[weevil]

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]

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.

[hannob]

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.

[theK]

I have a pet theory about that. The theory is that it is not the facts or the topic of Eco-Things.

I think generally we are at a point where it is too easy for normal people to be against things and eco friendly things are just the lowest hanging fruit. Normal people nowadays are much more stressed with the world at large, overstimulated by doomscrolling all night, obesse or unhealthy, locked in some financial treadmill, etc, etc...

In such a situation it is easy to see a wind farm next door as an attack on your landscape or the needs of EV mobility as overly complicated and so on and so on.

So its not the facts that matter, it is the lives of the 80% of the population that have just taken a dive for the worst over the last 20 years.

EDIT: preface

[myspy]

Hence why the gap between the poor and the richest people must be closed. Take the money from the billionaires and use it to rebuild the middle class and lift up the lower class.

[okr]

It is easy to judge other people, why they have a nimby opinion. Show me your property, if it has windmills or photovoltaic on them. Then it would be an intellectually honest conversation.

[itishappy]

That sounds hypocritical. If you're against wind and solar on some principle, I'd hope you apply that to your own life, not just others.

[throwaway60742]

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.

[kjksf]

If that's the reason then those people are misinformed.

Coal and gas plants are closing because they cannot compete on price with solar/wind + battery storage.

The cost advantage is not true everywhere but the future is clear. Coal and gas will not become cheaper. Solar and wind is most expensive today it'll ever be.

Storage in particular is so early in the cycle that we can expect the cost will drop at least in half. We've barely started making battery storage, the industry has 100x growth ahead.

And this is without pricing the real costs of using oil & coal & gas like all those people who have asthma (or worse) because they inhale the fumes.

Even living in a city (cars) has clear statistical link to increased asthma and other respiratory diseases compared to places with less cars.

[jacquesm]

> Storage in particular is so early in the cycle that we can expect the cost will drop at least in half. We've barely started making battery storage, the industry has 100x growth ahead.

You can add at least two more zeros there, and possibly three or more. Storage right now is mostly dams and all the easy places have been done. Battery storage is really at the proof of concept state and if you take hydro out of the equation you're looking at a tenth of a percent at best.

[natmaka]

A continental-scale mix (wind, solar...) is an efficient way to reduce the impact of intermittency on electricity production, and therefore storage ( https://www.imperial.ac.uk/news/180592/european-cooperation-... ).

V2G ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle-to-grid ) and gas turbines burning green hydrogen (generated by water electrolysis using over-produced electricity) are ramping up.

[Detrytus]

>> Coal and gas plants are closing because they cannot compete on price with solar/wind + battery storage.

First of all, I'm not aware of any large scale battery storage facilities anywhere, they are prohibitively expensive.

Second, coal and gas plant's main cost, at least in EU, is carbon tax. So the fact that they can't compete on price is a result of political decision, not of any shortcomings of the technology itself.

>> Storage in particular is so early in the cycle that we can expect the cost will drop at least in half.

Battery costs will be rising for at least the next decade, before they can fall: we need to ramp up lithium production first, before we can do that there will be significant shortages driving the prices up. The more popular EVs will become the worse it will be.

[matthewdgreen]

Then we'll ramp up production over the next few years. It's already happening at a phenomenal rate [0]. The world does not need vast amounts of storage in 2023: the goal for the next decade should be to build out renewables from 1% to ~50% of production everywhere, and to use storage mostly to smooth out the demand curve (which is currently highly profitable and happening quickly in places like CA [1].)

[0] https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/lithium-ion-b... [1] https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/batteries/chart-the-rem...

[hef19898]

Gas can't compete, because gas is too expensive. Coal actually could compete, it usually was the second type of power plant able to sell on the electricity markets, becasue CO2 certificates are just dirt cheap, way to cheap to move the needle, and coal as fuel was the least expensive (sun and win being free).

[throwaway60742]

No way they are misinformed, look at German power mix. Germany - the most vocal proponents of wind/solar - is the most polluting country in the whole EU.

> Coal and gas plants are closing because they cannot compete on price with solar/wind + battery storage.

