This might be off topic but I just don't know what else to do. I don't understand why we're not in full-on panic mode yet. It makes me scared. Really scared. As in I've never been so scared in my life.
We knew about climate change for decades. Scientists keep producing report after report after report. Every one grimmer then the preceding. Yet the global GHG emissions just keep going up. Governments and politicians have failed to act. I am tired of waiting for systemic change. I am tired of waiting for technological breakthrough.
While we should keep fighting for systemic change, I begin to believe individual action is paramount and a prerequisite for any broader change to take place. The time for signing petitions is over. It's time to act. There are no low-hanging fruits here. There will be no silver bullet. There will be lots and lots of tweaks across the board.
People don't like being told what to do. I get that. But I am not a politician telling you what to do. I am your peer crying for help. Please do something. Please don't say "most people" wan't sacrifice this or that. I am not talking to most people. I am addressing you, the HN crowd.
So what an honorable member of the HN community can do
- Stop flying to conferences. Go to a local meetup. It's fun. And cheaper. If you really need to get out of town, take a train. Don't think about it as not flying for the rest of your life. Rather, can we declare a moratorium on conferences for like three years? Let's hope by then Prometheus will give us carbon-neutral jet fuel
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19842240
- Shift your investments from fossil to green. If you can't find enough worthy greens, shift it to anything else. Some say it won't impact your returns
http://www.lse.ac.uk/GranthamInstitute/news/the-mythical-per...
Move your deposits and savings to a more sustainable bank. This might be one of the most underappreciated yet simple and powerful tools
https://fairfinanceguide.org
- Work less. Work part time, and part of that part time remotely. Reduce your commute. If your boss won't let you, find a job that will. In the current job market you can negotiate almost anything, and remote work must be the easiest thing to negotiate.
http://cepr.net/documents/publications/climate-change-worksh...
A firm lets its employees work four days a week while being paid for five. Everyone is happy, lower electricity bills, fewer cars on the road
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/19/world/asia/four-day-workw...
- I noticed that this one is quite controversial but I'll mention it anyway. Reduce your meat consumption as much as you can. It's fine to not go fully vegan, but make meat a special treat, something you are looking forward to, not an everyday snack. They say these new vega burgers are not too bad.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/04/30/dining/climat...
Apparently it takes 3.5% of the population to take an active stance to cause a change (https://www...
You know why. Most of the world has market economies that rely on growth. The measure of growth is GDP and put simply GDP doesn't measure how much you're wasting, just how productive you are. Short term political aims are in conflict with long term environmental stewardship. The current US president only cares about his numbers, not the mess he's leaving behind. We'll be in full panic mode when it negatively impacts GDP, which will of course be too late.
The problem is the feedback cycle is far to long for us to handle. Most learning works by doing something, seeing a bad result and then stop doing the thing. Problem is by the time the bad result comes things will be so far gone there is no hope for fixing it.
For a lot of older people alive today they will never see the consequences of their actions so the selfish option is to carry on.
It is not about politics, it is about nobody doing anything. Just look on the streets, millions of cars all burning away litres of gas every day, releasing even more CO2 into the atmosphere. Everyone knows it and noone does anything about it. It is not "the elite" who is ignoring the issue, it is literally 99% of the people who don't care enough to even take the bus or bycycle.
I am not saying I am better, but is not anonymous "others" or our "GDP-based system", it is 7 billion people who don't care much.
Disagree. The reason fuel is so cheap to permit the cars burning gas is because it's priced artificially low. If you were to charge based on replacement value (it's almost priceless given the production time), the cost of fuel would go up massively, productivity would stop and Mr Trump (and all the other world leaders) would no longer be able to boast about their growing numbers. I'm not denying individual responsibility, that's vital too but the big change also has to occur at the top and a market that lives on growth is a problem.
There should be a heavy carbon penalty on kerosene. It's surreal that people expect to fly across continents for €50.
My friend recently complained that our planned flights this summer (Germany-Scotland) are too expensive at the moment. He wants them for €150 and from an economic perspective he is right because you can have them for this little.
No, I would counter that something needs to be done about poor train infrastructure.
You are mentioning an important problem but I firmly believe that cheap flights are not a future-proof, sustainable solution as long as kerosene is the fuel.
Trains on the other hand could be a wonderful approach. Political incentives have stifled train infrastructure in the past. Trains in Germany are already a joke but its insane how this concept is just non-existent in the US due to the reign of cars and flights.
But I guess its more important to spend $600bn on a massively overinflated military or in case of Germany to politically support Big Car.
So you would want to increase the travel time for people who can't afford air travel, which would increase the amount of time they would need to take off from work? That doesn't seem fair to people who depend on a job for their livelihood.
The problem is that most of the ideas you propose - although good - only have force in the West.
Western countries are not the major culprit at the moment. EU has decreased their CO2 emissions by 20% during the last 30 years. USA has maintained them. China and India, increased them by 300% and China alone now emits more CO2 than USA, EU and Canada combined.
This is not to say that Western countries can just cross their arms and do nothing, but, they are not the ones that are going to change the picture and all this discourse about global warming has been turned in an anti-West political weapon that never addresses the real issues and never has the courage to point their finger at the countries that are the biggest problem at the moment.
This way, I fear no real change will happen until it's too late.
I don't know how you consider it "lowest hanging fruit" when beef is so tasty.
My current diet, I do not wish to state. However, I was a vegetarian in some phases of my life. If motivated enough, I could be a vegetarian for life. However, it would be a folly if I were to start believing that everyone can make sacrifices of this kind. For some people, giving up on things they like to eat is very hard. For some, giving up on using their car is hard. People can do different things to help and not everyone needs to do every single thing. An extreme approach is not practical and it's next to impossible to "sell" such an idea.
> Western countries are not the major culprit at the moment...
I believe this is a misconception. We didn't decrease our emissions, we outsourced them. A lot of the China pollution is due to exports for western consumption. Just look at the trade "disbalance" between China and USA.
I don't think you can account anywhere near 100% of China's increased emissions by what the USA "outsourced" in shifting its manufacturing there.
China is developing into a first-world nation with over a billion people. That's a lot of manufacturing and infrastructure development for purely domestic purposes. Building cities, streets, highways, railways, automobiles, that's a huge amount of metal and cement production.
If you want to blame the USA and other China-product-consuming countries for China's emissions, it's more for sending so much money in their direction on goods to fund all this large-scale development.
It's true, the USA isn't really at the helm anymore. We have high per-capita CO2 figures, but in absolute terms we're in the ballpark of just 50% of China's emissions.
India is set to explode, and there are already reports of manufacturing migrating there because China is becoming expensive as they get their act together.
When the dust settles I imagine China and India will be the dominant emitters with their massive populations. Every time these countries move their quality of life needle the slightest bit upwards across their population it makes a big impact.
Despite the recent improvements, the EU still emits more CO2 per capita than China and India [1]. Thus, most of the reduction still need to come from the western countries. (Though that will change soon if the current trend continues).
This doesn't make sense. Nobody is expecting Qatar (with the highest per capita emissions) to make the largest contribution to fixing the problem.
What's important is the actual reduction in emissions, and the jurisdiction with control over the largest quantity is most capable of reducing the total.
That's right, there are EU countries we could wipe off the face of the planet and it wouldn't make any difference.
Looking at per-capita numbers and trying to hold everyone in the world to the same standard has never been the way the world works, and if we tried to establish such a system, we'd never make any progress on this issue.
(If we wanted to hold everyone to the same standard, we could divert income from the rich and make them poor, because consumption pretty much increases linearly with income, except at the top decile where consumption increases massively. But attacking the richest isn't gonna save us either, because planet earth doesn't give a crap about the income levels of whoever's putting CO2 into the atmosphere. All that matters is how much of it we put in there.)
China is taking the problem seriously. Although their one-party rule is deplorable for human rights, it enables China to move rapidly on major technological issues like this because the economy is shaped by edicts from the top.
Anyone in the West who's trying to shift the blame to China is deluding themselves. We need to fix our politics so we can move with the same determination as China on this specific issue, not the other way around.
China is set to increase their CO2 emissions - according to their own policies and promises from their own government - by 20% just in the next 10 years. [1]
These figures are what their own government is aiming for when you examine their policies. The real one could be much higher.
If they're taking it seriously, why do they keep building coal power plants, building ghost towns, and manufacturing products that won't be sold just to inflate their GDP numbers?
Like the fact you think the reports have gotten more and more dire is debatable at best, there were many reports decades earlier that predicted that today we should have already experienced at least a foot of sea level rise.
Also if you were concerned this was a life or death situation, why didn't you mention global birth control as an option? At some point you have to admit that humans aren't going to be net carbon neutral unless we come up with some great new technology that just solves the carbon crisis.
If we assume the reality of this, it only stands to reason that a booming population will lead to more carbon pollution and so the flip side also stands that a shrinking population will reduce carbon pollution.
I'm just saying that I find the bleak view of the future where we all just stop flying planes, turn off our computers and live in our little communities. We have to accept that we are a global community and breaking that down isn't going to solve the problem of carbon pollution.
Please do get involved with Green New Deal activism. Personal responsibility is great but it will NOT fix the problem. We need fundamental changes in how our global economy operates. We are having a moment in politics where it seems real change is possible, so please don’t let the slow progress of past years get you down.
Remember civil rights took decades of hard, thankless work before MLK Jr. stepped on the scene. Or labor rights (Saturdays) or women’s suffrage or any major leap forward. Sometimes you have to strike the match a few times before it lights.
Agree. Personal responsibility ALONE will not fix the problem. But it's not either/or. While I applaud activism movements like Sunrise, I believe personal lifestyle adjustments are indispensable. After all, in any scenario, the systemic changes we are talking about will have to include (mandated) reduction in consumption. We might as well start now voluntarily, and think about how to keep our lives fun and enjoyable while consuming less.
I upvoted you, all the 3 suggestions are very good. However, I don't think individual action is going to cut it, I think the government needs to start explaining the problem and coordinating change (especially in private companies), and that's why you need petitions. It needs to be on people's minds, so that they can support each other in doing all these things that you have suggested and more.
What we often don't realize though is how many of our own individual actions are actually due to societal (cultural) pressures.
For example, flying to conferences. It is considered to be normal, and people who would refuse to fly (as a conscientious objector to climate change) would be considered "weird". But it is really just a cultural norm here. We readily accept vegetarians, for example, and we accommodate for that. In a similar way, we could accept that some people object to flying (or it could even be the default).
I know I’ll be bashed for this, but: create fewer humans. Isn’t it obvious by now that population increase is a big part of the problem?
Edit: I am not thinking of the direct CO2 emissions caused by breathing. It’s all the habitat destruction done for each of us and by each of us, the pollution in various forms and so on.
Can we really compensate for this by becoming more efficient? Can we become so efficient to handle a few more billion people? Where is the limit?
B: Even if everyone cut their birth rate instantly it would be 100 years before there would be much change. (Think about how long people live and the birthrate is never going to actually be zero.)
So even if that was the problem, which it's not, it's not solvable by any method that has to do with reducing the number of humans.
Only a new energy source can solve this, which makes population increase a completely pointless thing to discuss.
No, just stop flying private jets. Try to do online meetings and if you really need to be somewhere use commercial aircraft for travel to lower your footprint. It's easy. This hypothetical businessman can lower his footprint to level of South American villager with some effort and planning. As for the children of wealthy people I would rather have a millionaire with 10 kids which can receive proper health care and education (and with a bit of luck share their wealth with less fortunate people) than 10 kids living in poverty.
What do you think about the tokenization of emissions? It's certainly not a silver bullet or likely even a good answer, but it could incentivize people to choose more sustainable options. This could shift reducing emissions to a form of social competition thus more people might do it. In this kind of system, people might self-motivate themselves for the fear of being held accountable, or just simply for presentable bragging rights.
Pricing emissions is certainly a good idea. EU is doing it - https://ec.europa.eu/clima/policies/ets_en, but it's too weak, prices are too low. And that's kind of my point - politicians will never price it to the point where it harms growth.
The big hitters in terms of CO2 are Transportation, Industrial production, Power Generation and Food production. For each of those, some big wins:
- Travel less, particularly long haul and travel more sustainable, share a train, avoid air travel
- Buy less, particularly clothes and consumer electronics that you don't really need. Make things last longer, own less. Boycott manufacturers who make deliberately disposable/single use products.
- Make your home more efficient, that means insulation if you're in a cold place and ventalation, use of shade if you're in a hot place. Replace fossil fuel heating with renewable electric where possible
- Waste less food, eat less meat particularly red, buy things that don't have lots of waste attached (like short shelf lives, lots of packaging), and buy food that hasn't traveled far to get to you
How do you buy less clothes? Having less clothes just makes the stuff you have wear out faster. All of my clothes have worn out in ways you can't repair. Putting a patch over a hole looks worse than having a hole.
You may buy only clothes that you need and that's great but I'm almost sure that you know someone who buys dress for a one night out. Media and celebrities are always showing on the red carpet in new clothes and you never see them in the same clothes again. It is encourage to buy more and more clothes that very often are getting worn couple times and left in the closet forever. Some countries are better or worst at this. Here where I live, a walk-in closets are pretty rare, in USA they seems to be pretty much a standard. Why would you need a closet the size of a small room just to put there clothes of one or two people?
I encourage you to speak with someone who works at Primark, H&M or other shop of this sort and ask them how sale day looks like, how many of them are happening during the year and how many recurring, known-to-staff customers they have. You will be surprised. I don't even mention one-time-use clothes for special occasions like weddings (even as a guest), prom, Halloween etc.
IME in certain american social circles there is often an expectation for people (especially women) to come up with 'new looks' for social occasions, and not doing so is a sign that the person lacks taste, class, or wealth (or a combination of all 3). The most common noticeable thing is if a woman is attending many weddings, a husband may notice she insists on not wearing the same dress to each wedding. This is because if she does wear the same dress, she is highlighting that she lacks wealth or class at weddings, and if anyone notices her repeating dresses it is considered an affront or disrespect.
If you wear your clothes until they're worn out you're already doing well. There are many people who buy new clothes because they get tired of the old ones.
I patch my jeans and my gloves. It might not look very good, but it increases their life by at least 50%. I've also replaced zippers on jackets because they wore out.
I have found that some trendy clothes actually last a long time and some hardly lasts at all. I think I if I pay more attention I could work out how long lasting shirts feel so I can pick them out when looking for clothes.
When it comes to pants I find the pockets always rip first which is really annoying. I haven't tried to fix them yet but I have been keeping them for when I work out how to put new pockets on.
Look at quality of fabric, fastners, and stitching. No matter if 10th generarion grandma or last years sweatshop worker on a worn out machine, the result is where the value is. Cotton, nylon, hemp, even rayon over polyester, ykk zippers are still the best, look for triple stitching, nice tie offs at ends of hems, yank the seam to see if its too tight and will bind and break...
Better yet, many custom outfits can be specd and ordered online for a modest fee if you are like many who don't seem to fit americian vanity, nor asian sizing.
That only works if you wear the clothes you buy until they're worn out. Most don't, most buy clothes and have them sit in a drawer until they make up their mind they really don't like them and send them to landfill or the charity shop. From the sound of things, you're not the problem!
IIRC (from https://www.withouthotair.com/ ) one round trip over Atlantic is around the same carbon emmissions as a daily commute with the car. So things are not that simple.
That's why I also think it needs to be cultural norm. There is small minority of people who air travel a lot. If we could somehow manage to change the norm so they would travel less (for example, stayed much longer in the same place), it would be great.
Almost nothing is at the top of the list. As I mentioned there are not low hanging fruits. Everything is important. Also, not flying might be exactly something doing on individual level, while "drop all fossil fuels energy at home" requires infrastructure change. Also not-flying is a more publicly visible action which might inspire others to follow.
The problem is we should stop with the PR bollocks of doing useless but "publicly visible" actions.
There are real, important things at the top of the list.
Changing electricity supplier, driving less, buying the most efficient car possible or an electric one (if you can charge it with non-fossil fuel sources), etc. should occupy the headlines more that "air travel is bad (TM)"
> Air travel is not at the top of the list for the majority of people so let's not always mention it as an important action.
I disagree. It is important to realize its impact, so that we can organize the society so that it is not needed. The people who don't travel often still need to hold the minority accountable.
> The IPCC has estimated that aviation is responsible for around 3.5 percent of anthropogenic climate change, a figure which includes both CO2 and non-CO2 induced effects. The IPCC has produced scenarios estimating what this figure could be in 2050. The central case estimate is that aviation's contribution could grow to five percent of the total contribution by 2050 if action is not taken to tackle these emissions, though the highest scenario is 15 percent.
As I said, people tend to overstate the actual impact of aviation.
To me, air travel is one of those things that's artificially cheap. It's zero rated for tax and largely encouraged for economic growth reasons. It's direct impacts are perhaps not as bad, but indirectly someone going from the UK to New York for a hen weekend is the kind of thing that should be unacceptably and prohibitively expensive.
Climate change is not going to be addressed through individual actions. The only way anything substantial will get done is through concerted wide-scale government action. Get angry, get in the face of your representatives, be a one-issue voter and let them know it: https://rebellion.earth/
(Before some idiots comment 'b-b-but what about China and India?" we can put pressure on them too: carrot and stick with help to invest in green energy and trade sanctions if they continue polluting)
I admire and applaud people of XR who are willing to get arrested for the cause, and wide-scale government action is an absolute requirement, but while we are waiting for it, let's not use it as an excuse to not adjust our lifestyles today.
> I don't understand why we're not in full-on panic mode yet. It makes me scared. Really scared. As in I've never been so scared in my life.
I am completely with your mindset here. However, I think it is rather trivial to explain why we are not in full on panic mode.
Short-term profit and power games are more relevant to sociopathic and psychopathic individuals such as Mitch McConnell, Bolsonaro and tens of thousands of others in leadership positions. Marketing, political campaigns and propaganda smearing do the rest.
In Germany, the conservative party (CDU) as well as the "social" democrats (SPD) are in power and absolutely refuse to phase out coal as quickly as they did nuclear because of a few thousand coal jobs. The target is 2038 - as long as it fits their bill. Neither is willing to do the right thing because short term it might lose them voters.
Yes you heard that right - they will lose voters. Demographics in Germany shows us, that Germany is old and continues to age. Nothing but immigration will stop this.
Young people who care are simply overpowered at the ballot. This can sometimes feel schizophrenic as the vocal voices online are part of the group that votes less...
wasn't it obama who said that just by checking our tire pressure we would save fuel and co2? and checking tire pressure is something so so easy to do...
A similar comment of mine got downvoted, but I can at least upvote yours.
Population growth is IMO a big part of the issue. I do not believe we can become so efficient and consume so little that adding more billions to the population can be compensated for. People need to be fed, at the least. Think habitat destruction.
People will still produce CO2 in various ways. So reduce CO2 footprint per person by, say, 50% while increasing population by 50% will bring us no benefits with regard to CO2.
Limiting population growth is desireable from a general environmental perspective, but it is a big red herring with respect to the climate change. The fight against the climate change needs to make some significant progress in the next 2 or 3 decades. In that timeframe, population dynamic won't have any effect, short of global disasters. So any discussion about population growth in that context sounds like an (intended?) distraction from the actual necessary means.
On the matter of population growth, the data is actually giving me a lot of hope: in most developed countries, the population is stable or even declining. China has a reproduction rate much lower than the equilibrium one of 2, causing a lot of problems on its own, still the population is growing a bit more as the average lifespan keeps increasing. But there is a clear maximum in sight.
The elephant in the room rather is: what if the average Chineese citizen would emit as much carbon and the average American one? Without any population growth, if that happened, it would be game over. So the immediate call to action has to be to reduce carbon emissions. In any country.
> So any discussion about population growth in that context sounds like an (intended?) distraction from the actual necessary means.
I'm only saying that we should think about population growth in addition to other measures. Also, it's not about limiting population growth but actually reducing the number of people living on this planet as quickly as possible. In the long term, I can't see a more effective way to save resources.
> what if the average Chineese citizen would emit as much carbon and the average American one?
Then global carbon dioxide emissions would rise by ~10%. It wouldn't make much of a difference, as serious negative effects from climate change seem to be unavoidable. But this doesn't mean "game over". Mankind is a lot more resilient than you seem to think. That's why there's still a need for long-term thinking (centuries, not decades).
That's already happening, fertility rates have fallen below replacement levels in most of the developed world. It's only Africa that is lagging but Africa isn't creating the problem.
The population is continuing to grow because life expectancy is increasing.
China grew during a one child policy. Their ecosystem continued to change to support more people by growing more food. A global change that reduces food production by some % per year is needed to reduce the population.
Even if we had a major virus that killed 20% of the population once, we would still rapidly replace them and keep growing if we don’t learn to fit back into a sustainable lifestyle.
It's important to uderstand that what's required is a collective action, and probably an unprecedented one. If yourself and a handful (let's say 1 million) of friends opt out of society, go off grid and eat pine trees like beevers, it will make exactly zero impact on CO2 emission. Plus we'll lose your voices in the actions we do need which are of a more political type.
I don't say "opt out of society". I say stay in the society, refuse to fly, and convince your friends/colleagues/bosses/employees to do the same.
> what's required is a collective action
Wound't that collective action include not flying? And what form do you imagine it will take - a government order that forbids flying and makes airlines illegal?
I would say refusing to join your team on a trip to that fancy conference of the year takes some courage. Surely not as much courage as violating segregation laws but still.
They have not failed to act. Rather there is no action they can take. Not a single one of your suggestions, even all together, will make any meaningful difference.
> I am tired of waiting for systemic change. I am tired of waiting for technological breakthrough.
You're going to have to keep waiting because that is the only solution. There's simply is no other solution.
As proof for what I say, think about the ozone hole and freon. There was a problem, but in that case there actually was a solution. And the solution was implemented even though it was hard.
If there was a solution here, i.e. a new energy source, it would be implemented. And no, wind and solar as they exist today are not that solution although they are incremental help, and they are being installed incrementally, which makes sense.
But if this is the case then why don't we see a massive amount of research and development, like larger than the Manhattan and Apollo projects, to ensure we get a technological solution in time?
Instead we see that EU countries aren't even hitting the miserable EU target of 2.4% of GDP to be spent on R&D let alone the 3% 2020 target, and other nations fare even worse.
I agree that we should investigate nuclear power, especially fusion as it offers an order of magnitude more energy (I remember when Greenpeace denounced ITER, I guess because it used to have Thermonuclear in the name..)
But honestly, I don't think the environmental movement has that much power to block the research.
I suspect it's just that while people like the idea of scientific and technological progress, they don't like having to pay for it.
- I've never flown to a conference. I've been on a plane twice in my entire life.
- No investments
- I work remotely; no commute.
- I hardly ever buy meat.
Yet none of this matters. If everyone in my country followed suit, it still wouldn't amount to more than noise in the statistics. Individual action like this is pretty much futile. You just need to catch a glimpse of what are the largest sources of CO2 (and equivalent) emissions.
I'm with you, you are far from alone. My own thoughts are to ignore the pessimism and what others are/are not doing. As an individual, this is the only way I can defeat the prisoner dilemma. In addition to your suggestions, I would also say we need to learn to bring this topic up in all areas of life e.g. around the office, family gatherings etc. Not talking about uncomfortable topics may end up killing us, and our children. I want to be a part of that 3.5% :D
What I don't understand is why this is so controversial. I clicked on a link in the article, leading to this article: https://techcrunch.com/2019/05/06/new-study-shows-human-deve.... The comment on it is extremely dismissive about climate change. I see this on pretty much every news website nowadays. First of all I don't see how man-made climate change is even controversial with the amount of evidence we have, but furthermore I don't see why we shouldn't transition to renewable energy asap anyway. Even if climate change would be a hoax (which it is not), then why would it be a bad thing to make changes to prevent it from happening anyway? Why would it be a bad thing to get rid of air pollution? Why would it be a bad thing to switch to an energy source that doesn't run out in ~20 years simply because it isn't renewable?
What planet do you live on? The only radicals I see are on the left. Do you know how many poor people would die if the green new deal was ever implemented? Probably thousands would die and if that isn't radical I don't know what is.
And the green new deal with have zero effect on global temperatures.
Because powerful parties possess considerable vested interest in the current carbon-consumption status quo.
Ironically many of these interests could realise the new opportunities of growth in the energy space instead of focusing on potential impact to current business lines.
Think of it like optimization algorithm stuck in a local minimum. There's a deeper valley just over there, but you have to first climb a small hill to get there. The market is pretty much everyone executing an algorithm like this, with the extra tweak that staying too high relative to your friends for too long will kill your business.
Because it's much easier to deny something that big than to take care of it. We'd need a economic/cultural revolution at a global scale. Everything has to scale down, no more ICE, not more plastic, no more food imported from the other side of the world, reduce meat consumption, reduce traveling &c.
The current system is based on unlimited and exponential growth, everything else is considered a failure. An unlimited growth in a finite environment isn't possible, it's called instability.
The second problem is that many people convince themselves that "Science" will save us, that we'll terraform Mars or that shifting to electric cars will be enough, but that's too little, too late. Even if we'd hit our ecological goals, and we're not, we'd be far from fixing the problem. We don't need to slow down, we need a complete paradigm shift. It's like when you move form a basic 40sq meter flat to a fancy 250sq meter house, going back is very hard.
We have a very real thing happening right now on earth with extreme consequences: major species extinction, air pollution, water pollution, soon to be ecological refugees, &c. But the answer is mining asteroid and having a moon base.
Why would we care about asteroid gold and the few (<100) people that might go to the moon and live an extremely strenuous life. It's not like we'll all go to the moon, crack open a cold one and watch the moon superbowl.
Try telling someone from a few hundred years ago they’d catch a jet airplane to an undiscovered continent thousands of miles away for a quick vacation. And on the way they could crack a cold one traversing oceans that explorers would spend months trying to traverse in a wooden boat. They could even buy tickets on a magic handheld machine which can teleport information through thin air to anywhere on the planet in fractions of a second.
If you change your sense of scale from a few years to a few hundred, yeah, I think it’s likely humanity will be watching the moon superbowl, in fact it’s probably the most dull and conservative view of the future someone could have.
We don't have time to wait a few hundred years for technology to improve though. The fate of the climate is decided in the next ten to twenty years. If we don't stop catastrophic climate change now, it's quite likely that technological society will be busy fighting for scarce resources here instead of building space colonies.
For the foreseeable future those involve a handful of people getting there as a novelty (in the same way people having been on the ISS for decades), not 8 billion needing to survive.
Not to mention they're still vaporware... Brochures are easy.
In 30 years Miami might be under the waters, and we'd still be extremely lucky if we have a 200 sq ft base on the moon.
(On which a man haven't even set foot for the last 48 years).
It will take at least a century of focused effort until an off world colony can be self sufficient. Think of how complex even the simplest things are that you interact with on a daily basis and how difficult it would be to replicate the industries that manufacture them on the Moon or Mars.
You are correct but infinite resources of universe are out of our reach at the moment and if we will not work smart with Earth local resources we may never reach a level at which we will be able to benefit from resources outside of our planet.
Yeah right, how much does it cost to ship 1kg in space again ?
Do we even have the raw resources on earth / the tech to move everyone to a new planet and terraform it before we're all toast ?
Even if we do what's your moral standpoint on the fact that humanity destroyed 3+ billion years of evolution on earth in a few hundred years ?
Who in their right mind think that terraforming a planet is easier than just stopping destroying our home planet ?
Even if we do move to a new planet, in what kind of conditions will we live, I doubt we'd have even 10% f the comfort we have today. So why not scale down here, on earth, in the first place ?
The very big difference is that we are, at least partially, causing it, aware of it, aware it's going to be bad, and we know how to improve it. So we're making the decision, as a specie, not to care.
But sure in the big scheme of things it's not changing much, it's more of a personal / moral position.
But plenty of things cause extinction events, hell humans were causing the Wolly Mammoth to go extinct long before we had anything resembling a civilization. Plenty of other plants and animals will drive other animals to extinction. It’s the circle of life, one which we, being animals, are a part of.
I don't think that's where the question is. The issue is that other species dying might very well take us down too. It's an ecosystem where everything is interconnected, sure you can remove a few species here and there and nothing will change, but remove enough of them and we'll start seeing the consequences.
A good analogy is the Eiffel tower, you can remove a bolt, 10 bolts, 100 bolts, it'll still hold fine, remove one too many and it'll collapse. The metal will still be there (earth) but it won't be the Eiffel tower anymore (Life).
> The current rate of extinction of species is estimated at 100 to 1,000 times higher than natural background rates.
When I say about confusion in climate discussions (like elsewhere in the thread), I talk about precisely this. You arrived at the correct (IMO) conclusion that the primary and pressing issue with environmental damage is that systems humans depend on to live may collapse at some point, possibly quite suddenly. But in comments upthread, you argued about moral issues of letting species die. Those are two very separate problems! One of them is an issue of conscience, the other is an impending catastrophe that threatens to kill a lot of people and make even more suffer, and could likely be a civilization-ending process. I think bundling them together (which is common) is making people in general less receptive to the changes that need to be done.
> Yeah right, how much does it cost to ship 1kg in space again ?
a moon base would cost upwards of 20 billion USD.
the increase in the US military budget for FY2018 is 58 billion USD, bringing it to a total of 639 billion USD. that's just for FY2018. there is currently no world war.
> Do we even have the raw resources on earth / the tech to move everyone to a new planet and terraform it before we're all toast ?
no one mentioned anything about terraforming or moving people in this thread. i made a comment regarding finite resources, which aren't finite if you just look at the sky instead of the ground.
"A moon base" meaning what in this context? I'm guessing it means a NASA research based designed to host no more than a dozen astronauts at a time. That number is basically meaningless when it comes to colonization. We simply don't have the technology to establish an independent colony on the moon. We might be able to do it on Mars, but it will cost trillions of dollars.
Unless we make a breakthrough in physics (which is pretty unlikely to be possible in our current understanding), the universe will be limited to us. The best we can do is a sphere of human economy expanding its radius at near the speed of light. That still leaves out a good chunk of universe forever inaccessible to us. Physics does seem to put a limit on growth.
No, our environment is Earth, and only because we evolved to its conditions, and only by a very much luck that had them be in a very narrow zone that was good for life (and even Earth could not care less about us).
Our immediate environment aside from Earth is the vastness of the solar system, in planets totally unsuitable to support us, and with extreme costs to even get us to the nearest one, and with vast expanses of space and radiation to go through to get to the next.
We got humans to the closest rock for a few years, on a huge cost and effort, and with big risks (and some casualties), based on the competition of 2 superpowers. Since then, not only we haven't established any "base", but we haven't even been there for 48+ years (almost half a century)...
And even if by a very slim chance (which people who view technological progress as some kind of boundless Paolo Coelio fairy tale take for granted) we manage to do something in those planets, the next step (some earth like habitable planet elsewhere) is extremely more challenging, and speed of light limits would apply (of course people who view technological progress as some kind of boundless Paolo Coelio fairy tale bypass them with exotic contraptions that have us riding wormholes and what have you...).
And that's if war and climate mayhem doesn't have us concentrate all our efforts here...
Some food for though: don't concentrate on the pedantic details, but the high level arguments:
I think the idea that science is some kind of fairy tail or magical solution to all our problems is a bit off. But, ask someone in the 1800s how they feel about the future and you’d get some pretty ignorant and wildly inaccurate responses.
The thing is, you and I are no more qualified to speculate on the future than someone from 100 years ago would be qualified to speculate on the Internet. However I can say one thing: if we even make a fraction of the progress in the next 100 years compared to the progress in the last, I don’t think we have anything to worry about when it comes to energy or transportation.
>The thing is, you and I are no more qualified to speculate on the future than someone from 100 years ago would be qualified to speculate on the Internet.
I'd say we are.
We don't expect the speed of light to change for example. Whereas people in the 1800s didn't have any such hard limit (e.g. based on Newtonian theory).
We also have the benefit of hindsight, and can see the rate of technical development (and e.g. that the low hanging fruit were on the late 19th century, increasing on early 20th century, and dropping down after the later half of the 20th century.
>However I can say one thing: if we even make a fraction of the progress in the next 100 years compared to the progress in the last, I don’t think we have anything to worry about when it comes to energy or transportation.
Compared to the progress in the last 100 years, or the last 50 years? Because already the progress in the last 50 years is laughable compared to the progress up until 1970 or so.
E.g. we had electricity, nuclear energy, combustion engine, radio, tv, film, digital imaging, lasers, microwaves, satellites, internet, computers, airplanes, transistors, rockets, radars, and tons of other fundamentals already available by 1960s -- not so much huge progress later on aside from evolutionary stuff.
The internet is not a technology unto itself. Rather, it's an application of technology. The internet of today is vastly different from the internet of the 1960s (which GP included in their list), but it's not fundamentally different at a technological level. The change of the internet from ARPANET to today is driven by nothing more than incremental improvement in existing technologies.
When was the last time a new technology reached commercial success?
Well, even if "all technologies can be considered applications of other technologies" some are less so than others.
Besides we're not talking about mere products here, but core technologies, e.g. inventions. The steam engine, the combustion engine, electricity, the telephone, laser, microwave, satellites, and so on, weren't mere "applications of other technologies" and even less so a mere incremental bump in the way modern internet vs 60s/70s internet is.
We already had the internet invented in the 60s (ARPANET). And even a better conception of the www idea (Xanadu). The rest is evolutionary stuff -- and we haven't done better since, just spread the technology to everybody.
The moon is "a couple decades away from any practical use" in the same way that fusion power is. Likewise, there have been models of orbital economies for decades, and no one has even tried to actually do it. For all practical purposes our current reach extends to the surface of the Earth and no further.
The universe might be infinite, but growth will eventually be limited by the speed of light.
Per capita energy usage is about 6 MWh / year and our population has been doubling every 53 years. Assuming that continues, in 10000 years we'll be using 4e69 Wh / year. If we figure out 100% conversion of mass to energy, that's 1e56 kg of fuel, which is a lot more than all the matter in the visible universe.
You can play with these numbers a little, but even reducing the energy usage per person by a million only gives us another 1000 years. Soon we'll be growing so fast that every year we'll use all the resources within one light-year.
You should check out Hans Rosling's lectures [1]. Statistics points towards the fact that as people become more wealthy, they have less children. It should stagnate around 11 million people by most models.
Growth is fine, really. I'd start worrying when our economy starts to expand at a noticeable fraction of the speed of light.
The problem is sustainable growth. The path we're on isn't sustainable, unless we hit some scientific and political miracles in the next years. Sustainable growth is unfortunately slower than unsustainable one, so it loses out in competitive environment. Still, I don't think we should focus on attacking growth in general - just the type we have now. Done right, economic growth may yet save us.
> The earth is a finite world, sustainable or not you won't be able to grow indefinitely.
It's not "indefinitely". It's just "long enough that we can bootstrap a space economy and expand into the Solar System", or alternatively "long enough so that we can fix the environmental damage, get rid of poverty and most diseases, and slowly S-curve the economy into some acceptable state". Or some combination of that.
Moreover, not all growth is tied to physical space and resource use. We're also not using the space and resources we have efficiently. There's plenty of room on Earth for us to grow, but it might start looking more like improving things than expanding them.
> if we go back that would impact the GDP.
Switching to a sustainable level of growth will require that - slowing down the growth itself, and even a temporary shrinking of the economy.
In theory Growth could be detached from energy consumption, if I cook my neighbours a meal tonight and charge them £20 and tomorrow they do the same for me then GDP has grown by £40 but energy consumption has staid the same.
In reality it seems most of the things we find valuable do involve energy consumption. We are so far from completely decoupling it that you might as well consider money and energy to be the same thing. The more you spend and the richer you are the more damage you are causing the environment.
It seems politicians (of the environmental kind) who tell you we can grow and save the planet are almost certainly lying.
Energy consumption is indeed tied to anything interesting and useful we can do. But the problem isn't and never was energy use itself (global warming isn't caused by waste heat). The problem was a) unsustainable energy sources, which threaten energy security long-term, and b) polluting energy sources, which cause climate change (it so happens that a) and b) generally overlap, so people confuse this point).
Put another way: if we could suddenly switch transportation to electric and replace all our power generation with renewables with some surplus power on top, why would anyone want to limit energy consumption? That would be equivalent to saying, let's reverse civilization, bring back more poverty and suffering, because it was all cool and games 300 years ago.
> We are so far from completely decoupling it that you might as well consider money and energy to be the same thing.
With market setting prices according to supply and demand and business model shenanigans, and with lots of externalities everywhere unaccounted for, I'd say prices on everything are pretty well decoupled from energy use. It would be a better world if they weren't.
If we had a perpetual motion machine with zero emissions, we could build machines that carefully filtered the oceans and removed the plastic straws, and the environment would be fine.
That's the thing with energy, and why I'm arguing that aiming for reduction in energy production would be self-destructive for our civilization: with enough surplus energy, you can do near anything. We could remove from the air and the seas all the pollution we emitted so far. We could keep turning air into combustible hydrocarbons all day long and enjoy high-density hydrocarbon fuels that are carbon neutral. There's lots of things that could help which we aren't currently doing, because they don't make economical sense. With more cheap energy, they would.
Sure, I see what you're saying, and to an extent I agree - I don't think that us having clean energy, or producing more energy, is a bad thing in and of itself.
I'm more wary about the idea that we can solve all problems if we just have more energy.
What we're doing, and show no signs of slowing down on, is fundamentally restructuring how the planet works. We're building housing, industry, solar farms, roads, railroads, you name it - everywhere we can afford to, and having more energy makes that even easier.
You can suck CO2 out of the atmosphere; you can attempt to clean plastic from the oceans (I suspect that this would be difficult without side effects even with limitless energy; how do you avoid disturbing life on the seabed?).
But can you create natural wilderness? Can you provide habitats for wildlife? We don't even know what that means. Can we produce cities for humans rather than endless car-based hellscapes?
I vividly remember discussing this with my fellow students almost a decade ago now. The idea that we are going to turn the planet into a farm because we can.
I don't want to live on a farm. I want to live on a natural Earth that we live in symbiosis with, not an extremely efficient well-tuned machine.
> I don't think that us having clean energy, or producing more energy, is a bad thing in and of itself.
That's good; but unfortunately, people do fixate on "growth" and "energy use" as sources of problems, when they're not. To better evaluate what we can and should do, we need to keep in mind where exactly the problems come from.
> I'm more wary about the idea that we can solve all problems if we just have more energy.
I'm not saying we will or would, but we definitely could solve most of them. Energy is a necessary but not sufficient component of almost everything we do, and "more energy" is a necessary component of some ways of fixing climate that we currently aren't deploying - like e.g. synthesizing hydrocarbons instead of digging them up from the ground.
> But can you create natural wilderness? Can you provide habitats for wildlife?
Yes, we can. The best way to do it is to transplant some existing wilderness. The habitat will build itself, that's exactly what life is good at.
> Can we produce cities for humans rather than endless car-based hellscapes?
In theory, we can. In practice, this is where technology ends, and economy and politics start.
> I don't want to live on a farm. I want to live on a natural Earth that we live in symbiosis with, not an extremely efficient well-tuned machine.
Same, but that's because Earth already is a pretty decent machine, full of self-regulating feedback loops. It works well without supervision, and it's kind of dumb of us to break the feedback loops only to then have to maintain them "by hand", because they're crucial to our survival. We should be able to let it mostly be, enjoy it, and focus on doing other cool stuff. I still believe nature is there for us to exploit, but we're doing it the dumb way instead of the smart way.
Fusion reactor 8 light minutes away does not burn out for a good long while, long enough that we can consider it indefinite for the current climate debate.
So we have an energy source that we can use to rearrange the stuff that IS finite, ie the big rock with water on it.
What we don't want is for the rock to end up in a state where we can't live on it comfortably.
Now, as for growth, we could reach a state where people have roughly the replacement number of kids. In fact, it looks like that will happen. Then we just have to make sure the average amount of consumption doesn't take us over some limit.
Note that GDP is also a pretty imperfect measure. It was conceived in an era where having more stuff generally meant a better life, because some of that stuff was useful things like medicine, insulation, and so on. Nowadays a lot of things go into GDP that is perhaps not measuring what you really want.
>What we don't want is for the rock to end up in a state where we can't live on it comfortably.
This is what drives me crazy about climate change deniers and their continued delusional insistence that things are going great. Stopping catastrophic climate change is not some hippy-dippy tree-hugging "gotta save mother earth maaaaan" commune-enthusiast nonsense. It's about pure self-defence of humanity. It's about making sure that WE can still live on this rock. Why the hell can't they see that? What the hell is wrong with them?
> many people convince themselves that "Science" will save us
Why won't it? The main issue is where we get our energy from. There are working methods that are CO2 neutral. I'm firmly in the "only science will save us" camp.
> It's like when you move form a basic 40sq meter flat to a fancy 250sq meter house, going back is very hard.
I believe this is view harmful to the cause because it will only result in pushback, and rightfully so. Only excess wealth creates the spare capacity to care for the environment.
It is important to understand the limits of science. It won't save you universally from everything, no matter what you do. Your own action (or inaction, in case of waste) determines what can be done.
No, that's just the most currently newsworthy of literally hundreds of causes of the global ecological collapse. Ecologists have been mapping many of these causes for decades. The overarching cause of all the component causelets (eg. emissions, habitat destruction, soil & water degradation, etc) has been the expansion of a crude global civilisation based on selective ignorance of science. We pretend to respect science when it produces stuff we like ("technology"), but ignore the inconvenient understandings revealed by science as it relates to the complex living systems that sustain us.
“Growth” as the politicians and the lobbyists push it is simply not sustainable.
But both “the left” and “the right” have their agendas not to let you discuss or act on that.
"Bacteria grow by doubling. One bacterium divides to become two, the two divide to become 4, the 4 become 8, 16 and so on. Suppose we had bacteria that doubled in number this way every minute. Suppose we put one of these bacteria into an empty bottle at 11:00 in the morning, and then observe that the bottle is full at 12:00 noon. There's our case of just ordinary steady growth: it has a doubling time of one minute, it’s in the finite environment of one bottle.
I want to ask you three questions. Number one: at what time was the bottle half full? Well, would you believe 11:59, one minute before 12:00? Because they double in number every minute.
And the second question: if you were an average bacterium in that bottle, at what time would you first realise you were running of space? Well, let’s just look at the last minutes in the bottle. At 12:00 noon, it’s full; one minute before, it’s half full; 2 minutes before, it’s a quarter full; then an 1?8th; then a 1?16th. Let me ask you, at 5 minutes before 12:00, when the bottle is only 3% full and is 97% open space just yearning for development, how many of you would realise there’s a problem?"
Note that the before that point in the talk he explains that for any "steady growth" you can find the period in which what you observe doubles, i.e. any "steady growth" has its "doubling time."
> I'm firmly in the "only science will save us" camp.
The problem is that just saying that, allows policy makers and public to sit back and wait for the problem to be saved - without funding the science to do, or take other necessary policy steps.
In a sense you can argue that science has saved us - we have solar and wind, nuclear and excellent battery tech.
Science is primarily driven by private enterprise, that’s why. A business without any demand has no reason to exist. If the sea rises, or weather becomes more catastrophic, or oil becomes scarce, people will naturally devise solutions and mitigations. You can already see this in places like Florida where new construction techniques are being used to build houses that can withstand hurricane force winds.
And the number one problem is that waiting until the disaster hits is a really, really dumb strategy. It may be efficient on paper, but that's only if one places no value on human life and suffering, and is willing to gamble the disaster won't collapse the economy before it gets fixed.
You've provided a very good examnple of where private enterprise and the markets fail. If the sea rises and weather becomes more catastophic, people will indeed device solutions and mitgations.
Those mitigations won't necessarily include carbon reduction - they'll be increased levee construction, abandonment of low-lying cities and building codes adjusted so that '1 in a century' storms are encountered every couple of years.
What we are trying to do at this point, ius avoid such grim consequences, now and the market can't help us unless we promote panic, which isn't a great strategy.
This is true - science is just a tool, it needs force and direction. This is the job of governments, so you are right that science is just one part of the solution. In my mind it is a given that you need strong government support to make changes, so this was not the differences I wanted to focus on. The German Energiewende showed that it can be done, we basically bankrolled the creation of a global solar panel industry.
I wanted to put this in contrast to the "stop growth and consume less" mindset, which I believe will be massively insufficient in solving climate change. When we switch to alternative means of energy, at least in the beginning they will be more expensive than fossil, and you need to be able to afford this. Asia must be able to afford this! And they will not give up cars and go back to riding bicycles, this is a pipe dream.
"technology will save us" isn't a performative utterance. It's barely better than saying "god will save us".
Tech will certainly play a role, but I'm convinced that without a cultural, political and economical change we're doomed.
Saying "tech will save us" make people believe that they have no part to play, no responsibility.
We know what to do, the fact is that we're not acting fast enough.
"At the heart of capitalism is a vast and scarcely examined assumption: you are entitled to as great a share of the world’s resources as your money can buy. You can purchase as much land, as much atmospheric space, as many minerals, as much meat and fish as you can afford, regardless of who might be deprived. If you can pay for them, you can own entire mountain ranges and fertile plains. You can burn as much fuel as you like. Every pound or dollar secures a certain right over the world’s natural wealth."
there's a broader assumption which seems at least equally as dangerous.
the pie will keep getting bigger. more resources. more energy. more people. more goods. more kinds of goods. more movement of goods.
thats a direct consequence of your point in that we structurally assume an infinite number of fish, amount of land...and more importantly that the oceans and sky are so vast and unknowable that we throw as much into them as we want without anything ever coming back.
maybe we're living out the last aftershock of the end of the age of exploration. and we're so completely unprepared to manage any kind of economic contraction the only response is fear. growth is the seductive poison thats killing us.
Isn't the flaw in just treating this like an energy source problem? It isn't. Switching to Nuclear or renewable doesn't reduce the massive contribution from beef farming for example. Another huge contributor is deforestation due to crops such as palm oil, which demand is fueled largely by palm oil being considered a renewable energy source. It's too complex to boil down to 'wait for the unicorn technology to solve the problem'
It mostly is an energy problem [0]. Energy, transport and industry produce 70% of the emissions. Solutions to reduce them already exist it's just that the politicians refuse to use them.
The source you linked is a per-year breakdown for Germany only. Especially considering that it's a well-developed country that isn't a large commercial producer, I'd be very surprised if those results can be extrapolated onto the rest of the world.
> Why won't it? The main issue is where we get our energy from. There are working methods that are CO2 neutral. I'm firmly in the "only science will save us" camp.
If you mean "science" as in existing science and technology, then, sure, technological approaches are part of the solution.
Often, though, in these discussions, "science" is used to mean some sort of magical advancement that is just around the corner that will solve all our problems. That would be nice, but probably isn't the case. We'll probably see incremental advances in things like solar panels but we're up against some hard limits of physics. Reducing consumption and making efficiency savings are significantly easier.
> Only excess wealth creates the spare capacity to care for the environment.
I think this is view is harmful. First, it looks very clear that mitigating climate change is cheaper than dealing the consequences, so this "excess wealth" is mythical.
Second, we shouldn't be treating our environment as a luxury. We need to make sure the planet is liveable first, then see what other toys we can afford.
An unlimited growth in a finite environment isn't possible
Even limited 'growth' has not actually happened. It's a fiction. The physical reality is that complex sustainable evolved systems have been broken down to feed simpler crude unsustainable techological ones. There's no 'growth' to be seen - just an increase in planetary entropy. This is somewhat masked on a short-term & local scale because of the remarkable resilience of the evolved systems. But as those systems collapse, which now seems inevitable, the fictional nature of 'economic growth' will become very evident indeed.
> it misses the fact that the Earth is not a closed system
How so? It's not an argument per se - it's just a description of the physical reality that what economists falsely describe as 'growth' is actually a transfer of matter and energy from complex evolved sustainable systems (ie. what some people call 'nature', which I find to be misleading) to simple cultural-technological unsustainable systems. This transfer process damages the former to build the latter, increasing entropy (because our early-stage human tech is less ordered than evolved systems are). It is not 'growth' in any meaningful sense of the term at all, whether limited or unlimited.
Interesting point, that economic growth is a fiction - when the cost of growth is the deterioration of our own living environment, which is the true source of value. In fact, I'd posit that we do not even have the ability to produce "true value", we only know how to transform and consume it - perhaps in the same way that we're unable to "create energy" out of nothing. But then again.. Growth in general is all about consuming our surroundings, transforming the elements into new organizations, leaving waste behind.
Apparently, the main measure of economic growth is the gross domestic product - "the monetary value of all the finished goods and services produced", which is based on spending and consumption. Planetary entropy, as you say.
As someone else commented in this thread, what we need is a significant global shift in mentality and culture, our value systems and vision of what it means to be a grown-up civilization, not as an ever-hungry consumer, but an intelligent layer of nature.
> what we need is a significant global shift in mentality and culture
Agreed, though whether we have time for this to happen seems doubtful. It would require a dramatic slowdown of faux-growth to enable natural systems to recover, while we spend the time needed (probably centuries) to develop tech with sustainability approaching that of evolved systems. There's no a priori technical reason why this should not be possible, but political realities make it hard to imagine. Maybe another 'intelligent' species can make this happen in a few millennia.
> We'd need a economic/cultural revolution at a global scale. Everything has to scale down, no more ICE, not more plastic, no more food imported from the other side of the world, reduce meat consumption, reduce traveling &c.
This is a sentiment that rubs me the wrong way. I totally agree that we, at a global scale, need to drastically reduce our carbon footprint. And these reductions will have changes to our society. But many of the suggestions of those currently engaged in the cultural revolution are either focusing on small problems (like not buying food in plastic containers) or have complicated unintended consequences (like buying locally grown foods).
Shipping stuff on large boats is incredibly efficient per kg/km. It's not unlikely that I emit more Co2 driving my car to/from the grocery store than the emissions from shipping all the things I purchase to the store itself.
We should focus on things like stopping the burning of fossil fule for electricity generation and carbon natural land based transportation long before we almost religiously ban plastic straws.
I don't think the best way forward to actually solving this problem is engaging in some almost Protestant self hatred and punishment, trying to make the transition as impactful on our lives as possible.
That's another thing where I believe "those currently engaged in the cultural revolution" often get confused. Not all stuff bundled together under "problems with environment" is created equal.
Container ships are a problem because they usually run on ridiculously dirty fuel, which ends up polluting the ocean. But they're also extremely energy-efficient on a mass/distance basis. A saner world would have them use cleaner fuel[0].
Cars are a problem because at the scale they're used, they're both significant contributor to global warming and inefficient, energy-wise. Electrifying land transportation would fix the inefficiency and significantly reduce the carbon footprint. Powering the new electric fleet with green energy[1] would finally kill the emission issues.
Plastic straws, plastic packaging and other consumer disposables are a problem[2] because the plastic ends up in oceans, where it gets broken by UV into microplastics which then end up back in the food chain. Beyond that, it's mostly a sad thing to see. Energy and emissions-wise, plastic disposables are much smaller problem than other uses of fossil fuels, and sometimes they're likely better than the reusable alternatives proposed. But it's still so fucking sad to see so much garbage existing only as vehicle for marketing.
IMO people need to stop bundling these problems together. Even though they're all related, energy security != global warming != poisons in food chain != ethical considerations about animals. Those are all separate problems, with separate sets of solutions, and quite honestly, different prioritization.
--
[0] - My utopia would have nuclear-powered cargo ships as permanent global infrastructure, essentially treated as virtual conveyor belts.
[1] - Renewables or nuclear.
[2] - And we aren't even sure yet how big a problem this is. AFAIK this topic is covered mostly out of quite reasonable abundance of caution - we've noticed plastics showing up where they aren't supposed to. Even though there isn't any clear danger identified yet, history teaches us that human-released chemicals showing up in unexpected places generally don't lead to happy outcomes.
> Container ships are a problem because they usually run on ridiculously dirty fuel, which ends up polluting the ocean. But they're also extremely energy-efficient on a mass/distance basis. A saner world would have them use cleaner fuel[0].
One reason that they burn dirty fuel is because we have that fuel, and the way our economy works, it's going to be burned somewhere. Making large ships with engines that can burn that fuel was intended to be a way of having the air pollution be produced away from inhabited land.
Having the ships work with cleaner fuel means the dirty fuel will be burned somewhere else, without further changes.
But I agree with your main point -- "sustainability" attracts so much momentum that people try to frame everything under that umbrella. E.g. suffering of animals raised for food production is a problem, but even less related to the things you mention. Still often seen as part of the same agenda as reducing our CO2 output.
>> "Small molecules like those in propane, naphtha, gasoline for cars, and jet fuel have relatively low boiling points, and they are removed at the start of the fractional distillation process. Heavier petroleum products like diesel fuel and lubricating oil are much less volatile and distill out more slowly, while bunker oil is literally the bottom of the barrel; in oil distilling, the only things denser than bunker fuel are carbon black feedstock and bituminous residue (asphalt), which is used for paving roads and sealing roofs. "
Based on my (limited) understanding, there's no cleaning to be done. The kind of oil they burn in cargo ships is what's left after cleaning|distilling.
>> "It can't be cracked economically?"
This trash oil is produced anyway. There's no way to not make it and still make the less dirty kinds since it's what's left at the end of the process.
I see two possible solutions:
1: Invent commercial fusion reactors and burn it there. I don't know if this would produce less CO2.
2: Find something else to do with the trash oil that's less polluting. Markets are pretty good at finding uses for things, so there may just not be anything else.
Gasoline was a waste product until internal combustion engines came along. Trash oil probably occupied a similar status as waste until someone figured out it worked in ships. If trash oil were no longer economical to burn on ships, they would probably dump it in international waters instead unless some better use was incentivized.
The US and probably other countries pay farmers to destroy some crops to keep it profitable enough to make farming a viable industry. Farmers would sell all their crops without government intervention, driving profits below a sustainable level. They wouldn't just trash it otherwise.
Cargo ship owners are probably the only people who want the leftover oil. The shipping industry burns the oil industry's trash to make their ships go. Make using it uneconomical, and it gets dumped. That's what happens with byproducts no one wants to buy.
It might be a good idea to get people into contact with the smaller problems you mentioned because they are less political and less scary, still somewhat connected and people feel they can make a change. That's more than you get when people shy away instead.
Also, one point of activism is to get people into contact with an issue or a viewpoint so they can get used to the idea slowly, and when the time for changes comes it is familiar and unsurprising. So it's not about changing things right now but to pave the way for change in the future. (Maybe this is obvious, but for me it was a slightly different take of it.)
> (Maybe this is obvious, but for me it was a slightly different take of it.)
Not obvious at all. In fact, it's the first time I've encountered this idea. Thanks a lot for writing this. It makes me view some of the activist actions in a different light.
One of the problems is that environmentalists burn so much goodwill and political capital on stupid, low-effectiveness initiatives that cause irritation and inconvenience far greater than their potential positive effects.
Even if we move to 100% electric cars powered by renewables tomorrow, that’s 43% of CO2 output. After decades, we are not even at the point where we can do that much, by the way. Grid-scale battery storage is an essential part of the equation, and we are not there yet.
We are still at the beginning stages of even thinking about the other 57%. Electrifying the national freight rail grid would be massively expensive. (Keeping overheard catenary well maintained is so expensive that Maryland’s commuter rail is moving to diesel locomotives for Baltimore to DC service, even though the corridor was electrified more than a century ago.) There are no commercially available electric trucks yet.
That stuff can’t wait for later. To limit temperature increases to 2C, we need to immediately cut global CO2 by three times as much as the US’s total CO2 output. Meanwhile, in the last couple of decades, China has added more than a US worth of CO2 output. If India develops similarly, we’ll add another US and a half. Europe and the US going to zero output won’t cancel out those increases. Even the communist party’s goal in China only calls for 20% electric cars by 2025.
The reliable models we have show that if we don’t cut emissions dramatically and immediately, we will need to go to negative emissions in the short term. That’s another generational problem. Carbon recapture is in its infancy. Look how long it took to perfect solar.
For the record I live in Sweden, which has a per capita carbon foot print of around 4.5 ton vs 16.5 for the US. That's a massive difference. We are blessed with rivers which we can destroy for hydro and some rusting nuclear plants. US has a carbon intensity per kWh of ≈ 439 g, and Sweden ≈ 45 g.
I'm not sure about how that chart is constructed, but for me it's obvious that we need to lower the carbon intensity of electricity production right now. That would "eliminate" 32% of the chart, and I guess also have a dent in the other pies.
I don't see how stopping consuming or fundamentally changing society is a better or even faster way to achieving our goals.
I think it's absurd to talk about trying to radically change society before you stop burning fossil fules for electricity.
Cutting emissions dramatically and immediately is by deploying nuclear, and by electrifying your rail lines.
The thing is, most of the stuff we westerners have does not make us any happier. The straw will not make you happier. The new smartphone will not make you happier. Flying around the world looking at few touristy things will not make you happier. A new car will not make you happier, even if it has a slab of lithium mined from the salt flats of Bolivia or god knows where. Stop buying stuff. Stop doing stuff. Just stop. Stop mowing your lawn. Go outside and watch the birds. Bust up some concrete and plant a tree. You probably have some right in front of your house. If you're lucky enough to have a patch of green space, fill it with food producing plants and flowers for the pollinators. Have one child and lavish more attention on him/her than any family of more than one kid can. None of this stuff is a sacrifice, let alone self punishment, though you are likely surrounded by people who are convinced otherwise. Hunger makes food taste awesome, and riding your bicycle through miserable weather makes sunny days feel like heaven on earth.
None of the things you mention would make me happy. Things that would make me happier are: autonomous colony on mars, 1000 year or more life expectancy, huge floating cities in all oceans, faster computers, better batteries, 100 billion people living on earth, resurrection of mammoths, elimination of mosquitoes, ticks, and other pests, having five children who would be more successful than me, better understanding of physics, electric aeroplanes and dirigibles, general ai, artificial womb, crispr therapies to make people smarter, etc...
All of this depends on number of people constantly growing, and more of them buying more stuff and doing more stuff.
Yeah, at some point denial is the most acceptable option.
It's arguably not so much "science will save us" as "economics will save us". That's almost a religion in the US. Also, some distrust science on religious basis. And some even believe that it's all part of the coming apocalypse. Which is God's will.
> What I don't understand is why this is so controversial.
Thankfully I hope this will decline. Interesting tidbit I learned today: Mitch McConnell has finally admitted humans are causing climate change. Now the only (herculean) problem is getting him to tackle it properly. https://www.washingtonpost.com/video/politics/mcconnell-says...
personal responsibility? it's much easier to blame someone else for your troubles than admitting that you've voted with your feet for the past decades.
>Even if climate change would be a hoax (which it is not), then why would it be a bad thing to make changes to prevent it from happening anyway?
The concern is not necessarily that it's a hoax, but that hasty data will be used to push for specific policies, benefiting some, making money for others, and so on.
It's also very easy to turn into some semi-fascist "state of emergency" governance, if you have something all-encompassing as the climate to base your legitimacy on.
Of course it would be a good thing to get rid of air pollution, replace energy sources to cleaner ones, and even more so, cut down on consumerism and industrial production of all kinds of crap (that's the hardest part, and one that every corporate interest will be against, but without "reduce", alternative energy and recycle are just environment theater).
> What I don't understand is why this is so controversial
The amount of CO2 is not controversial. What's controversial is what we should change.
There are tons of people who fully believe in climate change but vehemently disagree on what we should do about it.
There are also those who don't think it's a reason to worry so much or panic.
All of those people get reworked by the controversy hungry Media and converted into climate change deniers, and the result is the political world we live in right now.
If we could disentangle all those things it would help a lot. But instead we get believers and deniers, i.e. basically religion.
There are also those who believe that exaggerating the problem is the best way to get people to do something. In my opinion that has backfired majorly.
What I don't understand is why this is so controversial.
Meticulously planned political & media interference campaigns run by fossil fuel companies and related think tanks. They understood the implications of climate change by the late 1970's and knew the writing was on the wall. They executed plans to delay political action for as long as possible in exactly the same way corporations had done with regard to tobacco regulation since the 1950s. These conspiracies against science and the public interest were remarkably successful. In some cases (eg. Heartland Institute) the very same organisations were involved in both campaigns.
But why Greenpeace and majority of other environmentalists where so strongly against nuclear energy? Were they the part of this conspiracy? It would be good to know, as all those eco organizations are still functioning and likely they are still governed by the people who were involved in this conspiracy?
I think they were blindsided by how huge of an issue climate change has become. If we had started decades earlier (and the knowledge was there), it might still have been a somewhat comfortable path, even without nuclear.
