Boomers don't care about our future, so I don't think anything is going to change in the near term until either a) we start seeing significant natural disasters or b) the boomers start dying out and lose control of the government or c) there's a full-on uprising.
It's mostly boomers. Maybe "not all boomers" in the same way "not all cops are bad", but it's mostly boomers. It's okay to recognize the problem, acknowledge it, and tackle it head on.
The tragedy of tragedy the commons is that it is not based on evidence. Elinor Ostron won the nobel prize by proving that the commons are sustainable most of the time.
Things only become unsustainable when those who exploit the land have no physical relationship with it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elinor_Ostrom.
No, she proved that the commons are sustainable only when those exploiting the land have a physical proximity and relationship to the land. Her research was entirely focused on small local communities organized around the exploitation of a specific natural resource (i.e., fishing village in Maine, forest village in Nepal).
In all other cases, the tragedy of the commons applied.
She has proved that it is not the form of management that causes environmental problems, but rather large-scale exploitation. In doing so, she has discredited the hypothesis of the tragedy of the commons, which was never based on evidence.
Many private industry owners do not even step on the ground they are exploiting. Why the tragedy of the commons gain so many traction?
C isn't happening yet, and congress is still about 2/3rd boomers. I don't think A is significant enough to affect retirement accounts, so it's not something boomers are passionate about.
Sorry to meta-comment, but I think this really isn't in the spirit of the kind of discussion we try to maintain on HN. It is also demonstrably false and not even a good generalization.
So get involved in something. Demonstrate, join a local activist group, volunteer, vote, change your lifestyle drastically. Pointing fingers over the internet isn't helpful.
Disagree, it's important to start changing the dialogue everywhere you can. HN likes to stick their head in the sand because a lot of the people on this site benefit directly from companies/investors who are part of the problem.
I can't afford that, I'm a wage slave. So I have to fight with the limited means I have, and one way I can fight (aside from protesting) is to make noise on the internet.
Changing the dialogue maybe, but thats not what your (now removed) comment did. It targeted a specific group of people and shifted the blame onto them. I've been involved in various climate and environmental related protests, blockades, open source projects and acts of (peaceful) civil disobedience and I've seen people from all age groups and walks of life getting involved. Alienating, blame shifting and generalising helps nobody. Instead point your frustration and energy at the system that they're a product of.
So you're saying we should just ignore the facts? The fact is: the government is mostly controlled by one particular demographic, and they are the ones who got us to this point. They want to maintain the status quo because it's the system that got them where they are, and they want to continue to benefit from it.
You are naive if you think you can change the world without first acknowledging where the problems came from to begin with. The reason why nothing changes is because there's a revolving door of the same people being in charge year after year.
"Boomers" are just people born before us. If you or I were born earlier would we have acted better than them? Probably not because people are shaped by their culture and environment. So whats the point of this argument?
Just look at any of the data surrounding a) who's running the government (hint: boomers) and b) who's voting for republicans (hint: boomers). Be mad if you want, but the data doesn't lie.
I think the angst with "boomers" is due to the fact that today's culture and the environment and modern science points out that we, all of us, should act in a better way to our environment. However a lot of older folk seems to think that can reasonably hold onto the prevailing view that existed when they were born rather than confront reality.
Young people today have an eye's open approach to the disasters that are coming and a lot of the responsible people are going skip out helping with the bill. The anger is understandable.
Certainly, but the way forward is to come up with convincing arguments and better solutions to the problems at hand. Blaming boomers is not effective. My point is that if you or I were born 30+ years earlier, we would be behaving (statistically) exactly the same way. So the blame game is pointless, in the end people are people.
People have been making great arguments for decades, but that hasn't worked. There hasn't been any substantial change. In fact, Trump has been gutting environmental laws, rolling back emissions rules, and castrating agencies like the EPA.
The time has passed to sit idle. Seriously, people need to get mad and start taking real action, because congress is not doing anything about it.
Real action? What specific climate fixing action would you recommend people take? I suspect eliminating electricity and transportation would have the greatest impact, although that is not realistic.
A big way to eliminate transportation is to legalize the construction of housing and the operation of businesses in and near cities, then allow people who commute for an hour or two to move so they don't have to commute. This is impossible, because we (boomers) have decided that it's important for our society for local governments (boomers) and sometimes residents (boomers) to have veto power over housing construction and the ability to delay business openings by years.
Even in the most optimistic CO2 reduction scenarios, we still need negative emissions that will offset existing CO2 or use-case where eliminating fossil fuels is not practical (e.g. airplanes).
