This analysis is incredibly flawed. It's face-palm levels of statistical incompetence here.
> High energy prices can cost lives. They discourage people from heating their homes properly, and living in cold conditions raises the risk of cardiac and respiratory problems.
Cardiac and respiratory problems you say! Hmmm, I wonder if there's a virus circulating that turns lungs into swiss cheese....or if it causes massive cardiac stress and damage too.
The author's presumption about how energy prices can lead to excess deaths hinges upon a mechanism that COVID-19 also affects. It's not correlation: it's causation. COVID-19 causes respiratory and cardiac problems. They did not even attempt to address this fact!
So then, they say "well some of these death's weren't caused by COVID-19." Ok sure. But how many of those folks who died from "the cold" actually died of hypothermia? Out of the ones that died from cardiac or repository distress, how many had prior COVID-19 infections? Were they recovered? If they recovered, was it full or did they have lingering, permanent long-COVID symptoms? Because we know there's a causal relationship, it really isn't hard to make the next step of inference to understand that this disease will be a very strong cofounding variable in those non-COVID-19 attributed excess deaths.
tl;dr This article is BS because it ignores the causal relationship that COVID-19 has on mechanism by which higher energy prices could plausibly lead to increased mortality.
The data shows that there are excess deaths beyond what can be directly attributed to Covid-19, that Covid-19 deaths are themselves not strongly correlated with energy prices, and that excess deaths in 2022-2023 were moderately correlated with energy prices. So we can be somewhat confident that Covid-19 is not the primary causal pathway to excess deaths in 2022-2023.
The worst problem is that the author concluded that there is a causal path between the high prices and excess deaths, which they absolutely did not do enough work to justify. For example, I don't see any longitudinal analysis here, nor do I see the effects of weather (temperature, humidity, cold snaps, high winds) accounted for. If your main causal hypothesis is that physically being cold caused the excess deaths, then something like 5th percentile temperature, events like "cold snap below -5 C for 3 or more days", etc. should be strongly correlated with excess deaths, after controlling for energy prices and baseline seasonality over several years.
Consider that temperature might actually be the underlying causal factor for both high prices and excess deaths! That is: cold winter causes more deaths, and cold winter also causes higher prices.
Maybe also having a warmer climate is correlated with being less dependent on Russian gas for heat due to geopolitical factors. That would be an interesting article in its own right, but it's not quite as exciting of a headline.
These points should be incredibly obvious to anyone writing for The Economist, and the fact that this wasn't even mentioned makes me think this article is more than just "incompetence" but outright bad faith.
> As wholesale energy prices fall and temperatures rise, the immediate threat may be over, but it is clear Mr Putin’s energy weapon was deadly.
Ugh, does it get any cornier?
I feel like readers ought to start demanding data and source code along with allegedly "data-driven" articles like this. That way at least I can do my own analysis using theirs as a starting point. Their list of sources at the bottom is not exactly something I can work with:
> Chart sources: The Economist’s excess-deaths tracker; Copernicus; HEPI
In any case, junk articles like this are exactly the reason I haven't subscribed to The Economist in years. Blogs written by actual economists seem to be the only place to find any sober analysis nowadays.
They have at least attempted to compare these excess deaths with a model of Covid excess deaths (although models are always wrong to varying degrees)
The most interesting thing to me is how younger ages who previously haven't been affected much by Covid seem to have suffered this past winter https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps
at least from people around me in Germany "younger people" seem to have been more affected by bad Covid cases then at any time before
like in my extended family/friend cycle Covid cases where people needed multipel weeks to recover from where rare before this winter, but not rare this winter
but due to changes in how Covid was handled in general I'm wouldn't be surprised if less then half the cases ended up in any Covid statistics
through then concluding from your personal environment to all of Germany is query a far stretch
This doesn't seem like a sound argument to me. Applied more generally, it quickly turns a bunch of statistics into nonsense.
E.g. the same argument could be made about COVID deaths themselves. They didn't die because of COVID, they died because they were obese, or smokers, or diabetic, or old, etc. Hell, you could argue that nobody died of COVID at all. They all died from failing to properly isolate themselves. Exposure to other people is causally related to getting COVID.
People don't die from heart attacks, they die from poor diet and exercise. People don't die of cancer, they die from eating red meat or not taking enough D3 or whatever. People don't die of gunshots, they die from poverty and poor mental health.