That did not happen anywhere in Europe. New gas plants are being constructed right now, and coal powerplants had to be restarted when Germans dropped nuclear.

> Storage in particular is so early in the cycle that we can expect the cost will drop at least in half. We've barely started making battery storage, the industry has 100x growth ahead.

We need to decarbonize today though. People don't want to pay the high prices, so how does the drop happen?

> And this is without pricing the real costs of using oil & coal & gas like all those people who have asthma (or worse) because they inhale the fumes.

Again, ask Germans about that. Their universal healthcare is going to get expensive soon if they continue on their "green" path.

> Even living in a city (cars) has clear statistical link to increased asthma and other respiratory diseases compared to places with less cars.

Completely orthogonal, people mostly agree on that, but they (where I live) want to charge the electric cars from nuclear energy.

[bondant]

> Germany - the most vocal proponents of wind/solar - is the most polluting country in the whole EU.

Are they? Looks like it's Poland who is generating the most CO2 for electricity production.

https://www.eea.europa.eu/data-and-maps/daviz/co2-emission-i...

[_fizz_buzz_]

> Germany - the most vocal proponents of wind/solar

According to whom. There is lots of pushback against renewables - in particular wind- in Germany. It takes something crazy like 7 years to approve a wind farm here. The current government is trying to improve the situation. But I would strongly question the premise of your comment e.g. Denmark seems a lot more successful.

[svnt]

Germany’s repeated renewables efforts were long subject to the fact that Germany was Russia’s European project to keep fossil fuels going as long as possible.

No other European country with as much technical competence has inexplicably failed so hard at renewables over and over.

Now Germany is experiencing a transition in market conditions that is uncomfortably quick.

[hef19898]

Can you elaborate, to a fellow (?) German, about just how a "green" political agenda will increase public health care costs? Or a re you just mixing multiple talking points (renewables bad, nuclear good, public health care bad, private health care good) without making any sense at all?

[unglaublich]

People pay billions in subsidies for the fossil fuel industry, so we can just move those and leave taxes as they are.

[throwaway60742]

Not everyone does. Maybe people in the US, but most EU countries don't have any fossil fuel industry to subsidize.

Where I live people are against solar/wind because they want to go nuclear.

[svnt]

Where you live you are subject to disinformation and nuclear is the last effort of delay and distraction.

You could put up massive solar and wind farms next year. How long would it be until sufficient nuclear capacity came online?

[hef19898]

Going niclear is such a FUD anti-renewables campaign, it is almost loughable people still fall it. New nuclear plants take decades to build, and are extremely expensive. So no, no significant nuclear capacity increase. All that campaign does, is making it harder for renewables, and thus easier for fossil fuels. Quite ingenious so, if you think about it.

[pydry]

>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.

That's how all propaganda functions. Fossil fuel/nuclear lobbyists pump ideas into the heads of the easily duped via mass media at a range of different intellectual levels and then the readers will absorb it like it was their own idea and echo it back.

The only difference between the upper and the lower intellectual levels of propaganda is that the upper level of propaganda might rely more on logical consistency, misdirection and attempts to make the reader feel smart while the lower levels will rely more on repetition of a simple message.

[svnt]

I think it is mostly a confusion of identity.

We are used to the people pushing against technological progress being someone other than older and somewhat tech-capable men.

These people have been holding out and formed their arguments back when they first learned about renewables, which was twenty or more years ago. Technology has continued to progress but their positions ossified early.

Now that the future they denied is here we are seeing vanilla guilt-backed rationalizing. We just aren’t used to seeing it from these guys because they were always excited back when technological progress generally proved them right.

[hef19898]

I read a comment lately along the lines of "80% of conservative outrage is caused by understanding how things work fornthe very first time". There is some truth to it.

[lstodd]

Which is as insightful as "80% of progressive outrage is caused by not understanding how things work at all". The is some truth to this too.

[ZeroGravitas]

A 5 whys analysis will likely get to "people benefiting from fossil fuel pollution not being costed in" one or two steps back from that guy who doesn't even know why he objects to wind power.

