Do I understand the article correctly that this is talking about the long tail of warming, as the climate gets asymptotically closer to what it'll eventually settle on? Like when you have a fridge and turn the power off, it'll get slower and slower towards environmental temperature, and they calculated this trend for thousands of years given CO2e already emitted rather than in the next, say, 50 years?
If yes, it sounds like something to keep in mind, i.e. it's not like we still have much of a CO2e budget remaining or time to waste (we'll have to take back out of the air what we put in from X years ago onwards), but at the same time it will also take many many years to get to dangerous warming levels (if we stopped emitting on an extremely optimistic schedule) and at some point between "in a while" and "in a few centuries" we have to suck those greenhouse gasses back out of the air to not have this effect run its full course. So this isn't "turns out we're doomed after all" as the headline suggests, just a further-into-the-future calculation that tells us what kinda already made sense (the long tail until settling on a new temperature average).
With my layman understanding this is correct in principle but according to the linked paper in the article the climate target of 1.5 C will already be surpassed in the year 2100 – even without any further CO2 emissions.
And yes, the tail effects of global warming beyond our usual time horizon of 2030/2050 were already known.
If there are no significant emissions to tax, then fixing environmental damage done by past generations sounds like something for governments to pick up with public money. We also spend public money on forest management, wildlife bridges to create reasonably sized habitats, etc.
It's also a while out. We have bigger issues today than "who's gonna suck back out some CO2 once we cut emissions sufficiently". We'll get to that in due time.
For what it's worth, if you have unavoidable emissions today that you want to compensate, and want to also fund the people working on CO2 capturing technology, see https://climeworks.shop for a pay-what-you-want option. I don't really believe in planting trees (which is way cheaper per ton of CO2 it claims to absolve you of), and these machines apparently emit "only" 10kg for every 100kg of CO2 captured (90% effective sounds reasonable), and it's accounted for who claimed which share of the machine's captured volume so it sounds directly effective to me. It's just that the scale is peanuts and will remain so until public bodies and companies start to run out of emission reduction options and decide to use it - but at that point we better have this tech geared up.
It's easier to just drive the prices of CO2 certificates up. A EU CO2 certificate for 1 ton of CO2 costs 25€. If you buy it and resell it at a higher price like 100€ it's either too expensive and will never be bought or if it will be bought you will be economically harming CO2 emitting companies.
My initial thought is that funding those participating in an ineffective scheme does not strike me as the most helpful option. But I really don't know enough about it to comment on whether that is the case here, or if it might indeed make sense for me to do this. Do you know of any research (doesn't have to be published, a blog post with a good analysis is just as helpful) that looked into whether this is a good idea?
I think the argument is that if we stopped all our CO2 emissions right now we would comply with the 1.5 C target in 2050 but would "only" break it in 2100. Since stopping all our emissions is not even close to what's happening (actually CO2 emissions are rising right now) that's not a viable model. So we will probably need to recapture CO2 as well – or rather we will need to develop the necessary tech first.
The main problem with trees is they’re very slow. It would take decades after we started planting billions of trees a year before they’d have grown to the extend where they’d have captured reasonable amounts of carbon.
So, yes, it’s an option. But it’s a slow option we’d need to start implementing immediately if we wanted it bear fruit.
(We produce enough CO2 that it takes 40 billion hardwood trees growing for 40 years to sequester as much CO2 as we make in a year. We’d have to plant a lot of trees, and then not touch them for years, to affect the course of things)
You are aware that "temporarily" in this context is the lifespan of a tree, right? Trees live anywhere from several decades to 20+ centuries, and their remains, once broken down, provide nutrients to the soil so more trees can grow.
Also the tree is not capturing carbon, instead emitting, half of the year if not planted in the optimal places near the equator.
And it's carbon neural or negative once almost fully grown.
Basic biology should tell you that the only thing that counts for carbon capture is biomass added. Anything that the tree does that doesn't permanently add to its mass can't capture carbon permanently. Hence, once a tree stops growing, it stops capturing carbon. It still respirates because it does things that require energy, but any carbon it captures doing so is released fairly quickly again, e.g. when the leaves it produced in spring fall off and rot. Of course many trees keep growing a little even after they reach maturity, but the rate of growth is minuscule. A mature stable forest stores a large amount of carbon, but it hardly captures any more.
Anyway, the land we have is limited. You literally can't cover the planet in one big forest to capture the gigatons of carbon we have released. You have to do active forest management and store the carbon somewhere stable, for example as biochar.
You are mostly right, but some of that carbon does sink into the soil and get captured for much longer periods, and some of that will will sink further and likely never see the surface of the earth again unless someone digs it up.
If you pants trees om every bit of avaliable land, that stilll would not be enough to compensate for the emissions - we use a lot of land for farming, and are emittinghundreds of years wortg of tree-catrure per decade.
You really dont want to roll the dice about the new global climate equilibrium. It is a huge system that we barely understand, and currently we are moving the needle far away from the settled equilibrium. It is perfectly possible that once you reach a tipping point then things will accelerate very fast to the new equilibrium, giving us no time to react.
Yes I really do think that makes a lot of sense, all that methane trapped in permafrost springs to mind. These scary once in a generation things do occasionally happen...
It is starting to happen now. Many ocean current turnovers rates are at or approaching the time since the start of the industrial revolution. Up until a few decades ago we kept getting clean water coming up from below with low concentrations of CO2. Now we are getting CO2 laden water that can't absorb nearly as much and what "fresh" water we got left coming to us isn't going to last much longer.
Yeah it's a tricky thing to write about concisely. On the one hand I wanted to add nuance to the alarmist headline, on the other (of course) I 100% agree with "let's not fuck around with the entire planet with tricky to predict effects like gulf stream etc."
I'm the kind of person that annoys all the Germans by driving 95km/h on highways because it cuts fuel emissions nearly in half compared to the recommended speed of 130km/h. We don't even pay for fuel, that's paid by my SO's employer, it's purely because it adds like 10% of time on most trips (those 2-3 minutes are negligible) and allows me to visit family without feeling as bad about individual transport (public transport isn't really an option here for trips further than the next city over, extremely poor connections even by German standards). Or wear extra clothing and put a blanket over my legs while working and see how low we can put the heater. Or not heat the bedroom at all during fall/spring and take a hot water bottle up to get warm under the blanket (must be way more efficient than heating the whole room up). In short, yep I'm with you on not gambling on these estimates. But I'm also for nuance and being realistic lest someone claims that "ökos" / climate weirdos hugely exaggerated again and it's all not so bad. I find it tricky.
Or go faster and plant trees. If you pay for it that helps tree planting economies of scale. (Reforestation, not just monoculture.)
I tried to do the same thing. Yes, individual actions have CO2e costs. It's not you, nor me, nor all of HN together that even can do anything impactful. Setting an example at best. (But then simply presenting a united coherent "yes carbon tax, yes ASAP, yes 125 USD/t" to everybody we discuss this with would probably help more.)
That said, irrational alarmism is its own kind of hell.
Planting trees, carbon capture, etc. is NOT "going faster". It's definitely good if you can do it supplementary, if you have money to burn after funding things that will help reduce emissions (roof insulation, double windows, replace car with electric car, add rooftop solar, fund a solar park or wind turbine nearby, etc.), but in virtually all cases it's much more expensive than reducing emissions and helping others do the same. We need to explore how to live sustainably rather than hope everyone will pay for their share of carbon capture (in the form of trees or whatever) while "the others" fix the underlying problem. We'd need an absolutely humongous number of trees or capture plants to retrieve today's emissions.
That said, I was actually just writing about the topic of planting trees :)
> For what it's worth, if you have unavoidable emissions today that you want to compensate, and want to also fund the people working on CO2 capturing technology, see https://climeworks.shop for a pay-what-you-want option. I don't really believe in planting trees (which is way cheaper per ton of CO2 it claims to absolve you of), and these machines apparently emit "only" 10kg for every 100kg of CO2 captured (90% effective sounds reasonable), and it's accounted for who claimed which share of the machine's captured volume so it sounds directly effective to me. It's just that the scale is peanuts and will remain so until public bodies and companies start to run out of emission reduction options and decide to use it - but at that point we better have this tech geared up.
I do need to sleep still tonight (0230 here) so I won't now type out (on mobile) the reasons I don't think trees are a reliable option. And by tomorrow it won't matter anymore, nobody will read it (I don't like the ephemerality of HN/reddit threads.) So these are my 2ct, hope I could clarify my reasoning as I will go sleep now.
Oh, thanks! Quite a nice setup partnering with a geothermic power plant!
Currently I prefer reforestation (or even better yet restoration of swamplands), because it's partly EU funded, so there's a small multiplier effect, and there's still a lot of land for "low hanging" forests, which help with local climate patterns a bit.
I'm aware of what >>we<< need to do, and I'm already working on the better heating/insulation part. But individual action is nothing compared to advocacy in terms of impact.
I know about it because I've a friend who basically bought a big plot of land and requested funds to plant trees.
EU reforestation, google autocompleted it halfway to eu funding for reforestation :o
"During the current 2014-2020 funding period the programme will contribute approximately €3.4 billion more.
The LIFE programme is divided into two sub-programmes, one for environment (representing 75% of the overall financial envelope) and one for climate action (representing 25% of the envelope)."
"Some EUR 8.2 billion has been earmarked for the 2015-2020 period (27% for reforestation, 18% to make forests more resilient and 18% for damage prevention)."
I don't see the actual difference between an individual choosing to drive slowly, eat vegan, and be cold at home, and that same individual choosing to spend extra for sequestration. Assuming that the offsets are honest, admittedly a big if.
One is painful in the lifestyle, one in the wallet, and both are drops in the bucket compared to changes on a civilizational level.
Which isn't to say you or anyone shouldn't pursue your own sense of moral behavior, quite the opposite in fact.
I would even say that using a normal amount of, say, electricity, but offsetting it with carbon capture, has one advantage: using a subnormal amount makes power fractionally cheaper for others.
But by how much? Well... by about the amount of difference any one set of human actions makes.
I'm not cold. I am someone who easily gets cold: I sit still 14 out of 16 hours every day, and I'm also way too selfish to let myself be cold all day every day.
It would neither be sustainable nor a good example for others.
No, I'm warm, sometimes too warm, and the room is currently at 17°C. Still a far cry from climate neutral of course, but a (to me) respectable percentage better than the 21-22°C I used to require as recently as last winter (I just hadn't looked into layering my clothing before, it was surprisingly simple to lower my thermal need by 5°C).
> an individual choosing to [do uncommon things]
Not only does it make me feel better, it also means I have first-hand experience to tell others what they could do and what impact it has had for me. The 2 extra minutes a 20-minute trip takes are mostly peanuts while saving a sizable amount of CO2 as well as money (most people pay for their fuel). I will still drive fast when I am in a rush, but for all regular trips you can choose to do this without leaving much earlier at all.
I think that perspective might help others consider their own choices. If nobody did this, it would be weird and abnormal. Now that they hear my experience, it's less so. I'm still an outlier, but it takes only one more person to set a trend.
This is of course an optimistic view and I'm well aware of that, but the alternative is doom and gloom, saying we realistically won't do anything anyway, why bother. I dunno, just seems nicer to me to try rather than accept failure beforehand. I can only do what I can do, and this is something I can do (walk the walk, then talk the talk).
(Anecdotal addition)
A friend became vegetarian for climate reasons. They drive on the highway at a literal 200km/h (125mph). Knowing that I also eat less meat and do other things towards the climate, upon hearing how fast I drive and what impact a 25% speed reduction already has, I noticed that they at least looked rather thoughtful for a minute. Will they change their habits? That's not up to me and I don't ask after it, but they at least thought about it and it will be a more conscious choice now. They might also be less likely to boast about their driving habit as they previously did, less normalizing such things.
Perhaps also not, what do I know. I just notice that a lot of people around me are making better choices in one area or another. Some use more plastic to better preserve food; it's often a trade-off. I use more clothing to preserve heat. I'm just happy that people are sharing ideas and trying new things.