The cold is the proximate cause of death here. They have a risk factor from COVID (or diabetes, or age, or any of the other crapload of comorbidities related to hypothermia), which made them vulnerable to dying from the cold. They might have survived if they hadn't had COVID, but they also might have survived if they were younger, or in better shape, or didn't have a different health condition.
I'm not sure what your point is here. You're trying to make some kind of reductio ad absurdum argument about what, statistics in general? Causal analysis is bad because causation is complicated at the intersection of social science and medicine? All models are wrong and therefore all models are useless?
The primary absurdity here is that the author didn't even do an acceptable correlational study, yet presented a specific and strong causal conclusion. The author failed to establish any causality for anything at all, other than weakly ruling out Covid as a notable cause of excess death in Germany.
The author's hypothesis is that people being cold (due to high energy prices) is the cause, but they absolutely do not manage to establish even the faintest hint of a valid causal argument to support that hypothesis.
You've identified a lot of complexity. But the answer is not to throw up your hands and declare everything equally unknowable, it's to do the hard work to figure out what's actually going on. That's not something we can do behind our keyboards right now, that doesn't mean their isn't a correct, knowable answer.
>> High energy prices can cost lives. They discourage people from heating their homes properly, and living in cold conditions raises the risk of cardiac and respiratory problems.
I wonder if this assertion is even true. Cold conditions have been shown to be beneficial in some ways (increase metabolism, increase in brown fat which burns more calories than regular fat, etc). I'm sure there are limits to this, but IIRC Europe ended up having a surprisingly warm winter this year.
My guess is it isn't cold itself that kills, but the effects of living in a cold, and damp, environment.
Take the UK for example, many houses are over 100 years old, made of brick and little insulation. Even before energy prices went crazy, during the winter you'd be paying hundreds of pounds a month for heating and some parts of the house would barely reach 20c. In most parts of the UK, temperatures below freezing are rare so it's probably +5C or similar outside at that time. And its an island that rains a lot, so combine that with 90% humidity and you have a rather high dew point.
Now back to the energy prices. Gas prices in the UK are around 3x what they were before COVID, and electricity prices around 5x - and let's not even start about other living costs. So you do as the media says and try to save money and energy by turning down the thermostat. Maybe you also turn off the radiator in the spare bedroom, and try to be smart by sealing up drafty windows.
This means your cold and damp home will be closer to the dew point and is going to be less ventilated (forced air heating or ventilation is not a thing in the UK; you ventilate by opening windows), which will to lead to more mold and fungus, and we have something which causes health issues. The winter in the UK was colder than normal too, with more days below freezing than usual.
(I'm from the UK, but live somewhere colder now, but as the humidity is so low during winter and houses are insulated properly, mold is not a thing here)
Your medical analysis is badly flawed. When people are cold this causes peripheral vasoconstriction, thus raising blood pressure. Not a problem for healthy young people, but it increases the risk of major adverse cardiac events for frail elderly people. This is common knowledge in the field.
But similarly, COVID-19 studies during last winter may not account for the increased respiratory problems due to high energy prices? It's confounded both ways.
I thought it was rather confusing how people with 2+ conditions died from covid(?) You could also not count them but it would be equally wrong. How hard does one have to sneeze to blame a traffic fatality on covid? It can never be statistically significant with so many people in bed and working from hone.
If the heating bill would be the problem we would all have died?
The article is as wrong as all the others, perhaps more so but I cant tell? can I?
> if there's a virus circulating that turns lungs into swiss cheese
Oh come off it, it wasn't doing that anymore last year. Almost 100% of the population had been vaccinated, recovered from infection, or most likely both in 2022 so for most it wasn't even as bad as a flu.
mRNA vaccine creation is humanity's most impressive technology. We'd be absolutely screwed right now if we didn't have this tech. (Or, more accurately: a lot more people would be dead otherwise).
For the initial variants, sure. But those have long since been replaced with much milder variants, closely resembling a mild cold for most. How are you able to attribute the reduction in deaths for this winter compared to the previous winter to vaccines? We had vaccines in the previous winter too.
It has been similarly speculated that shutdown of nuclear power plants after the Fukushima disaster has caused more deaths than the disaster itself, due to rise in energy costs:
I mostly find The Economist to be propaganda, for example they try to frame energy vs covid because they always want to disparage "green energy" and covid safety measures. That's their bias, I find it to be really grating but hey to each their own. What I would have liked to have seen in this article was a breakdown of the causes of death.
