Climate change: IPCC report is 'code red for humanity'

I see you're getting downvoted but maybe "get rid of" isn't the best approach. Certainly taxing air travel at a chunky rate would reduce unnecessary flights.

JCWasmx86• 5 years ago

I frankly don't think this would make sense. Imagine explaining the people of a country, that they aren't allowed to fly to e.g. Mallorca anymore. The acceptance would be somewhere between low and zero.

Maybe private air travel in one country, e.g. from Munich to Berlin could be reduced, but not international flights without any resistance

mtekman• 5 years ago

Emissions from aviation contributes 3% to greenhouse gasses.

_Algernon_3• 5 years ago

At least remove subsidies from all air travel, and add a carbon tax on top. Would make train much more competitive on many routes.

avnigo2• 5 years ago

Here's an informed article on bitcoin's energy use [0].

[0] https://hbr.org/2021/05/how-much-energy-does-bitcoin-actuall...

ealexhudson• 5 years ago

"The vast majority of Bitcoin’s energy consumption happens during the mining process. Once coins have been issued, the energy required to validate transactions is minimal."

Honestly, that doesn't seem particularly well-informed. I wonder how this person thinks transactions are committed to the blockchain, and how this is separate from the mining process?

Unless they literally mean "the energy required to consult the ledger of previous transactions", which doesn't seem a useful metric.

wesleywt• 5 years ago

We should have more bitcoin.

fighterpilot5• 5 years ago

Just tax carbon instead of trying to pick winners and losers

veidelis3• 5 years ago

On what evidence is your opinion based?

QasimK7• 5 years ago

I was recently thinking about why bitcoin shouldn't just be banned to help mitigate the ongoing climate catastrophe which led to my recent article [0] which equated banning bitcoin to banning ice cream, which I hope helps to illustrate the absurdity of picking and choosing versus just charging for carbon more directly.

[0] https://qasimk.io/2021/bitcoin-and-ice-cream/

dredmorbius10• 5 years ago

In general I agree.

In practice, there are behaviours which provide no net social benefit, exact tremendous costs, and yet are inherently self-perpetuating. Legal prohibitions can help in this case. It's a form of demand-dampening.

RandomLensman4• 5 years ago

If some things "are irreversible on timescales of centuries to millennia" then really just going carbon neutral etc. sounds like a pretty weak approach as it would create costs now and large benefits only far in the future. Maybe this really needs geoengineering (and more spending on mitigation)?

brylie4• 5 years ago

Has any means of geoengineering been demonstrated as feasable?

Given our track record, it would probably be best for us to scale back our consumption while promoting re-forestation. Nature can likely heal itself far better than our wildest geoengineering ambitions.

RandomLensman4• 5 years ago

Clearly feasible, as demonstrated by anthropogenic climate change. Going back to a different life style is an option, but will be strongly opposed by a lot of people (and not without justification).

Planet was much hotter, much colder etc. So as a species we need to learn to cope and tackle this anyway, why not start now?

benlumen2• 5 years ago

I love the idea of planting trees on every available patch of land too, but won't that just fuel more wildfires at this point?

dogma11382• 5 years ago

Yes, but it doesn’t mean carbon capture. The Netherlands cannot exist without geoengineering and more and more places are going to have to be building dikes and sea walls as flooding becomes a problem. Desalination would become more and more prevalent as we are dealing with droughts and we will likely have to engineer forests to be more resilient to forest fires by creating more and more clearings and other barriers to serve as firebreaks as well as planting new forests that may be less inducive to forest fires.

Joeri3• 5 years ago

Mitigation spending will happen anyway, the focus rightfully should be on minimizing the need for mitigation. By all accounts mitigation costs more than carbon reduction, it is just spent later on. I suppose it all comes down to how much of the problem our generation wants to kick down the road.

As for geoengineering. If you mean adding particles to cool the atmosphere, then this is a mitigation strategy (it doesn’t reduce carbon, just compensates for it). I think we need to research this to have a plan B, but it is kind of a desperation move, and quite risky, so I wouldn’t consider it smart to have it as plan A.

RandomLensman4• 5 years ago

Not sure I understand your mitigation point: If it is already too hot in some areas or flooding gets extreme, people living there would probably want mitigation now, not later. And if this just happens in ten years, also need to start thinking about mitigation now.

julius• 5 years ago

Here is one engineering solution:

Weather should be very controlable by how much sun hits the earth. Which then causes heat, wind, water evaporation etc etc.

Large sun screen satelites (very simple ones that can fold out foil origami style) could block out a lot of sun at places according to stabilization weather models. Same for reflector sattelites, which could add more sun in specific places.

The difficulty is that we cannot send a hundred thousand sattelites out of our gravity well. We would need to setup basic mining and manufacturing on the moon for this plan to work (you can send sattelites into earth orbit at almost zero cost). The time it would take to setup a factory on the moon should also be used to develop the necessary weather models, which should then be tested out very slowly with the first few thousands of sattelites.

kubanczyk• 5 years ago

Sun screen using balloons:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_geoengineering

Altering albedo alone still leaves us with ocean acidification problem, but I'm not up-to-date with the risks of that (other than coral reef dying out, which is absolutely tragic).

bjarneh• 5 years ago

Seinfeld was correct, the only warning we are afraid of is "dry clean only".

Zenst• 5 years ago

Minefield warnings kinda usurp clothing labels from experience.

matco11• 5 years ago

This pact aims to keep the rise in global temperatures well below 2C this century and to pursue efforts to keep it under 1.5C.

It seems to me that continuing to communicate just the average temperature increase is a missed opportunity to engage with a greater portion of the population.

1.5 or 2 degrees do not seem like much, but once one understands that’s an average made out of much bigger positive and negative swings in temperature, one gets a much more dramatic picture.

I suspect focusing on the widening of the temperature range, rather than the average temperature change would work better with communications to the wider public

headmelted7• 5 years ago

Also people need to be presented with the consequences.

I still know a lot of people who genuinely believe it means slightly warmer summers. They think I'm a crazy person when I mention the never-ending storms and lack of drinking water.

Also just dropping this link here as I remember watching it at the time and thinking isn't it great we're not there yet:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6CXRaTnKDXA

dkdbejwi3834• 5 years ago

Yeah, I don’t mean to be disparaging but the average person doesn’t really seem to grasp this beyond: it’ll be slightly warmer. And in a cold European climate, most people seem to think that’s a good thing. Warm summers are enjoyable when you’re swimming in the sea and having barbecues in the park.

Maybe there should be more focus on the frequency and intensity of storms, floods, extreme heatwaves, etc.

Although to be honest if this is lost on people up until now anyway, what hope is there?

A significant number of people just don’t seem to care.

bemmu• 5 years ago

Waitbutwhy put it well: “ 18,000 years ago, global temperatures were about 5ºC lower than the 20th century average. That was enough to put Canada, Scandinavia, and half of England and the US under a half a mile of ice”

mynameismon2• 5 years ago

When I was a kid, that was what I believed in too. And that is what most people would say if they heard it for the first time.

What most people do not do while saying this statement is taking the context of the change in average temperatures around the world. What should be shown are graphics like this XKCD [1], which puts in perspective the average global temperatures in past 22,000 years. (spoiler: the last time Earth's average global temperature was 4 degrees below the average global temperature during the 1970s, the Earth was covered in sheets of ice). This is where we have well and truly allowed climate change deniers to take over and spread misinformation.

[1] https://xkcd.com/1732

enriquto2• 5 years ago

They think I'm a crazy person when I mention the never-ending storms and lack of drinking water.

If you put it that way it's no wonder that they think you are crazy. Storms mean heavy rainfall that means more drinking water. What is your point, exactly?

benlumen2• 5 years ago

Completely agree. The "average" language always used is largely responsible for the apathy, I think. It's effectively meaningless.

Joeri3• 5 years ago

An ice age is a global temperature difference of about 5 degrees. So we are going to have at least a third of an ice age’s temperature delta in heating, if we do everything right, and two thirds if we do business as usual.

MauranKilom• 5 years ago

In comic form: https://xkcd.com/1379/

Xplune133• 5 years ago

Yes and I don't think people are going to wake up till everyone faces the consequences of climate change in their personal lives, which is quite honestly just sad.

teniutza• 5 years ago

I don't think this is going to be enough. We see everyday people affected by the pandemic yet many of them still refuse to get vaccinated, keep distance or even wear a mask... They will just dismiss these consequences as "one offs"...

I believe that our best chance is to do as much as we cand right now and to induce a sense of climate awareness into the younger generations. Bring them up believing, well, actually knowing, that the climate must be respected and protected constantly.

drclau• 5 years ago

There were people infected with Covid, in hospital, which still denied that Covid is real. Granted, those extremes are rare, but it shows how resilient in their beliefs deniers are. I think you are quite optimistic in thinking people will wake up.

Nevertheless, we don’t need everyone to accept the reality, for us to be able to take action as a civilization.

CalRobert• 5 years ago

Just expressing it in Fahrenheit for Americans would help.

hellbannedguy• 5 years ago

In the late 80's I took a Botney class at Sonoma State.

The professor always talked about what 1 degree of warming will do to the oceans. He talked about it all the time. It was his worst fear.

I though he might be overreacting a bit at the time, but not now.

He was an interesting guy, and was far from politically correct.

I remember his stance on people/bikes who don't walk on designated paths. The whole, "You are ruining the indiginious fauna argument". Well his unpopular stance was the surviving plants will be stronger.

I will never forget the honest worry he had over a 1 degree change in temperature.

tux3• 5 years ago

I agree that communicating the average seems very ineffective, and if you can carefully source better numbers to replace that measure, you would do well to post them here. People will be happy to copy those if you can show it to them.

I suspect it may not be trivial to find a measure for the widening that people intuitively understand, but it's worth trying.

gspr6• 5 years ago

I see this a lot, too. "It's just 2 degrees" – what the hell is wrong with you? If your body temperature is 2-3 degrees above normal, you feel like absolute shit.

Likewise for atmospheric CO₂ concentrations; "it's just 0.04 %" – dude, you surely start noticing the effects of "just" 0.04% alcohol in your blood. Or hey, try cyanide.

What is wrong with people?!

foxfluff2• 5 years ago

But this isn't about body temperature or alcohol concentrations, so comparisons like that are not useful.

Look, I just had a glass of cool water, perhaps between five to ten degrees celsius. And I'm about to have a coffee. What's that, fifty degrees? With 5% to 10% milk concentration. And I think I'll be just fine. You don't?! What the hell is wrong with you?

If you want to explain why a two-degree increase in average temperature on the planet is dramatic, then you need to do better than compare it to something completely different.

QasimK7• 5 years ago

If my room was 2 degrees hotter right now, I would barely notice. So "2 degrees" by itself actually really does mean very little even to me - and I already know about the catastrophic effects that are going to come out of 2 degrees. I have to think about the sea level rise, increasing heat waves, more floods, more extreme weather, and so on for it to actually have an impact on even me.

konspence4• 5 years ago

There's nothing to "keep" under 1.5C, we are pretty much already there when error bars are considered. 2C is going to be breached regardless because even if we went carbon neutral today we have decades of locked in warming.

Why the scientists are not communicating this information which has been in pop-science (as early as An Inconvenient Truth (2006), which documents the lag between CO2 rise and temp rise) is beyond me.

I still advocate for mitigation/reduction efforts because future generations exist and they deserve the best climate we can pass on, but let's not pretend like we are on track to preserve any level of normal. 1.5C is more than a moonshot - it is behind us.

ttiurani2• 5 years ago

Don't quite know what you mean by "locked in warming" (nor didn't have time to look at this report yet), but the previous scenarios have massive scale future magic carbon takeback tech baked in. I assume if there was something like that ongoing on a global scale and almost no new emissions, 1.5 degrees might be theoretically possible?

johnchristopher2• 5 years ago

Why the scientists are not communicating this information which has been in pop-science (as early as An Inconvenient Truth (2006), which documents the lag between CO2 rise and temp rise) is beyond me.

I might be biased but popular newspaper in my country have interviews in which scientists do talk about that.

clydethefrog3• 5 years ago

Because they are not popscientist, but a very professional body of scientists that will only go for the most conservative, solid information.

What also plays a role is that before the final report it has to be seen and corrected by governmental representatives.

whimsicalism12• 5 years ago

The exact way climate lag functions is still a very uncertain science. It is communicated, but it can't be communicated we because (unlike how Al Gore portrays it) the evidence around how long the lag is is still very uncertain.

I've done a lot of research into this because I am interested in climate lag.

ForHackernews• 5 years ago

They are not communicating that because they don't want people to lose hope and give up, even when that's probably the rational response.

As you say, these changes are already "baked in" and the natural environment is only to get more hostile to humans from here on out.

mrpopo• 5 years ago

Yes. In first approximation, if we reach a global temperature increase of X degrees, the actual temperature increase that people will actually feel on land will be double that. Oceans are warming up much more slowly because they are so deep and trap all the heat.

See this tweet: https://twitter.com/JFrancisClimate/status/13877671305657917...

And on top of that, there will be much higher temperature swings.

hutzlibu• 5 years ago

I think Randall puts it into perspective very well:

https://xkcd.com/1732/

(but still not targeting laypersons)

Scientific facts alone are not helping most people.

Recently there was torrential rain in parts of germany. And people were warned (per official SMS) with: Expect x liters of rain per hour.

Most understood, ok, so there is heavy rain. I keep my umbrella close by.

What they did not understand is, that this meant a massive flood, with houses close to small rivers vanished and over 160 people died.

fragmede• 5 years ago

1 or 2 just isn't a big number. How about using the number of Joules it would take to heat the Earth's atmosphere by 1 degree (Celcius, because we're not Philistines). It'll be an approximate (as is any measurement at planetary scale, eg 1 AU) but that's fine.

lordnacho• 5 years ago

I wrote about this not long ago, the problem with the climate crisis is there's no crisis point.

In a "proper" crisis or perhaps "ordinary" is a better term, there's a point where the leadership needs to drop all other agenda items and focus on the crisis. Whether that's bailing out the economy, starting a war, or calling a new election, there's a time when nothing else matters.

The climate crisis is a thousand individual, distributed, manageable events that happen all the time. Forest fires, floods, storms, they all happen and they're all dealt with locally. Everyone breathes a sigh of relief and moves on. Every time. Forever.

It's the frog boiling analogy. Can we handle x amount of rain? Yes. Can we handle 1.1x? Sure. How about 1.2x floods? Sure. It will be like inflation was to our generation, grandad will tell stories about how you could buy a whole meal for a dollar. Except instead of meals, it's hurricanes.

There doesn't seem to be anything in the context of what you said in your comment that would lead us to a "let's deal with it now" moment. Telling people about the 1 or 2 degrees, sure, they need to know, but it will never bring anyone to a negotiating table.

phreeza2• 5 years ago

I sincerely hope it won't be necessary, but in Kim Stanley Robinsons book Ministry for the future, there is a wet bulb heat wave that kills hundreds of thousands that serves to at least somewhat galvanize the world into action. Perhaps something like that could be a plausible thing to happen.

rescripting• 5 years ago

You'll experience the climate crisis as an ever increasing digital stream of catastrophes captured on cellphone camera until, one day, you're the one doing the filming.

virgilp6• 5 years ago

1.5 or 2 degrees do not seem like much

Did not seem like much to me, until I realized that 28 degrees inside the house is "comfortable" while 30 is "too hot".

brailsafe3• 5 years ago

In what world is 28°C comfortable!?

tgz• 5 years ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xqTanhErR_E

dredmorbius10• 5 years ago

You might want to clarify the relevance, and perhaps relevant sections, of that 11-hour video.

helsinkiandrew3• 5 years ago

Climate change: IPCC report is 'code red for humanity'

What almost alarms me more than the thought of a climate apocalypse is that I don't think this (a UN report) is going to have any effect on the opinions of 40% of the public who see climate change as some kind of job destroying conspiracy.

Nothing short of Florida disappearing under the sea is going to make any difference, perhaps we (as a species) don't deserve to continue.

gfodor6• 5 years ago

It seems fairly obvious that climate change is going to be solved before the bigger existential risks we face, which are for the most part unknowable or largely ignored. There are a lot of people working on climate change now, it's well established in the public's mind, and there are many incentives in place to accelerate solutions.

headmelted7• 5 years ago

there are many incentives in place to accelerate solutions

I don't believe this to be true. If you look at the incentives currently in place they're well short of what could be considered the minimum recommendations of any of the previous reports.

This is not an indicator of a world that takes climate change seriously:

[Saudi oil giant Aramco sees profits soar by almost 300%] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-58141607

GordonS2• 5 years ago

I presume this is missing a /s ?

hef19898• 5 years ago

It also seems companies are moving faster than politics. E.g. deprecating ICEs by 2030/35, without any policies forcing them. The mere discussion about increasing CO2 prices triggered coal power plant operators to think about phasing those put before any policy enforced coal exit.

The pessimist in me will only believe any of that, and any positive impact, once it happened. Not sooner.

sammalloy7• 5 years ago

Let's optimistically assume you are correct. If you could flip a magic switch right now and stop releasing carbon and fix all the other related problems, you would still have a massive delay of many decades (40 or more years) in bringing down air temperatures. The problem then becomes how do you survive the climate interregnum? This is why governments and private industry need to be working closely together, and nations with other nations. On the one hand, this will probably be the greatest job creation sector in human history, but on the other hand, we aren't all going to make it.

helsinkiandrew3• 5 years ago

climate change is going to be solved

But that's part of the problem - there isn't going to be a magic solution to climate change - it involves lots of changes to the way we do things, some small and some big (the way we travel, and build and consume things), most of which we already know about - but often they'll be economically damaging or a change in the way people live.

leinadho• 5 years ago

I like your attitude, and would love to hear more about why you think this. It doesn't seem obvious to me that it's something we'll actually "solve" while maintaining our current population/civilization, but maybe I just read too many doom and gloom articles?

tsimionescu3• 5 years ago

The reason you are wrong is that stopping (or even slowing down) climate change goes directly against the way the world economic system is set up.

Basically, to stop climate change in the next decade (which is already far too late to stop catastrophic effects, which are already beginning and will only get worse) we must significantly reduce the global economy. There is simply no way to keep growing growing the economy without also growing CO2 emissions in the near future.

And of course, global economic recession is not going to be acceptable, in an economic system predicated entirely on eternal growth (where "growing too slow" is already considered unacceptable). So, climate change action will be slow, small, and entirely too little to avoid the most catastrophic scenarios.

Better to see 10 more years of economic growth before a massive collapse, instead of 20-40 years of slow economic shrinking to a more manageable, carbon neutral world, right?

headmelted7• 5 years ago

That's all but inevitable at this stage.

The same is true for New York - any city at or only slightly above sea level is a foregone conclusion. Fluid dynamics don't care about your politics.

If it helps, going by elevation maps Disney World should survive with a lot of weather hardening!

GekkePrutser6• 5 years ago

I would imagine dyke schemes will be a solution for the mega metropolises. It's the poorer ones that will disappear.

TaupeRanger• 5 years ago

New York will figure out how to save itself. It's all the poor towns and cities around the world that will be obvious problems.

veidelis3• 5 years ago

Are these simulations public? Can I run see and run the code? Are all aspects taken into account that can affect the outcome, such as, Earth's magnetic field strength, activity of the Sun, shifting of magnetic poles?

adrianN13• 5 years ago

If you have a spare supercomputer I'm sure the scientists would be happy to help you run their stuff. The IPCC report cites its sources, you can go and check who the authors are and what the models take into account.

flat-bird• 5 years ago

As far as I know, the code is secret and the data that it runs on is secret, i.e., it is not science, and it is not really even attempting to appear to be science to anyone who knows what science is. Not reproducible even in theory due to secrecy means it cannot be science. It's not even wrong.

Besides being secret and likely buggy, any simulation of the climate necessarily incomplete, i.e. it omits quite a lot of phenomena. Complex systems are fundamentally non-amenable to simulation, but in this case, the results of the "simulation" are garbage squared, because they're "simulations" of some system that doesn't even exist.

This is the kind of stuff being passed off as science these days.

polote2• 5 years ago

40% of the public who see climate change as some kind of job destroying conspiracy.

These people are not the ones who need to take action, so who cares?

Policy makers are the ones who need to act, and they are already well aware for most of the consequences of global warming. The issue is that a lot of big corporations (The ones which really control police makers) are not going to be advantaged by transforming the society to a more respectful one regarding nature. So things move slowly, until things are getting really bad and day to day activities are drastically affected by global warming

dkdbejwi3834• 5 years ago

Policy makers who rely on the ignorant 40%’s vote to stay in a job aren’t going to risk their salary and pension.

JoeQuery• 5 years ago

The public elects the policy makers.

em5002• 5 years ago

Blaming "big corporations" for our woes looks pretty unconstructive to me. Most big corporations got big by giving consumers what they want. Trying to reduce emissions through big corporations (AFAICT the focus will be largely on energy, transport and construction) means making their products more expensive, which always triggers responses of regressiveness / inequality, short-circuiting the whole debate.

Put in another way: regardless whether execs at the oil and flight companies are to blame, or their flying and driving customers, a solution must involve large reductions in the amount of fuel burnt (which inevitably requires making that much more expensive than it is now).

helsinkiandrew3• 5 years ago

These people are not the ones who need to take action, so who cares?

Yes they are - big corporations and governments only do things when the public goes along with them, otherwise they go bust or get voted out.

It will take people making choices, changing the way they live, travel, eat, and buy things and using the products of companies that support that to make any change.

bb123• 5 years ago

Do you not think that "code red" fatigue is part of this? Ordinary people are bombarded with messages predicting doom at some distant point in the future for one reason or another on an almost daily basis, and yet life rolls on.

AstralStorm9• 5 years ago

Nah, people dismissed these warnings when they were new in 50s, applied at best patches that made them feel good when problems became apparent in 90s and so on.

It's not fatigue, it's ostrich politics. "If I don't look at it, it will go away." But it's not a predator, it's essentially a force of nature. We had this kind of (then social) problems being ignored lead to huge revolutions in the past. But this time, getting the head of a few lords abd ladies will be insufficient.

frockington13• 5 years ago

I can't remember the last time Miami Beach wasn't going to be underwater '{X} years from now'. When everything is a Code Red, nothing is. Happens at work all the time too

fighterpilot5• 5 years ago

They see it as a socialist ploy. The best solution is to propose a revenue neutral carbon tax and promise not to use it to increase total revenue. Offer to cut other taxes by a proportional amount and have that as a central part of the pitch. It'll get more political support.

sokoloff4• 5 years ago

I agree with the idea. At the same time, plenty of people have seen Lucy hold the football this way before.

Sharlin• 5 years ago

Fortunately it’s a lot less than 40% unless you only count the US. The EU is a climate leader. China is not a democracy. Even in the US economical realities are already more important than the cries of rednecks.

collegecamp293• 5 years ago

Well, the 40% are certainly not going be convinced if the "first United States Special Presidential Envoy for Climate" flew on his private jet 16 times to places like Martha's Vineyard since January. Can the leaders of climate action actually live up to their own standards?

skinkestek21• 5 years ago

Agree.

Without going into the religious bits and more spectacular bits of it there is an extremely interesting story going on in the last part of the book of Jonah in Nevi'im (in Christianity this is part of the old testament):

As Jonah tells the inhabitants of Nineveh about the impending doom they repent and the king of Nineveh puts on sackcloth, sits in ashes and makes a proclamation which decrees fasting, the wearing of sackcloth, prayer, and repentance.

Again, without going fully religious, this is an excellent example. When people see their "king" actually doing the thing themselves that they ask others to do, change happens. There is nothing religious about this. Here in Norway, former King Olav V was famous for, among other things, taking the tram during gas rationing in the 70ies.

Old people could still tell me back in the 80ies and 90ies that prince Olav and his siblings had actual porridge for breakfast like other kids.

Today royalty plays less of a role I guess compared to influencers and thought leaders of all kinds, but I still guess it would make a massive difference if next years Davos meeting was announced to be virtual because of climate concerns.

Or if a few tik tok/Instagram stars came out and showed their 2 generation old iPhones saying: I can get a new anytime I want but I actually do care about the environment.

justin662• 5 years ago

Well, the 40% are certainly not going be convinced if the "first United States Special Presidential Envoy for Climate" flew on his private jet 16 times to places like Martha's Vineyard since January.

Why?

I mean, okay, getting angry about hypocrisy is fun. But why would you allow someone else's hypocrisy to sway your view of what is or is not objectively true? That is not critical thinking.

pessimizer4• 5 years ago

Nothing short of Florida disappearing under the sea is going to make any difference

That won't make a difference; Liberals will blame the Floridians themselves for being conservative, and Conservatives will say it was an inevitable part of God's Plan, that saying it shouldn't have happened is a criticism of His Judgment, and that saying that it was caused by humans is claiming the type of power that only belongs to God.

kuraudo3• 5 years ago

I don't think strawmanning political parties is particularly helpful here.

justin662• 5 years ago

Nothing short of Florida disappearing under the sea is going to make any difference

You think that would be enough? Don't underestimate how many people would be willing to shrug off mass death and destruction of others if their tribe asked them to ignore it.

skinkestek21• 5 years ago

So now we can get rid of fast fashion, mandate reusability for products, reintroduce basic woodworking, metalcrafting and sewing/repair work in school and with that get rid of a huge chunk of the needless shipping?

Or are we still going to go after individuals eating traditional food while thought leaders fly across the globe in private jets (no kidding) telling us we need to change our diet?

PS: I'm already a enthusiastic carbon cutter even if it historically has been because it correlated very well with cost cutting and self sufficiency.

qeternity4• 5 years ago

cost cutting

Do you mind elaborating more on this? Is it just a matter of consuming less == fewer costs?

skinkestek21• 5 years ago

Also buy higher quality products, ideally used instead of cheaper products new.

Repairing instead of throwing away.

Avoiding unnecessary consumption, choosing what I prioritize.

Edit, another: Thinking smart wrt transport, haven't used car to get to work since maybe 10 years ago.

wiz21c3• 5 years ago

The problem is that for many people climate change adaptation boils down to that dichotomy. It'd be nice if there would be people teaching us there are other ways. Of course, we won't escape the fact we use a lot of energy and that, for the time being, most of it produces CO2.

konschubert2• 5 years ago

I think we should do neither. Impose a co2 emissions tax and let the market figure it out.

adrianN13• 5 years ago

A carbon tax that would be high enough to force changes quickly enough would also be devastating for the poorer segment of the population and hence very hard to pass in a democracy. I mixture of a carbon price and other measures can be easier to sell to the voters.

mschuster914• 5 years ago

Impose a co2 emissions tax and let the market figure it out.

Aka those who are rich will simply buy their way out of having to change, and the poor masses will have to bear the load. Neo-feudalism is not the answer to climate change - the problem starts with capitalism.

vortegne• 5 years ago

Will that help though? Capitalism and "letting the market figure it out" is how we got here. None of the systems in place work and are completely skippable by those with cash.

mellavora• 5 years ago

Why not tax it at the point of extraction?

brightstep2• 5 years ago

This is suicidal.

Joeri3• 5 years ago

Individual action won’t solve this problem. We need to leave the fossil fuels in the ground, which means switching energy sources, which is not something individuals have much influence on. Reducing energy use at the individual level is good, but insufficient if the energy used comes from fossil fuels.

I’m not sure we need to switch lifestyles that much, but we will need to radically change energy production. There has to come a global moratorium on fossil fuel production and the wells that exist need to be capped. If it comes out of the ground it will be used somewhere and the carbon will end up in the atmosphere. The more low carbon our lifestyle the cheaper fossil fuels will get and someone somewhere will always buy and use them. Regrettably politicians dare not talk about this elephant in the room.

ChrisRR• 5 years ago

We need both. We can't just ignore all individual action just because there's worse offenders.

Everyone collectively doing their part will have more of an effect than sitting on their arses and blaming fossil fuels.

flr03• 5 years ago

Individuals vote and buy. Companies keep doing what they do because: 1. The law allows it 2. There is a demand for their products

zejn8• 5 years ago

Individuals can and should reduce their direct CO2 footprint. Most of personal energy budget goes for transportation and heating and/or cooling the living spaces. Two solutions enable you to stop directly burning stuff: EVs and heatpumps.

Beyond that, cap-and-trade scheme has worked to reduce SO2 emissions and it will work to reduce CO2 emissions.

spaniard89277• 5 years ago

You can't transition from dinosaurs to sun in a day, so you need both.

