First: The same argument applies to suburban population, where autarky is even easier/cheaper than for industrial consumers: Just slap panels on the roof and a bunch of batteries into a shed, done. We won't even need much cheaper panels nor cells, really; it's mainly labor, integrator-margins and regulations that make this less (financially) attractive than the grid right now (pure cells are already in the $60/kWh range for single-digit quantities).

Second: If industrial consumers stop contributing towards electric grid costs and the general public dislikes it, you can just regulate against it, problem solved. But in practice governments already try to make the energy situation as appealing as possible for industry, so there is very little actually leveraged power that you really give up anyway.

The hydro fraction is also a really bad indicator in general, because it basically just reflects geography of a country and not really its effort to reduce CO2 emissions.

A better metric would simply be annual production, where we're in the ~30% range globally (https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-electricity-renewab...). Even that comparison portraits renewables very favorably, because dispatchable power is easier to handle than the same output from intermittent sources.

If you look beyond electricity (heating/total primary energy use) the picture gets even worse.

This is not an argument against renewables, this is against premature cheering and misleading use of numbers.

These are not typical sockpuppet accounts either, but mostly established users that (conjecture) don't care about having the same non-technical debate among non-experts devolve into flaming and namecalling.

See relevant statements and context from moderators here:

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

The best thing you can do to foster discussion of topics like this is to keep the discussion civil and interesting.

Blaming the site itself is simply incorrect.

I'd argue that the most important thing when trying to win wars is to aim for realistic outcomes.

The first gulf war was arguably a win because of realistic goals (get Iraq out of Kuwait and stop them from invading it again), while most other interventions in the region were basically "designed to fail", and unsurprisingly never achieved anything of note (and the problem was not lack of military capability).

Nobody is disputing the fact that the US spends more money on arms than anyone else and has the shiniest of toys as a result, but "winning" in war is about effecting the outcomes that you want, not about whether your weapon systems are superior.

The US military has clearly failed to deliver the outcome that Americans wanted in many recent conflicts (Vietnam, Taliban); counting those wars as "lost" makes a lot of sense.

Legislation is, in fact, specifically made so people (i.e. landlord) actually can't easily stop you from doing this.

Some systems are capable of running in isolation from grid (providing 230V AC on their own), but this is less common and often unnecessary.

Grids are not set up to move significant percentages of national consumption over longer distances, and expansion is slow, expensive and prone to nimbyism.

Countries already struggle to move electrical energy inside their own borders (e.g. Germany: north=>south), shifting double digit percentages of national consumption across Europe is not gonna happen any time soon. Germany alone plans to spend at least ~€100bn over the next decade on this (internally, not on connecting Spain!).

Much more effective to focus on local generation first than to try and rely on slightly better conditions for solar panels half a continent away.

I honestly don't see the problem, it's probably still worth it (because society still needs to provide less tap water and saves there).

> As for being targets themselves, the drones would be in enemy airspace so who/what is going to target the fighters?

Something like a sidewinder strapped under some of the attack drones. If you create the incentive (juicy, trained pilots exposed in slow aircraft engaging at low range) your opponent is gonna adapt. Exactly this evolution happened with Ukraine sea drones (already shot down several russian aircraft).

It is easy to get infected by the media narratives that are notoriously biased towards maximum drama, but I firmly believe that we are not gonna escalate into such a scenario.

There's always options; sorting priorities because of price, radical electrification of transport, or, at the extreme end, picking up coal hydration again (worked well enough to keep the Nazi war machine running for quite a while, with much worse access to crude).

For comparison: Copper prices did increase by 500% since 2000, but people barely even care, and that's how I would expect "shortages" to typically go.

In WW2, the US lost ~15000 airmen just in training accidents to crew the ~300k planes it built. I'm sure we could get that rate down substantially with modern simulators and safety investments (=> also not free), but human lives simply got comparatively more expensive (and competent pilots were not that cheap back then either).

The attacker, meanwhile, is certainly gonna lose less men building and controlling the drones, and he can afford at least 10 attack drones for every interceptor you build.

If you did something like this on a larger scale, a big concern would also be that your manned interceptor aircraft simply become targets themselves, so the "low-risk turkey shooting" could quickly degrade.

I do expect (non-suicide?) interceptor drones as countermeasure at some point (specifically against the "cruise missile with props" style of attack drones, less so in the FPV weight class), and those could be conceptually quite similar to old prop fighters.

If you want to scramble manned fighters (even WW2-style ones!) every time cheap drones are launched then the pure material cost per intercept might be acceptable (no guarantee here: you need more fuel and your ammunition is potentially more expensive than the drones payload, too), but the pilot wage/training costs alone ruins your entire balance as soon as there is any risk of losing the interceptors (either from human error/crashes or the drone operator being sneaky).

Big problem with stationary AA is probably coverage (need too many sites) and flak artillery is not gonna work out like in the past because the drones can fly much lower and ruin your range that way.

But non-sustainable pricing is very different from "cataclysmic collapse", and too many people expect the latter for too many things, which is just not realistic in my view (and historical precendent makes a strong case against that assumption, too).

A society where water prices gradually increases to "reverse-osmosis only" (instead of "pump-from-the-ground-everywhere") levels is very different from a society where water suddenly runs out.

If you had made predictions/scenarios in 1850 based on Guano deposits running out within a decade or two, you would have mispredicted completely, because a lot of the industry just transitioned to sodium nitrate (before synthetic fertilisers took over). Nowadays media landscape would've gladly made such doom-and-gloom predictions for global agriculture back then.

I completely agree that quickly depleting reserves often indicate non-sustainable pricing for ressources (which is obviously bad long term), but that is very different from sudden collapse.

Such predictions have an abysmal historic track record, because we tend to find workarounds both on the supply side (=> previously undiscovered reserves) as well as flexibility on the demand side (using substitutes).

This applies historically for oil, lithium, rare earth metals and basically everything else.

edit: I'm not saying we're never gonna run out of anything-- I'm just saying to not expect sudden, cataclysmic shortages in general, but instead steadily rising prices and a somewhat smoothish transition to alternatives.

The history of nuclear power was dominated by nation-states (instead of private investment). If the big incentive of enrichment ("supply chain safety for nuclear weapons") is taken away, I'm skeptical that enough capital flows into the whole technology to ever really make it worthwhile.

It seems pretty likely to me that nuclear power in 1980 ends up in a similar position as fusion power today, instead: Looking somewhat promising but very expensive and no one really wants to invest enough.

Nuclear power also arguably saved lots of lives by avoiding fossil emissions/air pollution (probably significantly more than were killed in Hiroshima, Nagasaki and all nuclear accidents combined; https://www.giss.nasa.gov/pubs/abs/kh05000e.html estimates ~2M).

Personally, I'll gladly take a small risk of global nuclear war over a larger risk increase for a conventional WW3, but this might be a matter of taste...

But it is reasonable to assume that less starvation from a slightly earlier end of the war compensated for the higher lethality of nuclear bombs.

A potential land invasion (with lots of death Americans) is also often cited to "justify" the nukes, but I'd be careful with that argument because it is unclear that it would've been necessary (in a no-nuke timeline). The US post-war strategic bombing survey said on this: "it is the Survey's opinion that certainly prior to 31 December 1945, and in all probability prior to 1 November 1945, Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated."