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[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 30.7 ms ] thread
Published November 25, 2014
haha seriously fox . Fake news is getting out of control.
https://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/renewables/what-it-would-re...

That realization prompted us to reconsider the economics of energy. What’s needed, we concluded, are reliable zero-carbon energy sources so cheap that the operators of power plants and industrial facilities alike have an economic rationale for switching over soon—say, within the next 40 years. Let’s face it, businesses won’t make sacrifices and pay more for clean energy based on altruism alone.

The market is made by people too. Not only businesses make those decisions.

A disruptive fusion technology, for example, might skip the steam and produce high-energy charged particles that can be converted directly into electricity.

Really. Only mention to nuclear, and it's SciFi good-feelium based.

I'm not sure which to mistrust more: the source who has continually rejected any plausibility to the theory of climate change and its anthropological causes, or the software engineers at the company that has continually infantalized their employees into believing they are the sole arbiters of plausibility.

Where have you gone Adam Savage? Our nation turns its lonely eye to you, woo hoo hoo.

Fox News clearly trying to spin the article for their audience (herp derp, renewable are vaguely insufficient! Take our implication that fossil fuels are necessary and run with it!), here's the link to the less biased original:

https://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/renewables/what-it-would-re...

To oversimplify their point, shoving current renewable technologies into existing grids helps, but it isn't going to do the job for a variety of reasons. So we need radically different grid infrastructures, technologies and economics to get truly sustainable power generation.

Fundamentally the issue is CO2 sticks around in the atmosphere for a century or more. Reducing emissions is good, but until/unless they drop to a sustainable level we're just buying time.

Primary source (2014): https://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/renewables/what-it-would-re...

Per the HN guidelines:

>Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter.

I mention this because the posted article has exactly the sort of bias that would reasonably be expected from Fox News. The article's implication, of course, is that wind and solar are useless. It would be more appropriate to interpret the original source as stating that wind and solar are significantly helpful but that we're too late to prevent severe climate-related issues using wind and solar alone.

I think one should keep in mind Arthur Clarke's quote:

“When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.” — Arthur C. Clarke

A declaration that some broad systemic thing is impossible suggests some hubris in the certainty that all possible options have been analyzed. The declaration that something is possible on there other hand, then there is some reasonable chance that the suggested path has been well analyzed.

Faux News spins strawman headlines to mislead their audience to conform to a climate denial agenda. Film @ 11.

In order to “solve” climate change, there’s unlikely to ever be a single panacea, but many holistic, overlapping solutions to arrive at a better than an ice age or desert planet WCS.

For one, Paul Beckwith mentioned about the locked-in climate change that’s already in motion due to the energy already absorbed by oceans. In order to stop it from becoming worse or to eventually roll it back, massive projects like geoengineering will be needed to reflect energy back into space that would bring the energy account back to a livable level. This would also stabilize the northern polar vortex, because without extensive sea ice, it will wander around and cause even more changes in daily weather and seasonal patterns.