And if you need both, you need individuals to make the switch too. And for individuals to make the switch, you need to allow it.

skinkestek21• 5 years ago

Individual action won’t solve this problem.

Not sure if we agree or not.

To make it clear, what I write is not about individual actions but about smart legislation and massive campaigns:

- mandate teaching practical repair work instead of todays "feel good"/"feel bad" subjects environmental studies in school

- a giant hike on import taxes on fast fashion and cheap "use once" gadgets and electronics

- gradually increase mandatory warranties until selling low quality is a losing prospect

- make "news anchors" - at least in public tv stations - use more ordinary clothing, and reuse it.

- do make ads and tv shows about cobolt mining

- do inform the public about our unhealthy dependency on China

- do make ads about the stupidity of living in wastefulness

- edit: do mock "individualism" that consists of having to go to exotic places

- edit: do tax food import! Urge other countries to do the same! Especially anyone who burns rainforest.

shellfishgene• 5 years ago

which means switching energy sources, which is not something individuals have much influence on

I'm not sure how it is in the US or around the world, but in Germany switching to 100% renewable energy for your home takes about 10 minutes online, by changing contract or company. Sure - if everyone did it there would not be enough supply, but apparently the majority does not despite being able to.

tonyedgecombe8• 5 years ago

Individual action won’t solve this problem.

Although from an individuals perspective it makes sense to change on your own terms rather than waiting for it to be forced on you.

Dumblydorr2• 5 years ago

Individual actions help, they aren't sufficient alone but if every citizen went vegan and didn't vacation, it would probably buy us a couple more years to transition our energy system. Every little bit helps, but I do agree industry is the low hanging and greater emitting fruit that must change first. For instance air conditioning, there are very potent greenhouse gasses in ACs, companies would do well to phase those out fully and quickly and dispose of them properly. A little government incentive there would be a massive win, much easier than telling humans not to travel.

triceratops9• 5 years ago

Individual action won’t solve this problem

This is true. But if large portions of the electorate start living like GP, they'll have no problem with voting for carbon taxes and other measures that'll cost money. They won't be swayed by talking heads on TV shouting "environmental Marxism!".

dleslie7• 5 years ago

Individual action won’t solve this problem. We need to leave the fossil fuels in the ground, which means switching energy sources, which is not something individuals have much influence on.

The covid shutdown should have put this myth to bed forever.

Hundreds of millions stuck at home and no longer commuting took a massive dent out of carbon emissions and sent shock waves through the oil industry.

Individual action can save the planet; we have to be drops in the flood.

I’m not sure we need to switch lifestyles that much, but we will need to radically change energy production.

There's no way we can continue to works as we do and plan cities as we do and stem the oncoming catastrophe with any alacrity.

pcthrowaway• 5 years ago

Or are we still going to go after individuals eating traditional food

I mean, yes, we should continue doing that. Our relationship with food is unhealthy and also a massive contributor to environmental decline. I'm not sure why you contrast this with other improvements we can make, many of which, individually, would be less impactful than a transition to a more sustainable diet.

pigeonhole1233• 5 years ago

Farming is a small contributor to greenhouse gas emissions and the recent attacks on red meat for example are nonsensical if you look at the math that is used to justify it.

hootbootscoot3• 5 years ago

The point I got from the OP was that traditional culture was low-carbon from day 0, and that at least Britain's climate change minister was jetting about an AWFUL lot, and there are plenty of jet-setters pushing a vegan diet upon the world when home-kept chickens are obviously a net plus, both in terms of food waste (accounts for a significant carbon and other pollution footprint, as we pay to produce it) and in terms of proteins that don't require killing your chickens over (eggs). Contrast that with having a cat or dog (look at amount of animals slaughtered for pet foods)

I agree that our systems need revamping in a large-scale way, particularly agriculture, as you imply.

blix• 5 years ago

I'm not sure what exactly is a 'healthy' relationship with food, or when the last time any significant fraction of the human population had attained this. Maybe before agriculture, but even that is dubious.

I'm not convinced it is possible at current population levels.

Fiahil2• 5 years ago

Our relationship with food is unhealthy

Your American relationship with food is unhealthy. Our relationship with food here in France, and many other countries is perfectly fine.

cblconfederate3• 5 years ago

What about tourism ?

skinkestek21• 5 years ago

Already cut massively thanks to COVID-19.

I say we should try to keep it at a level close to where it is now.

But we need to set the expectations here and I guess today's influencers and thought leaders won't be of much help :-/

mytailorisrich10• 5 years ago

These are all marginal issues.

Even at the current level of population demand on resources is too great and will be massively too great if poverty is eradicated (as it should).

The long term solution for both the environment and people's quality of life (I don't think that not being able to travel, not being able to eat what one wants, having to live in a small flat in a dense city with mass transit only is a good life) is not only to have an objective to cut emission but to also have an objective to cut population.

Now, that is a very sensitive topic and so everyone prefers to ignore it.

rcMgD2BwE72F9• 5 years ago

The long term solution for both the environment and people's quality of life is not only to have an objective to cut emission but to have an objective to cut population. >Now, that is a very sensitive topic and so everyone prefers to ignore it.

No. You are ignoring that countries whose population is increasing are, per capita, not emitting much. Please compare the eqCO2 per capita in Africa vs Europe or USA. If we ask a minority to curb their pollution, we can easily fix the climate problem. But those who emit the most ask everyone to not have children... because they refuse to change their behavior. This is a sensitive topic only to the minority that is responsible for the catastrophe.

Again, I beg your to research who are polluting more that what our ecosystems can endure and tell me why we should block human beings from procreating vs asking the culprits to curb their crazy consumption/pollution and leave the rest of the world alone.

jonpo• 5 years ago

Start with the entirely unnessecary carniverous apex predators (aka pets) people insist on keeping. If people cant get rid of pets, then asking them to avoid replicating their own DNA is going to be a challenge.

coffeefirst• 5 years ago

Correct.

There's a desire to turn this into some kind of mass moral failing. We're all sinners with our cheeseburgers, or something like that.

This doesn't change the outcome. Mostly it's just an annoying distraction from the massive industrial endeavors that might actually make a dent.

Making more stuff locally would also be a fine idea.

nathias2• 5 years ago

The responses in this topic alone are enough to see the chances of success are very low.

sammalloy7• 5 years ago

One of the biggest problems I've come across are older people who say or think "I've got mine, I won't be alive when the shit hits the fan, so I don't care." If you can address that aspect of the problem, then you're probably half way there to solving it.

nathias2• 5 years ago

I'd say that a reduction of systemic issues to personal responsibility is a much bigger problem than that. Global warming is a problem of externalities and can only be solved as such.

Aerroon7• 5 years ago

To me it looks more that people from rich countries got theirs, but people from poorer countries aren't allowed to have theirs. The people from rich countries will stop them because of climate change.

It's easy to demand that others change their behavior.

poorjohnmacafee3• 5 years ago

But there is new hope that deep cuts in emissions of greenhouse gases could stabilise rising temperatures.

How is this possible when you have water vapor in a positive feedback loop, which is a far more potent, prevalent ghg that increases with any rise in temperature.

"Water vapor reduction" has to be part of the message at this stage, not just carbon reduction.

GekkePrutser6• 5 years ago

I don't really see how this is possible for humanity at a scale that affects global warming. Most water vapour by far is generated by nature itself. We couldn't make a dent in that.

The CO2 is what upset the balance and we are by far the biggest contributor there so it makes sense to address that.

poorjohnmacafee3• 5 years ago

The point is reversing the CO2 does not reverse all that proportionally much larger increase in water vapor... eg. we have no choice but to address water vapor as well as CO2 if we want to have any chance in fixing global warming.

Aerroon7• 5 years ago

Water vapor also means more clouds which reflect sunlight. Are you sure that it's a positive feedback loop?

Edit: this is a genuine question. The last time I read about it the result was inconclusive whether it caused or hindered warming.

flavius29663• 5 years ago

It's both, actually. Water vapor is positive no matter what. Clouds can be both positive and negative at the same time, depending on cloud type, altitude etc.

This is one of the things that are hard to model. Get this wrong and you can swing from a mere +1 global warming (what CO2 alone would do in 100 years) to +3 or more.

dredmorbius10• 5 years ago

Water vapour has a short residence time in the atmosphere, is self-limiting (excess water precipitates out as rain or snow), and is already at equilibrium given ambient conditions.

The one variable that could drive additional water vapour is CO2, which by warming the atmosphere further increases the ability to hold water, and the amount of water vapour present.

If you want to reduce water vapour as a greenhouse-gas component of the atmosphere, reduce CO2 levels.

https://skepticalscience.com/water-vapor-greenhouse-gas.htm

poorjohnmacafee3• 5 years ago

Your link is not relevant to the point made.

Just to be clear water vapor capacity increases due to temperature, for example, relative humidity measures how much water vapor is in the air for a given temperature. Any sort of increase in temperature will increase water vapor.

Yes, CO2 raises the temperature, you get a massive increase in water vapor, which again, is a more potent ghg. Reversing that same amount of CO2 does not magically reverse all of that water vapor. This is the crux of the problem, why water vapor is now also a problem that needs to be addressed.

wiz21c3• 5 years ago

The article, and many like it, does a poor job of explaining the consequences we will face. 1.5°C doesn't mean much to the lay man. Explain that uncertain harvests, tied to speculation on risks, will much likely lead to an increase in the price of bread. Add to that an increase in oil will also lead to a price increase.

Heatwave in Greece ? Greece is usually hot in summer so one doesn't care. Now explain how many houses were burnt in fire, how many people died, how much it costs to rebuild houses, where that money will be taken from, etc.

Consequences... Not prediction. Interestingly, my kids have hard time understanding the word "consequence". It's a difficult concept to get.

Bellamy2• 5 years ago

Wildfires in Canada and Russia. Floats in Germany. Etc, etc...

We have known 40 years what will happen and now for our leaders those consequences seem to come as a surprise.

I hope the Germans will vote for the Green party in the September's federal elections and other countries will follow the example.

dantheman3• 5 years ago

Didn't Germany b decide to dismantle their nuclear power plants?

longtom6• 5 years ago

I dearly hope the Greens will not win. Reducing consumption is an extremely tricky problem, and likely unfeasible without creating large amounts of poverty. I'd rather live in a rich, powerful nation with strong workforce and military rebuilding after each storm than being stripped my last rights and eating worms while a tiny elite still enjoying the freedoms we once had. Please do not fall for the propaganda.

lazyjones• 5 years ago

Wildfires in Greece are common since several decades, fires are usually laid or started out of negligence.

There is no sign of "uncertain harvests" in all the years people have been speculating about this as a potential consequence of global warming. Crop yields are breaking one record after another: https://www.agriculture.com/news/business/record-high-world-...

dakra• 5 years ago

I really liked Bill Gates new Book: How to Avoid a Climate Disaster[1]. I liked that it shows what we have to do to get to 0 greenhouse gas emissions. What's the current state of technology and what's still left to do to get there.

I often find suggestions like "Meatless Monday" or "Only fly when really necessary" etc, while probably good, not really useful advice. In Gates book he talks about that transportation and "building things" is good and we should not stop it, but instead find a way to make it emission free.

[1] https://www.gatesnotes.com/Energy/My-new-climate-book-is-fin...

gspr6• 5 years ago

I very much agree, and as a bonus, these more optimistic solutions – solutions where we do something instead of (just) stopping doing something – seem easier for people to swallow too.

rcMgD2BwE72F9• 5 years ago

We have the means to stop the catastrophe. We don't need more solutions, just to comprehend that our behavior is destroying our ecosystems and pick the right solutions for the right behavior. We just need to act on it.

Also, no one pretended that violence can be annihilated when we collectively decided to swallow that killing one another is not a right and we outlaw it (except in some context that is defined by laws and treaties).

mynameismon2• 5 years ago

What I also like about the book is that it speaks very practically: Gates doesn't put the onus on developing countries to reduce emissions. Instead, he shows how the developed nations need to allow people in developing nations to reach the status of developed nations while reducing their own emissions.

mytailorisrich10• 5 years ago

As usual the elephant in the room is the global population.

We can't eradicate poverty, protect the environment, and maintain the human population we currently have.

Bikeshedding is always easier than facing hard issues so people focus on marginal things, like air travel or plastic cups, rather than facing the root cause of it all.

Do we want all humans to have a good life with high living standards among a thriving natural world? If the answer is yes then we need to be lucid enough to realise that this is not doable on this planet if we are 8+ billions.

nmca• 5 years ago

Most models forecast a 10bn max pop due to decades long trend of richer countries having lower birth rates.

gspr6• 5 years ago

As usual the elephant in the room is the global population.

No. Thankfully, the global population is more or less levelling off. We know the recipe by now: lift people out of abject poverty (wherein children are the only ones providing for you at old age), combat child mortality (under which people have far more children to be sure that at least some grow up), and give women control of their own bodies and education (so that they no longer have to be child-bearing machines).

We've seen this work again and again, most strikingly in Asia. We know it works. If the same process happens for Africa, the world population will certainly level off.

There's plenty of problems ahead for humanity, but it seems that we don't have to panic about the global population anymore!

mytailorisrich10• 5 years ago

Levelling off at 8-9 billions is unsustainable if poverty is eradicated and probably even if it isn't.

The demand on resources is simply too great.

Global population is a key problem for humanity.

thejohnconway2• 5 years ago

Okay, what’s your policy going to be?

jokoon2• 5 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malthusianism#Criticism

thewhitetulip5• 5 years ago

Climate change is bad. Govt are not doing anything.

But has any model taken into consideration about covid deaths?

h4kor2• 5 years ago

Covid put a minuscule dent into the carbon emmision, but we are basically back to normal.

Death don't have a great effect as the general carbon production (oil, coal, gas) are still rising.

thewhitetulip5• 5 years ago

True. But I was thinking that since a million people have died there would be some dent in carbon

dredmorbius10• 5 years ago

Covid-19 deaths have been all but invisible in the larger scheme, at least to date.

Far more signficant has been the global economic shutdown imposed by quarantine and containment efforts. That's somewhat reduced fossil fuel usage, though that effect has also been limited. It was enough to show up in BP's annual review of global energy usage though, released about a month ago in July:

https://www.bp.com/en/global/corporate/energy-economics/stat...

Submitted at the time though there was no discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27798644

thewhitetulip5• 5 years ago

Since lockdowns have been lifted I don't thin this will be relevant anymore.

adrianN13• 5 years ago

Project Drawdown has a nice overview with things we could do and what their respective impact would be: https://www.drawdown.org/solutions/table-of-solutions

Bellamy2• 5 years ago

This is great.

Every decision maker should read that list.

h4kor2• 5 years ago

We are running head first into the Great Filter.

walton_simons2• 5 years ago

This has been my pet theory for a while. What if the actual great filter for an intelligent species is the difficulty of escaping your home planet _before_ you've consumed all of its resources? I will — naturally — have a human-centric view of this, but it does seem like a very hard thing to do, given the physical and technical challenges of getting out of the gravity well, and actually surviving for extended periods in the harshness of space. Not to mention the travel time of getting anywhere worthwhile!

It seems pretty clear to me now that we're not going to make it. We need to cut global emissions by 15% a year, every year, starting in 2020[1]. As a species, we aren't capable of the kind of global organisation and foresight it will take to achieve this. I'll suspect we'll continue hurtling headlong towards the edge of the cliff (although there's a good chance we're already over it, and currently hanging in the air like Wile E. Coyote) until there's a war over the last dwindling resources, or a simultaneous worldwide failure of food production.

I've wondered a few times that if we were to go back in time to the start of human civilisation, knowing what we know now, would we be able to direct our energies more appropriately, and make it off earth in sufficient numbers to enable us to become a spacefaring species? Then I remember that science predicted all of this back in the 19th century[2]. We did nothing then, and we're doing nothing now. Alok Sharma says it's a catastrophe, but "also insisted the UK could carry on with fossil-fuel projects."[3] We're in real trouble.

[1] https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2020/1/3/21045263... [2] https://daily.jstor.org/how-19th-century-scientists-predicte... [3] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/aug/07/were-on-...

guilhas5• 5 years ago

The stupidity filter

nonbirithm• 5 years ago

This is why I think escaping from a ruined Earth is fruitless if the tendency to grow and consume everything in sight is baked into our genes. We'd just ruin Mars, too.

We can't seem to escape from our own deeply ingrained instincts, only transplant them to every inch of untouched soil we can reach. I tend to see the overwhelming evolutionary success of humans as similar to a virus that is too powerful and kills the host.

My belief is that we will have to suffer the consequences first before the death instinct is ingrained politically and socially in every person in power who contributes to the destruction of Earth. We can continue feeling fine doing what we are doing right now because not enough people have died off yet to make the drastic changes worth it. Societies will be forced to become places where optimism is extinguished in favor of pragmatism. They will only become those places because the scale of death and destruction will cross an unwritten threshold that needed to be crossed first before that change in mindset could take place.

I believe this opportunity to save the Earth that's being proposed right now will not happen because no amount of hypotheticals or climate science fiction that warns of this will be heeded, because they have to remain just that by their own nature - hypothetical, instead of actual, lived human history. That includes what I am writing right now. Our imagination is an innovative evolutionary advantage, but it has ultimately failed us. Our instincts for growth have won out against any scenario of global collapse and catastrophe and heartbreak we can think of. That is just our nature as a species, and it is a sad thing to consider, but as a result, pretty soon everyone will have to hope that they're not going to be one of the billions of people that will soon die off from climate-driven warfare or famine or any other catastrophe that's about take place. But after the dust settles, we will gain the one precious, irrevocable thing whose absence is preventing us from taking action right now - history.

At that point, if we still don't have a better way of thinking of the environmental issues figured out, then I would consider our curious experiment in biological fitness finished, once and for all.

ur-whale5• 5 years ago

Every one is focused on climate change.

But climate change is just a symptom, and absolutely not the disease.

No one seems to want to discuss or even mention the actual root cause of climate change, namely: there are simply too many people on the planet.

Go back to less than 1B human on planet earth, and climate change will stop being a problem in a heartbeat.

But the implications of such a drastic population decrease are simply impossible for any politician to even consider, much less discuss openly.

Not to mention the swath of folks for whom "be fruitful and multiply" is still a basic moral tenet.

automatic6131• 5 years ago

Yeah, how do you think planning the largest genocide in history sounds to people? Do you even hear yourself? Do you want to go to 6 out of 7 people and tell them they cannot breed? What will be the punishment if they do? Or will you forcibly sterilise them?

axelroze• 5 years ago

World population will decline in any case if/when climate catastrophe happens. People will drown, drop dead from heats, die from starvation, etc. It's the Lotka-Volterra model where the predator is the environment.

Climate catastrophe is created by humans. Climate catastrophe kills humans. Conclusion: Humans kill humans. The genocide (mass scale murder) is already here (assuming climate change will be as bad as worst predictions are)

Only the strongest will survive. That is the cornerstone of Nazi ethics. That will also be the reality of everyone when food and water gets scarce. Damned if you sterilise 6B people, damned if you don't and they die from heat or fighting each other for food.

Moral theoretisising aside, population will decline before the total climate collapse. The current ethical beliefs of feminism, harsh economic conditions for young people (inequality and foreseeable end of growth), depressing reality how we will die horribly from ISIS, China or Climate Change. All of them bring about to less pairs creating children.

But humans will survive. We are worse than cockroaches. Nothing can destroy us. Mars might happen. Singularity maybe. But human race will persist in any case as long as earth persists in any livable state (-60 to +60 degrees C, somewhat fresh Air and uncontaminated water). Humans will downscale to a couple millions but will remain.

ur-whale5• 5 years ago

Do you even hear yourself?

The one who seems to be hearing voices in his head is you. I never suggested such a thing as genocide or forced sterilization.

I'm simply pointing out what I believe to be the root cause of the problem, and that if you keep applying ointment to wooden legs, you aren't going to achieve much.

But then talking about overpopulation is taboo, so let's just dig our heads in the sand and wait to get properly baked.

albertgoeswoof• 5 years ago

Go back to less than 1B human on planet earth

How do you know it's 1 billion and not 1 million or 10 billion? Hint: you don't know.

This is non-actionable opinion and therefore actively harmful as it further propagates no-action on climate change or solving problems whatsoever.

The population is peaking anyway, growth rates are dramatically slowing, so this is not at all a relevant point.

ur-whale5• 5 years ago

How do you know it's 1 billion and not 1 million or 10 billion? Hint: you don't know.

I certainly don't.

That wasn't the point. The point was that this is the conversation that matters, not how much cows fart.

But the downvotes of my comment are its perfect vindication: it's not something that anyone is willing to have honest conversations about.

thejohnconway2• 5 years ago

In every discussion of environmental problems, someone says this like it’s some sort of obvious solution that everyone’s too afraid to discuss. But I want specifics from you — what would the actual policy be, and how would you implement it?

Are you talking about the genocide of billions for people? I mean, that’s far worse than the crisis we face!

Or are you talking about birth control? That would have to be radical and start right now to have much of an effect, and how on earth would you get everyone to agree with it?

Both these “solutions” seem utterly absurd on their face, and WAY harder to implement that even to most radical non-genocidal environmental policies.

ur-whale5• 5 years ago

what would the actual policy

I do not claim to have a solution, I'm simply pointing out where the focus of the conversation should be.

All of the "be friendly to the environment" type solutions to global warning I'm hearing about are all completely naive and simply ignoring human nature and the basic desire humans have for comfort and improvement to their lives.

Barring an amazing technological advance that'll let us control CO2 levels in our environment at planet scale, I believe it's time to be honest about the correlation between population size and global warming and to discuss what we can do about it.

Are you talking about the genocide of billions for people?

Obviously not.

I mean, that’s far worse than the crisis we face!

That remains to be seen. The number of people that might suffer to the point of loss of life because of climate change is something that - as another comment pointed out - no one can properly estimate.

Or are you talking about birth control?

This is an avenue that needs to be discussed indeed. Perhaps not the way China did it, but something more along the lines of what the US did with educating people about tobacco. And also discussing the far reaching economic impact slow population decrease would have on the economy and infrastructures.

most radical non-genocidal environmental policies.

That was my point. Environmental policies are IMO completely useless in the face of what the population wants. The problem is most acute in democracies where e.g. raising taxes on gas is a surefire way for a politician to commit political suicide. But even in tyrannies like China, I doubt they'll be able to restrain the wants and needs of their people to the point where we'll solve global warming.

rcMgD2BwE72F9• 5 years ago

there are simply too many people on the planet.

This is false. Only a minority of the population is responsible for the catastrophe. Take Africa, a continent with over 1.2 billion inhabitants: their carbon footprint, *all import included*, is below what our ecosystems can support. The way of live of the majority of human beings is sustainable.

Why force countries that are sustainable overall (at least in terms of C02 emissions) to not have children because the richest are destroying the climate.

ash• 5 years ago

World population is projected to (at least) level out by 2100.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Projections_of_population_grow...

ur-whale5• 5 years ago

World population is projected to (at least) level out by 2100.

By which time it'll be way too late, so I'm not sure how that helps.

aww_dang4• 5 years ago

You can also turn the logic around with this. Many of the globalist institutions promoting climate apocalypse have a historical background in 'population control'. Globalists do openly discuss limiting population growth. What is difficult to discuss is the link between eugenicist population control schemes and the climate scare.

hootbootscoot3• 5 years ago

The actual report https://www.ipcc.ch/assessment-report/ar6/

I suspect that bad-faith-social-actors will attempt, as always, to undermine this report and minimize the obvious need to act in reality on Earth circa 2021.

I suspect that we must come up with social and economic mechanisms for making ALL pollution the problem of the polluter, versus an externality for everyone to absorb.

I suspect that we had better find such mechanisms NOW, vs a later that is too late.

malwarebytess3• 5 years ago

At some point we need to consider ramping down mass production no matter the consequences. This is getting out of hand.

Aerroon7• 5 years ago

And do what? Cause even more human suffering by preventing others from reaching a better standard of living?

What do we ramp down? Electronics? Clothes? Food? Transport?

malwarebytess3• 5 years ago

Yes. We managed before mass production and we will manage again.

It's either the inevitable collapse of civilization or a deliberate controlled ramp down, globally. There will not be some magic technology to fix this and we clearly are not going to be able to finesse this.

It's time to start considering and planning for a global slowdown of production and a radical shift in the way we live.

If we don't do it the biosphere is going to do it for us.

m4rtink9• 5 years ago

Mass production and deployment of clean technology is the only realistic way to get out if this.

It's not like there are not options available, many states are not exactly poor and past experience has shown we can scale production insanely fast if there is an important reason for it.

keewee76• 5 years ago

Yes only America and Europe should be wealthy.

malwarebytess3• 5 years ago

Meaningless thought terminating cliche you have there.

I'm talking about a global change. And if we don't do it the biosphere will do it for us.

c01n• 5 years ago

Rastafarians where right:

- Don't eat meat

- Don't use plastic

- Don't use cars

- Grow your own food

- Love the earth

And yes Babylon is literally burning.

perryizgr8• 5 years ago

"We will see even more intense and more frequent heatwaves," said Dr Friederike Otto, from the University of Oxford, UK, and one of the IPCC report's authors.
"And we will also see an increase in heavy rainfall events on a global scale, and also increases in some types of droughts in some regions of the world."

According to TFA these are the consequences to expect if 1.5 degrees rise occurs. Doesn't sound like "code red" to me.

matzab• 5 years ago

According to TFA (a few paragraphs above your quotes, even) we won't stay at 1.5 degrees.

karol• 5 years ago

We still cannot be sure if it is anthropocentric climate chance but that doesn't really matter. If we want to "return to baseline conditions" - what we try to show on graphs, then we need to cool down the atmosphere using aerosols: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/05/160519120731.h...

Realistically there is not and there isn't going to be in the current decade an agreement between nations on CO2 reduction. Whatever we change in EU China and India is going to undo by mining coal. So geo-engineering negotiations should start now.

baxtr2• 5 years ago

The world's population was at around 5.3 bn in 1990 and is now approaching 7.7 bn. This ain't a popular opinion on HN, but I think a key factor to getting climate change under control (whatever that means), is to reduce the growth and to stabilize the population.

ggm• 5 years ago

It's stabilising. Look at the curve. Increasing wealth in Africa and Asia correlates strongly to a drop in birthrate. The problem isn't unconstrained population growth, it's the energy budget inherent in the population we have already, as standards of living rise worldwide.

30y and we didn't double. We probably won't hit 10b

danparsonson3• 5 years ago

10b would be just over 25% more people - therefore even if we manage to reduce per-capita environmental impact by 25% (which is evidently no mean feat), we'd still just be treading water.

adrianN13• 5 years ago

The best way to do that is probably improving the education of girls in developing countries: https://www.drawdown.org/solutions/health-and-education

rory6• 5 years ago

This is likely true to some definition of best (which is not exactly most effective).

occz2• 5 years ago

Growth is already projected to peak at around 10-11 billion, though. The general trend is for countries going towards replacement rate, or even below, as they become wealthier.

rory6• 5 years ago

That prediction relies on all regions becoming wealthier, though. Which isn't currently happening.

https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.KD.ZG?locat... https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.KD.ZG?locat...

dangfang• 5 years ago

Al gore proven right once again. https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2021/mar/02/facebook-p...

NickBBBBB• 5 years ago

A.E. Currie's Utopia 5 series of books are well worth a read. They are speculative fiction, describing how the world burns over the second quarter of the 21st century. But frankly terrifying as each year passes and they align with reality.

rich_sasha8• 5 years ago

It’s just so hard to know what actions have what impact on CO2 production. Some are high-pain, low-gain (switching devices off instead of standby?), some are opposite (cycling instead of driving when possible etc).

For that if for no other reason, I’d rather if consumer prices included an explicit CO2 tax. The here can be a rebate for poorer people, or personal allowance, whatever, but there would be a fixed yardstick for measuring your personal impact.

Off the top of my head, I have no idea which if my activities generates the most CO2. My car? Energy use? Diet? Going skiing once a year? No idea.

Newspaper articles only help a little, they usually present an incomplete picture, and optimising against an incorrect utility function is often counterproductive.

I’m imagining something like VAT, where “value added/carbon” adds up over the lifetime of product/service production.

shadowfaxRodeo6• 5 years ago

Even if every person on the planet did what you reasonably expect of yourself, we would still not even be close to reducing CO2 production.