The ocean has far more effect on co2 than trees. The lush rain forests in South America are C02 neutral, because there is so much life in the rain forest it uses up all the oxygen it produces. The idea that the rain forest are the “lungs” of the earth is just a myth, the oceans are.
True, but I do not think wind resistance is 100% or your full consumption. But even if it were, then you would you 90% more fuel per hour. But in on case travel more than 30% further. But if I were to guess (at least from my car, but I will check it in the future) it is more like 6,2l/100km at 100km/h and 7l/100km at 130km/h.
I have a configurable display that shows average fuel consumption per 100km, momentary fuel consumption per 100km, kilometers remaining with available fuel, or some other value that I forgot about.
It's always set to the momentary fuel consumption and I have a good idea about how much things like grades (in/declines), wind, acceleration, etc. impact the consumption. The consumption per 100km is not the best measure for acceleration or idling (more useful would be something like "ml used in last 10 seconds"), but it give me some indication. Using the cruise control to accelerate (when safe; e.g. on steep uphill highway on-ramps you need to shift down and put that pedal down to get to a more safe merging speed) it's limited to about 8-9l/100km which is pretty good (many Germans consider such amounts normal for their cruising speed, let alone accelerating).
Sort of, yeah, but note that the half-life of CO2 in the atmosphere is on the order of a couple centuries for scrubbing into the deep oceans (it gets scrubbed faster into other sinks such as the ocean surface, but those sinks also fill up).
So any warming effect will only last centuries, not thousands of years.
I'm looking at a human scale, on the order of thousands of years at most (in 1000 years, I expect we'll be able to live on space ships for considerable amounts of time, perhaps even long enough to reach nearby stars before we need to resupply).
Within a few thousand years, there are already cycles visible. If that's what you refer to, then I just mean to generalize that cycle to a new average. E.g. if we cycled between 19°C and 21°C every 11 years due to the solar cycle, then that would be shifted to 21-23°C instead. (I'm making these numbers up, they're just examples of what kind of effect I mean.)
Beyond those thousands of years, even if we're considering the sustainability of our climate even if we had never discovered the use of fire in the first place, yeah there is no "eventually settle" of course. It will change depending on things like the sun burning out, asteroids hitting, other geological shifts, changes in who inhabits the world, etc. That seems beyond the scope of the discussion, we can't simply change that by changing our habits.
The climate doesn't have an asymptote unless all the inputs are steady. If humanity were to disappear, the warming would continue for a while but then start to subside as the excess CO2 is absorbed in the oceans (absent things like feedback loops due to arctic methane, etc...).
To be blunt: we've fucked it up already, and anything we do to "fix" world ecology at this stage is going to be characterized as something like terraforming. We aren't ever going back to "normal" in our lifetime or our grandkids'.
Don't you think we might have to terraform (to experiment with our only planet) a whole lot less if we manage to reduce, reuse, recycle instead of continue as we do?
I agree that it seems likely that we'll have to do some sort of geo-engineering in the future. But if you mean that as an excuse to not even try and just let future generations undo everything with hopefully better tech and a world in chaos, then I vehemently disagree. I don't even have kids nor plan on ever having any, it's just immoral (and perhaps it's my way of finding purpose in life to help fix a problem humanity is facing).
At risk? It seems like they never looked at that Princeton study that stated it had already taken place in 2014 [0].
Personally speaking it took the 2008 crisis to finally force me to accept this truth, the US is a corpo-facist State with a very well traveled revolving door between politics and certain 'Private' Industries that benefit the most of from favourable policy and legislation as their lobbying budgets reflects that--banking, schooling, pharma/medical, and most blatant of all military contractors spanning everything from fastfood chains that supply on base meals, to mercenaries for hire (Blackwater/Xe) to weapons manufacturing (Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Ratheon et al).
When you look back at how every crisis before and after 2008 was handled in just my lifetime, be it the opioid epidemic, dotcom bubble before that in the 2000s to the wallstreet corruption and Iran Contra and crack crisis in the 80s their is very little consequence for their corporate and political affiliates, where as entire generations of the populace are let to their own devices.
I hate to to say this, as I wish we could just bypass it entirely already a logical decesion, but short of stopping the CCP expanding its far more dysfunctional form of tyrannical Imperialism (and disregard for the environment) acting as a deterrent in South Asia the US has no real function anymore in anything that matters, and we would benefit from hastening the transition from this pointless archaic and clearly Oligarchical nation state model as soon as possible to a Global confederation so we can start solving real issues on the Global level that demand all of our attention: specifically pertaining to climate change and the fallout from just that alone.
It really fills me with dread that we can't figure this very obvious problem all while we are trying to tackle being a multi planetary species.
Boeing just got hit with a $2.5B with a deferred prosecution fine and no criminal prosecutions mentioned for conspiracy of fraud when employees intentionally lied to the regulators. For any pleb or small business owner this is a sure way to get all your assets seized in a 'slam dunk' case ending in federal prison, but this is a MegaCorp with cronyist assurances from DoD and NASA contracts so expect more sweet heart contracts to come their way to recover far more than this in the near future.
Sitting in front of a fire can feel cosy, but being set on fire is generally unwelcome.
Unfortunately Earth's climate is one of those complex systems where a single temperature in a single location at a specific time doesn't give much information about how desirable conditions will be for humanity generally in future years.
Every time I read these reports, six months later they find out the data was faked, emails are leaked with political agendas, etc. I straight don’t trust “science”. Don’t get me started on the replication crises. Or how many times climate predictions have been off by hundreds of percent
I’m not an expert, but I have a dual masters in math and cs. If you listened to these people 30 years ago, you would expect we would all be engulfed in a fire ball by now. It hasn’t happened. Almost none of the past predictions have turned true. Ever. I’m not going to start now and these people need to be held accountable for studies that they did in the past that didn’t work
Also, sorry for offending everyone’s ministry of science
Did you look at the paper? Is the data wrong? The calculations? Is there anything you can re-run with alternative data sources that you do trust? Or calculations you checked? Or do you "straight up" not trust people when the conclusion is not controversial enough (or some other random justification) without actually checking anything? At the very least, do you have any sort of data or analysis that backs up the claim that it's more likely than not that this will turn out to be faked data in 6 months, e.g. did a majority of climate-change-is-real papers go down that fate?
"Retrospectively comparing future model projections to observations provides a robust and independent test of model skill. Here we analyze the performance of climate models published between 1970 and 2007 in projecting future global mean surface temperature (GMST) changes. Models are compared to observations based on both the change in GMST over time and the change in GMST over the change in external forcing. The latter approach accounts for mismatches in model forcings, a potential source of error in model projections independent of the accuracy of model physics. We find that climate models published over the past five decades were skillful in predicting subsequent GMST changes, with most models examined showing warming consistent with observations, particularly when mismatches between model‐projected and observationally estimated forcings were taken into account."
the only time i've ever actually seen them wrong is when the predictions happen far faster or are more catastrophic than predicted.
It's wild how many people believe this is still "in dispute" but then again, that's what Exxon and Chevron paid big bucks for, nonstop merchants of endless doubt.
I really think that the vast majority of people, say 90%, really don't think 'this is still "in dispute"'. Of those, I wouldn't be surprised if a decent share disagrees on the severity of the problem, and probably 95% of those 90% have very little idea about the time-sensitivity of the issue in the first place. However, virtually nobody I speak to thinks it's a non-issue, and if you look at polls about whether the government should do more against it, you usually see a large majority (and that's only a subset of those that acknowledge that there is an issue at all).
Perhaps murica is, as usual, an outlier among generally educated countries, but let's not pretend like there is too much dispute to get things done on this topic, or that denying it is anything more than a conspiracy theory with a vocal troll/joke aspect to it as well as a couple of real conspiracy theorists.
The biggest problem is that people don't believe they can do anything. A family member of mine wants to put a solar park in a nearby field. "Great!" I said, "I'll chip in!" Realizing I wasn't doing it for monetary gain (I don't live nearby enough to really profit from it), they then told me to not be "more catholic than the pope" (not sure if that translates well) and wouldn't accept the money I wanted to put towards this directly effective good cause. They (singular) are not doing it for the climate, they don't believe it will make a difference. They think it's a good investment for their own riches. But they don't think climate is a non-issue, just that they can't do anything about it, nor believe that there would be a sufficient majority to collectively (i.e. have the government) do something about it.
I mean, they're right about this being absolute peanuts, but the presence of solar fields and wind turbines also sends a message to those who learn of it: we can do this, we are doing things, it is economical, let's go for it.
No, they think climate change is a liberal conspiracy funded by the regulars, gates, china, soros...
I mean any advertisement comment thread, as in fairly general targeting, on Facebook or Instagram that even remotely references climate change is flooded to the brim with kooks and nativist conspiracy theories.
It's just an avalanche of fruitcakes and unhinged wackos.
Hundreds, sometimes thousands of people talking about scientist conspiracies and just the looniest stuff. Sometimes the comments are effectively 100% cranks and wackos. It seems to be much more mainstream than I'm comfortable acknowledging
Check Wikipedia on the topic, there are a ton of papers that were (within the given error margins) right about the warming we'd be seeing given a certain number of continued emissions. Even the oil companies were behind this and continue to not deny it (they just continue, just like tobacco companies, to not care enough because it makes them very rich and there is enough diffusion of accountability).
Nobody ever said fireball, but the average temperature moving multiples of degrees is already materializing in real world measurements.
I’m not an expert, but I have a dual masters in math and cs. If you listened to these people 30 years ago, you would expect we would all be engulfed in a fire ball by now. It hasn’t happened. Almost none of the past predictions have turned true. Ever. I’m not going to start now and these people need to be held accountable for studies that they did in the past that didn’t work
> If you listened to these people 30 years ago, you would expect we would all be engulfed in a fire ball by now.
Once again, can you link to a significant (say, a fifth) share of the papers on this topic at the time that claim that? Or if that's not what you mean by "these people", how about even a single one?
> these people need to be held accountable for studies that they did in the past that didn’t work.
If there are such papers, did anyone ever show that a single one of these did not the best they could with the information available at the time? Again, any sort of analysis (of your own or by anyone else) that shows negligence or anything of the sort would give your ideas some sort of credibility.
The the absolute knuckledraggery of extrapolating data over 100 years + without accounting for all the fat tail of all other events.
IF I had told anyone 10 years ago that a large mob is going to attack Congress and Senate will have to evacuated and a guy dressed up as Viking and shirtless would seat in Speaker
s chair people would call me stupid. More such surprises exist in history and in future.
Climate change is a non issue if we humans invents a far cheaper and cleaner source of energy. We can use that energy to literally suck and filter out CO2 from air.
> Climate change is a non issue if we humans invents a far cheaper and cleaner source of energy. We can use that energy to literally suck and filter out CO2 from air.
And our political problems will be a non-issue, too, when we invent new political structures and modes of governance that improve well-being for every human on earth 100x compared to today while allowing a 100x reduction in labor. Best not to worry about today's political problems, then.
I kinda think like you, I find knowledgeable analysts too keen on forgetting disruption. I don't want to fantasize about potential scifi.. but simply a few discussions about potential research paths and then put some weight behind. There are way more money floating around on useless thing than required to do so for energy/climate solutions.
The physically possible options for energy production haven't changed too much in the last 80 years. Betting on a magical technology to spontaneously emerge in the next 80 seems dubious.
The only cheaper energy source (that include pilotability) would be nuclear. Its not as portable, but it exist. Fission is limited (not really, but minerals will be expensive to mine after a while).
So We have Fusion left. ITER will be up before 2028 hopefully. We just found a better way to make our fusion magnetic fields, so this is not a pipedream. BUT even this advance is not enough for sustainable fusion. We have to find an even better way to create our magnetic fields, sustainable under high temperature (probably with high pressure). We recently found a supraconductor that is interesting because it work at "high" temperature (high for physicien is death for people), high pressure. sadly we don't understand shit about all those new supraconductor, we don't even understand CuO supraconductors yet.
If we have fusion in 2080, it will be because we invested heavily for this (and we're not). And it is a silver bullet, that we're not allowed to miss, or else.
We are signing checks without provision unless we find the right tech, at the right time. My guess is that some will have to pay. Most of us here aren't to concerned (i know i'm not, probably only people living close to the Ohio river should be less concerned than me), but people living in Florida and south of Texas will want to buy a climatised suit if they hope to be able to be out more than 10 day a year by 2080.
> The only cheaper energy source (that include pilotability) would be nuclear.
There is no need to make any such assumptions. As I have pointed out just because you and me can't see it right now does not mean something else wont be there. World is complex.
"Tipping points" are so-named because, after you've crossed them, you can magically disappear all of the CO2 in the atmosphere away instantly, and it's still too late to reverse the thermodynamic momentum of the bad stuff happening. If we don't stop racing to those tipping points, we'd better get fusion working pretty fast.
It's the same pattern of reactions we see in the US with covid.
It's not real. It's a hoax. Even if it's real, it's not nearly as bad as they say, and it'll cost too much and kill jobs. Even if it's as bad as they say, it's too late to do anything about it, we're powerless.
Well, not quite. If we had started back when climate change became clear mid-20th century, #3 wouldn't have been needed. But now, it is indeed the only option, and it will be very expensive. And the more we delay, the more expensive it'll become. We are basically screwing over future generations who will have to pay our debts.
Eh, carbon capture has always been a good idea to develop. Some things just make the most sense releasing greenhouse gases and will for the foreseeable future, e.g. CH4-powered rockets or CO2 released from cement. Will never be a problem if we're capturing as much as we emit.
Carbon capture works at a point site. Put your machine there and you get a nice concentration of CO2. Once it's in the atmosphere you are basically just building a more efficient tree. Any machines you build will have to be as large as forests. Who is going to pay for that?
By definition this would be keynesian gold digging. Pay people to do something that has very little economic benefits for the individual doing it and it's not in competition with any other private industry. It's basically an extreme example of a luxury.
The leader of the free world last 4 years has been a proud climate change denier. We need action yesterday, but for action we need leaders, but our leaders are not willing to do anything. This seems like an unsolvable problem to me.
People who have the most power to reduce carbon emission are the same people who are least eager to do so.
When I mean leader I mean leader. 45th potus is not. He's just a guy in power, a systemic incident if you will, but he has no understanding of what populations need. A leader has that.
Based on current events nothing makes political will like fear for life. I think society probably needs to experience climate change disasters to really do something about it.
We are already experiencing climate change disasters around the world and doing nothing. How long do we have to wait, until crops fail and the rich are starving?
Well some people are doing something, even though so far it is ineffective. I think it is a spectrum. The worse life gets or the more fearing the people get, the more motivated they will be. It seems we are not there yet. Maybe next generation or the generation after that, 30-60 years. But maybe the change will be slow and continuous and people who can will just adapt.
I suspect you're going to get downvoted to hell, but you're right. And, the fact is, neither of these points are compatible with capitalism.
There's also a point 6, which is reduce and then stabilize the global population at sustainable levels. Having fewer humans around is simply the easiest way to consume less while allowing a reasonable standard of living.
Humans are by nature pro-growth. Any policy which works against that needs to account for it, which they never do.
Also populations stabilize when you reach a certain standard of living, which is exactly why the environmental mentality should be pro-growth – get to that point as soon as possible, and use that extra manpower to get to carbon neutral as soon as possible with the three things I listed. You don't need 4, 5, and 6. Simpler plans are always better.
No, capitalism is the problem. You can't fix capitalism with more capitalism. Growth at all costs is what is killing us.
Populations don't stabilize due to growth. They stabilize when the standard of living reaches a point where having many children stops making sense. If only there was a way we could share our prosperity with everyone.... hmm. Is that called capitalism? Why, no, it is not.
We're not a virus on the Earth; we're cancer. Cancer only kills people if it grows too fast. For example, many men die with prostate cancer, while relatively few die of it.
Blanket statements like this almost never help. They readily fall in danger of presenting a moralistic or normalizing argument in debate, which require zero baseline. If you're going to debate people you need to provide an actual solution that doesn't just say, "stop what you're doing", "you're the problem", etc...
Conservation may have worked sometime in the 60's or earlier, however, economies would've stalled and our present would likely be quite different. It is possible to engineer our way out of climate change, but it will take the best minds being 100% committed to it and incentives that align to it.
We already have enough wealth in the world to share. There's no need to continue oppressing the global south in order to fuel growth that's going to kill us.
I may have agreed with you before capitalism pissed away our future. But, we just don't have the time left, and we must sacrifice in the short term to save the long term. These are facts. If we don't take drastic action now, climate change will abolish capitalism for us in a few decades. Is that what you want?
Nobody proposed growth at all costs, but I don't think we have the same understanding of what growth means. To wit: how does your standard of living "reach a certain point" without growth? How does your SoL get higher without growing your manufacturing capabilities; without growing your power generation capacity?
We're neither a virus nor a cancer. We're the only thing that matters. The earth doesn't care if it dies. It doesn't have feelings. The last [insert endangered species here] doesn't know that it is the last of its kind, it doesn't care either. The only reason these things matter is because people care. The solution is therefore never going to be "make people's lives worse".
Very easily. Share the wealth now, and population growth will slow. When there are fewer humans on the planet, standards of living will rise.
If humanity can't accept the temporary reduction of some people's standard of living to save civilization, then there is no hope. Therefore, I choose to believe you are wrong here.
Incidentally, the people who have made everyone's life worse aren't those who are going to fix the situation. They're those who kept borrowing from future generations to make their lives better.
Ah, I see the problem. You think when I say "growth" I mean population growth. I do not. Well I do, but that's the minority of what I'm talking about when I say "growth".
> If humanity can't accept the temporary reduction of some people's standard of living to save civilization, then there is no hope
Citation very much needed. You asserting that we need to reduce certain people's SoL is not the same as demonstrating such, and neither you nor anyone else has done so.
Don't know who you're referring to with your last statement, but OK.
No, I mean growth in consumption. People borrowed from the future by consuming too much. It was, and is unsustainable. Reduction in population is the way to achieve reduction in consumption.
Show me you're willing to be convinced, and I'll give you every citation you need.
Consumption of what? We know how to generate power with minimal CO2 emissions. We know how to recycle many (most) of the materials we use and are inventing new ones every day that don't need to have a negative environmental impact. We know how to capture carbon. We're getting better at these things every day. That rate of innovation slows the moment we decide to decrease SoL / attempt to cap populations / etc.
No matter how you slice it, it all eventually comes down to energy.
We know how to generate power with minimal CO2 emissions, but we don't do it at the necessary scale. We know how to recycle, but we don't actually do that, either, and it takes energy. And, capturing carbon... well, if you want to put the carbon genie back in the bottle, you have to either expend energy to do it, or violate the laws of thermodynamics. One cuts into the amount of energy you can consume, while the other is an impossibility. All this is just making the argument that we need to share the technology to do these things as broadly as possible, including throughout the global south.
Do you or do you not believe there's a finite amount of energy we can expend and still remain sustainable? Essentially, we're limited to biomass (which puts carbon back in the air that was taken out of the air previously), nuclear, gravity (hydroelectric, more or less), and solar (solar panels, wind). To go past that, we need to get into fossil fuels, and be very, very careful we don't exceed the ability of the Earth to absorb the CO2 we put in the air. Unfortunately, we're coming close to exceeding the capacity of the Earth to absorb any nontrivial amount of CO2 and still remain broadly habitable, which is why we're having significant warming over the past several decades. As you said, humans are very pro-growth, which means we're really bad at respecting these sorts of limits. So, we need to remove the temptation to do so ASAP if we are to succeed.
As for innovation, you just told me we have all the technology necessary to go net zero carbon, so, who cares about innovation in the short term? Do you want to watch the collapse of global civilization on your iPhone 15, or something?
Honestly, as long as you're going to sit there and tell me we can capitalism our way out of a problem that was caused by capitalism, you're not convincing me that you can be convinced otherwise. You're literally espousing a position that capitalists refer to as "capitalist realism," which is essentially "we can't conceive of any alternative to capitalism, so, there is no alternative!"
You know the definition of insanity, right? Tell me again why it makes sense that we're going to capitalism our way out of this?
First off, you keep saying that this problem was "caused by capitalism". It isn't / wasn't. You might've missed it, but the USSR wasn't exactly a bastion of environmental conscientiousness. This problem is caused by people wanting better lives and / or more stuff. This is not a unique property of capitalism, this is a result of humanity at scale. You are confusing correlation with causation. Of course every problem is correlated with capitalism, almost every society on earth is now capitalistic so any problem is "capitalism's fault" – except it's not, because the problems would still exist with any other economic system we've tried, as is clearly demonstrated by every non-capitalist society that has ever existed which invariably used lots of fossil fuels if they had anywhere near a decent standard of living.
You rightly point out this is an energy problem. That is why we need to go full tilt on nuclear. Nuclear can generate vast amounts of energy with near zero CO2 emission and also without requiring vast swaths of land (solar), localized geological features (hydro), etc.
Finally, I haven't proposed we "solve this with capitalism". Please go back and re-read my first comment, where I say we need to solve this with:
1. Electrify everything.
2. Lots of nuclear (fission), with fusion sooner rather than later.
3. Carbon capture.
Nowhere is capitalism stipulated. Of course, I do actually think capitalism is the way to go, because it is the best system we've ever invented for promoting efficiency, which is obviously a good thing in this discussion. But that was not the point I was making.
1 is actually optional if you have 2 and 3 working well, meaning we can keep using hydrocarbon fuels in our cars if we have enough carbon-free energy to capture the carbon and synthesize hydrocarbons.
Electric cars seem to be viable, so it's really only interesting for planes right now.
To me it sounds neither easy or obvious. Is there any FAQ to learn more about the concept? Some questions I have: How would introduced algae affect various oceanic biomes? What happens to captured carbon in short term and in long term? Would pH change? How can the speed and spreading of process be controlled?
Too late for some unrealistic short-term fights which probably are lost but the fight does not end. We will still need to decrease atmospheric pollution in 2040.
I don't think anyone will have much budget left between the adaptation measures and the wars over water.
Right now, people can afford to spend national budgets paying for global benefits (co2 reduction). When things get difficult, those programs will be the first to go...
Good point. I think it can go both ways. Either society disintegrates and any hopes for grandious climate fix projects will be gone, those left will try to adapt; or with some luck during the next decades enough people in power will act soon enough to at least start fixing the problem. Some forerunner disasters and fear can help there.
Currently, the richest 10% are responsible for half of all CO2 emissions [1], and you only need $93k be in the richest 10% [2], quite modest by HN standards. Historically, the only way countries have been able to lift themselves out of poverty is by burning fossil fuels for energy. While alternative energy is rapidly advancing, Nigeria isn't going to wait decades to build a solar plant when they can build several coal power plants right now.
According to the Oxfam report linked by that Gyardian article[1], the global top 1% (~ millionaires) produce 15% of emissions, "more than twice the poorest 50% (c.3.1 billion people), or more than the entire cumulative emissions of citizens in the EU."
no, the answer is to use nuclear - a scalable technology which we have spent decades developing and operating. France gets 75% of its electricity from nuclear.
People are too frighten of a nuclear meltdown like in Chernobyl or East coast Japan.
Sure, we have been productively making nuclear plant to be safer but it takes time to convince the population, i guess.
Is that even the issue any more? Most people probably don't remember Chernobyl, and forgot about Japan the instant it left the news.
I think the real resistance, is the drug of indignation. Folks are manufacturing it all the time, latching onto anything they can find to get spun up about. With negligible attention to facts. Its the one constant in our brave new world.
I actually grew up near Chernobyl and both my parents still work there. Pretty much anyone who knows even a little about nuclear energy and does not have a political position is very much pro-nuclear.