And nuclear does have its problems. I used to be against it, but right now the risk and problems are just not an issue compared to the consequences of carbon emissions.
I view Greenpeace on the same level as PETA, a front for power hungry people to do whatever they want and have fanatical followers. I do not believe they are trying to genuinely push for a better world
I don't feel green energy is the main issue here. Regular people I know or see around me all seem to think that "green is cool, if they build it and it works that's nice", but that's about the extent of their opinion. The main contention points with individuals seem to be about changes necessary. For instance, I've been criticized and called names (usually related to communism) by people just for mentioning that maybe taxing carbon emissions isn't a bad idea at this point. There are few things that get people so angry so fast than suggestion that gasoline should cost more, and that maybe we should drive less, so that half of this gasoline isn't burned down in traffic jams.
> I don't see why we shouldn't transition to renewable energy asap anyway
I am no expert, and I think neither are you, so we are just making some small talk here, but: I think we don't have the tech to go all in on renewable. Solar is cool and all, but where do we store the energy? Batteries don't scale at a global level (for now). I mean look at Germany: they tried. They got off nuclear and now they emit more CO2 than when they started because they had to revert back to coal.
I see no easy solution to this. Not for now. And for sure it's not something like "let's just switch to wind and solar and we are good".
You are wrong. The carbon emissions of electricity production in Germany are in a constant decline. Germany never had a large amount of nuclear energy in the mix, so we are not "reverting to coal", we unfortunately keep our coal plants running at full steam (literally). But this also was large part to some economics of the market. Still, the CO2 emissions of the electricity production are going down, last year, we had about as much reneweables in the mix as coal, this year the reneweables should be larger than coal.
There is enough data showing, that about 80% reneweables in the mix are possible without larger storage facilites, if the gaps are covered by gas power plants which can change their output power quick enough to react on the demand. Neither coal nor nuclear can do this.
That Germany is missing its emission targets has two reasons. One is, that coal is not ramped down aggressively enough, which has mostly economical reasons, coal is to profitable for the power companies, but recent forced closures of some coal plants shifted a bit here. And the other elephant in the room is the raising fuel consumption for transportation. Going electric for cars would have a large impact there.
No, Germany is not importing coal-based power from our neighbours, nor are we doing so with nuclear power. Germany is a net exporter of electricity. Unfortunately too much of that being coal power produced in Germany.
Germany is part of the European power grid, so there are times, when power is imported to compensate for local over- and underproduction. As Germany is in the middle of Europe, far more power is conducted across of Germany. You cannot count French nuclear power as in import, if the same amount of power is exported to Austria at the same time (a very common situation). Germany is a net power exporter.
Gas is important in two way: first of all, it is way cleaner than coal, so it is the best short term replacement for coal. Germany almost has enough (currently mostly idle) gas power plants to completely replace coal short term. As long as there are no mass storage facilities, gas is needed as the gap filler for the times when neither wind and solar can power the grid. As the production capacity grows, these gaps are going to get increasingly smaller. It remains to be seen what is the best long-term solution, either to grow large storage facilities to get to 100% reneweables or allow like 10% gas in the mix.
>gas is needed as the gap filler for the times when neither wind and solar can power the grid.
This is the entire point!! Wind and solar can't replace fossil fuels. So what Germany did was replace non-CO2 emitting nuclear power with CO2 emitting power generation (natural gas and coal). I guess fighting global warning is less important than satisfying irrational German paranoia against nuclear.
>As the production capacity grows, these gaps are going to get increasingly smaller.
Your argumentation is full of fallacies.
First of all, we didn't "replace" nuclear with coal - as I wrote before, we didn't build new coal power plants. Most of all, the renweables are replacing nuclear. And they are replacing coal. If we get rid of 90% of fossil fuels in electricty production, how are we not replacing fossil fuels with reneweables?
The sun will start shining at night?
That sentence did a huge disservice to your post. Of course the sun doesn't shine at night. But no one wants to replace all energy production by solar alone. Wind is the companion of solar, both are roughly the same size in Germany. Wind is what delivers the power at night (where electricity consumption is lowest) and solar adds the power for the additional requirements during daytime.
You are ignoring both heating and transportation, each of which creates as much of Germany's CO2 emissions as electricity generation.
Replacing both with domestic non-fossil solutions is near-impossible in the medium term unless nuclear forms a big part of the baseload - heating on those winter nights where the sun doesn't shine but electric heat exchangers work full tilt, and generation for those electric cars charging throughout the winter night.
We were talking specifically about the electricity production, not the total energy production. So you are changing the topic. But they are related topics. First of all, you must not make the mistake to compare the termal energy used in transportation and (to a lesser part) for heating with the electrical energy produced. An electric car uses less than a third of thermal energy consumed by a combustion engined car. Heat pumps are way more efficient than any thermal heaters. To convert all cars to electric in Germany, the electricity production would have to be increased by a mere 15%. To get rid of all fossile energy is of course a larger step, something we have to work at.
>Most of all, the renweables are replacing nuclear.
They aren't. We agreed that wind/solar is not capable of serving as the base power generation of a modern economy. Lack of city-scale battery technology, and the variability of solar and wind precludes this use case.
So what Germany did was remove a non-CO2 emitting power source and replaced it with a mix of solar/wind AND CO2-emitting power generation (via existing coal plants, new gas plants, and importation of coal-based power when they need it).
If the name of the game is to cut CO2 emissions as much as possible, you're at net negative. It necessarily means that had you not closed down nuclear power plants, you would have cut MORE CO2 emissions than you do now. That's just a statement of fact.
And this is my problem with anti-nuke policies. Implicitly the anti-nuke activists are saying that cutting CO2 emissions isn't as important as preventing expansion of nuclear power or even keeping existing plants running. Consider this and cry for our civilization: had the developed world doubled-down on nuclear power in the 60-70s to the same level as France, we would have prevented trillions of tons of CO2 from being emitted into the atmosphere. That could have bought us a few extra decades. I am convinced that history will see antinuclear view as more destructive than right-wing global warming denialism (which on balance does not actually do anything).
>Of course the sun doesn't shine at night. But no one wants to replace all energy production by solar alone. Wind is the companion of solar, both are roughly the same size in Germany. Wind is what delivers the power at night. Meaning that you have to overprovision your infrastructure to supplement periods of low output.
Again, this is a disingenuous point. The problem with wind and solar is not only variability but also the fact that peak generation does not match peak consumption. If peak wind generation is at 3am, it doesn't do our society any good because we need power at 6pm. Worse than that, solar and wind generation profile changes with weather and seasons.
So no, it's not simple as saying: Solar peaks during the day, and Wind peaks during the night and therefore they complement each other ... because they don't.
Spiegel is not really credible, they’ve published a large number of completely fabricated stories. If they can’t see through the deception of one of their reporters there is no way they can make sense of misinformation by more competent adversaries.
A link would have been useful. If you mean this article: https://docs.google.com/document/d/148Lym3a487S8lha50QXGJfjQ... (which sounds like a not very careful translation), it does not contradict what I said. It rightfully critizises, how politics in recent years were dealing with the switch to reneweables - either stalling or preventing faster extension, not even doing basic necessary actions. The failure to extend the power grid is a good example. The other would be the ongoing protection for coal production in Germany. Many politicians prefer to artificially protect 1 job in coal instead of creating 2 in reneweables.
You're making a big assumption that simply doesn't hold: it's not a matter of "let's switch to renewables and keep everything else the same". Fossil fues have an energy density that's unparalleled anywhere else in nature and most renewables are simply riding off of that (the machines, factories, trucks and ships producing and transporting wind towers and solar cells are not and won't be running on electricity). Read up on EROEI (energy returned on energy invested) if you're interested in the topic.
I just read a calculation how automatic milking machines will turn a tidy profit on milk into a loss with energy costs per kwh just 10 cents higher. Milking by hand will be _more_ profitable with that small a difference.
So it's controversial because doing something about climate change involves massive changes to our way of life. Not simply switching your SUV for a Tesla, we're talking up to and including economic collapse and deindustrialization.
Diesel, fuel oil and coal. Admittedly, the latter mostly goes through a power plant to turn into electricity first - with the concomitant losses on the way.
Retooling would be a better word. Saul Griffit (via Bret Victor[0]), calls switching to clean energy "more like retooling for World War II, except with everyone playing on the same team". The scale of expenditure and impact on the economy seems appropriate.
Not to forget that WWII was a war won by oil. Whoever was able to mobilize the most energy (in the form of oil) could win (a great book about that: Oil, Power and War[0]). Retooling in the face of declining energy availability will be a different matter.
We're not going to face declining energy availability for the next few decades. Fighting climate change is in big part a retooling of the energy production, which makes it tricky, but we still have enough dirty sources to burn to replace them with clean ones. Also, at least for now, we're not bombing each other's oil stores too much, so there's that.
By the way, the EROEI of fossil fuel is terrible. Do you know how much energy was required to turn all that organic matter into oil? A single gallon of gas requires 98 tons of plants to grow, then be buried, and then pressured and heated until they become oil, then finally be dug out and refined.
Fossil fuels have an energy density that’s peanuts to Uranium. And lucky for us, there’s enough of it in the oceans to power humanity for centuries. If oil does get expensive enough and the ROI flips for economies of scale to apply to nuclear generation, we will have enough energy for SUV-sized flying Teslas in a century, no problem.
A 1GW coal plant requires a 100-car trainload of coal every three days.
A 1GW conventional nuclear plant is refueled by a single 18-wheeler truck, every year and a half.
A 1GW fast reactor or thorium reactor would require only one ton of fuel, about the size of a beachball, once a year. A lump of fuel smaller than a golfball would provide all the energy you need for your entire life, transportation included.
Fossil fuels still have the best energy density for cars and airplanes, but for large ships or anything stationary, nuclear is far superior. And not just for electricity; several GenIV designs run hot enough for process heat.
EROEI of fossil fuels is pretty pathetic. It has been going down over time for the last 100 years. It won't take more than 30 years until oil hits an EROEI of 1. If you had followed any of the trends of renewable technology then you should be aware that economic collapse and deindustrialization are easily avoidable. Maybe there will be 10 days in a year that the most energy intensive factories will have to shut down due to a combination of low wind and solar but this also means on 10 other days in the year there will be an excess of energy.
> First of all I don't see how man-made climate change is even controversial with the amount of evidence we have
This is a strong assumption. How can we have evidence for that? We do not understand climate enough to make such an assertion.
This is the answer to your question. Enough people see that strong assertions for man-made climate change are not necessarily backed up. Hence the controversy.
> but furthermore I don't see why we shouldn't transition to renewable energy asap anyway
Because that comes with it's own problems? For instance, around here there are a lot of wind wheels, these machines create problems. It's not just "energy for free". For example one problem is they kill a massive amount of insects.
There are also people advocating for nuclear energy, improved ways of providing nuclear energy. Maybe they are right?
> Even if climate change would be a hoax (which it is not), then why would it be a bad thing to make changes to prevent it from happening anyway?
This is a good question I asked myself many times as well. I don't know.
One part of the answer could be priorities. We can't do everything at once. SO what comes first?
Note that the chart in the linked comic begins in the middle of the last ice age. It ends one or two degree celsius above the mean temperature of the previous 500 years (or so). The big hockey stick at the end is a prediction! At the point in the chart at about 16000 BCE it states that the short warming or cooling spikes have probably been smoothed out (after all, those ancient temperatures are only available by proxy).
I don’t necessarily agree with that person, but he didn’t deny climate change, only that humans are at the cause, and, in a not so delicate way suggested that climate change studies may not be accurate and may be colored by politics.
What if (Man Made) climate change was simply a set of natural processes and feedback loops? Wouldn’t alternative energy be better? Absolutely. It’s quieter, more efficient, and cleaner, especially nuclear energy. But a lot of the malthusian politics and negativity would have to go. Perhaps you could have a bigger house and not feel guilty about it? Maybe you won’t shame a neighbor for having another kid? Perhaps millions of people in the developing world can live a better life without being told they should stop to save the planet.
co2 and air pollution are not the same thing (if global warming weren't real). While it is fairly viable economically to scrub mercury emissions out of a coal plant, or carbon monoxide out of a car,it is effectively impossible to scrub co2.
So people in the industry that depends on fossil fuels know this, they know the only answer to getting co2 out of the atmosphere is to not use fossil fuels at all, which is an extremely hard/expensive thing to do. Moonshot level project, globally. Some just worry about their own riches, others rightly worry it would cause global disaster (it could if we did it wrong!)
I don't understand it either, so I had to come up with an explanation for myself.
I think it is controversial because the cost of this transition is not priced into the modern human lifestyle. So either the lifestyle changes or it gets a lot more expensive. And it challenges the business model of fossil fuel companies and the global power balance of oil producing countries. It can't get much more disruptive than this transition.
You are thinking in terms of what is good for human society. But the world is run by capital, and now that mass disinformation is relatively cheap to accomplish, it is even easier do discredit science if you have a descent amount of money to spend.
There will always be people that claim something in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. It's not a rational position, so it quickly becomes very complicated to figure out why someone would keep holding on to it. It can be (and frequently is) different for each person that holds an identical position so it is also not a super useful thing to figure out. Unless you are trying to unpack why a loved one holds an irrational position, of course. But the venue for that is maybe not HN :)
You are missing out that certain people are paying to manufacture anti-renewable fervor! -- There's literally no logical reason for not progressing technology wise.. but Big Oil think differently.
> First of all I don't see how man-made climate change is even controversial with the amount of evidence we have
It's because it's very hard to prove causation. We have lots of evidence of correlation, and the scientific consensus, but that's not 100% proof to many people.
> What I don't understand is why this is so controversial.
Our attention is a finite resource too. When some issue is in the news daily and obsessed about by a whole bunch of interest groups, from European-style liberals who have new taxes in mind (Macron) to the radical left who want us to live a frugal, Eastern-Bloc lifestyle, while we all see no real effects by this CO2 monster on our daily lives, it's bound to meet some resistance.
> I don't see why we shouldn't transition to renewable energy asap anyway.
Germany is transitioning to renewables quickly and has put a huge burden on households with high electricity prices (€0.30 per KWh average, even affecting EV adoption after some sensationalist "EV more expensive than Diesel fuel" themed articles) while the industry gets it cheap. Is this reasonable?
> Why would it be a bad thing to get rid of air pollution?
This is a great idea, but it has nothing to do with CO2 (= not air pollution in the usual sense, we all exhale it). I wish we could invest 1/10 of the efforts currently underway against CO2 in just getting rid of pollution in cities - from heating (with "renewable" wood), cars, industry, ships, airplanes (where's the CO2 tax and why do these things happen? https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6993173/Actress-Emm...).
Because if you live in the first world, like most of these companies, you will feel the effects of climate change the least. Climate change is a bigger problem for developing nations with birth rates way too high and limited resources.
It is much more about economic reality than ambition. Replacing fossil fuel energy sources with renewable energy sources is an expensive process. Some argue that it is the responsibility of the nations of this world to make sure it's implemented, i.e., the governments, but it's difficult to see how this can be done efficiently through either a democratic or undemocratic process. Getting the state to produce anything puts you at risk of ending up with the Trabant version of whatever product or service we're talking about.
Furthermore, it's difficult to foresee which problems will arise from replacing fossil fuel energy with renewables like wind or solar.
Capex on new solar is cheaper than opex on old coal. It's not an expensive process, not any more. Objections that it is are just out of date - fairly common for objections to tech.
According to someone, sure. But it is an expression of human arrogance to think that climate change can be fought just by following this here recipe and that we can look into the future and see that there will be a net benefit to changing to this or that energy source.
> But it is an expression of human arrogance to think that climate change can be fought just by following this here recipe
The causes of anthropogenic climate change are extremely well documented and easily measureable, and "reduce the amount of carbon put into the air and recapture carbon already in the air if possible" isn't very complicated, just expensive.
> The causes of anthropogenic climate change are extremely well documented and easily measureable, and "reduce the amount of carbon put into the air and recapture carbon already in the air if possible" isn't very complicated, just expensive.
An honest question: If I were to go about convincing myself of anthropogenic climate change and possibly that these changes would lead to a horrible future for humankind, where should I look? What should I read? Which videos to watch?
The mainstream media portrays the science as settled, i.e., anthropogenic climate change is real and horrible consequences will follow, even though it isn't difficult to find disagreeing opinions - both from people on the fringes and from Nobel-winning scientists. I hear convincing arguments from both sides.
I should mention that I am extremely sceptical of anything the state does, so I am biased against any solution involving the state. I fear that the fight against anthropogenic climate change is just another tool to increase state power, like the war on drugs or the war on poverty.
> I don't see why we shouldn't transition to renewable energy asap anyway
Most of the arguments that I see concern the low effectiveness of renewable energy sources and the pollution caused by the batteries (either during their creation or when trying to get rid of them).
What I do not see is why we should not transition to modern thorium-based nuclear power plants.
It's so funny because that comment on TechCrunch.com is true. You think you are correct because enough people have told you how to think. When you actually look at the science. When you examine the data and ask critical question the theory of man made global warming falls apart.
Do global temperatures change over time? Of course. There have been five ice ages in the history of the earth. Did you know that we are currently in an ice age? In fact we are in an interglacial period that began about 11,000 years ago.
So what drives global temperatures? Is it CO2? Let's look at the history of this planet to answer this question. Can we do that?
It turns out we can do that... We can use ice core data (and to a lesser extent tree rings) to look back thousands of years of global temperatures. We also have co2 levels from air bubbles captured in the ice cores.
So is there a relationship between co2 and global temperatures? There is. But... the relationship is the opposite of what Global Warming alarmists what you to believe. Global temperatures drive co2 levels. This means that when global temperatures rise co2 levels rise hundreds or thousands of years later. And when global temperatures fall co2 levels fall hundreds or thousands of years later.
This is a fundamental fact that any honest scientist will not dispute. And this fact throws the entire theory of mand made global warming into the trash can.
By the way what does drive global temperatures? Look up in the sky and you see this big ball of burning gas. That is the entity that drives global temperatures and not trace amounts (co2 is 0.04 percent of earths atmosphere).
>Even if climate change would be a hoax (which it is not), then why would it be a bad thing to make changes to prevent it from happening anyway? Why would it be a bad thing to get rid of air pollution? Why would it be a bad thing to switch to an energy source that doesn't run out in ~20 years simply because it isn't renewable?
If we look at carbon footprint, single use paper bags have the lowest footprint.
So if we prioritized limiting carbon footprint, we would encourage single use plastic bags. However, we are not, we are discouraging them.
If environmentalists had signed on to encourage carbon free energy, they would have pushed for reducing the roadblocks to nuclear power even at the cost of making them more unsafe. That is not what happened. Instead, environmental groups were one of the biggest opponents to nuclear power.
If you really believe climate change is the biggest problem facing humans, you will need to do things and encourage things that may be dangerous or harmful but that can help slow down climate change.
Are you trying to make an argument that regulations on carbon would pay for themselves due to decentralization? I don't think economists would agree with that.
Maybe the strategy should have been to maintain trustworthiness and condemn hoaxes on all sides of the isle, such as the type that have been talked about on Capitol Hill lately. Who can blame them at this point?
it's also the imbalance of cost, where western countries get shamed and blamed if they don't agree to costly restrictions while places like China and India cause most of the world's pollution and don't care
> I don't see how man-made climate change is even controversial
What's controversial (at least, if we're talking reasonable discussion) is not that climate change is happening, nor that human activities cause at least a good portion of it, but whether we understand all the factors involved well enough to predict with high confidence that spending trillions of dollars on drastic measures to reduce or eliminate CO2 emissions will stop it from happening. If we don't have high confidence that spending the trillions of dollars will do that (and I don't, nor do I see how anyone could given that climate models are overpredicting warming and our ability to predict economic consequences is even worse than our ability to predict future climate), then we shouldn't be spending the trillions of dollars--or at least, not on measures aimed directly at drastically reducing or eliminating CO2 emissions.
That's not to say, however, that there aren't other things we could be doing, that might help with climate change as a side effect. One is switching to non-fossil-fuel energy sources (see below). Another is making our infrastructure more robust, which helps civilization to withstand change in general. Still another is bringing more people out of poverty, since the richer people are, the more easily they can adapt to change.
> I don't see why we shouldn't transition to renewable energy asap anyway
A better term than "renewable" would be "non-fossil-fuel", since that would include nuclear (which is not considered "renewable" by most definitions). I agree that switching to non-fossil-fuel energy is something we should be doing anyway, both for scarcity reasons and for national security reasons: much of the money we spend on foreign oil ends up funding terrorism. I wish more people would realize that we don't need to agree on climate change alarmism in order to work on switching energy sources.
There's been a very well coordinated propaganda campaign around climate change denial. This campaign improved upon the tactics that tobacco industry lobbyists used to deny the connection between smoking and cancer.
In particular, by tying climate change denial to political identity, and casting climate research as immoral for its lying, it created a passionate base of climate change denalists to call into every radio show, to swarm message boards, and to harass those who speak publicly about climate change.
If you can listen to podcasts, the best summary of this is from the Drilled podcast, in my opinion:
A major part of it is just branding. The left gains a strategic advantage by making the right look bad when it comes to climate / environment / etc. For that reason, things are purposefully not phrased in ways that would appeal to people on the right.
And even when the motivation is not so sinister as that, people who care about the topic have a particular world view, and they don't spend the time to figure out how their world-view differs from those who aren't as concerned. What motivates one group is not one motivates another. If climate activists are serious about fixing the problem, then they need to abandon the branding aspect and find language that appeals to those not in their target market. Otherwise it's all just a lot of value-signalling.
That's a very odd spin on this, the "left trying to make the right look bad" comes from decades of concerted efforts from climate change denalists courting Republican and right media, and the media gobbling it up.
Claiming that environmentalists aren't phrasing things correctly for the right to care about the environment is pretty much the definition of tone policing. Republicans could easily take up the fight against climate change on their own terms, but the very very few Republicans that have tried have been shunned by the rest of the party.
And if you are truly convinced that it is a life-or-death problem, then you need to be pushing up against that over and over, working to get buy-in. "Well, we tried." is not good enough. And if it is, then there isn't really a problem to begin with.
Really weird framing to say that the people that are factually correct have an obligation to argue others out of their self imposed lies and self deception.
Rather, let's blame the true villain here, the political ideology that places itself as more important than truth or science, the political ideology that says "if I'm wrong and you can't convince me with science then it's your fault for not trying hard enough." What sort of epistemically closure is acceptable?
Winning hearts and minds is evangelism. To evangelize, you meet people where they are, show that you can relate to where they currently are, and then lead them in the direction you want them to go. "Pacing and leading" is another term for it.
People are motivated by different things. Telling them the things that motivate you, and then calling them names when they aren't motivated by the same line of thought, is a very unproductive way to win them over.
You can tell people the "what" till your face turns blue, but if you are unable to hook into a "why" that resonates with them, they will do precisely nothing.
My point is that if you truly believe that this is a matter of life and death, you need to be out in the world pounding the pavement just the same as all the street preachers that themselves truly believe what they have to say is a matter of life and death.
In a similar vein, if the arguments most street preachers give falls completely flat for you, consider the reverse and why what you are saying is falling flat to the people you are evangelizing to. To be effective, preaching has to be for the audience, and not for the preacher. And that is exactly what this sort of advocacy is, preaching.
Man the chinese are taking the hoax way too far. /s
We need a major shift in our ways of producing/consuming and on our quest for progress at all cost. We're heading for major issues, even in the short term. Humanity is committing suicide and taking Life with her.
Only about 25,000 years ago (into the last ice age), atmospheric CO2 levels were at 180 ppm. That was the LOWEST LEVEL in the entire 4.7 billion year history of earth. This is something that the ice worshipping fanatics of today will not tell you.
At 150 ppm, the enyzyme RuBisCo, existing in all photosynthetic organisms, basically stops functioning. At this point, all photosynthetic life dies off, followed by all other life given the food chain. It would be earth's greatest extinction event.
Thank humanity for putting some CO2 back into the atmosphere and averting a global catastrophe. At 415 ppm, it's a small fraction of the highest levels reached in earth's history, at 8000 ppm.
This is scary because of our current political situation. Even when nature is on our side we have mindless headstrong morons heading nuclear states and we seem to be in verge of war. People do not trust science and still believe in afterlife and heaven or hell rather than believing in our planet and its current problems. Amount of CO2 is definitely going to trigger extreme climate change and that is going to destabilize our geopolitics, and we simply are not ready for that change. We should start making life style changes for the sake of millions of species that are getting extinct and also to start a culture of responsible citizen of earth.
I'm fairly sure that meat production and farming for human consumption is the best way to have a quick global impact on climate change, slowing deforestation and slowing species extinction.
Fossil fuels are the wrong target for a quick win (which we need).
I really don't get this type of defeatist thinking, and I see this in basically every climate discussion.
It's pretty simple - it either happens (along with renewables etc.) or we face the consequences. It either happens willingly or forcefully. And as a matter of fact, veganism/flexitarianism are on the rise, so it is happening. Some people just get it and act.
I've just look at some stats (a few first google results, no idea if they are correct) and it seems that in developed countries meat production has about 3% impact on CO2 the whole emission. It is also not clear how this number was calculated, as "deforestation" is mentioned as a factor that increases CO2 emission, I don't know how much it contributes to those 3% - maybe it would be enough to stop deforestation. The most harmful is beef production, pork or chickens seems to be much less important. So yes, maybe beef consumption will help, but only very little.
In a nutshell, in developed countries, the deforestation happened a long time ago, so it doesn't have a big impact on the continuing CO2 contribution from meat production. In other words, no new land is being cleared for livestock in most developed countries. In developing countries, unfortunately, deforestation for livestock production can be a big contribution to CO2.
Become a hunter and harvest deer meat instead of purchasing cow meat. You will be participating in sustainability of forests and wild game populations and helping to fund your local wildlife and fisheries agency. Deer populations have reached record levels of around 33 million in the U.S. alone, and they are very destructive to the forests (and suffer horrible deaths in the winter as they overgraze and strip the land of all edibles). The meat is very lean and nutritious.
Entomophagy is also an option -- eat grasshoppers. Insect protein is high quality, low fat, and very abundant. It's lower on the food chain than mammalian protein, easily grown, and can be prepared into tasty dishes (more common in Africa and Asia than in the U.S. and Europe).
I feel this is a misnomer. The carbon to grow the corn the cows eat comes from the atmosphere. Corn doesn't create new carbon. Cows don't create new carbon. Some of the carbon does get released back into the atmosphere as the corn is harvested and the cows eat it.
The reason fossil fuels are so bad is that we are releasing carbon that has been sequestered for thousands and millions of years. We need to stop increasing the max supply in the atmosphere and slow recapture what is there so we can reduce the ppm and start lowering the greenhouse effects we have created.
It does and right now we are doing both. There is also a lot of promise around methane capture which we can then burn as fuel and only end up with CO2 (but no new CO2). Methane will also eventually turn back into CO2 and water but it takes several years. Our biggest challenge is that humans (me included) are selfish. We really just need less people to give the earth time to heal itself without doubling down on the destruction at the same time.
How is convincing everyone to change their diet a “quick win?” Seems to me converting fossil fuels to renewables is the “quicker win” as it doesn’t require all of humanity to change their behavior.
You can see their point though right? We can use Nuclear power but have to except every 30 years or so an accident will happen causing a massive exclusion zone and clean up op.
Doesn't sound like a fair price to pay to me (and a lot of others).
*Today. More and more countries are getting rid of it in favour of cheaper and more flexible natural gas.
Sure, there's China with its insatiable appetite for energy, but few years back they too shuttered 105 coal plant projects, and this is something that's likely to continue purely because of how the economics are playing out nowadays.
We are already using lots of Nuclear power, turns out it didn't help!
Nuclear power is slow to build safely, and if we had started to build all that power decades ago of the sake of avoiding climate change you are already in the bizzaro timeline where the regime cared about climate change decades ago.
It takes around five years to build a reactor, give or take (and yes, I'm well aware that in .fi we have the world's most expensive nuclear reactor that's taken 15 years and still ain't ready). I'm pretty sure the climate change anxiety was there 5, 10, 15 years ago. Or we could start today. Goddamn politics.
It's been pretty well established and even discussed on HN that higher CO2 levels impairs some facets of human cognition. I quick glance at some of the research suggests that this impairment can begin around ~700ppm. Having higher and still increasing atmospheric CO2 levels means indoor concentrations will make diffusion between indoor and the outdoor even slower.
On the climate related side, the graph of CO2 levels for the last 10,000 years is very consistent, around 260ppm, up till recently. We should have just as concerned (or were) when it crossed 300ppm, 400ppm, etc.
On a more political note, while some/most climate change deniers at this point are likely ignoring evidence - having graphs with non-zero axis can be called out as a bit misleading which makes the increase relatively larger than it actually is; visually it's at ~230% of it's normal level when it's actually 'only' 157% compared to baseline. Graph manipulation has been used to in the past to spread false information about global warming/climate change so I think it's especially important to make everything above board. It only takes a few people spreading the graph around with the axis cropped out and then everyone will cry 'fake news'.
Pretty much my reading of it. Simply getting up and walking around would put far more CO2 into your blood than such a small change in atmospheric concentration.
I don't really understand the level of credulity here on associations between CO2 and mental impairment.
Looking at that chart if some of you have alive for 100,000 years, this year you'd be celebrating "100,000 years of panic".
Apart from few exceptions, CO2 ppm has been going up forever.
Why 415 ppm is worse (and by how much) than 404 or 390, you can't explain. In the 90s we had until 2020 to turn things around, that prediction was an abysmal failure so now it's new scenarios and scares).
I am most astonished that some people actually pay attention to this ludicrous nonsense.
Most people are one or two paychecks away from personal extinction event and you're trying to persuade them they should pay more for "green" energy or support imposing limits on wealth generation and consumption.
You can't even make the science work but that's the least of your worries. 10-20 years ago when (most) middle class westerners were idle and looked for ways to kill time, this would have worked. Now they are fighting against their own extinction. Simulate that.
Regardless of my personal financial situation or average temperatures, I will never support any government program that purports to mitigate it. Period.
The Bible gives man dominion over the Earth. Presumably, that’s a license to do whatever we want with it without consequence. The Bible predicts an apocolypse driven by supernatural forces, not one of man’s making. There’s no room for both, therefore the one in the Bible is true and the one predicted by heathens is false. This is why Christians, specifically, tend to dismiss man-made global warming.
