Ask HN: What can I do to actively fight climate change?

Re:Ask HN: What can I do to actively fight climate change? by snarkypixel on Monday September 20, 2021 @10:50PM (#28601588)

Biggest problem about climate change is political correctness. We're too afraid to talk about the real problems and solutions because of "votes". Instead, we focus on small wins without any real impacts because it's "safe" and make people happy, like recycling.

Real problem and solutions:

  - energy -> Need hydro or nuclear. Everything else is just marketing bullshit. Windmills aren't reliable, you still need a way to store the energy and have a backup. If you factor in the cost of that backup and other solutions, you soon realize that hydro (or nuclear if hydro isn't possible) is way more cost efficient.

  - transportation -> Living in a suburb should have a penalty cost. Just compare the environmental impact between an apartment in a city and a mansion in a suburb with 5 cars. One is killing the planet much faster, there should be a penalty for it. I'm not saying forbid living in a suburb, I'm saying there should be an additional cost to living in a suburb because of the environmental impact.

  - greenhouse gases -> penalty cost in proportion to the damage caused (for instance, buying meat from livestock should be WAY more expensive.)

I'm not a climate change expert, but I do know that people react to incentive. And right now, there's no penalty to killing the planet so we can't blame people for making the decisions they're making. And policy makers can't set real policies because of fear (rightfully so) of not being elected.

It seems like we'll need to wait until the Earth is almost doomed before implementing these policies, but then it might be too late. Maybe another way is to have a "bad guy climate change" that all political party would need to take into account as part of their mandate, so the votes would be about who can best solve these issues rather than whether they should be tackled.

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Re:Ask HN: What can I do to actively fight climate change? by invalidname on Tuesday September 21, 2021 @03:00AM (#28602655)

This isn't accurate. Wind is very consistent in deeper seas and high altitude. It's also consistent when it's spread out. This means smart large scale grids can deliver a lot of electricity and ideally sell surplus to neighboring states/countries (another important option). There are plenty of storage options, batteries are some of them but moving water around is another important storage option which helps later on for generating with hydro.

Furthermore, mixing solar, wind, hydro, geo thermal etc provides an additional level of reliability and scale. These are all very reliable when combined together and need fewer storage options.

And yes, some storage makes sense. Not a lot, but the value here is the fast response time for peaks/lows in consumption.

Notice I'm not against nuclear which is a valid option. But right now the financials don't back nuclear as much as it did 5 years ago. Building a nuclear plant is expensive and slow. The costs didn't drop since you need a completely different level of security/reliability. The cost of renewables dropped like a stone. You can build them almost instantly since objections are low by comparison. So you'd end up solving things much faster with renewables than you would with nuclear, no PC involved.

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Re:Ask HN: What can I do to actively fight climate change? by JudgePenitent on Monday September 20, 2021 @10:55PM (#28601622)

> Real problem and solutions: - energy -> Need hydro or nuclear. Everything else is just marketing bullshit.

Agree in general, yet from what i've read most of the worlds hydro (read: river) resources are already being tapped extensively. Although hydro makes up a healthy chunk today, can it expand and grow along with our increasing energy demands when we've already tapped the largest rivers? I am curious if you have sources that show hydro can grow.

I recall reading this counter to hydro in a Smil book (Growth I believe) although I will have to double check which one.

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