
Utopian ideas on climate change will get us precisely nowhere - ergot
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2017/jan/22/utopian-ideas-climate-change-flying-electric-cars
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philipkglass
I once heard the back-to-nature approach deftly savaged as "abstinence-only
decarbonization."

There is some low-hanging fruit to be plucked in terms of reducing consumption
but the vast majority of the decarbonization effort should be focused on
different modes of _production_. There are solid _quantitative_ reasons to
focus on cleaning up production instead of decreasing consumption, as well as
the obvious political advantages. In 2014 the IPCC estimated that coal power
had a median CO2-equivalent emissions intensity of 820 grams per kilowatt hour
and that rooftop photovoltaic generation had a median intensity of 41 grams
per kWh, 95% lower. So you could ask people to turn off their air conditioners
in the summer, and if you convinced half of households to endure that
discomfort it would actually reduce emissions _much less_ than if everyone
air-conditioned like before but via solar power instead of fossil power.
Imposing austerity on energy services is a painful and not even particularly
effective way to cut emissions.

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cjbenedikt
Spot on! And Tesla demonstrated that.