Also, there’s a lot of fear out there that renewable energy means less jobs, especially across the entire coal mining supply chain. There’s a fear that transitioning to a renewable energy economy means a transition from dumb jobs to smart jobs.
Just want to point out that "Christians" in this context refers to some sects of Christianity in America and these beliefs are not the norm amongst Christians worldwide. Actually I hazard, not even the norm amongst Christians in the US.
I wouldn’t dismiss conservative, Bible-believing Christians as merely a sect.
Also, I shouldn’t single out Christianity. I just happen to know it well because it was a big part of my childhood. A lot of other religions also have a general disregard for science.
They're usually evangelicals. Evangelicals outnumber Catholics in the US, and also outnumber all mainline Protestent denominations (Methodist, Lutheran, etc) combined. They're fast gaining ground in Latin America as well.
Not all evangelicals are so adamantly anti-reason, but I'd be very confident in saying most are. Evangelical Christianity in the US is lazy and cruel. The Bible is used to justify their worst impulses, while they ignore all the parts about loving your enemies, etc. It's not a demanding religion. It's easy. Their god doesn't care about charity or peace that take effort and compassion, but only that you are on His team.
As someone who grew up a mainstream European Lutheran, the views of American evangelical Christians have always seemed more like a doomsday cult than anything based on Jesus's teachings.
It boggles my mind that these people have taken over the definition of Christianity in such an influential country. I imagine my feelings about evangelicals are roughly the same as how mainstream muslims feel about Islamic State.
I just want to second this. This is not a mainstream view. Dominion over the earth does not mean strip mining, hunting whales to extinction and most of all not destroying God's creation.
A school of theological thought that is gaining traction in protestant circles is that "new earth" spoken about in the bible is in fact this earth (fixed). Fixing this earth then has important religious significance.
This is in stark contrast to those extremist sects who wish for nuclear war to bring on the apocalypse.
I'm really depressed about climate change. There is no way to fix this from an individual point of view. Society is impossibly reliant on fossil fuels. Individuals going vegan, reducing consumption etc will have negligible effect. The only possible solution to all this is a technological solution that requires zero sacrifice from individuals. Technology got us into this mess, If we don't find a technological solution to this issue then all is lost.
> Please, try to at least be honest enough to openly admit you don't care about climate change out of convenience for yourself.
yes, it's true, I can't see myself going back to a pre-industrial quality of life for the sake of climate change, and be honest, neither can you. The resources used to produce the computer you typed your comment on probably equates to 50 years of resource consumption of someone from 1500AD. Not to mention your phone, car, earphones, public transport, roads, electricity, air conditioning, heating, Netflix, Youtube, datacenters, air travel, grocery shopping, insane supply chain that made your $50 Levis possible etc. etc.
Add in billions of people who are aspiring to your level of affluence + billions more who will be born who will fight tooth and nail to experience the luxury of Netlix and chill and you see we are fucked. There is no way out of this and no amount of tree hugging will make things better. Joe average wants his SUV, cheap jeans and Happy Meal. Fuck you if you get in his way.
It's a whirlpool of catastrophe and you can't get out of it even if you tried.
Technology will save us or the species is finished.
>political action is possible
Your "Save the Whales" badge is part of the problem (literally, plastic + metal pin produced in a third world country). Your political banners and TV adverts are part of the problem. All by products of fossil fuels.
Since apparently dishonest characterisation of strangers is how you want this thread to go: Can you please at least take your big oil astroturfing money quietly? I'm sure the Trump campaign will be a bit disappointed you don't turn up to their rallies, but as long as you stay home and use the money to order more cheetos they'll be fine with it.
> I'm sure the Trump campaign will be a bit disappointed you don't turn up to their rallies,
settle down, i'm not some right wing climate change denier. My point is that yours (and my) entire existence is dependent on a whole chain of environment decimating externalities. Simply existing in modern society makes you complicit in the destruction of the planet.
Ever eaten an avocado in winter? yup you just did your little bit to kill the planet. And even if you completely went off grid, zero carbon, neanderthal level of self deprivation to earn your environmentalist eagle scout badge, then guess what? The world is literally brimming with people who don't give a fuck and will vote out any politician who even thinks about raising power bills by 0.001% for the sake of climate change.
Add to that the billions who still aspire to the luxury of a flushing toilet let alone the luxury of being an eco warrior from behind a $2000 Macbook and you see... we are fucked.
Unless of course some clever silicon valley nerd comes up with a way to capture carbon, sequester it, provide clean energy for the 4 billion people who are clamouring to get out of poverty.
Nah, more money to be made from ad networks and ride sharing apps I guess.
Hey just wanted to say that I like your style of writing. It's funny and spot on. It's actually much much more compelling to read your voice than the "inconvenient truth" style.
For all the people down voting, I suggest considering this voice as a weapon in the fight against climate change. It might be salty but there's virtue in it.
You went into personal attack here and got vicious downthread. That's not allowed on HN, regardless of how large a concern is or how strongly you feel about it. If we don't moderate this strictly, the community will destroy itself, so we moderate this strictly. That means banning accounts that post like this, so please don't post like this again.
If "we" are not a selfish species, say 99% are really good, and would shut off the AC, say no to meat, wish to ban plastics etc...
The 1%, can and would destroy and burn the planet. Remember, BP oil spill in the Gulf? Thats just one. On a global scale, the few hundreds of millions, and of those dozens, are burning the planet, despite the billions who do not.
The destructive capacity of the few far outwidth the constructive capacity of the many.
The problem is not the air condition or the electricity needed to run the air conditioner.
The problem is the electricity was generated by burning a fossil fuel and that causes massive amounts of CO2 pollution.
So the solution is quite simple.
Just tax, and tax hard any electricity producer that is creating CO2 pollution.
What will happen is for a short time Joe's electricity bill will go up and he will put his air con on low.
But in the longer term market forces will quickly find ways to make electricity without producing CO2 just so that they can sell cheaper electricity to Joe and have him once again cranking up his air con to full.
Right now there is no real cost to creating CO2 pollution so of course there is no incentive to stop producing CO2.
The other alternative is also simple. Just do nothing.
Then just wait a decade or two by which time it will be way too late and then the world will quickly realise there are no 'chuckles' to be found down that path.
it's already too late. The planet is too small to accommodate this many humans. There is no hope. I understand the need to feel like you're doing something in the face of this catastrophe, but we're doomed.
The only solution is some as yet undiscovered technology that will reverse the actions of 7.7 billion parasites, who in aggregate are too selfish to make true sacrifices for the common good (myself included)
Is it even enough of a first step? Even in Washington State, which is a solidly blue state, the carbon tax ballot initiative has now failed twice. Similarly in Canada, the carbon tax, which I believe to be a powerful tool against climate change, is hugely controversial.
It seems we need to do everything we can individually, we need governments to step forward, AND we need companies/academics to innovate numerous times.
You are wrong. As long as one is living in a democracy, it is very easy for the individual to change things. To fight climate change, we mainly have to get rid of carbon fuels for electricity production and for transport. Except for flying, there are carbon-free replacements for both, which require no sacrifices from individuals. Keep pushing for them.
Technology alone is not enough. Every 12 to 15 years we are adding 1 billion people more. We expect 9 billion people around 2050. More air pollution, water pollution, soil contamination, less forests, etc.
I hope that technology will save us, but if not then we are finished.
If tech can't save us from ourselves then the only sane thing left to do is to wring every last bit of enjoyment from our fossil dependent lives before it all disappears forever. Eat a burger, drive a Cadillac, leave your lights on, enjoy your imported beer and set off your imported fireworks because expecting Johhny average to put off his iPhone upgrade is down right delusional.
There's still levels, you know.. just because we maybe can't make 1.5°C does not mean we shouldn't aim for 2°C, or even 3°C, this is lower than what we could do.
> There is no way to fix this from an individual point of view.
individual actions ALONE will not fix the problem, but they might be necessary to encourage broader societal change. Apparently it only takes 3.5% of the population to take an active stance on something to cause a change (https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1&v=YJSehRlU34w). Don't feel discouraged to adjust your lifestyle just because the effect is "negligible".
> individual actions ALONE will not fix the problem, but they might be necessary to encourage broader societal change
If there are ever enough bleeding heart, average, first world, wealthy (by global standards), vegan converts who will "encourage broader societal change" then I will eat my hat.
I'll eat a whole shop full of hats.
A billion dirt poor Bangladeshis would kill you and your whole family for the luxury of having a hotdog and a flip phone. They don't give a shit about you and your vegan burger, or that you switched you whole house to LED lights because they're 82% more efficient.
That's why we're fucked.
To curtail global climate change you would first need to forgo all modern luxuries and then wipe all third world countries from the map.
I understand your frustration. Believe me, I used to feel the same. But just because a Bangladeshis would kill me or you for our luxury doesn't mean we shouldn't try to do something about it. And you know, now when I started changing my lifestyle I feel much better about myself, and yes there is nothing wrong about that.
You ... might want to look up the meaning of this word (self-flagellation).
You don't need to suffer to change your lifestyle. I reduced meat consumption by 50-75% and do not miss it. If I feel like eating meat I do - and I attribute the success of it to the fact that it was not a complete change like becoming a vegetarian. You can fail at being a vegetarian. I can't have a I gave in and not I don't even have to try anymore and go back to my old lifestyle-moment. I might not have consumed as little meat as I initially wanted but as much as possible without suffering from it.
No, it's quite the opposite. Flying is a terrible experience anyway, traffic jams are awful, working less is the best thing in the world, less meet is good for you.
It's like saying exercise is self-flagellation. It's not.
But again, you sound just like me a couple of years ago. We might have more in common than you imagine.
Don't get me wrong. I am as depressed about climate change as anyone. I happen to believe that our chances of avoiding catastrophic climate change are super slim. Yet, we can choose how we live our lives while the drama unfolds. If one believes in impending collapse, ever more reasons to quit working full-time and use the extra days off to sit in a park, enjoy sunlight, play bridge/poker drinking beer/whisky or whatever your poison is. Or whatever your idea of emissions free fun.
Friend, your specific points are generally correct. Your fears and concerns are well founded.
(To be clear: I don't think that the worst results of climate change ("reduce human population back to a few hundred thousand and we start all over again") are assured, even if we're currently not even close to doing enough; but I think the odds are plenty high, and thus, plenty alarming.)
As someone who has been long dancing with the despair you're dancing with right now, allow me to gently suggest something to you.
> feel-good eco activism
> You're doing just enough to soothe your conscience without actually depriving yourself.
Let's assume that these are accurate. Then, let's assume for a moment that a person who comes to sufficiently understand the size and magnitude of the problems we're facing can go one of three ways.
1. The person has the fortitude and wherewithal to make the necessary changes, and does embrace a completely different, radical personal way of life. A small percentage of people do this.
2. The person embraces the realities, sufficient to motivate them to various changes in action and perspective, but still all together insufficient compared to the total scope of the problem.
3. Fall into despair.
This is a simplification, of course. It's quite possible for a person to items 1 or 2 and also 3.
My point: our greatest enemy here is despair.
It's better to go part of the way, #2 above, and avoid despair than it is to do nothing. It's far better to do #2 above than it is to fall into despair.
I urge you to give all people, yourself included, permission to push through various stages of acceptance and action.
Personally I feel it's best to just accept that we're burning this bitch and that only a major technological advancement in energy will do the job at this point. Thinking that you personally are highly responsible for it or that a single government can magically fix it is just futile and unless you're a specific kind of person who can handle that futility well, I'd even say harmful to your mental health. Knowing when to give up is important.
Operations like Commonwealth Fusion Systems and Breakthrough Energy Ventures are doing far more to realistically put a stop to climate change than anyone else is at this point.
I’m guessing millions of people feel the way you do. I certainly do. My wife was really depressed about climate change to the point where she saw no reason for living. It took us a long time, moving countries and changing everything about our lives for her to move on from that feeling. Now, I’m the one who feels hopeless. It feels like a lost cause.
I used to also be depressed about climate change, but then I got a job in the clean energy sector. Waking up every day and getting paid to fight climate change feels really good. It has really turned my depression into hope.
I'd like to encourage you to take a look and see what you can find about career opportunities in the clean energy sector. You may be surprised at how many software and tech jobs there are (it's a fast growing space).
There is a relatively small group of companies/people who know better, but would lose billions if this problem is addressed, they have an army of lobbyists and media companies to push the hoax/not-our-problem-narrative, and finally you have a huge undereducated part of the population who are already skeptical of 'elitist' scientists even before the manipulation begins. This problem also seems to be more extreme in the US compared to other western countries due to e.g. the prevalence of Fox News and decades of creationism leading the anti-science crusade. All in all, you can't really count on having a shared definition of 'reality' any more, as this has now been politisized.
There's a great deal of spin coming from the people warning about climate change too. End of the world stuff.
Here's something to consider: during the Early Eocene period (roughly 50 million years ago) temperatures were 9C-14C higher than now and CO2 levels were 1000-2000 parts per million [1].
And yet according to science, Earth was covered in forests from pole to pole, mammals flourished, and the oceans were "teeming with fish and other sea life". [2]
That's something you won't hear much about, because it doesn't fit the agenda.
It is. But environmental narratives fed to people are confused; they're mixing up "protect the nature because it's cute" with "protect the nature because our food depends on it".
Sure, but those changes took millions of years and evolution had time to work. Making similar changes over decades does not give evolution time to adapt.
Most people warning about climate change don’t say it is the end of the world, they say climate is complex, we never did this before, nature will be fine, but if whether human civilisagion will be fine is not very sure.
It is a huge experiment on a planetary scale and staying on the safe side here is simple the rational approach.
The irrational approach is to hope it will somehow turn out great, despite the already grim looking damage predictions.
And the simply evil approach is working against scientific evidence and rational arguments for personal gain. People like these are like cancer, destroying civilization from within for personal growth.
Spin? Doesn't seem like spin, more the best prediction on available data. Few sciences are perfect. Do we talk of spin from gravity science because we haven't yet proved that?
For the Eocene, also according to science, we see fossil evidence of crocodiles at the poles. That likely makes most of the temperate to equatorial zones uninhabitable for humans, whilst being lovely for the "snakes found in the tropics that would require much higher average temperatures to sustain them".
I notice you don't mention that "All the members of the new mammal orders were small, under 10 kg", and "Eocene mammals were only 60% of the size of the primitive Palaeocene mammals that preceded them. They were also smaller than the mammals that followed them".
So whilst it was lovely for species evolved to those conditions, and life as a whole, for large species such as those of the size of say humanity, it seems to have been exceptionally hostile.
> All the members of the new mammal orders were small, under 10 kg.
I don't know if that statement is technically true but it's certainly misleading. Perhaps "all the members of the new mammal orders" were under 10kg, but not all mammals during the early Eocene were under 10kg.
Cambaytherium and Coryphodon, for example, lived during the early Eocene and were roughly pig sized and cow sized, respectively.[1,2]
In other words, that carefully phrased statement, if true, is a great example of the unscientific spin I was talking about.
> fossil evidence of crocodiles at the poles. That likely makes most of the temperate to equatorial zones uninhabitable for humans
We also see fossil evidence of large mammals in India. In the early Eocene temperatures differed less between the tropics and the poles and between winter and summer.
> In other words, you seem to be suggesting that all the mammals that lived during that era were under 10kg, which would be a great example of the unscientific spin I was talking about.
I'm suggesting nothing of the kind, but directly quoting from the wikipedia page you linked. Please stop putting words in my mouth.
I will note that the Wiki page on Coryphodon says: "These changes in size are thought to be linked to global climate change, with the size minimum in the Coryphodon lineage occurring shortly after Paleocene-Eocene boundary". Which appears to indicate clear evolutionary pressure to evolve smaller.
The pressure on mammals appears to have been consistently toward smaller size, seen in newly evolved species and the evolution of existing species. We already know that heat penalises larger mammals harder than the small, so that does not seem inconsistent.
> for large species such as those of the size of say humanity, it seems to have been exceptionally hostile.
That was your statement, not Wikipedia. What was that based on if not the incorrect implication about the size of mammals?
Nonetheless, I've already edited my post to make it clear that I was talking about the implications of the statement from Wikipedia.
> The pressure on mammals appears to have been consistently toward smaller size
If "the size minimum in the Coryphodon lineage occurr[ed] shortly after Paleocene-Eocene boundary" then the decrease occurred before the early Eocene, not during. The temperature actually continued to increase for several million years after the Paleocene-Eocene boundary.[1]
That pressure might have been due to the rapid changes at the Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum, not temperature itself, and after the thermal maximum, size increased again even with the higher temperatures.
If there's evolutionary pressure on existing species to become smaller, and newly evolved species are smaller than those of preceding and following eras, it seems entirely reasonable to conclude it was somehow hostile for larger land mammals, no? That is not a statement that every single one was under 10kg or perfectly fit the identified trend.
We should remember that even during the adjacent times (the Paleocene and Middle Eocene) temperatures were about 8C higher than they are now, and large mammals (some of the largest ever) evolved during those times.
The decrease in size probably had more to do with the chaos wrought by whatever unknown event caused the thermal maximum than with the temperature itself.
To make this all more relevant: I'm not saying that climate change won't be disruptive. It will. I'm just saying we can adapt and endure. And I think we should plan for that, because we clearly aren't going to stop it.
It is interesting that with climate change, the public debate is mostly about 'is it man-made?' as if it'd just become a non-issue if it was. It's debating a fundamental point while we need practical solutions or even just concepts to cope with all sorts of interconnected problems on the entire spectrum of what we as humans are able to address - from microorganisms to geopolitics. While at this point, nobody is sure what will happen, societies will get a clearer picture of the imminent consequences over the next decades. At the moment, everyone seems to be waiting.
You might have disproved the point that all mammals very less than 10 Kg, but Wikipedia states on the Coryphodon[0] that the size of the species also decreased, and that "these changes in size are thought to be linked to global climate change". So the general argument certainly seems to hold.
It also "had one of the smallest brain/body ratios of any mammal, living or extinct" so that may not be the best example of how this kind of environment might be fit for humans.
What about all the people living in coastal areas or close to major rivers? That’s like 50% of the population, in addition to much of our shared history (buildings). It will all be under water and cause large migrations, unsettling much of society. Is that not worth fighting for?
it is a weird western media quirk that the first symptom people talk about is sea level rise. I think its an accidental product of all the news reports about melting ice caps and polar bears, so people have scoped the problem as ice melting and water rising in their heads.
this is basically, to a first order approximation, wrong. sea level rise, even in a nasty BAU/RCP8.5 scenario is really a next-century problem. we're talking tens of centimeters.
meanwhile, vast swaths of the euphrates, indo-gangetic, nile and yellow river deltas will suffer droughts and both successive and concurrent crop failures.
the flood of refugees from drought/famine/war into every city around the world will vastly exceed the flood of water at their shoreline (this century).
Don't forget that we are talking not only about climate change but also the rate of change. It's probably fine to have crocodiles at the poles if you have millions of years to adapt. If you only have a few decades it might not be so great.
But how long did the transition to those conditions take? We're changing the climate so fast that there is no chance for anything to evolve with the change.
I agree the panic seems a bit overdone sometimes. Also projecting current trends in renewable energy prices and storage we should be able to go zero net emissions in a couple of decades or so.
I really really wish that we are overdoing it.
The data just looks that bad, and we are one the worst path.
We emitted 5/6th of what's ok to stay below 1.5°C, and 2°C is not that much more, and we're not stopping. (500 Gt vs 600 Gt)
At the current emission rate (12 Gt/yr) we have 10 years left to stop completely. A few decades won't cut it.
Almost all scenarious of the IPCC now include negative emissions to be able to reach the targets.
The technology does not exist, would need to be implemented on a massive scale (eg plant all the available area minus agriculture and a selected few sanctuaries with trees and make biochar out of them) and the investment in eg artificial photosynthesis is not there, probably because there is little money in it. (The process is different from that for biofuels.)
We might not make it in time. Don't rely on this.
(The total available stored carbon seems to be on the order of 3000 Gt.)
I am all for controlling CO2 and moving away from fossil fuels but I also agree with you.
Climate is complicated, there are many complicated feedback loops going on. As just one example warming temperatures promotes plant growth especially algae which captures CO2 interning back to the ocean floor. Of course some of that algae is not good for us (red tide).
I am not worried about life on earth, it will adapt and survive, it has seen worse, I doubt we would turn into Venus, but its a slight possibility.
The issue is what happens to human society, it will most likely adapt too, but at what cost? Rising sea levels, food supply having to adapt, these things could caused great suffering to many, then again maybe not. I don't want my kids to suffer or their kids.
The point is we don't exactly know how it will play out so why push it? Lets get off fossil fuels as fast as we can, we know its the right thing to do for many reasons, one of which is to stop returning so much CO2 back into the atmosphere.
True, but nowadays we can't afford geographically changing human-inhabitable areas driven by climate change.
If climate change causes the areas we currently inhabit to become unhospitable, we risk adding the danger of economic disasters and wars threatening our survival.
Human life was, amongst other things, possible because of one of the biggest climate disasters ever to occur on earth, the big oxygenation event [0], so we could even see climate change as something positive but clearly that doesn't buy us anything today.
At 1000 ppm of CO2 human cognition starts to decline. At 2000 ppm you're looking at severe cognitive decline, drowsiness, headaches. Letting it get that high is dangerous just on the basis of CO2 concentration alone.
In such an environment, mankind might survive, but our current farming set-up won't. It might only kill 7 billion people our of 7.5, no big deal. (When looked at from a few million years in the future.)
> CO2 levels were 1000-2000
Indoor CO2 levels are usually double the outdoor levels. H
Humans become dumb/sluggish at concentrations over 1500ppm, and nauseous at over 2000. Life will thrive, human life won't.
I'm pretty sure there was also no one around to complain when their coastal cities filled with millions of people went under water. Pretty terrible example if you ask me.
On the scale of millions of years, Earth's life will adapt to the new, extremely warm climate we are causing to occur.
On the scale of centuries, in this extremely rapid warming event we are making happen, a majority of life on Earth will die, including most humans. Evolution is slow, global warming is fast.
In the very long run, yes, palm trees (or their evolutionary successors) will flourish in Antarctica.
In the short run, meaning a length of time that exceeds human written history, we will live in an inhospitable ecological desert, and billions will die.
That's something YOU won't hear about, because it doesn't fit the agenda of the people that are lying to you for profit.
Blaming the “companies” and “lobbyists” is such a cop-out. The companies are just giving people what they want. If people demanded a shift to a climate friendly lifestyle tomorrow, Exxon would have no choice but to follow suit.
Looking at the major trends of the last several decades. People moving to brand new sunbelt suburbs where they drive everywhere in SUVs. Buying disposable clothes, electronics, etc., made in China and shipped over the ocean. Even the token attempts at being environmentally conscious are ridiculous. I go to Whole Foods here in Maryland and everything is grown in f—king California. It’s a joke.
Nobody is willing to make the lifestyle changes it would take to have a real impact on climate change. And it’s not unique to the US. Canada and Australia have similar carbon footprints per capita, suggesting it’s more a combination of material wealth and low density. Blaming corporations instead of the people for all that is asinine.
And what are our best and brightest from Stanford, etc., doing? Figuring out carbon recapture? No, working at Google figuring out how to more effectively advertise disposable consumer goods that are shipped over from China, used a few times, and shipped back to China for disposal.
Howdy rayiner, our paths have crossed several times on HN regarding mass surveillance and privacy, and I always mostly respected your points of view, even if different from my own. However, I'm really worried about this reply on climate change. So many of your arguments can be easily refuted or aren't relevant. I'm worried you've fallen prey to climate denier FUD traps (or worse your profile is being used by shills).
Could we have a conversation offline? I'd like to learn more about your situation and what has brought you to this reply. Feel free to send me an email and we can schedule a time to talk.
If you disagree with one of my points, please reply here so people can have the benefit of the public debate. I’m certainly no climate change denier (I worked at Northwestern’s environmental law clinic, though my focus there was water pollution).
Okie dokie, replies below. However, I still would like to learn more about from where your views originated, so I hope you don't mind if I email you.
> Blaming the “companies” and “lobbyists” is such a cop-out. The companies are just giving people what they want. If people demanded a shift to a climate friendly lifestyle tomorrow, Exxon would have no choice but to follow suit.
As we've seen with Russian propaganda efforts, the firehose of falsehoods can be extremely effective at keeping people in the dark or convincing them of something not in their best interest. People demanding a shift requires education around the topic, and Exxon literally prevented research on the topic from coming out for decades.
> Looking at the major trends of the last several decades. People moving to brand new sunbelt suburbs where they drive everywhere in SUVs. Buying disposable clothes, electronics, etc., made in China and shipped over the ocean. Even the token attempts at being environmentally conscious are ridiculous. I go to Whole Foods here in Maryland and everything is grown in f—king California. It’s a joke.
I'm very confused what point you're trying to make here. That systems or not optimizing for environmental impact? Of course they aren't. They are optimizing based on the incentives they are following. People move to suburbs and drive SUVs to feel safer and more wealthy. People move to the sunbelt because the winter sucks. People buy disposable clothes and stuff is shipped from China because it's cheaper to do so. It's really expensive to grow produce in Maryland, so you ship it from California.
> Nobody is willing to make the lifestyle changes it would take to have a real impact on climate change. And it’s not unique to the US. Canada and Australia have similar carbon footprints per capita, suggesting it’s more a combination of material wealth and low density. Blaming corporations instead of the people for all that is asinine.
You're right, asking someone to give up their lifestyle sucks. However, you're equating changing lifestyle with fighting climate change. That's where we disagree. The goal of fighting climate change isn't to get people to change their lifestyles, it's to stop sequestered carbon from entering the carbon cycle. One way to do that is to ask people to stop being so excessive (e.g. changing lifestyle), but nowadays we have so many more options.
Most climate change solutions nowadays start with the assumption that we shouldn't ask people to change lifestyles, and just deploy carbon-free infrastructure that is a drop-in replacement for existing carbon-intense infrastructure. Solar, Wind, EVs, batteries, biofuels, etc. all never ask you to stop buying disposable shirts from China. All they do is replace the power that powers the factory and the fuel that is used to ship it to you with sources that don't add carbon the carbon cycle. So that when you are living your life in your disposable shirt and eating your California avocados, you're not contributing to climate change anymore.
> And what are our best and brightest from Stanford, etc., doing? Figuring out carbon recapture? No, working at Google figuring out how to more effectively advertise disposable consumer goods that are shipped over from China, used a few times, and shipped back to China for disposal.
We'll I'm just the best and brightest from UT-Austin, so not Stanford, but I did make the career switch from traditional tech to cleantech. And every time one of these threads come up I try to post that you, too, can make the switch from Google to cleantech. However, every time that happens, there are pessimists like yourself who shit all over my call for help. That's okay though, the capitalist in me kind of sees this as an opportunity. The fewer competitors I have in my particular niche, the more money I make. So I guess I should be partially thanking you for slowing down the climate change tech enlightenment :)
The US per-capita power consumption is 10kw. That's 10kw of continuous draw every minute, every day. And that's not household use, that's per capital.. so a household of 4 is using about 1 megawatt-hours /day.
Where do you plan to find that in your non-lifestyle change world? Solar? That's 8000sqft of installed solar with the highest efficiency panels. That needs to be coupled with hundreds of kwh storage. Total cost : hundreds of thousands of dollars.
The numbers cited here seemed high to me, so I checked them. Primary energy consumption in the US[1] ~1 * 10 ^ 20 Joules. Divided by population and number of seconds in a year[2] is about 10000 Joules per person-second, so about 10kW per person. A kilowatt of peak solar power requires about 8 square meters of panels[3]. Since the sun doesn't shine all the time and you don't get peak output all the time 750 square meters per person doesn't seem terribly unrealistic.
That being said, there is a lot of space where nobody lives in the US. There are some 28000 square meters per person in the US. Dedicating about 3% of that to solar panels doesn't seem impossible.
Some energy saving is also possible without changing the average lifestyle too much. Insulating homes helps quite a bit. Electric cars are more efficient that gas cars.
>Since the sun doesn't shine all the time and you don't get peak output all the time 750 square meters per person doesn't seem terribly unrealistic.
At current prices, that much PV capacity would cost around 25 trillion dollars. That price doesn't include any storage capacity.
The climate is changing far too rapidly for us to hope for science fiction solutions. We need a major reduction in emissions now, which means both a vast increase in renewable production and a vast reduction in overall consumption.
You only need a third of that to get the same amount of electricity out of them as by burning 10 kW of fossil fuels. Spread over 20 to 30 years that's suddenly not so much anymore. How much does the US spend on energy each year now? How much to secure the imports?
You forgot that this is primary energy consumption you two are writing about. 10 kW of primary energy consumption if replaced with solar requires only about a third of that to yield the same results since about two thirds are heat losses when converting fossil fuels to useable energy.
Jesus, that's incredible. If we regard modern automation as effectively replacing slave labor, that's the equivalent of having 100 human slaves doing hard physical graft on behalf of each and every person 24 hours a day.
> As we've seen with Russian propaganda efforts, the firehose of falsehoods can be extremely effective at keeping people in the dark or convincing them of something not in their best interest. People demanding a shift requires education around the topic, and Exxon literally prevented research on the topic from coming out for decades.
We have the research now, but people aren't changing their behavior.
> I'm very confused what point you're trying to make here. That systems or not optimizing for environmental impact? Of course they aren't. They are optimizing based on the incentives they are following. People move to suburbs and drive SUVs to feel safer and more wealthy. People move to the sunbelt because the winter sucks. People buy disposable clothes and stuff is shipped from China because it's cheaper to do so. It's really expensive to grow produce in Maryland, so you ship it from California.
And that is what causes climate change. Exxon is just giving people what they want. The blame rests with people who want a lifestyle that's incompatible with avoiding climate change, not the companies that simply are feeding consumer demand.
> All they do is replace the power that powers the factory and the fuel that is used to ship it to you with sources that don't add carbon the carbon cycle. So that when you are living your life in your disposable shirt and eating your California avocados, you're not contributing to climate change anymore.