By all means do those things. But if you want to make a real difference you need to look beyond your own activities.

Change your community, your company, your industry. What can you do that changes the defaults for everyone else? Try and find low-hanging fruit.

Join your local climate activist group e.g. 350.org — they'll be full of people with solutions.

rob_c4• 5 years ago

Not sure what solutions that group is supposed to be espoucing but they're mostly just a political lobbying group.

Frankly until the shouting and arguing stops and someone who can make a difference comes to the table I'm out. There is was too much posturing which makes no difference and is bad on both sides from plastic signs complaining about pollution to politicians who travel from ecological disaster to ecological disaster via private jet, and that's even before you realise just how in the pocket mainstream politicians of both sides are to the current status quo.

rich_sasha8• 5 years ago

It's a start though. It makes the CO2 use visible and transparent. I reckon so many people would care a lot about carbon in electricity if their itemised power bill included a fat slice of 'carbon'. Suddenly there would be pressure to decarbonise etc. Large companies could optimise their (significant at scale) bill for carbon use. Do the PCs really have to run 24/7 for example?

It's the old 'you cannot improve what you cannot measure'.

lukastr0• 5 years ago

Small changes to personal consumption are not the best way to contribute to fighting climate change. A significantly more effective actionstep would be to donate a small portion of your income to highly effective climate charities [1].

I'm not against changing personal consumption - for example, I went vegan. But this is not where the majority of my impact on the world lies, as even a small donation vastly outweighs the effect that my veganism has.

[1] https://founderspledge.com/stories/climate-and-lifestyle-rep...

czzr• 5 years ago

The inability of the US to pass a carbon tax will be one of humanities great tragedies. That they are the theoretical champions of the free market is just piling cruel irony on top of that.

rich_sasha8• 5 years ago

It's not just US. Is there a real carbon tax anywhere at all?

zthrowaway2• 5 years ago

What’s with the hyperbole when this topic is discussed every time? It doesn’t add weight to your argument after a certain point. With the US being no where near China and India in CO2 production I think it’ll be fine. You can sleep safe and sound at night.

ianai• 5 years ago

Agree, though the ability to add a tax to goods/services for carbon seems unlikely in the US. I suspect people might be more agreeable if they knew there was a direct relationship between carbon tax and carbon abatement-and couldn't be squandered on something else (like cutting taxes for wealthy/multi-national corps). i.e. $1 of tax means $1 toward sequestration, or something like that.

whimsicalism12• 5 years ago

Surveys have shown Americans have basically 0 inclination to pay more than $10/mo even if it would completely solve climate change for sure.

It's a good thing we don't live in a real democracy, because hopefully elites will wake up faster than that.

nosianu4• 5 years ago

It’s just so hard to know what actions have what impact on CO2 production

Not really. For some reason the actually quite simple problem is needlessly complicated in the discussions.

Stop digging up ANY carbon from below ground where it was safely buried.

Any carbon above ground is part of the cycle that includes atmospheric CO2. You need huge effort to change how much of it is in CO2 form at any time while still having no certainty that it won't change very quickly (into CO2 atmospheric form), e.g. through fires (like the many burning forests just now).

The earth's solution to removing the CO2 from the atmosphere was to bury it deep underground. Getting it back out from there is the BIG problem. The details of the above-ground carbon cycle are a small problem with very little impact compared to the big issue of getting more and more of the ancient carbon back up into the cycle.

Of course, it's no use discussing the stop of all coal, gas, and oil digging, because there is zero chance of it happening. Coal at most and not even that looks likely, globally.

It's like not caring about the huge hole in the hull of the ship while arguing about how to "safely" store all the water coming in.

rich_sasha8• 5 years ago

You're describing the objective function, but ignoring the constraints. Stop digging up coal - fine. Cut off power to people who have no other power sources? Erm... What about emergency diesel generators for hospitals, diesel use for shipping goods (lowest-carbon-emitting means of transport). It's just not that simple.

ugjka• 5 years ago

It is too late for everything, there are cascading effects that are completely out of control like the permafrost melting and releasing methane. What are you going to do about that?

danybittel• 5 years ago

I really like your post!

It's not rocket science. Too many interest groups are convoluting the issue.

But, I think to clearest, easiest way is to just ban "coal, gas, oil". Then let the lack of it "tickle" through the economy.

Not by tomorrow, mind you, have it gradually reduce. Where there are problems, help with tax money.

We've done it before, with asbestos, lead in gas, ..

londons_explore3• 5 years ago

Stop digging up ANY carbon from below ground where it was safely buried.

If a country does this today, they will be at a severe economic disadvantage compared to a neighbouring country which continues using coal. All their manufactured goods will end up more expensive, nobody will buy their exports, and their population and economy will suffer.

Only a few countries have done this to any extent, and they are countries who either don't have many fossil fuels, or whose main exports don't involve energy.

The only real solution is for all countries to agree to limit/stop digging up coal/oil/gas at the same time, and to apply punitive sanctions to countries who do not adhere to the agreement.

There isn't really any other way. OPEC could do it if it had a few more members. The US could do it if they were prepared to threaten sanctions or millitary force. Nobody else can really do it.

ZeroGravitas8• 5 years ago

You're not really disagreeing with the previous poster.

We need to do what you suggest as quickly as possible. That means some things that depend on that carbon downstream should be stopped, replaced with alternatives or at the very least heavily discouraged while a market for substitutes created. But how do we decide which ones to do first? Ideally the cheapest and biggest impact. Our best tool for doing so is probably a well regulated market with a carbon fee.

Unfortunately, the same groups that caused the problem, then tried to cover up the problem, then attacked all the solutions continues to talk about how great a carbon tax will be, while also funding the politicians who will never let it happen.

But, if you want to know what the most sensible answer is then just look at what vaguely sensible countries are doing. What they're doing today is probably what we should all have been doing 20 years ago.

This usually involves putting some kind of financial incentive on electricity producers to move to low carbon alternatives (gas is fine as a short term substitute, but if we'd started 20 years ago we'd no longer need it today) and other CO2 emitters to use electricity rather than fossil fuels (e.g. cars).

Other basic elements are carbon tariffs to stop other countries undercutting your efforts.

It's not rocket science. The whole "this is impossible" stuff is just bullshit from the people who don't want to do it. EVs, Solar and Wind Turbines were all impossible according to the same people. Most of the moonshot stuff is trying to come up with a technical solution to the political issues, and that's hard.

fouc• 5 years ago

That's not super helpful to the individual.

Take an individual that bikes everywhere. What other changes can he make in his life that would reduce the demand of "digging out carbon"?

As it turns out, he's relying on rubber wheels for his bicycle, he's relying on synthetic clothing for comfort, and numerous in his life products are made with plastic. What are the highest impact changes he can make?

stinos• 5 years ago

You do not mention methane at all, isn't that oversimplifying things?

grumblenum• 5 years ago

Ah, so we just eliminate low-cost transportation, agriculture, textiles and consumer goods and consequently starve billions of people. A modest proposal for such an ill-specified problem with unfalsifiable causes. I like it.

zabatuvajdka• 5 years ago

I think the broader problem is the human mental condition. One of the largest contributors to global emissions is large scale factory farming but how many people are going to stop eating at McDonalds?

Point being: people’s habits need to change across the board, but yet they argue that policy makers have no right dictating what they can/can’t do…

If you ask a big business owner to halt production in the name of climate change, will they? Hell no.

The government can squeeze people financially though so it literally is up to them to force businesses to comply lest they will exhaust their finances for non compliance.

I dunno it’s a pretty interesting dilemma though…

godshatter• 5 years ago

OK, stop digging up any carbon from below ground, but let's do it slowly. Turn off all the oil extractors and coal mining equipment tomorrow and I'm guessing we'd have at best a month before chaos erupts in the streets. One ransomware attack caused panic buying and chaos on the east coast for a few days. I'd argue that we need some oil production, for plastic if nothing else. But on a much smaller scale than how we use it now.

You'd have to get this done globally, though. It doesn't matter if one country stops if others double down. It would be best to be done in concert with the other oil extracting countries so that prices wouldn't destabilize. This is probably what climate agreements should target rather than reducing consumption.

Oil isn't extracted from the ground because people like it's color or something, it's what runs our industrial civilization presently. And I don't want to start looking for a piece of land in the mountains tomorrow that I can defend and start ammo-ing up because we suddenly decided oil wasn't going to be extracted anymore :)

I do like the idea of looking at the problem at it's source, quite literally. Turn that tap off in a way that doesn't cause massive instability and the carbon in the atmosphere will eventually take care of itself. It's a perspective I never thought to look at the problem from. Not sure why, it seems obvious in retrospect.

zelphirkalt7• 5 years ago

If you have children, then that is probably the most impactful. They will need/want the same living standards as other people. They get the full package of other impactful things you mention plus some more like house building. For example a young family does no longer live in the same small 2 person flat, but instead builds a house (or lets build). Especially in first world countries and developing to first world countries, where everyone wants to have the high living standard, having children will be the most impactful action.

Perhaps there should be a high CO2 tax on having children, which one needs to continue to pay, while the children live?

Al-Khwarizmi• 5 years ago

Children are part of the goal. I mean, what's the point of preserving the planet for the future generations if we don't make future generations?

If you follow your logic to the extreme, the most beneficial actions would be things like euthanasia or just plain suicide.

virgilp6• 5 years ago

one needs to continue to pay, while the children live?

Can you kill them if you no longer afford the tax?

(any answer to this question should suggest how ridiculous a tax like this would be)

brobdingnagians2• 5 years ago

If we are going down that line of commentary-- Large families with lots of children are usually more efficient than small single or two child families, since large families tend to spend less per person and the children learn to make do and be resourceful. Resources are pooled, everything is used, hand-me-downs are used multiple times. Reducing, reusing and recycling are parts of daily life out of necessity. More activities and entertainment are undertaken in the house and less vacations/travel are used. Things like boardgames are more feasible on a daily basis, etc. Home production is also more economical.

The wealthy people with one child lavished with entertainment, travel, and resource expenditure learn to be wasteful and buy every new fashion and gadget.

Of course, I believe we should generally leave people alone and let them go about their business instead of imposing arbitrary government requirements; but if we go down that road, then the poorer families with lots of children should just get a free pass since they are more efficient by nature.

rob_c4• 5 years ago

I remember in the UK when a think tank asked do you need a family pet like a dog which lives 10+years which is almost exclusively a carnivore and needs specialist things bought for it. Turns out over a lifetime that's worse than a 2nd family car for the environment (who's have thought)...

The group was attacked for being heartless. Not to mention that they did mention family size and population growth in the same report without suggesting that be tackled. (They tries to be taken as not a doomsayer)

Then again British policy over the last 2 years has been based on a promise from a liar that 20M+ people will die in Britain alone. So if someone goes to the British govt promising the climate will kill 40M+ over all time maybe they'll listen...

dade_3• 5 years ago

Instead of trying to control people's lives and their very personal decision to have children and how many, we should be ensuring every women in every country in the world is provided at least basic education. A vast amount of benefits including an 'automatic' birth rate drop.

The population in the first world is dropping. Immigration from less wealthy countries is the reason for the growth.

oliwarner4• 5 years ago

I think we all have a fairly good idea of some things that would help, it's the scale we struggle to comprehend. But even if you could find out the magic threshold for what it would take, if there's anything that lockdown and covid restrictions in the UK have taught me in the past 18 months, it's that we all need to follow the rules or it's pointless.

It's so disheartening to see others not pay these taxes, to not restructure and restrict their lifestyles.

It seems that unless things change globally, why are we even considering making changes? 1000 people in Quatar generate over seven times as much CO2 as 1000 people in the UK. Luxembourg, the US, Canada, Australia (and more) all generate three times as much CO2 as the UK per 1000 residents. The US has no carbon taxes. They've long been able to buy fuel and fly domestically for ridiculously low prices. Yeah, I'm having a whinge, but this is my point. If we're not all in this together, what's the point?

wffurr• 5 years ago

Long past time to start enforcing carbon tariffs on non-compliant countries.

whimsicalism12• 5 years ago

If we're not all in this together, what's the point?

The point is that while we are squabbling over the most fair division of the burden, we are screwing future generations.

Qatar has 0.03% of the worlds population. We can't let climate renegade states preclude us from taking action, and we can't sit around until we have a world government.

zthrowaway2• 5 years ago

The attempt to force people into limiting their lives for CO2 concerns falls into environmental authoritarianism. That’s why. Lots of people see it that way and when you mix hyperbolic environmentalist doomsday predictions that never actually happen people stop taking this seriously.

Additionally, the US is built on the foundation of personal freedom and autonomy. We would be the last country where people would willingly restructure and restrict their lives for someone’s agenda.

zejn8• 5 years ago

The easiest way to approach this is to "stop burning stuff". Is a material being burned? Then it almost certainly emits CO2. Do you call it fuel? Stop using it or use it as little as possible.

Most personal energy use is for heating living spaces and transportation. EVs are great for transportation, e-bikes are even better. Heat pumps are great for heating and cooling living spaces. Using these one can drastically reduce direct personal CO2 emissions. Sure, you're then buying electricity and part of electricity is produced by burning stuff. If possible, you should then get solar panels, to at least offset the amount of electricity used.

With regard to purchasing one should regard objects that have been over temperature of boiling water as things that took a significat amount of energy to be created: food is cooked, metals and glass are melted, and so on. Is there a way to reuse them, or at least recycle?

smt88• 5 years ago

Cows and concrete don't involve burning things, but they do produce a large percentage of total CO2 emissions.

captainmuon• 5 years ago

I don't think conscious customers can steer the economy quickly enough. If we stop emitting any greenhouse gases today, global warming will still accelerate for more than a decade. (And I don't believe very much in boycotts anyway - when a customer decides to switch to a different product, marginal price changes are likely to cause another customer to switch the other way, simply speaking.)

I think at this point we need an international coalition that slams the breaks and sets a strict deadline for ceasing CO2 emission. If there are not severe shortages, it means we are not strict enough and can go faster. And then let the market work. If a steak costs $100 or you have to wait 3 years for a car, that's sucks, but so be it.

pjerem2• 5 years ago

In France and in Europe we have online emissions calculator. If you happen to live in France, you can make the simulation on the « Mes Gestes Climat » website.

I don’t know if it exists in USA (since those things are highly country-dependent) but I suppose it may exists. Those are interesting tools to get actionable feedback.

rich_sasha8• 5 years ago

This is good, but ultimately opt-in. I think you need something much wider-ranging than this.

lcam84• 5 years ago

The dividend from the taxes should be evenly distributed to everyone. This would compensate people who have good environmental lifestyle and allow local business that produce low carbon (due low distribution) to be more competitive

kebman2• 5 years ago

The emphasis many countries take is to focus on car owners and drivers by taxing private commuters to death, with dubious environmental gains outside of increasing state income. Meanwhile one cargo ship or cruise liner arguably pollutes way more than millions(!) of cars. I'm not sure that's a great route to take politically, no pun intended. They seem to go for the lowest hanging cash grab before going after those where it's actually the easiest to get the biggest gains in terms of environment and actually lowering of negative emissions.

adrianN13• 5 years ago

Cargo ships "pollute" as much as millions of cars, but that pollution is sulphur, not carbon.

tpxl• 5 years ago

Same with garbage bags and plastic straws. Stuff comes in stores absolutely wrapped in tons of plastic and they go and ban plastic straws. Not to mention stuff that's triple wrapped (sweets for example).

5424582• 5 years ago

Is that true? I’m seeing that cruise ships emit a lot of particulates (namely sulphur dioxide), but the actual co2-equivalent numbers I’m seeing are 0.8t/passenger for cruise ships - which is bad, but not quite as bad as described in your post.

https://www.tourismdashboard.org/explore-the-data/cruise-shi...

sammalloy7• 5 years ago

The emphasis many countries take is to focus on car owners and drivers by taxing private commuters to death, with dubious environmental gains outside of increasing state income.

There was a study that came out a while ago that showed the majority of pollution in Los Angeles came from commercial trucks, likely involved in shipping and delivery. I think I also read that those trucks and the type involved in construction have extremely loose pollution controls and requirements. Many of them might be exempt or grandfathered in to current regulations.

TigeriusKirk• 5 years ago

The most impactful thing you can do as an individual is devote yourself to improving clean energy resources and carbon sequestration technologies.

If you're here there's a good chance you have the ability to help engineer these techs. That's going have way, way more impact than riding your bicycle.

menesss• 5 years ago

Do you have any suggestions on how to get started on this?

MildlySerious• 5 years ago

Here's a small parametric projection you can adjust to get a rough idea[1]. The conclusion is that we need to work on all ends, starting with heavy carbon taxing.

We have pretty much squandered the time for anything but a drastic 180 degree turn.

The best thing you can do as an individual is to be vocal about those concerns and put pressure on your political representatives to take action, CCL[2] being one example of that.

I'm not a big proponent of the individual carbon footprint thing, it's mostly an attempt to shift responsibility to the individual when the ones that can actually get meaningful action on the way are corporations and governments. Despite that, avoiding meat (if you can't avoid all, focus on beef), buying local produce and avoiding flights where possible are still beneficial things to do and the biggest contributions you can make. I would add not driving a 20 year old car, but a lot of time you not driving it just means someone else will be driving that car instead.

[1] https://en-roads.climateinteractive.org/scenario.html

[2] https://citizensclimatelobby.org/

bamboozled• 5 years ago

I love how corporations can pollute the absolute shit out of the atmosphere, but when it comes to me having a steak, I’m the bad guy, this is one of the biggest cons of our time.

Could you imagine how much more damage cheap air travel, coal fired power generation etc has done compared to people eating food ?

Do you know who eats all the beef they like ? Oil company executives.

NumberWangMan8• 5 years ago

To be very specific -- if you want a carbon fee & dividend, which is strongly supported by both economists and scientists as the most efficient, effective way to get the USA to net zero carbon emissions by 2050, call and write your senator as soon as you can using this link which will help you out with instructions (as well as explain more details if you're interested):

https://citizensclimatelobby.org/senate/

It only takes about 10 minutes! Right now we have the best chance we've had in a long time to get meaningful climate legislation passed.

VoodooJuJu• 5 years ago

It's not hard to know what actions impact CO2 production. Like nosianu else said, just stop taking carbon fuel out of the ground. Anything above ground is part of the carbon cycle and is fair game - manure, trees (to a point), etc.

But I think what's hard about this is not understanding what causes CO2 production, but understanding what it means to stop burning buried carbon fuel. It means no more computer, cel phone, cars, no flying, no 2-day shipping for [ANY PRODUCT!], no container ships and planes shipping food and products all over the world. It might mean abandoning air-conditioning and having to hand-wash your clothes. It means abandoning modern comforts (not necessities). It means abandoning a hyper-consoomer lifestyle and becoming more localist, which most of us simply cannot fathom doing.

benjaminwootton• 5 years ago

Not sure if I’ll get voted down as a conspiracy theorist, but some kind of mobile app “passport” or “digital ID” would be a great way of tracking your carbon budget. Especially with a bit of big tech surveillance supporting the whole programme.

I wonder how they could get something like that adopted quickly?

api5• 5 years ago

Coal is 60% of all carbon emissions. Phase out coal for electricity production. Just doing that would go far.

agumonkey2• 5 years ago

Switching what devices ?

High pain to me is no more transport, overheat, empty shelves.

Reducing devices seems like a freebie

agumonkey2• 5 years ago

Fair point, it's blurry

From the top of my head, most cited ones are

Concrete production

Heating / cooling (unless designed to be physically smart)

Beef production

Worldwide transportation (fruits all year long)

Cars

If you eat a Mediterranean die, move by foot or bike and have a well insulated house with no AC you're good

adolph4• 5 years ago

Why pick on AC? How about adding no heat?

belorn2• 5 years ago

There were a study done in Sweden a few years ago that looked at the question about an individuals actions and the corresponding CO2 production.

No car > skipping flight > buy green energy > Get a electric car > diet.

https://www.lunduniversity.lu.se/article/four-lifestyle-choi...

npteljes3• 5 years ago

How could you leave out the one with the biggest impact, which is basically "less humans"?

AstralStorm9• 5 years ago

That one for Sweden. In countries that neglected it in building codes, before buying green energy there's an "greenify your home" bit. Mostly heat insulation and removal of fossil fueled heating.

api5• 5 years ago

How does this differ if the majority of your electricity is zero carbon?

Coal electricity is 60% of emissions. Aviation is less than 5%. How is skipping a flight that highly ranked of you are burning a ton of carbon just being at home (if you have coal fired power).

Actual rankings have to be energy mix dependent.

aivisol• 5 years ago

The highest bar in the chart says "have one fewer child". It actually exceeds any others by extremely large margin [0]. How is that even considered as the option? One child less means halving population after every generation. Eliminate the population and problem solved?

[0] https://www.lunduniversity.lu.se/drimage/1120/630/4832/fourc...

Mikeb853• 5 years ago

Of course the biggest emitters are industrial. Anything we attribute to individuals pales in comparison to the transport industry, production of goods like steel and concrete, resource extraction, power generation and production of consumer goods.

Telling consumers to cut back on X is essentially passing the back and making consumers feel bad without actually addressing the bulk of emissions.

lucb1e8• 5 years ago

Also note that some of them are easy and you can simply do them today. Buying green energy might not be as good as ditching your car altogether, but it's a lot easier so you might as well start with the quick wins.

And the category of buying shiny new stuff is missing. It's a big part of consumer-influencable emissions, though it's admittedly even harder to make a significant impact on than ditching cars after you bought your essentials second-hand (where possible/reasonable of course). Pushing for products to be produced in a climate-neutral fashion (voting with your wallet) would definitely be something though.

Edit: wait, Sweden. How is space heating not on that list? Surely where the majority of the Swedes live is not too cold for heat pumps with perhaps a bit of aid from pure electrical heat creation for a few days per year, is it?

justnotworthit• 5 years ago

Get a electric car Chart says "Switch eletric car to car free". Text says car free is 2.4 tonnes a year, diet 0.8 a year.

sundvor• 5 years ago

Do what we do in Vic, Australia: Add usage tax for EVs, with only a narrow timed limited vehicle discount for standard range EVs. And not a single ICEV co² tax in sight.

That'll help (the oil companies).

jussij2• 5 years ago

For anyone concerned about climate change, the most important thing you can do is cast a vote for a political party that the issue seriously.

timmg• 5 years ago

I think the reality is that even parties who take the issue seriously know the solutions are difficult. Making difficult decisions is a great way to get voted out in the next term.

An example from the US:

During discussions for the recent bipartisan infrastructure deals, Republicans wanted to raise the gas tax to help pay for the bill. Progressives felt it would affect the middle class too much so they pushed it out.

Gas tax isn't exactly a carbon tax. But it is close. So here's a case where the party on the Right wanted a "CO2 tax" but the party on the Left scuttled it. (https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/24/us/politics/what-is-in-th...)

I think France saw something similar with the "Yellow Vest" movement. I'm definitely not knowledgeable about French politics, but I think a lot of that protest was around an increase in gas tax.

city41• 5 years ago

In the US, any party that takes the issue seriously does not get elected in an meaningful capacity. Maybe a city representative, even state representative here and there, but that's about it.

NumberWangMan8• 5 years ago

This helps, but there's a time lag, and the person you voted for does not know why you voted for them over the other party. Letting your congressperson know that you care about it by calling them or writing them directly is much, much more effective at getting policies you care about implemented. You should vote (in every election!) because they know who votes and who doesn't, and want to make voters happy -- but you also need to know that this is an issue of interest to you.

Right now, here's a very straightforward way to do that for climate change: https://citizensclimatelobby.org/senate/

snomad• 5 years ago

We don't even need a carbon tax per se; we just need consumption based tax system (as the US had until 1913), instead of a productivity based tax system.

fsflover• 5 years ago

It’s just so hard to know what actions have what impact on CO2 production. Some are high-pain, low-gain (switching devices off instead of standby?), some are opposite (cycling instead of driving when possible etc).

http://www.kimnicholas.com/uploads/2/5/7/6/25766487/fig1full...

But the tax is probably more important still. Also, political action.

modmans2nd• 5 years ago

How about makign a masive push to gen 4 nuclear reactors that can burn what we today call "waste" and then dump coal?

coliveira• 5 years ago

The day true environmental costs are embedded in every item, is the day capitalism will come to an end. The nature of the system is to underpay for items that are not helping certain groups. Take just the example of food. 90+% of the price you pay go to middlemen. Real producers make close to nothing on each food item. But food contributes to a large percentage of global warming. Suddenly you will have to start paying lots of money to producing countries of most food consumed in the world. And this is just one item of the things we consume every day.

pas3• 5 years ago

And why would that make "capitalism" "come to an end"?

It opens up new niches for food production. Especially more capital intensive ways (eg vertical farming).

The trend of less and less people being employed in food production continues.

the_lonely_road2• 5 years ago

If I do all of the things that I can do to reduce my families CO2 output, and I mean really dig into sacrificing our quality of life, how much CO2 will I prevent for all of that hardship and sacrifice? How much CO2 was put out in service of President Trump's endless rallies? How much CO2 was put out in service of President Obama's birthday bash this last week?

As long as the elites, including the goddamn political elites, are living in opulence and emitting immensely more CO2 than my family could ever hope to save with even a barebones existence, I will choose to be damned to hell with the rest of humanity before I make one more sacrifice of my family.

Carbon needs to be taxed and it needs to be fair. There will be no future for us if we continue down this opt in path. That much is crystal clear.

tpm• 5 years ago

I found Project Drawdown's Solutions Table quite good:

https://drawdown.org/solutions/table-of-solutions

chadlavi• 5 years ago

Actions everyday people can take are a drop in the bucket. The answer is in stopping major polluting corporations. And it's also the one thing America will never do, because that's who has the money.

jhrmnn• 5 years ago

Only people are final consumers in every production chain, not corporations. (Even if indirectly, say, by driving on a freshly built highway.) So people’s everyday decisions could have a major impact, if collective. Often it’s very hard to understand how CO2 emissions flow along the production chains though.

NumberWangMan8• 5 years ago

I think others have mentioned CCL already, but if you live in the USA want a specific, concrete, easy action you can take RIGHT NOW to move us toward a carbon tax & dividend, check this out:

https://citizensclimatelobby.org/senate/

Right now we have the best chance in a long time to actually get a carbon tax passed, but it depends on lots of us calling and writing our senators to make sure they know we want one! If you support this, please do it as soon as you have a chance.

And I very much agree -- even for people who are willing to take individual action, without including environmental impact into the price of things, it's very hard to figure out where you can best make a difference.

guilhas5• 5 years ago

Carbon tax is a scam. It is exactly what economists not worried about the environment would invent

thehappypm8• 5 years ago

The rebate-for-poor-people thing is really the main issue. the West is already on its way towards reducing CO2 emissions and it's accelerating with new technologies, without austerity forcing the hand. Meanwhile the developing world (the poor people) are growing CO2 dramatically. It's irrelevant where CO2 comes from. That's why this is so damn hard.

cblconfederate3• 5 years ago

If the premise is that it is caused by humans, then start by reducing them

dleslie7• 5 years ago

If you fly to go skiing then it's the vacation. Jet fuel isn't clean burning by any means. Car is next.

Depending on how your power is generated, that energy use may be carbon neutral.

triceratops9• 5 years ago

It’s just so hard to know what actions have what impact on CO2 production

To a first approximation, every time you pull out your wallet, you're emitting carbon. The bigger the $ sign, the more carbon you're emitting.

New car > used car

New furniture > used furniture

High energy bill > low energy bill

High grocery bill > low grocery bill

Big house > small house

Long commute > short commute

Expensive vacation > cheap vacation

After you've gotten past the big stuff, there are nuances. Burning your trash is cheaper than paying for trash removal but obviously worse for the environment (better yet; generate less trash). A diet of Twinkies is cheaper than a diet of leafy greens but it'll cost you on healthcare in the long run, so likely worse carbon emissions.

Try to run your household budget as lean as you can, and vote for politicians who support collective action against climate change. I think that's as much as any individual can do.

roguesupport• 5 years ago

I know this will just haul in the downvotes, but I just want to point out the EVERY IPCC report, EVER, has been dead wrong. Every single one of them.

clydethefrog3• 5 years ago

You are right, but your premise is probably different. They were indeed wrong. They were too conservative.