It means we give away solar, wind, and energy storage to the poor, and build all of the above as fast as manufacturing allows. You make it economically untenable to burn fossil fuels.
Global PV production capacity is ~170GW per year, current fossil generation capacity in Africa is about 135GW. Not outlandish to get that replaced in short order while accounting for growth. Want it done faster? Build more PV manufacturing capacity. The product is glass and silicon with a hint of rare earths. PV panels are almost
100% recyclable.
Overbuilt renewables should be used to sequester atmospheric carbon instead of curtailing (throwing excess renewables away when unneeded). It’s going to take an incredible amount of energy to stick all of that burned carbon from the last 100 years back into the ground.
Thats not possible because we have the same capacity to produce product so there will always be a top % who use most of those resources. I think the real take away is that most gains can be made by fixing the processes of rich countries.
Countries like Australia have massive amounts of underutilized renewable energy that are not being used to their fullest extent combined with an American like obsession with cars.
We should be focusing on areas where easy wins can be made rather than looking at countries with the highest level of emissions which is a pointless statistic when they all have different population counts.
These aren't minimal changes. Most of our greenhouse gas emissions come from energy production. We have solutions to this but they are not being deployed widely due to political bikeshedding, corruption and blame passing.
Also we are going to shift a lot of chemical energy based industries to purely electric. Transport will require green electricity and reduce it's dependence on burning things.
So, the figures in that Oxfam report, when that Guardian article was published, was from 2007/2008. The report was written in 2015, but the data was already out of date. I mention that because from 2007 to 2019 (figures from 2020 aren't available yet), China's per capita emissions increased by 55% while those of the West have declined. China's per capita emissions have risen from 5.25 tCO2/capita in 2007 to 8.12t in 2019 while the UK's have dropped to now just 5.45tCO2.
On the other hand, your point about solar vs coal is wrong. It takes less time now to build a solar power plant than a coal power plant. Especially for developing countries that don't already have substantial port and/or rail infrastructure. And this applies somewhat to natural gas, too. It's diesel that they tend to run for this reason. Solar, and now solar + storage, can compete just fine with diesel (and solar + storage + diesel is a pretty resilient combination that also can be built out super fast, is very cheap to build and operate, and also happens to get you to like 80-90% carbonfree... so there's decent hope out there).
Thanks for the updated figures. It's worth noting that China does 28% of the world's manufacturing, much of which is exported to developed countries.
As far as solar goes, clearly coal is cheaper than solar in Nigeria because that's what they're mostly building now. Regulations and subsidies are what make solar cheaper than coal in the US.
Edit: To be clear, I'm completely in favor of coal being replaced by renewables. I'm just pointing this out to raise awareness of the economic realities that are incentivizing coal power in developing countries.
This is absolutely not true. Solar and wind, unsubsizded, are the cheapest forms of energy currently. I highly recommend reviewing both links below to better understand the economics.
I'll admit solar and wind are more attractive than I had thought, which makes me somewhat more optimistic.
That said, I think this analysis misses two important factors when it comes to impoverished countries. Otherwise, you would see more solar there. Developing countries have much lower standards when it comes to building a new power plant, so don't need to pay for sulfur scrubbers. The other factor is that unskilled labor much cheaper there. Solar and wind require much higher-skill labor as there is much more maintenance that needs to be done.
> Solar and wind require much higher-skill labor as there is much more maintenance that needs to be done.
Are you sure that the steam turbine (high RPM, balancing, thermal stress to blades, steam conditioning) is easier to maintain than a electric generator or an array of photovoltaics with control circuits?
Modern steam turbine plants are not that old, and they require a lot more maintenance. Plus, Nigeria produces hardly any coal, so you'll have to either import coal (requires import terminal and rail plus reliance on foreign coal) or mine more coal (open coal mine infrastructure, rail). Solar just produces electricity and doesn't need a bunch of infrastructure.
> The owners of Australia's newest coal-fired power station have written down the value of the asset to zero, wiping out a $1.2 billion investment in the face of an onslaught of renewable energy. ... The decision was booked in Sumitomo's September accounts, in which the company acknowledged the facility was worthless despite being barely 10 years old.
Requirements for high reliability can be lower in places where electricity itself isn't a given. In other words, if you don't have money for full range of functions, you'd be glad to have at least some.
I remember my department had a few very large grants for solar and wind integration studies. There is always some x profitable level to integrate into some portion of the grid. Before you actually start to lose money. Used to be around 30% in most cases a decade ago. Imagine it is bit asymptotic without improvements to the cost of energy storage. I would guess 40% in most cases now.
Yes, I argue even when accounting for grid integration. It's a slam dunk anywhere where it's paired with natural gas due to fast throttling on open cycle and combined cycle turbines, and a little less so where coal is used. Nigeria, for example, is primarily natural gas for fossil electrical generation (~16% of their electrical generation capacity), so any kwh's you're generating with renewables is natural gas burned only when renewables can't meet load demand.
Check out South Australia on OpenNEM [1]. Paired with natural gas and transmission, they're at an exceptionally high amount of renewables penetration [2] and have a very low cost of power in Australia [3]. They're also using a large, recently expanded, Tesla utility scale battery for ancillary/frequency response services [4] (previously profitably performed by natural gas generators), which is causing financial pain for those mentioned gas operators (who are having trouble profiting now on either the power provided or frequency response services).
There are some regions for which storage requirements are relatively small, and would be perfect for 100% solar rollout targets.
Phoenix and Las Vegas come to mind - places where incident solar flux and electricity demand (due to heavy air conditioner use) almost perfectly coincide (peaks are separated by only ~50 minutes)
Nigeria also fits that description. It's right on the equator, meaning there's very little seasonal variation in solar. This is in contrast to all of Europe, especially northern Europe like the UK and Germany.
This is not true, the figures you and others have provided account for an additional theoretical externality cost on our well being for coal. The nominal price of coal energy in the US is more than half of the cost of solar per kWh (3.2 vs 6.8 cents on average)[1].
It’s even cheaper in third-world countries (and China) due to the cost of labor.
Your source is from 2011. Coal has gotten more expensive and solar much cheaper. In fact, building new, unsubsidized solar power plants is cheaper than operating an existing (and paid for) coal power plant: https://www.pv-magazine.com/2020/10/23/its-cheaper-to-build-....
2.9-3.8 cents per kWh for unsubsidized solar in the US.
Nigeria is closer to the equator and has lower labor costs for installation, so their solar costs will be even cheaper.
The Lazard study includes carbon pricing which is exactly what I said: “[All studies] provided account for an additional theoretical externality cost on our well being for coal”.
Like every industry in the last decade, coal generators have also become more efficient.
I’d be shocked (heh) if solar power becomes more efficient given the Shockley-Quessier limit of PV cells which have a maximum efficiency in the best theoretical case with an infinite stacking of panels of 30%. Large synchronous machines on the other hand, in practice, can have a 95% efficiency.
I’m sympathetic to your agenda but it’s deceitful and unfair to presume agreement given the unique circumstances theses results affect conclusions. A place like Nigeria has to worry about what’s happening to their people in the next month rather than in the next 50 years, thus they’ll have different trade offs to make.
> Regulations and subsidies are what make solar cheaper than coal in the US.
Please stop parroting this. Coal is cheaper than solar in the same way that a house with no down payment is free. The environmental debt from coal's CO2 emissions will far exceed costs of solar.
The point is that even without pollution costs - and without subsidies either way - it might be more expensive to build coal plant than an equivalent solar plant. Operation costs are clearly higher in case of coal. Pollution is the cherry on top, or possibly the proverbial elephant in the room.
> Coal is cheaper than solar in the same way that a house with no down payment is free.
Except that rich europeans got the "house with no down payment" for centuries, but now expect poor africans to put down a down payment? That's going to be a hard sell to poor africans desperate to get out of poverty.
> The environmental debt from coal's CO2 emissions will far exceed costs of solar.
Expecting poor africans to give a shit is going to be a real hard sell. Especially when the climate problem is almost exclusively a rich european creation and poor africans had nothing to do with it.
Caring about climate is an enterprise of the privileged few. Unless we are willing to subsidize billions of poor africans and others around the world to the tune of trillions of dollars, I think africans and everyone else are going to go with the lowest hanging fruit. It's 2021 and hundreds of millions of africans live with electricity today. Think about that. It's insane. Considering the centuries of suffering they endured, if they have to burn down the planet to get some semblance of good life, then so be it. Let europe live in mud huts for a few centuries.
Unfortunately in 2021, lifting people out of poverty still always implies increased carbon emissions (historically that's how rich countries got to where they are). After the death of colonialism, poor countries also naturally want to have the same luxuries rich countries already enjoy. But now we realize that with our current scientific advancements these luxurious lifestyles are not sustainable for such a large global population.
What you said is 100% right, just the tone was a bit harsh. Since this site mostly has people from rich countries who refuse to learn history and accept any blame, you will be downvoted.
> As far as solar goes, clearly coal is cheaper than solar in Nigeria because that's what they're mostly building now.
If we want to find out what's cheaper in order to decide what it is more reasonable to build, we can't rely on the fact that something is actually being built as an argument. It's the other way around - first we decide what's better, then do it, otherwise whatever we do would be right since we're doing that.
Or - in this case - if you assume that those calculations were made and it was found that the coal is cheaper - and that's why they're building coal plants - then there is a question of discrepancy (coal is more expensive lately than solar according to <sources>), which needs to be addressed, otherwise it might be assumed that a mistake was made.
> Regulations and subsidies are what make solar cheaper than coal in the US.
Doesn't coal industry also receive subsidies, and aren't those subsides comparable or bigger than subsidies for solar? I'm not sure; are you?
"Coal is cheaper than solar in Nigeria because that's what they're mostly building now"
Firtly, thats a circular argument:"clearly bloodletting works because everyone is using it"
Secondary, the argument is meanongless without a timespan - for example a hydroelectric dam is the chepest source of electricity ever, but is very expensive upfront: no private investor wants to fund that because their returns will take decades. Channel tonnel is profitable now, but initial investort got wrecked, etc.
A hypothetical asset that lasts forever has infinite ROI but if it takes you 200 years to make your money back noone will invest.
Nigeria may not have the funds to bank roll renewables even if they are cheaper in the long run. Cash flow often matters a lot more than people realise.
Coal is worse in that regard because of potential for delays and the binary nature of operating a coal power plant. You either have built the whole thing and it's making some money or you haven't and it's a money pit.
Solar also doesn't have to be centralized like a Coal plant. Not only can solar start delivering power on day 1, it can be incrementally added closer to the point of use, also saving on distribution costs.
If someone said a coal plant is being built in Nigeria, my first thought that this is being forced on them by creditors that probably already own a bunch of coal.
> It's worth noting that China does 28% of the world's manufacturing, much of which is exported to developed countries.
You don't have to go to bat for china, you know. Does the fact that they have so much manufacturing make their emissions ok? If those manufacturing emissions we're instead from the US, would you make the same note?
the point being that an importing country should be held at least partially responsible for the emissions of the manufacturing country. if the importing country made the widgets themselves, their emissions would increase. if the importing country didn't buy the widgets at all then the manufacturing country wouldn't produce them and not emit as much CO2
For the sake of the oceans, embargo all marxist countries, the worst slavers in history actively trying to enslave us all, back into starvation and cannibalism. All they can do is lie and bully.
> the point being that an importing country should be held at least partially responsible for the emissions of the manufacturing country.
Ok, so Saudi Arabia is responsible for America's emissions. Russia is responsible for Europe's emissions. America is responsible for China's emissions.
But let's just keep playing word games to deflect responsibility from China and make sure it's all America's fault.
> China's per capita emissions increased by 55% while those of the West have declined.
Well that's because china was late to industrialization ( by 150 years ) has come from a low emission base. And even if ignore the fact that a significant chunk of china's emissions are dedicated solely to manufacturing goods/junk for the west, if we completely stopped all emissions, it would still take china many decades of emissions to catch up to the emission's put out by the west the past 200 years or so.
