← Back to context

Comment by nilslindemann

5 months ago

And brown bears are less dangerous than cars because fewer people are killed by them. If you see a car, RUN. They are dangerous. Brown bears, not so much. Go ahead, pat their fur, statistically this is safe.

It’s important to understand the qualifier per unit of energy.

The correct parable for you would have been the number of bear deaths vs interactions with bears weighed against number of car deaths vs interactions with cars.

Not apples to apples.

Just being near a potentially aggressive bear is a bad situation.

Being near a car or a nuclear power plant is not a bad siuation.

Of course you should run in the other direction if you're close to a potentially aggressive bear.

Same thing if you're in the path of an out of control car, or near a nuclear power plant accident.

But you've got to separate the "probability of bad situation occurring" from the "severity of the bad situation when it does occur".

You generally can't really pet a wild brown bear, since they are not interested in humans and would avoid you. You can't run away from it either, since it can outrun you easily

By your logic, it's wrong to spend many billions per year on traffic safety. It should go into bear safety instead.

"Average deaths per TWh produced" is a good yardstick to me.