Some historical perspective:

1990: 1st Assessment

Little observational evidence for a detectable human influence on climate

1995: 2nd Assessment

The balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on global climate

2000: 3rd Assessment

Most of the observed warming over the last fifty years is likely* to have been due to the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations

* > 66% chance

2007: 4th Assessment

Most of the observed increase in global average temeratures since the mid-20th century is very likely* to to the observed increase in anthopogenic greenhouse concentrations

* > 90% chance

2016

It is extremely likely** that human influence has been the dominant cause of the observed warming since the mid-20th century.

** > 95% chance

2021: It is indisputable that human activities are causing climate change, making extreme climate events, including heat waves, heavy rainfall, and droughts, more frequent and severe.

fnoof• 5 years ago

Most of the comments here are opinions on what other people should do to stop climate change.

For those that have read up on it, What are the highest impact things the average hacker news reader can do over the next few years?

m4rtink9• 5 years ago

Get involved in carbon free energy sources getting better and more widely introduced as well as current energy using devices being more efficient ?

Any improvement by an andividual of this kind that gets deployed in scale eclipses any changes of lifestyle of a single.individual can have.

zejn8• 5 years ago

For direct emissions: Stop burning stuff. Do you call it fuel? Stop burning it. Or at least burn it as little as possible.

EVs and heat pumps solve two of biggest personal direct emissions sources: transportation and heating living spaces.

Beyond that, if you own a roof, get solar panels. Those are a modern miracle at capturing 20% of the Sun's energy, when photosynthesis for crop plants is about 1% to 2%.

Grow your own food, if you have a garden.

dredmorbius10• 5 years ago

Change policy.

This isn't a problem solved by individualism.

dunslandsboo• 5 years ago

How many doomsday predictions do we need to see not coming true before these people finally give up.

danparsonson3• 5 years ago

I'm not sure what rock you've been living under lately but it sounds comfortable.

holografix• 5 years ago

I have this overwhelming feeling that it’s over.

Are there publications and articles or studies etc about how the rich are preparing for the impact of climate change?

Are there large swaths of Alaska being bought up? Farms in California being sold cheap? Mega security mansions popping up in New Zealand? Fresh water supply chains suddenly being consolidated under the same biz? Is this part of the reason why China is getting half of Africa in debt? To secure a food bowl and have a legitimate reason to deploy force when needed?

perfunctory• 5 years ago

New Zealand https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2018-rich-new-zealand-doo...

longtom6• 5 years ago

The propaganda and media cooptation is just staggering. It's extremely suspicious that very little attention is paid to the fact that reducing consumption will likely increase poverty. If you trace, for example, the supply chain of some medicine you might use, or might depend on in future: The machinery, chemical refinery, transport, sourcing or resources, management, markets, and infrastructure below all that. All of this will get orders of magnitude more expensive if we reduce carbon emissions. You will not be able to afford medicine if you need it, and possibly die of a horrible death, e.g. from an infection and without painkillers. In the meanwhile, anyone raising these issues is defamed as climate change denier.

scrollaway2• 5 years ago

You have a kernel of truth there which isn't talked about enough (the fact that CO2 consumption brings advantages which reduce death and misery AND potentially reduce further CO2 consumption as well, in a "you gotta spend money to make money" way).

Unfortunately you are wrapping it in delusional hysteria such as "you will die of a horrible death from an infection without painkillers". So you're getting down voted because you are completely ignoring how things such as subsidies work.

truckerbill2• 5 years ago

Out of curiosity, who here is trying to make a change? Through either lifestyle or lobbying. If not why?

skinkestek21• 5 years ago

Have been doing a lot of the right things for a couple of decades already, mostly because it is also the smart thing to do from a personal economic perspective though.

- reuse / repair instead of throwing away

- buying used

- put effort into maintenance

- avoiding wasteful activities

I actually enjoy it and I have a good life.

truckerbill2• 5 years ago

It's really satisfying to me bypassing the consumer cycle, I agree. Woodworking and electronics is fun and useful.

Gigachad5• 5 years ago

Recently moved to the city and got rid of my car. I now walk everywhere. I feel like this has cut out a fairly significant chunk of my impact.

contravariant• 5 years ago

For those interested, here's a link to the report that was released today: https://www.ipcc.ch/report/sixth-assessment-report-working-g...

hasa• 5 years ago

We should reduce pollution, not panic about weather. Seas are full of plastic and organic waste, dry land too, rain forests are burned down to make more field. I don't claim that human would not affect to climate, but it is extremely difficult to prove statistically when the data we have is something like 100 years from the full 5 billion years of existence of earth. How can you take all factors into account in this kind of statistical analysis?

jimworm3• 5 years ago

For all the carbon capture that the Devonian/Carboniferous period did over 100 million years, humanity undid a large part of it in 150 or so years. And now to preserve human civilisation in some form, the most direct way is probably to rebuild that carbon sink within a much shorter time. Much shorter than 150 years, not 100 million.

Current carbon emissions are over 10 billion tonnes per year, so the capture speed will have to exceed that by however much required, probably something like 10x as much. If a process could be scaled to capture 100 billions tonnes of carbon per year, it could be a viable way out of the mess.

Is it even possible with current technology given unlimited funding and political will? For example, if insoluble carbonates could be synthesised from atmospheric carbon dioxide, that could be a form of long-term carbon storage.

cnity7• 5 years ago

In theory, a sink large enough to bring the Earth back to carbon neutral would be possible if the Sahara were reforested[0]:

The team's calculations suggest the forested deserts could draw down around 8bn tonnes of carbon a year, about the same as emitted from fossil fuels and deforestation today.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2009/nov/04/forests-d...

Edit:

if insoluble carbonates could be synthesised from atmospheric carbon dioxide

indeed, if only there was a highly efficient process that could convert the carbon in the atmosphere into hydrocarbons, using energy purely from the sun...

jimworm3• 5 years ago

Trees with their own conversion capacity are indeed a good interim solution, but in the long term this form of carbon storage isn't as permanent as rocks, especially given how prone trees are to dying and decaying in the biosphere of today. The Devonian didn't have that problem. For example, parts of the Amazon have become greenhouse gas emitters even when human-caused deforestation is discounted.

There's also the very real possibility of forest fires releasing huge amounts of carbon at once. Even dead trees preserved in peat bogs could burn and release carbon in this manner.

Rocks have their own weaknesses such as ocean acidification, but relatively speaking they're much more stable.

titzer10• 5 years ago

Thank you, I was just about to jump in and point out the obvious. Tech has blinded us to all solutions...except more tech.

azeirah• 5 years ago

According to a video I watched, reforesting the sahara comes with its own huge problems. Dust clouds from the sahara travel the atlantic to the Amazon rain forest, where it allegedly plays an important role in sustaining the Amazon.

In short, green Sahara would turn the Amazon Rainforest in the new Sahara. And that will then have its own massive implications etc...

Cycl0ps3• 5 years ago

I've thought about it myself and the best answer that comes to mind is clear-cutting entire forests, tossing that biomass down a mineshaft, and replanting to start the process over again. All this talk of planting trees removes atmospheric carbon, but until it's out of the system entirely we're one forest fire away from wiping out decades of carbon removal.

lucb1e8• 5 years ago

You might be interested to learn of Climeworks if you're looking for a more reliable way to remove emissions than planting trees (which is, indeed, mostly not really working as well as too slow).

titzer10• 5 years ago

Do not clear-cut forests. You will obliterate the biome that is the understory. It's like giving yourself a haircut and removing your scalp down to the skull.

FooHentai2• 5 years ago

Yep, my favorite currently as well: https://cbmjournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1750-0...

10 Gigatonnes a year at a stable rate with an initial large bonus amount for the first decade or so. More if you bury more than the core logs. Burial isn't as bad as needing old mineshafts either, a small, deep pit something like 25m square is enough to bury 1km square of logged materials.

There are still issues with this proposal such as the potential for land degradation and biodiversity loss but good potential for mitigating these things as well. The main sells to me are that a) all the tech to get started today exist and are widely deployed and b) it results in carbon being re-interred in a fairly direct reversal of what we've been doing to dig it out.

knrz• 5 years ago

I’ve been doing a lot of research in the space and the most damning part of it all is that our civilization’s carbon capture capacity is not there yet. We don’t have the technology to do that — yet. That’s why one of the most impactful things we can do is support the technology companies in developing this technology.

dont__panic• 5 years ago

There are 7 billion people on the planet. Couldn't we just... have everyone plant a few trees? Trees weigh something like a quarter of a ton+ when fully grown, and pull directly from the atmosphere. Even if we remove the 50% of people who live in cities without yards, if every rural human planted 5 trees a year we'd end up sequestering a lot of that carbon, right? I know it's not permanent but if you just keep planting trees you can easily buy yourself 20 years with the open space we have.

inglor_cz2• 5 years ago

Planting a tree won't do much on its own. It must survive and grow. The thing is, a lot of places where trees thrive are already covered with forest. With 7 billion people, you cannot sacrifice much of the arable land either.

Israelis have been reforesting their country for about 100 years and they have the best results on Earth (at least percentage-wise), but even they face bad odds in really dry places like the Negev desert.

https://aardvarkisrael.com/the-reforestation-of-israel/

keewee76• 5 years ago

How is the world preparing for millions of climate refugees?

According to the latest estimates Southern India will not be inhabitable for humans by 2050.

250 million people live in Southern India.

shadowfaxRodeo6• 5 years ago

The internet causes around 5% of global carbon emmissions.

It's invisible, and difficult to measure, so little gets done about it. But if you're a developer who wants to help. Check out:

https://sustainablewebdesign.org/

Pretty much all the solutions to making a greener web would make the web better in general.

- Send less data (efficient video, images, fonts, etc) - Make fewer requests - Use a CDN (the greenest one you can) - Stop collecting vast amounts of personal data - Better bot blocking - Use PWAs when appropriate

- Change the culture, foster competition for doing the above.

I'm sure there's a thousand more items you could add to the list.

Gigachad5• 5 years ago

Something that almost the entire population uses all day is only using 5%? Sounds incredibly efficient. Repacking fonts to be smaller sounds about as useful as plugging a hand crank generator in to the power point.

shadowfaxRodeo6• 5 years ago

Solutions to the climate crisis can all be broken down into smaller and smaller parts — small enough to be ignored — or small enough to be easily fixed.

For web developers that 5% is our responsibility, and we have the means to change it in ways many people cannot.

As for fonts — yes I'm sure it would make a big impact. Font files are a decent chunk of average page weight.

carrolldunham• 5 years ago

  >*Stop collecting vast amounts of personal data*

This is why I left and denounce green movements. It's always (on an individual activist up to organization level), a front for completely unrelated ideological agendas.

Edit: 'A front' is too strong - a convenient vector. But you poison the well by failing to restrain yourself from slipping that stuff in.

shadowfaxRodeo6• 5 years ago

Most of the activists I know are not developers, they don't have tech savvy people in their groups. And as far as I can tell developers will just add a million tracking scripts to anything without much thought.

I don't think this makes green movements fake. it just means that they don't understand security and privacy.

I couldn't even join my local group during lockdown because they only opperate on facebook.

cblconfederate3• 5 years ago

The internet causes much more. It facilitates turning millions of houses to hotels, cheap flights, cheap rides, high speed intercontinental trade and a relentless behavioral treadmill of selfies in exotic backgrounds. The internet is the biggest driver of consumerism and its biggest beneficiary as attested by the exorbitant valuations of related companies

fulafel• 5 years ago

Where's that internet @ 5% of global emissions number from? It sounds suspiciously high. Networking is not that energy intensive compared to stuff that goes on in data centers and end user devices. Mobile network base stations are pretty power hungry though.

edit: there's a near 5% number in here, but it's not about internet or global emissions: https://internethealthreport.org/2018/the-internet-uses-more... - was linked from your https://sustainablewebdesign.org/ page. It's a 2017 estimate from Greenpeace about how much energy ICT sector as a whole will use as a percentage of electricity consumption by now. So it didn't predict the 'net would produce 5% of global emissions, it predicted all of global ICT would use 5% of all electricity - a much wider slice of a much smaller pie that also includes a lot of renewables and nuclear.

thendrill• 5 years ago

Can someone please explain why should a middle class, middle aged blue collar worker care about this? How does any of this make his life better or worse?

zer0tonin• 5 years ago

Do they like access to cheaply grown food? Enjoy a summer without a 50°C heat spike? Don't want their kids to get enrolled in a war over resources?

If they answer "yes" to any of that, they should maybe care.

walton_simons2• 5 years ago

Does he care about anyone but himself? Does he have children or grandchildren? Nephews or nieces? Does he care about their safety and welfare, and want them to have good lives?

titannet• 5 years ago

I don't understand the underlying argumentation. Going "net zero" would require changing the live of every human on the planet, that's just not going to happen in a controlled manner. How about some achievable goals like not building new coal plants? And slightly less BS along the lines of replacing (houses, cars, whatever) with new slightly more efficient variations.

okokwhatever• 5 years ago

People, it's easy. If we are having difficulties to reduce our consumption because the lack of preparation let's first reduce how many people are living in the world with a worldwide One Child policy. Obviously this will produce future issues that will have to be addressed but it's a necessary step (temporally?) to gain some time.

5424582• 5 years ago

That would not work. Ignoring the mass revolt that would occur in most western nations, it would also be wildly insufficient, destroy the economy, and take a very long time to make an impact. There are much better uses for such a massive amount of political capital.

paganel2• 5 years ago

I fail to see the same climate-related apocalyptic messages coming from the mainstream media exactly one year ago. It's either the situation has gotten exponentially worse in this last year (unlikely) or that the focus has turned from one apocalypse (covid in the wealthy countries) to another one (climate change). At this rate only a big regional war can shift the focus again from this specific subject.

jokoon2• 5 years ago

I'm still very skeptical how the measures will take into effect if they ever happen. In france the yellow vests protest was caused by a planned carbon tax increase on gas. Car dependent citizens rioted.

A carbon tax will reduce the living standard of everyone, and it will take time for society to readjust. I really think the economy will tank and take a lot of time to adjust to a green economy, as it's not only electricity, transportation and meat: it's also the production of cement and steel, landfills, chemical production, crop burning and deforestation, rice. There are tens of little things that once combined, emit a lot of CO2.

Road transport is only 12% of co2 emissions. So to be clear, electric cars are nice, but they're solving almost nothing.

Since humans generally compete against each other for everything, and since we live in an age of individualism and not collectivism, I'm quite pessimistic about humanity reducing their emissions, because the air is the single thing that is collectivized.

Edit: fixed grammar

qeternity4• 5 years ago

Only 12% of ROAD TRANSPORT emits co2.

Road transportation accounts for ca. 12% of global emissions. Nearly 100% of road transportation emits CO2.

lucb1e8• 5 years ago

Also "only 12%" as if that's nothing. If other things are both easier to tackle and make up >50% then there might be a point ignoring this eight of the problem for now, but it's not.

TaylorAlexander2• 5 years ago

Only 12% of ROAD TRANSPORT emits co2. So to be clear, electric cars are nice, but they're solving almost nothing.

I just want to add, that so many people buy in to the idea that the solution to gas powered cars is electric cars. But I feel like the significantly climate friendlier solution is bicycles and trains. The latter requires us to really go outside of our comfort zones (in the USA anyway) and we just don't want to do that. Which is too bad because I would find a bicycle friendly city to be much more livable. I lived in silicon valley for 15 years and it was remarkable how hostile it felt to bicycles for how flat it all is.

But I wonder what are the other problems like this. Where we think the solution is an electric car (and lithium mining, and working long hours to pay off the price tag, and emissions when manufacturing it) when a better solution would be adapting to a bicycle-focused world. I think plastic pollution is one area where we think bioplastics or recycling are the solution, but a better one would be standardized glass bottles with municipal washing systems. And zero waste grocery stores. We really need those. I have collected so many jars to reuse and its amazing what we keep buying and throwing away with every container of food.

TeMPOraL11• 5 years ago

I just want to add, that so many people buy in to the idea that the solution to gas powered cars is electric cars. But I feel like the significantly climate friendlier solution is bicycles and trains.

And I want to say: yes. Everyone knows that. I don't get why this point has to be raised every time the topic of EVs and climate intersect.

EVs aren't competing with bicycles and trains, they're competing with ICE cars. Both for market and attention. If bicycles could work instead of EVs where people want to introduce EVs, they would've already replaced ICEs in that role.

To use a software analogy, bringing up bikes and trains here reads like, "You all talk about replacing this legacy component with an API-compatible alternative that's an order of magnitude faster -- but you know what would be even better? Rewriting the whole codebase so that we don't need that component anymore."

zzbzq• 5 years ago

Bicycle and trains are an "ideal solution" that works for abandoning this Save File and starting a New Game. Since we're building on top of already existing society, in the U.S. it's not tenable. We'd need to rebuild 98% of what's already been built around cars, in order to support populations living in walkable cities getting around by train. And obviously, re-building that much infrastructure would require counterproductive amounts of energy.

jordanbeiber• 5 years ago

There’s several other pullutants removed by moving to electric transportation, not only co2.

In densely populated areas we’re seeing severe effects on our health thanks to all the other crap being emitted by burning fossil fuels.

I believe in a 100 years people will be like: “…and they burned this crap in the middle of where they lived?! Crazy stuff”.

But yeah, otherwise I agree - it’s a damned if you do, damned if you don’t type situation.

rcMgD2BwE72F9• 5 years ago

In france the yellow vests protest was caused by a planned carbon tax increase on gas. Car dependent citizens rioted.

It's reductive. The protest was not just on the carbon tax, but that the carbon tax was used to finance the cancellation of the wealth tax (aka ISF for "Impot sur la Fortune"). Source: https://wikileaks.org/macron-emails/emailid/50207

I'm French and I've had my tax rate almost cut in half since Macron has become President... because I gained millions on the stock markets. The more I earn from capital gains, the less I'm taxed (relative to my wealth). Each extra € is taxed at 30% (all included), which is less than my far-less-rich coworkers (who only earn salaries, which can be taxed at 45%... 1.5x my tax rate!). And this is wihout even talking about the ISF!

This is soooo unfair and the Gilets Jaunes are simply aware of that, even if they don't know all the little details, and despite the media not describing what's really going on.

belorn2• 5 years ago

A recent strategy is to add a carbon tax on imports in the form of tariffs. I don't think the yellow vests protest will go up in arms over it, especially since the second effect of tariffs is to encourage national production. It will effect french farmers that rely on exports, but since those tariffs are import taxes that reside in other countries there is not much point to protesting to the french government.

What the yellow vests protest demonstrated is that carbon taxes need to be designed so that individual voters are less impacted directly. Add a carbon tax on power plants and energy prices might go up, but if you already have 50% wind or nuclear, the effect will be quite damped. If energy prices is already quite unstable with huge spike and dips, the effect might not even be noticed in the noise, and the critical application of blame can be directed to the weather when the price do go up.

qayxc• 5 years ago

Road transport is only 12% of co2 emissions.

This is flawed reasoning. The figure only applies to the _continuous_ CO2 emissions of road traffic. It's ignoring the CO2 emissions caused by building the vehicles, building and maintaining infrastructure and the consequences of car-centric urban planning (urban sprawl, unliveable city centres, wasted space for parking, lots of sealed ground, traffic problems, poor air quality, etc.).

This kind of reasoning also is the cause that nothing will change in the near future, because no one has the courage to price goods and services according to their true impact. A car on the road is more than just a CO2 emitter - it has to be built, scrapped, requires roads, causes traffic problems, reduces air quality, causes health issues from noise and pollutants, generates micro-particles (from tyres), seals ground (parking spaces), reduces the efficiency and liveability of cities and so on.

Debates about climate and environment need to stop focussing on CO2 emissions and start taking into account the broader impact. That's why EVs are nothing but greenwashing. That's why car traffic as a whole has to be reduced dramatically. Emissions only tell a very small part of the story (here: 12%).

fbn79• 5 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intergovernmental_Panel_on_Cli...

_y5hn• 5 years ago

Can air-conditioners capture CO2, collect fuel while keeping you cool as the world heats up? [1,2,3]

Humans added fossile fuels into the atmosphere and oceans already. This won't disappear completely for a thousand years [4], so we need to find ways to remove it.

[1] https://www.fastcompany.com/90342957/what-if-every-air-condi...

[2] https://duanetilden.com/2019/05/18/using-building-air-condit...

[3] https://www.cbc.ca/radio/quirks/may-4-2019-brain-resuscitati...

[4] https://skepticalscience.com/why-global-warming-can-accelera...

Throwaway1974015• 5 years ago

Anyone who claims to be "following the science" knows that there is no such thing as "code red" in science and lo and behold it's not what the IPCC report says but a UN representative. This is a media and ideologically driven narrative and have absolutely nothing to do with reality yet it's used to scare people who can do absolutely nothing and will only be used to push draconian and anti-human decisions on the energy front.

Anyone who wants to actually understand what the IPCC is finding should go read the actual report and they will find just like all the other IPCC reports that things are not even close to what the media and environmental organizations want you to believe, in fact, the IPCC reports are getting less concerned not more and you will find there is a lot more uncertainty with a lot of metrics.

There is no scientifically demonstrated consequence of climate change we don't know how to deal with today let alone in 80 years from now. Yes the use of fossil fuel have externalities, some of them negative luckily most of them positive.

AstralStorm9• 5 years ago

Yeah? Tell me how you deal with displacement of millions of hungry people and I'll give you a Nobel peace prize. Well, the monetary amount of, we'll do a Fig or something.

clydethefrog3• 5 years ago

I saw the IPCC press conference this morning. I don't recall the scientists getting less concerned, in fact, it was quite the opposite. I am interested in where in the conference or in the report where they claim thing are less severe than they thought.

Also the positive sides seem interesting, could you also link the section in the IPCC report?

Throwaway1974015• 5 years ago

Read the report. It doesn't matter what they say at a press conference which is created to push a certain political agenda.

The only thing that matters is what can be scientifically demonstrated, not just speculated. From that make your own assessment.

lawn• 5 years ago

the IPCC reports are getting less concerned not more

Yeah, no.

Tycho• 5 years ago

1. That the planet is warming and we can accurately measure that

2. That we can accurately model the effect of CO2 on temperature and sea levels

3. That we can accurately model increasing levels of 'bad weather' and disasters based on temperature increase

4. That we can translate these climate forecasts into socioeconomic repercussions well enough to make global policy decisions that should be enforced at great cost

My credulity decreases with each successive layer.

tedk-422• 5 years ago

The nuclear solution has been there this whole time.

Too many solar / wind dummies getting in the way of this being a viable replacement claiming 'oh yeah these green sources can cleanly swap into coal/gas plants' while completely ignoring base load / growth requirements which nuclear can fill without being dependent on external variables.

DrBazza• 5 years ago

The nuclear solution has been there this whole time.

Yes, but it's more subtle than that.

Despite the naysayers, and those that don't accept science and fact, nuclear, is clean, is safe, and is available right now. Deaths due to nuclear power station (construction, accidents,

Amongst the many problems with uranium-based nuclear power is: government legislation and control, government obsession with also producing weapons grade fuel, preventing other countries (Iran, North Korea) from having it, and lastly cost, as a consequence of all of these things.

And because of the weapons grade part, and other reasons, thorium has never been pursued. But China is, https://www.livescience.com/china-creates-new-thorium-reacto..., and it seems like the West is going to be in China's pocket again, if it is successful.

As for fusion. That's still 30 years away as usual.

tedk-422• 5 years ago

Fusion isn't a commercially viable solution I agree.

The focus should be on traditional nuclear fission reactions. Indeed China are leading the development, but the USA still remains the number 1 producer in nuclear power followed by France.

While you do mention governments, it's really a popularity issue that prevents widespread acceptance and adoption.

Similar to COVID vaccinations, people need more education on Nuclear as a safe and real solution to replace carbon based energy generation technologies.

My country Australia is an example of how ineffective governments are in educating people on what the right thing to do is.

You mention cost as an issue, but it's only an issue due to man-made red tape and systems put in place by interest groups to force nuclear out of the public and make it so difficult to attain. People pandered on the same rhetoric about lithium batteries and look where we are now. The economics will work themselves out once things are placed into motion in that direction.

At the end of the day, we should be willing to pay rather than being cheap about the environment and letting natural disaster after natural disaster continue.

jsonne• 5 years ago

If there is anything covid has taught me its that collective action isn't something we can rely on and is a lot more wishful thinking about the state of humanity rather than a sober look at the reality. Governments need to tax CO2 emissions on the business side and pour the money into carbon capture technology in the private space through investment and perhaps some sort of bounty program (you get $x for each ton you capture). The greatest hope I see for the future of humanity is the incentive for a brilliant mind/leader to become the next Bezos/Musk via climate change technology and to do that the incentives have to be setup to make it happen. I'm past hoping for people to do the right things en masse.

Chris20483• 5 years ago

And if a country doesn't, are we willing/able to go to war? Given that some countries will burn down forests that pollute their airspace, and the airspace of their neighbours it's pretty likely there will be those that refuse the tax.

pas3• 5 years ago

Maybe not straight to war, but taxing cross border trade, embargo, etc. are all effective.

geewee• 5 years ago

You smack import taxes on them that correspond to the carbon tax that should have been + 10%. Then they can either do the carbon tax or have their exports made much, much more expensive.

winslett• 5 years ago

Exactly. He said “collective action” won’t work, then called for “collective action” among governments. In these thought analysis, an self-serving person is a good proxy for how any government will behave.

endtime• 5 years ago

Isn't it funny how COVID has caused the government-inclined to want more government and the government-disinclined to want less government? Almost as if this complex issue about which we still don't have all the facts has just made people feel that their prior beliefs have been confirmed? I wonder if there's a phrase for a bias like that.

dTal3• 5 years ago

Are you saying that Covid has had zero net effect on people's political inclinations? That the stark lesson in the importance of coordinated action has only hit home amongst those who were already "government inclined"? Because I don't that's true.

bcrosby95• 5 years ago

Isn't it funny how the "government-disinclined" that don't want to wear masks generally support Florida laws that makes it illegal for businesses to mandate masks?

headmelted7• 5 years ago

This.

A 200% value-added tax on fossil fuels that rises by 10% every year would provide the capital.

EDIT: To clarify, this is not a suggestion to raise capital from the tax as much as it's to raise capital from the use of fossil fuels. It's a suggestion for an increasingly punitive financial cost to force behavioural changes.

throwaway744678• 5 years ago

Wow, nice realistic solution! This will definitely not cause a major financial crisis. You should run for office.

the_lonely_road2• 5 years ago

We have an infinite money printing machine. We don't need access to any capital. That's not what the carbon tax is about. We need to change behavior. We need everyone that uses carbon to pay for its use (including the externalities) so that they stop using it as much as they are. This is why poor people can't be exempt. This is why the rich can't just pay for it. We all need a massive increase in the cost of everything that touches carbon (read everything) so we start driving to the next city once per year instead of every weekend, so that we start eating a BLT once a month instead of twice a week (a lot of heart issues down here in the south for a reason), and the list goes on.

jcfrei• 5 years ago

That's not going to work. A lot of people (and industries) rely on cars to do their jobs. It's a lot of low-income households who rely most on cars because they live in remote areas due to housing costs and have to commute to city centers to find work. Such a tax would cause a huge backlash in large parts of the population in any country and the government who enacts it would be quickly disbanded. We need subsidies to pay for the transitions (pay for changing people's heating, buying them electric cars, etc.). Financing this shouldn't be a problem for most developed countries at the current interest rates.

criddell2• 5 years ago

The chance of the electorate asking their representatives to impose punitive taxes on them has no chance of happening in the US.

mempko7• 5 years ago

We don't need to raise capital. We don't need taxes to pay for the renewable and adaptive work we need to do. Taxes are strictly punitive and saying we need to raise taxes to raise funds is not only wrong, but delays action.

1337shadow2• 5 years ago

Each human being emits 25 tons of CO2 per year just by breathing, should the businesses also be taxed based on their number of employees? People often forget the good parts about the little CO2 increase from the past century, I care a lot about environment (I'm a countryside person) but CO2 - many people forget it is the food of the plants that we need to eat - just takes all the place in the environmental debate and what I think are more important matters such as waste reduction, ocean cleaning, recycling, durable/fixable hardware... I'm hoping for people to do a cost/benefit analysis of the CO2 situation and start thinking rationally and work on what is actually bad for us, not just CO2 greenwhashing bs.

thomaslord• 5 years ago

Obviously there are many other big issues, but the things you've listed don't have a (direct) impact on climate change specifically. There's lots of things going on that damage the environment in various ways and I agree that we should work on those too, but if we can't take action on climate change all that other stuff will sort of take care of itself when society as we know it ceases to exist.