We don't have time to develop all that technology: https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-why-the-ipcc-1-5c-repor.... According to new, revised estimates, having a 50/50 chance of limiting tempeature increaes to 1.5C leaves us with 14 years of carbon emissions at current levels. After which point the world economy has to hit zero carbon emissions. Meanwhile, carbon emissions are still going up: https://www.climatechangenews.com/files/2017/03/238eb46742db.... From 2000-2015, China added an amount of CO2 output that exceeds the entire US output. China continues to grow, while India is approaching where China was before 2000 and may have a similarly explosive growth in CO2 emissions in the next two decades.
Not only is there no solution that allows us to keep living the way we are living while averting climate change. There never was. Even if we had listened to the hippies and cut U.S. emissions by half starting in the 1960s, China's growth alone would have completely wiped out that savings multiple times over.
> We have the research now, but people aren't changing their behavior.
They are. Clean energy mandates are being passed in many states; climate change and the Green New Deal is a front and center topic in the Democratic presidential primary race; the Paris Climate Agreement passed on a global scale; China is electrifying transportation and building as much solar, wind, and nuclear as fast a possible; India is phasing out coal as fast a possible; and on and on.
A person as an individual isn't changing their behavior to a large extent, but people in aggregate are.
> And that is what causes climate change.
No, it's not. Again, climate change is caused by injecting sequestered carbon into the carbon cycle. Previously, it just so happened that the act of driving your SUV around did exactly that. However, more and more that's not true. As we electrify transportation and clean the grid, the act of driving around becomes less and less what causes climate change.
> We don't have time to develop all that technology
We already have the technology, it's just a matter of deploying it. Every auto manufacturer is releasing major electric models by next year. Clean energy generation in the U.S. is set to surpass coal generation this year. China is electrifying transportation and switching to clean energy (including nuclear) as fast as possible. India is building more solar than ever and accelerating that deployment.
As I'm sure you've seen, my favorite climate change joke is, "They say we won't act until it's too late... Luckily, it's too late!"
Climate change is my generation's great challenge. If we lose, we die. So, many of us are fighting with everything we have. Some are trying to get people to change behavior, some are trying to make drop-in replacements. But none of us are giving up. It sounds like you've already given up.
FYI, HN is limiting reply depth, so I doubt I can reply more. Please email me back if you can.
> Exxon is just giving people what they want. The blame rests with people who want a lifestyle that's incompatible with avoiding climate change, not the companies that simply are feeding consumer demand.
Well, Purdue Pharma is also only giving people what they want. In and of itself, that doesn't mean much.
Exxon is doing significantly more than just giving people what they want [1], as do many (most?) of the big dinosaurs of the established industries that currently make the world go round. Do we need to go into the vast efforts at influencing the public that such entities expend in order to maintain their domination and wealth? You have vastly more expertise on this subject, so I wouldn't be able to tell you anything new.
The world does need to advance, but advance to where? Thermodynamically, it must slow down or it will overheat and crash into the ceiling.
> Not only is there no solution that allows us to keep living the way we are living while averting climate change. There never was. Even if we had listened to the hippies and cut U.S. emissions by half starting in the 1960s, China's growth alone would have completely wiped out that savings multiple times over.
You don't know that, and it's a false dilemma anyway. People change their lifestyles all the time in response to their economic environment and incentives, as they have been doing throughout history.
I tend to listen more to the experts when they say something is possible. When they tell me in no uncertain terms that a very important problem has no solution, I listen more to the kids.
What a bizarre, patronising, and dishonest reply this is.
rayiner has simply correctly pointed out that the markets follow consumer preference and that those preferences place low value on renewable energy & sustainability.
No one is calling man-made climate change into question.
I agree with his post, more or less. It could probably have been delivered in a less confrontational manner. rayiner has often made posts with lawyer style arguments defending questionable behavior by governments and corporations. In this case he is deflecting blame from the companies that originate the carbon emissions saying that they're just fulfilling a free market demand, as if it's impossible for companies to behave ethically without government or consumer coercion.
Do not assume there are only two sides to this. There are those of us who are perfectly aware of the effects that humans have on climate change, while not really caring if the planet is destroyed or not.
I am not responsible for the planet and saving it. So please don't try to guilt me into taking responsibility for "saving" the planet. I've already done my part by not having children. It is up to parents and people who care enough about the species to save the planet and humanity. I'll be dead in a decade and not really bothered by this impending doom.
Planets, Nations and species die every day, given the vastness of the universe. It's admirable to try to save something, but the willingness to do so must come from within, free from external collective pressure mixed with shaming and guilt.
> Buying disposable ... electronics ... made in China and shipped over the ocean.
I don't think that LG markets it's Android phones as being disposable. I do think that they should, and I think that if they won't do it voluntarily that consumers should be made aware of the fact that these purchases are for disposable "products" through any other available means. If that requires regulation, so be it. No consumers stood up and demanded planned obsolescence from these corporations.
LG's easy for me to pick on, since their phones are essentially disposable pieces of junk, and I've been burned by them three times, but you could drop in most electronic manufacturers here. If they're selling disposable electronics then they should market them that way. The fact that we all accept that they're disposable is a separate problem from the demand, IMHO.
I also don't think that anyone ever thought that when they spend hundreds of dollars on a smartphone or a laptop or whatever that they wouldn't actually own it or have the right to service it on their terms. And yet, here we are.
It's a collective action problem and the characteristic of collective action problems is that individual incentives aren't aligned with group incentives.
You can't go from individual decisions and then infer group desires. The inferential step isn't sound. It's like saying fishermen must want to make fish extinct because they persistently overfish in the absence of fishing quotas.
IMO human society simply isn't mature enough to deal with this problem. I don't think there will be serious action until it's an emergency for enough wealthy people - and I don't think that's the system working, I think it's swerving at the last moment. There will continue to be a lot of collateral damage before the emergency is pressing enough.
>...individual incentives aren't aligned with group incentives... IMO human society simply isn't mature enough to deal with this problem.
I think it's an hypocrisy issue primarily. The people shouting for us to make a change won't make it first.
If even a majority of the people that say we should lower our carbon foot print bought only food and clothing produced without dirty electricity sources, didn't fly in private planes and only drove Prius/hybrid/electric cars, etc... (for starters)
Then maybe, just maybe they could convince everyone else it's even _possible_ to do what they expect everyone else to do to save the planet.
Hard disagree. That’s like not taking someone’s position against excessive government budget deficits seriously because they don’t voluntarily pay excess taxes to pay down the debt.
Climate change is a collective problem and will _only_ be resolved by collective regulations and incentives. This is not a problem we can all just “chip in” on and have it magically go away.
Hypocrisy is the root of many, many disparities in the world.
Consider how things would be if Hollywood lead the way with all the celebrities (percentage wise easily top percent polluters in the US) giving up their gas guzzling vehicles, private planes, excessive travel, etc... Much of the public would follow their example automatically, even many politicians.
It sounds like you are advocating for "I don't have to do it if everyone isn't".
> If you say everyone should do something, but you are _unwilling_ to do it first, it's hypocrisy.
Saying we should do something, meaning all of us collectively, and saying individuals should do something are two different assertions, though the verbiage is sometimes precisely the same. A person can very logically, and without hypocrisy, state that everyone should cut their CO2 output drastically to save the planet (which would be effective and help, and would also require major changes in infrastructure, law, and government) without taking drastic steps of their own (which would not be effective and would not help in any perceptible way).
Collective action problem.
> There are many examples in history where individuals stood up for a belief and lead the way to change.
This isn't a hypothetical. It's a worthwhile exercise to consider whether the hippies who have actually been taking drastic steps to lower their environmental footprint since the sixties have moved the needle at all, in terms of actual environmental degradation, public perception, or in terms of politics. Also consider whether they might have been more effective by working and spending money and effort engaging in mainstream politics and living like the rest of us.
> Hypocrisy from leadership (whoever they are) robs people of motivation and compassion towards both the subject and the message. (ie, climate change)
This might actually be true. An electorate that points at Al Gore and says "that guy uses a lot of CO2 so clearly this whole climate change thing is bullshit" is too stupid to live and will come to a bad end. I live in hope that at least a plurality of us will eventually be a lot smarter than that.
I think you misunderstood my point. Hypocrites are liars, deceivers, manipulators, immoral and unethical among other things.
If the people calling for changes in society related to climate change are of this ilk/type/caliber, then there is no way anything will ever change ethically.
Though, it could be done through propaganda, deceit and force. In other words, tyranny.
Or, end the hypocrisy and lead by example. Everything else is hand waving and rhetoric or worse.
> Hypocrites are liars, deceivers, manipulators, immoral and unethical among other things.
You've proven yourself incapable of identifying hypocrisy, in part because of your strange denial of the existence of collective action problems, but you're also flattering yourself if you think hypocrisy is anything other than a universal human trait.
This is all silly. If you're in a debate, debate the issues, don't attack the character of your opponent. If you're a citizen evaluating or advocating for or against a policy position, debate the pros and cons of the policy. What you are so fixated on is a weird non-issue.
My argument is about hypocrisy, why do you think I should change my argument simply because you think it's wrong? This seems almost silly.
Hypocrisy is a character issue and I think I have hypocrisy's definition correct. If you are honest/moral/ethical, can you be a hypocrite? I don't think so, hypocrisy at it's core is dishonest. Therefore if you practice hypocrisy, you are a liar. Seems like a logical conclusion.
The effect of any one person being "non-hypocritical" is minuscule. Effects will only significant en masse, and defectors must be punished, because it's profitable to defect. That means some mechanism to keep people in line must be used - and in our world that normally means the state. So agitation for political change is the correct approach.
Moral systems are another way of enforcing group will against individuals that would otherwise find it profitable/ to defect. Shaming works more efficiently in locally connected societies, though, and it's hard to scale it up to this kind of global problem.
You describe a textbook case of the tragedy of the commons, which is exactly what is happening. If we really wan't to address the problem then there needs to be new legislation, customers changing their behavior adequately is probably never going to happen. Regulations which ban certain goods or make them extremely expensive (like gasoline taxes) are politically impossible (see yellow vest movement) due to their uneven impact on the population. So the only alternative is probably massive government subsidies for anything that reduces CO2 emissions.
I would happily drive electric cars and power my house and electronics off solar power if the infrastructure was readily available to support its usage and cost was affordable or highly subsidized.
Well duh; would wouldn't do X if X was affordable and no sacrifice?
Everyone would buy fancy new electric cars powered by lithium from exploited natural resources in poor countries, if the cost was affordable and they got a high status Electric Car.
Would you, instead, walk 2 hours per day to and from work, in all weathers, in expensive heavy, several times patched, thirty year old woolen clothes, and eat locally sourced vegetarian food, to combat climate change?
> If people demanded a shift to a climate friendly lifestyle tomorrow, Exxon would have no choice but to follow suit.
This is a myth that is perpetuated by free-market libertarians and is completely disconnected from reality.
First of all, a very large number of people are demanding exactly that and large corporations have no interest in it. Consumers also cannot make the transition or demand a transition unless there are viable alternatives -- which requires research and if the private sector won't fund that research then viable alternatives won't show up. It's much easier, less risky, and cheaper for the private sector to try to kill a new industry (where they aren't entrenched) than it is for them to compete in it.
In addition, a lot of emissions are unrelated to the type of product being provided. Consumers might not have a green option (and thus cannot "vote with their wallet"), and even if they have a green option they might not care enough. According to the EPA[1] more than 75% of emissions are caused by transportation, industrial processes, and energy production. Reducing industrial emissions created during the manufacturing process of goods would have a much more significant impact than consumers changing what brand of soap they use.
We have laws to protect people from vendors selling tainted or poisoned food. By the logic of a free-market libertarian we should allow the sale of such food because consumers would choose not to purchase it and "market effects" would kill the business. But we all know that the reason those regulations were introduced is because before they were introduced people were dying because of unsafe food being sold.
> Nobody is willing to make the lifestyle changes it would take to have a real impact on climate change. Blaming corporations instead of the people for all that is asinine.
That's bullshit. See [1], individual consumers are one of the smallest contributors to climate change. The main contributors are industry. If emissions were taxed and there were tax breaks for operating in a green manner (such as the carbon tax which was repealed by our coal-loving Liberal government) then companies would have a financial incentive to do research into less polluting processes.
> And what are our best and brightest from Stanford, etc., doing? Figuring out carbon recapture?
Governments (in Australia at least) are cutting funding for climate change (at the behest of their political donors that, as above, have a vested interest against climate-change research). The intended effect of this is that there ends up being so much brain-drain away from public-sector research into climate change. Which is exactly what's happening. I agree that this is a very bad thing, but it makes no sense to blame PhD students (people with no money and no power) that couldn't get grants because the government is actively working against the public.
>Consumers also cannot make the transition or demand a transition unless there are viable alternatives
There are already viable alternatives. Buy less stuff, travel less, turn down your heating/AC, eat less meat and dairy. When people say "viable alternatives", they really mean "free lunch" - they want to maintain exactly the same lifestyle as they do now, just without the carbon emissions. That's completely untenable, no matter what technologies emerge over the next few decades. Even with the most optimistic forecasts of the pace of technological development, we'll have to make some radical changes to our lifestyle to prevent a climate disaster.
That's bullshit. See [1], individual consumers are one of the smallest contributors to climate change. The main contributors are industry.
Without consumers, there is no industry. Airline companies don't burn kerosene for the hell of it, they burn it because people keep buying plane tickets and keep shipping things by air freight. If we stop buying plane tickets and air freighted goods, they go out of business and so they stop burning kerosene.
The blame game over climate change is just blatant buck-passing. It's not my fault, it's the big corporations. It's not my fault, it's the government. It's not my fault, it's the people who vote for the other party. As long as there's someone else to point the finger at, you're absolved of responsibility. How many tons of carbon emissions does your lifestyle cause? What can you do right now to reduce that number? We'll only see meaningful change if a lot more people start asking those questions and acting upon the answers rather than waiting for someone else to act.
> Buy less stuff, travel less, turn down your heating/AC, eat less meat and dairy.
I'm going to repeat this again -- the vast majority of emissions are from industrial processes. Optimising the industrial processes to reduce emissions (as opposed to reduce costs) will result in emissions improvements.
Yes, in theory if the entire planet reduced its meat intake by 50% this would be a massive improvement -- but so would killing 50% of people. If your proposed solution to the problem is not viable from the outset you aren't proposing a solution, you're just deflecting blame.
Also -- contrary to popular belief, personal transport like cars (or commercial planes) are far from the largest emitters.
> Airline companies don't burn kerosene for the hell of it, they burn it because people keep buying plane tickets and keep shipping things by air freight. If we stop buying plane tickets and air freighted goods, they go out of business and so they stop burning kerosene.
Planes are actually more fuel-efficient than cars per-head. And planes are far from the largest polluters in "transportation" -- that would be trucks (especially older trucks that are under-maintained).
> The blame game over climate change is just blatant buck-passing.
You are buck-passing by arguing that it's the sole responsibility of the public to solve this crisis. Not corporations which knew about the effects of climate-change in the 60s and tried to hide it from the public and government. Not governments which are placating their donors by passing (or abolishing) milk-toast regulations to fix the problem.
I do my best to reduce my carbon emissions but that is not going to make any palpable difference.
If we wanted to go to war, then it would be the government's responsibility to organise the war effort. But if we want to stop humanity from going into war due to resource shortage all of a sudden it's about "personal responsibility".
Exxon and friends have been deliberately misleading people for decades about the problem. You can’t propagandize people for thirty years and then turn around and say, this is really your fault for believing me.
If big oil companies had just pumped oil and responded to the market then I might agree with you. But that’s not at all what happened.
The book "Private Empire" by Steve Coll is excellent on this. Unbearably frustrating at points, because it seems that Exxon were well aware of the issue and there were some suggestions rolling around that would have made them trailblazers in renewables, but they were just too risk-averse.
Blaming the “companies” and “lobbyists” is such a cop-out. The companies are just giving people what they want.
It is the purpose of advertising and propaganda to tell people how to want. It's misleading at best to say "people want new cars" without considering the decades of advertising selling the dream of new cars as a form of success and high social status, as an aspirational desire, as a reward for hard work, as a kind of personal freedom and ability to go anywhere on your terms, and then sell that as desirable, etc. There's a reason Hollywood SciFi films have Audi cars as product placement, and it isn't because "people want to see a future with up-market German cars" and Hollywood is responding to that demand.
Blaming individuals is just as much a cop-out. Most people just follow the path of least resistance in their lives that was hewn into place for them. For instance cities where bicycling is the most comfortable way of traveling also have high rates of cycling. Companies and politics play a huge role in shaping most of our daily lives.
> The companies are just giving people what they want.
Propaganda is extremely effective.
> Nobody is willing to make the lifestyle changes it would take to have a real impact on climate change. And it’s not unique to the US. Canada and Australia have similar carbon footprints per capita, suggesting it’s more a combination of material wealth and low density. Blaming corporations instead of the people for all that is asinine.
People move where it is cheap to live comfortably. Every level of US government subsidizes the shit out of suburbs and car commuting. If the true costs of people’s lifestyle were factored into the price, behavior would change in a hurry.
Individual consumers don’t have the information or analysis time necessary to factor in systemic effects of every choice.
> And what are our best and brightest from Stanford, etc., doing? Figuring out carbon recapture?
Some of them are. But doing research takes funding. If we want the smartest to take careers as researchers instead of looking to sell out and retire young, we should (a) tax/regulate the financial industry down to near break-even and enforce laws against fraud and other financial crimes, (b) tax capital gains as income, add additional income tax brackets for those making millions per year, tax large inheritances into the ground, consider adding a wealth tax, and crack down on tax evasion, (c) enact sweeping campaign finance reform, (d) pump more public money into basic research, (e) stop subsidizing the fossil fuel industry and shift those subsidies toward renewable energy, (f) while we are at it, clean up the broken health insurance system.
> I go to Whole Foods here in Maryland and everything is grown in f—king California.
Well yeah. That's true for a lot of the world; California is the leading exporter - and sometimes the only significant exporter - of a rather absurd number of varieties of fruits and vegetables. California's Central Valley has the right intersection of climate (plenty of sunshine, and snow is rare to the point of statistical irrelevance), good soil, adequate water (occasional droughts notwithstanding), and size (enough room for a lot of farmland) to be an agricultural powerhouse.
There's also and even more educated group who knows humans only accelerated a natural and enevitable carbon cycle that humans didn't cause nor can stop.
Humans can't stop global warming. Then what can we do? What should we do?
Wondering what you can do? Especially for liberals? My idea of where to start: shame your company into phasing out business trips. I know we all like to travel but it needs to stop being seen as a work perk and start being seen as a liability. We put internet cables across the oceans and continents for a reason -- so we travel less, not more. Find a way to reward those who refuse to go -- maybe have a fun local hangout or whatever. Get your supervisor chain to stop making someone fly every month/week/whatever. Because every cross-continental/trans-atlantic flight (very roughly) emits around 20% [1] and 100% [2] of your entire year's worth of driving.
Ive almost lost hope at this point; while I will continue to support green movements and live closer to green, I don’t hold any faith that things will change.
If they do, great. Otherwise, prepare your children for a world where their children may be less intelligent due to higher concentrations of Co2. Water will be expensive. People will wear masks everywhere and only rich people can afford houses with completely pure air.
I truly hope it doesn’t come to this, but my fear is that when pollution gets to a certain point, those in charge will basically say “fuck it” and let things run their course.
Maybe but it's extremely unlikely. Think about the amount of damage a single person does to the environment. It would take a truly insane effort for someone to have a beneficial effect on it (assuming the live in civilisation).
Don't you think technology is helping? Hybrid and EV cars are becoming common and probably in 10 years, the average vehicle on the city roads will be an EV. Solar energy is coming down in price and residential adoption in the U.S. is booming. The average person today believes in recycling and cutting emissions. Battery technology is advancing. Also worth pointing out that in North America at least, vast reforestation has taken place. In a few years, we will be a lot closer to a zero emissions civilization, though probably we'll never actually get to zero but at least we'll reduce our impact substantially and then it will be a matter of waiting for ecosystems to move back into balance. There's no reason why for example the polar ice caps can't re-freeze, and there's even evidence of some of that happening in places. Don't give up hope.
And yet it says, "The report details the economic damage expected should governments fail to enact policies to reduce emissions. The United States, it said, could lose roughly 1.2 percent of gross domestic product for every 1.8 degrees of warming."
So an extreme rise in temperature of 3.6 degrees could reduce US GDP by 2.4%? That's about 18 months of average growth. That doesn't seem like a crisis to me - what am I missing?
I think you're reading that sentence as if that's the only effect on the US. Also assuming the effect is linear in the change in temperature (is it really?).
Which is really the problem, isn't it? However, no politician says this publicly because Western economies are built on a gigantic Ponzi scheme where we need more and more people to be born and create wealth for our ever-increasing retirements.
Basically all civilizations end like this. There were many before, there might be some in the future.
If we'll destroy biology completely we still have a small chance a new type of existence can emerge - silicon based intelligent form, what we call AI right now. It probably can survive without oxygen, even without planet. But it's a big MAYBE yet.
Realistically, can anything be done without turning off electricity at the whole globe at once? "Going Amish", one might say?
It's not just about burning coal or going green, we are also using resources which are not replenishable. Even if all cars become electric and we switch to nuclear power and start eating bugs, we'll keep producing plastic, chemical substances and so on.
I'm no climate change denier, but there is a complexity to the effects which NASA has identified (and recently updated) https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2016/carbon-dioxide-fer...
In particular the Sahel, famously arid and increasing in size a few decades ago, is now becoming more fertile again to the extent that people are moving back there.
The first half degree Celsius of human induced warming was quite probably a good thing on net. There's really no way that the fifth half degree will be anything but a catastrophe.
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 335 ms ] threadWe knew about climate change for decades. Scientists keep producing report after report after report. Every one grimmer then the preceding. Yet the global GHG emissions just keep going up. Governments and politicians have failed to act. I am tired of waiting for systemic change. I am tired of waiting for technological breakthrough.
While we should keep fighting for systemic change, I begin to believe individual action is paramount and a prerequisite for any broader change to take place. The time for signing petitions is over. It's time to act. There are no low-hanging fruits here. There will be no silver bullet. There will be lots and lots of tweaks across the board.
People don't like being told what to do. I get that. But I am not a politician telling you what to do. I am your peer crying for help. Please do something. Please don't say "most people" wan't sacrifice this or that. I am not talking to most people. I am addressing you, the HN crowd.
So what an honorable member of the HN community can do
- Stop flying to conferences. Go to a local meetup. It's fun. And cheaper. If you really need to get out of town, take a train. Don't think about it as not flying for the rest of your life. Rather, can we declare a moratorium on conferences for like three years? Let's hope by then Prometheus will give us carbon-neutral jet fuel https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19842240
- Shift your investments from fossil to green. If you can't find enough worthy greens, shift it to anything else. Some say it won't impact your returns http://www.lse.ac.uk/GranthamInstitute/news/the-mythical-per... Move your deposits and savings to a more sustainable bank. This might be one of the most underappreciated yet simple and powerful tools https://fairfinanceguide.org
- Work less. Work part time, and part of that part time remotely. Reduce your commute. If your boss won't let you, find a job that will. In the current job market you can negotiate almost anything, and remote work must be the easiest thing to negotiate. http://cepr.net/documents/publications/climate-change-worksh... A firm lets its employees work four days a week while being paid for five. Everyone is happy, lower electricity bills, fewer cars on the road https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/19/world/asia/four-day-workw...
- I noticed that this one is quite controversial but I'll mention it anyway. Reduce your meat consumption as much as you can. It's fine to not go fully vegan, but make meat a special treat, something you are looking forward to, not an everyday snack. They say these new vega burgers are not too bad. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/04/30/dining/climat...
Apparently it takes 3.5% of the population to take an active stance to cause a change (https://www...
For a lot of older people alive today they will never see the consequences of their actions so the selfish option is to carry on.
I am not saying I am better, but is not anonymous "others" or our "GDP-based system", it is 7 billion people who don't care much.
My friend recently complained that our planned flights this summer (Germany-Scotland) are too expensive at the moment. He wants them for €150 and from an economic perspective he is right because you can have them for this little.
Flying needs to be far more expensive.
You are mentioning an important problem but I firmly believe that cheap flights are not a future-proof, sustainable solution as long as kerosene is the fuel.
Trains on the other hand could be a wonderful approach. Political incentives have stifled train infrastructure in the past. Trains in Germany are already a joke but its insane how this concept is just non-existent in the US due to the reign of cars and flights.
But I guess its more important to spend $600bn on a massively overinflated military or in case of Germany to politically support Big Car.
Western countries are not the major culprit at the moment. EU has decreased their CO2 emissions by 20% during the last 30 years. USA has maintained them. China and India, increased them by 300% and China alone now emits more CO2 than USA, EU and Canada combined.
This is not to say that Western countries can just cross their arms and do nothing, but, they are not the ones that are going to change the picture and all this discourse about global warming has been turned in an anti-West political weapon that never addresses the real issues and never has the courage to point their finger at the countries that are the biggest problem at the moment.
This way, I fear no real change will happen until it's too late.
Disagree. How many products in your house/apartment are 'made in china'?
The West has simply outsourced its pollution.
Better would be all meat altogether, but by far the lowest hanging fruit is to stop beef production and farming.
My current diet, I do not wish to state. However, I was a vegetarian in some phases of my life. If motivated enough, I could be a vegetarian for life. However, it would be a folly if I were to start believing that everyone can make sacrifices of this kind. For some people, giving up on things they like to eat is very hard. For some, giving up on using their car is hard. People can do different things to help and not everyone needs to do every single thing. An extreme approach is not practical and it's next to impossible to "sell" such an idea.
I believe this is a misconception. We didn't decrease our emissions, we outsourced them. A lot of the China pollution is due to exports for western consumption. Just look at the trade "disbalance" between China and USA.
China is developing into a first-world nation with over a billion people. That's a lot of manufacturing and infrastructure development for purely domestic purposes. Building cities, streets, highways, railways, automobiles, that's a huge amount of metal and cement production.
If you want to blame the USA and other China-product-consuming countries for China's emissions, it's more for sending so much money in their direction on goods to fund all this large-scale development.
India is set to explode, and there are already reports of manufacturing migrating there because China is becoming expensive as they get their act together.
When the dust settles I imagine China and India will be the dominant emitters with their massive populations. Every time these countries move their quality of life needle the slightest bit upwards across their population it makes a big impact.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_di...
What's important is the actual reduction in emissions, and the jurisdiction with control over the largest quantity is most capable of reducing the total.
Looking at per-capita numbers and trying to hold everyone in the world to the same standard has never been the way the world works, and if we tried to establish such a system, we'd never make any progress on this issue.
(If we wanted to hold everyone to the same standard, we could divert income from the rich and make them poor, because consumption pretty much increases linearly with income, except at the top decile where consumption increases massively. But attacking the richest isn't gonna save us either, because planet earth doesn't give a crap about the income levels of whoever's putting CO2 into the atmosphere. All that matters is how much of it we put in there.)
Anyone in the West who's trying to shift the blame to China is deluding themselves. We need to fix our politics so we can move with the same determination as China on this specific issue, not the other way around.
These figures are what their own government is aiming for when you examine their policies. The real one could be much higher.
[1] https://climateactiontracker.org/countries/china
Like the fact you think the reports have gotten more and more dire is debatable at best, there were many reports decades earlier that predicted that today we should have already experienced at least a foot of sea level rise.
Also if you were concerned this was a life or death situation, why didn't you mention global birth control as an option? At some point you have to admit that humans aren't going to be net carbon neutral unless we come up with some great new technology that just solves the carbon crisis.
If we assume the reality of this, it only stands to reason that a booming population will lead to more carbon pollution and so the flip side also stands that a shrinking population will reduce carbon pollution.
I'm just saying that I find the bleak view of the future where we all just stop flying planes, turn off our computers and live in our little communities. We have to accept that we are a global community and breaking that down isn't going to solve the problem of carbon pollution.
Remember civil rights took decades of hard, thankless work before MLK Jr. stepped on the scene. Or labor rights (Saturdays) or women’s suffrage or any major leap forward. Sometimes you have to strike the match a few times before it lights.
A starting point for GND activism is the Sunrise Movement: https://www.sunrisemovement.org/
I agree individual action alone is not enough. But it might be a necessary stepping stone to start transforming the economy.
For example, flying to conferences. It is considered to be normal, and people who would refuse to fly (as a conscientious objector to climate change) would be considered "weird". But it is really just a cultural norm here. We readily accept vegetarians, for example, and we accommodate for that. In a similar way, we could accept that some people object to flying (or it could even be the default).
Exactly, shifting cultural norm is more important than an actual emissions saving from skipping a flight.
Edit: I am not thinking of the direct CO2 emissions caused by breathing. It’s all the habitat destruction done for each of us and by each of us, the pollution in various forms and so on. Can we really compensate for this by becoming more efficient? Can we become so efficient to handle a few more billion people? Where is the limit?
B: Even if everyone cut their birth rate instantly it would be 100 years before there would be much change. (Think about how long people live and the birthrate is never going to actually be zero.)
So even if that was the problem, which it's not, it's not solvable by any method that has to do with reducing the number of humans.
Only a new energy source can solve this, which makes population increase a completely pointless thing to discuss.
- Travel less, particularly long haul and travel more sustainable, share a train, avoid air travel
- Buy less, particularly clothes and consumer electronics that you don't really need. Make things last longer, own less. Boycott manufacturers who make deliberately disposable/single use products.
- Make your home more efficient, that means insulation if you're in a cold place and ventalation, use of shade if you're in a hot place. Replace fossil fuel heating with renewable electric where possible
- Waste less food, eat less meat particularly red, buy things that don't have lots of waste attached (like short shelf lives, lots of packaging), and buy food that hasn't traveled far to get to you
Any more suggestions?
I just can't bring myself to throw out clothes with holes in them and wear them on the weekends because I don't want them to go to waste.
I patch my jeans and my gloves. It might not look very good, but it increases their life by at least 50%. I've also replaced zippers on jackets because they wore out.
When it comes to pants I find the pockets always rip first which is really annoying. I haven't tried to fix them yet but I have been keeping them for when I work out how to put new pockets on.
Better yet, many custom outfits can be specd and ordered online for a modest fee if you are like many who don't seem to fit americian vanity, nor asian sizing.
People need to rank their daily activities and make changes in their daily lives where the impact is biggest.
Most people fly once a year at most.
In the US I'm thinking that daily transportation and daily use of energy in electricity/heating/air con are at the top of the list.
