In reality, does anyone see anything other than a bad ending to all of this? I wish I could start a poll here, but does anyone really think there's still time? Really?
Political-economic forces, they're just not going to cave until it's too late. 10 years? Unless the economy fumbles soon Trump will have the next six of those. So, four left. Four damn years to change everything. I think a lot of the focus goes on reducing energy emissions because it's easy political blame gaming. But it's too late and it's not going to work. We're going to destroy the Earth while bickering about it.
Assume consumption will continue to rise, assume that oil will continue to own politicians. People will continue to consume, expect to maintain their standard of living off cheap goods shipped from China, heating for ever-larger homes, buying from companies with huge carbon footprints, and blaming others.
I think the reasonable thing to do is invest more in the cleanup scenario. But that doesn't score political gotcha points and it's not profitable /right now/, so that probably won't happen either.
Global warming isn't a black and white issue. Generally speaking each fraction of a degree the planet warms is worse than the last and even if we don't have much chance of actually containing warming at 2 degrees, let along 1.5, not letting warming go from 3.0 to 3.5 is still incredibly important.
We will certainly need to invest in cleanup. But how much we'll have to invest can be multiple orders of magnitude larger or smaller depending on the investments we make now.
We will wait until the very last minute to do anything significant, reacting rather than anticipating. Then, when the effects of climate change are completely undeniable, we will try work-arounds other than solving the underlying cause.
My thought is that we will eventually try to put a thin reflective material into space (or manufacture it in space in 20-40 years) to create some sort of semi-permanent sun-shield that reflects 2-5% of the sunlight we receive. It would have to be massive in area, but think of your car's sun visor on a hot day.
Putting particles into the atmosphere to do the same thing would also do the job but it could affect other things and cause more abnormal weather.
I don't see our use of fossil fuels or consumption of livestock slowing down. People make exceptions for themselves because they are the center and most important part of their own experience. "You can't get a man to understand something when his job depends on him not understanding it" - Upton Sinclair.
Also it's worth saying that Bill Gates should be able to do better than a tiny 1 billion (1/96th of his wealth) given the dire situation we are in. Actions taken earlier will have a larger impact toward mitigating climate change. 1 billion is like him tossing a penny at the problem. I'm sure Microsoft has contributed a large amount of CO2 to the atmosphere over time as well.
We can give up, or we can take action. The choice is ours. I still think popular pressure can make a difference, it's how every progressive action yet has come about.
Many countries are already onboard, China is realising very quickly how important the environment is. The US public is on the side of reducing emissions, I think the only thing left is to convince US elites and we can get there.
I'm hugely pessimistic, but I haven't given up. Everyone frustrated by lack of action is another potential protester locking themselves up in front of a fracking plant or daubing graffiti and disabling a pump at a petrol station.
Realistically I don't think there will be much real or adequate government action until the system we have is creaking at the seams. Dealing with migration from poorer parts of the world, dealing with the cost and chaos of weather events like floods and storms. Some actually buying land 500 ft above sea level, away from population centres. Governments having to choose between martial law or reelection will change views on global throwaway consumerism surprisingly quickly.
I also expect to see a rebirth in spending on navies, troops and border guards amongst the developed nations.
Nonetheless there comes a point (as yet unknown) where it becomes a choice of fix it or watch Rome burn. It might even reach a last minute point where it's clearly cheaper to fix it than keep ignoring it. By that time costs could easily be an order of magnitude higher, and far more dependent on geo engineering that might generate its own unforeseen problems.
But every tiny act from individuals might, just might, contribute to a tipping point before it gets that far.
> ... is another potential protester locking themselves up in front of a fracking plant ...
Isn't fracking responsible for a massive drop in coal use though? The increased amount of natural gas available means that wholesale prices for it have dropped, which has made coal-powered energy plants increasingly less viable financially compared to natural gas power stations. And natural gas, fracking and all, is far less of an environmental problem than coal is with all its mountain-top removal strip mining and cancerous, radioactive soot.
> I wish I could start a poll here, but does anyone really think there's still time? Really?
Climate change is not a black & white thing; it's a gradient of bad things. No, we're not going to avoid heavy costs (sea level rise, higher disasters, etc.), but we can avoid making those costs even higher.
Maintaining anything like our lifestyle in a low-carbon world requires widespread electrical energy storage. (Nuclear plants cannot load-balance by starting and stopping. Fusion is unlikely to overcome this limitation in the foreseeable future.) Such technologies are in their infancy.