TeMPOraL11• 5 years ago

I feel we need a new, completely separate word for "net emissions", because too often the discussion gets confused around this point.

Each human being emits 25 tons of CO2 per year just by breathing

In almost all cases we care about net emissions. Breathing is net carbon neutral.

What we really need is to tax the net carbon that's added to the "fast carbon loop" (the biosphere). That is, carbon that's being dug up from the ground.

xattt• 5 years ago

Googling this number gives different answers for respiratory CO2 emissions per person. Various forms of wildlife obviously also emits CO2 and historically, this has not contributed to climate change prior to the last century. This is a moot point.

Toutouxc• 5 years ago

Each human being emits 25 tons of CO2 per year just by breathing

I believe you may be off by two orders of magnitude.

toolz• 5 years ago

Indeed, I feel developed countries have grown far too fond of brigades that end in legislation that no one understands but it placates the loudest people enough that no one actually checks to see if legislation even worked.

The vocal dissidents will attach their reputation to said legislation and become an apologist regardless of the legislation's efficacy - so we end up with a legislative body that doesn't have to fix anything, they just have to do something noticeable.

Reminds me of when there was legislation put out that blended gas and biofuel would get tax credits in order to increase biofuel (the greener energy) usage - instead paper plants that used exclusively biofuel started adding gasoline to their biofuel just to get the tax credit and no one cared.

It's my understanding that they attempted to close the loophole in 2009, (4 years after the credit was created), but it wasn't actually closed and no one cares anymore.

davidcbc2• 5 years ago

Everyone always forgets the good part of mass extinction events

heeton• 5 years ago

Yes. Of course, the business would also receive a tax credit for all the CO2 being sequestered by employees eating food. /s

Also, your 25 tons number is wildly wrong. It's simple to work it out on the back of an envelope:

CO2 is a produced from O2 and sources of carbon in your food. C + O2 = CO2

The molecular mass of the Carbon in CO2 is 12, the total molelcular weight of CO2 is 44. So, 27% of the mass of the CO2 you breath out ultimately comes from your food.

25 tonnes of CO2 being breathed out a year would imply 18.5kg of Carbon being consumed per day.

You must be hitting leg day hard.

bbddg• 5 years ago

"Durable/fixable hardware" is a more important matter than climate change? Only on hackernews folks...

1propionyl• 5 years ago

The greatest hope I see for the future of humanity is the incentive for a brilliant mind/leader to become the next Bezos/Musk via climate change technology
...isn't something we can rely on and is a lot more wishful thinking about the state of humanity rather than a sober look at the reality.

I don't mean for this to sound too critical but how do you square these two concepts?

The idea of a great inventor/scientist/theorist is to me kind of obsolete. It existed in a time of much more low-hanging fruit but today most scientific/theoretic progress is slow and the collective result of many groups slow, focused, and methodical work. Even before, even the greats stood on the shoulders of myriad giants.

The idea of hoping for a "great leader" who is solely capable of "fixing" things is to my mind a very concerning and alarming idea.

Even if you may not think that... the idea that "one good idea" is enough to solve our problems immediately, or even just quickly enough, feels like escapism to me. No matter how good of an engineering solution is achieved there will be a slow and painful process of rolling it out fraught with cultural and political questions. It doesn't behoove us to push that off, even if the engineering questions feel more essential. It's an inevitable problem. We should consider it earlier rather than later.

toomanyducks• 5 years ago

Came here to say this. I also want to add that there are no solutions with the West's current consumption habits. If we all switch to electric cars today, oil might be doing okay, but we'll still be exploiting workers and raiding resources in environmentally costly lithium mines. This is not a technical issue. This is a political issue. The question we should be asking is how we reduce our consumption and how to increase our reciprocity with the environment, not at an individual level, but at a systemic and societal level. And here's the hard part: this isn't done through innovation. This is done through reducing the capitalist pressures to consume and produce. This is driven locally, slowly, and radically by pushing back against what capitalism has done.

galangalalgol• 5 years ago

In democratic nations, government actions are collective action, and so they have the same problem. In non-democratic nations those in charge are often the beneficiaries of the status quo. I'm not hopeful for government action either. People want a quick fix with little loss in living standard and few changes. That tells me that either we won't notice the incremental changes enough to act, and we'll ride this to the end, or we'll wake up and suddenly fund a massive but cheap climate engineering project that will work, but have unintended consequences, like iron fertilization of the oceans for albedo impacts. Worst case we go snowball earth and kill everything instead of just ourselves.

bko6• 5 years ago

Believe it or not, western countries have reduced carbon emissions over the last ~15 years, in both absolute and per capita terms (despite a growing population). The only countries that are growing their carbon emissions are developing countries; mainly China, India and Russia.

China is particularly troubling since they make up 28% of all emissions (US is 15%) and they have both a growing population and growing emissions per capita.

And it's not that China is producing emissions during manufacturing goods the entire world consumes. Take a look at "China: Consumption-based accounting: how do emissions compare when we adjust for trade?" and you'll see ~90% of their emissions are for consumption [2]

Annual consumption-based emissions are domestic emissions adjusted for trade. If a country imports goods the CO₂ emissions needed to produce such goods are added to its domestic emissions; if it exports goods then this is subtracted.

2018 had 8.96 bn carbon tons in consumption out of a total of 9.96 bn total tons (~90% consumption)

The good news is that China is good at collective action. The bad news is, they're China.

[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/183943/us-carbon-dioxide...

[1] https://www.ucsusa.org/resources/each-countrys-share-co2-emi...

[2] https://ourworldindata.org/co2/country/china

eganist• 5 years ago

I'm looking at how China's currently pummeling their tech sector for the sake of the party* and am hoping that they'll apply the same decisioning to their emissions-heavy industries as well.

Doubt it'll happen, but I can be wishful with my thoughts.

----

* https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/China-tech/China-s-tech-cra...

vlkr• 5 years ago

China is less troubling than US if you look at per capita numbers: US 15.52, China 7.38 tons of CO2

cjbenedikt• 5 years ago

"China is particularly troubling since they make up 28% of all emissions (US is 15%) and they have both a growing population and growing emissions per capita" If you calculate emissions per capita (US 350m - China 1b) then the US still beats China handily...just saying.

lovemenot• 5 years ago

> The bad news is, they're China.

Not sure what your point is here, but whatever it may be, I feel sure it is not helpful wrt to climate policy in the world's largest emitter. If you have some other axe to grind, maybe take it elsewhere.

China is dominant in industries that are currently significant in renewables. Especially solar PV. They already have the largest EV fleet, including buses.

The next industry to really matter will be energy storage. China is positioning to dominate in batteries too. If they do, good luck to them. Not because I love everything about China, but because somebody needs to scale this and if China does, then that's good for energy transition.

> they have a growing population

Currently about +0.3% per annum. Which puts them around the lower 30th percentile of countries by population growth.

China is certainly large, but it is not growing much and should soon be shrinking.

kumarvvr8• 5 years ago

The only countries that are growing their carbon emissions are developing countries; mainly China, India and Russia

Developed nations have polluted the planet for decades, with highest rates of energy consumption per capita. They have failed to build systems and processess that enables sustainable living. They have lived their excess and now lecture the world that their "90% of emissions are from consumption"

One group of people have taken the world for granted. Now want everyone else to bear the cost. Typical.

alexgmcm4• 5 years ago

But how much of this is due to Western nations essentially outsourcing emissions to China by shifting manufacturing etc. there?

The per-capita emissions are important because countries with high per-capita emissions likely have a lot of low-hanging fruit.

I mean reducing per-capita emissions in the USA could be done by improving public transport etc. whereas in China it would likely be condemning millions of people to poverty.

agent3274• 5 years ago

The West lowered their CO2 production by moving all manufacturing to China, so this isn't too surprising. Also, China, like most of the world except for Afrika, has a shrinking population (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birth_rate).

China needs to start building nuclear power plants and replace all those coal plants.

joshgree88• 5 years ago

We have decreased ours and they have increased theirs but we are still buying more and more shit from them - their emissions are our emissions - while the demand side exists the supply will too - it will just be supplied from somewhere else...

mytailorisrich10• 5 years ago

China is particularly troubling since they make up 28% of all emissions (US is 15%) and they have both a growing population and growing emissions per capita.

That is just providing proof that we cannot eradicate poverty on the planet without destroying it in the process with 8 billion human beings. And this is just CO2 emissions but the issue is with consumption of resources in general: What is happening is simply that consumption of resources increases when people are lifted out of poverty (quite obviously since that's pretty much poverty means).

The only sustainable way for human development is to bring global population down at the same time at global standard of living increases.

failuser• 5 years ago

I’m pretty sure Russia is still way below (50%) the 1990 levels though.

adolph4• 5 years ago

China's population will age out soon enough and with that their emissions should reduce.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1101677/population-distr...

keewee76• 5 years ago

Chinese rise in emissions is because of Western manufacturing.

Russian rise in emissions is because of Western European need for heating.

If we stop outsourcing manufacturing to China and stop buying gas from Russia their emissions will also fall.

But India and Africa are significantly poorer than China and Russia.

India and Africa should be allowed to emit CO2 for the next two decades or they will remain poor forever.

Iwan-Zotow2• 5 years ago

mainly China, India and Russia.

nope, not Russia

Russia is one of the few countries building nuclear.

"A share of nuclear power plants (branches of Rosenergoatom Concern, part of ROSATOM’s Electric Power Division) in the energy mix of Russia was 20.28% in 2020. In 2019, this indicator was 19.04%."

"CO2 emissions decreased by -2.13% over the previous year (2015), representing a decrease by -36,108,200 tons over 2015, when CO2 emissions were 1,698,007,500 tons. CO2 emissions per capita in the Russian Federation are equivalent to 11.44 tons per person (based on a population of 145,275,383 in 2016), a decrease by -0.27% over the figure of 11.71 CO2 tons per person registered in 2015; this represents a change of -2.3% in CO2 emissions per capita."

keewee76• 5 years ago

Blaming China and India is the typical Republican talking point about climate change.

There is a reason Noam Chomsky has called the Republican party the most dangerous organization in the world because of how they promote Western inaction on climate change.

robinsoh• 5 years ago

Believe it or not, western countries have reduced carbon emissions over the last ~15 years, in both absolute and per capita terms (despite a growing population). The only countries that are growing their carbon emissions are developing countries; mainly China, India and Russia.

USA: 15.50 metric tons (2016) India: 1.82 metric tons (2016)

Source: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EN.ATM.CO2E.PC?location...

One American is emitting 15 Indians worth of carbon emissions.

In terms of your claim that "western countries have reduced carbon emissions" it is important to realize that increasingly developed countries have been outsourcing most of their high polluting industries. https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2017/4/18/1533104...

"During the early 2000s, these “emissions transfers” were growing at a stunning pace, nearly 11 percent per year, as more and more Western manufacturing was shifting to Asia. Factories making computers, electronics, apparel, and furniture would close in the US, open up in China, and then ship their products back home to the US. Americans got the goods; China got the pollution (and the jobs)."

kergonath2• 5 years ago

China is particularly troubling since they make up 28% of all emissions (US is 15%) and they have both a growing population and growing emissions per capita.

You seem to have discovered that the lifestyle of western countries is unsustainable (and the US is particularly bad). It does not make it China's fault.

Pokepokalypse• 5 years ago

believe it or not, this is a WHOLE WORLD problem.

A "western country" can not "conveniently" cut their carbon emissions, and still buy shit manufactured overseas, and pretend everything is hunkey-dorey.

oakfr2• 5 years ago

Interestingly, covid seems to have taught me the opposite. When covid hit, the time-to-market of a new vaccine was 10-15 years. The collective action of governments divided this number literally by ten. Despite all the bad words we've heard about bad policies and mistakes done by governments, I think we should be proud of what humankind has achieved during covid (granted, some governments have done and still do very poorly but let's not enter this kind of discussion).

As a consequence, I am quite optimistic about what we could do if the effects of climate chang were as obvious as those of covid (which unfortunately is not the case). And in that respect, I believe in both government action and the intervention of brilliant minds/leaders. We'll need (and have) both.

Cosmin_C2• 5 years ago

The collective actions of governments did nothing there. What happened is we got exceedingly lucky the research was already there for 30-odd years and interested parties pumped money into it like there was no tomorrow.

Most governments since COVID started faffed about endlessly and took really poor measures all around for what it looked like eternity (with a few notable exceptions). Eventually they got around getting it half-right and here we are, massive death tolls that could have probably been avoided with earlier lockdowns, properly enforced mask wearing and so on.

At the same time a lot of countries where education has been and is poor are full with people who eschieve vaccination for the dumbest reasons possible and see in this manifestations of their freedoms (of spreading further a potentially deadly disease).

This pandemic brought the worst out of people and in a few situations the best.

No, human kind cannot rely on collective actions because human beings are way too selfish to do something for the greater good. And we can see it because we are in this point in time with climate change, the final hour - and still there are a LOT of people denying climate change just as there are people denying COVID is a problem.

namelessoracle• 5 years ago

One of the major things government did to get the covid vaccine out faster was... wait for it .... be LESS involved and not apply rules and regulations they normally do.

kumarvvr8• 5 years ago

This is what corporations have done to the society at large. They raped the idea of critical thought.

When you see large corporations putting money into something, it is 100% a for profit venture. Capitalism has taught them so.

No, the world did not come together, not with trump shouting the virus is "fake" at the top of his voice.

Corporations saw an opportunity, grabbed it. The opportunity is lax regulations in the hurry to get out the vaccine.

Also, this specific type of virus was being researched and vaccine formulations were being done at the time of the outbreak.

nradov3• 5 years ago

In particular Operation Warp Speed significantly accelerated the pace of vaccine mass production by removing the financial risk for pharmaceutical companies.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Warp_Speed?wprov=sfl...

ErikVandeWater2• 5 years ago

The efficacy of the vaccines is really being called into question though. Gibraltar and Iceland are getting more cases after being 99 and 75% respectively. Iceland is actually getting record cases.

The government did very little to protect the most vulnerable and chose actions that massively disrupted people's lives. Shutting down schools was probably the most egregious of the many mistakes.

Bodell• 5 years ago

Here’s a long article addressing this idea specifically. Though this person was chastised quite brutally for being “negative”.

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/what-if-w...

syshum3• 5 years ago

> collective action isn't something we can rely on

hmmm

>Governments need to

You do understand that government is collective action, and you should not rely on it right?

tax CO2 emissions on the business side

I am still opposed to Co2 taxation in most of the implementations proposed. it ends up just creating perverse incentives for companies to game the system, Just look at how destructive ewaste regulations have been for the environment were you have companies preventing the repair of their products to ensure they get "credit" for the destruction (aka recycle) of reparable electrics that then simply end up in some 3rd world nation for children to pick through

I just cation that you need to fully look at the unintended consequences of taxation and government regulation, the road to hell is paves with good intentions. If you think the world has problems, what until you see government solutions to those problems...

cal5k• 5 years ago

Bingo. Carbon taxes in Canada really function as yet another power grab, with the federal government promising to rebate the taxes back to Canadians.

In effect it's a case of "Just trust us with the money... we promise we'll give it back", which will obviously change as soon as more money is needed to fuel their insatiable appetite for spending. It's not even a question of "if", it's "when".

In practice, this means much higher home heating costs in areas where there aren't practical alternatives, higher transportation costs, higher costs for food production, and pretty much price inflation on any consumer goods that are transported by road, rail, or air... which is all of them.

It makes Canadian industry less competitive than ever at a time when GDP per capita is lagging badly behind the US.

corey_moncure• 5 years ago

We already have an ideal carbon capture technology optimized by Nature Inc. through a state of the art evolutionary algorithm running trillions of parallel processes for billions of years. It's called Trees (TM). With Trees (TM) the CO2 emissions problem has a simple two step solution that anyone can accomplish with ease:

1) Stop cutting down Trees

2) Plant more Trees

That's it. The end. Problem solved.

msandford• 5 years ago

If you want to get extra fancy, there's a different step 1.

1a) Cut down lots of trees 1b) Turn them into charcoal 1c) Bury the charcoal in agricultural land, sequestering the carbon and increasing yields

wongarsu• 5 years ago

To offset our entire current greenhouse gas emissions with trees alone, we would have to increase earth's total plant biomass by 10% each year.

Given how slow most types of trees grow that seems completely unfeasible unless we give up most meat (taking space that we now use for growing animal feed).

(Yes, we have a lot of space in the desert, but studies show limited effect on global warming from planting anything there once you account for how well sand reflects heat back into space).

NonContro• 5 years ago

That's not really accurate, since the trees will biodegrade at the end of their lifecycle.

We would need to recreate the Azolla Event: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azolla_event

Or even the Carboniferous period where microbes could not digest lignin and cellulose: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carboniferous

Which is impossible. We simply need to stop digging fossil fuels out of the ground in order to burn them.

mempko7• 5 years ago

The nasty thing about global warming is that it's weakening the jet stream. This causes places to one year have crazy amounts of years and the next drought. The rainy years, things grow like crazy! Lots of growth. On drought all that new growth dries up and is tinder for forest fires.

We need more trees for sure, but at the same time would would need to put huge efforts in forest fire prevention otherwise poof, all that hard work trees do sequestering CO2 literally goes up in smoke.

pmorici• 5 years ago

Isn’t Musk the climate change guy you are looking for. He’s done more to advance the cause of sustainable energy than perhaps anyone.

verytrivial2• 5 years ago

He gives electric transportation and storage with one hand, and takes away with the promise of literally thousand of ultra-low-efficiency fuel (methane) burning rocket launches with the other.

yoavm• 5 years ago

Right, especially when he put $1.5b in Bitcoin.

f6v3• 5 years ago

A "climate change guy" would be someone who gets everyone to use a train or a bus, not a premium sedan.

thrwyoilarticle• 5 years ago

He's built and sold millions of cars. That's pollution.

f6v3• 5 years ago

Governments need to tax CO2 emissions on the business side

Europe is so taxed I can't even fart without paying to the government. Don't get me wrong, I get a lot for what I pay, but it's borderline too much.

justsid2• 5 years ago

Tough luck everyone, OP said he already pays too many taxes, so unfortunately climate action has to go on the back burner. But good news, at least while we are still alive he won’t feel like the government is taking took much.

rubyist5eva• 5 years ago

Ah, so even more cronyism on the backs of taxpayers than there already is. Perfect plan!

mempko7• 5 years ago

This! People really don't understand that we have plenty of authoritarianism already and it's that authoritarianism is what got us here.

If Musk could have invented something to solve climate change, you think we would still be spending so much time trying to get off the planet?

jdavis703• 5 years ago

COVID-19 was a program of systemic action. The US had lockdowns, mask mandates and even soft vaccine mandates. None of this was enough to crush the virus. Why? Because systems are made of individuals who will decide whether or not they want to collaborate on solving a problem.

asd4232• 5 years ago

That's why individuals should not have the freedom of choice. China's actions against the virus proved rather effective because the government actually has authority there. Western democracy is clearly weak when it comes to dealing with crisis of any kind.

throw0101a• 5 years ago

None of this was enough to crush the virus. Why? Because systems are made of individuals who will decide whether or not they want to collaborate on solving a problem.

Many of the individuals currently refusing vaccines in the US didn't just decide, there was an active effort made to convince them not to get one:

Had the US continued to vaccinate in the summer at the same rate as in the spring, the US would be near herd immunity by now. It took a lot of work by powerful people and institutions to prevent that outcome. It didn't just *happen.* It was *done.*

* https://twitter.com/davidfrum/status/1416215130656882688

COVID vaccine refusal was not some unprompted, spontaneous reaction among pro-Trump Americans. It was manufactured: first as part of a larger program of denial to cover for Trump's pandemic failures; then after Trump lost, in order to stoke feelings of victimhood and persecution.

* https://twitter.com/davidfrum/status/1416408864027824131

People think that either (a) COVID itself is a hoax or not that bad, or (b) that the vaccines are a hoax:

* https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-57958358

* https://www.montgomeryadvertiser.com/story/news/2021/07/23/a...

These beliefs are highly correlated with where you sit on the political spectrum in the US, and probably your primary news sources.

newbamboo• 5 years ago

Bingo.

It’s great folly to think climate change can be solved by “waking people up” and that whole endeavor probably just makes things worse. It becomes a red/blue issue where nearly half the population take opposing sides, like mindless zombies. A solution, if we are to find one, will not come from the many but from the few, maybe just a single person or invention. Emerging economies pollute, necessarily. That’s the real problem. Surely it feels good to some people to say “I told you so!”, to see oneself on some noble crusade to enlighten the masses about the troubles that are to come. But it’s not at all productive in fact it’s the opposite. Not everyone has the ears to hear. The good side has to accept that sad truth and give up on the political squabbling. Spend energy thinking about solutions that don’t require building consensus with the guys in jack up trucks and the poor third world nations that pollute to survive.

mempko7• 5 years ago

The solution is not authoritarianism. We have plenty of that now and got here because of that. We have not just governmental authoritarianism, but also in business. In fact, business authoritarianism is arguably why we are here.

sailingparrot• 5 years ago

A solution, if we are to find one, will not come from the many but from the few, maybe just a single person or invention.

This is going to sound harsh, but to me this argument seems like a mental contortion to absolve yourself from doing anything and not feel bad about it.

In the past 20 years we have seen significant progress in slowing down, or even reducing for some countries, the emission of CO2. It is not enough, but it's definitely significant. This happened thanks to the many, via awareness campaign and political pressure. And this bought us some precious time.

Even if you truly believe the solution will come from a Messiah appearing with a techno-miracle, you should still push to wake people up: The more people are truly aware of the problem, the more will be interested in working in climate-related tech, giving us more chance for "that single invention" to appear. And you also want the mass to be enlightened about this to continue trying to slow down the train, giving more time for technological breakthrough to appear before we are completely screwed.

mempko7• 5 years ago

What did Musk or Bezos build? What did they invent? Nothing. Everything built and invented was by their workers. The success of Amazon and SpaceX/Tesla is a form of collective action. The collective action of employees, and the collective action of government policy which provided the playground that Bezos and Musk play in.

hpkuarg• 5 years ago

Good leaders make for good collective action.

dredmorbius10• 5 years ago

This is a frequent but weak argument.

If you've ever tried to organise a group lunch for a party of more than two, you've got some sense of how difficult it is to orchestrate group activities.

Whatever you think of Musk and Bezos, and I'm not much of a fan of either, they've both led organisations to transformational accomplishments.

That in itself is something, notable, and has been recognised throughout history.

The question of whether those accomplishements are good or worthwhile, or how reward and profit should be allocated, are separate ones.

But your object is a lazy and tired one.

phkahler• 5 years ago

> Governments need to tax CO2 emissions on the business side...

I'd say its easier to tax those who extract carbon from the ground (or import it). Far fewer companies.

(for this post I'm assuming the goal to reduce CO2 emissions is correct)

gruez10• 5 years ago

You probably need a mix, because "extract carbon from the ground" wouldn't work for other sources (eg. methane or cement production).

wutbrodo4• 5 years ago

Governments need to tax CO2 emissions on the business side and pour the money into carbon capture technology in the private space through investment and perhaps some sort of bounty program

Unfortunately, getting this proposed, passed without mutilation, and enforced is also a collective action problem.

Though I agree with your implied point that decentralized solutions should be the baseline, especially as they don't preclude coordinated action if that somehow becomes possible. To do otherwise is to pointlessly leave a powerful, relatively easy-to-deploy policy tool on the table for essentially religious reasons.

Unfortunately, there's a pretty powerful contingent of superstitious economic illiterates in our politics that see market-based solutions as automatically suspect, in the same way that there are powerful scientific illiterates that see nuclear as "unclean" (which is basically "unholy" laundered by modernity).

I'm past hoping for people to do the right things en masse

What scares me is that there doesn't even seem to be a constituency for bold action on climate. I used to at least be comforted by the political left carrying the torch, but the most recent iteration of the party has a "climate policy" that just dresses up the same old unrelated economic wishlist in climate rhetoric like a skinsuit (again, any proposal that doesn't emphasize nuclear is unserious; the Green New Deal explicitly rejects it)

amanaplanacanal12• 5 years ago

In the US, I expect solar and wind plus storage is cheaper than nuclear. It doesn’t really matter though, if you put high enough taxes on carbon the market will sort it out. The government shouldn’t be picking individual technologies, because they are likely to fuck it up.

TOGoS2• 5 years ago

What scares me is that there doesn't even seem to be a constituency for bold action on climate. I used to at least be comforted by the political left carrying the torch, but the most recent iteration of the party has a "climate policy" that just dresses up the same old unrelated economic wishlist in climate rhetoric like a skinsuit

The left != the party (by which I assume you mean the Democrats)

A sizeable fraction of the population understands that climate change is an enormous problem and when polled has said solving it should be a priority (no numbers or poll link offhand, sorry). They are also routinely told that they are terrible people if they don't support the party that at least acknowledges climate change in their rhetoric over the one that for all I can tell is 100% committed to turning the planet into one big oil spill.

Don't confuse the actions of the politicians with what the populace actually cares about. Something like 70% wants universal government-run healthcare (yeah, even the people who watch Fox news[1]) but even with Democratic majorities in congress the politicians can't seem to scrounge the two craps to even pretend like they want to make it happen.

[1] https://youtu.be/zmlL8SRrImQ

skyfaller• 5 years ago

I used to think as you do about nuclear, but I've become convinced that old nuclear technology is too expensive to compete with renewables OR fossil fuels, and new nuclear technology cannot scale up enough to matter before 2050 (when the worst effects of climate change will either have been averted or made inevitable).

- https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2018/7/11/1755564...

- https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/10/201005112141.h...

I still absolutely believe it is worth investing in nuclear just in case I'm wrong, and it would be nice to explore the universe later using e.g. cold fusion if our civilization survives this crisis, but I do not think we should rely on or expect nuclear power to make any significant contribution to addressing the climate crisis on the very tight timeline necessary.

minikites• 5 years ago

the next Bezos/Musk via climate change technology

We have the technology and expertise now, we just choose not to use it.

lotsofpulp3• 5 years ago

What technology has the convenience and cheapness of fossil fuels? The versatility and strength of plastics, the power of diesel, and the portability and ease of use of all the fossil fuels?

anyonecancode2• 5 years ago

If there is anything covid has taught me its that collective action isn't something we can rely on and is a lot more wishful thinking about the state of humanity rather than a sober look at the reality.

If climate change plays out the way the pandemic has, I think we will have collective action, but it'll be uneven and fall short. We'll avoid the most dire outcomes, but blow right past acceptable outcomes. Many, many will die who could have been saved, the cost will be enormous, but we'll successfully avoid the absolute worst cases. I don't know if we call that a successful failure or a failed success.

BoxOfRain• 5 years ago

If the pandemic is anything to go by, the collective action will harm the common people (especially the poor) while the elites get to play by entirely separate rules! While there's no doubt that sacrifices in quality of life are going to have to be made I think it's very important that the elites are seen to suffer as much as the common man otherwise the inevitable result will be increasingly ungovernable countries.

daxfohl3• 5 years ago

It'll play out like the recycling/renewables industry. Some people will do things that are easy and catchy, there will be some net gains, but much of it will eventually turn to barely break-even or worse, like the unsustainable single-stream recycling or trendy-but-usually-fails-before-breaking-even things like reusable straws.

The world is just going to change and we'll either figure out how to live with it (probably) or we won't (if there's a mass biome collapse that leaves us foodless, unless we can generate 9B people's worth of food from bacteria or something).

robomartin12• 5 years ago

I'm past hoping for people to do the right things en masse.

Getting people behind goals with long timelines is pretty much impossible. As you said, the pandemic demonstrated (and continues to demonstrate) how we behave and think.

Governments need to tax CO2 emissions on the business side and pour the money into carbon capture technology

No. Sorry. You are buying into propaganda.

Put simply: We (humanity) cannot do a thing about atmospheric CO2 concentration.

This is a planetary-scale problem requiring resources and energy over tens of thousands of years, not a few dozen. It is unreasonable to think we can actually affect a planetary-scale problem in anything approaching a human time scale. Yet this is exactly what we are being sold. We are far more likely to kill all life on earth than to fix atmospheric CO2 concentration.