> China's per capita emissions have risen from 5.25 tCO2/capita in 2007 to 8.12t in 2019 while the UK's have dropped to now just 5.45tCO2.
That's deceptive since much of UK's emissions was export to china via manufacturing. It's like your roommate "cleaning" his room by dump his trash in your room.
Just by something as basic as "standard of living", it's a certainty that the west, and especially the UK, accounts for far more emissions on a per capita basis. It's impossible that on a per capita basis, a brit has lower emission footprint that a chinese person, indian, african, etc.
Certainly, we aren't any better here in the US. I remember watching a documentary that said that if everyone on earth lived like us, it would take like 5 additional earth's resources.
To be fair, solar mix places more stress on the electrical grid and likely requires more expertise to maintain in countries struggling with brain drain. That said it's still preferable to building more coal plants.
Christine Lagarde (head of ECB) also got a lot of flak for announcing that the european central bank will keep reducing it's exposure to CO2 intensive companies.
At this point the amount of self harm in the population is so great that there is nothing to be done. Is this the curse of right wing populism? Why do disenfranchised people love voting for people that don't care about them? Trump didn't win the election but he still had lots of support even though he was only looking out for himself (and others like him) during his presidency.
Green investments are such an incredibly easy way to implement jobs programs yet people hate on them because they believe not subsidizing anything is more important than solving real problems like domestic underemployment. Yes, when I talk about green investments I am not even considering how you are doing something for the planet, I'm just talking about the economic impact of building up a domestic industry. For all intents and purposes you could also have spent money on maintaining roads or building lots of houses for all I care but when you listen to someone like Trump he would spend it on useless crap like coal. There are very little employment opportunities (if you ignore the work needed to undo the CO2 emissions) in a dying industry. But hey, it's got high visibility and is an emotional topic so lets shoot renewables down in favor of it even though you had more to benefit from the "green scam" (hyperbole) than coal.
China is doing an extreme amount of jobs programs. All those ghost cities are there to employ construction workers first, sell capital to wealthy individuals and eventually be populated by immigrants. They also loan money to developing countries and build infrastructure for them.
>Are we so lacking in innovation that we cannot come up with sustainable development models?
Well, yes. We Americans are fat, lazy and comfortable. 70 years of being on top will do that to you. But we are still voracious, even in old age, and will happily burn resources on our vanity, greed, and, perhaps worst of all, mere convenience. We are not willing to inconvenience ourselves to address global threats. (And that alone is enough to disqualify us from any kind of global leadership role.)
(In fact I believe it was a twin existential threat that led them to loose their minds. Global climate change requires of Democracy what I call a "voluntary contraction". This is impossible to accept by the many people in this culture who feel entitled to earn/consume even more than their parents, and their grandparents, because it's been that way for 80 years. Sustainability changes this; it means accepting that you'll have less material wealth than your parents. The other threat is more personal: politically correct thought policing from the left, complete with mob enforcement through cancel culture. Together these threats might be powerful enough to cause a delusion in which one is saved from reality by a reality TV star.)
> Sustainability changes this; it means accepting that you'll have less material wealth than your parents
There is actually more wealth to be gained for the average person because green investments can be an effective domestic jobs program. Central bank money is merely increasing the relative value of wealthy people's assets. So it's a net loss for the working class. If wealth inequality grows by 2x they owe the rich twice as much.
If that money could be channeled in a way that pays the income of workers and actually gets spent it would mean that economic growth will come back and incomes will grow over time instead of stagnating.
That is, unless we put actual scientists in political power who understand that helping fund solar in Nigeria and elsewhere will be a net positive for your own economy by simple aversion of several economic disasters due to climate change.
I wonder if they've done that analysis and found that it wouldn't actually be worth it. My concern is that those threat models might not be great at factoring in the cost of the end times.
>helping fund solar in Nigeria and elsewhere will be a net positive for your own economy
The issue here is probably that there are so many people on earth you'd have to invest in so many places that you'd be a poor country before getting any returns.
Well, in theory that would be the case. In practice as long as you invest printed central bank money carefully you can actually make a nice return. However I don't see why any country would have an obligation to invest into foreign infrastructure. It would be more politically acceptable to solve domestic problems first.
> Nigeria isn't going to wait decades to build a solar plant when they can build several coal power plants right now.
Solar is cheaper & quicker to build & run than coal plants. And it can be built incrementally and start generating power and profits very quickly, compared to traditional power plants, which are large construction projects that don't generate power or profit until after they're completed.
And without grid scale storage, which doesn't exist, solar at noon is about as useful as coal in the middle of Australia. Renewable only is a pipe dream and is distracting from the fact that we need to build nuclear plants if we want to have a planet by the end of the century.
> While alternative energy is rapidly advancing, Nigeria isn't going to wait decades to build a solar plant when they can build several coal power plants right now.
It is _faster_ and _cheaper_ for Nigeria to build a solar plant right now. [0] We've crossed over that line.
It's actionable. Maybe it takes a lot of rehashing to get through, but still. Lots of these people voluntarily give up cars, big houses etc already, and more are partial to making carbon caps / policies that result in carbon neutrality.
New coal plants are not economical compared to solar in any sunny location, Nigeria definitely included. It's cheaper in many places to build new solar compared to operating existing coal plants - that's how bad it's got for coal.
Coal is on the way out and nothing can stop that now.
>Historically, the only way countries have been able to lift themselves out of poverty is by burning fossil fuels for energy
I think this is only because historically, the only realistic way to produce energy for a lot of nations was by burning fossil fuels. No poor nation 70 years ago would be able to construct a nuclear plant or build a massive dam. Now, we have renewable sources available for a much lower upfront cost than what was available historically.
Are the richest 10% responsible for half because each percentile generates 5% or because the 1% generates 49% and the other 9% basically generate nothing?
Please go by sovereign nation. China is the world's largest contributing country to CO2 emissions—a trend that has steadily risen over the years—now producing 10.06 billion metric tons of CO2 (and increasing). US is half of that and falling further. India is at #3 with half of US emissions.
Honestly, after seeing how poorly scientists botched modeling covid-19 infection/death rates, I just get how it's possible to model something like this which is several decades in the future and have confidence in your prediction.
I don't know, the IPCC 2005 models are really accurate (you have to take the "if nothing is done" line).
But i guess 15 years is not enough for you.
Well, it's simple. Look at BP scientist model in the late 70's and look how much we diverged. 40 years, if the model is false you will see it fast no?
Since you're a skeptic, you have to follow the rule: look at the evidence that say you're wrong before looking at the evidence that say you're right. Luckily, those models can be the evidence of both at the same time, so you only have to do your own research twice!
Did they botch them or did they make the best predictions possible with the information available at the time?
What's the alternative, to only act when you have 100% certainty about anything? Would doing absolutely nothing between the beginning of 2020 and now have resulted in better or worse outcomes for Covid?
I'm having a hard time nailing down the math. I know that the estimate is that we were at 280ppm pre-industrial, and that one recent reading was 412ppm. I think that corresponds to 2187 GTCO2 and 3217 GTCO2 respectively. But the IPCC - a while ago - said we had to stay below 2900 to have a 2/3 chance of remaining below 2 degrees. Another source says we're at 2300 anthropogenic GTCO2 now. How do I square that math? I know that there's a difference between "total" GTCO2 and anthropogenic GTCO2, and I also know that the planet absorbs about 55% of anthropogenic.
Oh... I think I got it. 3217-2187 = 1030 anthropogenic in the atmosphere, and 55% will get reabsorbed, so that put us at the 2289 total that won't get reabsorbed. And since we emit 37.1 per year (figure probably out of date), and 45% of that sticks around, we have about 36 years before we go past 2900 (at this rate). Although I'm not sure if that reabsorption is already figured in to the 37.1 figure.
To clarify... 2289 is the amount anthropogenically emitted, before reabsorption (whatever the correct term is). 1030 is the amount left behind after reabsorption.
The (probably out of date) IPCC guideline is to stay under 2900 emitted, and the 37.1 is how much is emitted per year, so those numbers don't have to take absorption into account.
Therefore, the difference is 611, or about 16.5 years from whenever that measurement was taken. So, roughly - 2036. The world needs to be carbon neutral by 2036, according to that math. (And those numbers are behind the science in more recent articles, which are implying overshoot and that 2 degrees is inevitable.)
Slowing the growth of greenhouse gas emissions isn’t enough, we need to be net negative, but we don’t have the technology to capture and sequester 40 billion metrics tonnes of greenhouse gases per year, every year.
I would say we have the tech, we just don't have the political will to do so. We could have turned most of the world into using nuclear power if we wanted. We could have overbuilt nuclear to pay the energy costs required for mass carbon sequestering. We could still do it today. But not without the political will to fund massive energy projects that go beyond merely satiating our consumer demands.
I’m really not surprised by this news : Unfortunately, global warming is consubstantial with human activity. In fact, the only thing that is ecological, is poverty. I'm not trolling, I'm serious : By the laws of physics, the richer you are, the more you consume, the more you pollute by producing CO2. All the people who tell you that you can keep the same GDP while producing less CO2 are wrong.
Emissions are going down in many countries and their GDP isn't shrinking. In fact, if you invested more in emission reductions you could probably increase GDP growth.
Is that true? Is it still true if you take into account that the CO2 emissions are maybe emitted say in China, to produce the goods of those supposedly virtuous countries?
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[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 70.2 ms ] threadIf yes, it sounds like something to keep in mind, i.e. it's not like we still have much of a CO2e budget remaining or time to waste (we'll have to take back out of the air what we put in from X years ago onwards), but at the same time it will also take many many years to get to dangerous warming levels (if we stopped emitting on an extremely optimistic schedule) and at some point between "in a while" and "in a few centuries" we have to suck those greenhouse gasses back out of the air to not have this effect run its full course. So this isn't "turns out we're doomed after all" as the headline suggests, just a further-into-the-future calculation that tells us what kinda already made sense (the long tail until settling on a new temperature average).
And yes, the tail effects of global warming beyond our usual time horizon of 2030/2050 were already known.
It's also a while out. We have bigger issues today than "who's gonna suck back out some CO2 once we cut emissions sufficiently". We'll get to that in due time.
For what it's worth, if you have unavoidable emissions today that you want to compensate, and want to also fund the people working on CO2 capturing technology, see https://climeworks.shop for a pay-what-you-want option. I don't really believe in planting trees (which is way cheaper per ton of CO2 it claims to absolve you of), and these machines apparently emit "only" 10kg for every 100kg of CO2 captured (90% effective sounds reasonable), and it's accounted for who claimed which share of the machine's captured volume so it sounds directly effective to me. It's just that the scale is peanuts and will remain so until public bodies and companies start to run out of emission reduction options and decide to use it - but at that point we better have this tech geared up.
Maybe this is a stupid question, but isn't the necessary tech "planting trees"?
So, yes, it’s an option. But it’s a slow option we’d need to start implementing immediately if we wanted it bear fruit.
(We produce enough CO2 that it takes 40 billion hardwood trees growing for 40 years to sequester as much CO2 as we make in a year. We’d have to plant a lot of trees, and then not touch them for years, to affect the course of things)
Hence why you need to cut them down and bury.
And, BTW, trees don't stop growing. They keep adding mass in their trunks. Literally the first google hit for "do trees stop growing": https://earthsky.org/earth/what-makes-a-tree-stop-growing
Edit: guess what? They even grow faster as they get older! https://www.npr.org/2014/01/16/262479807/old-trees-grow-fast...
Anyway, the land we have is limited. You literally can't cover the planet in one big forest to capture the gigatons of carbon we have released. You have to do active forest management and store the carbon somewhere stable, for example as biochar.
Basically we see plateaus where large increments of reagent do nothing, then a massive abrupt shift as the buffering potential of the system fails.