It seems like the implication is that energy costs caused people to freeze to death, or at least keep the temperature low and... get more sick? I guess? Not sure. But since energy prices are tied to everything else, how much of these excess deaths were knock-on effects of high energy prices affecting the costs of goods and subsequently human behavior? I would be curious to see a breakdown of the effects because it's hard for me to believe that people are just freezing to death because they can't afford $100/month extra on their electricity bills. Maybe this is true, but I would like to see a breakdown of the causes of death for each person.
One of the things that came to mind is the idea that let's say there's some percentage of people on the verge of suicide on any given day. Could an extra $100/mo on their utility bill, or the inflation from high energy prices, have enough of an effect that they kill themselves?
I think this would be a more interesting analysis than "herp derp energy production is more important than covid safety", especially when the easy argument against the effect of energy costs on an individual is that expensive energy is only relevant when consumers pay for it directly. If the state subsidizes energy production then (assuming no blackouts) nobody is going to freeze to death (which they hinted at in their article, but didn't realize the end conclusion that a nationalized energy sector makes energy costs largely irrelevant to the individual).
Personally I don't really care either way, but I think this post sucks and I don't see why it's so high up.
Disparaging COVID safety measures means it's propaganda now? I absolutely get disliking the economist (they are war mongering at every occasion), but criticism of COVID measures isn't some sort of weird agenda lol. It only makes sense to look back and see what went wrong, and if anything there is a huge lack of criticism of how it all went down.
Like I don't get it, would it have been propaganda if they praised COVID measures or?
> Like I don't get it, would it have been propaganda if they praised COVID measures or?
Yes, I am pointing out their bias. There is plenty of propaganda on the other side, but people aren't posting articles from Mother Jones or Salon or Breitbart on here.
In an article about energy deaths a COVID comparison feels very shoe-horned in. Propaganda can be factual, nothing in this article was not factual, but it's still propaganda. I find that the primary purpose of The Economist is to be propaganda, it has little intellectual value. Which is the point of the rest of my comment.
> because they always want to disparage "green energy" and covid safety measures.
This is simply not a true reflection of the voice of the economist, which has been climate-real (in terms of aligned with the scientific evidence) for more than 25 years
The Economist doesn't do climate denial, they just do concern trolling wrt green energy. "Oh man look at how supply doesn't keep up with demand during the day" and they usually don't acknowledge that market incentives will lead to solutions like storage and arbitrage, because the user is meant to be left with the impression that green energy is a half-baked solution that wont work with our grid.
Nothing in this article is non-factual, but their primary purpose is as a propaganda piece. There isn't much intellectual value.
a) even if I grant you your timeline, that's still decades of delay and denial
b) they have still been championing people like Bjorn Lomborg within that timeframe.
c) they appear to have become more US culture war aligned recently as their readership changed which is obviously a step backwards on climate (and COVID)
If people are really freezing to death because they can't afford a relatively small exess expense I'd conclude that we need to improve the social safety net. Perhaps raise taxes and subsidize heating for the poor and vulnerable. Not decrease energy prices overall, mainly benefiting large manufacturing industries, while simultaneously causing climate change. But that's not a conclusion you'll read in the economist...
In the UK it was a vast increase in monthly expenses (still is) and yes it was partially subsidised. What nobody did was the obvious step of insulating houses, despite years of protest from Insulate Britain, who were dismissed as weirdos.
It's propaganda because the primary goal of the economist is to convince you of something (that the status quo/neoliberalism should be enforced). Propaganda also doesn't mean nothing in this article was non-factual.
Mother Jones also has a lot of 100% factual articles, but their main goal as a propaganda outlet is to convince people to become socialists. I don't think that belongs on HN either, even though I love Mother Jones.
Is there value in posting a pure propaganda piece to HN? I don't think so, not unless the point of the post is to practice media literacy by looking at propaganda academically. I think it would be more interesting to post something more scientific without the narrative bias. More room for debate beyond the confines of what the author wants to push.
Also I never said The Economist denies climate change. They disparage green energy. All the people replying to my original comment never actually addressed the point I was making, they immediately jumped to "but the Economist doesn't do climate denialism" and got mad at my usage of the word propaganda
Either way, this article is crap and so is most of what The Economist comes up with because it--again--is propaganda.
