Climate Change Tracker

Re:Climate Change Tracker by palata on Tuesday September 05, 2023 @07:40AM (#37390387)

You completely miss my point. You are the arrogant want saying "don't worry, we can solve it, we know". I am the one with humility saying "guys, I have seen how engineering works, it's always harder than we think". Tell me: how do you make plastic with solar energy? Because last time I checked, plastic was made of oil. There are tons of engineering problems (from the fact that nobody has ever produced that much solar energy to the fact that you can't control solar energy - what do you do when there is no sun? Happens at least every night...).

Plus, if your only reference is the price of solar power today, then you are highly uninformed on the subject at hand. Of course solar power is cheap: in many places it is subsidized, and it is built with cheap, abundant fossil fuels. But make no mistake: solar today is absolutely marginal. So you are extrapolating from the current marginal energy production of solar to 100% of the world, with the only argument that "last you checked, solar today is very cheap" and "those who believe they know slightly more than me are arrogant, I won't listen to them".

> while not having any desire to learn.

Let me take you on that. I will share with you my favorite introduction book on the subject (it is cheap, from a really respected french engineer, and it took me 5h to read). If you do have any desire to learn, read it seriously. Now in all fairness, if you share with me the title of a serious book that explains why degrowth is "arrogant and stupid", I commit to reading it.

Do we have a deal?

My choice is "World without end" (in French: "Le monde sans fin"):

https://www.amazon.com/World-Without-End-Blain-Christophe-eb...

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Re:Climate Change Tracker by _hypx on Tuesday September 05, 2023 @02:55PM (#37396120)

If you can make hydrogen and capture carbon, you have the ingredients for making plastics. It will likely be more expensive than today’s plastics, at least initially, but for critical needs like medical devices, this is totally acceptable.

You can build solar and wind power without fossil fuels, or at least not much. We are able to power large vehicles and industry with renewable energy now. Most notably, with the advent of green steel, infrastructure projects in general no longer require significant use of fossil fuels. Now to be fair, this was not known to the greenies, who thought that solar panels on the roof and an EV in the garage will magical solve everything. But it is known to those who actually study this problem. This problem is rapidly resolving itself in reality.

I cannot read a book in a short amount of time. But from the sample it is just repeating fairly simplistic arguments against green energy. It is mostly a repeat of what was being said on theoildrum.com from a while back. Even then, they were mostly wrong. These days, the few areas where they were right are also being proven wrong. It is akin to the “god of the gaps” argument, where the gaps where we didn’t know how to eliminate fossil fuel usage are constantly shrinking.

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