It's been disolving a lot of CO2 for us, but at some point, it'll reach an equilibrium and our air concentration of CO2 will go up much faster
I'm the kind of person that annoys all the Germans by driving 95km/h on highways because it cuts fuel emissions nearly in half compared to the recommended speed of 130km/h. We don't even pay for fuel, that's paid by my SO's employer, it's purely because it adds like 10% of time on most trips (those 2-3 minutes are negligible) and allows me to visit family without feeling as bad about individual transport (public transport isn't really an option here for trips further than the next city over, extremely poor connections even by German standards). Or wear extra clothing and put a blanket over my legs while working and see how low we can put the heater. Or not heat the bedroom at all during fall/spring and take a hot water bottle up to get warm under the blanket (must be way more efficient than heating the whole room up). In short, yep I'm with you on not gambling on these estimates. But I'm also for nuance and being realistic lest someone claims that "ökos" / climate weirdos hugely exaggerated again and it's all not so bad. I find it tricky.
I tried to do the same thing. Yes, individual actions have CO2e costs. It's not you, nor me, nor all of HN together that even can do anything impactful. Setting an example at best. (But then simply presenting a united coherent "yes carbon tax, yes ASAP, yes 125 USD/t" to everybody we discuss this with would probably help more.)
That said, irrational alarmism is its own kind of hell.
That said, I was actually just writing about the topic of planting trees :)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25680156
> For what it's worth, if you have unavoidable emissions today that you want to compensate, and want to also fund the people working on CO2 capturing technology, see https://climeworks.shop for a pay-what-you-want option. I don't really believe in planting trees (which is way cheaper per ton of CO2 it claims to absolve you of), and these machines apparently emit "only" 10kg for every 100kg of CO2 captured (90% effective sounds reasonable), and it's accounted for who claimed which share of the machine's captured volume so it sounds directly effective to me. It's just that the scale is peanuts and will remain so until public bodies and companies start to run out of emission reduction options and decide to use it - but at that point we better have this tech geared up.
I do need to sleep still tonight (0230 here) so I won't now type out (on mobile) the reasons I don't think trees are a reliable option. And by tomorrow it won't matter anymore, nobody will read it (I don't like the ephemerality of HN/reddit threads.) So these are my 2ct, hope I could clarify my reasoning as I will go sleep now.
Currently I prefer reforestation (or even better yet restoration of swamplands), because it's partly EU funded, so there's a small multiplier effect, and there's still a lot of land for "low hanging" forests, which help with local climate patterns a bit.
I'm aware of what >>we<< need to do, and I'm already working on the better heating/insulation part. But individual action is nothing compared to advocacy in terms of impact.
EU reforestation, google autocompleted it halfway to eu funding for reforestation :o
"During the current 2014-2020 funding period the programme will contribute approximately €3.4 billion more.
The LIFE programme is divided into two sub-programmes, one for environment (representing 75% of the overall financial envelope) and one for climate action (representing 25% of the envelope)."
https://lifereforest.com/life-programme/
"Some EUR 8.2 billion has been earmarked for the 2015-2020 period (27% for reforestation, 18% to make forests more resilient and 18% for damage prevention)."
https://www.europarl.europa.eu/factsheets/en/sheet/105/the-e...
One is painful in the lifestyle, one in the wallet, and both are drops in the bucket compared to changes on a civilizational level.
Which isn't to say you or anyone shouldn't pursue your own sense of moral behavior, quite the opposite in fact.
I would even say that using a normal amount of, say, electricity, but offsetting it with carbon capture, has one advantage: using a subnormal amount makes power fractionally cheaper for others.
But by how much? Well... by about the amount of difference any one set of human actions makes.
I'm not cold. I am someone who easily gets cold: I sit still 14 out of 16 hours every day, and I'm also way too selfish to let myself be cold all day every day.
It would neither be sustainable nor a good example for others.
No, I'm warm, sometimes too warm, and the room is currently at 17°C. Still a far cry from climate neutral of course, but a (to me) respectable percentage better than the 21-22°C I used to require as recently as last winter (I just hadn't looked into layering my clothing before, it was surprisingly simple to lower my thermal need by 5°C).
> an individual choosing to [do uncommon things]
Not only does it make me feel better, it also means I have first-hand experience to tell others what they could do and what impact it has had for me. The 2 extra minutes a 20-minute trip takes are mostly peanuts while saving a sizable amount of CO2 as well as money (most people pay for their fuel). I will still drive fast when I am in a rush, but for all regular trips you can choose to do this without leaving much earlier at all.
I think that perspective might help others consider their own choices. If nobody did this, it would be weird and abnormal. Now that they hear my experience, it's less so. I'm still an outlier, but it takes only one more person to set a trend.
This is of course an optimistic view and I'm well aware of that, but the alternative is doom and gloom, saying we realistically won't do anything anyway, why bother. I dunno, just seems nicer to me to try rather than accept failure beforehand. I can only do what I can do, and this is something I can do (walk the walk, then talk the talk).
(Anecdotal addition)
A friend became vegetarian for climate reasons. They drive on the highway at a literal 200km/h (125mph). Knowing that I also eat less meat and do other things towards the climate, upon hearing how fast I drive and what impact a 25% speed reduction already has, I noticed that they at least looked rather thoughtful for a minute. Will they change their habits? That's not up to me and I don't ask after it, but they at least thought about it and it will be a more conscious choice now. They might also be less likely to boast about their driving habit as they previously did, less normalizing such things.
Perhaps also not, what do I know. I just notice that a lot of people around me are making better choices in one area or another. Some use more plastic to better preserve food; it's often a trade-off. I use more clothing to preserve heat. I'm just happy that people are sharing ideas and trying new things.
Sure, it's nothing of what we'll have to sequester, but - as I already mentioned - currently it's quite a low hanging fruit.
I have a configurable display that shows average fuel consumption per 100km, momentary fuel consumption per 100km, kilometers remaining with available fuel, or some other value that I forgot about.
It's always set to the momentary fuel consumption and I have a good idea about how much things like grades (in/declines), wind, acceleration, etc. impact the consumption. The consumption per 100km is not the best measure for acceleration or idling (more useful would be something like "ml used in last 10 seconds"), but it give me some indication. Using the cruise control to accelerate (when safe; e.g. on steep uphill highway on-ramps you need to shift down and put that pedal down to get to a more safe merging speed) it's limited to about 8-9l/100km which is pretty good (many Germans consider such amounts normal for their cruising speed, let alone accelerating).
So any warming effect will only last centuries, not thousands of years.
Earth’s climate has never and will never “eventually settle” regardless of the existence of humans.
Within a few thousand years, there are already cycles visible. If that's what you refer to, then I just mean to generalize that cycle to a new average. E.g. if we cycled between 19°C and 21°C every 11 years due to the solar cycle, then that would be shifted to 21-23°C instead. (I'm making these numbers up, they're just examples of what kind of effect I mean.)
Beyond those thousands of years, even if we're considering the sustainability of our climate even if we had never discovered the use of fire in the first place, yeah there is no "eventually settle" of course. It will change depending on things like the sun burning out, asteroids hitting, other geological shifts, changes in who inhabits the world, etc. That seems beyond the scope of the discussion, we can't simply change that by changing our habits.
To be blunt: we've fucked it up already, and anything we do to "fix" world ecology at this stage is going to be characterized as something like terraforming. We aren't ever going back to "normal" in our lifetime or our grandkids'.
I agree that it seems likely that we'll have to do some sort of geo-engineering in the future. But if you mean that as an excuse to not even try and just let future generations undo everything with hopefully better tech and a world in chaos, then I vehemently disagree. I don't even have kids nor plan on ever having any, it's just immoral (and perhaps it's my way of finding purpose in life to help fix a problem humanity is facing).
At risk? It seems like they never looked at that Princeton study that stated it had already taken place in 2014 [0].
Personally speaking it took the 2008 crisis to finally force me to accept this truth, the US is a corpo-facist State with a very well traveled revolving door between politics and certain 'Private' Industries that benefit the most of from favourable policy and legislation as their lobbying budgets reflects that--banking, schooling, pharma/medical, and most blatant of all military contractors spanning everything from fastfood chains that supply on base meals, to mercenaries for hire (Blackwater/Xe) to weapons manufacturing (Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Ratheon et al).
When you look back at how every crisis before and after 2008 was handled in just my lifetime, be it the opioid epidemic, dotcom bubble before that in the 2000s to the wallstreet corruption and Iran Contra and crack crisis in the 80s their is very little consequence for their corporate and political affiliates, where as entire generations of the populace are let to their own devices.
I hate to to say this, as I wish we could just bypass it entirely already a logical decesion, but short of stopping the CCP expanding its far more dysfunctional form of tyrannical Imperialism (and disregard for the environment) acting as a deterrent in South Asia the US has no real function anymore in anything that matters, and we would benefit from hastening the transition from this pointless archaic and clearly Oligarchical nation state model as soon as possible to a Global confederation so we can start solving real issues on the Global level that demand all of our attention: specifically pertaining to climate change and the fallout from just that alone.
It really fills me with dread that we can't figure this very obvious problem all while we are trying to tackle being a multi planetary species.
Boeing just got hit with a $2.5B with a deferred prosecution fine and no criminal prosecutions mentioned for conspiracy of fraud when employees intentionally lied to the regulators. For any pleb or small business owner this is a sure way to get all your assets seized in a 'slam dunk' case ending in federal prison, but this is a MegaCorp with cronyist assurances from DoD and NASA contracts so expect more sweet heart contracts to come their way to recover far more than this in the near future.
What a joke...
0:https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-poli...
Unfortunately Earth's climate is one of those complex systems where a single temperature in a single location at a specific time doesn't give much information about how desirable conditions will be for humanity generally in future years.
I’m not an expert, but I have a dual masters in math and cs. If you listened to these people 30 years ago, you would expect we would all be engulfed in a fire ball by now. It hasn’t happened. Almost none of the past predictions have turned true. Ever. I’m not going to start now and these people need to be held accountable for studies that they did in the past that didn’t work
Also, sorry for offending everyone’s ministry of science
"Retrospectively comparing future model projections to observations provides a robust and independent test of model skill. Here we analyze the performance of climate models published between 1970 and 2007 in projecting future global mean surface temperature (GMST) changes. Models are compared to observations based on both the change in GMST over time and the change in GMST over the change in external forcing. The latter approach accounts for mismatches in model forcings, a potential source of error in model projections independent of the accuracy of model physics. We find that climate models published over the past five decades were skillful in predicting subsequent GMST changes, with most models examined showing warming consistent with observations, particularly when mismatches between model‐projected and observationally estimated forcings were taken into account."
Just look at this graph comparing the predictions from 1990 to the actual observations: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intergovernmental_Panel_on_Cli...
It's wild how many people believe this is still "in dispute" but then again, that's what Exxon and Chevron paid big bucks for, nonstop merchants of endless doubt.
Perhaps murica is, as usual, an outlier among generally educated countries, but let's not pretend like there is too much dispute to get things done on this topic, or that denying it is anything more than a conspiracy theory with a vocal troll/joke aspect to it as well as a couple of real conspiracy theorists.
The biggest problem is that people don't believe they can do anything. A family member of mine wants to put a solar park in a nearby field. "Great!" I said, "I'll chip in!" Realizing I wasn't doing it for monetary gain (I don't live nearby enough to really profit from it), they then told me to not be "more catholic than the pope" (not sure if that translates well) and wouldn't accept the money I wanted to put towards this directly effective good cause. They (singular) are not doing it for the climate, they don't believe it will make a difference. They think it's a good investment for their own riches. But they don't think climate is a non-issue, just that they can't do anything about it, nor believe that there would be a sufficient majority to collectively (i.e. have the government) do something about it.
I mean, they're right about this being absolute peanuts, but the presence of solar fields and wind turbines also sends a message to those who learn of it: we can do this, we are doing things, it is economical, let's go for it.
I mean any advertisement comment thread, as in fairly general targeting, on Facebook or Instagram that even remotely references climate change is flooded to the brim with kooks and nativist conspiracy theories.
