocate away. It's harmless.

I do have problems with people who argue against transitioning to 100% renewable energy with this argument. That's actively harmful. You won't actually convince anyone but it plays into the hands of anti-EV, pro fossil fuel interests. The likes of BP that spill a fuck ton of oil into the ocean and we just shrug it off. And then they go "but mining lithium is harmful" (which it isn't, at least not more harmful than mining gigatons of coal or fracking gas).

The problem with your position is a total lack of perspective of what's harmful to the planet and what can realistically be done about it.

[Barrin92]

>The problem with your position is a total lack of perspective of what's harmful to the planet and what can realistically be done about it.

The heaviest polluters and carbon emitters on earth could very easily reduce their pollution and emissions by at least 50% say, if not way more by changing the way we consume, travel, what we eat and so on. We are talking low hanging fruits here.

Do you now how many battery stations we need to plaster on earth, how many not yet invented technologies we need to get to significant renewable use which we could get for free if we could turn half of our coal plants off?

Just for 'perspective', over the last 30 years we have gone from, 93-95% carbon based fuel sources to... 88% today. People want to go to Mars in 10 years but it's 'unrealistic' to advocate that people replace beef with chicken and air travel with a train? This is the actual most bizarre thing about this argument, the complete inversion of who has lost perspective and realism.

[cogman10]

> Do you now how many battery stations we need to plaster on earth?

Global power consumption is at ~23TWh. To make it through the night on nothing but solar, you'd need about 1/3th of that dedicated to batteries (Likely a lot less though due to wind, hydro, and nuclear production) So ~8 TWh of storage on the extreme end. Roughly 8000x our current battery deployments.

A lot, but not really crazy.

> how many not yet invented technologies we need to get to significant renewable

0. There are no technologies needed for significant renewable deployment. About the only thing needed is manufacturing capacity. Solar efficiency is crazy high as is wind which has driven cost/watt way down. Battery prices have similarly fallen off a cliff (and are still falling), which makes that extremely feasible at this point.

New tech will make the whole transition cheaper, but certainly isn't needed to get things switched over.

> which we could get for free if we could turn half of our coal plants off?

Ok.. but that solves only the power generation problem and runs smack dab into the politics problem. Wanting to turn off coal doesn't make it happen.

> 'unrealistic' to advocate that people replace beef with chicken and air travel with a train?

Yes, because you are talking about winning over a huge diverse group of people. Going to mars requires one rich asshole to invest in mars travel. He doesn't have to convince millions to change their habits or minds.

Realism is realizing that you can't control others thoughts or behaviors. An excellent example of this is what's happening with COVID.

You want to tell me it's realistic to convince people to give up their favorite foods when getting people to just wear masks is seen as a breach of liberty or whatever garbage?

Come on. The amount of rational people is FAR too low to realistically expect that sort of pleading to work.

[pixl97]

>The heaviest polluters and carbon emitters on earth could very easily reduce their pollution and emissions by at least 50% say, if not way more by changing the way we consume, travel, what we eat and so on

Then how are batteries going to screw that up? If and when we do that, using batteries would still make things more energy efficient and greener.

[imtringued]

>The heaviest polluters and carbon emitters on earth could very easily reduce their pollution and emissions by at least 50% say, if not way more by changing the way we consume, travel, what we eat and so on. We are talking low hanging fruits here.

Very easily? People start protests over much less than 50%.

[afarrell]

The problem is that many forum-commentators don't know how to craft policy that avoids figuratively trying to "boil the ocean".