Political and economic reform may not be happening at the pace it needs to, but developing energy storage technology will go a long way towards being able to implement the reforms when people are willing to accept them.
The same argument applies to lab-grown meat and some kinds of carbon capture for industrial processes that necessarily release CO2, particularly cement and steel production. Ensuring that we have the technology makes it easier to use it when people are willing to.
My guess is that we won't do much until there is widespread suffering like dislocation of people or wars. And even then not much will be done until the polluting nations will feel the heat.
My hope is that at some point new energy sources like solar or fusion will make fossil fuels obsolete so the problem may just go away.
I'm pessimistic about governments solving it through policy, but optimistic about science solving it. I'm particularly interested in technologies that sequester CO2, and I think this is a fantastic way to start setting prices for a carbon tax when things get worse. If all else fails, I've seen proposals for geoengineering that could work out in a reasonably short amount of time.
I'd prefer if we solved it through being responsible (plant more trees, stop cutting down the rainforest, move to renewable energy, etc), but I'm not all that worried in general.
I'm optimistic about renewable energy coming online fairly quickly, even optimistic about the transportation sector undergoing a vast transformation with the right pushes.
I'm less optimistic about people consuming less. Unless market forces make it more costly to toss away material, we're going to need an entirely new way of manufacturing a lot of different types of things.
CEB is possibly going to be a great alternative for concrete brick construction if it takes off based on the Boring Company. I'm not quite certain of the technical nature, but I understand this uses a minimal amount of concrete added to a highly compressed block of earth. Adobe construction has been used quite a lot in the past. (Probably won't work so well for skyscrapers). That being said, there are supposed to be alternatives here but scale is the main concern. Steel looks like it is going to be the main thing for a long time.
Politics are cyclical in nature, the next cycle will shift and we will likely see a radical shift in a lot of these policies. Will it be enough? Hopefully, but probably not everything.
My main concern, and I think about this quite often, is the sheer magnitude of our consumption and waste we produce every single day. Landfills need to be adapted to capture methane for one. But more than that, more products need to be made with compostable material.
I've seen a lot of recent food shops / juiceshops here in Austin that now provide compostable cups / silverware / packaging where nothing is provided in Sytofoam or plastic (all plant based material). It appears to be scalable and something I would love to see elsewhere with manufacturing / packaging.
Though I can also imagine a world where people will want to be able to get whatever they need nearly instantly. Maybe 3D metal printing will accelerate at larger scales and take into account better recycling / raw material breakdowns. That being said, it's argued that 3D printing is more environmentally sustainable as an additive manufacturing process rather than the traditional subtractive process of cutting and breaking down material to form and producing waste.
> A U.S. Department of Energy study confirmed that utilizing additive manufacturing can reduce material needs and costs by up to 90%. Along with waste savings, the DOE also found that 3-D printing can save energy, especially when a component that was previously made by combining several smaller parts is consolidated into one.
> https://www1.eere.energy.gov/manufacturing/pdfs/additive_man...
It's not going to be pretty, for sure, but we can still make a difference. Not emitting greenhouse gasses, as hard as it is, is still far cheaper than cleaning the mess afterwards.
It's hard to see how things can change right now, but if we can get the majority on board, I think we can see radical change happening quite quickly. The key point is that people must realize radical changes are required, now. Buying organic and recycling a few things isn't going to cut it.
I'm not very optimistic about the outcome in the coming few decades. But I'm hopeful.
When places like Miami, Norfolk, and Shanghai will be consistently overrun by tides, or when food supplies come under severe pressure, my hope is that there will be some kind of major wake up call and cleanup act. With the major polluters (the US and China in particular) leading the way forward with funding, bespoke technology, and (hopefully) clawbacks on the main polluters.
The central problem is convincing people that what they do actually makes a difference and it doesn't have to mean they cut their own throats for the greater good. People don't act because they think it involves a high personal cost without really making difference.
It doesn't require government intervention to change that.
Any mitigation action we take is worthwhile as it will reduce risks and future costs. I'm not optimistic we'll do enough to prevent serious change. But we can't give up on mitigation strategies as they could still make the difference between 'really bad' and catastrophic.
For all the reasons you give, bad things are going to happen. We don't have time to stop that, but if we start now, we can mitigate the severity of those bad things that do happen and prevent others. The cleanup scenario isn't an option in any respect if the earth is really screwed.
