Given the depth and breath of the costs, banning the use of fossil fuels in PoW schemes doesn’t seem particularly unreasonable. Especially given the broader social goal of reducing fossil fuel use wherever possible.
There are plenty of things I think people over-value. I may think that buying cars or living in places where you would need them is overvalued, but I won’t argue for banning those. People can form their own opinions on how much they value different things. They shouldn’t however profit from not cleaning up their own messes and having others foot the bill.
So there are certainly uses for PoW, but I agree they are few and far between.
1) reducing the ability to profit off of actions that cause environmental damage thereby aligning the market interest to reduce such actions
2) funding the investment in reversing the damage
whereas your suggestion above is doing literally nothing to help…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intergovernmental_Panel_on_Cli...
I really think that the possibility of obtaining the wrong conclusions are much higher than getting it right, yet the consequences of putting a ton of restrictions is really harmful for many people, especially in developing countries.
Maybe you could compare it to dice. It's very hard to predict on what number a dice is going to land. But if you throw it a lot of times, you'll eventually start to see the distribution converge somewhere. And when you then take a drill and make a hole in the side of the dice, or glue something to its side or whatever, and then throw it a lot of times again, you'll see that the distribution changes. Also, you can make reasonable statements about those developments. "If I make it heavier on the side opposite six, I think I'll start seeing more sixes, because the side opposite is pulled down more by gravity". You don't need to be able to predict the short-term outputs of a system to see changes in its long-term trends, and you can absolutely reason about and possibly predict those long-term changes.
I think it is a really difficult thing to guess. And anyways, even if it is not, how can you stop it if China, India and US say no to it bc there is no current technology to replace?
We could be in the situation where a lot of restrictions are set and later the guess is wrong. More expensive energy means putting a ton of people back into poverty, literally.
What it predicts for developing countries is disaster, which we already see. More droughts in the summer combined with floods in spring/autumn.
This leads to food insecurity and ecosystem disruption, which will be more harmful than not doing anything.
Weather is hard to predict short-term, but the long-term trends (i.e. climate) are visible.
But the dice experiment is: one leaves variables out of the model bc of its overwhelming complexity for what we know so far.
No, I do not buy this, vote me negative but I do not. If it was true, the weather forecast should be guessable.
What should be addressed though is the problem of negative externalities not being priced in. This is not specific to energy usage of PoW or any other use of energy. Those producing emissions should categorically be required to foot the bill for repairing any damage done and those taxes should be put to use to that end. Once priced in, many things that otherwise commonize costs but privatize profits may prove to be not worth pursuing.
If the societal good done by certain things is worth the negative externalities, those can be explicitly and transparently funded through subsidies which offset some portion of the costs.