It's just an avalanche of fruitcakes and unhinged wackos.
Hundreds, sometimes thousands of people talking about scientist conspiracies and just the looniest stuff. Sometimes the comments are effectively 100% cranks and wackos. It seems to be much more mainstream than I'm comfortable acknowledging
Nobody ever said fireball, but the average temperature moving multiples of degrees is already materializing in real world measurements.
Once again, can you link to a significant (say, a fifth) share of the papers on this topic at the time that claim that? Or if that's not what you mean by "these people", how about even a single one?
> these people need to be held accountable for studies that they did in the past that didn’t work.
If there are such papers, did anyone ever show that a single one of these did not the best they could with the information available at the time? Again, any sort of analysis (of your own or by anyone else) that shows negligence or anything of the sort would give your ideas some sort of credibility.
Could you link to a meta-analysis of climate research that shows this?
IF I had told anyone 10 years ago that a large mob is going to attack Congress and Senate will have to evacuated and a guy dressed up as Viking and shirtless would seat in Speaker s chair people would call me stupid. More such surprises exist in history and in future.
Climate change is a non issue if we humans invents a far cheaper and cleaner source of energy. We can use that energy to literally suck and filter out CO2 from air.
The problem is we have to actually do it.
The only cheaper energy source (that include pilotability) would be nuclear. Its not as portable, but it exist. Fission is limited (not really, but minerals will be expensive to mine after a while).
So We have Fusion left. ITER will be up before 2028 hopefully. We just found a better way to make our fusion magnetic fields, so this is not a pipedream. BUT even this advance is not enough for sustainable fusion. We have to find an even better way to create our magnetic fields, sustainable under high temperature (probably with high pressure). We recently found a supraconductor that is interesting because it work at "high" temperature (high for physicien is death for people), high pressure. sadly we don't understand shit about all those new supraconductor, we don't even understand CuO supraconductors yet.
If we have fusion in 2080, it will be because we invested heavily for this (and we're not). And it is a silver bullet, that we're not allowed to miss, or else.
We are signing checks without provision unless we find the right tech, at the right time. My guess is that some will have to pay. Most of us here aren't to concerned (i know i'm not, probably only people living close to the Ohio river should be less concerned than me), but people living in Florida and south of Texas will want to buy a climatised suit if they hope to be able to be out more than 10 day a year by 2080.
There is no need to make any such assumptions. As I have pointed out just because you and me can't see it right now does not mean something else wont be there. World is complex.
Think logically. The paper is there to look at, as is the data.
I understand not trusting scientists, I disagree and think it's a bad idea, but understand why someone would not.
Not trusting science is a whole different ballgame.
All warnings about catastrophic consequences have been laughably wrong. Joke material, really.
Like that one about the earth becoming unlivable by 2020. Now I see the same predictions but for 2030, 2070, 2100 and whatever. So funny.
Yeah. I don't see that happening.
It's not real. It's a hoax. Even if it's real, it's not nearly as bad as they say, and it'll cost too much and kill jobs. Even if it's as bad as they say, it's too late to do anything about it, we're powerless.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nSXIetP5iak
1. Electrify everything.
2. Lots of nuclear (fission), with fusion sooner rather than later.
3. Carbon capture.
Well, not quite. If we had started back when climate change became clear mid-20th century, #3 wouldn't have been needed. But now, it is indeed the only option, and it will be very expensive. And the more we delay, the more expensive it'll become. We are basically screwing over future generations who will have to pay our debts.
By definition this would be keynesian gold digging. Pay people to do something that has very little economic benefits for the individual doing it and it's not in competition with any other private industry. It's basically an extreme example of a luxury.
People who have the most power to reduce carbon emission are the same people who are least eager to do so.
The future of energy is in storage.
Sometime in the future, coal and oil will run out. We, as a society, have to develop sustainable means of generating energy.
5. Let the economy stall, it will at some point anyway.
There's also a point 6, which is reduce and then stabilize the global population at sustainable levels. Having fewer humans around is simply the easiest way to consume less while allowing a reasonable standard of living.
Humans are by nature pro-growth. Any policy which works against that needs to account for it, which they never do.
Also populations stabilize when you reach a certain standard of living, which is exactly why the environmental mentality should be pro-growth – get to that point as soon as possible, and use that extra manpower to get to carbon neutral as soon as possible with the three things I listed. You don't need 4, 5, and 6. Simpler plans are always better.
Populations don't stabilize due to growth. They stabilize when the standard of living reaches a point where having many children stops making sense. If only there was a way we could share our prosperity with everyone.... hmm. Is that called capitalism? Why, no, it is not.
We're not a virus on the Earth; we're cancer. Cancer only kills people if it grows too fast. For example, many men die with prostate cancer, while relatively few die of it.
Blanket statements like this almost never help. They readily fall in danger of presenting a moralistic or normalizing argument in debate, which require zero baseline. If you're going to debate people you need to provide an actual solution that doesn't just say, "stop what you're doing", "you're the problem", etc...
Conservation may have worked sometime in the 60's or earlier, however, economies would've stalled and our present would likely be quite different. It is possible to engineer our way out of climate change, but it will take the best minds being 100% committed to it and incentives that align to it.
Guess what the best way to get to a post-scarcity economy is? You guessed it, growth. Innovation. Progress. Not stalling it.
I may have agreed with you before capitalism pissed away our future. But, we just don't have the time left, and we must sacrifice in the short term to save the long term. These are facts. If we don't take drastic action now, climate change will abolish capitalism for us in a few decades. Is that what you want?
We're neither a virus nor a cancer. We're the only thing that matters. The earth doesn't care if it dies. It doesn't have feelings. The last [insert endangered species here] doesn't know that it is the last of its kind, it doesn't care either. The only reason these things matter is because people care. The solution is therefore never going to be "make people's lives worse".
If humanity can't accept the temporary reduction of some people's standard of living to save civilization, then there is no hope. Therefore, I choose to believe you are wrong here.
Incidentally, the people who have made everyone's life worse aren't those who are going to fix the situation. They're those who kept borrowing from future generations to make their lives better.
> If humanity can't accept the temporary reduction of some people's standard of living to save civilization, then there is no hope
Citation very much needed. You asserting that we need to reduce certain people's SoL is not the same as demonstrating such, and neither you nor anyone else has done so.
Don't know who you're referring to with your last statement, but OK.
Show me you're willing to be convinced, and I'll give you every citation you need.
We know how to generate power with minimal CO2 emissions, but we don't do it at the necessary scale. We know how to recycle, but we don't actually do that, either, and it takes energy. And, capturing carbon... well, if you want to put the carbon genie back in the bottle, you have to either expend energy to do it, or violate the laws of thermodynamics. One cuts into the amount of energy you can consume, while the other is an impossibility. All this is just making the argument that we need to share the technology to do these things as broadly as possible, including throughout the global south.
Do you or do you not believe there's a finite amount of energy we can expend and still remain sustainable? Essentially, we're limited to biomass (which puts carbon back in the air that was taken out of the air previously), nuclear, gravity (hydroelectric, more or less), and solar (solar panels, wind). To go past that, we need to get into fossil fuels, and be very, very careful we don't exceed the ability of the Earth to absorb the CO2 we put in the air. Unfortunately, we're coming close to exceeding the capacity of the Earth to absorb any nontrivial amount of CO2 and still remain broadly habitable, which is why we're having significant warming over the past several decades. As you said, humans are very pro-growth, which means we're really bad at respecting these sorts of limits. So, we need to remove the temptation to do so ASAP if we are to succeed.
As for innovation, you just told me we have all the technology necessary to go net zero carbon, so, who cares about innovation in the short term? Do you want to watch the collapse of global civilization on your iPhone 15, or something?
Honestly, as long as you're going to sit there and tell me we can capitalism our way out of a problem that was caused by capitalism, you're not convincing me that you can be convinced otherwise. You're literally espousing a position that capitalists refer to as "capitalist realism," which is essentially "we can't conceive of any alternative to capitalism, so, there is no alternative!"
You know the definition of insanity, right? Tell me again why it makes sense that we're going to capitalism our way out of this?
You rightly point out this is an energy problem. That is why we need to go full tilt on nuclear. Nuclear can generate vast amounts of energy with near zero CO2 emission and also without requiring vast swaths of land (solar), localized geological features (hydro), etc.
Finally, I haven't proposed we "solve this with capitalism". Please go back and re-read my first comment, where I say we need to solve this with:
1. Electrify everything.
2. Lots of nuclear (fission), with fusion sooner rather than later.
3. Carbon capture.
Nowhere is capitalism stipulated. Of course, I do actually think capitalism is the way to go, because it is the best system we've ever invented for promoting efficiency, which is obviously a good thing in this discussion. But that was not the point I was making.
Electric cars seem to be viable, so it's really only interesting for planes right now.
Algae capturing carbon and falling to the bottom of the ocean seems so obvious and so easy and scalable!
Right now, people can afford to spend national budgets paying for global benefits (co2 reduction). When things get difficult, those programs will be the first to go...
Not enough people have been paying attention.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/dec/02/worlds-r...
[2] https://www.cnbc.com/2018/11/07/how-much-money-you-need-to-b...
[1]: https://oxfamilibrary.openrepository.com/bitstream/handle/10...
I think the real resistance, is the drug of indignation. Folks are manufacturing it all the time, latching onto anything they can find to get spun up about. With negligible attention to facts. Its the one constant in our brave new world.
Global PV production capacity is ~170GW per year, current fossil generation capacity in Africa is about 135GW. Not outlandish to get that replaced in short order while accounting for growth. Want it done faster? Build more PV manufacturing capacity. The product is glass and silicon with a hint of rare earths. PV panels are almost 100% recyclable.
Overbuilt renewables should be used to sequester atmospheric carbon instead of curtailing (throwing excess renewables away when unneeded). It’s going to take an incredible amount of energy to stick all of that burned carbon from the last 100 years back into the ground.
TLDR “You must construct additional pylons.”
Countries like Australia have massive amounts of underutilized renewable energy that are not being used to their fullest extent combined with an American like obsession with cars.
We should be focusing on areas where easy wins can be made rather than looking at countries with the highest level of emissions which is a pointless statistic when they all have different population counts.
A ton of quick wins that amount to minimal real changes to total emissions isn't going to stop the earth from heating too fast
On the other hand, your point about solar vs coal is wrong. It takes less time now to build a solar power plant than a coal power plant. Especially for developing countries that don't already have substantial port and/or rail infrastructure. And this applies somewhat to natural gas, too. It's diesel that they tend to run for this reason. Solar, and now solar + storage, can compete just fine with diesel (and solar + storage + diesel is a pretty resilient combination that also can be built out super fast, is very cheap to build and operate, and also happens to get you to like 80-90% carbonfree... so there's decent hope out there).
As far as solar goes, clearly coal is cheaper than solar in Nigeria because that's what they're mostly building now. Regulations and subsidies are what make solar cheaper than coal in the US.
Edit: To be clear, I'm completely in favor of coal being replaced by renewables. I'm just pointing this out to raise awareness of the economic realities that are incentivizing coal power in developing countries.
https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-...
https://www.irena.org/newsroom/pressreleases/2020/Jun/Renewa...
That said, I think this analysis misses two important factors when it comes to impoverished countries. Otherwise, you would see more solar there. Developing countries have much lower standards when it comes to building a new power plant, so don't need to pay for sulfur scrubbers. The other factor is that unskilled labor much cheaper there. Solar and wind require much higher-skill labor as there is much more maintenance that needs to be done.
Are you sure that the steam turbine (high RPM, balancing, thermal stress to blades, steam conditioning) is easier to maintain than a electric generator or an array of photovoltaics with control circuits?
https://www.abc.net.au/news/12990532
> The owners of Australia's newest coal-fired power station have written down the value of the asset to zero, wiping out a $1.2 billion investment in the face of an onslaught of renewable energy. ... The decision was booked in Sumitomo's September accounts, in which the company acknowledged the facility was worthless despite being barely 10 years old.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variable_renewable_energy#Comp...