[hbossy]

I think it's just coming from experience. They remember how every past attempt at making cars eco-friendly eventually resulted in worse personal experience via taxes, prices and worse repairability, so any new one gets a "no" by default.

[natmaka]

This. And this is generic: since the first oil shock (50 years ago) many Western nations were nearly always bathing into some economic crisis, therefore many think that experience shows that any attempt, on any front, leads to a new downturn.

It also seems true when it comes to innovation: an innovation today becomes/creates a problem tomorrow.

[lynx23]

Yeah, its called free will, you know. I dont have to like everything, period.

[svnt]

Most thinking people move beyond this position. An arbitrary position is no position at all.

[hef19898]

A weak opinion, strongly hold. Or some such.

[jandrese]

The ugly truth is that propaganda works, especially over long time periods. The fossil fuel industry has been funding propaganda for decades now, longer than most people have been alive. They commissioned studies about climate change in the 50s and knew exactly what was going to happen and how it would affect their businesses so they got ahead of it with continuous ad campaigns and political activism.

This has been going on for so long we are now in an era where for a sizable percentage of the population truth no longer matters. That was the long term goal all along, once climate change became otherwise undeniable the people would be disassociated from reality and still support the fossil fuel industry.

[unglaublich]

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.

[fodkodrasz]

> 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)

[Muromec]

There is that and then there is Greenpeace campaining against nuclear non-stop because Choronobyl'.

[pydry]

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...

[wkat4242]

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]

And Windscale (whitewashed to 'Sellafield') and an endless series of near-catastrophes.

[wkat4242]

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]

In NL we apparently almost had a major incident at Petten.

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.

[0xDEF]

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.

[hkwerf]

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...

[lbriner]

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]

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]

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.

[aziaziazi]

What makes you troubled in an authoritarian measure for the greater good ? There’s already plenty of it and most are ok with it: speed limits, parking laws, violence, sex with children, art (graph) on public/private infrastructure… the list goes on.

Law must always adapt to the society greater good and that means adding new one and removing the obsoletes.

[hef19898]

You think a speed limit is authoritarian? Man, read some history...

The people who scare me moat, are tjose convinced to be right and morally superior. They can justify any atrocity by claiming to do it for the "greater good". The path to hell is covered by good intentions, and if I dare say so, we marched as a species already more than once.

By the way, if you want to get broad, public support for measures to fight climate change, argueing fro draconian enforxement is exaclty what people are affraid of. And what populists use to get support. In the end, you will achieve the opposite of what you want.

[aziaziazi]

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]

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]

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]

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.

[fsflover]

> pro nuclear propaganda

Here are a couple of good pieces of such propaganda for you:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26673987

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29278996

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26603464

[jacquesm]

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.

[inglor_cz]

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]

The list of top ten solar pnel vendors / brands is one online search away, e.g. here:

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]

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]

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.

[petre]

They get funding from Big Oil, Russia etc.

https://www.axios.com/2017/12/15/big-oils-electric-fight-aga...

https://www.greenpeace.org/eu-unit/issues/climate-energy/462...

[Lanolderen]

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"

[mathieuh]

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]

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]

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

[robertlagrant]

> 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.

ULEZ was a tiny central part of London. New ULEZ is...all of London[0].

[0] https://tfl.gov.uk/modes/driving/ultra-low-emission-zone/ule... - the map shows the red outlined congestion charge zone (old ULEZ) vs the new blue area (new ULEZ)

[tpm]

Yes I know, and the point is? Still no trace of millions of drivers.

[robertlagrant]

The point is the study you cite is on that tiny inner bit, compared to the giant outer bit.

[extraduder_ire]

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]

Sure, but that also applies only to pre-Euro 6 diesel cars, so pretty old anyway.

[robertlagrant]

7 years old. Basically it's a tax on people who don't have a new diesel. And on businesses who require vehicles to get goods in.

[extraduder_ire]

Can one not just add an after-market adblue filter onto the car to hit the emission requirements? Like, do a reverse VW on it.