Do you think that things after Trump will be better? How much things improved when we changed from Bush to Obama, in most fundamental areas? We are talking about a different party, a different message, even a different skin color if you want. But still wars, economy, surveillance, care about climate and so on kept going in the same direction, and even got worse.
Something else will be a priority for our attention while the trends will keep going as usual, until is already too late to do something, or to force taking desperate measures (i.e. not fully understood geoengineering) that will do even more harm than doing nothing.
People in power don't need to fear the effects of climate change in their lifetimes, they can afford to live comfortably, and even profit over the ones that can't.
> In reality, does anyone see anything other than a bad ending to all of this?
Do I think we, collectively as humans, have the will and the actual resources to change everything about "our" modern way of life in 10 years? Nope. Not one bit. Should we stop trying? Nope, not one bit.
Do I think all living things will die? No. I do think large populations will die as a result of climate change, which means they will no longer be contributing to and accelerating the problem. I mean if 20% of the population (number out of thin air) die, that means the factories that generated the things those people were consuming wouldn't be needed, the food they would have eaten wouldn't be needed, etc. All resources those people were consuming, and the byproducts of creating those resources, would go away.
So, the "healing process" would start to accelerate and maybe after 100 years, we'll be back at the point where we get to do it all over again because we don't seem to collectively learn beyond what makes the most money the easiest way. "I know x is bad, but I gotta feed my family..." or "I refuse to see it as bad because that's my job and I don't want to feel badly about myself."
I think the sad fact that no one wants to really admit/mention is we are overpopulating the planet. I know, I know... "you could take the whole population of the US and put them in x state and they'll each have x acres," etc. But that doesn't take into account the factories generating pollution to create the things that sustain their lives, or the space it takes to grow the food to sustain them, etc.
I'm not a scientist nor a expert in this subject, but those are my layman impressions gathered over the last 45 years. People rarely change unless they are forced to, or it's too late. I hope I'm wrong.
Agreed. I wouldn't be so skeptical about the effects[0] if it wasn't because those researchers weren't being paid by big government, while recommending new taxes[1].
[0] it seems unlikely that humans have no influence on the environment. It equally seems improbable that we can predict sea levels half a century from now with any accuracy.
[1] before anybody puts words in my mouth, I reserve the same skepticsm for any other report coming out of the mouth of an institution which advocates it should have more funding...
[0] sounds like you're saying "my gut says its improbable that we can detect sea level rise 50 years ahead". Why does it seem that way? These scientists are using evidence for these estimates so they are not pulled out of the air.
[1] Are you going to remain skeptical without looking into it, seems more like you're dismissive rather than skeptical but maybe I am reading this wrong.? How could any researcher ever make the claim that something is a big issue and needs to be investigated further and fixed without triggering this skeptical reflex?
Re: "it seems unlikely that humans have no influence on the environment. It equally seems improbable that we can predict sea levels half a century from now with any accuracy"
Shouldn't there be evidence about how past climate predictions fared? Climate change has been a hot topic (pun somewhat intended) for decades. Since Carter's presidency at least. There should have been at least a few environmental predictions that we can verify in retrospect.
My suggestion is that every product should include environmental fact sheet, so that consumers could make better decisions. Every product should be tracked through the supply chain and every process including energy production and transportation would be included in the final product fact sheet.
If consumers would buy more environmentally friendly products, markets would direct every producer and supplier to be more environmentally friendly, without any other government intervention or sanctions. Just make it mandatory to be transparent and to include this information in every product. Put warning labels on products that have missing information.
Not just that. Companies should have to pay for their emissions. Like how we have to pay local government to take our garbage, companies should have to pay to pollute the planet. It's insane that Starbucks et al can produce as much waste as they want without any requirement to pay for the damage.
And the reason that makes sense is it isn't just about "punish the evil corporations!". If the emissions had a price, the price of the product would reflect that.
The method to calculate there fact sheets (or environmental footprints) is called life cycle assessment, and has been trying to come up with labels for a long time. There have been large projects by Walmart and Tesco, for example, to label all their products. The problem is data availability.