This is NOT a guess on my part. This conclusion is well supported by data going back 800,000 years. The science is there and this conclusion has already been reached. The problem is that the issue of climate change has been politicized to the point where --much as is the case with certain aspects of the pandemic-- the scientific truth does not matter.

Most intelligent people with a modicum of science coursework are perfectly equipped to understand this conclusion. The problem is in pulling people away from what has effectively become indoctrination to have them take a few minutes to actually exercise critical thinking.

What if I told you a high school kid with basic math skill could understand this conclusion?

How many of those reading this would be open-minded enough to say: "OK. Show me. I am willing to do the work in the interest of learning if what I am have been led to believe is wrong.". In my experience people would rather stick to their beliefs, punitively issue a down-vote and move on rather than understand. In this way one is no different from anti-vaxers.

OK, so a few of you are interested in confirming this claim. Good news. It's easy.

Here's the first and simplest claim to confirm:

If all of humanity left the planet today and all of our technology was shutdown, it would take somewhere in the order of 50,000 years for atmospheric CO2 to drop 100 ppm.

How do you confirm this?

What if we had atmospheric CO2 data from before humanity industrialized to the point of being relevant?

We do! We have 800,000 years of very accurate atmospheric CO2 data extracted from ice core samples. Here it is:

Here's that graph:

https://cdiac.ess-dive.lbl.gov/images/air_bubbles_historical...

And the data:

https://cdiac.ess-dive.lbl.gov/trends/co2/ice_core_co2.html

You then fit straight lines to the graph in order to determine the rate of change of both atmospheric CO2 accumulation and decline. Here are my lines for the decline portion of the data:

https://imgur.com/37AKa8L

Looking at it in rough strokes, it looks like it took, on average, somewhere around 25,000 years for a 100 ppm increase and, say, 50,000 years for a corresponding 100 ppm decrease. In some cases it took twice that time, I am just trying to generalize.

The planet did this entirely on its own...because we were not around or we were insignificant during this time period.

This is extremely valuable data and an equally valuable conclusion because it establishes an important baseline:

BASELINE: If humanity LEFT THE PLANET tomorrow, it would take about 50,000 years for a reduction of about 100 ppm in atmospheric CO2.

I'll repeat that: If we left the planet and all of our technology was shut down, you are looking at a minimum of 50,000 years for a meaningful "save the planet" change in CO2 concentration.

At this point the question becomes glaringly obvious:

How does anything LESS than leaving the planet even make a dent on CO2 at a human time scale?

Because of the baseline revealed by this data we know, without any doubt, that anything less than leaving the planet cannot possibly delivery a faster rate of change, a faster decline than 100 ppm in 50,000 years. It's a planetary-scale problem that requires planetary-scale time.

Any solution proposed by anyone must pass the simplest test: How is that more than humanity leaving the planet?

Solar panels all over the planet? How is that MORE than leaving the planet?

A billion electric vehicles? Same question.

No more fossil fuels? Nope.

In fact, Google Research boldly set out to show the world that a full migration to renewable energy sources could address the issue. To their credit, when they discovered just how wrong they were, they published the data. In this charged environment these researchers deserve a ton of respect. They went in --and say so themselves-- with a position of believing that renewables could save the planet. What they discovered instead was precisely what I understood through the simple exercise on this graph, that this is an impossibility. Their methodology was different from mine, the result was the same.

Here's that paper, it is well worth reading:

https://storage.googleapis.com/pub-tools-public-publication-...

From the paper:

"we had shared the attitude of many stalwart environmentalists: We felt that with steady improvements to today’s renewable energy technologies, our society could stave off catastrophic climate change. We now know that to be a false hope"

"Trying to combat climate change exclusively with today’s renewable energy technologies simply won’t work"

"if all power plants and industrial facilities switch over to zero-carbon energy sources right now, we’ll still be left with a ruinous amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. It would take centuries for atmospheric levels to return to normal"

"<snip> to see whether a 55 percent emission cut by 2050 would bring the world back below that 350-ppm threshold. Our calculations revealed otherwise. Even if every renewable energy technology advanced as quickly as imagined and they were all applied globally, atmospheric CO2 levels wouldn’t just remain above 350 ppm; they would continue to rise exponentially due to continued fossil fuel use."

"Suppose for a moment that <snip> we had found cheap renewable energy technologies that could gradually replace all the world’s coal plants <snip> Even if that dream had come to pass, it still wouldn’t have solved climate change. This realization was frankly shocking"

Well worth reading. Like I said, these guys deserve a ton of respect for effectively saying "we were wrong, and here's why".

Why aren't we talking about this AT ALL?

This is reality. Not what we are being told by politicians and zealots.

Climate change has become a religion or a cult and science has been left far behind. Here are two ways to come to the same general conclusion. One uses a super-simple look at 800,000 years of atmospheric CO2 data. The other took a detailed look at mathematical climate and other models. The conclusion was the same: We can cover the planet with renewable energy sources and do NOTHING to atmospheric CO2, or worse.

I've been trying to elevate this to some level of consciousness here on HN any time the topic comes-up. It is often met with a pile of downvotes and attacks. Because, of course, they "know", even though none of the detractors bothered to devote even 1% of the time I have trying to understand reality in a sea of nonsense.

Frankly, I am not sure what else to do. In this charged political climate it is actually dangerous to stick your neck out too far. I am not denying climate change, I am simply saying "the emperor has no clothes" to all the nonsense we seem to be told to focus on.

I think we need to learn to live with whatever is coming. We can't do a thing about it. New industries will sprout to help us manage it. The planet will deal (and is dealing) with CO2 as it has for millions of years.

And that's the other set of questions that the graphs and some research can answer:

How did CO2 increase when humanity was not around to muck it up?

Continental scale forest fires burning for 25,000 years as well as other sources of CO2. The fires in CA right now are contributing more CO2 than (informed conjecture) the entire fleet of internal combustion vehicles in California, if not the country. It is hubris to think we can counter this and "save the planet". Truly laughable in some sense.

How did the planet bring it down?

Rain, storms, cyclones, hurricanes, and the regrowth of vegetation over 50,000+ years.

So, we have to learn to deal with changing weather patterns and perhaps start helping the planet a tiny bit by planting trees. Judiciously though, because more trees could also mean more fuel to burn. In other words, we could, if not careful, actually increase CO2 if we plant a billion trees and create the conditions for the mother of all forest fires.

Please push for promoting an understanding of the reality we are living rather than a the fantasy of thinking we can actually affect planetary-scale problems. We need to apply our minds, investment and effort towards transitioning into a high CO2 future rather than a fantasy that says we can control how an entire planetary ecosystem works in 50 years. It would be like believing we can "install" an atmosphere on Mars in 50 years. Yeah. Pretty crazy if you ask me.

gilbetron5• 5 years ago

This is a really poor take. At no point in our history is there anything approaching a sudden cessation of human industry and activity that is core to your thought experiment. You are comparing geologic, astronomical, and evolutionary changes that are incredibly gradual for the most part when compared to human activity. By using your exact same logic I can easily "prove" that the massive increase in CO2 that has happened in the past 150 years is impossible.

Your analogy is exactly like saying that since the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_Tunnel_State_Park took a million years to form, it's impossible for humanity to create 1000 foot tunnel in less than a million years.

notabee2• 5 years ago

1. Humans have managed to fundamentally alter the global climate on a timescale of about 150 years.

2. Humans are incapable of fundamentally altering the climate on any significant scale compared to natural processes.

Pick one.

Yes, feedbacks can outpace what we're already emitting. Yes, we're in a dire situation that is going to take radical innovation and a huge surplus of zero carbon energy to basically reverse the exothermic process we used to burn millions of years of stored carbon with an endothermic process to draw it back down. But this doomer stuff isn't helpful. Anything we do to mitigate the rise of greenhouse gases, even if it is not a complete reversal (that's pretty much off the table) will give us time to innovate and change the outcome from extinction-level catastrophic to merely a drastic change in our way of life. Every bit counts. Trees, BECCs, direct air carbon capture, lowering emissions, albedo alteration, etc. The sad thing is I don't think you've researched that thoroughly, you're only got the parade of some scary facts. Indulging in overwhelming doom is just another emotional coping strategy to avoid responsibility, the same as outright denial.

istorical3• 5 years ago

You seem to be drawing no distinction between the following two possible outcomes:

1. Slow carbon emissions now despite the incredible amount we've already added and hope that the damage we've done is not enough to completely ruin the planet.

2. Do nothing and let emissions accelerate even further, create an even bigger problem than we've already created. Gamble to an even greater extent with our future.

Where in your incredibly long essay have you provided any reason to believe option 2 is better than option 1?

As far as I can tell, all you've done is prove we can't get back to pre-industrial levels quickly just by stopping emissions today. So what?

Who ever said the goal was to get back to pre-industrial levels? I think all climate science believers aim to do is reduce the extent of this incredible gamble and unintended experiment humanity has undertaken. Instead of gambling on a 1% odds of survival slot machine, climate scientists want to slow down and gamble on a 10% odds of survival slot machine. No one ever said we could move that probability back to 100% odds of survival slot machine.

To me your post comes across like someone on the Titanic saying 'Hey guys, we've looked at the data and situation, stop thinking these 20 lifeboats will be able to rescue us. Just give up.' when there are some people arguing that the ship isn't sinking at all, and others trying to quickly come up with ways to create more impromptu lifeboats, trying to figure out how to stop the ship from sinking, or trying to urge those that they can to get in the lifeboats, despite the fact some will still die. At the end of the day your post just encourages those who don't think the ship is sinking or those that think there's no point to try getting in a lifeboat or creating a new one out of furniture to just go back down below deck and listen to the violinists for another hour before drowning.

glogla2• 5 years ago

Seeing the Apple thing and the Australis thing and the EU thing, I'm happy humanity will kill itself by Climate Change.

We have built systems that make it impossible for evil to fail, it will always succeed. You can see it popping up everywhere - loss of privacy, climate change denialism, covid denialism, fascism everywhere, chinese extermination camps, ...

We will all die out and it is a good thing. We will all suffer terribly and that's good, we deserve that too.

joshmarlow• 5 years ago

Even assuming your take is right and humanity deserves the fate we're actively constructing, it's not just our fate. We're a hardy and clever species - by the time we are extinct from climate change, it'll be a hard environment for mammals in general. Even if you believe we deserve to go, it's still worth trying to fix things for those who can't.

serverholic• 5 years ago

This is why libertarianism doesn't work. Some things need a central authority to enforce it.

ttiurani2• 5 years ago

I'm past hoping for people to do the right things en masse.

This isn't either or: we can heavily incentivize creating climate change tech AND drive for a systemic change. It is IMO immoral to just give up on a sustainable political solution because it is hard: huge changes have happened in the past and can happen again.

fangorn• 5 years ago

Too much of a good thing... I can picture a scenario, admittedly science fiction for now, when carbon capture is so lucrative it's removed to an extent plants don't have enough of it. Not to say carbon capture is bad, just that humans + greed = unintended consequences, every time.

jpfed• 5 years ago

As a programmer, I empathize with the impulse to go with the elegant, unified solution of carbon taxes.

The problem is that everybody gets hurt, in at least a short-term sense, by a carbon tax. And yes, a lot of people will understand that this is a necessary pain. But all the worst carbon offenders that might campaign against a climate policy would get hurt by the same thing at the same time, so they would provide a large lobbying voice to weaken or destroy what's hurting them (this example is about carbon taxes, but really any sort of universal punitive measure) as a policy.

Politically, punishments will remain effective for longer if they are targeted so that the opposition to them remains divided. It _might_ help if carbon taxes could be adopted on a per-industry basis, because polluters are nothing if not keen to avoid thinking about anything that they perceive as not their problem- it should be possible to avoid triggering any sort of sense of polluter-solidarity on their part.

Another possibility is offering positive financial incentives to stopping fossil fuel activity. The government could directly give cash to companies that stop pulling coal and oil out of the ground, or stop burning it. Fracking companies in particular should be given a ton of money if they convert to geothermal.

derbOac• 5 years ago

Ecologically sustainable changes will happen when it's cheap and/or comfortable to do, period.

Increasing the costs of carbon-based choices will just lead to civil unrest. I think this is already part of where recent problems in the US are coming from.

Carbon taxes and similar solutions implicitly assume that the individual making the carbon-positive choice is the one who should bear the cost. I feel a bit like it's you have decades of individuals and groups insulating themselves from real costs, through deception and ignorance, and then us deciding to pass those costs onto those who can't or don't want it anyway. Socialized risk, capitalized gain all over again.

You might say that nature is going to extract those costs one way or another, but this is one case where I think the moral responsibility is in spreading those costs out in ways that can be borne realistically.

Better for the average person worldwide to make the sustainable choices cheaper rather than increase the costs of the unsustainable choices, because then that's implicitly just increasing costs for everything in many situations.

rmoon• 5 years ago

"if the world acts fast".., from the article, then I understand that it is going to be really difficult too.

wolverine876• 5 years ago

collective action isn't something we can rely on and is a lot more wishful thinking about the state of humanity rather than a sober look at the reality

I understand that is a popular worry these days (and I understand why some might feel that way, given how troubling recent history is) but I think the news from history is much better than that - it's actually very good: In just the last half-century: Civil rights, women's rights, the overthrow of non-democratic regimes worldwide (E. Europe, S. Africa, S. Korea, etc. etc.), etc. In fact, the current reactionary (for lack of a better word) movement - the one that obstructs progress on Covid and climate change, among other things - is collective action to a significant extent.

It's interesting to me that as the tools for collective action have improved by orders of magnitude (i.e., the Internet and its applications), those tools are instead used to spread a message to depress action. More interesting is that the message only spreads on one side of the political world - the reactionaries aren't telling each other how useless and impossible their goals are.

Whatever the reason, it's very convenient for the status quo, for the people in power, that the public disavows their own ability to challenge them.

The greatest hope I see for the future of humanity is the incentive for a brilliant mind/leader to become the next Bezos/Musk

From my perspective, what a depressing and self-demeaning outlook. We don't need some 'great person' to do it for us; we can do it. We can do it, right now, which means to first stop telling each other that we can't. Nothing can stop us, literally, except us not trying.

For centuries, the American story has been that we can accomplish anything together, that any person can make a difference. It's the faith behind Silicon Valley startups too. We've revolutionized politics, government, freedom, prosperity, technology ...

aantix• 5 years ago

You mean… what you have determined as “the right thing”.

Even though others may also have different needs, desires, and risks.

TOGoS2• 5 years ago

collective action isn't something we can rely on
Governments need to tax CO2 emissions on the business side

Getting the government to do anything that impacts the profits of powerful companies will itself require heroic amounts of well-organized collective action.

the incentive for a brilliant mind/leader to become the next Bezos/Musk via climate change technology

The problem is political, not technical. Moreover, people who become billionaires are averse to questioning the economic systems that prevent us from being able to take collective action to tackle climate change (and other systemic problems), because it has served them so well. That's why they build bunkers and space ships in the hope of personal salvation. They ain't going to fix this for us. It's collective action or apocalypse.

Lammy• 5 years ago

If there is anything covid has taught me its that collective action isn't something we can rely on

Thank goodness dummies like me have smart authoritarians like you to make decisions for us about what The Right Thing™ is :)

5faulker• 5 years ago

The history of humanity is filled with stories where technologies require a full adherence to a set of rules to avoid externaliies. And since this cannot be done, it explains much of what's happening in the world today.

GordonS2• 5 years ago

collective action isn't something we can rely on and is a lot more wishful thinking about the state of humanity rather than a sober look at the reality. Governments need to tax CO2 emissions

I fully agree, but if history has taught me anything about Western politics, it's that power and money reign supreme. The term of politicians only lasts a few years, and many will do everything they can to feather their cap during that time, doing the bidding of big business. And the top priority for many is to stay in power - changes to help the climate are expensive, and indeed getting more expensive the longer we delay, so few have what it takes to be bold and put policies in place that may be unpopular with a large segment of their constituents.

And then there is the economic arms race that is characteristic of our modern, divided world. Countries don't want to make hard decisions, because they know some others won't.

Honestly, it looks very, very grim. To have any hope of mitigating what's going to come, we need massive global action that is going to be to the short to medium-term detriment of many politicians, corporations, lobbying groups, and of course regular citizens too. I strongly hope I'm wrong, but I just can't see any future where any of that happens :(

andy_ppp• 5 years ago

Is there any sign something will happen at COP26? Or will we just carry on with the same? Can you imagine what the anti-vax nut jobs will do when confronted with the reality of extremely expensive everything and less of it? For example moving the food system over to local produce with very little meat would help a lot but there is no political ability to make such a change.

madis• 5 years ago

How about building more nuclear electric stations? The nuclear energy production hasn't increased in the US for past 30 years, while oil and gas have exploded. Retards. Saame thing in EU - closing down the plants in Germany and Spain

heurisko• 5 years ago

I find messaging like this on climate change poor, and possibly counter productive.

There need to be concrete solutions offered, be that nuclear, wind, solar, electric vehicles etc..

database_lost• 5 years ago

I still don't see how our individual actions can have a widespread impact regarding climate change, sure, it will have some effect, but I'm willing to bet it would add up to fractions in the end. Pushing political and economic leaders to take action by tackling just the top mega polluters on the other hand seems like it would have significant impact https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/ac13f1

ciconia• 5 years ago

This is not only a question of transitioning to "green" energy. It's also a question of values. For me, humanity is at a cross roads, all possibilities are open, and we need to choose, individually and collectively: short term growth or long term sustainability, consumerist delirium or happy sobriety [1], mission-to-mars escapism or this-planet-is-our-only-home realism.

[1] http://www.lejournalinternational.info/en/pierre-rabhi-inter...

spodek• 5 years ago

More science doesn't hurt, but we lack leadership. Scientists are trained to research, report, and expand knowledge, but not the social and emotional skills to influence behavior.

If we want other people to change, we have to recognize that information, however accurate and valuable, and telling people what to do is of limited effect. If we want different outcomes we have to do different things.

Yes, still research, but don't expect it to change people's behavior. There are things that do, more like listening, role models, vision, empathy, stories, images, and what leaders do. I work on creating role models, stories, and vision.

I started my podcast, originally Leadership and the Environment, now This Sustainable Life https://joshuaspodek.com/podcast, to bring leaders and leadership to the environment. Maybe it's for you, maybe not, but it's what I wish was around before I started acting. The first episode https://shows.acast.com/leadership-and-the-environment/episo... describes the strategy.

whiddershins3• 5 years ago

The notion that humanity would go extinct from any of this is absolutely unrealistic.

What we are talking about is at worst massive economic damage and loss of life, similar to a very serious war.

Which is horrible, but really not the threat it is made out to be.

Moreover, since these changes happen relatively slowly (compared to bombs and such) much of the loss of life can be mitigated.

So we are talking economic damage and loss of property and infrastructure. Primarily.

Let’s be honest that the most likely course through all this is to adapt to the changing planet. I think that would be so much more refreshing than all the hand wringing.

baliex2• 5 years ago

I'm not sure you'd take the same position if you were one of the people who was going to be immediately and directly affected by the change that's coming. I expect at some point some change will happen which does affect you and you won't like it. That moment has already come for some people, spare a thought for them.

whiddershins3• 5 years ago

I am. I’m saying let’s reduce the impact to them, which is likely doable.

Help them. Prioritize dealing with the effects of climate change over ‘fighting’ climate change.

kumarvvr8• 5 years ago

The notion that humanity would go extinct from any of this is absolutely unrealistic

Why not?

With the current societal focus on materialism and luxury, perpetuation of greed and glorification of power, climate need not do much. Wipe out some fraction of the population is all it needs to do.

The rest will be done by us.

The last two people will fire bombs at each other and kill each other for sure.

frockington13• 5 years ago

The last two people will fire bombs at each other and kill each other for sure.

We've had nuclear bombs for 70 years now and yet we're still alive. This doesn't seem to support this stance. I also don't see everyone on earth rolling over the second it gets a little hotter. Sure some people will but the vast majority will want to survive

brbrodude• 5 years ago

The instabilities that come from it may very well put us into a full blown dark age, the economic & societal stresses may bring dialogue to a halt, civil & military conflicts most certainly will rise along with it and with it the world would accelerate in the way of catastrophe instead of moving towards adapting or fixing. It won't go down well, you're deluding yourself if you think it won't propagate to the rest of reality. It would be a self-reinforcing loop of tragedies, downward spiraling.

amusedcyclist• 5 years ago

Its not that humanity will go extinct with 1.5 degree rise in average temperature. However this will likely directly kill 10s/100s of millions of people and destroy ecosystems and weather patterns that humans depend on, which in turn can create a lot of political instability which could increase the chances of a extinction threatening event (like nuclear war for example). The other path to extinction is the world where we open up some feedback loops which are currently unaware of , runaway heating is an example of that, where each degree of heating causes the rate of heating to rise.

titzer10• 5 years ago

Oh, I agree with you that humanity probably won't go extinct in the next 100 or maybe even 200 years. We're pretty adaptable.

But if you think the global oceans being completely empty of fish--I mean, nothing larger than your hand is alive--entire continents reverting to first savannah, then desert, and parts currently desert literally becoming uninhabitable, then yeah, sure, it's some economic damage and a small war.

This isn't "adapting to a changing planet". It's more like "adapting to life without the leg I am currently hacking at with a dull rusty blade--oh look, bone! can't quit now...".

daxfohl3• 5 years ago

I think there's a reasonable chance of that. We'll figure out different crops to grow, we'll move away from deserts, etc. It may be hard, life expectancy may fall steeply, but we'll adapt largely intact, and then we'll eventually run out of fossil fuels anyway.

But if you look at what's happening in the Great Barrier Reef. It's dying. The ecosystem is dying from the bottom, and nothing on top can survive either. I think this is a very real possibility too.

whiddershins3• 5 years ago

You should research this more deeply.

juanani• 5 years ago

What's 'code red' mean? Did we pass amber? Is purple the next stage? I love our obsession with coloring our alarms. I wanna see indigo on there next if you're listening designer.

frockington13• 5 years ago

Reminds me of the homeland security threat level chart. When its orange, we're serious. When it's red, we're super for real serious

josh_today2• 5 years ago

If the Sahara and Grand Canyon once flowed with water before civilization

What makes a paper straw the solution so our polar ice caps have less thaw?

This is a serious question and not denying climate change. What’s our ultimate end goal after everything has gone green if we cannot change the planet’s cycles?

awestroke• 5 years ago

* Plastic pollution is orthogonal to climate change

* It sounds like you are implying that there is no man-made climate change, only natural cycles. This is 100% false. We are facing extinction as a species, and it's due to greenhouse gases we emit.

josh_today2• 5 years ago

I’m not denying man made climate change. I’m challenging the status quo and looking for a response with our solution when the climate will, evidentially, change.

stragio• 5 years ago

If you are looking for an overview of future climate scenarios of each country worldwide: https://www.howhotwillitget.com. The coming months I am going to update the website with the new data and fix some running issues. Follow my Twitter if you want to stay updated.

iamfbpt• 5 years ago

I'm surprised that after that many decades of complete BS propaganda, corruption and misleading information, people still take UN studies seriously.

ihuk3• 5 years ago

We bought an expensive washing machine 3 years ago thinking it will last us a long time. It already broke down twice. It's been broken for almost a month now waiting for parts and whatnot. There's a good chance we'll have to get another one.

Does Electrolux/AEG care? No. They don't care about the environment, their only obligation is to their shareholders. But frankly neither do I anymore. Next time, I'll buy the cheapest one and when it inevitably breaks down I'll throw it away and get another cheap one.

It's absurd that in the world where planned obsolescence, cruising industry and fast fashion exist, ordinary people are tasked with saving the planet. This is like trying to improve performance of a program using naive algorithm with O(n^2) complexity by rewriting it in assembler.

Thlom2• 5 years ago

I bought a relatively expensive Miele washing machine and a Miele dryer 7-8 years ago. No problems what so ever. Just a tip.

foepys• 5 years ago

My 35 year old Miele is also working fine. I had to replace the pump once after 20 years but that was easy, I just ordered it from Miele for a few Euros. End of production for this model was in the 80s by the way.

Thlom2• 5 years ago

Haha. Two days after this post the drier started acting up. Luckily it was just a matter of opening it up and putting back the rpm counter/home sensor.

syshum3• 5 years ago

Ironically I have often found the cheaper models to be more reliable because they tend to be less complex, less parts, and are "dumb" mechanical machines vs these "smart" devices that are to clever for their own good

jstsch• 5 years ago

That's not normal. Both my Siemens washer & dryer will reach 10 years this December and both are working like new. Price wise in the 75th percentile models (of Siemens).

The dryer is a heat pump model, which was quite a bit more expensive than other models at the time. The salesperson at the local MediaMarkt even recommend against it, since you would never 'make the money back' in energy costs from it. This is quite wrong. In fact, with EU energy prices you recoup the difference within 2 years using it twice a week.

dangoor2• 5 years ago

I completely agree and think pricing should reflect more of the externalities.

Side note: I do not consider myself a "handy" person. Never cared much for fixing things around the house. However, thanks to YouTube and (at least in the US) RepairClinic, I have found that certain kinds of repairs to appliances are actually easy and I can get them done much more quickly than when calling a repair service because RepairClinic has the parts in stock. (I have the added benefit of living ~30 minute drive from RepairClinic.)

Also, I haven't personally found a correlation between price and reliability.

bradleyjg• 5 years ago

ordinary people are tasked with saving the planet

I can’t read minds, but my sense is that much of what individuals are asked to do is knowingly conservation theater. If you want to put a positive spin on that, you can say it makes them feel more committed to supporting the regulatory changes necessary by building a sense of shared sacrifice. The cynical version writes itself.

masklinn3• 5 years ago

I can’t read minds, but my sense is that much of what individuals are asked to do is knowingly conservation theater.

Oh it's not just conservation theatre, it's also cynical responsibilities shifting: by convincing everyone that the public at large is to blame, corporations get off scot-free

whymauri• 5 years ago

My house recently started vigorously composting. I can't help but wonder how many centuries of daily composting we would need to offset the climate impact of the plastic composting bin, composable bags, and composting infrastructure. Feels good, but no impact. Sigh.

kylebyproxy• 5 years ago

Ehh, I look at it more like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space%E2%80%93time_tradeoff

Either we can have more stuff and larger material/waste/energy/emissions footprint to save us some time/effort or improve convenience/pleasure, or we can put in the time & effort to lessen our footprint. I say we're overindulging our pleasures and underperforming our responsibilities.

That's not to say we're necessarily lazy, but likely due to a combination of pressures that distract and exhaust us through the course of our modern lives. Remove the oppressive/coercive/manipulative influences and more individuals will have the space to act responsibly. The greater challenge will be to train them to actually do so.

You seem to want to wash your hands of the whole thing, as if the presence of major polluters somehow absolves you from your part in this. Ultimately, it comes down to the actions of individuals. The faceless organizations pillaging the environment subsist entirely on our patronage; stop feeding into them and they die off. Ezpz.

Is handwashing dishes & clothes really too much to ask?

krob• 5 years ago

Not sure which country you live in, but if you can get a speed queen branded washer / dryer, you'll likely never have to replace them. They're repairable.

brightstep2• 5 years ago

A handful of corporations are responsible for the vast majority of warming. It's not our fault, it's theirs. They did it, and they knew they were doing it. Any individual action may make you feel good but it does nothing to address the problem.

gruez10• 5 years ago

A handful of corporations are responsible for the vast majority of warming. It's not our fault, it's theirs. They did it, and they knew they were doing it.

Consumers want oil. Drilling for oil is legal. BP drills for oil. Why is BP's fault?

Or, to switch around the entities a bit. America likes widgets. Making widgets generates pollution. Prior to the 90s it was mostly made in America, so that's where all the pollution is emitted. It's clear that America is to blame. Now it's the 2000s. Thanks to globalization it's now cheaper to make in China rather than the US. Now all the pollution is being emitted in china. Who's fault is it? Is America suddenly off the hook?

slumdev• 5 years ago

If you're in the United States, consider buying a Speed Queen.

They're not pretty. They don't have lots of features. They use more water*.

But they'll last forever.

*Many consider this to be a drawback, but it results in cleaner clothing.

kumarvvr8• 5 years ago

It is time that the people of earth build a consensus and prepare for stagnant growth.

It is clear that the ever present pressure of capitalism to show "growth YoY" is a major cause of pollution.

