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by bigiain
1437 days ago
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> It would take massive social change The optimist in me observes that there really has been a “massive change” in renewable energy in the last few decades. Too little and too slow, perhaps, but who would have imagined 20 or 30 years ago that we’d have electricity prices dropping below zero at times because of an over abundance of wind and solar power? I also believe that _people_ reducing their daily energy use by 30% is totally a realistic thing. Where I am (.au) the energy market is going crazy, with electricity retailers bumping prices by 30-50%, and even publicly advising customers to go elsewhere because their rates are going to jump by so much. Almost everybody I know has had discussions lately about what the best way to reduce energy use is. All these price rises are going to tart hitting peoples bills at the end of this month or quarter, and I’m positive those energy saving discussions are going to ramp up then. |
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It is, but it will have more or less 0 effect on global warming if nothing else changes. The global shipping industry, manufacturing of trillions of tons of junk no one actually needs are the biggest problems. Cheap fashion, cheap gadgets, cheap toys, cheap home decor, cheap jewelry and many other things which go from resource in the ground to cheap junk back to landfill in less than a year, while directly producing CO2 in chemical refinent processes, and indirectly producing more CO2 in energy costs, and producing more CO2 to be shipped halfway across the globe.
And all propped up by a marketing and advertisement industry that works very hard to find new psychological tricks to manipulate adults and children to buy more of all of these.
Of course, other more useful industries are also massively wasteful - inordinate amounts of food are produced, transported around the world, stored in massive warehouses until they are no longer considered sellable, and then thrown away. Same with cars, furniture, appliances.
And let's not forget the vast amounts of computation being thrown away - most spectacularly by Bitcoin and Ethereum, but also by so many advertising AI projects, mobile "games" that are just slot machines without any payout, and just general waste (we've built our backend in JS and run it on a Python interpreter in a container in an x86 VM running on an ARM processor, in a cluster with three master nodes for 1 worker node because we have to be highly available for our 3 customers who open the app once every week).