I sympathize with this, but if climate experts are to believed, we’ve stalled to the point where we have perhaps a decade to get emissions under control in order to meet targets, and most countries haven’t even begun to make significant changes. At some point there will be pain. The question is, “do we want a little pain now or a lot of pain down the road?”. And to be clear, “wearing a coat inside during winter” may just constitute “a little pain” compared to the famines and wars that are likely if we fail to get our emissions to zero in time.

"we have perhaps a decade to get emissions under control"

Every year we're told it's our absolute last chance. Environmental brinkmanship hasn't work and the tune needs to be changed. Literally no economies are planning for mass famine or wars because no-one actually believes that is going to happen, except religious cults.

Because every year IS our absolute last chance. Each emitted ton is there "forever" (at least for multiple centuries). Climate change can be stopped (like, paused indefinitely) but can't be reversed.

You are right that there is no absolute deadline. Now we are stuck with our hotter summers "forever". But we are not yet stuck with what comes next.

> no-one actually believes that is going to happen

That is the problem exactly. We do not listen to scientists, because it's more convenient to ignore it. And when their models become reality, we'll just blame them for it, as they "knew" and did not prevent it.

All I'm going to say is always look at where these 'scientists' are getting their funding from. I'm not a climate denier, but realize much of the NGD is really a redistribution of funds. Driving EV machines will still require electricity, most of which is still generated by fossil fuels. Then there's the quagmire of what to do with spent batteries. The Earth has heated and cooled over millions of years, so I really doubt we're at the point of no return.

>Driving EV machines will still require electricity, most of which is still generated by fossil fuels.

Most, compared to all. And power plants are much more efficient at capturing energy than internal combustible engines. I see no real issues with the technology, just small kinks to be worked out, which is expected

Every year the goalposts move a little bit. Thirty years ago the goal was ca. 0° of global warming. Now we're debating whether we can muster the political will to limit warming to 2° (unlikely) or 3°.

Could it also be our understanding is gradually improving and the externalities are just lagging more than first thought?

No,it’s mainly that business won’t change until it’s forced on them. Big tragedy of the commons problem

Right. They want regulation...but NOT THAT REGULATION!! No one will be able to agree on anything as politicians bounce between big donors bitching and various voter poll data.

Somewhere out in left field are the right things that need to be done.

1. The same thing could've been said about the Covid-19 pandemic back in February 2020. In fact, a certain American President said as much. The fact that people are incapable of envisioning major disruptions to their lives does not prove that scientists are wrong; it's proves that humans can be blindsided by their own biases.

2. Countries don't plan their economies half a century ahead. Most struggle to plan beyond the next election cycle.

I have was a denier of: CO2 emitted by humans causes global warming until I studied chemistry. Then it hit me. The earth is warming, we are making it warm faster. This place is normally hot...we are making it worse.

The claims sound fantastic if you don't have a solid education. The people you are trying to convince do not have an education that will allow them to understand for themselves. They fundamentally distrust the people trying to convince them. There is no "to be believed." That has already reached the saturation point.

In democratic countries, the answer to the question of "do we want a little pain before the elections or a lot of pain down the road?" is quite clear - if you accept the pain now, you'll get voted out and get replaced by someone who will proclaim that the pain isn't needed, promise to undo your measures and kick the problem even further down the road to some other future government.

> Your mistake is weighing superstition vs tangible harm.

Care to share which of the thousands of peer-reviewed papers on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's website, you have:

a) read

b) understood

c) found errors in

d) brought to the world's attention?

500, 10, 1, ? I thought not.

And yes, of course it sucks - no one wants this. You seem to think the unpleasantness of the diagnosis and remedy gives you and yours an out.

https://www.ipcc.ch/

> You seem to think the unpleasantness of the diagnosis and remedy gives you and yours an out.

This is such an interesting observation. I had always thought that with a dire enough problem, humanity would band together and come up with a solution at all cost.

But after observing the worldwide response to the pandemic, I’m quite sure the world will become engulfed in wildfire and famine while a notable fraction of the population continues to insist that “this is normal and everything is fine”.

It’s an odd situation where magical thinking (“it can’t happen to me”) negates self-preservation.

The IPCC has been making dire predictions now for 3 decades. Can you point to any that came true?

Off the top of my head I know that

1. Glacier park was to vanish by 2020. Its still there, barely changed, some glaciers shrank, others grew.

2. Sea level didn't rise as expected.

3 Polar bears are strong, and are not on the endangered list.

4. Temperatures did not rise as much as expected. We are still way below the Roman and Bronze age warm periods.

5. Damage from weather has increased in America, but that is a result of a policy to rebuild, instead of abandoning areas prone to bad weather. Increasing the probability of being damaged by bad weather. Actual weather severity has not changed much.

