It's very fucking expensive. And those articles frequently on the front page of HN are biased and are not telling the whole story. That's the problem. NGOs are framing the public discourse in a very one-sided way. If you raise concerns, you are a "denier" and downvoted into oblivion because people just want to believe the beautiful story of clean energy vs. greedy capitalist pigs.
That's definitely true, it's rare to see a fully civilised discussion where those concerns are addressed without the accompanying rhetoric.
Having said that, surely it's a fact that we'll run out of fossil fuels at some point and will need an alternate source of energy, and that will be expensive no matter when we do it, so why not start early?
Opportunity cost. Those resources could conceivably be better spent building roads, railways, factories, protecting wetlands, rewilding forests, educating children...
There are plenty of current, pressing problems to solve; why solve a problem that won't exist for decades if not centuries?
OK, I can understand that. Does that however not come with the assumption that we can solve that problem quickly when it does come about (assuming we can calculate roughly when we run out of fossil fuels)? I don't know how much evidence there is out there that that's the case.
In a market economy, we never actually run out of a resource; rather, the price rises gradually in accordance with increasing scarcity and cost of extraction, making alternatives more cost-effective, increasing the reward to researching alternatives, and pushing the use of that resource into niches where the cost doesn't matter as much.
Examples of this would be guano (replaced by saltpeter and then by the Haber process) and whale oil (replaced by petroleum).
You don't seem to grasp what I am saying at all. I am not against upgrading our energy capabilities. This whole comment chain started because of the claim that only lizard people have incentive to lie. This couldn't be further from the truth. There are snake people who lie, scream and spread FUD who just want to take the lizards' place.
Their screaming leads to a lot of tension and escalation. THIS IS A PROBLEM. SOLVE IT RIGHT NOW. This is what FUD is after all. This leads to rash decisions. We don't know where and when to invest. Should we invest in more nuclear and supplement with distributed photovoltaics? Should we build giant panels? Should we focus on batteries and what kinds of batteries?
Or should we focus on hydro power instead? Or maybe beam energy from space (it's a thing)? What about clean chemical reactions?
And most importantly - when should we start and when should we double down on it? What are the checkpoints of R&D and production grade equipment? What should we wait on?
Opportunists did what they do best - they found an opportunity to get attention and are exploiting it for their gain. This goes against the general public's gain. That's what I am against. Repeating completely unproductive rhetoric to get the tension high.
I agree about unproductive rhetoric, and my question wasn't aimed at you specifically, I was just wondering out loud about the opposite viewpoint. The focus of the climate discussion in general should definitely be more towards the points you raised, I'm just curious about people who don't think it's even a discussion worth having.
Yes, your upfront cost are expensive, because of course the plants have to be build. But that was the case with fossil plants as well, the only difference is, they are already built.
But in the long run, it's cheaper due to the lack of needed fuel.
So there's three things here: upfront cost, running costs, and decommissioning costs. The running costs of renewable generation are nonzero even if the fuel is free, as there's considerable maintenance cost. The long run cost - and so the decision whether to build fossil or renewable - has to take all three into account.
