The coal mine that ate Hambacher forest

Indeed, you can have all of germany on screen and still see it.

> "Source" is not a magic incantation that invalidates a statement.

That is correct. The statement is already insufficiently justified all by itself. "Source?" simply points out this pre-existing problem.

> When subsidies change, price goes up, we have seen that repeatedly happening in the German electricity market, most prominently with the EEG.

So, if we were to completely subsidize electricity for all citizens ... the price paid by citizens would go up? And that is because when we forced utilities to buy certain forms of energy at a fixed price, they passed that cost on to the customer? Are you really sure that that is your argument?

> You try to derail my point by underhandedly claiming I want more coal, which is false. I am pro-nuclear until we get fusion (also technically a nuclear technology) working.

You seemed to object to cutting subsidies for coal. But well, I guess your plan then is to increase the share of nuclear energy by continuing the subsidy for coal!?

> "But the costs are hidden, deconstruction will have to be paid by the taxpayer". Maybe - but when we were nuclear and before we installed bird-shredding and insect-killing wind farms, before we made everyone pay for large amounts of money to gift to rich homeowners to put solar on their roofs, electricity was considerably cheaper.

Erm, what? So, maybe the costs are hidden and will be paid via taxes ... but the prices that didn't include those costs were considerably cheaper? And that is supposed to be an argument for what exactly? That we should pay rich homeowners with taxes rather than increased energy prices?

And shredding birds somehow also magically kills the insects that those birds don't get to eat? Or what is that argument about?

> The actual cost of power generation apparently can be a lot lower, because the hypercapitalist US pays about a third of our price.

So, how much of the long-term costs of electricity generation in the US are included in the retail price? We don't want to be comparing apples to oranges, do we?

> Also, if you need to prop up an energy source with money, obviously it is not cost-effective.

How does that follow?

> I pay about 46 Eurocents per kilowatt hour, or around 52 US-Cents, with EnBW (900 kw/h per year[1], fixed costs factored in). Arguably, I could lower that to about 42 Eurocents per kilowatt hour if I change to Yello, who are famous for buying large amounts of nuclear electricity. Which, btw, is about to end here. With my low consumption, savings of about 36 Euros are just not worth it.

Well, that's certainly not representative. I pay ~ 0.27 EUR/kWh effective, though at ~ 3000 kWh per year, which makes a big difference for the effective price--and as such, I doubt you can reasonably compare your 0.50 USD to some average 0.12 USD in the US.

> So here I am - a single who moved to a small flat, all the lights are LEDs (which are considerably more expensive than the old ones)

Wut?

If we assume your typical "60 W" LED lamp lasts 10000 hours, that's 3 EUR for the lamp (if you buy reasonable quality somewhat cheaply) plus (assuming 6 W) 60 kWh of electricity, which at 0,46 EUR/kWh costs 27.60 EUR, so a total of 29.60 EUR.

The same amount of light from incandescent lamps is 10 60 W bulbs at ~ 0,40 EUR each, plus 600 kWh of electricity, that would be 276 EUR, so a total of 280 EUR.

What kind of LED lamps do you buy where LED lamps are "considerably more expensive"?! Even if we assume cheaper electricity, or terrible lamps that blow out after 1000 h, or that the incandescent bulbs were for free ... how do you manage to make LED lamps more expensive?!

> I won't be painted as some kind of environmental monster or a right-winger because I do not support risking the social cohesion of our society to provide for some people's green renewable fantasies.

I don't care whether you are a right-winger, your suggestion amounted to implementing right-wing policies.

As for whether those "fantasies" are bad policy or not, your arguments so far have not been particularly convincing.

> So, what exactly is right-wing in not making the price of electricity rise to appease some crypto-right-wing Greens?

The unjustified assumption that this is about appeasing anyone, and not about finding the best solution for an actual problem.

It seems to be news for the person blaming capitalism for the woes of the world, though. So discussion is not welcome? Why can't people just ignore threads they are not interested in?

Afaik a lot of stories repeat on HN, so the "newsworthiness" criterion seems a bit arbitrary. Also, shouldn't it make a difference if it is a top level thread? I wouldn't submit a story about "socialism starving millions of people".

I know, your "new" policies have been in place for a while, but I think you really kind of destroyed Hacker News. I don't understand why you worry about curbing discussions in deeply nested threads, as they would be easy to ignore by people who don't care. I don't think you worry about SEO or anything like that, so really, what is your incentive?

Also, there are lots of "boring" and repetitive threads on HN (like on global warming), I think you may actually single out "capitalism vs socialism" for ideological reasons. I don't believe you that nobody is curious about capitalism vs socialism anymore. On the contrary, the "battle" is more relevant than ever, with socialist having a real shot at the US elections. It is a question that affects most of us a lot more than most topics would.

No I said the protestors claiming there is an easy solution is the problem. They believe everything could just be switched over to renewables at no cost, in fact, they think it would be cheaper to do so.

You do the same. You claim it is "technically a solved problem". It really isn't. You are just naive about "renewable energy".

> No I said the protestors claiming there is an easy solution is the problem.

Source?

> They believe everything could just be switched over to renewables at no cost,

Source?

> in fact, they think it would be cheaper to do so.

So, how do you know that is not the case? (And no, pretending that climate change won't cause any costs is not how this works. If your stance is that climate change won't have any costs, that's on you to demonstrate.)

> You do the same. You claim it is "technically a solved problem". It really isn't.

So, which part of it is not technically solved?