[rob74]

It's the same here too... before the recent state-level elections here in Bavaria is was basically "everyone against the Green party", the right-wing government (CSU and Freie Wähler) trying to out-populist the far-right populists from the AfD while trying to not sound too much like them - with the result that the AfD gained 4.4 % points compared to the last elections, FW gained 4,2%, CSU lost 0,2% (looks like they weren't populist enough) and the Greens lost 3,2%, losing the status of largest opposition party to the AfD.

[hef19898]

And basically all because of how we shoupd be heating our homes in the future. Quite pathetic actually, but every time I am in the more rural areas of Bavaria (a state I love, I am one of those with a healthy amount of regional partiotism of the absolute not serious kind), I remember the days of my youth: Without FW and AfD, all those opinions (from anti-semitic borderline hate speech to blatant racism and sexism, the pursuitbof short term profits regardless of costs, the disregard for nature if a dime could be made...) all existed to the same extent, they were only covered, and welcome, by the CSU as it was. Lately, there is split happeneing, were those more radical elements are drifting a bit further right. The same happened to the SPD when Lafontaine split of Die Linke after his fall-out with Schröder.

The next federal elections will be "fun", I just hope us Germans, as a whole, do the same thing that happened across Europe lately: prevent the more extremenright from getting the power of government (I know the post-fasiscts won in Italy).

That being said, I do think that most of the pro-AfD votes come from people deeply affraid of the change they see happening, affraid that someone will take away things from them. Not that this is the case, but it sure seems like it sometimes (I can see it myself). Unless a true pro-democratic coalition forms (explicitly incl. media), we will be stuck in this situation for the time being.

[thelastgallon]

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/climat...

[2] 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#:~:tex....

[4] https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldw...

[5] https://docs.google.com/document/d/1y_VFQC5qMuLYKoqLg0ooKIgV...

[6] https://www.amazon.com/Turning-Oil-Into-Salt-Independence/dp...

[winter_blue]

> 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.....

[littlestymaar]

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]

> 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.

[littlestymaar]

> Full solar lifecycle emissions are around an order of magnitude lower than fossil fuels.

This is nonsense. First of all, “fossil fuel” doesn't mean much as depending on the technology involved the CO2 amount per kWh varies a lot (GTCC vs dumb lignite plant, that's more than a 2x ratio). Then, when you're adding a solar panel you can't compare its output to the same amount of energy produced by “fossil fuel”, you must compare it to the energy mix of the country you're deploying it into (to take the most extreme example: if you're adding a solar panel in France, you're basically replacing nuclear with solar, so you're just adding CO2 emissions). Overall, with the very low solar yields we have in most Europe (everywhere but the Mediterranean) and the fact that in many country the electricity mix is multiple time less carbon-heavy than what coal gives you, your “order of magnitude” is gone.

And I'm not even talking about the substitution effect here, where one Euro invested in solar in Europe is one Euro that doesn't get invested in a better decarbonation project (solar being financed elsewhere, wind, geothermal, nuclear), but that's also something to consider when advocating for a technology.

[throwaway60742]

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]

Are you saying that if we don’t build solar panels, we won’t have to use electricity generated by gas and coal?

[throwaway60742]

Yes, because instead of wind/solar+storage+grid capable of handling the peaks, we would be building nuclear. Using much less concrete and much less diesel for construction trucks.

[hef19898]

You actually believe, that producing a solar panel, transporting it to the installation site on the other side of the planet, and maintaining it consumes more energy than the module will produce? Where do you get your numbers from, the back of a cereal box bought from Wish?

[kemotep]

Currently the alternative to solar and wind, is coal and gas. Your argument that solar panels cost more in electricity to build and deploy could also be made about nuclear. I agree that we should build more nuclear power plants but do you have evidence that they require less infrastructure than solar? A nuclear power plant seems more expensive to build than a field full of panels. Uranium mining and refining is cheaper and easier than lithium mining and refining? Could you please share your sources I would like to read about that.

Nuclear, solar, wind, geothermal, etc are all better than coal and gas. We need to build more, upgrade infrastructure, not limit ourselves to one solution as our energy needs and decarbonization efforts will evolve over time. But the alternative to solar isn’t nuclear its the status quo of gas and coal.

