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by Klarios 1665 days ago
While I think you underestimate what this means for a lot of 'other' people than 'us' (comparable rich people) it has hard/deadly affects already.

And even less human critical things are also dramatic just not for everyone. When you tell me all coral reefs are dying I really think this is very bad.

1 comments

No, my opinion includes concern for developing nations. Not allowing them to access fossil fuels or other forms of cheap plentiful energy means they can't develop properly (i.e., permanent impoverishment).
This is silly. Wind and solar are cheaper than coal and in many circumstances cheaper than natural gas. Storage tech is also getting cheaper. The capital costs of decentralized renewables are also favorable to a lot of rural parts of the world VS building out transmission lines of hundreds of miles.

Africa never really built out an extensive land line telephone system, but most Africans have cell phones now. They do not need to move through an obsolete technology in order to adopt a new one.

> Wind and solar are cheaper than coal and in many circumstances cheaper than natural gas.

Now do the reliability part.

Edit: Worth reading this [1] and this [2].

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-01020-z

[2] https://archive.md/4D5R6

Theres a nearly limitless number of ways to store energy. Plenty of them don't require cobalt. The cheaper renewables get the less efficient storage technologies need to be to be cost effective.

Anywhere pricing of electricity fluctuates with the intermittence of renewables there is opportunity to use storage to profit. The faster we drive the adoption of renewables in the 1st world the faster prices on storage tech will drop which will benefit the developing world. Especially the parts which will never have transmission lines built out from some centralized power plant 300 kilometers away.