Climate change denial has moved beyond explicitly denying its existence at this point. At least the kind that can sway otherwise reasonably intelligent people.
> It's not happening
> Okay maybe it's happening but we didn't cause it
> Okay maybe it's happening and maybe we did cause it but we shouldn't do anything about it because insert easily debunkable bullshit about electric vehicles and renewables being impractical or whataboutism involving other countries here. <== WE ARE HERE
> Okay it's happening and we caused it but it's too late to do anything now so lets just keep the status quo.
The evidence-based research on long COVID is limited and of mixed quality. From what I've seen, there are significant gaps in experimental methodology and a lot of studies based on extremely subjective surveys which don't effectively filter co-morbities. I would strongly caution you to examine the data before adopting a strong position on the issue and applying it to potentially unrelated phenomena.
Long COVID, from what I can tell / have read, is acknowledged by research[1][2]. The mechanism of it, and what is the best treatment for the people suffering from it, I think, are still the subject of ongoing research.
Though it is worth noting there is experimental clinical data providing a plausible pathway to suggest long COVID is a result of cell activity dysfunction with plausible biomarkers of dysfunction, and we've known this long enough to know long COVID is a real medical pathology (one distinct from acute infection based on biomarker evidence):
Since this in the Economist, I'm surprised the author didn't go full Swiftean "Modest Proposal", and say that this is a good thing, because it frees up a lot of caregivers to do more productive things.
Reading the comments of for this article, HN -> Reddit (or worse). This is political BS, nothing technical or entrepreneurial. Gresham's Law?
Guess it's time to go elsewhere - have fun, try to stay civil with each other and (somehow) return to tech-related topics. I'll check in at some point in the future.
The comments are talking about politics because the article is politically motivated horseshit, not the other way around.
If you're lamenting the article making it to the front page though I hear you. HN has a weird boomer right wing uncle vibe when it comes to anything to do with the climate or renewable energy. Lots of people repeating the same tired easily debunkable soundbites and getting a disturbing number of upvotes.
Readit News
> High energy prices can cost lives. They discourage people from heating their homes properly, and living in cold conditions raises the risk of cardiac and respiratory problems.
Cardiac and respiratory problems you say! Hmmm, I wonder if there's a virus circulating that turns lungs into swiss cheese....or if it causes massive cardiac stress and damage too.
The author's presumption about how energy prices can lead to excess deaths hinges upon a mechanism that COVID-19 also affects. It's not correlation: it's causation. COVID-19 causes respiratory and cardiac problems. They did not even attempt to address this fact!
So then, they say "well some of these death's weren't caused by COVID-19." Ok sure. But how many of those folks who died from "the cold" actually died of hypothermia? Out of the ones that died from cardiac or repository distress, how many had prior COVID-19 infections? Were they recovered? If they recovered, was it full or did they have lingering, permanent long-COVID symptoms? Because we know there's a causal relationship, it really isn't hard to make the next step of inference to understand that this disease will be a very strong cofounding variable in those non-COVID-19 attributed excess deaths.
tl;dr This article is BS because it ignores the causal relationship that COVID-19 has on mechanism by which higher energy prices could plausibly lead to increased mortality.
The worst problem is that the author concluded that there is a causal path between the high prices and excess deaths, which they absolutely did not do enough work to justify. For example, I don't see any longitudinal analysis here, nor do I see the effects of weather (temperature, humidity, cold snaps, high winds) accounted for. If your main causal hypothesis is that physically being cold caused the excess deaths, then something like 5th percentile temperature, events like "cold snap below -5 C for 3 or more days", etc. should be strongly correlated with excess deaths, after controlling for energy prices and baseline seasonality over several years.
Consider that temperature might actually be the underlying causal factor for both high prices and excess deaths! That is: cold winter causes more deaths, and cold winter also causes higher prices.
Maybe also having a warmer climate is correlated with being less dependent on Russian gas for heat due to geopolitical factors. That would be an interesting article in its own right, but it's not quite as exciting of a headline.
These points should be incredibly obvious to anyone writing for The Economist, and the fact that this wasn't even mentioned makes me think this article is more than just "incompetence" but outright bad faith.
> As wholesale energy prices fall and temperatures rise, the immediate threat may be over, but it is clear Mr Putin’s energy weapon was deadly.
