[tw04]

> 4. And most importantly, how much is economically viable?

But literally the least important factor beyond “should we have started yesterday”. The amount of waste humanity has perpetuated in just the last 100 years because something wasn’t “economically viable” this fiscal quarter makes my head hurt.

[automatic6131]

Doing economically inviable things is waste. It's pumping resources into something worth less than the sum of its inputs.

Apropos of nothing, see one trillion dollars into datacenters.

[tw04]

Which is why they pumped fracking waste water into deep aquifers, because it wasn’t “economically viable” to pull that water out of the ground. Fast forward a decade and people are up in arms that those fresh water aquifers are no longer viable sources of drinking water, wondering how anyone could have been so short sighted.

Just because something isn’t economically viable today doesn’t mean it never will be. That short term thinking is exactly why China is absolutely decimating the US in renewable energy.

[automatic6131]

That's a different matter, that's an unpriced externality, were the oil company required to pay to sort the water out didn't choose because they weren't forced to.

So the oil should be economically unviable but due to poor regulation, they were able to extract it.

[tw04]

That’s just a cop out. There are externalities to everything and they are never completely accounted for. So by definition only looking at “economic viability” is a failed experiment as I posited from the get go.

We make decisions based on objective reality, not a perfect theory in a lab.

[actionfromafar]

That is exactly it - how do we define economically inviable? There are many answers, very different.

[westurner]

Total cost estimates should included unassessed environmental hazard, carbon, energy mix