6. In school, I was made to feel terrified of desertification. The opposite happened, the deserts retreated. The globe is greening.

As I said, that is off the top of my head, but it can all be backed up by data. Or prove me wrong. Can you show me a few ipcc predictions which actually came true? Thanks.

The IPCC does not make predictions. Never has, never will. The whole point, which real climate scientists repeat as nauseum, is we can never know absolutes because of the huge number of variables and timeframes. So what they do instead is provide scenarios. And each scenario has a series of weightings or probabilities. The summaries spell these out in rough terms, the full reports go into intricate detail and sources. If you spend the time to read the summaries you will find a good number of scenarios which are currently playing out as we speak.

Thousands of researchers making predictions with ever shifting probabilities is what you call unfalsifiable.

The predictions we’re talking about play out over decades. The sources cite other predictions. It’s a feedback loop of assumptions and peer review from people who you know already share the same assumptions.

Climate science is much more akin to sociology than a hard science.

Except climate science has tons and tons of hard data that the models need to agree with to be publishable, whereas sociology has questionnaires administered to a group of 20 sociology students.

Making a model that agrees with historical data is literally the base case for modeling. Like it is a feature of all forecasting solutions

The settled science used to be that leeches were a valid cure for a ton of medical issues. Lots of peer reviewed research on it at the time, I’m sure.

> The idea that we should eliminate fossil fuels is truly a privileged take.

It is, and it's our only option. It's the reason nobody is doing a lot to combat climate change: because it'll require a lot of tears, effort and money, and nobody wants or can afford to spend them.

At the end, it's always the poor that have to pay. It's always been like that. Doesn't make climate change any less real.

Climate change is indeed a justice problem and we should optimize for justice rather than just raw temperature management. There are "solutions" that cause more injustice by denying efficient energy to the global poor.

But the wealthy people who make this argument tend to argue for total inaction rather than a justice-focused approach where they sacrifice greatly in order to permit the global poor to have access to efficient energy for as long as possible.

It's difficult to believe the working class in America should bear the sacrifice when the richest people in the world just flew their private jets to a lavish climate conference thousands of miles from home to discuss how much the working class should sacrifice.

Any sacrifice that is called for should start at the top.

Cool. I think you'll find that a large number of climate activists are very on board with pretty extreme policies pulling from the rich. The people calling it "superstition" tend to be people who don't support high taxes on the wealthy.

That may be true at the grassroots level, but I've never seen it materialize at the policy level.

Perhaps I've missed something. Could you cite an example of an actual (not merely theoretical) climate policy that pulls from the rich without hurting the working class?

I mean, there is barely any climate policy at all in the first place.

The working class in America is part of the richest people in the world.

How many of them have a private jet? Your working class American might make 5 times as much as a person living in the third world, but the clowns at this climate conference are easily 1,000 times as rich. Your comparison is meaningless.

The actions of a few thousand extremely rich people have little influence on global emissions. The actions of 300 million Americans do.

Anyone could use that excuse: "I'm just one person, it doesn't matter what I do."

It's even less credible when the one person is putting 10x as much carbon in the atmosphere as the average person.

And until the rich start making personal sacrifices, they lack any moral authority to demand sacrifices from others.

So because removing fossil fuels will be difficult to do, we shouldn't try and we should instead bury our head in the sand about the very real problems that lay ahead of us?

Yes, this is precisely why we should have phased these out in the first world (and required the same of our business partners in the second world) decades ago. The longer we wait, the worse it will be. It’s like credit card debt—if you stop depending on it, you’ll have a little less money in the short term, but you need to or you’ll have much less money in the long term.

Solar is an excellent replacement for home heating oil during the Michigan winters.

The vast majority of people in Michigan are already connected to an extremely efficient distribution network for electricity. The marginal cost of delivering additional energy through this network does not round to zero, it is zero. Meanwhile heating oil is delivered by trucks with a large cost in depreciation, labor, and fuel (further fossil fuels burnt in support of a system which was designed to make economic sense with <$10 oil). Whereas domestically produced oil can never drop below $40-50 a (marginal) barrel at the refinery, and imported oil never realistically below $30 + the cost of fighting forever wars for resources, there is a clear and feasible convergence of the marginal cost of solar energy generated in the Southwest US to $0. All this would make solar a viable replacement even without the role of heat pumps, which reduce the raw energy cost of heating with solar to around 20% of that of burning fuel.