[stinos]

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.

Is that true for the complete lifetime (which is what matters in the end) of, say, a PV installation in one's home? Or even for the complete PV industry?

[V__]

It is not, it's not even close. It's better by a factor of 10 to 20. [1]

[1] https://energy.utexas.edu/news/nuclear-and-wind-power-estima...

[littlestymaar]

Your figures have nothing to do with deploying solar panels in northern US / Europe. These are average numbers, that includes the panels deployed in Arizona or Australia. Solar is a good idea when you put in it the right place (like a desert), but not when you put in in the British Isles or in Denmark, that's the point I'm making.

[stinos]

Fair enough perhaps, but in any case: please you point us to the numbers for that?

Seeing the annual output of a typcial rather small 5kW peak home PV installation in Western Europe or even Denmark, it just seems unlikely that it would not offset whatever emissions it takes during its mining/production/shipment/installation during its lifetime.

[hef19898]

Helsinki is around, judging from looking at a chart on a phone screen, 20-30% more expensive than Munich per kWh produced using solar.. And still, Helsinki still is cheaper by a factor of roughly 2 than the average spot market kWh prices in 2022.

I linked to the source in one of my other comments. Also, Finland installed a ton of solar lasr year, so I guess if someone is doing sometjing someone else claims is impossible, it is possible regardless of what people say and believe.

[rypskar]

>>right place (like a desert)

The panels are less efficient when it is hot, so at summer Denmark is the right place. They are even using solar on Svalbard [0] with good results 9 months a year

[0]https://nordregioprojects.org/blog/2019/11/28/archipelago-of...

[littlestymaar]

> The panels are less efficient when it is hot, so at summer Denmark is the right place.

Panels are less efficient when hot (which is a problem), but they are even less efficient when the sun is low on the horizon, which is the case even in summer in Denmark, and when there are clouds. These a reason why the most efficient plants aren't actually in Denmark but in Arizona…

> with good results 9 months a year

Nothing in your link allows assessing how good the results are supposed to be. The fact that, without any quantitative elements, you assume the results presented here to be “good” tells a lot about your confirmation bias.

[sanxiyn]

> The western world's energy and resource consumption isn't sustainable

If god wanted us to have infinite energy and resources he would have put a gigantic fusion reactor in the sky. (OH on Twitter)

[flgb]

That’s a complete myth and just more of the same ‘concern trolling’ on renewables that is hampering decarbonization

[Muromec]

Also driving a bicycle is polluting, because bicycles don't grow on trees, but are produced by industry. Yeah, yeah.

[unglaublich]

And we haven’t even talked about the peanut butter sandwich the cyclist eats in morning!

[hef19898]

You zave no idea about energy consumption along a supply chain, if you actually believe any of this.

[littlestymaar]

> You zave no idea about energy consumption along a supply chain, if you actually believe any of this.

This has nothing to to with supply chain, but with the fact that the Nederlands and Seattle aren't especially sunny places…

[hef19898]

Then you shoupd tell the goverment in the Netherlands, they seem to believe they got 14% of their electricity from solar in 2022:

https://www.euractiv.com/section/politics/news/the-netherlan...

[littlestymaar]

Public subsidies work, I'm not doubting that.

USSR used to grow orange in Siberia too, that a state program can do it doesn't mean it's efficient in any way…

[marssaxman]

And yet, the solar panels I installed on my Seattle house a decade ago generated enough power to pay for themselves in six years. Solar works great here. Overcast skies are not a problem: solar panels don't care which direction the photons come from, and they work more efficiently at cooler temperatures.

[littlestymaar]

> And yet, the solar panels I installed on my Seattle house a decade ago generated enough power to pay for themselves in six years.

That tells something about your local electricity market though, not about the energy or CO2 emission efficiency.

[svnt]

Where do you get this information? I’m genuinely curious.

[jacquesm]

This is exactly what TFA addresses.

[littlestymaar]

Not at all! (see ZeroGravitas'[1] comment if you want to read it without the paywall instead of making a fool of yourself…)

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37912630

[orwell_bruh]

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]

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]

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]

> 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.