To Imane, pt 77

I did a Google search for "I'm assuming Imane hasn't read my most recent weblog post addressed to her", and one of the results was https://www.gatesnotes.com/work/accelerate-energy-innovation/reader/three-tough-truths-about-climate

I'm reluctant to link to something by Gates. My oldest brother mentioned, around 2012~2013, that Gates sometimes responded to emails; he might have said that he emailed Gates himself about some issue and got a reply (my oldest brother worked at Microsoft at the time, the company which Gates co-founded). But I never tried this. I assumed someone else read Gates's emails and anything I wrote would get filtered out, and did not want to have to deal with the uncertainty of whether Gates had read my email and ignored it (some people might say that someone who does this is "evil"). I had already tried, and failed, to contact Warren Buffett, and Gates would be "another person to contact simply because they're rich".

But Gates did sign, and co-founded, the Giving Pledge. I like how when I visit that page, under his name, it says "alt text is not supported." Clearly an error, though I can't be bothered to spend 3 minutes loading another browser to see if it's just my browser being old. (Web browsers used to have things like the Acid3 test which all modern browsers used to pass but no longer do, and I don't know why my browser being old could potentially lead to things being rendered differently. Progress.)

So how does this idea fix the problem of people being deported from Sweden to Afghanistan, and Afghanistan being poor due to lack of fossil fuels?

The argument for the world being better is "people would do fewer wasteful things with fossil fuels". Like, spending 80 minutes per day driving at 100 km/h to get to work, and another 80 minutes driving back.

Step 1: more jobs are created.

Step 2: people get smarter, and act smarter. Problems like unemployment being solved lets us focus on other problems, and the whole 'conflicting goals' thing helps with signal accuracy, which helps with filtering solutions to problems.

Step 3: countries with fossil fuels reduce their production of them, because using them all now is dumb.

Step 4: ?? renewable energy is potentially more competitive on price, and the market optimizes for them to achieve scale, OR

Step 4: ?? we realize that renewable energy is not long-term viable due to the difficulty of recycling critical materials etc., maybe the only real renewable energy is hydroelectric dams and maybe even those are temporary on a geologic timescale, and we adjust our expectations for the future. (And we get an answer to the Fermi paradox.)

Compare the article from Gates. He says,

I know that some climate advocates will disagree with me, call me a hypocrite because of my own carbon footprint (which I fully offset with legitimate carbon credits)

So THAT'S how people justify what they do. Just spend more money, problem solved. Rich people are moral, poor people are not, according to this solution.

He also says,

I work with scientists and innovators who are committed to preventing a climate disaster and making cheap, reliable clean energy available to everyone. Ten years ago, some of them joined me in creating Breakthrough Energy, an investment platform whose sole purpose is to accelerate clean energy innovation and deployment. We’ve supported more than 150 companies so far, many of which have blossomed into major businesses. We’re helping build a growing ecosystem of thousands of innovators working on every aspect of the problem.

Compare the problem of shoes. Does Gates feel the need to invest in shoe production? No, because shoe production is already profitable, with many companies doing it.

The logic behind "what society is doing is basically fine": waste a lot of fossil fuels, but because there are rich people like Gates, they can afford to fund people who work on the problem of clean energy, who would otherwise not be working on this problem because it isn't profitable and people need an income. Let's say that (incredibly optimistic) 10% of the "unnecessary" use of fossil fuels goes towards supporting research into clean energy.

What I am suggesting instead, in Step 3 of the above progression, is to make clean energy profitable by making fossil fuels expensive.

I don't think I'll bother to read more of Gates's article, beyond the point I quoted above, but the article's title is "Three tough truths about climate" and the "What to know" section at the start lists three points, one of which says "which includes reducing the Green Premium to zero". A search for Green Premium shows that the article defines it as "the cost difference between clean and dirty ways of doing something".

If fossil fuels are expensive, will the Green Premium reach zero? Or does "clean energy" have fossil fuel inputs (like the fuel that powers the vehicles that are used to mine lithium, used for batteries) that mean that the Green Premium can never reach zero, when properly calculated?

Some people are afraid to find out, so they do nothing, and hope.

Are you afraid of Step 1 in the above progression?

Or are you like a certain player in Aion, who had on their website character profile, "Doesn't afraid"?