I live in Michigan. I have a 5.9kwh solar array. Spring/fall, I can produce over 40kwh/day. Summer heat lowers my production to upper 30-40kwh.

January 2021, I produced 197kwh the entire month.

I know this discussion is focused on heating. But from an electric vehicle perspective; 197kwh is not that much. In the winter, I don't think it would be enough electricity for a homes electric needs + EV or electric heat.

I can make 1MWh over 1 month in the summer. Basically, Michigan has short days in the winter. Snow does sit on top of the solar array until it melts, which robs me of production during sunny winter days.

It wouldn't be impossible to use solar to replace heating oil in Michigan, and the over capacity installed to satisfy winter demand could serve as a "peaker plant" during the warm summer months.

While I know renewables have decreased in costs, I think the costs related to building overcapacity is a hindrance.

It's not that hard to store solar power as Hydrogen and turn that back into electricity. The end-to-end efficiency is not as good as for batteries, but building something that can hold Hydrogen for a few months is cheaper than building the equivalent amount of batteries.

It's true that hydrogen is more practical for storing energy for months, but I think that storing energy for a few hours each day between daytime and nighttime (and transporting it from hot, sunny states to freezing, dark ones) is the important problem to solve.

You need to solve both problems to reach 100% renewables, but doing in the order of demand side improvements, short term storage and then long term storage is probably the cheapest way to proceed.

Did you miss the part where Michigan is already connected by a transcontinental electricity distribution grid to places like Las Vegas (8 average hours of sunlight in January, average temp 9C in January)?

That’s a gross oversimplification of reality - to the point of outright falsehood.

Michigan can’t get any electricity from Nevada today - they are on different grid ties, and there would need to be a ton of upgrades in the DC-DC and VFT ties between them to get that significant a chunk of electricity sent the ~2000 miles from Nevada to Detroit.

Can you not get out there with a long handled broom and knock the snow off?

Serious question, I’m debating a similar setup for myself.

There are roof rakes that you use for getting the snow off of roofs. I assume they also remove snow from solar panels.

So connect to some wind power which in the midwest produces 3x the capacity in the winter as it does the summer [0].

[0]: https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=20112

That's the job of utilities, not individual consumers.

Look, if the government wants to migrate utilities away from gas for heating and replace that with something else, the way you to do that is to have the government build, or contract out to build, the something else that is just as reliable and just as affordable, and then when that is in place, you work with the utility to switch over to the new thing and then retire the old thing. This is called a migration.

Shocking, I know.

The way you don't do it is to adopt some neoliberal obsession with turning everything into a market where end users trying to heat their homes are facing higher prices, and the hope is that these higher prices just cause the utility to transition to something else through the magic of markets.

That's not what markets are good at. Funding big infrastructure projects and coordinating the replacement of one infrastructure with another is the responsibility of government, not markets.

We didn't build our hydro and nuclear capacity by relying on the magic of the free market. We had a planned decision to build this infrastructure as a result of public need, and so we built it, and then the utilities hooked up to it, and the end user got power. We didn't build the interstate highway system by relying on free markets either. When people want to deploy subways, the solution is to build subways, not just tax gas and hope subways just spring up out of the market.

Telling individual homeowners "Well, there is wind power technology out there" is eco-sadism.

It is taking things offline or penalizing them instead of having replacements provided, and we just hope that the penalties will cause replacements to spring up.

This is faith-based energy policy. It is not effective governance, and it is not politically sustainable.

The Michigan pipeline shutdown has been discussed for most of this year; back in May the MI governor began her attempts to shut it down by revoking easements issued to the operator.

It's not honest to characterize what has been happening in the last few weeks as a last minute action by the administration "just before winter".

It's also not honest to focus exclusively on the costs of the pipeline being shutdown without also considering the potential costs of it staying open. I'm entirely open to someone presenting the case that the costs of shutdown vastly outweigh even the worst projected cost of it remaining open, but if you're going to present that case, do it while being aware that there are people (including the MI governor and various Indian tribes) who don't agree with this assessment.

MI voted for Biden in 2020, its US HoR representation is split evenly between both parties, and both US Senators are Democrats. If you're suggesting that those in favor of carbon credits and higher gas taxes might lose representation if this pipeline is closed, maybe make that case more explicitly.

Also, it's not unambiguously clear that winning battleground states like Michigan is synonymous with winning Michigan, nor that it's necessarily required at all given the steady drifts of some red states into the purply-blue zone.