Ugh, does it get any cornier?
I feel like readers ought to start demanding data and source code along with allegedly "data-driven" articles like this. That way at least I can do my own analysis using theirs as a starting point. Their list of sources at the bottom is not exactly something I can work with:
> Chart sources: The Economist’s excess-deaths tracker; Copernicus; HEPI
In any case, junk articles like this are exactly the reason I haven't subscribed to The Economist in years. Blogs written by actual economists seem to be the only place to find any sober analysis nowadays.
lower temperature = higher deaths
then you should be pro-anthropogenic climate change as you would see it as saving lives.
The most interesting thing to me is how younger ages who previously haven't been affected much by Covid seem to have suffered this past winter https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps
like in my extended family/friend cycle Covid cases where people needed multipel weeks to recover from where rare before this winter, but not rare this winter
but due to changes in how Covid was handled in general I'm wouldn't be surprised if less then half the cases ended up in any Covid statistics
through then concluding from your personal environment to all of Germany is query a far stretch
Just look into the studies of 22 and 23.
E.g. the same argument could be made about COVID deaths themselves. They didn't die because of COVID, they died because they were obese, or smokers, or diabetic, or old, etc. Hell, you could argue that nobody died of COVID at all. They all died from failing to properly isolate themselves. Exposure to other people is causally related to getting COVID.
People don't die from heart attacks, they die from poor diet and exercise. People don't die of cancer, they die from eating red meat or not taking enough D3 or whatever. People don't die of gunshots, they die from poverty and poor mental health.
The cold is the proximate cause of death here. They have a risk factor from COVID (or diabetes, or age, or any of the other crapload of comorbidities related to hypothermia), which made them vulnerable to dying from the cold. They might have survived if they hadn't had COVID, but they also might have survived if they were younger, or in better shape, or didn't have a different health condition.
The primary absurdity here is that the author didn't even do an acceptable correlational study, yet presented a specific and strong causal conclusion. The author failed to establish any causality for anything at all, other than weakly ruling out Covid as a notable cause of excess death in Germany.
The author's hypothesis is that people being cold (due to high energy prices) is the cause, but they absolutely do not manage to establish even the faintest hint of a valid causal argument to support that hypothesis.
Well done! Remember that.
I wonder if this assertion is even true. Cold conditions have been shown to be beneficial in some ways (increase metabolism, increase in brown fat which burns more calories than regular fat, etc). I'm sure there are limits to this, but IIRC Europe ended up having a surprisingly warm winter this year.
Take the UK for example, many houses are over 100 years old, made of brick and little insulation. Even before energy prices went crazy, during the winter you'd be paying hundreds of pounds a month for heating and some parts of the house would barely reach 20c. In most parts of the UK, temperatures below freezing are rare so it's probably +5C or similar outside at that time. And its an island that rains a lot, so combine that with 90% humidity and you have a rather high dew point.
Now back to the energy prices. Gas prices in the UK are around 3x what they were before COVID, and electricity prices around 5x - and let's not even start about other living costs. So you do as the media says and try to save money and energy by turning down the thermostat. Maybe you also turn off the radiator in the spare bedroom, and try to be smart by sealing up drafty windows.
This means your cold and damp home will be closer to the dew point and is going to be less ventilated (forced air heating or ventilation is not a thing in the UK; you ventilate by opening windows), which will to lead to more mold and fungus, and we have something which causes health issues. The winter in the UK was colder than normal too, with more days below freezing than usual.
(I'm from the UK, but live somewhere colder now, but as the humidity is so low during winter and houses are insulated properly, mold is not a thing here)
Deleted Comment
If the heating bill would be the problem we would all have died?
The article is as wrong as all the others, perhaps more so but I cant tell? can I?
Oh come off it, it wasn't doing that anymore last year. Almost 100% of the population had been vaccinated, recovered from infection, or most likely both in 2022 so for most it wasn't even as bad as a flu.
Dead Comment
It's not the case that more people died last winter due to "expensive energy" than due to Covid-19 in total (see https://www.bbc.com/news/world-51235105).
Dead Comment
https://www.economist.com/asia/2019/11/07/was-shutting-japan...