The incentives are wrong. Sustainability should be paramount and carbon tax should be handed down heavily.

realce2• 5 years ago

Where is the company that specializes in retrofitting combustion vehicles to electric?

dangoor2• 5 years ago

If you're in the US, now is the time to contact your representative and senators. This is possibly our last chance at real climate action for a decade:

https://www.volts.wtf/p/crunch-time-this-is-americas-last

Dumblydorr2• 5 years ago

Isn't it time to block the sun's radiant energy? What is the real disadvantage to trying to lift a giant solar umbrella that blocks light from hitting the Earth? It may be pricy but we spend billions per climate disaster, if we could use a few falcon heavy launches and reduce incoming energy by 1 or 2%, we could buy ourselves the time to fix our emissions and ramp up carbon capture.

The other alternative could be increasing cloud cover by releasing aerosols into the upper atmosphere. This would be like an artificial volcanic eruption, a purposeful but temporary hazing which would buy us a little time and let the planet cool off for 50 years before we're ready to go au natural again.

Can someone give me the critiques of these? They seem much simpler than crying about disasters and reports to GOP foot-draggers and all those who don't care about science. The sad reality is around 10,000 government and business officials have 90% of the power on climate, I don't see convincing all these power brokers to help the biosphere, they want profits not environmental restoration. So, let's have them block the sun's energy until we've transitioned our energy system.

quenix• 5 years ago

How about the multitude of life on the planet that relies on photosynthesis?

And our own bodies? We get most of our vitamin D from a biosynthesis pathway that requires UVB exposure. Systematically depriving all of humanity of vitamin D could be disastrous.

And our circadian rhythms? The human circadian rhythm is mediated by two processes, denoted "S" and "C", of which C has evolved to rely on daily exposure to sunlight. The circadian rhythm affects almost all parts of our humanity.

LeifCarrotson• 5 years ago

Sure, I'll take a crack at the first one, involving 'a few' Falcon Heavy launches. Falcon Heavy can get (very roughly) 16 tonnes to L1. Ignoring critical station-keeping and rigidity issues entirely for the sake of simplicity, and assuming the sail is a single sheet of aluminized mylar at 10 g/m^2, that's 1.6 square kilometers of coverage. To put the planet in shadow would require about 100 million such shades.

More importantly, people who won't do anything about the problem now while it's getting worse will not do anything if we had a temporary fix in place. This should be obvious from human nature, if it's not obvious, you can observe those temporary fixes permanently installed as infrastructure and business operations all over. We don't need more time to think about it, we just need to get started.

alexgmcm4• 5 years ago

Neither of these reduce greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere and I'd be concerned that rather than being used as an extremely short-term fix while we reduce emissions they would just become a band-aid to continue business as usual.

The problem is that once we go down that path we'd have to do it permanently, and if we were ever unable to keep up the release of aerosols or the maintenance of the solar umbrella etc. then the temperature would rapidly soar to wherever it would have been in their absence.

It just seems incredibly high-risk and avoids actually solving the root problem. I saw such geo-engineering described as "a band-aid on a bullet wound" which seemed quite apt.

10x-dev• 5 years ago

Brilliant minds of HN, serious question: what needs to happen for us to be able to extract CO2 from the air and place it in containers somewhere? What's the root problem there?

(I'm guessing off-planet, but that can come later).

tibiahurried2• 5 years ago

Still, it is so sad to see companies who could avoid their employees commuting and polluting, fighting to get their employees back to the office! This shows how overall businesses and people don’t really care for climate change.

kuraudo3• 5 years ago

I do find it odd that, given the reported reduction in carbon emissions from covid, that governments are not outright mandating work from home for compatible jobs as an easy win to this problem.

tibiahurried2• 5 years ago

Exactly! It annoys me so much reading about big tech co, pledging on becoming carbon negative, produce zero waste, etc ... but still force thousands of people everyday to commute and pollute just for the sake of it.

They really don't care.

throwaway098763• 5 years ago

As someone else pointed out, this is a huge collective action problem that we don't seem to have the institutions and social structures to solve this. Some people are willing to make sacrifices to solve this but many are not. We don't have means or willingness to force the non-cooperating people to cooperate. I'm surprised we haven't seen more terrorism targeted at carbon emitters. But then I see that recently a huge pipeline and a beef processing plant got hacked. That got blamed on Chinese or Russian hackers. It makes me wonder though, if those had been hacks by climate activists would the government tell us? The public discussion sparked by that would be quite different and might lead to an increase in that type of activity. This also is straight up a plot line from The Ministry for the Future which.

signaturefish3• 5 years ago

Possibly-relatedly, I'm in the process of getting some retrofit work done on my house to improve its insulation and reduce the carbon costs of heating it. I absolutely had not appreciated that a place like this, an 80s brick-built terraced house in southern England, could be responsible for 3.4 tonnes of CO2 emissions per year in heating costs alone.

The necessary retrofit work is expensive, on the order of £50'000 over the next ten years, which makes it pretty much out of reach for the huge majority of people in the UK, but will take that down to 0.2 tonnes/year (narrowly missing net-zero because of the concrete-slab construction of the floor). We really need to be subsidising retrofit work like this, so that ordinary people can afford to have it done, because it makes a huge difference to what must be millions of similar houses in the UK alone.

kieranmaine3• 5 years ago

I think it will be more feasible to decarbonize the heating instead. If feasible heat storage technology can mature and lower the cost of electric heating then it becomes financially viable.

Out of interest, what work are you getting done?

signaturefish3• 5 years ago

The whole bill of work is as follows:

* Full external-wall-insulation (180mm thick) with brick slip dressing so it doesn't stick out like a sore thumb amidst all the brick houses in the road.

* Triple-glazed windows and doors throughout, replacing single-glazed original units which are at end-of-life.

* 300mm deep loft insulation, replacing poor-quality and patchy 80-100mm insulation.

* Full airtightness sealing (i.e. the house should leak almost no warm air to the outside world), ...with heat-recovering mechanical ventilation so we don't all suffocate.

* Air-source heat pump to replace the gas boiler, driving underfloor heating in place of the wet-circuit radiators.

* 12-panel solar photovoltaic install on the roof (plus batteries etc).

Fully agreed on decarbonizing heating, but it's not an either/or thing, both approaches work and are to some extent necessary. Any heat you're not losing to the outside world doesn't need to be replaced by the heating system, is the theory. Here in the UK, I'm working to AECB (Association of Eco-Conscious Builders) standards: we cant quite hit PassiveHaus without knocking the whole thing down and rebuilding, but we can get pretty close.

There's a whole separate argument to be had about subsidy of electric heating vs subsidy of gas heating, if I recall correctly. A good electric heating system should be just as effective as a gas system, but in the UK it can cost up to four times as much to run because of the current mess of subsidies. That needs sorting out, as well, as telling people they have to pay much more for a somewhat more eco-conscious system isn't going to fly with the general population.

habosa2• 5 years ago

Just. Tax. It.

We have warmed the earth because we love comfort and money. We will never stop loving those things. So instead let's use the same systems to fix this (or at least slow things down).

As an individual my largest carbon impact is air travel. I like to go places, it's one of the main things I work to afford. Every single plane ticket I take should have a tax which is used to offset or capture the carbon emissions of my flight. I will pay it. Anyone not willing to pay it will have to fly less. Any airlines that can't operate under the tax will not operate.

Now do the same thing for corporate polluters, packaging waste, etc. If a country won't do this for domestic goods we can at least impose climate tariffs at borders.

The only other thing that could work is some fantastic new technological solution, but let's not wait for that.

blhack• 5 years ago

How do you make the major polluters pay the tax?

triceratops9• 5 years ago

I don't understand the question.

danuker• 5 years ago

Boycotts and import duties.

cannabis_sam2• 5 years ago

By reducing the “freedom” of corporations. (Of course, this requires your country to not have surrendered to regulatory capture.)

3pt141592• 5 years ago

I've been saying this for years, but I finally get why "Just. Tax. It." doesn't work. The voters. They turn out in droves when it comes to taxes on something as visible as the price they pay at the pump or when it comes to the oil patch in Alberta.

It's politically easier to create import duties or to go into debt and subsidize things. The level of taxation we need to stop a complete catastrophe is higher than people will put up with in most of the world.

FinanceAnon2• 5 years ago

True, Switzerland (who I view as a "green" and progressive country) recently voted against those taxes in a referendum. I think it would be much worse in other countries.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-57457384

ip263• 5 years ago

It seems like you could make it popular with a carbon dividend to every citizen. If you use less carbon than average, by god you make money!

But most times the tax is proposed, special interests on the left insist the revenue must be spent on <pet cause> & sink the whole effort.

Ajedi32• 5 years ago

That's a fundamental problem with any regulatory measure intended to reduce carbon emissions. Cheap energy is good for the economy. Fossil fuels are cheap. Any attempt to reduce the use of fossil fuels is going to hurt voters in the short term no matter how you package it.

Sure, you can try to be sneaky about it, implementing policies that only indirectly impact fossil fuels and hoping the voters don't notice you're the one to blame for the rising price of energy. Or you can be honest, bite the bullet, and try to convince the public a carbon tax is necessary to avoid something even worse down the line. Either way you're fighting an uphill battle.

gigel82• 5 years ago

Start by taxing the big polluters, not individuals. Less than 1/3rd of pollution comes from individuals (and mostly from ICE cars, so incentivize EVs to tackle that), the rest comes from industry so go after the big piece of the pie first.

The industry will R&D ways to cut pollution since they'll be financially incentivized to do that, the resulting technology will be later adapted for other applications.

bertil6• 5 years ago

I agree with you for cars, which is why I think the appropriate approach is to:

1. tax flying, or rather shame airlines who do not compensate aggressively until they all do, and monitor compensation schemes because at the moment, too many are non-sensical blackmail-like counter-factual arguments around cutting forests;

2. ban industrial releases of CO2: all has to be captured and stored; storage is cheap now, so industrials will rather do that than lobby (until storage price go up, but at that points, things will have gotten much uglier);

3. ban new ICE cars, or make those excessively expensive to build: second-hand cars price will explode subsidising current car owners, and opening a wider gap for electric cars. Guarantee loans on electric cars to make them unaffordable cheaper, until the resell value takes over. No need to make gas more expensive: electric cars are cheaper to maintain today. You just have to make it more obvious to buyers.

rcMgD2BwE72F9• 5 years ago

We will never stop loving those things

Did we just tax tobacco? People loved tobacco. At some point, with the right information (e.g media not bought by big business), we can realize that things that are bad for us are just bad for us.

We can avoid telling us that and have someone take money from our wallet to prevent us from buying the things that kill us, but why not just better inform ourselves about the way we're killing us?

Anywhere I go now, I'm overwhelmed by ads telling me to buy a big SUV, go flight somewhere every weekend, buy something new because I deserve more, etc.

Of course, those paying for the ads say they're advertising because I want those things... but why are they advertising, then? If I wanted a bigger SUV/picker so much, they would not keep the ad spend and keep that as profit for their shareholders.

The whole system wants more, more, more stuff and they know the more addictive are the bigger/larger/shinier/louder/anything-er and that takes energy and pollutes. They need that more than the consumers.

I stopped loving this shit (no car, no flight, small flat, etc), and I'm still flooded with "BUY" orders. Employers will do everything to have me buy a car (I don't need) instead of taking the money of that car for myself.

It isn't a problem of wish or desire but we're told it is, because the consumption system keeps playing with these desires. I should just watch Century of the Self again...

coalslaw• 5 years ago

I'm not sure tobacco is a good comparison here. Tobacco was a relatively easy thing to tax/restrict/ban as it serves no real purpose beyond individual enjoyment.

rebuilder• 5 years ago

The problem is, just taxing CO2 emissions doesn't let you control who gets hit by the price increases. It could very well lead to increases in food and transportation costs that would be disproportionately burdensome to the poorest part of the population. Raising the cost of those items is politically very unpopular since it tends to cause unrest.

So I think what we'll get instead is some complex system of first taxing everything and then subsidizing some forms of consumption (again, food and transportation), while trying to incentivize switching over to renewable energy sources.

frankbreetz• 5 years ago

If you use carbon tax to fund ubi, it will only hit above average emitters, who will be incentivised to emit less.

gruez10• 5 years ago

So I think what we'll get instead is some complex system of first taxing everything and then subsidizing some forms of consumption (again, food and transportation),

or just tax everything, then giving it back to everyone via a flat dividend?

IngoBlechschmid• 5 years ago

The earnings of the CO2 tax could be equally distributed to all citizens on a monthly basis. That way, while consumer prices would increase, all those citizens who contribute below average to the country's CO2 emissions (and those are the vast majority and especially includes people who are poor) would, in sum, have more money available than before.

mberning• 5 years ago

Carbon taxes disproportionately hurt low income people. Rich folks will still drive their cars, fly on jets, and use tons of energy in general. Carbon taxes also make your nation less competitive in a global economy. That’s not good when enemy states have zero compunction about using fossil fuels to overtake you economically and militarily. Carbon taxes also incentivize industry to move production to nations with little or no carbon tax. In general I find it extremely foolish to think that carbon taxes would be a good way of going about this.

rcpt2• 5 years ago

Climate change disproportionately hurts low income people even more.

Those who rely on crop yields and fish stocks to survive every year and don't have the money to become refugees will have a much harder time than the first world folks who might need to start carpooling.

jpeloquin• 5 years ago

Carbon taxes disproportionately hurt low income people.

If the carbon tax collected was re-distributed uniformly as a tax credit (each person gets the same tax credit), would it still hurt low income people?

I Googled this and it seems like it should help people with low incomes, but maybe there's something wrong with the underlying reasoning.

https://aneconomicsense.org/2020/08/06/a-carbon-tax-with-red...

it_citizen2• 5 years ago

A carbon tax with dividends would solve that problem. It would be a net positive for the first 6 or 7 decile of the population while still sending a strong signal to the markets to switch to greener alternatives to stay competitive.

Regarding moving production abroad, the carbon tax should work hand in hand with a border adjustment mechanism.

You can look at how it has been implemented in Canada: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_pricing_in_Canada

renewiltord• 5 years ago

Yeah well that’s because poor people (in America) are hella carbon inefficient for economic value creation. They’ll drive like 100 miles each way to work a $16/hr job as a McDonalds worker.

That shit is not sustainable.

titzer10• 5 years ago

Every single plane ticket I take should have a tax which is used to offset or capture the carbon emissions of my flight. I will pay it.

So what you're saying is that it won't change your behavior. Why don't you just donate $1000 or whatever to a charity? (I dunno, maybe you already do). I don't mean to attack you, but encoded in your very language is the exact problem. No one is willing to change their own behavior, they want other people to change. Repeat this x 7 billion and suddenly you understand what the inertia is.

We live in the fading dream of a world that we sold to us that we could do whatever we want with absolutely no consequences; worse, that everything that we did that "made money" and contributed to GDP growth was good for everyone. Turns out that that was bullshit greed talking and the God of consequences is visiting its revenge on us through the same lesson every petri dish full of bacteria learns: you will choke to death on your own waste products.

meowkit• 5 years ago

No one is willing to change their own behavior, they want other people to change.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons

A tax is a practical way to address this. Internalizing the externalities is the way the wiki puts it.

rocgf5• 5 years ago

Pardon me, but your post is just about virtue signalling or you're missing the point entirely.

If you increase the taxes for something, you will drop the demand and, therefore, consumption. It doesn't matter whether OP will change his/her behaviour, it matter that we, as a planet of people taking X flights per year, will reduce our flights by Y% due to tax.

I don't want to change my behaviour because that doesn't fix anything. I want to be forced to changed my behaviour, along with everyone else on the planet, through taxation for which I am happy to vote for and support with all my being.

habosa2• 5 years ago

Actually I do personally offset my personal carbon footprint by taxing myself, via Klima: https://klima.com/

However that's not an efficient way for 8 billion people to get out of this problem.

ihuk3• 5 years ago

Where would that money go though?

Do you honestly believe that given enough money politicians can come up with a viable solution for climate change? Mind you those are the same people who want to end privacy on the Internet[1].

Same people who came up with European Union’s biofuel mandate which caused deforestation of Indonesia for palm-oil plantations. Across the pond, it's the same people that subsidized ethanol fuel which, more or less, benefited only corn farmers.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28115343

beachy2• 5 years ago

Where would that money go though?

It doesn't really matter. Even if the tax revenue was piled up and set on fire, the planet would still be better off for it

briantakita5• 5 years ago

Who enforces the taxes? The same parties who are doing most of the polluting. The military, government, the technocrats in control of the systems.

Just. Tax. It. puts more power in the hands of the people causing the problems.

On the other hand, what if the climate change was primarily driven by natural cycles? Taxing everybody would have a negative impact on the populations' readiness & survivability to these changes. Many people already do not trust big government to be beneficial & responsive to their needs, for good reason. Making living even more difficult for the population by increasing taxes would only cause more to reject the systems that bind them.

---

It seems like the downvotes, are related to some Epistimological blind spots on the part of the downvoters.

I recommend https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RAqOMGnJ2MQ&ab_channel=Actua...

As an alternative, you can all just pay me Trillions of dollars, & I will solve all of the climate issues. We are in this together, after all...

bumby7• 5 years ago

what if the climate change was primarily driven by natural cycles?

What if climate change was perpetuated by giant sloths who want to drive humans to extinction? We can play the “what if” game and I think it’s important to keep an open mind in science, but to quote Walter Kotschnig, not so open that our brains fall out.

We can use a bit of Bayesian inference here. Given the current data, the probability of natural cycles (or ground sloths) being the root cause seems low. Given the potential risk, hanging our hat on that small chance seems like an irrational choice. Or a potential one that just reduces our cognitive dissonance so we feel better about ourselves.

I know there’s many people who bristle at the thought of any authority outside of themselves but that can become an epistemological bias in its own right.

Likewise, the comment adds very little to the discussion because the compliment can be said with equal validity.

”-The free market- puts more power in the hands of the people causing the problems.”

Can easily extend to individual consumers just as your statement points the finger at government

intrasight• 5 years ago

Economists have been saying this for years. Really it's the only way to let market forces decide. Make it a publicly listed company that collects the tax, and distribute dividends equally to all citizens. Such things should be possible with digital currencies.

laristine• 5 years ago

That _publicly listed company_ sounds like... the government.

notJim6• 5 years ago

Economists have been saying this for years

Maybe with this track record, they should reconsider their ideas? https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/why-has-climate-economics-...

xkjkls4• 5 years ago

Taxing it is still pretty hard to do. It's often hard to know exact emissions or what to test. I agree its probably an easier solution, but the accounting of "who is actually producing the carbon" is incredibly complicated, and will become more incredibly complicated as soon as literally billions of dollars are at stake.

CountSessine3• 5 years ago

It doesn’t actually seem that complicated at all. Tax crude oil and coal. That’s seems pretty simple. Maybe there’s something I haven’t thought of.

ttul3• 5 years ago

Taxation of carbon totally works. British Columbia has a $50/tonne tax, which increases the cost of unleaded gas by about CAD $0.996/L and natural gas by $0.0882/m^3 [1]

Revenue from the tax goes into the government's general revenue, which allows BC to have among the lowest rate of income tax of any province in Canada. Meanwhile, BC has the highest rate of electrical vehicle purchasing in North America [2]. One study showed that employment increased by 0.74% as a result of the carbon tax [3]. Finally, research shows that the tax is highly progressive, having a smaller impact on poor households than rich ones [4].

[1] https://www2.gov.bc.ca/assets/gov/taxes/sales-taxes/publicat...

[2] https://vancouversun.com/opinion/mark-zacharias-and-ian-nevi...

[3] https://contacts.ucalgary.ca/info/econ/files/info/unitis/pub...

[4] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09287...

brailsafe3• 5 years ago

The lower income tax actually offsets the premium I pay to live here vs other provinces. Or at least that's how it worked out when I had a job last March. The rent keeps coming, but the money ain't.

notJim6• 5 years ago

Carbon taxes are political suicide in the US. In fact, we know that oil companies push for them exactly because they know how unpopular they are.

In Washington state, one of the more progressive states, they've failed over and over again to pass a carbon tax. Nothing they can do makes it work politically. In France, a carbon tax kicked off the yellow vests movement.

Like it or not, the Green New Deal framing works better, because it emphasizes the benefits, rather than the costs.

PoignardAzur2• 5 years ago

I think Washington state did manage to pass a carbon tax?

https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/washington-states-...

omegaworks• 5 years ago

Exactly. America is structurally dependent on cars. The working poor have been forced into increasingly long commutes to find affordable housing. We need big structural changes: densification, massive investment in sustainable transit systems and urban design.

lutorm5• 5 years ago

It seems a strategy that might work is pairing the carbon tax with a universal refundable tax credit such that it's revenue-neutral. That way people can pocket the difference if they want to use less carbon.

aero-glide2• 5 years ago

But airlines by itself is only responsible for 2.3% of global emissions.

mempko7• 5 years ago

Carbon taxes are pushed by the fossil fuel industry precisely because they are politically untenable. They push for the solution they know isn't going to happen.

palanq• 5 years ago

National carbon taxes for the US are politically infeasible. Best we can do right now is big climate-tied infrastructure spending packages, sector-specific targets, R&D investments--whole mess of things. That is the stuff that can pass for the foreseeable future. Carbon taxes as the exclusive solution is a naive dream of economists.

zug_zug• 5 years ago

Interestingly, if we add an offset tax to gasoline it'd only be 30 cents a gallon for inefficient capture (a lot, politically, but not harsher than living in your house for a year). With newer capture technologies it could be closer to 4 cents a gallon, which is less than the price difference between gas stations.

The second-order effects are that once you build thousands of these capture stations there's huge financial upside to making them even better.

Tax actually seems very feasible.

qeternity4• 5 years ago

Do you have a source for these numbers?

docmars• 5 years ago

Here come "climate" lockdowns

rglover2• 5 years ago

No, it's not. https://twitter.com/RogerPielkeJr/status/1424712163281694725

This is more media fearmongering.

Edit: Threadreader link https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1424712163281694725.html

ripdog• 5 years ago

I don't understand any of that. Any chance of an acronym dictionary for us laymen?

rglover2• 5 years ago

The official report the original BBC article is based on is available here: https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/downloads/report/IPCC_AR6.... Definitions are inside, but the big ones he mentions are Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), AR6 (Annual Report 6), and WGI (Working Group I).

Essentially what he's saying is that the conclusions in the report are based heavily on the more-extreme, though less-likely outcomes (i.e., exaggerating the truth of the impact of climate change based on observational data by using extreme models/predictions). The report also ignores his (Roger's) own heavily-cited research in favor of a less-cited resource that confirms their biases.

Edit: this is problematic because it generates headlines like the one this article is using and sends people into a panic spiral (as opposed to focusing on long-term solutions and actual science).

honkycat• 5 years ago

The genie is out of the bottle.

We have been talking in circles for the last three decades and nobody has done anything to address the corporations who represent the majority of the greenhouse gas emissions.

And every time I talk to my parents or meet someone new who is my age: "so are you planning to have kids? No? Why not?" I am so tired of living at the end of the world.

At this point the question is not "is it going to get bad?" It is "how bad will it get?" Mass deaths from famine, drought, and plague do not seem out-of the question.

darepublic2• 5 years ago

It's hard for me to believe humanity will get it's act together. Shit will hit the fan and then every man for themselves. Due to luck of the draw some will get hit much harder than others

etoulas• 5 years ago

Why isn’t there a metric like:

Cumulative CO2 emissions per capita, per consumption, etc.

Would that give us a better sense of how much more the developed countries have emitted so far vs the developing countries.

zelienople• 5 years ago

Too. Many. People.

The corporations do bad things because you give them money. Your lifestyles are horribly wasteful because you buy too much stuff that you don't need, and for the wrong reasons. Then you throw it away.

You buy new clothes not because you need them but because it makes you feel better about yourself and because you think the other monkeys will be impressed.

In turn, the other monkeys feel like they have to buy new clothing.

Then you throw it all out when fashion changes and you buy more.

The end result is that tonnes of clothing are discarded annually in my small neighbourhood.

I gather so much of this for my clothing bank that the homeless people don't want it any more. They are overwhelmed with clothing.

We run a clothing exchange for everyone and we still can't get rid of it. We try to ship it to other countries but they already have mountains of it. It has to be sent for industrial re-processing or put into landfills.

Your consumer goods last about one month after their already-short warranties expire and then you throw those out, too. Over 80% of what comes into my e-waste program is working or can be easily repaired. You don't even bother; you just throw it out.

Several groups in my neighbourhood have active campaigns against me because they feel like it is beneath their dignity to repair and recycle what they call "garbage". These people are defective monkeys who feel that they are better than others because they can afford to waste more and destroy the planet faster than everyone else.

Then you reproduce unrestrictedly and teach your little monkey babies the same ridiculously wasteful lifestyle. "You're a princess; you're a beautiful and unique snowflake; everything revolves around you. Go out and destroy the animals and pollute the oceans and kill the insects and wipe out the wetlands because you're worth it!"

No, you are monkeys who have gotten uppity. You have a few successes in technology, but you are actually horrible monsters who care only about themselves and maintaining your idiot social order by force.

You need to control your own numbers and stop the horrific waste of your idiot monkey lifestyles before you choke on your own exhaust and drown in your plastic refuse.

blondie9x• 5 years ago

The only way to stop this catastrophe is global population reduction and consumption limitations.

Nothing so far. No effort by anyone has flattened the curve. CO2, CH4, SF6, and N20 are all consistently growing linearly with human consumption. https://gml.noaa.gov/ccgg/trends/

We have to do everything possible to flatten the curve and that will take sacrifice and changes today.

phreeza2• 5 years ago

I recently learned about the idea of the "global carbon reward", which is an idea to create a monetary (meaning not fiscal) incentive to reduce or capture carbon emissions. Kind of like a gold backed currency is based on gold mined from the ground but based in carbon "mined" from the air. And through the monetary route it doesn't create any direct expenditure or debt on govt balance sheets, a bit like quantitative easing that is happening anyway.

There is a summary video here: https://youtu.be/Kmd2TSHsdoM

mark_l_watson• 5 years ago

My gut feeling is that a combination of naturally recurring chaotic weather cycles, together with human produced damage will either be fatal to humanity, or cause huge problems.

I also believe that the Universe is teaming with life, intelligence, and love, and in the grand scheme of things, how important really is human life on this one planet. As individuals people tend to over emphasize their own importance, and I would argue that as wonderful as human culture is, an asteroid or weather knocking us out is sad, but that is about it.

happynacho• 5 years ago

When COVID isn't alarmist enough anymore, time to switch topics.

fouric• 5 years ago

There's a chart in the article from the IPCC report showing observed vs simulated global average temperature changes. How are the scientists making these models guarding against overfitting?

I am not a climate change skeptic - I am simply asking an honest question that I don't know the answer to (which will be useful for dispelling the common argument that I hear some of my friends make). I also shouldn't have to place this kind of disclaimer in my post in the first place.

ksdakfasdf• 5 years ago

In principle, these models can be run a la 'ab initio' (from first principles) so no fitting is required. Of course, there are subtleties and unknowns, so some fitting is needed, but overfitting can be checked in the usual ways.

BallinBige• 5 years ago

Climate science has advanced quite a bit since the last IPCC assessment in 2014. We're also seeing far more impact in the real world in terms of more frequent storms, floods, droughts and wildfires. Previously it was more difficult to prove these were related to climate change as there are natural variations.

throwaway5752• 5 years ago

The good (and bad) news is this will solve itself: if we don't act, humanity will die off substantially and technologically regress. Without dense and easily extractible energy source like hydrocarbons we're unlikely to achieve this level of technology again, and famine, war, and disease will take their natural courses when we can't fertilize our crops like we have in the past, are fighting new weather patterns, and don't have the research base to create sophisticated medicines. We can avoid it and become a post hydrocarbon energy based world, but given the last 5 years, I don't think collectively people are intelligent enough to pull it off. It is a shame, it would have been nice to discover more secrets of the universe and to colonize the solar system.

merpnderp• 5 years ago

If anyone actually believed it was "code red for humanity" they'd be pushing nuclear power. There is zero chance of moving off carbon energy sources without causing catastrophic mayhem, unless we use massive amounts of nuclear.