Are you talking about the nearly 70-year-old oil and gas pipeline "Enbridge Line 5" that bisects Lake Michigan and Lake Huron?

Indeed, it would be great if the United States proactively funded deteriorating infrastructure before it was past-expiration and at risk of collapsing.

Woah, what are you honestly on about?

You can claim that the US is artificially raising natural gas prices, but the exact opposite is true. By chance of circumstance, we've historically underbuilt LNG processing facilities and that is isolating the US market from the rest of the world, so we have some of the lowest natural gas prices in the world right now.

Please take your uninformed takes and cringey political rallying elsewhere, it's not what this platform is designed for.

Flamewar comments like this will get you banned on HN. You've been breaking the site guidelines in other places too, unfortunately. That's not cool. (Edit: and we've already had to ask you more than once to stop doing it:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28378481

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22198190)

If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules, we'd appreciate it.

I feel like you are being unnecessarily confrontational over a difference of opinion.

I think they make a decent point, and contributed to this conversation. Calm down.

This is such a bad take. HN regularly hosts popular discussions on topics like this. Your attempt to silence discussion is unwelcome and offensive.

Amy Goodman Is Facing Prison for Reporting on the Dakota Access Pipeline 621 pts https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12719333

US passes emergency waiver over fuel pipeline cyber-attack 611 pts https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27101092

Biden shutting down natural gas pipelines is certainly relevant and on-topic in a discussion of the supply shock and why, as you said, "Natural gas [is] extremely expensive".

Trying to bury relevant facts because they're politically inconvenient is trampling curiosity.

> The above makes oil and gas more costly to extract and to ship, which raises the price.

I'm not sure if you're just expressing your personal concerns over what you believe can hypothetically happen, or whether you're grossly misinformed.

Meanwhile, even though gas prices are breaking records all over the world, in the US they are still below the prices from 2010, back in the days no one in the US was concerned about gas prices because they were 3 times higher a couple years back during Bush2's presidency.

https://www.eia.gov/dnav/ng/hist/rngwhhdm.htm

> I'm not sure if you're just expressing your personal concerns over what you believe can hypothetically happen, or whether you're grossly misinformed.

So do you have an argument to make, or just a stream of ad hominem followed by smoke and mirrors?

You point out that oil and gas prices are high all over the world with a price gap between gas prices in the US and the rest of the world -- because gas is shipped overseas in LNG form and it's a separate market, thus there is generally a gap between world gas prices and domestic gas prices -- to address this we do things like build pipelines from cheap gas countries (like Canada) to other countries and we build more liquefaction plants. But you take this price gap as some sort of vindication of U.S. policy, that perhaps Biden is keeping gas prices low?

So let me spare you the trouble. The facts that Biden has restricted Oil and Gas drilling, cancelled one pipeline and is about to cancel another, and is trying to discourage oil investment by taking away the investment tax credits from this industry -- these increase gas prices, and gas prices have been increasing. Just not as much as in other parts of the world. That is true even if there is there is structural gas price gap vis-a-vis the rest of the world and even if prices are not at the level they were before the fracking revolution caused them to tumble and be truly affordable to many.

Please stop posting flamewar comments to HN and breaking the site guidelines. You've done it repeatedly lately, it's not what this site is for, and it destroys what it is for. That means we have to ban such accounts. I don't want to ban you, so if you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to posting in the intended spirit, we'd appreciate it.

> So do you have an argument to make (...)

I already did. You made an unsubstantiated claim, and I pointed out your personal assertion was wrong and baseless, and provided a time history of gas prices as evidence, including the fact that not so long ago they were over 3 times higher than the current market price.

If you have a problem with the facts feel free to point out what exactly leads you to believe that justifies the discrepancy between your personal beliefs and the facts.

No, you are wrong.

>the fact that not so long ago they were over 3 times higher

They never were. You can check futures price data here: https://www.investing.com/commodities/natural-gas On top of that you're probably talking about those spikes in 2005 and 2008, but they were short lived and spikes are natural for gas markets because of various circumstances (seasonality, pipeline situation, weather, how full are the reserves etc).

>not so long ago It was 13 years ago! And now it's the highest price since. The reason for such a ridiculously low prices for so long was shale gas extraction. Now US is losing this and more. Because natural gas prices are so sensitive (and react quickly!) to various things - you better hope for warm winter with decisions like these...

Also comparing prices in US and in other countries is intellectually dishonest or you simply don't know how natural gas market works.