It seems like the implication is that energy costs caused people to freeze to death, or at least keep the temperature low and... get more sick? I guess? Not sure. But since energy prices are tied to everything else, how much of these excess deaths were knock-on effects of high energy prices affecting the costs of goods and subsequently human behavior? I would be curious to see a breakdown of the effects because it's hard for me to believe that people are just freezing to death because they can't afford $100/month extra on their electricity bills. Maybe this is true, but I would like to see a breakdown of the causes of death for each person.
One of the things that came to mind is the idea that let's say there's some percentage of people on the verge of suicide on any given day. Could an extra $100/mo on their utility bill, or the inflation from high energy prices, have enough of an effect that they kill themselves?
I think this would be a more interesting analysis than "herp derp energy production is more important than covid safety", especially when the easy argument against the effect of energy costs on an individual is that expensive energy is only relevant when consumers pay for it directly. If the state subsidizes energy production then (assuming no blackouts) nobody is going to freeze to death (which they hinted at in their article, but didn't realize the end conclusion that a nationalized energy sector makes energy costs largely irrelevant to the individual).
Personally I don't really care either way, but I think this post sucks and I don't see why it's so high up.
Like I don't get it, would it have been propaganda if they praised COVID measures or?
Yes, I am pointing out their bias. There is plenty of propaganda on the other side, but people aren't posting articles from Mother Jones or Salon or Breitbart on here.
In an article about energy deaths a COVID comparison feels very shoe-horned in. Propaganda can be factual, nothing in this article was not factual, but it's still propaganda. I find that the primary purpose of The Economist is to be propaganda, it has little intellectual value. Which is the point of the rest of my comment.
This is simply not a true reflection of the voice of the economist, which has been climate-real (in terms of aligned with the scientific evidence) for more than 25 years
Nothing in this article is non-factual, but their primary purpose is as a propaganda piece. There isn't much intellectual value.
b) they have still been championing people like Bjorn Lomborg within that timeframe.
c) they appear to have become more US culture war aligned recently as their readership changed which is obviously a step backwards on climate (and COVID)
But of course because they posted something that you don't agree with, they must be propaganda.
It's propaganda because the primary goal of the economist is to convince you of something (that the status quo/neoliberalism should be enforced). Propaganda also doesn't mean nothing in this article was non-factual.
Mother Jones also has a lot of 100% factual articles, but their main goal as a propaganda outlet is to convince people to become socialists. I don't think that belongs on HN either, even though I love Mother Jones.
Is there value in posting a pure propaganda piece to HN? I don't think so, not unless the point of the post is to practice media literacy by looking at propaganda academically. I think it would be more interesting to post something more scientific without the narrative bias. More room for debate beyond the confines of what the author wants to push.
Also I never said The Economist denies climate change. They disparage green energy. All the people replying to my original comment never actually addressed the point I was making, they immediately jumped to "but the Economist doesn't do climate denialism" and got mad at my usage of the word propaganda
Either way, this article is crap and so is most of what The Economist comes up with because it--again--is propaganda.
> It's not happening
> Okay maybe it's happening but we didn't cause it
> Okay maybe it's happening and maybe we did cause it but we shouldn't do anything about it because insert easily debunkable bullshit about electric vehicles and renewables being impractical or whataboutism involving other countries here. <== WE ARE HERE
> Okay it's happening and we caused it but it's too late to do anything now so lets just keep the status quo.
Because that would mean we would have to acknowledge long covid, and possible immune system damage of repeated infections.
That won't do at all, people might want not to die for the ecconomy.
It could be because of that, which is why the article address it, and accounts for in in their modelling.
Deleted Comment
[1]: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/long-term-effects/...
[2]: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41579-022-00846-2
(etc.; there are numerous studies that are not hard to find?)
Elevated vascular transformation blood biomarkers in Long-COVID indicate angiogenesis as a key pathophysiological mechanism, https://molmed.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s10020-022...
Plasma Proteome of Long-covid Patients Indicates Hypoxia-mediated Vasculo-proliferative Disease With Impact on Brain and Heart Function (Preprint), https://assets.researchsquare.com/files/rs-2448315/v1/8043bd...
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Modest_Proposal
Guess it's time to go elsewhere - have fun, try to stay civil with each other and (somehow) return to tech-related topics. I'll check in at some point in the future.
If you're lamenting the article making it to the front page though I hear you. HN has a weird boomer right wing uncle vibe when it comes to anything to do with the climate or renewable energy. Lots of people repeating the same tired easily debunkable soundbites and getting a disturbing number of upvotes.