Comment by woodandsteel
5 years ago
Vaclav Smil is looking at this all wrong. There are three phases here
1) power is produced by plants that take fossil fuels to build and fossil fuels to run
2) power is produce by plants that take fossil fuels to build and no fossil fuels to run
3) power is produced by plants that were built using renewable energy and run off of it too.
Most of the people who focus on phase 2 basically want us to stay on fossil fuels forever, but they don't want to come out and say it.
> Most of the people who focus on phase 2 basically want us to stay on fossil fuels forever, but they don't want to come out and say it.
How do you know this? Serious question.
Because if you leave out the first and third phases, then there is no reason to develop renewables and get off of fossil fuels. And if that was not what they thought, they should say it, but they don't.
But let me ask you the question, what is your position on global climate change and renewables? Do you believe global climate change is real, caused at least considerably by human fossil fuel emissions and dangerous? Do you believe we should be replacing fossil fuels with renewables?
And what do you think of my three phase analysis?
> And if that was not what they thought...
Oh, so you do realize you are speculating about what other people think then? It wasn't clear in your prior comment.
> But let me ask you the question, what is your position on global climate change and renewables?
My position is that until we realize that the problem preventing us from moving forward is not a lack of climate science, but rather a lack of psychological/neurological science, and a lack of widespread knowledge of, and acceptance of, that which we already know...including, or maybe even especially, among the intellectually gifted, like many people right here on HN.
Because of this, I consider the rest of your comment is moot. Doesn't matter if it's right or wrong, it makes no difference. We have the same conversations here day after day, year after year, with the same self-important tones of intellectual and moral superiority. And for what? Does anything ever change? You can have a ten phase analysis and it doesn't mean shit at the end of the day if you can't get people to agree on a direction to move in.
If you cared about the environment as much as you think you do, you'd be willing to listen to what I'm saying. And if you were willing to listen to what I'm saying, you'd be the first person on HN. But I suspect, like all the others, you won't...because this is the nature of an uncontrolled Default Mode Network.
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