Ok_Hope_8507 t1_jaofv9j wrote
Reply to comment by 6thReplacementMonkey in Electric world that kicks out fossil fuels will cost less than combustion economy. 30TW of wind and solar PV will take 0.2% of earth's surface. by DisasterousGiraffe
So you're suggesting a global conspiracy to slowly produce renewables?
6thReplacementMonkey t1_jaorhde wrote
No, I'm suggesting a semi-global organized effort to delay or sabotage anything that leads to less reliance on fossil fuels. Semi-global in the sense that the people involved are from many different countries, not in the sense that everyone is in on it. It's probably the governments/royal families of a few petro-states (Russia, Saudi Arabia, etc), along with the people who own the big oil and coal companies, along with people who are heavily invested in those companies. It's not a conspiracy in the "secret criminal plot" sense, and more like an alignment along common interests that leads to some illegal behavior and a lot of unethical/anti-free-market/imperialist behavior. It's also not a conspiracy in the "nobody knows but us" sense, because some of the groups involved are pretty open about a lot of it (e.g. Koch Industries and the Heritage Foundation).
Radulescu1999 t1_jaq4k6a wrote
>It has always been cheaper overall to switch to renewables.
If that was true, China would already be 100% renewable. They are not.
6thReplacementMonkey t1_jarht9p wrote
Think bigger picture. If you can externalize the costs of the ecological damage we are doing, the public health costs, the costs of wars to control resources, etc., then it looks cheaper to use them.
If you include all of the true costs, for everyone, then it would have been much, much cheaper to move to renewables as quickly as possible decades ago.
That's the fundamental problem - the negative effects can always be pushed off onto someone else, somewhere else, until suddenly they can't anymore. It leads to people making decisions that are good for them now, but are worse for everyone, later.
Radulescu1999 t1_jarya84 wrote
Renewables wouldn’t have worked decades ago. Battery capacity was terrible, and wind and solar was extremely inefficient.
Though I agree that we still should have invested more into renewables (the US), an overall switch to renewables wouldn’t have been possible (as in 100%).
Though if we invested more into nuclear, hydropower, and geothermal (for specific areas), and invested in solar/wind (for their development/research), that would have been most ideal.
6thReplacementMonkey t1_jas5hs2 wrote
> Renewables wouldn’t have worked decades ago. Battery capacity was terrible, and wind and solar was extremely inefficient.
Yes they would have. It would have cost more to implement them without more R&D, but that wasn't the only choice. We could have invested heavily in R&D and gotten there much sooner. Despite the extra cost, it would still have been cheaper overall.
The thing people seem to not be getting from my posts is "overall." Big Picture. Total spend. Everything accounted for.
If you draw a circle around a piece of it, then yes, you can argue about costs. That's exactly why they do it.
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