IIRC (from https://www.withouthotair.com/ ) one round trip over Atlantic is around the same carbon emmissions as a daily commute with the car. So things are not that simple.
That's why I also think it needs to be cultural norm. There is small minority of people who air travel a lot. If we could somehow manage to change the norm so they would travel less (for example, stayed much longer in the same place), it would be great.
My point remains: Air travel is not at the top of the list for the majority of people so let's not always mention it as an important action.
It would probably be more productive to tell people to drop all fossil fuels energy at home, and for their car if they can.
Almost nothing is at the top of the list. As I mentioned there are not low hanging fruits. Everything is important. Also, not flying might be exactly something doing on individual level, while "drop all fossil fuels energy at home" requires infrastructure change. Also not-flying is a more publicly visible action which might inspire others to follow.
There are real, important things at the top of the list.
Changing electricity supplier, driving less, buying the most efficient car possible or an electric one (if you can charge it with non-fossil fuel sources), etc. should occupy the headlines more that "air travel is bad (TM)"
I disagree. It is important to realize its impact, so that we can organize the society so that it is not needed. The people who don't travel often still need to hold the minority accountable.
If the airline industry continues growing at current rates by 2050 it will consume the whole CO2 budget if we want to stay below 2°C.
In reality we now need to change everything and pretty quickly.
As I said, people tend to overstate the actual impact of aviation.
There are much higher priority things to do.
(Before some idiots comment 'b-b-but what about China and India?" we can put pressure on them too: carrot and stick with help to invest in green energy and trade sanctions if they continue polluting)
I am completely with your mindset here. However, I think it is rather trivial to explain why we are not in full on panic mode.
Short-term profit and power games are more relevant to sociopathic and psychopathic individuals such as Mitch McConnell, Bolsonaro and tens of thousands of others in leadership positions. Marketing, political campaigns and propaganda smearing do the rest.
In Germany, the conservative party (CDU) as well as the "social" democrats (SPD) are in power and absolutely refuse to phase out coal as quickly as they did nuclear because of a few thousand coal jobs. The target is 2038 - as long as it fits their bill. Neither is willing to do the right thing because short term it might lose them voters.
Yes you heard that right - they will lose voters. Demographics in Germany shows us, that Germany is old and continues to age. Nothing but immigration will stop this.
Young people who care are simply overpowered at the ballot. This can sometimes feel schizophrenic as the vocal voices online are part of the group that votes less...
People will still produce CO2 in various ways. So reduce CO2 footprint per person by, say, 50% while increasing population by 50% will bring us no benefits with regard to CO2.
On the matter of population growth, the data is actually giving me a lot of hope: in most developed countries, the population is stable or even declining. China has a reproduction rate much lower than the equilibrium one of 2, causing a lot of problems on its own, still the population is growing a bit more as the average lifespan keeps increasing. But there is a clear maximum in sight.
The elephant in the room rather is: what if the average Chineese citizen would emit as much carbon and the average American one? Without any population growth, if that happened, it would be game over. So the immediate call to action has to be to reduce carbon emissions. In any country.
I'm only saying that we should think about population growth in addition to other measures. Also, it's not about limiting population growth but actually reducing the number of people living on this planet as quickly as possible. In the long term, I can't see a more effective way to save resources.
> what if the average Chineese citizen would emit as much carbon and the average American one?
Then global carbon dioxide emissions would rise by ~10%. It wouldn't make much of a difference, as serious negative effects from climate change seem to be unavoidable. But this doesn't mean "game over". Mankind is a lot more resilient than you seem to think. That's why there's still a need for long-term thinking (centuries, not decades).
The population is continuing to grow because life expectancy is increasing.
Even if we had a major virus that killed 20% of the population once, we would still rapidly replace them and keep growing if we don’t learn to fit back into a sustainable lifestyle.
> what's required is a collective action
Wound't that collective action include not flying? And what form do you imagine it will take - a government order that forbids flying and makes airlines illegal?
I would say refusing to join your team on a trip to that fancy conference of the year takes some courage. Surely not as much courage as violating segregation laws but still.
They have not failed to act. Rather there is no action they can take. Not a single one of your suggestions, even all together, will make any meaningful difference.
> I am tired of waiting for systemic change. I am tired of waiting for technological breakthrough.
You're going to have to keep waiting because that is the only solution. There's simply is no other solution.
As proof for what I say, think about the ozone hole and freon. There was a problem, but in that case there actually was a solution. And the solution was implemented even though it was hard.
If there was a solution here, i.e. a new energy source, it would be implemented. And no, wind and solar as they exist today are not that solution although they are incremental help, and they are being installed incrementally, which makes sense.
Instead we see that EU countries aren't even hitting the miserable EU target of 2.4% of GDP to be spent on R&D let alone the 3% 2020 target, and other nations fare even worse.
The irony of that is not lost on me, but I suspect it is lost on them.
But honestly, I don't think the environmental movement has that much power to block the research.
I suspect it's just that while people like the idea of scientific and technological progress, they don't like having to pay for it.
To block implementation, not research. Why do you think nuclear power is so expensive?
- No investments
- I work remotely; no commute.
- I hardly ever buy meat.
Yet none of this matters. If everyone in my country followed suit, it still wouldn't amount to more than noise in the statistics. Individual action like this is pretty much futile. You just need to catch a glimpse of what are the largest sources of CO2 (and equivalent) emissions.
This is provably false. The effect of not commuting and avoiding animal products is measurable and very relevant.
Not to dismiss the important of collective action against industrial pollution.
Then I guess I just saved the planet, everyone thank me. I'll leave the proof to you.
And the green new deal with have zero effect on global temperatures.
Ironically many of these interests could realise the new opportunities of growth in the energy space instead of focusing on potential impact to current business lines.
And there’s a path dependence too, first movers to accept the pending disruption can be at a considerable advantage.
The current system is based on unlimited and exponential growth, everything else is considered a failure. An unlimited growth in a finite environment isn't possible, it's called instability.
The second problem is that many people convince themselves that "Science" will save us, that we'll terraform Mars or that shifting to electric cars will be enough, but that's too little, too late. Even if we'd hit our ecological goals, and we're not, we'd be far from fixing the problem. We don't need to slow down, we need a complete paradigm shift. It's like when you move form a basic 40sq meter flat to a fancy 250sq meter house, going back is very hard.
but our environment is the universe, and the universe is infinite in resources...
Get a human permanently and self-sufficiently out of LEO and i'll agree a limited part of the solar system is our environment.
For the foreseeable future our environment is earth and not a lot else.
We have a very real thing happening right now on earth with extreme consequences: major species extinction, air pollution, water pollution, soon to be ecological refugees, &c. But the answer is mining asteroid and having a moon base.
Why would we care about asteroid gold and the few (<100) people that might go to the moon and live an extremely strenuous life. It's not like we'll all go to the moon, crack open a cold one and watch the moon superbowl.
If you change your sense of scale from a few years to a few hundred, yeah, I think it’s likely humanity will be watching the moon superbowl, in fact it’s probably the most dull and conservative view of the future someone could have.
Not to mention they're still vaporware... Brochures are easy.
In 30 years Miami might be under the waters, and we'd still be extremely lucky if we have a 200 sq ft base on the moon.
(On which a man haven't even set foot for the last 48 years).
scientific progress.
Do we even have the raw resources on earth / the tech to move everyone to a new planet and terraform it before we're all toast ?
Even if we do what's your moral standpoint on the fact that humanity destroyed 3+ billion years of evolution on earth in a few hundred years ?
Who in their right mind think that terraforming a planet is easier than just stopping destroying our home planet ?
Even if we do move to a new planet, in what kind of conditions will we live, I doubt we'd have even 10% f the comfort we have today. So why not scale down here, on earth, in the first place ?
didn't the earth go thru numerous planet-wide extinction events? and those were much much faster than a few hundred years.
In which case it will be little consolation that amoebas or even cockroaches and squirrels might survive...
But sure in the big scheme of things it's not changing much, it's more of a personal / moral position.
A good analogy is the Eiffel tower, you can remove a bolt, 10 bolts, 100 bolts, it'll still hold fine, remove one too many and it'll collapse. The metal will still be there (earth) but it won't be the Eiffel tower anymore (Life).
> The current rate of extinction of species is estimated at 100 to 1,000 times higher than natural background rates.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction
a moon base would cost upwards of 20 billion USD.
the increase in the US military budget for FY2018 is 58 billion USD, bringing it to a total of 639 billion USD. that's just for FY2018. there is currently no world war.
> Do we even have the raw resources on earth / the tech to move everyone to a new planet and terraform it before we're all toast ?
no one mentioned anything about terraforming or moving people in this thread. i made a comment regarding finite resources, which aren't finite if you just look at the sky instead of the ground.
It doesn;t have much to do with the original topic, but I think you're way underestimating it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ouiTMXuDAQ
Our immediate environment aside from Earth is the vastness of the solar system, in planets totally unsuitable to support us, and with extreme costs to even get us to the nearest one, and with vast expanses of space and radiation to go through to get to the next.
We got humans to the closest rock for a few years, on a huge cost and effort, and with big risks (and some casualties), based on the competition of 2 superpowers. Since then, not only we haven't established any "base", but we haven't even been there for 48+ years (almost half a century)...
And even if by a very slim chance (which people who view technological progress as some kind of boundless Paolo Coelio fairy tale take for granted) we manage to do something in those planets, the next step (some earth like habitable planet elsewhere) is extremely more challenging, and speed of light limits would apply (of course people who view technological progress as some kind of boundless Paolo Coelio fairy tale bypass them with exotic contraptions that have us riding wormholes and what have you...).
And that's if war and climate mayhem doesn't have us concentrate all our efforts here...
Some food for though: don't concentrate on the pedantic details, but the high level arguments:
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2009/11/the_myth...
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2007/06/the_high...
The thing is, you and I are no more qualified to speculate on the future than someone from 100 years ago would be qualified to speculate on the Internet. However I can say one thing: if we even make a fraction of the progress in the next 100 years compared to the progress in the last, I don’t think we have anything to worry about when it comes to energy or transportation.
I'd say we are.
We don't expect the speed of light to change for example. Whereas people in the 1800s didn't have any such hard limit (e.g. based on Newtonian theory).
We also have the benefit of hindsight, and can see the rate of technical development (and e.g. that the low hanging fruit were on the late 19th century, increasing on early 20th century, and dropping down after the later half of the 20th century.
>However I can say one thing: if we even make a fraction of the progress in the next 100 years compared to the progress in the last, I don’t think we have anything to worry about when it comes to energy or transportation.
Compared to the progress in the last 100 years, or the last 50 years? Because already the progress in the last 50 years is laughable compared to the progress up until 1970 or so.
E.g. we had electricity, nuclear energy, combustion engine, radio, tv, film, digital imaging, lasers, microwaves, satellites, internet, computers, airplanes, transistors, rockets, radars, and tons of other fundamentals already available by 1960s -- not so much huge progress later on aside from evolutionary stuff.
(Well, we did have the slinky)
shouldn't the internet be considered the greatest achievement yet?
When was the last time a new technology reached commercial success?
Besides we're not talking about mere products here, but core technologies, e.g. inventions. The steam engine, the combustion engine, electricity, the telephone, laser, microwave, satellites, and so on, weren't mere "applications of other technologies" and even less so a mere incremental bump in the way modern internet vs 60s/70s internet is.
Even the moon which is the closest stable near earth resource is at least a couple of decades away from any practical use.
Chances are that the climate of earth will become more unstable before any kind of space based economy can really be taken seriously.
Per capita energy usage is about 6 MWh / year and our population has been doubling every 53 years. Assuming that continues, in 10000 years we'll be using 4e69 Wh / year. If we figure out 100% conversion of mass to energy, that's 1e56 kg of fuel, which is a lot more than all the matter in the visible universe.
You can play with these numbers a little, but even reducing the energy usage per person by a million only gives us another 1000 years. Soon we'll be growing so fast that every year we'll use all the resources within one light-year.
[1] https://youtu.be/FACK2knC08E
The problem is sustainable growth. The path we're on isn't sustainable, unless we hit some scientific and political miracles in the next years. Sustainable growth is unfortunately slower than unsustainable one, so it loses out in competitive environment. Still, I don't think we should focus on attacking growth in general - just the type we have now. Done right, economic growth may yet save us.
Also we already consume more than we should, if we go back that would impact the GDP.
It's not "indefinitely". It's just "long enough that we can bootstrap a space economy and expand into the Solar System", or alternatively "long enough so that we can fix the environmental damage, get rid of poverty and most diseases, and slowly S-curve the economy into some acceptable state". Or some combination of that.
Moreover, not all growth is tied to physical space and resource use. We're also not using the space and resources we have efficiently. There's plenty of room on Earth for us to grow, but it might start looking more like improving things than expanding them.
> if we go back that would impact the GDP.
Switching to a sustainable level of growth will require that - slowing down the growth itself, and even a temporary shrinking of the economy.
In reality it seems most of the things we find valuable do involve energy consumption. We are so far from completely decoupling it that you might as well consider money and energy to be the same thing. The more you spend and the richer you are the more damage you are causing the environment.
It seems politicians (of the environmental kind) who tell you we can grow and save the planet are almost certainly lying.
Put another way: if we could suddenly switch transportation to electric and replace all our power generation with renewables with some surplus power on top, why would anyone want to limit energy consumption? That would be equivalent to saying, let's reverse civilization, bring back more poverty and suffering, because it was all cool and games 300 years ago.
> We are so far from completely decoupling it that you might as well consider money and energy to be the same thing.
With market setting prices according to supply and demand and business model shenanigans, and with lots of externalities everywhere unaccounted for, I'd say prices on everything are pretty well decoupled from energy use. It would be a better world if they weren't.
Not only in the sense of 'pollution' as such, but just completely changing ecosystems.
We could have a perpetual motion machine with zero emissions, and we'd still have to handle 7 billion people chucking straws in the ocean or whatever.
If we actually had an unlimited energy source we'd probably turn half of the planet into skyscrapers with farms in them or something.
That's the thing with energy, and why I'm arguing that aiming for reduction in energy production would be self-destructive for our civilization: with enough surplus energy, you can do near anything. We could remove from the air and the seas all the pollution we emitted so far. We could keep turning air into combustible hydrocarbons all day long and enjoy high-density hydrocarbon fuels that are carbon neutral. There's lots of things that could help which we aren't currently doing, because they don't make economical sense. With more cheap energy, they would.
I'm more wary about the idea that we can solve all problems if we just have more energy.
What we're doing, and show no signs of slowing down on, is fundamentally restructuring how the planet works. We're building housing, industry, solar farms, roads, railroads, you name it - everywhere we can afford to, and having more energy makes that even easier.
You can suck CO2 out of the atmosphere; you can attempt to clean plastic from the oceans (I suspect that this would be difficult without side effects even with limitless energy; how do you avoid disturbing life on the seabed?).
But can you create natural wilderness? Can you provide habitats for wildlife? We don't even know what that means. Can we produce cities for humans rather than endless car-based hellscapes?
I vividly remember discussing this with my fellow students almost a decade ago now. The idea that we are going to turn the planet into a farm because we can.
I don't want to live on a farm. I want to live on a natural Earth that we live in symbiosis with, not an extremely efficient well-tuned machine.
That's good; but unfortunately, people do fixate on "growth" and "energy use" as sources of problems, when they're not. To better evaluate what we can and should do, we need to keep in mind where exactly the problems come from.
> I'm more wary about the idea that we can solve all problems if we just have more energy.
I'm not saying we will or would, but we definitely could solve most of them. Energy is a necessary but not sufficient component of almost everything we do, and "more energy" is a necessary component of some ways of fixing climate that we currently aren't deploying - like e.g. synthesizing hydrocarbons instead of digging them up from the ground.
> But can you create natural wilderness? Can you provide habitats for wildlife?
Yes, we can. The best way to do it is to transplant some existing wilderness. The habitat will build itself, that's exactly what life is good at.
> Can we produce cities for humans rather than endless car-based hellscapes?
In theory, we can. In practice, this is where technology ends, and economy and politics start.
> I don't want to live on a farm. I want to live on a natural Earth that we live in symbiosis with, not an extremely efficient well-tuned machine.
Same, but that's because Earth already is a pretty decent machine, full of self-regulating feedback loops. It works well without supervision, and it's kind of dumb of us to break the feedback loops only to then have to maintain them "by hand", because they're crucial to our survival. We should be able to let it mostly be, enjoy it, and focus on doing other cool stuff. I still believe nature is there for us to exploit, but we're doing it the dumb way instead of the smart way.
Fusion reactor 8 light minutes away does not burn out for a good long while, long enough that we can consider it indefinite for the current climate debate.
So we have an energy source that we can use to rearrange the stuff that IS finite, ie the big rock with water on it.
What we don't want is for the rock to end up in a state where we can't live on it comfortably.
Now, as for growth, we could reach a state where people have roughly the replacement number of kids. In fact, it looks like that will happen. Then we just have to make sure the average amount of consumption doesn't take us over some limit.
Note that GDP is also a pretty imperfect measure. It was conceived in an era where having more stuff generally meant a better life, because some of that stuff was useful things like medicine, insulation, and so on. Nowadays a lot of things go into GDP that is perhaps not measuring what you really want.
This is what drives me crazy about climate change deniers and their continued delusional insistence that things are going great. Stopping catastrophic climate change is not some hippy-dippy tree-hugging "gotta save mother earth maaaaan" commune-enthusiast nonsense. It's about pure self-defence of humanity. It's about making sure that WE can still live on this rock. Why the hell can't they see that? What the hell is wrong with them?
Why won't it? The main issue is where we get our energy from. There are working methods that are CO2 neutral. I'm firmly in the "only science will save us" camp.
> It's like when you move form a basic 40sq meter flat to a fancy 250sq meter house, going back is very hard.
I believe this is view harmful to the cause because it will only result in pushback, and rightfully so. Only excess wealth creates the spare capacity to care for the environment.
The problem is that many people (who express that conviction) treat "Science" just like the God in the famous anecdote: http://epistle.us/inspiration/godwillsaveme.html
It is important to understand the limits of science. It won't save you universally from everything, no matter what you do. Your own action (or inaction, in case of waste) determines what can be done.
No, that's just the most currently newsworthy of literally hundreds of causes of the global ecological collapse. Ecologists have been mapping many of these causes for decades. The overarching cause of all the component causelets (eg. emissions, habitat destruction, soil & water degradation, etc) has been the expansion of a crude global civilisation based on selective ignorance of science. We pretend to respect science when it produces stuff we like ("technology"), but ignore the inconvenient understandings revealed by science as it relates to the complex living systems that sustain us.
https://www.albartlett.org/presentations/arithmetic_populati...
“Growth” as the politicians and the lobbyists push it is simply not sustainable.
But both “the left” and “the right” have their agendas not to let you discuss or act on that.
"Bacteria grow by doubling. One bacterium divides to become two, the two divide to become 4, the 4 become 8, 16 and so on. Suppose we had bacteria that doubled in number this way every minute. Suppose we put one of these bacteria into an empty bottle at 11:00 in the morning, and then observe that the bottle is full at 12:00 noon. There's our case of just ordinary steady growth: it has a doubling time of one minute, it’s in the finite environment of one bottle.
I want to ask you three questions. Number one: at what time was the bottle half full? Well, would you believe 11:59, one minute before 12:00? Because they double in number every minute.
And the second question: if you were an average bacterium in that bottle, at what time would you first realise you were running of space? Well, let’s just look at the last minutes in the bottle. At 12:00 noon, it’s full; one minute before, it’s half full; 2 minutes before, it’s a quarter full; then an 1?8th; then a 1?16th. Let me ask you, at 5 minutes before 12:00, when the bottle is only 3% full and is 97% open space just yearning for development, how many of you would realise there’s a problem?"
Note that the before that point in the talk he explains that for any "steady growth" you can find the period in which what you observe doubles, i.e. any "steady growth" has its "doubling time."
The problem is that just saying that, allows policy makers and public to sit back and wait for the problem to be saved - without funding the science to do, or take other necessary policy steps.
In a sense you can argue that science has saved us - we have solar and wind, nuclear and excellent battery tech.
So why aren't we "saved"?
Those mitigations won't necessarily include carbon reduction - they'll be increased levee construction, abandonment of low-lying cities and building codes adjusted so that '1 in a century' storms are encountered every couple of years.
What we are trying to do at this point, ius avoid such grim consequences, now and the market can't help us unless we promote panic, which isn't a great strategy.
I wanted to put this in contrast to the "stop growth and consume less" mindset, which I believe will be massively insufficient in solving climate change. When we switch to alternative means of energy, at least in the beginning they will be more expensive than fossil, and you need to be able to afford this. Asia must be able to afford this! And they will not give up cars and go back to riding bicycles, this is a pipe dream.
Tech will certainly play a role, but I'm convinced that without a cultural, political and economical change we're doomed. Saying "tech will save us" make people believe that they have no part to play, no responsibility.
We know what to do, the fact is that we're not acting fast enough.
"At the heart of capitalism is a vast and scarcely examined assumption: you are entitled to as great a share of the world’s resources as your money can buy. You can purchase as much land, as much atmospheric space, as many minerals, as much meat and fish as you can afford, regardless of who might be deprived. If you can pay for them, you can own entire mountain ranges and fertile plains. You can burn as much fuel as you like. Every pound or dollar secures a certain right over the world’s natural wealth."
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/mar/15/capita...
the pie will keep getting bigger. more resources. more energy. more people. more goods. more kinds of goods. more movement of goods.
thats a direct consequence of your point in that we structurally assume an infinite number of fish, amount of land...and more importantly that the oceans and sky are so vast and unknowable that we throw as much into them as we want without anything ever coming back.
maybe we're living out the last aftershock of the end of the age of exploration. and we're so completely unprepared to manage any kind of economic contraction the only response is fear. growth is the seductive poison thats killing us.
[0] https://www.cleanenergywire.org/sites/default/files/styles/g...
If you mean "science" as in existing science and technology, then, sure, technological approaches are part of the solution.
Often, though, in these discussions, "science" is used to mean some sort of magical advancement that is just around the corner that will solve all our problems. That would be nice, but probably isn't the case. We'll probably see incremental advances in things like solar panels but we're up against some hard limits of physics. Reducing consumption and making efficiency savings are significantly easier.
> Only excess wealth creates the spare capacity to care for the environment.
I think this is view is harmful. First, it looks very clear that mitigating climate change is cheaper than dealing the consequences, so this "excess wealth" is mythical.
Second, we shouldn't be treating our environment as a luxury. We need to make sure the planet is liveable first, then see what other toys we can afford.
> Why won't it?
Because science doesn't run the world, politicians do.
Even limited 'growth' has not actually happened. It's a fiction. The physical reality is that complex sustainable evolved systems have been broken down to feed simpler crude unsustainable techological ones. There's no 'growth' to be seen - just an increase in planetary entropy. This is somewhat masked on a short-term & local scale because of the remarkable resilience of the evolved systems. But as those systems collapse, which now seems inevitable, the fictional nature of 'economic growth' will become very evident indeed.
Life on earth is only possible because we're receiving a constant flow of energy from the sun.
Surely, we should not expect exponential growth, but it doesn't mean we could not have unlimited growth.
How so? It's not an argument per se - it's just a description of the physical reality that what economists falsely describe as 'growth' is actually a transfer of matter and energy from complex evolved sustainable systems (ie. what some people call 'nature', which I find to be misleading) to simple cultural-technological unsustainable systems. This transfer process damages the former to build the latter, increasing entropy (because our early-stage human tech is less ordered than evolved systems are). It is not 'growth' in any meaningful sense of the term at all, whether limited or unlimited.
Apparently, the main measure of economic growth is the gross domestic product - "the monetary value of all the finished goods and services produced", which is based on spending and consumption. Planetary entropy, as you say.
As someone else commented in this thread, what we need is a significant global shift in mentality and culture, our value systems and vision of what it means to be a grown-up civilization, not as an ever-hungry consumer, but an intelligent layer of nature.
Agreed, though whether we have time for this to happen seems doubtful. It would require a dramatic slowdown of faux-growth to enable natural systems to recover, while we spend the time needed (probably centuries) to develop tech with sustainability approaching that of evolved systems. There's no a priori technical reason why this should not be possible, but political realities make it hard to imagine. Maybe another 'intelligent' species can make this happen in a few millennia.
This is a sentiment that rubs me the wrong way. I totally agree that we, at a global scale, need to drastically reduce our carbon footprint. And these reductions will have changes to our society. But many of the suggestions of those currently engaged in the cultural revolution are either focusing on small problems (like not buying food in plastic containers) or have complicated unintended consequences (like buying locally grown foods).
Shipping stuff on large boats is incredibly efficient per kg/km. It's not unlikely that I emit more Co2 driving my car to/from the grocery store than the emissions from shipping all the things I purchase to the store itself.
We should focus on things like stopping the burning of fossil fule for electricity generation and carbon natural land based transportation long before we almost religiously ban plastic straws.
I don't think the best way forward to actually solving this problem is engaging in some almost Protestant self hatred and punishment, trying to make the transition as impactful on our lives as possible.
Container ships are a problem because they usually run on ridiculously dirty fuel, which ends up polluting the ocean. But they're also extremely energy-efficient on a mass/distance basis. A saner world would have them use cleaner fuel[0].
Cars are a problem because at the scale they're used, they're both significant contributor to global warming and inefficient, energy-wise. Electrifying land transportation would fix the inefficiency and significantly reduce the carbon footprint. Powering the new electric fleet with green energy[1] would finally kill the emission issues.
Plastic straws, plastic packaging and other consumer disposables are a problem[2] because the plastic ends up in oceans, where it gets broken by UV into microplastics which then end up back in the food chain. Beyond that, it's mostly a sad thing to see. Energy and emissions-wise, plastic disposables are much smaller problem than other uses of fossil fuels, and sometimes they're likely better than the reusable alternatives proposed. But it's still so fucking sad to see so much garbage existing only as vehicle for marketing.
IMO people need to stop bundling these problems together. Even though they're all related, energy security != global warming != poisons in food chain != ethical considerations about animals. Those are all separate problems, with separate sets of solutions, and quite honestly, different prioritization.
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[0] - My utopia would have nuclear-powered cargo ships as permanent global infrastructure, essentially treated as virtual conveyor belts.
[1] - Renewables or nuclear.
[2] - And we aren't even sure yet how big a problem this is. AFAIK this topic is covered mostly out of quite reasonable abundance of caution - we've noticed plastics showing up where they aren't supposed to. Even though there isn't any clear danger identified yet, history teaches us that human-released chemicals showing up in unexpected places generally don't lead to happy outcomes.
One reason that they burn dirty fuel is because we have that fuel, and the way our economy works, it's going to be burned somewhere. Making large ships with engines that can burn that fuel was intended to be a way of having the air pollution be produced away from inhabited land.
Having the ships work with cleaner fuel means the dirty fuel will be burned somewhere else, without further changes.
But I agree with your main point -- "sustainability" attracts so much momentum that people try to frame everything under that umbrella. E.g. suffering of animals raised for food production is a problem, but even less related to the things you mention. Still often seen as part of the same agenda as reducing our CO2 output.
Anyway, if there were sufficient political will to do things, taxes would solve this shit overnight.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_oil
>> "Small molecules like those in propane, naphtha, gasoline for cars, and jet fuel have relatively low boiling points, and they are removed at the start of the fractional distillation process. Heavier petroleum products like diesel fuel and lubricating oil are much less volatile and distill out more slowly, while bunker oil is literally the bottom of the barrel; in oil distilling, the only things denser than bunker fuel are carbon black feedstock and bituminous residue (asphalt), which is used for paving roads and sealing roofs. "
I'm asking because I only have a passing familiarity with how oil production works.
>> "It can't be cracked economically?"
This trash oil is produced anyway. There's no way to not make it and still make the less dirty kinds since it's what's left at the end of the process.
I see two possible solutions:
1: Invent commercial fusion reactors and burn it there. I don't know if this would produce less CO2.
2: Find something else to do with the trash oil that's less polluting. Markets are pretty good at finding uses for things, so there may just not be anything else.
Gasoline was a waste product until internal combustion engines came along. Trash oil probably occupied a similar status as waste until someone figured out it worked in ships. If trash oil were no longer economical to burn on ships, they would probably dump it in international waters instead unless some better use was incentivized.
The US and probably other countries pay farmers to destroy some crops to keep it profitable enough to make farming a viable industry. Farmers would sell all their crops without government intervention, driving profits below a sustainable level. They wouldn't just trash it otherwise.
Cargo ship owners are probably the only people who want the leftover oil. The shipping industry burns the oil industry's trash to make their ships go. Make using it uneconomical, and it gets dumped. That's what happens with byproducts no one wants to buy.
It might be a good idea to get people into contact with the smaller problems you mentioned because they are less political and less scary, still somewhat connected and people feel they can make a change. That's more than you get when people shy away instead.
Also, one point of activism is to get people into contact with an issue or a viewpoint so they can get used to the idea slowly, and when the time for changes comes it is familiar and unsurprising. So it's not about changing things right now but to pave the way for change in the future. (Maybe this is obvious, but for me it was a slightly different take of it.)
Not obvious at all. In fact, it's the first time I've encountered this idea. Thanks a lot for writing this. It makes me view some of the activist actions in a different light.
Even if we move to 100% electric cars powered by renewables tomorrow, that’s 43% of CO2 output. After decades, we are not even at the point where we can do that much, by the way. Grid-scale battery storage is an essential part of the equation, and we are not there yet.
We are still at the beginning stages of even thinking about the other 57%. Electrifying the national freight rail grid would be massively expensive. (Keeping overheard catenary well maintained is so expensive that Maryland’s commuter rail is moving to diesel locomotives for Baltimore to DC service, even though the corridor was electrified more than a century ago.) There are no commercially available electric trucks yet.
That stuff can’t wait for later. To limit temperature increases to 2C, we need to immediately cut global CO2 by three times as much as the US’s total CO2 output. Meanwhile, in the last couple of decades, China has added more than a US worth of CO2 output. If India develops similarly, we’ll add another US and a half. Europe and the US going to zero output won’t cancel out those increases. Even the communist party’s goal in China only calls for 20% electric cars by 2025.
The reliable models we have show that if we don’t cut emissions dramatically and immediately, we will need to go to negative emissions in the short term. That’s another generational problem. Carbon recapture is in its infancy. Look how long it took to perfect solar.