For instance, the last 4 years my state has averaged 37% production of total possible installed wind generation capacity. This is a very windy state which is in the top 2 for installed wind capacity and number one per capita. But throughout a day wind power can very from nearly zero to close to max capacity. Those periods of near zero production can last non-trivial amounts of time no realistic battery could provide for.

The only solutions are continue with our gas turbine/wind power mix where we build enough gas turbines to handle 100% of the load for when the wind production is bottoming out, or replace everything with nuclear.

Nuclear gets us to net carbon zero fastest and with technology easy to export to developing countries in desperate need of plentiful, reliable, cheap electricity.

ptkd• 5 years ago

I see this take a lot, and it’s kind of misinformed. The primary drawbacks of nuclear are: 1) incredible slow to build. A typical plant takes ~20 years from decision to productionized 2) extremely expensive, with a massively frontloaded cost. By contrast, solar and wind are fast to install and now cheaper.

wind power can be zero at some parts of the day

There are a few solutions to this actually. First, having a more nationalized grid can amortize variant weather conditions (very unlikely it’s not windy everywhere, for example). Second, there actually are long-duration battery solutions coming out. Look up “energy tower” for a very weird one, and “form energy” for a more traditional model.

Finally — I will agree that nuclear is probably some piece of the pie in the future. But analysts think we can get to 80% renewables with currently existing tech: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.technologyreview.com/2012/0...

bpodgursky3• 5 years ago

If it was actually code red, we would waive literally all safety regulations and environmental policy reviews, and break ground on new plants tomorrow. And cost would be no object.

mywittyname• 5 years ago

Nuclear power can be fast to build. It would need to be constructed in volume, with immutable designs. Right now, America builds so few nuclear plants that they are essentially all one-off designs. Mass production is key here.

Vis-à-vis costs, the government can poof into existence trillions of dollars with no ill effects. Cost is an easily overcome obstacle.

If a mandate came down to produce 1000 new nuclear reactors by 2030, I think it could be achieved. The country just needs the political will to make it happen.

korantu• 5 years ago

The report talks about hypothetical setup with smart girds and customers reacting on price change. This configuration was never tried at 80% scale. It might or might not work.

People did try decarbonise industrial economy to 70% - it worked with technology existing not now but in the eighties. And it did not put any limitations on consumers, while taking just 10 years to implement.

Surely at code red we should be looking at things that were shown to work?

biztos• 5 years ago

long-duration battery solutions

This isn't practical everywhere, but on the island of El Hierro (Canary Islands) there is a wind-and-battery solution in the form of a wind-pumped hydro-electric station. In effect there is a big pool of water acting as a battery and the wind turbine "charges" it.

When I ran across it on a trip to the island I was really impressed. Very original solution!

https://www.researchgate.net/figure/The-basic-configuration-...

shookness• 5 years ago

Small modular nuclear reactors could be an answer to your primary concern: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_modular_reactor https://www.nuscalepower.com/

tda3• 5 years ago

Don't forget the substantial costs to clean up. Just think about growing up in a world full of EOL nuclear plants left by generations before you that need to be cleaned up... In a political unstable world due to an ongoing climate crisis.

Even today we as a whole struggle with decommissioning nuclear plants, and the costs are astronomical this is already a huge problem now, let alone in a post climate change world

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_decommissioning

voldacar• 5 years ago

A typical plant takes ~20 years from decision to productionized

If this were truly "code red" and people really believed that, we would find a way to push the bureaucrats out of the way and build nuclear capacity way sooner than 20 yrs. Humans can do amazing things under dire stress.

This is not happening, so I will assume "code red" is hyperbole, something that the IPCC is not entirely known to shun.

1-6• 5 years ago

I think we're also forgetting that adoption of nuclear power is also dependent on a stable government. Geopolitical risks probably outweigh all the drawbacks mentioned.

matkoniecz7• 5 years ago

If people believed that global warning is an extinction threat for humanity / code red / critically important...

Then waiving almost all regulations on nuclear power and accepting some meltdowns would be reasonable.

And also waiving nearly all regulations on solar power, wind power, massive construction of hydropower etc.

krona• 5 years ago

A typical plant takes ~20 years from decision to productionized

500 days for a small modular reactor (450MW) https://www.rolls-royce.com/innovation/small-modular-reactor...

At least, that's what the brochure says.

elproxy8• 5 years ago

Yes it's slow to build today, though it hasn't always been the case: France once built 56 reactors over 15 years [0]. Yes it's expensive, but once again, this isn't a feature of Nuclear power, but one of the capitalist (or at the very least neoliberal) system it is built into: 60% of the Hinkley point C costs are due to the mode of financing (not 100% public) [1]. The real question is not whether this or that type of electricity generation is better (although it's also an important question), but rather how we can completely redesign our socio-economic system to quickly wean ourselves off of fossil fuels (hint: global logistics are far from electrified), reduce emissions from the agricultural sector (we do need to eat), etc.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_France#Messme... [1] https://www.nao.org.uk/report/hinkley-point-c/

mtooth• 5 years ago

Agreed - if the situation is as dire as presented then nuclear fission is the only clear solution today for baseload power. All the rebuttals I usually read seem to present hypothetical alternatives that may very well come to fruition but we have nuclear as a well-tested and known solution to the problem ready for us to begin using today should we simply decide to act.

systemvoltage4• 5 years ago

Meanwhile California is busy decommissioning Diablo plant: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diablo_Canyon_Power_Plant

I don’t see a path forward without Nuclear. Europe and China has done better in this area than US. There is a bunch of fear mongering in liberal California circles about Nuclear. Well informed and technically minded people I know in Bay Area all support Nuclear power.

Frankly the media has done an awful job of fear mongering with the term “Nuclear” and “Radiation”.

h1fra• 5 years ago

While I agree Nuclear is the most probable solution it's not easy to build and fuel is very sparse. France who is leading the way is 100% depend on other countries, I'm not sure it will play well in the coming years

85% of uranium is produced in six countries: Kazakhstan, Canada, Australia, Namibia, Niger, and Russia.

And the second issue is to focus on electricity production, while there is a ton a other things creating pollution. You won't save the planet if you still have thousands of ships on the sea and planes in the air; meat and clothes production too...

There are a dozen of topics to be addressed, with multiple solutions and I would say none of them are being really tackled. (except energy in the less efficient way = no green worldwide grid)

FabHK5• 5 years ago

You won't save the planet if you still have thousands of ships on the sea and planes in the air

Aviation contributes only 2% of global air pollution, though maybe 5% of global greenhouse effect (due to the high altitudes airplanes operate at). Textile production, indeed, contributes more to climate change than aviation and maritime shipping combined [1].

However, with abundant electricity you can switch many transportation modes to electric, and (where technical constraints don't allow that yet, eg intercontinental aviation) maybe utilise synthetic fuels.

I would say none of them are being really tackled

I would say many challenges are being tackled, and the intensity will increase even further.

[1] https://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/headlines/society/202...

xkjkls4• 5 years ago

Third is the political problem. The international community has some tight limitations on who can refine Uranium. That's reasonable in a lot of ways as an effort to limit nuclear proliferation, but countries don't exactly like being put in the position that they can produce nuclear energy but only if 100% of their supply chain is outsourced to current Western powers.

jandrewrogers3• 5 years ago

Greatly reducing meat production, particularly beef and other ruminants, will have a smaller effect than many people expect. Even if we don't eat them, vast numbers of ruminants will still need to exist because they are a critical part of natural ecosystems.

Humans made space for their preferred ruminants, like beef, by displacing vast populations of other ruminants which have similar climate impact. I don't think most people fully appreciate just how large the natural population was before we started raising beef at scale. Even if we eliminated the beef herds, other ruminant species would immediately start filling the vacuum.

ClumsyPilot2• 5 years ago

85% of uranium is produced in six countries: Kazakhstan, Canada, Australia, Namibia, Niger, and Russia.

So there is a major uranium producer in every corner of the world? That's better than oil and many elements critical in electronic. Like whats your benchmark" it cant be as common as dirt.

outworlder4• 5 years ago

> 85% of uranium is produced in six countries: Kazakhstan, Canada, Australia, Namibia, Niger, and Russia.

What about thorium? Other elements?

tda3• 5 years ago

As pointed out in he comments below, the climate crisis will reduce political stability. And stability is essential to ensure that there will be a strong enough society left to properly decommission a nuclear plant when it will be EOL in 50 years. Decommissioning is likely to be vastly more expensive than initial construction, and after that you still need to figure out how to make sure no one will want to touch the waste for the next few thousand years.

For the current crisis we need to put a cap on carbon extraction now, and quickly bring extraction rates down to zero. Let the price of oil rise and capitalism should sort it out. Only when fossil fuel prices rise to say 500 USD per barrel will people and industries start effectively reducing consumption. Other than on extremely energy intensive activities (transatlantic flights) fossil fuel prices are just a rounding error.

lake_vincent• 5 years ago

"capitalism should sort it out"

Oh, you sweet summer child!

GVIrish4• 5 years ago

If you can't sell people on nuclear power, there is no way in hell you're gonna sell people on extreme taxes on oil. And even if you could, the base load problem will still be there.

Maybe if carbon were heavily taxed it would incentivize energy storage solutions but as of right now cost effective solutions are no viable yet.

jasonlaramburu• 5 years ago

Those periods of near zero production can last non-trivial amounts of time no realistic battery could provide for

There are many options (electrochemical, gravity etc) for grid-scale energy storage of various durations that are commercially-viable today. 0-8 hours tends to be the most needed duration in the US but there are solutions that can store power for days or weeks without losses. Even in a 100% nuclear or gas-fired world storage is critical. During the Texas blackout both nuclear and gas assets failed due to the cold temperatures.

elproxy8• 5 years ago

Besides the fact that electricity generation is merely one aspect of GHG emissions (hello agriculture, land use, transportation, etc). The ultimate argument against the "let's not radically change our ways and only retool the engine" view is the following: we have ~120 years of known reserves for the current fission reactors, with a potential 10x multiplier with fast neutron reactors should anybody (other than the russians and the chinese) bother to invest into researching the field. How many more doublings in our economy (and hence energy use) does it take to consume it all ? At a measly (by economists and politicians standards) rate of 2%/year, you get a doubling every 35 years. in 350 years (yeah I know this sounds very far in the light of the current news) we'd have increased our demand by 3 orders of magnitude...

slashdev2• 5 years ago

To me this makes so much sense. But when you look at the costs involved it's far cheaper and less risky to deploy 2x in renewables and a bunch of energy storage plus some gas plants and long distance transmission.

New innovations in nuclear maybe have a chance to change this, but renewables are still getting cheaper so even if they succeed they must still beat the moving target.

In another world where we had embraced nuclear long ago and kept innovating it would have made so much sense. It still will be a part of the solution, but the economics really aren't there and the private sector isn't dumb. Markets will allocate capital according to risks and returns and nuclear will continue to be overlooked until it can compete.

jjoonathan• 5 years ago

Nuclear is able to compete on merit and has been forever, but we chose to create a legal environment in which one or two dedicated NIMBYs could stall a project indefinitely. That's the entire reason why "the economics aren't there." We aren't talking about costs of building a reactor or risk of it melting down, we're talking about the cost and risk of 1001 strategically sequential ground squirrel environmental impact studies pushing the project duration out to infinity. Allowing this is a political choice, not an evaluation of the technology.

I tend to agree with you that the ship has sailed, though. If we had just kept building at the same pace as 40 years ago (linear extrapolation, not exponential) then we'd recently have celebrated the completion of a zero-emission grid. Unfortunately, we chose to pump the atmosphere full of CO2 instead. Ugh.

ClumsyPilot2• 5 years ago

"Markets will allocate capital according to risks"

Like you know, the risk to end organised civilisation through climate change. Haha, funny

matkoniecz7• 5 years ago

deploy 2x in renewables and a bunch of energy storage plus some gas plants and long distance transmission

Is it actually sufficient? Feel free to link even technical sources (as long as it is not paywalled without way of checking quality).

My impression is that right now "bunch of energy storage" is 100% unfeasible to provide power from renewables without blackouts. And existing ones work thanks to nearby countries with scalable non-renewable on demand power, with rare exception of countries with low population density and great opportunity for hydropower that is available on demand.

ttul3• 5 years ago

While it's true that the state has to backstop the externalities of nuclear through insurance guarantees, the obvious and present externalities of carbon burning massively outweigh these guarantees. The state picks up a huge ROI by covering nuclear risks while taxing the living shit out of carbon pollution.

juanuys• 5 years ago

Wasn't Bill Gates going to build a new type of reactor [0] before Trump became president and shut down US/China collaboration [1]?

It seems there's some movement from Mr. Gates around nuclear again, but not sure if the Natrium stuff is the same as the TWR (travelling wave reactor) of 5 years ago. [2]

0. https://www.terrapower.com/

1. https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/energy/a25728221/te...

2. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jun/03/bill-gates-w...

zacmps• 5 years ago

Those periods of near zero production can last non-trivial amounts of time no realistic battery could provide for.

Interestingly not the case. New Zealand is currently considering what would become the largest battery in the world, Lake Onslow.

Consisting of a giant artificial lake and hydro dam it could store ~12 terawatt-hours.

This would be enough to smooth over any variations in renewable load and remove the need for fossil fuel peaker plants.

lvs• 5 years ago

Can you kindly edit your comment to remove the accusation that people worried about nuclear power don't believe in the severity of climate change? These people are just looking at a different risk assessment.

outworlder4• 5 years ago

If anyone actually believed it was "code red for humanity" they'd be pushing nuclear power

In theory. I used to say the same thing until recently. Now, I'm not sure.

Let's say we decide that yes, nuclear is the way to go, as it provides a lot of energy with barely any pollution (other than mining and construction). The 'waste', while a problem, is inconsequential compared to spewing crap in the atmosphere.

Let's also assume that the designs will not cause proliferation concerns (we have such designs, as well as more plentiful fuels). In fact, let's assume we will use the best designs we have in general.

Even then, what's the turnaround time to construct new power plants? The figures I've seen suggest it takes almost a decade until a plant is operational. Do we still have the time do build them in enough numbers to make a difference?

wizardofdos2• 5 years ago

No we don't.

We have to reduce comsumption, and not just a bit but by a lot.

gefhfff• 5 years ago

There are storage possibilities beyond batteries, e.g. hydrogen/methane

elihu2• 5 years ago

I'm tentatively in favor of more nuclear power plants, but I'm not convinced it's the only solution. We definitely need more electricity that comes from non-carbon-emitting sources, but solar and wind seem to be winning on cost.

In order to rely more heavily on wind and solar, we will need either enormous batteries or better power distribution across the grid.

Lithium iron phosphate cells should be pretty cheap in mass quantities, and they don't require nickel or cobalt. They can also last a very long time, so cost is amortized over many years. If the batteries cost $100 per kwh and a typical household needs 30 kwh to get through a 24 hour cycle, then that's $3000 worth of batteries per household. The real cost would be higher when you add in battery management systems, chargers, inverters, and so on, but if it's centrally managed it doesn't seem like the manufacturing, installation, and operation cost would be insurmountable.

In terms of the energy grid, I think it would be a good idea to look into constructing major transcontinental high voltage DC lines so the United States can buy solar power from, say, Algeria when the sun is shining there and sell surplus power to Europe and Asia when it's daytime in the U.S..

To sum up: I think nuclear could be a part of the solution, but it isn't the only option. We do have alternatives.

krasi0• 5 years ago

Let's not forget that there are many regions in the world (say in the middle East or Africa) where the situation is constantly volatile to put it mildly and where a nuclear power plant would be impossible to be secured properly against insurgency.

ropable• 5 years ago

Nuclear is an especially sensible option in my country (Australia) IMO; we have an abundance of uranium ore, a geologically stable continent, a high-quality interconnected electrical grid (over most of the population), and a reliable political/governance environment. It would be an enormous improvement over our current reliance on coal-fired generation for base loads.

8eye• 5 years ago

hard pass on that, way too many issues in disaster zones. also, not good for you at all if it gets anywhere near people

LightG• 5 years ago

It's not about "belief" ... short termism is what will do for humanity.

marvoronc3452• 5 years ago

nice

asoneth• 5 years ago

I'd love to see new reactors come on line, but I remain skeptical that nuclear power will be widely used in the US as long as it remains so scary to so many people.

It's scary because disasters stay on the front page for months if not years, it's associated with civilization-ending weapons, radiation and the illnesses it causes are mysterious, we don't really have a great plan for dealing with waste, and nuclear advocates are (by-and-large) a bunch of energy nerds who actually believe some new reactor design or statistical analysis will finally convince the American public to go pro-nuke.

The scarier climate change becomes, the more people seem willing to accept nuclear power. But that could be too little too late.

ttobbaybbob• 5 years ago

Climate engineering is obviously incredibly fraught for a variety of reasons (unintended consequences/etc) but at what point do we start to consider it ? start developing and evaluating technologies related to it ? it seems like it would be something we want in the toolbox since its a solution orthogonal to consumption of carbon

cannabis_sam2• 5 years ago

There is absolutely no way in this world that any politician can get elected on the promise to increase gas prices and electricity costs.

If only we actually properly taxed the parasites who hoard wealth at the expense of our very existence..

cdcadmits• 5 years ago

1967: ‘Dire famine by 1975.’ - Source: Salt Lake Tribune, November 17, 1967

1969: ‘Everyone will disappear in a cloud of blue steam by 1989.’ - Source: New York Times, August 10 1969

1970: Ice age by 2000 - Source: Boston Globe, April 16, 1970

1970: ‘America subject to water rationing by 1974 and food rationing by 1980.’ - Source: Redlands Daily Facts, October 6, 1970

1971: ‘New Ice Age Coming’ - Source: Washington Post, July 9, 1971

1972: New ice age by 2070 - Source: NOAA, October 2015

1974: ‘New Ice Age Coming Fast’ - Source: The Guardian, January 29, 1974

1974: ‘Another Ice Age?’ - Source: TIME, June 24, 1974

1974: Ozone Depletion a ‘Great Peril to Life’ -

1976: ‘The Cooling’ - Source: New York Times Book Review, July 18, 1976

1980: ‘Acid Rain Kills Life in Lakes’ - Noblesville Ledger (Noblesville, IN) April 9, 1980

1978: ‘No End in Sight’ to 30-Year Cooling Trend - Source: New York Times, January 5, 1978

1988: James Hansen forecasts increase regional drought in 1990s - Source: RealClimateScience.com

1988: Washington DC days over 90F to from 35 to 85 - Source: RealClimateScience.com

1988: Maldives completely under water in 30 years - Source: Agence France Press, September 26, 1988

1989: Rising seas to ‘obliterate’ nations by 2000 - Source: Associated Press, June 30, 1989

1989: New York City’s West Side Highway underwater by 2019 - Source: Salon.com, October 23, 2001

1995 to Present: Climate Model Failure - Source: CEI.org

2000: ‘Children won’t know what snow is.' - Source: The Independent, March 20, 2000

2002: Famine in 10 years - Source: The Guardian, December 23, 2002

2004: Britain to have Siberian climate by 2020 - Source: The Guardian, February 21, 2004

2008: Arctic will be ice-free by 2018 - Source: Associated Press, June 24, 2008

2008: Al Gore warns of ice-free Arctic by 2013 - Source: WattsUpWithThat.com, December 16, 2018

2009: Prince Charles says only 8 years to save the planet - Source: The Independent, July 9, 2009

2009: UK prime minister says 50 days to ‘save the planet from catastrophe’ - Source: The Independent: October 20, 2009

2009: Arctic ice-free by 2014 - Source: USA Today, December 14, 2009

2013: Arctic ice-free by 2015 - Source: The Guardian, July 24, 2013

2013: Arctic ice-free by 2016 - Source: The Guardian, December 9, 2013

2014: Only 500 days before ‘climate chaos’ - Sources: Washington Examiner

shreyshnaccount2• 5 years ago

why is the main focus on CO2 and not sulphides and nitrogenous gasses that cause a helluvalot more greenhouse effect than CO2 and are released by industries all around? am I missing something or is this fact ignored?( not saying that nothing should be done about CO2 tho)

philipkglass• 5 years ago

It's because CO2 is by far the largest contributor, accounting for 80% of warming emissions from human activities in the US:

https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/overview-greenhouse-gases

Some gases containing sulfur and nitrogen are far more potent per molecule than CO2, but they are emitted in much smaller volumes. They collectively account for less than 10% of warming emissions.

shreyshnaccount2• 5 years ago

makes sense, thanks!

darepublic2• 5 years ago

So why I am still manipulating html documents forty hours a week. I guess I should be getting involved in activism or just plain disaster prepping. Time to bone up on gardening

daxfohl3• 5 years ago

Was there anything about food supply? I see that as the biggest concern. We can deal with heat and floods and such. But when the world's bio ecosystem starts looking like the Great Barrier Reef's, then that's when we start talking about collapse or extinction.

hbscharp• 5 years ago

The Energy Transition Show podcast is a resource that should receive more attention. It is subscription based, but a free-as-in-beer "best of" episode was released recently.

https://xenetwork.org/ets/episodes/episode-151-best-of-ets/

I shared many of the attitudes popular on HN regarding technology and climate change. ETS has convinced me that:

1. We don’t need to utilize nuclear power to account for the intermittency of solar and wind.

2. Carbon capture and storage technology doesn't need to exist in order achieve decarbonization.

I used to despair about climate change. I'm still quite worried about displacing the centralized incumbent interests. This podcast and its associated resources has gotten me off the couch and thinking about how to apply myself to be part of the solution.

Tiktaalik• 5 years ago

In Canada our so called environmentalist parties BC/AB NDP and Fed Liberals are still insisting we can meet our climate goals while expanding the oil sands and developing liquified natural gas for export.

It's like they're conducting the train, saying that only they can stop it, while continuing to shovel coal in the furnace.

We need someone that has the strength to pull that emergency brake instead.

lcall• 5 years ago

While it is important to be good stewards and not pollute etc, and I respect & admire the scientists and others working to help us do better -- I don't think we are competent to solve climate issues as a whole, when we can't trust each other to keep our word (so much of the time), and especially when we have rejected much specific advice of the planet's Creator. At the same time, things can be OK for us in the long run, if we really try to learn what we should do, and do that. I would include praying, honesty, kindness and humility (willingness to learn) among those things. Really there is good reason for hope for the best; these problems are expected now.

(Edit: thoughtful comments appreciated, with any downvotes; thank you.)

briantakita5• 5 years ago

If this was really "code red for humanity", the global elite jetsetters, China, & military should set the example & drastically reduce their emissions to be in line with the average population. Otherwise, it's another case of "rules for thee but not for me".

hbornfree• 5 years ago

Given how impossible it is achieve global consensus on policy, I'm pretty inclined to believe that a technological breakthrough is the only solution. Maybe a series of them.

In the best case, carbon removal and sequestration tech. In the neutral case, clean and efficient energy tech. In the worst case, climate-catastrophe coping tech.

chris_va• 5 years ago

(disclaimer, I work in a Climate&Energy group)

- There are a number of technical solutions for climate change.

- There are a number of technical entrepreneurs who would love to implement those solutions.

... there is no market to pay for it.

I will echo other folks in this thread in calling for a carbon tax (or Carbon Dividend, possibly the most politically feasible option) to create such a market. Please call your representative! The number of people that have asked me how they can help, but haven't called their representative is driving me crazy!

Such legislation is not intrinsically complicated. If we can just get that passed, I would go to bed at night knowing that the majority of the problem is basically solved.

c7DJTLrn• 5 years ago

There's a lot of nonsense in these comments that doesn't hold up to the most basic scrutiny.

Humanity is going to go extinct

There's no evidence for that. A temperature rise of 2 degrees celsius is by no means a threat to the human race. It is a problem, but not an extinction event.

We should invest in nuclear

Nuclear is extremely expensive and prone to going wrong. It's not a valid argument to state that "nuclear has improved and now it's safe" because nothing is 100% safe and the Fukushima Daiichi disaster is a perfect demonstration of how even recent iterations of the technology with multiple redundancies can go wrong.

Wind/solar doesn't work because it's intermittent

There's no reason we can't have a distributed network of wind and solar farms around the world that can fulfill demand at all times.

We should tax carbon

Taxing carbon could reduce output, sure, but the fact is that humanity is dependent on fossil fuels right now. How can you possibly suggest we start punishing consumers for their carbon footprint when there is no viable alternative? Besides, reducing output at this scale won't have any impact now, it's too late for that. We need to be reversing output.

We need to stop eating meat on Mondays

Sorry but these schemes have no purpose other than to make one feel good about themselves. Most people are not interested in giving up meat at all, let alone for one day a week, so the demand for meat isn't budging. Meat alternatives are promising but won't take hold unless the consumer has an incentive to switch.

We need to capture carbon from the atmosphere

This kind of technology has been debunked by Thunderf00t and many others. To grab that carbon you need to spend at least as much energy as you got from the combustion. So, effectively we need AT LEAST as much energy as we have used since the beginning of the industrial revolution. Trees are good at gathering carbon but they're not good as a long-term carbon sink.

We need to use electric cars

...this solves nothing. The energy still needs to come from somewhere, the carbon is still in the atmosphere, and moreover we need to build everybody a new car which is a carbon-heavy and environmentally unfriendly process in itself.

matkoniecz7• 5 years ago

Humanity is going to go extinct

Yeah, this is about as fact-based as "there is no global warming"

...this solves nothing. The energy still needs to come from somewhere

It can come from renewables, unlike with combustion engine

There's no reason we can't have a distributed network of wind and solar farms around the world that can fulfill demand at all times.

cost, energy losses, political issues (nothing making it impossible but I would not describe it as "no reason")

And power loses from Africa to say Poland would be quite unfun.

because nothing is 100% safe

Duh.

Nuclear is extremely expensive

Waive nearly all regulation and it would be cheaper.

(yes, we would get some meltdowns - but if people actually believed "extinction threat to humanity", "red alert" etc then it would be preferable. And likely still less radioactive than carbon power.)

kortex• 5 years ago

>Humanity is going to go extinct

People aren't worried about the climate or the environment changing enough to directly cause humans to go extinct. More like climate change (plus our huge population) leading to increased resource contention, leading to increased conflict, leading to a superweapons conflict, ergo it's an existential threat.

Nuclear is extremely expensive and prone to going wrong.

This has been debunked in this thread and countless others. It's a solvable problem, but we in the US lack the will.

To grab that carbon you need to spend at least as much energy as you got from the combustion.

Eh. See solutions involving olivine. It's best to not release it in the first place. Which is why...

>We need to use electric cars
...this solves nothing.

... is bupkis. The fewer ICEs releasing carbon, the better. EVs can be powered by renewables. ICEs cannot (economically) be powered by renewables. EtOH is trash, biobutanol and Fischer-Tropsch gasoline are too expensive and likely will stay so.

Addendum on nuclear since it keeps coming up. Five tips from HN's favorite lightning rod mogul would dramatically improve the nuclear industry:

1. Make your requirements less dumb. How much design and regulatory cruft and holdover do we have from the beginning of the atomic age? Not suggesting "move fast and break things" but I am suggesting iterate at the small scale and never stop trying to improve safety, cost, and speed, in that order.

2. Try to delete processes and steps. Smaller, more modular reactors. Use fewer parts, and more off the shelf for what you need.

3. Simplify.

4. Accelerate cycle time. This goes hand-in-hand with Simplify.

5. Try to automate it. This is least essential, and doesn't mean just robots, but more jigwork and assembly line, vs nonrecurring engineering, the better.

BigKahuna1• 5 years ago

I see a future where Carbon Capture Utilization and Sequestration (CCUS) will allow the transition to renewables and sustainability (without nuclear). There are significant advancements in CO2 Capture and when there is a commitment to innovation (R&D$s) to develop new commodities that permanently sequester the captured CO2, we will learn how to integrate the environment with profit motivation. The Green Industrial Carbon Cycle will enable the transition.

kottaram• 5 years ago

Humanity has basically evolved with the innovation in technology in the last 50 years. Of course there's gonna be a 2 degree change in climate. I cant believe the author of the article is trying to compare the last 50 years with every other 50 year period in 2000 years lol.

tomrod• 5 years ago

This drives so much existential angst for me. We utterly and abysmally failed at collective action with COVID-19. How can I anticipate that we achieve anything when people are left to their own devices?

isoblvck• 5 years ago

it was code red YEARS ago when the first report came out. what you thought they were just joking the first time around

marvoronc3452• 5 years ago

nice

Climate change: IPCC report is 'code red for humanity'

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