I remember my department had a few very large grants for solar and wind integration studies. There is always some x profitable level to integrate into some portion of the grid. Before you actually start to lose money. Used to be around 30% in most cases a decade ago. Imagine it is bit asymptotic without improvements to the cost of energy storage. I would guess 40% in most cases now.
Found this: https://www.iea.org/articles/will-system-integration-of-rene...
Check out South Australia on OpenNEM [1]. Paired with natural gas and transmission, they're at an exceptionally high amount of renewables penetration [2] and have a very low cost of power in Australia [3]. They're also using a large, recently expanded, Tesla utility scale battery for ancillary/frequency response services [4] (previously profitably performed by natural gas generators), which is causing financial pain for those mentioned gas operators (who are having trouble profiting now on either the power provided or frequency response services).
[1] https://opennem.org.au/energy/sa1/?range=7d&interval=30m
[2] https://www.afr.com/policy/energy-and-climate/coal-generatio...
[3] https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2019/dec/24/south...
[4] https://hornsdalepowerreserve.com.au/
Phoenix and Las Vegas come to mind - places where incident solar flux and electricity demand (due to heavy air conditioner use) almost perfectly coincide (peaks are separated by only ~50 minutes)
As soon as you need to store energy wind and solar become much more expensive.
It’s even cheaper in third-world countries (and China) due to the cost of labor.
[1] https://www.brookings.edu/opinions/the-real-costs-of-u-s-ene...
Nigeria is closer to the equator and has lower labor costs for installation, so their solar costs will be even cheaper.
Like every industry in the last decade, coal generators have also become more efficient.
I’d be shocked (heh) if solar power becomes more efficient given the Shockley-Quessier limit of PV cells which have a maximum efficiency in the best theoretical case with an infinite stacking of panels of 30%. Large synchronous machines on the other hand, in practice, can have a 95% efficiency.
Here’s a study without the “carbon pricing”: https://energy.mit.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/MITEI-WP-2...
Again coal is much cheaper.
I’m sympathetic to your agenda but it’s deceitful and unfair to presume agreement given the unique circumstances theses results affect conclusions. A place like Nigeria has to worry about what’s happening to their people in the next month rather than in the next 50 years, thus they’ll have different trade offs to make.
Please stop parroting this. Coal is cheaper than solar in the same way that a house with no down payment is free. The environmental debt from coal's CO2 emissions will far exceed costs of solar.
Except that rich europeans got the "house with no down payment" for centuries, but now expect poor africans to put down a down payment? That's going to be a hard sell to poor africans desperate to get out of poverty.
> The environmental debt from coal's CO2 emissions will far exceed costs of solar.
Expecting poor africans to give a shit is going to be a real hard sell. Especially when the climate problem is almost exclusively a rich european creation and poor africans had nothing to do with it.
Caring about climate is an enterprise of the privileged few. Unless we are willing to subsidize billions of poor africans and others around the world to the tune of trillions of dollars, I think africans and everyone else are going to go with the lowest hanging fruit. It's 2021 and hundreds of millions of africans live with electricity today. Think about that. It's insane. Considering the centuries of suffering they endured, if they have to burn down the planet to get some semblance of good life, then so be it. Let europe live in mud huts for a few centuries.
https://www.aa.com.tr/en/africa/600-million-africans-go-with...
This kind of vindictive rhetoric is probably something we should try to avoid in times like these. Even if you’re just “trying to make a point”.
Really our only chance of solving the climate is doubling down on high tech. Turning Europe back centuries would be clearly counterproductive.
I can just buy an AC and pay for electric heating. I'm not so sure that every African can do that.
What you said is 100% right, just the tone was a bit harsh. Since this site mostly has people from rich countries who refuse to learn history and accept any blame, you will be downvoted.
If we want to find out what's cheaper in order to decide what it is more reasonable to build, we can't rely on the fact that something is actually being built as an argument. It's the other way around - first we decide what's better, then do it, otherwise whatever we do would be right since we're doing that.
Or - in this case - if you assume that those calculations were made and it was found that the coal is cheaper - and that's why they're building coal plants - then there is a question of discrepancy (coal is more expensive lately than solar according to <sources>), which needs to be addressed, otherwise it might be assumed that a mistake was made.
> Regulations and subsidies are what make solar cheaper than coal in the US.
Doesn't coal industry also receive subsidies, and aren't those subsides comparable or bigger than subsidies for solar? I'm not sure; are you?
I didn’t follow the logic there. Are you saying everything everyone does is right?
I dig that, but it’s a strange thing to see in an argument.
We can't assume a proposition is correct if we're trying to figure out if it's correct or not.
The post I'm replying to was in effect "coal is cheaper since they're building coal plants". I disagree, and show why the logic is "illogical".
Firtly, thats a circular argument:"clearly bloodletting works because everyone is using it"
Secondary, the argument is meanongless without a timespan - for example a hydroelectric dam is the chepest source of electricity ever, but is very expensive upfront: no private investor wants to fund that because their returns will take decades. Channel tonnel is profitable now, but initial investort got wrecked, etc.
A hypothetical asset that lasts forever has infinite ROI but if it takes you 200 years to make your money back noone will invest.
If someone said a coal plant is being built in Nigeria, my first thought that this is being forced on them by creditors that probably already own a bunch of coal.
You don't have to go to bat for china, you know. Does the fact that they have so much manufacturing make their emissions ok? If those manufacturing emissions we're instead from the US, would you make the same note?
Ok, so Saudi Arabia is responsible for America's emissions. Russia is responsible for Europe's emissions. America is responsible for China's emissions.
But let's just keep playing word games to deflect responsibility from China and make sure it's all America's fault.
Well that's because china was late to industrialization ( by 150 years ) has come from a low emission base. And even if ignore the fact that a significant chunk of china's emissions are dedicated solely to manufacturing goods/junk for the west, if we completely stopped all emissions, it would still take china many decades of emissions to catch up to the emission's put out by the west the past 200 years or so.
> China's per capita emissions have risen from 5.25 tCO2/capita in 2007 to 8.12t in 2019 while the UK's have dropped to now just 5.45tCO2.
That's deceptive since much of UK's emissions was export to china via manufacturing. It's like your roommate "cleaning" his room by dump his trash in your room.
Just by something as basic as "standard of living", it's a certainty that the west, and especially the UK, accounts for far more emissions on a per capita basis. It's impossible that on a per capita basis, a brit has lower emission footprint that a chinese person, indian, african, etc.
Certainly, we aren't any better here in the US. I remember watching a documentary that said that if everyone on earth lived like us, it would take like 5 additional earth's resources.
Total UK emissions including imported emissions have been falling since 2007.
https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/nationalaccounts/uksectoracco...
This is an interesting point, but I don't get the cause and effect scenario here.
What bothers me is the ideological trap that fossil fuels are the only resources that can be exploited to bring people out of poverty.
Are we so lacking in innovation that we cannot come up with sustainable development models?
Meanwhile people are 'investing' in bitcoin, and pumping meme stocks.
At this point the amount of self harm in the population is so great that there is nothing to be done. Is this the curse of right wing populism? Why do disenfranchised people love voting for people that don't care about them? Trump didn't win the election but he still had lots of support even though he was only looking out for himself (and others like him) during his presidency.
Green investments are such an incredibly easy way to implement jobs programs yet people hate on them because they believe not subsidizing anything is more important than solving real problems like domestic underemployment. Yes, when I talk about green investments I am not even considering how you are doing something for the planet, I'm just talking about the economic impact of building up a domestic industry. For all intents and purposes you could also have spent money on maintaining roads or building lots of houses for all I care but when you listen to someone like Trump he would spend it on useless crap like coal. There are very little employment opportunities (if you ignore the work needed to undo the CO2 emissions) in a dying industry. But hey, it's got high visibility and is an emotional topic so lets shoot renewables down in favor of it even though you had more to benefit from the "green scam" (hyperbole) than coal.
China is doing an extreme amount of jobs programs. All those ghost cities are there to employ construction workers first, sell capital to wealthy individuals and eventually be populated by immigrants. They also loan money to developing countries and build infrastructure for them.
Well, yes. We Americans are fat, lazy and comfortable. 70 years of being on top will do that to you. But we are still voracious, even in old age, and will happily burn resources on our vanity, greed, and, perhaps worst of all, mere convenience. We are not willing to inconvenience ourselves to address global threats. (And that alone is enough to disqualify us from any kind of global leadership role.)
(In fact I believe it was a twin existential threat that led them to loose their minds. Global climate change requires of Democracy what I call a "voluntary contraction". This is impossible to accept by the many people in this culture who feel entitled to earn/consume even more than their parents, and their grandparents, because it's been that way for 80 years. Sustainability changes this; it means accepting that you'll have less material wealth than your parents. The other threat is more personal: politically correct thought policing from the left, complete with mob enforcement through cancel culture. Together these threats might be powerful enough to cause a delusion in which one is saved from reality by a reality TV star.)
There is actually more wealth to be gained for the average person because green investments can be an effective domestic jobs program. Central bank money is merely increasing the relative value of wealthy people's assets. So it's a net loss for the working class. If wealth inequality grows by 2x they owe the rich twice as much. If that money could be channeled in a way that pays the income of workers and actually gets spent it would mean that economic growth will come back and incomes will grow over time instead of stagnating.
The issue here is probably that there are so many people on earth you'd have to invest in so many places that you'd be a poor country before getting any returns.
Solar is cheaper & quicker to build & run than coal plants. And it can be built incrementally and start generating power and profits very quickly, compared to traditional power plants, which are large construction projects that don't generate power or profit until after they're completed.
I sure know which one I want to bet the future of the planet on.
This doesn't mean you can't have nuclear, but it's no longer necessarily.
https://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/renewables/germanys-energie...
Acemoglu and Robinson's concept of "extractive elites" is useful here.[1]
1. http://whynationsfail.com/blog/2012/5/1/who-are-the-extracti...
It is _faster_ and _cheaper_ for Nigeria to build a solar plant right now. [0] We've crossed over that line.
[0] https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/a34372005/solar-che...
The richest 760 million people are responsible for half of all CO2 emissions.
I am imagine that includes the cars, big homes, the electricity, and all the products that we buy from China.
I’m not sure what you want us to do with that information. There’s nothing actionable in that observation.
We should’ve stopped using coal two decades ago. I’m sure we can spend all night talking about this, but it’s all been said before.
Making sure my manufacturered imports are carbon neutral will be difficult. All the other indirect emissions will also be hard to account for.
Not sure why you're calling this out. Container shipping is very efficient.
We have to look at the entire supply chain if we want to reduce our emissions.
Coal is on the way out and nothing can stop that now.
I think this is only because historically, the only realistic way to produce energy for a lot of nations was by burning fossil fuels. No poor nation 70 years ago would be able to construct a nuclear plant or build a massive dam. Now, we have renewable sources available for a much lower upfront cost than what was available historically.
But i guess 15 years is not enough for you.
Well, it's simple. Look at BP scientist model in the late 70's and look how much we diverged. 40 years, if the model is false you will see it fast no?
Since you're a skeptic, you have to follow the rule: look at the evidence that say you're wrong before looking at the evidence that say you're right. Luckily, those models can be the evidence of both at the same time, so you only have to do your own research twice!
What's the alternative, to only act when you have 100% certainty about anything? Would doing absolutely nothing between the beginning of 2020 and now have resulted in better or worse outcomes for Covid?
The (probably out of date) IPCC guideline is to stay under 2900 emitted, and the 37.1 is how much is emitted per year, so those numbers don't have to take absorption into account.
Therefore, the difference is 611, or about 16.5 years from whenever that measurement was taken. So, roughly - 2036. The world needs to be carbon neutral by 2036, according to that math. (And those numbers are behind the science in more recent articles, which are implying overshoot and that 2 degrees is inevitable.)