I'm not sure about how that chart is constructed, but for me it's obvious that we need to lower the carbon intensity of electricity production right now. That would "eliminate" 32% of the chart, and I guess also have a dent in the other pies.
I don't see how stopping consuming or fundamentally changing society is a better or even faster way to achieving our goals.
I think it's absurd to talk about trying to radically change society before you stop burning fossil fules for electricity.
Cutting emissions dramatically and immediately is by deploying nuclear, and by electrifying your rail lines.
All of this depends on number of people constantly growing, and more of them buying more stuff and doing more stuff.
It's arguably not so much "science will save us" as "economics will save us". That's almost a religion in the US. Also, some distrust science on religious basis. And some even believe that it's all part of the coming apocalypse. Which is God's will.
Thankfully I hope this will decline. Interesting tidbit I learned today: Mitch McConnell has finally admitted humans are causing climate change. Now the only (herculean) problem is getting him to tackle it properly. https://www.washingtonpost.com/video/politics/mcconnell-says...
The concern is not necessarily that it's a hoax, but that hasty data will be used to push for specific policies, benefiting some, making money for others, and so on.
It's also very easy to turn into some semi-fascist "state of emergency" governance, if you have something all-encompassing as the climate to base your legitimacy on.
Of course it would be a good thing to get rid of air pollution, replace energy sources to cleaner ones, and even more so, cut down on consumerism and industrial production of all kinds of crap (that's the hardest part, and one that every corporate interest will be against, but without "reduce", alternative energy and recycle are just environment theater).
The amount of CO2 is not controversial. What's controversial is what we should change.
There are tons of people who fully believe in climate change but vehemently disagree on what we should do about it.
There are also those who don't think it's a reason to worry so much or panic.
All of those people get reworked by the controversy hungry Media and converted into climate change deniers, and the result is the political world we live in right now.
If we could disentangle all those things it would help a lot. But instead we get believers and deniers, i.e. basically religion.
There are also those who believe that exaggerating the problem is the best way to get people to do something. In my opinion that has backfired majorly.
Meticulously planned political & media interference campaigns run by fossil fuel companies and related think tanks. They understood the implications of climate change by the late 1970's and knew the writing was on the wall. They executed plans to delay political action for as long as possible in exactly the same way corporations had done with regard to tobacco regulation since the 1950s. These conspiracies against science and the public interest were remarkably successful. In some cases (eg. Heartland Institute) the very same organisations were involved in both campaigns.
And nuclear does have its problems. I used to be against it, but right now the risk and problems are just not an issue compared to the consequences of carbon emissions.
- an expensive solution to a non-existing problem, for the profit of a few
- a plot to undermine Western countries (or the US in particular), reducing its competitiveness
- a geopolitical attack on oil-producing countries
I am no expert, and I think neither are you, so we are just making some small talk here, but: I think we don't have the tech to go all in on renewable. Solar is cool and all, but where do we store the energy? Batteries don't scale at a global level (for now). I mean look at Germany: they tried. They got off nuclear and now they emit more CO2 than when they started because they had to revert back to coal.
I see no easy solution to this. Not for now. And for sure it's not something like "let's just switch to wind and solar and we are good".
There is enough data showing, that about 80% reneweables in the mix are possible without larger storage facilites, if the gaps are covered by gas power plants which can change their output power quick enough to react on the demand. Neither coal nor nuclear can do this.
That Germany is missing its emission targets has two reasons. One is, that coal is not ramped down aggressively enough, which has mostly economical reasons, coal is to profitable for the power companies, but recent forced closures of some coal plants shifted a bit here. And the other elephant in the room is the raising fuel consumption for transportation. Going electric for cars would have a large impact there.
Let me ask you this, if solar is capable of replacing fossil fuels, why did Germany sign a multi-decade/mult-billion-euro deal to buy Russian gas?
Besides, gas is a cheap, fast way to replace coal with drastically reduced carbon emissions.
Germany is part of the European power grid, so there are times, when power is imported to compensate for local over- and underproduction. As Germany is in the middle of Europe, far more power is conducted across of Germany. You cannot count French nuclear power as in import, if the same amount of power is exported to Austria at the same time (a very common situation). Germany is a net power exporter.
Gas is important in two way: first of all, it is way cleaner than coal, so it is the best short term replacement for coal. Germany almost has enough (currently mostly idle) gas power plants to completely replace coal short term. As long as there are no mass storage facilities, gas is needed as the gap filler for the times when neither wind and solar can power the grid. As the production capacity grows, these gaps are going to get increasingly smaller. It remains to be seen what is the best long-term solution, either to grow large storage facilities to get to 100% reneweables or allow like 10% gas in the mix.
And there aren't.
>gas is needed as the gap filler for the times when neither wind and solar can power the grid.
This is the entire point!! Wind and solar can't replace fossil fuels. So what Germany did was replace non-CO2 emitting nuclear power with CO2 emitting power generation (natural gas and coal). I guess fighting global warning is less important than satisfying irrational German paranoia against nuclear.
>As the production capacity grows, these gaps are going to get increasingly smaller.
The sun will start shining at night?
The sun will start shining at night?
That sentence did a huge disservice to your post. Of course the sun doesn't shine at night. But no one wants to replace all energy production by solar alone. Wind is the companion of solar, both are roughly the same size in Germany. Wind is what delivers the power at night (where electricity consumption is lowest) and solar adds the power for the additional requirements during daytime.
Replacing both with domestic non-fossil solutions is near-impossible in the medium term unless nuclear forms a big part of the baseload - heating on those winter nights where the sun doesn't shine but electric heat exchangers work full tilt, and generation for those electric cars charging throughout the winter night.
They aren't. We agreed that wind/solar is not capable of serving as the base power generation of a modern economy. Lack of city-scale battery technology, and the variability of solar and wind precludes this use case.
So what Germany did was remove a non-CO2 emitting power source and replaced it with a mix of solar/wind AND CO2-emitting power generation (via existing coal plants, new gas plants, and importation of coal-based power when they need it).
If the name of the game is to cut CO2 emissions as much as possible, you're at net negative. It necessarily means that had you not closed down nuclear power plants, you would have cut MORE CO2 emissions than you do now. That's just a statement of fact.
And this is my problem with anti-nuke policies. Implicitly the anti-nuke activists are saying that cutting CO2 emissions isn't as important as preventing expansion of nuclear power or even keeping existing plants running. Consider this and cry for our civilization: had the developed world doubled-down on nuclear power in the 60-70s to the same level as France, we would have prevented trillions of tons of CO2 from being emitted into the atmosphere. That could have bought us a few extra decades. I am convinced that history will see antinuclear view as more destructive than right-wing global warming denialism (which on balance does not actually do anything).
>Of course the sun doesn't shine at night. But no one wants to replace all energy production by solar alone. Wind is the companion of solar, both are roughly the same size in Germany. Wind is what delivers the power at night. Meaning that you have to overprovision your infrastructure to supplement periods of low output.
Again, this is a disingenuous point. The problem with wind and solar is not only variability but also the fact that peak generation does not match peak consumption. If peak wind generation is at 3am, it doesn't do our society any good because we need power at 6pm. Worse than that, solar and wind generation profile changes with weather and seasons.
So no, it's not simple as saying: Solar peaks during the day, and Wind peaks during the night and therefore they complement each other ... because they don't.
I just read a calculation how automatic milking machines will turn a tidy profit on milk into a loss with energy costs per kwh just 10 cents higher. Milking by hand will be _more_ profitable with that small a difference.
So it's controversial because doing something about climate change involves massive changes to our way of life. Not simply switching your SUV for a Tesla, we're talking up to and including economic collapse and deindustrialization.
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[0] - http://worrydream.com/ClimateChange/
[0]: https://www.chelseagreen.com/product/oil-power-and-war/
A 1GW conventional nuclear plant is refueled by a single 18-wheeler truck, every year and a half.
A 1GW fast reactor or thorium reactor would require only one ton of fuel, about the size of a beachball, once a year. A lump of fuel smaller than a golfball would provide all the energy you need for your entire life, transportation included.
Fossil fuels still have the best energy density for cars and airplanes, but for large ships or anything stationary, nuclear is far superior. And not just for electricity; several GenIV designs run hot enough for process heat.
This is a strong assumption. How can we have evidence for that? We do not understand climate enough to make such an assertion.
This is the answer to your question. Enough people see that strong assertions for man-made climate change are not necessarily backed up. Hence the controversy.
> but furthermore I don't see why we shouldn't transition to renewable energy asap anyway
Because that comes with it's own problems? For instance, around here there are a lot of wind wheels, these machines create problems. It's not just "energy for free". For example one problem is they kill a massive amount of insects.
There are also people advocating for nuclear energy, improved ways of providing nuclear energy. Maybe they are right?
> Even if climate change would be a hoax (which it is not), then why would it be a bad thing to make changes to prevent it from happening anyway?
This is a good question I asked myself many times as well. I don't know.
One part of the answer could be priorities. We can't do everything at once. SO what comes first?
https://xkcd.com/1732/
What if (Man Made) climate change was simply a set of natural processes and feedback loops? Wouldn’t alternative energy be better? Absolutely. It’s quieter, more efficient, and cleaner, especially nuclear energy. But a lot of the malthusian politics and negativity would have to go. Perhaps you could have a bigger house and not feel guilty about it? Maybe you won’t shame a neighbor for having another kid? Perhaps millions of people in the developing world can live a better life without being told they should stop to save the planet.
Because solar and wind (+ battery) cannot replace coal and gas.
So people in the industry that depends on fossil fuels know this, they know the only answer to getting co2 out of the atmosphere is to not use fossil fuels at all, which is an extremely hard/expensive thing to do. Moonshot level project, globally. Some just worry about their own riches, others rightly worry it would cause global disaster (it could if we did it wrong!)
I think it is controversial because the cost of this transition is not priced into the modern human lifestyle. So either the lifestyle changes or it gets a lot more expensive. And it challenges the business model of fossil fuel companies and the global power balance of oil producing countries. It can't get much more disruptive than this transition.
You are thinking in terms of what is good for human society. But the world is run by capital, and now that mass disinformation is relatively cheap to accomplish, it is even easier do discredit science if you have a descent amount of money to spend.
It's because it's very hard to prove causation. We have lots of evidence of correlation, and the scientific consensus, but that's not 100% proof to many people.
Our attention is a finite resource too. When some issue is in the news daily and obsessed about by a whole bunch of interest groups, from European-style liberals who have new taxes in mind (Macron) to the radical left who want us to live a frugal, Eastern-Bloc lifestyle, while we all see no real effects by this CO2 monster on our daily lives, it's bound to meet some resistance.
> I don't see why we shouldn't transition to renewable energy asap anyway.
Germany is transitioning to renewables quickly and has put a huge burden on households with high electricity prices (€0.30 per KWh average, even affecting EV adoption after some sensationalist "EV more expensive than Diesel fuel" themed articles) while the industry gets it cheap. Is this reasonable?
> Why would it be a bad thing to get rid of air pollution?
This is a great idea, but it has nothing to do with CO2 (= not air pollution in the usual sense, we all exhale it). I wish we could invest 1/10 of the efforts currently underway against CO2 in just getting rid of pollution in cities - from heating (with "renewable" wood), cars, industry, ships, airplanes (where's the CO2 tax and why do these things happen? https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6993173/Actress-Emm...).
Furthermore, it's difficult to foresee which problems will arise from replacing fossil fuel energy with renewables like wind or solar.
The causes of anthropogenic climate change are extremely well documented and easily measureable, and "reduce the amount of carbon put into the air and recapture carbon already in the air if possible" isn't very complicated, just expensive.
An honest question: If I were to go about convincing myself of anthropogenic climate change and possibly that these changes would lead to a horrible future for humankind, where should I look? What should I read? Which videos to watch?
The mainstream media portrays the science as settled, i.e., anthropogenic climate change is real and horrible consequences will follow, even though it isn't difficult to find disagreeing opinions - both from people on the fringes and from Nobel-winning scientists. I hear convincing arguments from both sides.
I should mention that I am extremely sceptical of anything the state does, so I am biased against any solution involving the state. I fear that the fight against anthropogenic climate change is just another tool to increase state power, like the war on drugs or the war on poverty.
Most of the arguments that I see concern the low effectiveness of renewable energy sources and the pollution caused by the batteries (either during their creation or when trying to get rid of them).
What I do not see is why we should not transition to modern thorium-based nuclear power plants.
Do global temperatures change over time? Of course. There have been five ice ages in the history of the earth. Did you know that we are currently in an ice age? In fact we are in an interglacial period that began about 11,000 years ago.
So what drives global temperatures? Is it CO2? Let's look at the history of this planet to answer this question. Can we do that?
It turns out we can do that... We can use ice core data (and to a lesser extent tree rings) to look back thousands of years of global temperatures. We also have co2 levels from air bubbles captured in the ice cores.
So is there a relationship between co2 and global temperatures? There is. But... the relationship is the opposite of what Global Warming alarmists what you to believe. Global temperatures drive co2 levels. This means that when global temperatures rise co2 levels rise hundreds or thousands of years later. And when global temperatures fall co2 levels fall hundreds or thousands of years later.
This is a fundamental fact that any honest scientist will not dispute. And this fact throws the entire theory of mand made global warming into the trash can.
By the way what does drive global temperatures? Look up in the sky and you see this big ball of burning gas. That is the entity that drives global temperatures and not trace amounts (co2 is 0.04 percent of earths atmosphere).
If we look at carbon footprint, single use paper bags have the lowest footprint.
https://stanfordmag.org/contents/paper-plastic-or-reusable
So if we prioritized limiting carbon footprint, we would encourage single use plastic bags. However, we are not, we are discouraging them.
If environmentalists had signed on to encourage carbon free energy, they would have pushed for reducing the roadblocks to nuclear power even at the cost of making them more unsafe. That is not what happened. Instead, environmental groups were one of the biggest opponents to nuclear power.
If you really believe climate change is the biggest problem facing humans, you will need to do things and encourage things that may be dangerous or harmful but that can help slow down climate change.
Because those come at significant cost, and if there's nothing to worry about then why spend tens of trillions of dollars to stop it?
I mean you might as well use Pascal's wager to argue for religion if you're only looking at potential benefits and ignoring costs.
Extremely shortsighted thinking. If we're talking about cost, this should be the argument: tens of trillions < the future of humanity.
Furthermore, CO2 levels are one aspect of a larger problem, "pollution", and I'm not entirely convinced it's necessarily the worst part of it.
What's controversial (at least, if we're talking reasonable discussion) is not that climate change is happening, nor that human activities cause at least a good portion of it, but whether we understand all the factors involved well enough to predict with high confidence that spending trillions of dollars on drastic measures to reduce or eliminate CO2 emissions will stop it from happening. If we don't have high confidence that spending the trillions of dollars will do that (and I don't, nor do I see how anyone could given that climate models are overpredicting warming and our ability to predict economic consequences is even worse than our ability to predict future climate), then we shouldn't be spending the trillions of dollars--or at least, not on measures aimed directly at drastically reducing or eliminating CO2 emissions.
That's not to say, however, that there aren't other things we could be doing, that might help with climate change as a side effect. One is switching to non-fossil-fuel energy sources (see below). Another is making our infrastructure more robust, which helps civilization to withstand change in general. Still another is bringing more people out of poverty, since the richer people are, the more easily they can adapt to change.
> I don't see why we shouldn't transition to renewable energy asap anyway
A better term than "renewable" would be "non-fossil-fuel", since that would include nuclear (which is not considered "renewable" by most definitions). I agree that switching to non-fossil-fuel energy is something we should be doing anyway, both for scarcity reasons and for national security reasons: much of the money we spend on foreign oil ends up funding terrorism. I wish more people would realize that we don't need to agree on climate change alarmism in order to work on switching energy sources.
In particular, by tying climate change denial to political identity, and casting climate research as immoral for its lying, it created a passionate base of climate change denalists to call into every radio show, to swarm message boards, and to harass those who speak publicly about climate change.
If you can listen to podcasts, the best summary of this is from the Drilled podcast, in my opinion:
https://www.criticalfrequency.org/drilled
And even when the motivation is not so sinister as that, people who care about the topic have a particular world view, and they don't spend the time to figure out how their world-view differs from those who aren't as concerned. What motivates one group is not one motivates another. If climate activists are serious about fixing the problem, then they need to abandon the branding aspect and find language that appeals to those not in their target market. Otherwise it's all just a lot of value-signalling.
Claiming that environmentalists aren't phrasing things correctly for the right to care about the environment is pretty much the definition of tone policing. Republicans could easily take up the fight against climate change on their own terms, but the very very few Republicans that have tried have been shunned by the rest of the party.
Rather, let's blame the true villain here, the political ideology that places itself as more important than truth or science, the political ideology that says "if I'm wrong and you can't convince me with science then it's your fault for not trying hard enough." What sort of epistemically closure is acceptable?
People are motivated by different things. Telling them the things that motivate you, and then calling them names when they aren't motivated by the same line of thought, is a very unproductive way to win them over.
You can tell people the "what" till your face turns blue, but if you are unable to hook into a "why" that resonates with them, they will do precisely nothing.
My point is that if you truly believe that this is a matter of life and death, you need to be out in the world pounding the pavement just the same as all the street preachers that themselves truly believe what they have to say is a matter of life and death.
In a similar vein, if the arguments most street preachers give falls completely flat for you, consider the reverse and why what you are saying is falling flat to the people you are evangelizing to. To be effective, preaching has to be for the audience, and not for the preacher. And that is exactly what this sort of advocacy is, preaching.
CO2 is not a pollutant, and no one knows what will happen with increasing levels.
We need a major shift in our ways of producing/consuming and on our quest for progress at all cost. We're heading for major issues, even in the short term. Humanity is committing suicide and taking Life with her.
https://reliefweb.int/report/world/climate-migrants-might-re...
https://www.biologicaldiversity.org/programs/biodiversity/el...
Its not a tiny fraction!
Compared to what?
At 150 ppm, the enyzyme RuBisCo, existing in all photosynthetic organisms, basically stops functioning. At this point, all photosynthetic life dies off, followed by all other life given the food chain. It would be earth's greatest extinction event.
Thank humanity for putting some CO2 back into the atmosphere and averting a global catastrophe. At 415 ppm, it's a small fraction of the highest levels reached in earth's history, at 8000 ppm.
https://notrickszone.com/2013/05/17/atmospheric-co2-concentr...
Fossil fuels are the wrong target for a quick win (which we need).
Caveat: I eat meat once a week now.
It's pretty simple - it either happens (along with renewables etc.) or we face the consequences. It either happens willingly or forcefully. And as a matter of fact, veganism/flexitarianism are on the rise, so it is happening. Some people just get it and act.
CO2 is not the only GHG.
EDIT: See https://ourworldindata.org/co2-and-other-greenhouse-gas-emis...
Entomophagy is also an option -- eat grasshoppers. Insect protein is high quality, low fat, and very abundant. It's lower on the food chain than mammalian protein, easily grown, and can be prepared into tasty dishes (more common in Africa and Asia than in the U.S. and Europe).
The reason fossil fuels are so bad is that we are releasing carbon that has been sequestered for thousands and millions of years. We need to stop increasing the max supply in the atmosphere and slow recapture what is there so we can reduce the ppm and start lowering the greenhouse effects we have created.
Doesn't sound like a fair price to pay to me (and a lot of others).
coal (30%)
gas (24%)
oil (33%)
hydro (7%)
nuclear (4%)
other renewables (2%)
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-p...
https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldw...
Never heard of Solar leaving a large chunk of a country uninhabitable for millennia though.
Sure, there's China with its insatiable appetite for energy, but few years back they too shuttered 105 coal plant projects, and this is something that's likely to continue purely because of how the economics are playing out nowadays.
Nuclear power is slow to build safely, and if we had started to build all that power decades ago of the sake of avoiding climate change you are already in the bizzaro timeline where the regime cared about climate change decades ago.
Of course it did. Lots of CO2 emissions were avoided. It helped much more than all wind and solar combined.
Of course regimes didn't care, and their refusal to build new nuclear power plants proves they still don't care.
On the climate related side, the graph of CO2 levels for the last 10,000 years is very consistent, around 260ppm, up till recently. We should have just as concerned (or were) when it crossed 300ppm, 400ppm, etc.
On a more political note, while some/most climate change deniers at this point are likely ignoring evidence - having graphs with non-zero axis can be called out as a bit misleading which makes the increase relatively larger than it actually is; visually it's at ~230% of it's normal level when it's actually 'only' 157% compared to baseline. Graph manipulation has been used to in the past to spread false information about global warming/climate change so I think it's especially important to make everything above board. It only takes a few people spreading the graph around with the axis cropped out and then everyone will cry 'fake news'.
I don't really understand the level of credulity here on associations between CO2 and mental impairment.
Apart from few exceptions, CO2 ppm has been going up forever.
Why 415 ppm is worse (and by how much) than 404 or 390, you can't explain. In the 90s we had until 2020 to turn things around, that prediction was an abysmal failure so now it's new scenarios and scares).
I am most astonished that some people actually pay attention to this ludicrous nonsense.
Most people are one or two paychecks away from personal extinction event and you're trying to persuade them they should pay more for "green" energy or support imposing limits on wealth generation and consumption.
You can't even make the science work but that's the least of your worries. 10-20 years ago when (most) middle class westerners were idle and looked for ways to kill time, this would have worked. Now they are fighting against their own extinction. Simulate that.
Regardless of my personal financial situation or average temperatures, I will never support any government program that purports to mitigate it. Period.
Also, there’s a lot of fear out there that renewable energy means less jobs, especially across the entire coal mining supply chain. There’s a fear that transitioning to a renewable energy economy means a transition from dumb jobs to smart jobs.
Also, I shouldn’t single out Christianity. I just happen to know it well because it was a big part of my childhood. A lot of other religions also have a general disregard for science.
Not all evangelicals are so adamantly anti-reason, but I'd be very confident in saying most are. Evangelical Christianity in the US is lazy and cruel. The Bible is used to justify their worst impulses, while they ignore all the parts about loving your enemies, etc. It's not a demanding religion. It's easy. Their god doesn't care about charity or peace that take effort and compassion, but only that you are on His team.
It boggles my mind that these people have taken over the definition of Christianity in such an influential country. I imagine my feelings about evangelicals are roughly the same as how mainstream muslims feel about Islamic State.
A school of theological thought that is gaining traction in protestant circles is that "new earth" spoken about in the bible is in fact this earth (fixed). Fixing this earth then has important religious significance.
This is in stark contrast to those extremist sects who wish for nuclear war to bring on the apocalypse.
Regent College (BC, Canada) have a good lecture on the subject:
https://www.reframecourse.com/episodes/episode-6
(The whole series is very good in my opinion)
Thank you for making this outrageous assumption explicit. It drives me crazy when people leave it as an unstated assumption.
A true tragedy of the commons.
Please, try to at least be honest enough to openly admit you don't care about climate change out of convenience for yourself.
yes, it's true, I can't see myself going back to a pre-industrial quality of life for the sake of climate change, and be honest, neither can you. The resources used to produce the computer you typed your comment on probably equates to 50 years of resource consumption of someone from 1500AD. Not to mention your phone, car, earphones, public transport, roads, electricity, air conditioning, heating, Netflix, Youtube, datacenters, air travel, grocery shopping, insane supply chain that made your $50 Levis possible etc. etc.
Add in billions of people who are aspiring to your level of affluence + billions more who will be born who will fight tooth and nail to experience the luxury of Netlix and chill and you see we are fucked. There is no way out of this and no amount of tree hugging will make things better. Joe average wants his SUV, cheap jeans and Happy Meal. Fuck you if you get in his way.
It's a whirlpool of catastrophe and you can't get out of it even if you tried.
Technology will save us or the species is finished.
>political action is possible
Your "Save the Whales" badge is part of the problem (literally, plastic + metal pin produced in a third world country). Your political banners and TV adverts are part of the problem. All by products of fossil fuels.
settle down, i'm not some right wing climate change denier. My point is that yours (and my) entire existence is dependent on a whole chain of environment decimating externalities. Simply existing in modern society makes you complicit in the destruction of the planet.
Ever eaten an avocado in winter? yup you just did your little bit to kill the planet. And even if you completely went off grid, zero carbon, neanderthal level of self deprivation to earn your environmentalist eagle scout badge, then guess what? The world is literally brimming with people who don't give a fuck and will vote out any politician who even thinks about raising power bills by 0.001% for the sake of climate change.
Add to that the billions who still aspire to the luxury of a flushing toilet let alone the luxury of being an eco warrior from behind a $2000 Macbook and you see... we are fucked.
Unless of course some clever silicon valley nerd comes up with a way to capture carbon, sequester it, provide clean energy for the 4 billion people who are clamouring to get out of poverty.
Nah, more money to be made from ad networks and ride sharing apps I guess.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
For all the people down voting, I suggest considering this voice as a weapon in the fight against climate change. It might be salty but there's virtue in it.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
hahahahahaha ooooh boy, that is some grade A wishful thinking.
Here's a thought... try to convince the average Joe to not turn on his air conditioning on a hot day "for the environment".
see how that goes.
We are a selfish species that deserves to go extinct. Have you ever considered that?
If "we" are not a selfish species, say 99% are really good, and would shut off the AC, say no to meat, wish to ban plastics etc...
The 1%, can and would destroy and burn the planet. Remember, BP oil spill in the Gulf? Thats just one. On a global scale, the few hundreds of millions, and of those dozens, are burning the planet, despite the billions who do not.
The destructive capacity of the few far outwidth the constructive capacity of the many.
The problem is not the air condition or the electricity needed to run the air conditioner.
The problem is the electricity was generated by burning a fossil fuel and that causes massive amounts of CO2 pollution.
So the solution is quite simple.
Just tax, and tax hard any electricity producer that is creating CO2 pollution.
What will happen is for a short time Joe's electricity bill will go up and he will put his air con on low.
But in the longer term market forces will quickly find ways to make electricity without producing CO2 just so that they can sell cheaper electricity to Joe and have him once again cranking up his air con to full.
Right now there is no real cost to creating CO2 pollution so of course there is no incentive to stop producing CO2.
hehe that gave me a chuckle ;)
Then just wait a decade or two by which time it will be way too late and then the world will quickly realise there are no 'chuckles' to be found down that path.
it's already too late. The planet is too small to accommodate this many humans. There is no hope. I understand the need to feel like you're doing something in the face of this catastrophe, but we're doomed.
The only solution is some as yet undiscovered technology that will reverse the actions of 7.7 billion parasites, who in aggregate are too selfish to make true sacrifices for the common good (myself included)
Totally agree. The Earth will handle that.
It seems we need to do everything we can individually, we need governments to step forward, AND we need companies/academics to innovate numerous times.
I hope so.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_overpopulation#Effects_o...
I hope that technology will save us, but if not then we are finished.
If tech can't save us from ourselves then the only sane thing left to do is to wring every last bit of enjoyment from our fossil dependent lives before it all disappears forever. Eat a burger, drive a Cadillac, leave your lights on, enjoy your imported beer and set off your imported fireworks because expecting Johhny average to put off his iPhone upgrade is down right delusional.
We're all going to hell together, yee haw.
individual actions ALONE will not fix the problem, but they might be necessary to encourage broader societal change. Apparently it only takes 3.5% of the population to take an active stance on something to cause a change (https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1&v=YJSehRlU34w). Don't feel discouraged to adjust your lifestyle just because the effect is "negligible".
If there are ever enough bleeding heart, average, first world, wealthy (by global standards), vegan converts who will "encourage broader societal change" then I will eat my hat.
I'll eat a whole shop full of hats.
A billion dirt poor Bangladeshis would kill you and your whole family for the luxury of having a hotdog and a flip phone. They don't give a shit about you and your vegan burger, or that you switched you whole house to LED lights because they're 82% more efficient.
That's why we're fucked.
To curtail global climate change you would first need to forgo all modern luxuries and then wipe all third world countries from the map.
good luck with that.
p.s. this kind of charts give me hope https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-05-03/impossibl... It might be too little too late, but at least we can say we tried.
This is self-flagellation and sorry, but it does nothing and has no impact on the bigger picture.
You don't need to suffer to change your lifestyle. I reduced meat consumption by 50-75% and do not miss it. If I feel like eating meat I do - and I attribute the success of it to the fact that it was not a complete change like becoming a vegetarian. You can fail at being a vegetarian. I can't have a I gave in and not I don't even have to try anymore and go back to my old lifestyle-moment. I might not have consumed as little meat as I initially wanted but as much as possible without suffering from it.
No, it's quite the opposite. Flying is a terrible experience anyway, traffic jams are awful, working less is the best thing in the world, less meet is good for you.
It's like saying exercise is self-flagellation. It's not.
But again, you sound just like me a couple of years ago. We might have more in common than you imagine.
You're doing just enough to soothe your conscience without actually depriving yourself.
The problem is, that's not nearly enough to make any difference. Not even close.
To actually make a difference you and every single first-world citizen would need to forgo
- all imported goods
- all electronics
- all plastics
- all red meat
- all heating and cooling
- all private transportation
- ration electricity
- most industrial goods
- ration food (a lot of GHG are produced by agriculture)
And third world countries would need to all agree to stop economic progress and revert to pre-industrial conditions.
We will all drown in rising flood waters before any of that will ever happen.
It's a technological solution or bust.
The only other "solution" is that climate change will reduce human population back to a few hundred thousand and we start all over again.
(To be clear: I don't think that the worst results of climate change ("reduce human population back to a few hundred thousand and we start all over again") are assured, even if we're currently not even close to doing enough; but I think the odds are plenty high, and thus, plenty alarming.)
As someone who has been long dancing with the despair you're dancing with right now, allow me to gently suggest something to you.
> feel-good eco activism
> You're doing just enough to soothe your conscience without actually depriving yourself.
Let's assume that these are accurate. Then, let's assume for a moment that a person who comes to sufficiently understand the size and magnitude of the problems we're facing can go one of three ways.
1. The person has the fortitude and wherewithal to make the necessary changes, and does embrace a completely different, radical personal way of life. A small percentage of people do this.
2. The person embraces the realities, sufficient to motivate them to various changes in action and perspective, but still all together insufficient compared to the total scope of the problem.
3. Fall into despair.
This is a simplification, of course. It's quite possible for a person to items 1 or 2 and also 3.
My point: our greatest enemy here is despair.
It's better to go part of the way, #2 above, and avoid despair than it is to do nothing. It's far better to do #2 above than it is to fall into despair.