I've read somewhere that this method is a non-starter, because the methane it produces more than offsets the carbon it sequesters. I'd love to be wrong, of course.
Whales play a crucial part in natural iron fertilization of oceans, because they go deep underwater to eat a large amount of krill, which are iron-rich, and deject near the surface, because they need to breathe. Their dejections fertilize the phytoplankton which lives near the surface. Because they need to move between deep and shallow water, and because they travel over large distances, whales act as nutrient pumps for the ecosystem.
> Even in the most optimistic CO2 reduction scenarios, we still need negative emissions
I think this is something a lot of people miss and I'm not sure why sequestration as a whole is a controversial subject (well I don't think planting more trees is _that_ controversial, though there are nuances people aren't usually aware of). We don't just need to be carbon neutral, we need to be negative. Plus there are many industries that we have no neutral method, such as concrete and steel production. Most people think if we solve energy and transportation we solve the problem instead of only solving 60% of the problem.
The other important factor here is that emissions are the problem. If coal plants sequester 110% of their emissions, there's no problem (well... in terms of CO2eq). The fact that this is a controversial subject is odd to me because it seems like the fastest way to get carbon negative. Sequester coal and natural gas plants until we can switch to a fully green (or green + nuclear, depending on your country's/region's constraints) system.
But if we talk about energy + transportation only being 60% of the issue (and US + Europe only being 30% of global emissions) it becomes much more important to talk about getting to NEGATIVE emissions, not zero (plus this helps with the 40 year lag of CO2 and temperature). And for those saying that other countries should take up their share 1) do you want to make that bet? You've all worked on team projects. We can't force them. 2) How do you ask a developing country to choose between hospitals and green energy? They don't have enough for both and one clearly has a shorter return on investment in number of human lives saved. (We can pick on China though, they're rich enough that they don't have to choose, but US and Europe need to be picked on as well).
> I think this is something a lot of people miss and I'm not sure why sequestration as a whole is a controversial subject
One of the major reasons it's controversial is that it has been used as a distraction and a false promise. I.e. arguments of the form "we can continue to burn fossil fuels, because some magic future CCS technology will fix everything" are very common.
I mean to be honest, it isn't burning fossil fuels that's the (CO2eq) problem. It is the emissions they leave. The problem is emissions, not where we get the emissions from (argument restricted to climate). This does seem to be a missed point by many. The problems is emissions, not source. The reason we talk about sources is because they correlate to emissions.
I don't get your point. What do you mean? How can the problem be CO2 emissions but not the source of those emissions? Of course if we want to solve the CO2 emission problem we have to reduce it at it's source?
> How can the problem be CO2 emissions but not the source of those emissions?
Because the problem is emissions, not who creates those emissions.
What I'm saying is that if coal does so much sequestration that it in effect has negative emissions, this is actually better than solar which has a little emissions. This is because we care about emissions.
I'll make an analogy. Let's say we have two companies that output poison in their process. Company A produces 10000 units and company B produces 5 units. Company A shifts and now produces -10 units of poison and company B doesn't change. Initially company B is better but after the change company A is better because really all we care is about the poison being produced and not actually what the companies do. Because at the end of the day, our goal is less poison. That's the number that matters.
The article mentions power by wave energy. I could not tell from the article if this is real or hypothetical. It sounds like a good idea but I have not heard anything about this. That is a constant source of naturally occurring kinetic energy. I did find the following on Wikipedia:
As a Texan I heard a lot about potentially tapping wind energy from floating turbines off the Galveston coast but have not heard about this in practice while the wind farms in west Texas are exploding in volume.
There are converters at coast lines that are reality and being tested/used.[0] There are plans to install converters at the bottom of the sea to collect wave energy, but if my memory serves correct, there were concerns that this would slow down processes in the ocean and might lead to problems in its ecosystem.
Wave power has been a pipedream since the 1970s; the problem is that water is too powerful and tends to destroy structures over time. As well as being corrosive and full of living things that cause "fouling". It's also not been very well funded.
Offshore wind turbines on the other hand are practically a mature technology, while getting larger and larger over time (improves efficiency). There's loads around the UK, although mostly fixed rather than floating. Floating is a less mature technology.
Perhaps it would work better in estuaries, with clean(er) river/fresh water. The ecological impact may be prohibitive, but as an engineering task it seems easier.
Extracting tidal power from estuaries is another similar pipe dream - people have been discussing building one in the Severn estuary for as long as I have been alive.