I urge you to give all people, yourself included, permission to push through various stages of acceptance and action.
Operations like Commonwealth Fusion Systems and Breakthrough Energy Ventures are doing far more to realistically put a stop to climate change than anyone else is at this point.
I'd like to encourage you to take a look and see what you can find about career opportunities in the clean energy sector. You may be surprised at how many software and tech jobs there are (it's a fast growing space).
Here's something to consider: during the Early Eocene period (roughly 50 million years ago) temperatures were 9C-14C higher than now and CO2 levels were 1000-2000 parts per million [1].
And yet according to science, Earth was covered in forests from pole to pole, mammals flourished, and the oceans were "teeming with fish and other sea life". [2]
That's something you won't hear much about, because it doesn't fit the agenda.
1: https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/global-warming/early-eocene-period
2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eocene
I thought the big deal was that we liked it how it was.
It is a huge experiment on a planetary scale and staying on the safe side here is simple the rational approach.
The irrational approach is to hope it will somehow turn out great, despite the already grim looking damage predictions.
And the simply evil approach is working against scientific evidence and rational arguments for personal gain. People like these are like cancer, destroying civilization from within for personal growth.
For the Eocene, also according to science, we see fossil evidence of crocodiles at the poles. That likely makes most of the temperate to equatorial zones uninhabitable for humans, whilst being lovely for the "snakes found in the tropics that would require much higher average temperatures to sustain them".
I notice you don't mention that "All the members of the new mammal orders were small, under 10 kg", and "Eocene mammals were only 60% of the size of the primitive Palaeocene mammals that preceded them. They were also smaller than the mammals that followed them".
So whilst it was lovely for species evolved to those conditions, and life as a whole, for large species such as those of the size of say humanity, it seems to have been exceptionally hostile.
I don't know if that statement is technically true but it's certainly misleading. Perhaps "all the members of the new mammal orders" were under 10kg, but not all mammals during the early Eocene were under 10kg.
Cambaytherium and Coryphodon, for example, lived during the early Eocene and were roughly pig sized and cow sized, respectively.[1,2]
In other words, that carefully phrased statement, if true, is a great example of the unscientific spin I was talking about.
> fossil evidence of crocodiles at the poles. That likely makes most of the temperate to equatorial zones uninhabitable for humans
We also see fossil evidence of large mammals in India. In the early Eocene temperatures differed less between the tropics and the poles and between winter and summer.
1: https://www.thoughtco.com/coryphodon-peaked-tooth-1093184
2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambaytherium
I'm suggesting nothing of the kind, but directly quoting from the wikipedia page you linked. Please stop putting words in my mouth.
I will note that the Wiki page on Coryphodon says: "These changes in size are thought to be linked to global climate change, with the size minimum in the Coryphodon lineage occurring shortly after Paleocene-Eocene boundary". Which appears to indicate clear evolutionary pressure to evolve smaller.
The pressure on mammals appears to have been consistently toward smaller size, seen in newly evolved species and the evolution of existing species. We already know that heat penalises larger mammals harder than the small, so that does not seem inconsistent.
That was your statement, not Wikipedia. What was that based on if not the incorrect implication about the size of mammals?
Nonetheless, I've already edited my post to make it clear that I was talking about the implications of the statement from Wikipedia.
> The pressure on mammals appears to have been consistently toward smaller size
If "the size minimum in the Coryphodon lineage occurr[ed] shortly after Paleocene-Eocene boundary" then the decrease occurred before the early Eocene, not during. The temperature actually continued to increase for several million years after the Paleocene-Eocene boundary.[1]
That pressure might have been due to the rapid changes at the Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum, not temperature itself, and after the thermal maximum, size increased again even with the higher temperatures.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleocene%E2%80%93Eocene_Therm...
The decrease in size probably had more to do with the chaos wrought by whatever unknown event caused the thermal maximum than with the temperature itself.
To make this all more relevant: I'm not saying that climate change won't be disruptive. It will. I'm just saying we can adapt and endure. And I think we should plan for that, because we clearly aren't going to stop it.
It also "had one of the smallest brain/body ratios of any mammal, living or extinct" so that may not be the best example of how this kind of environment might be fit for humans.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coryphodon
this is basically, to a first order approximation, wrong. sea level rise, even in a nasty BAU/RCP8.5 scenario is really a next-century problem. we're talking tens of centimeters.
meanwhile, vast swaths of the euphrates, indo-gangetic, nile and yellow river deltas will suffer droughts and both successive and concurrent crop failures.
the flood of refugees from drought/famine/war into every city around the world will vastly exceed the flood of water at their shoreline (this century).
We emitted 5/6th of what's ok to stay below 1.5°C, and 2°C is not that much more, and we're not stopping. (500 Gt vs 600 Gt)
At the current emission rate (12 Gt/yr) we have 10 years left to stop completely. A few decades won't cut it.
Almost all scenarious of the IPCC now include negative emissions to be able to reach the targets.
The technology does not exist, would need to be implemented on a massive scale (eg plant all the available area minus agriculture and a selected few sanctuaries with trees and make biochar out of them) and the investment in eg artificial photosynthesis is not there, probably because there is little money in it. (The process is different from that for biofuels.) We might not make it in time. Don't rely on this.
(The total available stored carbon seems to be on the order of 3000 Gt.)
https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar5/wg1/summary-for-policymakers/ (Figure SPM.10)
Climate is complicated, there are many complicated feedback loops going on. As just one example warming temperatures promotes plant growth especially algae which captures CO2 interning back to the ocean floor. Of course some of that algae is not good for us (red tide).
I am not worried about life on earth, it will adapt and survive, it has seen worse, I doubt we would turn into Venus, but its a slight possibility.
The issue is what happens to human society, it will most likely adapt too, but at what cost? Rising sea levels, food supply having to adapt, these things could caused great suffering to many, then again maybe not. I don't want my kids to suffer or their kids.
The point is we don't exactly know how it will play out so why push it? Lets get off fossil fuels as fast as we can, we know its the right thing to do for many reasons, one of which is to stop returning so much CO2 back into the atmosphere.
If climate change causes the areas we currently inhabit to become unhospitable, we risk adding the danger of economic disasters and wars threatening our survival.
Human life was, amongst other things, possible because of one of the biggest climate disasters ever to occur on earth, the big oxygenation event [0], so we could even see climate change as something positive but clearly that doesn't buy us anything today.
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxygenation_Event
In such an environment, mankind might survive, but our current farming set-up won't. It might only kill 7 billion people our of 7.5, no big deal. (When looked at from a few million years in the future.)
> CO2 levels were 1000-2000
Indoor CO2 levels are usually double the outdoor levels. H Humans become dumb/sluggish at concentrations over 1500ppm, and nauseous at over 2000. Life will thrive, human life won't.
Sure, life will find a way. But the high rate of change will be disruptive.
Here's something to consider: The transition won't be pleasant.
On the scale of centuries, in this extremely rapid warming event we are making happen, a majority of life on Earth will die, including most humans. Evolution is slow, global warming is fast.
In the very long run, yes, palm trees (or their evolutionary successors) will flourish in Antarctica.
In the short run, meaning a length of time that exceeds human written history, we will live in an inhospitable ecological desert, and billions will die.
That's something YOU won't hear about, because it doesn't fit the agenda of the people that are lying to you for profit.
Looking at the major trends of the last several decades. People moving to brand new sunbelt suburbs where they drive everywhere in SUVs. Buying disposable clothes, electronics, etc., made in China and shipped over the ocean. Even the token attempts at being environmentally conscious are ridiculous. I go to Whole Foods here in Maryland and everything is grown in f—king California. It’s a joke.
Nobody is willing to make the lifestyle changes it would take to have a real impact on climate change. And it’s not unique to the US. Canada and Australia have similar carbon footprints per capita, suggesting it’s more a combination of material wealth and low density. Blaming corporations instead of the people for all that is asinine.
And what are our best and brightest from Stanford, etc., doing? Figuring out carbon recapture? No, working at Google figuring out how to more effectively advertise disposable consumer goods that are shipped over from China, used a few times, and shipped back to China for disposal.
Could we have a conversation offline? I'd like to learn more about your situation and what has brought you to this reply. Feel free to send me an email and we can schedule a time to talk.
> Blaming the “companies” and “lobbyists” is such a cop-out. The companies are just giving people what they want. If people demanded a shift to a climate friendly lifestyle tomorrow, Exxon would have no choice but to follow suit.
As we've seen with Russian propaganda efforts, the firehose of falsehoods can be extremely effective at keeping people in the dark or convincing them of something not in their best interest. People demanding a shift requires education around the topic, and Exxon literally prevented research on the topic from coming out for decades.
> Looking at the major trends of the last several decades. People moving to brand new sunbelt suburbs where they drive everywhere in SUVs. Buying disposable clothes, electronics, etc., made in China and shipped over the ocean. Even the token attempts at being environmentally conscious are ridiculous. I go to Whole Foods here in Maryland and everything is grown in f—king California. It’s a joke.
I'm very confused what point you're trying to make here. That systems or not optimizing for environmental impact? Of course they aren't. They are optimizing based on the incentives they are following. People move to suburbs and drive SUVs to feel safer and more wealthy. People move to the sunbelt because the winter sucks. People buy disposable clothes and stuff is shipped from China because it's cheaper to do so. It's really expensive to grow produce in Maryland, so you ship it from California.
> Nobody is willing to make the lifestyle changes it would take to have a real impact on climate change. And it’s not unique to the US. Canada and Australia have similar carbon footprints per capita, suggesting it’s more a combination of material wealth and low density. Blaming corporations instead of the people for all that is asinine.
You're right, asking someone to give up their lifestyle sucks. However, you're equating changing lifestyle with fighting climate change. That's where we disagree. The goal of fighting climate change isn't to get people to change their lifestyles, it's to stop sequestered carbon from entering the carbon cycle. One way to do that is to ask people to stop being so excessive (e.g. changing lifestyle), but nowadays we have so many more options.
Most climate change solutions nowadays start with the assumption that we shouldn't ask people to change lifestyles, and just deploy carbon-free infrastructure that is a drop-in replacement for existing carbon-intense infrastructure. Solar, Wind, EVs, batteries, biofuels, etc. all never ask you to stop buying disposable shirts from China. All they do is replace the power that powers the factory and the fuel that is used to ship it to you with sources that don't add carbon the carbon cycle. So that when you are living your life in your disposable shirt and eating your California avocados, you're not contributing to climate change anymore.
> And what are our best and brightest from Stanford, etc., doing? Figuring out carbon recapture? No, working at Google figuring out how to more effectively advertise disposable consumer goods that are shipped over from China, used a few times, and shipped back to China for disposal.
We'll I'm just the best and brightest from UT-Austin, so not Stanford, but I did make the career switch from traditional tech to cleantech. And every time one of these threads come up I try to post that you, too, can make the switch from Google to cleantech. However, every time that happens, there are pessimists like yourself who shit all over my call for help. That's okay though, the capitalist in me kind of sees this as an opportunity. The fewer competitors I have in my particular niche, the more money I make. So I guess I should be partially thanking you for slowing down the climate change tech enlightenment :)
Where do you plan to find that in your non-lifestyle change world? Solar? That's 8000sqft of installed solar with the highest efficiency panels. That needs to be coupled with hundreds of kwh storage. Total cost : hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Good luck on that.
That being said, there is a lot of space where nobody lives in the US. There are some 28000 square meters per person in the US. Dedicating about 3% of that to solar panels doesn't seem impossible.
Some energy saving is also possible without changing the average lifestyle too much. Insulating homes helps quite a bit. Electric cars are more efficient that gas cars.
[1] https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/?page=us_energy_home
[2] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=10%5E20+joules+%2F+(3....
[3] https://www.quora.com/How-much-solar-energy-can-be-tapped-in...
At current prices, that much PV capacity would cost around 25 trillion dollars. That price doesn't include any storage capacity.
The climate is changing far too rapidly for us to hope for science fiction solutions. We need a major reduction in emissions now, which means both a vast increase in renewable production and a vast reduction in overall consumption.
Nuclear.
We have the research now, but people aren't changing their behavior.
> I'm very confused what point you're trying to make here. That systems or not optimizing for environmental impact? Of course they aren't. They are optimizing based on the incentives they are following. People move to suburbs and drive SUVs to feel safer and more wealthy. People move to the sunbelt because the winter sucks. People buy disposable clothes and stuff is shipped from China because it's cheaper to do so. It's really expensive to grow produce in Maryland, so you ship it from California.
And that is what causes climate change. Exxon is just giving people what they want. The blame rests with people who want a lifestyle that's incompatible with avoiding climate change, not the companies that simply are feeding consumer demand.
> All they do is replace the power that powers the factory and the fuel that is used to ship it to you with sources that don't add carbon the carbon cycle. So that when you are living your life in your disposable shirt and eating your California avocados, you're not contributing to climate change anymore.
We don't have time to develop all that technology: https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-why-the-ipcc-1-5c-repor.... According to new, revised estimates, having a 50/50 chance of limiting tempeature increaes to 1.5C leaves us with 14 years of carbon emissions at current levels. After which point the world economy has to hit zero carbon emissions. Meanwhile, carbon emissions are still going up: https://www.climatechangenews.com/files/2017/03/238eb46742db.... From 2000-2015, China added an amount of CO2 output that exceeds the entire US output. China continues to grow, while India is approaching where China was before 2000 and may have a similarly explosive growth in CO2 emissions in the next two decades.
Not only is there no solution that allows us to keep living the way we are living while averting climate change. There never was. Even if we had listened to the hippies and cut U.S. emissions by half starting in the 1960s, China's growth alone would have completely wiped out that savings multiple times over.
They are. Clean energy mandates are being passed in many states; climate change and the Green New Deal is a front and center topic in the Democratic presidential primary race; the Paris Climate Agreement passed on a global scale; China is electrifying transportation and building as much solar, wind, and nuclear as fast a possible; India is phasing out coal as fast a possible; and on and on.
A person as an individual isn't changing their behavior to a large extent, but people in aggregate are.
> And that is what causes climate change.
No, it's not. Again, climate change is caused by injecting sequestered carbon into the carbon cycle. Previously, it just so happened that the act of driving your SUV around did exactly that. However, more and more that's not true. As we electrify transportation and clean the grid, the act of driving around becomes less and less what causes climate change.
> We don't have time to develop all that technology
We already have the technology, it's just a matter of deploying it. Every auto manufacturer is releasing major electric models by next year. Clean energy generation in the U.S. is set to surpass coal generation this year. China is electrifying transportation and switching to clean energy (including nuclear) as fast as possible. India is building more solar than ever and accelerating that deployment.
As I'm sure you've seen, my favorite climate change joke is, "They say we won't act until it's too late... Luckily, it's too late!"
Climate change is my generation's great challenge. If we lose, we die. So, many of us are fighting with everything we have. Some are trying to get people to change behavior, some are trying to make drop-in replacements. But none of us are giving up. It sounds like you've already given up.
FYI, HN is limiting reply depth, so I doubt I can reply more. Please email me back if you can.
Well, Purdue Pharma is also only giving people what they want. In and of itself, that doesn't mean much.
Exxon is doing significantly more than just giving people what they want [1], as do many (most?) of the big dinosaurs of the established industries that currently make the world go round. Do we need to go into the vast efforts at influencing the public that such entities expend in order to maintain their domination and wealth? You have vastly more expertise on this subject, so I wouldn't be able to tell you anything new.
The world does need to advance, but advance to where? Thermodynamically, it must slow down or it will overheat and crash into the ceiling.
> Not only is there no solution that allows us to keep living the way we are living while averting climate change. There never was. Even if we had listened to the hippies and cut U.S. emissions by half starting in the 1960s, China's growth alone would have completely wiped out that savings multiple times over.
You don't know that, and it's a false dilemma anyway. People change their lifestyles all the time in response to their economic environment and incentives, as they have been doing throughout history.
I tend to listen more to the experts when they say something is possible. When they tell me in no uncertain terms that a very important problem has no solution, I listen more to the kids.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/23/climate/exxon-global-warm...
Doerr and Khosla probably soured SV on cleantech
rayiner has simply correctly pointed out that the markets follow consumer preference and that those preferences place low value on renewable energy & sustainability.
No one is calling man-made climate change into question.
I am not responsible for the planet and saving it. So please don't try to guilt me into taking responsibility for "saving" the planet. I've already done my part by not having children. It is up to parents and people who care enough about the species to save the planet and humanity. I'll be dead in a decade and not really bothered by this impending doom.
Planets, Nations and species die every day, given the vastness of the universe. It's admirable to try to save something, but the willingness to do so must come from within, free from external collective pressure mixed with shaming and guilt.
I don't think that LG markets it's Android phones as being disposable. I do think that they should, and I think that if they won't do it voluntarily that consumers should be made aware of the fact that these purchases are for disposable "products" through any other available means. If that requires regulation, so be it. No consumers stood up and demanded planned obsolescence from these corporations.
LG's easy for me to pick on, since their phones are essentially disposable pieces of junk, and I've been burned by them three times, but you could drop in most electronic manufacturers here. If they're selling disposable electronics then they should market them that way. The fact that we all accept that they're disposable is a separate problem from the demand, IMHO.
I also don't think that anyone ever thought that when they spend hundreds of dollars on a smartphone or a laptop or whatever that they wouldn't actually own it or have the right to service it on their terms. And yet, here we are.
You can't go from individual decisions and then infer group desires. The inferential step isn't sound. It's like saying fishermen must want to make fish extinct because they persistently overfish in the absence of fishing quotas.
IMO human society simply isn't mature enough to deal with this problem. I don't think there will be serious action until it's an emergency for enough wealthy people - and I don't think that's the system working, I think it's swerving at the last moment. There will continue to be a lot of collateral damage before the emergency is pressing enough.
I think it's an hypocrisy issue primarily. The people shouting for us to make a change won't make it first.
If even a majority of the people that say we should lower our carbon foot print bought only food and clothing produced without dirty electricity sources, didn't fly in private planes and only drove Prius/hybrid/electric cars, etc... (for starters)
Then maybe, just maybe they could convince everyone else it's even _possible_ to do what they expect everyone else to do to save the planet.
Climate change is a collective problem and will _only_ be resolved by collective regulations and incentives. This is not a problem we can all just “chip in” on and have it magically go away.
Consider how things would be if Hollywood lead the way with all the celebrities (percentage wise easily top percent polluters in the US) giving up their gas guzzling vehicles, private planes, excessive travel, etc... Much of the public would follow their example automatically, even many politicians.
It sounds like you are advocating for "I don't have to do it if everyone isn't".
Hypocrisy from leadership (whoever they are) robs people of motivation and compassion towards both the subject and the message. (ie, climate change)
There are many examples in history where individuals stood up for a belief and lead the way to change.
Saying we should do something, meaning all of us collectively, and saying individuals should do something are two different assertions, though the verbiage is sometimes precisely the same. A person can very logically, and without hypocrisy, state that everyone should cut their CO2 output drastically to save the planet (which would be effective and help, and would also require major changes in infrastructure, law, and government) without taking drastic steps of their own (which would not be effective and would not help in any perceptible way).
Collective action problem.
> There are many examples in history where individuals stood up for a belief and lead the way to change.
This isn't a hypothetical. It's a worthwhile exercise to consider whether the hippies who have actually been taking drastic steps to lower their environmental footprint since the sixties have moved the needle at all, in terms of actual environmental degradation, public perception, or in terms of politics. Also consider whether they might have been more effective by working and spending money and effort engaging in mainstream politics and living like the rest of us.
> Hypocrisy from leadership (whoever they are) robs people of motivation and compassion towards both the subject and the message. (ie, climate change)
This might actually be true. An electorate that points at Al Gore and says "that guy uses a lot of CO2 so clearly this whole climate change thing is bullshit" is too stupid to live and will come to a bad end. I live in hope that at least a plurality of us will eventually be a lot smarter than that.
If the people calling for changes in society related to climate change are of this ilk/type/caliber, then there is no way anything will ever change ethically.
Though, it could be done through propaganda, deceit and force. In other words, tyranny.
Or, end the hypocrisy and lead by example. Everything else is hand waving and rhetoric or worse.
You've proven yourself incapable of identifying hypocrisy, in part because of your strange denial of the existence of collective action problems, but you're also flattering yourself if you think hypocrisy is anything other than a universal human trait.
This is all silly. If you're in a debate, debate the issues, don't attack the character of your opponent. If you're a citizen evaluating or advocating for or against a policy position, debate the pros and cons of the policy. What you are so fixated on is a weird non-issue.
Hypocrisy is a character issue and I think I have hypocrisy's definition correct. If you are honest/moral/ethical, can you be a hypocrite? I don't think so, hypocrisy at it's core is dishonest. Therefore if you practice hypocrisy, you are a liar. Seems like a logical conclusion.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypocrisy
https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/hypocrisy
It's not. It's game theory; it's simple mathematics. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_action_problem
The effect of any one person being "non-hypocritical" is minuscule. Effects will only significant en masse, and defectors must be punished, because it's profitable to defect. That means some mechanism to keep people in line must be used - and in our world that normally means the state. So agitation for political change is the correct approach.
Moral systems are another way of enforcing group will against individuals that would otherwise find it profitable/ to defect. Shaming works more efficiently in locally connected societies, though, and it's hard to scale it up to this kind of global problem.
Did celebrities back then continue to blatantly litter while telling everyone else to stop littering?
That is what they are doing with climate change. Do as I say, not as I do.
Everyone would buy fancy new electric cars powered by lithium from exploited natural resources in poor countries, if the cost was affordable and they got a high status Electric Car.
Would you, instead, walk 2 hours per day to and from work, in all weathers, in expensive heavy, several times patched, thirty year old woolen clothes, and eat locally sourced vegetarian food, to combat climate change?
People who think that's hyper alarmist underestimate how nasty things will get when the harvest fails.
People move out ... to where?
Now multiply this by a few cities every ten years. It's going to be nasty.
This is a myth that is perpetuated by free-market libertarians and is completely disconnected from reality.
First of all, a very large number of people are demanding exactly that and large corporations have no interest in it. Consumers also cannot make the transition or demand a transition unless there are viable alternatives -- which requires research and if the private sector won't fund that research then viable alternatives won't show up. It's much easier, less risky, and cheaper for the private sector to try to kill a new industry (where they aren't entrenched) than it is for them to compete in it.
In addition, a lot of emissions are unrelated to the type of product being provided. Consumers might not have a green option (and thus cannot "vote with their wallet"), and even if they have a green option they might not care enough. According to the EPA[1] more than 75% of emissions are caused by transportation, industrial processes, and energy production. Reducing industrial emissions created during the manufacturing process of goods would have a much more significant impact than consumers changing what brand of soap they use.
We have laws to protect people from vendors selling tainted or poisoned food. By the logic of a free-market libertarian we should allow the sale of such food because consumers would choose not to purchase it and "market effects" would kill the business. But we all know that the reason those regulations were introduced is because before they were introduced people were dying because of unsafe food being sold.
> Nobody is willing to make the lifestyle changes it would take to have a real impact on climate change. Blaming corporations instead of the people for all that is asinine.
That's bullshit. See [1], individual consumers are one of the smallest contributors to climate change. The main contributors are industry. If emissions were taxed and there were tax breaks for operating in a green manner (such as the carbon tax which was repealed by our coal-loving Liberal government) then companies would have a financial incentive to do research into less polluting processes.
> And what are our best and brightest from Stanford, etc., doing? Figuring out carbon recapture?
Governments (in Australia at least) are cutting funding for climate change (at the behest of their political donors that, as above, have a vested interest against climate-change research). The intended effect of this is that there ends up being so much brain-drain away from public-sector research into climate change. Which is exactly what's happening. I agree that this is a very bad thing, but it makes no sense to blame PhD students (people with no money and no power) that couldn't get grants because the government is actively working against the public.
[1]: https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emis...
There are already viable alternatives. Buy less stuff, travel less, turn down your heating/AC, eat less meat and dairy. When people say "viable alternatives", they really mean "free lunch" - they want to maintain exactly the same lifestyle as they do now, just without the carbon emissions. That's completely untenable, no matter what technologies emerge over the next few decades. Even with the most optimistic forecasts of the pace of technological development, we'll have to make some radical changes to our lifestyle to prevent a climate disaster.
That's bullshit. See [1], individual consumers are one of the smallest contributors to climate change. The main contributors are industry.
Without consumers, there is no industry. Airline companies don't burn kerosene for the hell of it, they burn it because people keep buying plane tickets and keep shipping things by air freight. If we stop buying plane tickets and air freighted goods, they go out of business and so they stop burning kerosene.
The blame game over climate change is just blatant buck-passing. It's not my fault, it's the big corporations. It's not my fault, it's the government. It's not my fault, it's the people who vote for the other party. As long as there's someone else to point the finger at, you're absolved of responsibility. How many tons of carbon emissions does your lifestyle cause? What can you do right now to reduce that number? We'll only see meaningful change if a lot more people start asking those questions and acting upon the answers rather than waiting for someone else to act.
I'm going to repeat this again -- the vast majority of emissions are from industrial processes. Optimising the industrial processes to reduce emissions (as opposed to reduce costs) will result in emissions improvements.
Yes, in theory if the entire planet reduced its meat intake by 50% this would be a massive improvement -- but so would killing 50% of people. If your proposed solution to the problem is not viable from the outset you aren't proposing a solution, you're just deflecting blame.
Also -- contrary to popular belief, personal transport like cars (or commercial planes) are far from the largest emitters.
> Airline companies don't burn kerosene for the hell of it, they burn it because people keep buying plane tickets and keep shipping things by air freight. If we stop buying plane tickets and air freighted goods, they go out of business and so they stop burning kerosene.
Planes are actually more fuel-efficient than cars per-head. And planes are far from the largest polluters in "transportation" -- that would be trucks (especially older trucks that are under-maintained).
> The blame game over climate change is just blatant buck-passing.
You are buck-passing by arguing that it's the sole responsibility of the public to solve this crisis. Not corporations which knew about the effects of climate-change in the 60s and tried to hide it from the public and government. Not governments which are placating their donors by passing (or abolishing) milk-toast regulations to fix the problem.
I do my best to reduce my carbon emissions but that is not going to make any palpable difference.
If we wanted to go to war, then it would be the government's responsibility to organise the war effort. But if we want to stop humanity from going into war due to resource shortage all of a sudden it's about "personal responsibility".
If big oil companies had just pumped oil and responded to the market then I might agree with you. But that’s not at all what happened.
It is the purpose of advertising and propaganda to tell people how to want. It's misleading at best to say "people want new cars" without considering the decades of advertising selling the dream of new cars as a form of success and high social status, as an aspirational desire, as a reward for hard work, as a kind of personal freedom and ability to go anywhere on your terms, and then sell that as desirable, etc. There's a reason Hollywood SciFi films have Audi cars as product placement, and it isn't because "people want to see a future with up-market German cars" and Hollywood is responding to that demand.
Propaganda is extremely effective.
> Nobody is willing to make the lifestyle changes it would take to have a real impact on climate change. And it’s not unique to the US. Canada and Australia have similar carbon footprints per capita, suggesting it’s more a combination of material wealth and low density. Blaming corporations instead of the people for all that is asinine.
People move where it is cheap to live comfortably. Every level of US government subsidizes the shit out of suburbs and car commuting. If the true costs of people’s lifestyle were factored into the price, behavior would change in a hurry.
Individual consumers don’t have the information or analysis time necessary to factor in systemic effects of every choice.
> And what are our best and brightest from Stanford, etc., doing? Figuring out carbon recapture?
Some of them are. But doing research takes funding. If we want the smartest to take careers as researchers instead of looking to sell out and retire young, we should (a) tax/regulate the financial industry down to near break-even and enforce laws against fraud and other financial crimes, (b) tax capital gains as income, add additional income tax brackets for those making millions per year, tax large inheritances into the ground, consider adding a wealth tax, and crack down on tax evasion, (c) enact sweeping campaign finance reform, (d) pump more public money into basic research, (e) stop subsidizing the fossil fuel industry and shift those subsidies toward renewable energy, (f) while we are at it, clean up the broken health insurance system.
Well yeah. That's true for a lot of the world; California is the leading exporter - and sometimes the only significant exporter - of a rather absurd number of varieties of fruits and vegetables. California's Central Valley has the right intersection of climate (plenty of sunshine, and snow is rare to the point of statistical irrelevance), good soil, adequate water (occasional droughts notwithstanding), and size (enough room for a lot of farmland) to be an agricultural powerhouse.
Why have we ended up here? Do you think it’s because the general population demanded cheap crap?
It’s the other way around.
Cheap crap is more profitable, hence a lot of its manufacturing have been off-shored decades ago to those willing to do it cheaper.
This cheap often unneeded crap is marketed as a dream and sold to an irrational population incapable of escaping evolution.
I keep saying this “collection” of what we call money is like a hoarding disorder.
Why keep collecting when I have enough that it cannot spent during several lifetimes?
Add to that, all science point to it destroying this very earth.
Looks like no one is escaping evolution.
Humans can't stop global warming. Then what can we do? What should we do?
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/27/climate/airplane-pollutio...
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/blog/2010/sep/09/car...
If they do, great. Otherwise, prepare your children for a world where their children may be less intelligent due to higher concentrations of Co2. Water will be expensive. People will wear masks everywhere and only rich people can afford houses with completely pure air.
I truly hope it doesn’t come to this, but my fear is that when pollution gets to a certain point, those in charge will basically say “fuck it” and let things run their course.
If you're stressed about the environment you shouldn't be having children
Every child is also a chance.
And yet it says, "The report details the economic damage expected should governments fail to enact policies to reduce emissions. The United States, it said, could lose roughly 1.2 percent of gross domestic product for every 1.8 degrees of warming."
So an extreme rise in temperature of 3.6 degrees could reduce US GDP by 2.4%? That's about 18 months of average growth. That doesn't seem like a crisis to me - what am I missing?
Am I simplifying things excessively here?
If we'll destroy biology completely we still have a small chance a new type of existence can emerge - silicon based intelligent form, what we call AI right now. It probably can survive without oxygen, even without planet. But it's a big MAYBE yet.
It's not just about burning coal or going green, we are also using resources which are not replenishable. Even if all cars become electric and we switch to nuclear power and start eating bugs, we'll keep producing plastic, chemical substances and so on.
But seriously, the article you link to is directly stating rising CO2 levels as one of the causes as CO2 is good for plants.