Tide power is intermittent but extremely predictable and not tied to the diurnal cycle, which would be advantages.
They've been successfully extracting power from the Rance estuary for over half a century.
The trouble with estuaries is that in addition to the ecosystem damage and change to flood dynamics associated with hydro power in general, they also tend to be used for ships to navigate, so getting a scheme which suits everyone is a major challenge.
Yes, there is so much untapped potential for wind and solar that at the current time it's pretty much pointless to spend R&D on unproven technology. We don't have the time to develop new methods for energy generation before we need to be mostly carbon neutral. For the same reason it doesn't make much sense to fund next-gen nuclear power. It just takes too long.
Perhaps the floating bit is the hold up. Extremely destructive hurricanes are a nearly annual occurrence in that area so the turbines must not be fixed and must be able to right themselves vertically after severe wind/waves. Otherwise they are not worth the investment.
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[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 126 ms ] threadhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons
In all other cases, the tragedy of the commons applied.
Many private industry owners do not even step on the ground they are exploiting. Why the tragedy of the commons gain so many traction?
You are naive if you think you can change the world without first acknowledging where the problems came from to begin with. The reason why nothing changes is because there's a revolving door of the same people being in charge year after year.
Because it's easy to blame other things.
It's hard to find workable solutions and you are not contributing any value. HN is not Reddit.
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/03/the-republican-party...
https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R45583.pdf
The time has passed to sit idle. Seriously, people need to get mad and start taking real action, because congress is not doing anything about it.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Even in the most optimistic CO2 reduction scenarios, we still need negative emissions that will offset existing CO2 or use-case where eliminating fossil fuels is not practical (e.g. airplanes).
I think this is something a lot of people miss and I'm not sure why sequestration as a whole is a controversial subject (well I don't think planting more trees is _that_ controversial, though there are nuances people aren't usually aware of). We don't just need to be carbon neutral, we need to be negative. Plus there are many industries that we have no neutral method, such as concrete and steel production. Most people think if we solve energy and transportation we solve the problem instead of only solving 60% of the problem.
The other important factor here is that emissions are the problem. If coal plants sequester 110% of their emissions, there's no problem (well... in terms of CO2eq). The fact that this is a controversial subject is odd to me because it seems like the fastest way to get carbon negative. Sequester coal and natural gas plants until we can switch to a fully green (or green + nuclear, depending on your country's/region's constraints) system.
But if we talk about energy + transportation only being 60% of the issue (and US + Europe only being 30% of global emissions) it becomes much more important to talk about getting to NEGATIVE emissions, not zero (plus this helps with the 40 year lag of CO2 and temperature). And for those saying that other countries should take up their share 1) do you want to make that bet? You've all worked on team projects. We can't force them. 2) How do you ask a developing country to choose between hospitals and green energy? They don't have enough for both and one clearly has a shorter return on investment in number of human lives saved. (We can pick on China though, they're rich enough that they don't have to choose, but US and Europe need to be picked on as well).
One of the major reasons it's controversial is that it has been used as a distraction and a false promise. I.e. arguments of the form "we can continue to burn fossil fuels, because some magic future CCS technology will fix everything" are very common.
Because the problem is emissions, not who creates those emissions.
What I'm saying is that if coal does so much sequestration that it in effect has negative emissions, this is actually better than solar which has a little emissions. This is because we care about emissions.
I'll make an analogy. Let's say we have two companies that output poison in their process. Company A produces 10000 units and company B produces 5 units. Company A shifts and now produces -10 units of poison and company B doesn't change. Initially company B is better but after the change company A is better because really all we care is about the poison being produced and not actually what the companies do. Because at the end of the day, our goal is less poison. That's the number that matters.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wave_power
As a Texan I heard a lot about potentially tapping wind energy from floating turbines off the Galveston coast but have not heard about this in practice while the wind farms in west Texas are exploding in volume.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power_in_Texas
[0]: https://www.marinetechnologynews.com/blogs/wave-energy-resea...
Offshore wind turbines on the other hand are practically a mature technology, while getting larger and larger over time (improves efficiency). There's loads around the UK, although mostly fixed rather than floating. Floating is a less mature technology.
Tide power is intermittent but extremely predictable and not tied to the diurnal cycle, which would be advantages.
The trouble with estuaries is that in addition to the ecosystem damage and change to flood dynamics associated with hydro power in general, they also tend to be used for ships to navigate, so getting a scheme which suits everyone is a major challenge.