This is an area where the Hacker News community can help. There is an initiative to replace the closed-source databases used to calculate such labels called BONSAI: https://bonsai.uno/;https://github.com/BONSAMURAIS/bonsai (I am one of the volunteers). We are doing the best we can, but could really benefit from people with expertise in
* Semantic web/RDF (to design and populate the larger database)
* Text processing (to use the web as a source of data on production and consumption)
* Machine learning/remote sensing (to understand the spatial pattern of industry)
If people would make rational choices based on knowledge there would be no obesity (you have amount of calories on product labels).
People are aware that catastrophe is coming but they are in denial. It's just better to not think about it, like with death, you know it will come but you don't think about it, just carry with your life. And I can see the same exact thing with global warming when I talk to different people. It's better to think that I can't do nothing than think I can do something but I will need to change my style of life.
There are things one can do to live longer but they require sacrifices, do not eat bad stuff, exercise etc. For a lot of people price is too high. The problem is that in case of global warming those people are making choices for other people also.
There is no political will to change things, as every politician knows that the costs for that would be too high today. So that's why they think it's better to postpone this decisions, automatically making the cost a lot higher. There is also believe that someone will figure out a way to stop global warming in his basement and will save the humanity from itself. The problem is a lot more complex than just CO2, it's about the current economic model of the modern society in which we live. Constant growth and resource exploitation are not sustainable for long term.
Being "green" is not enough. You also have to be a conscious consumer of electricity. If 40% of the online green electricity is going to heating and lighting the empty houses of the rich, that is still not good. Excessive consumerism is still bad even if the entire process uses entirely green energy.
Further, this fact sheet should be accessible through an API, rolled up per company, person, and family, and exposed through easy to use applications so anyone could easily know the environmental footprint of any entity.
Awareness is the first step to solving any problem, and measurement and reporting would facilitate this. Perhaps we need more draconian laws that would force this on all corporations and individuals, considering the dire consequences.
The power required to track the entire human industrial supply chain using a block-chain algorithm would be so incredible that it would quickly dwarf any possible gains. It would in fact be a significant percentage of all total power consumption in the world.
How negatively would that impact the environment? More importantly how will you deal with people who will read such a fact sheet as how to "own the libs" and buy the worst environmental products?
That's just one easy example; the beef industry has long been associated with the oil industry by simple virtue of being relatively co-located in states like Texas and Oklahoma.
Legit question, though - are cattle actually carbon-neutral? I mean, where does their carbon come from? Eating plants, that were grown specifically to feed the cattle.
Which gets to another question, since I'm not bothering to research before asking... how much worse is methane than CO2 as a greenhouse gas, per carbon atom involved? Because that's basically what cows do. They convert atmospheric CO2 (via plants) into atmospheric methane (via farts).
As far as carbon neutrality goes, you’re drawing a conclusion about the value based only on the first derivative. If you hold livestock numbers constant (they’re increasing, alas, but let’s not worry about that yet) then there will be a rough equilibrium. However, the gas is in the atmosphere for some time until it gets fixed back into the soil, and continues to have a warming effect in the meantime.
Any carbon tax has to punish emissions. Net zero emissions isn’t enough anymore.
From wikipedia: Methane has a large effect but for a relatively brief period, having an estimated lifetime of 9 years in the atmosphere, whereas carbon dioxide has a small effect for a long period, having an estimated lifetime of over 100 years.
> Legit question, though - are cattle actually carbon-neutral?
The vast majority of beef produced is not carbon neutral. From the Beef Cattle Research Council [1] of Canada (not exactly an anti-beef organization):
"Presently, the economic conditions are favorable for the production of beef from grain in many regions of the world, largely because of the availability of inexpensive fossil fuels"
The plants you are referring to are produced with massive amounts of fossil fuel. By one estimate, each steer "consumes" 284 gallons of oil via feed during its lifetime [2]
On top of this, cows are one of the most inefficient ways to turn energy inputs into protein (10x less efficient than other types of meat, 100x less efficient than grain protein), primarily due to large size of the animals must be grown to before slaughter, which uses wastes a lot of energy. [3]
There is a large variance between the ratio of input energy to protein output of various types of meat, with lamb (57:1) and beef (40:1) being the least efficient, and broiler chickens (4:1) being the most efficient [4]
(Also without searching first) Methane is something like 50 times more effective as a greenhouse gas. That's after allowing for the fact it dissipates far more quickly, initially it's even more.
So even though it's a small part of emissions it's a significant constituent of climate change.
> where does their carbon come from? Eating plants
For Betty the cow on a small homestead sure.
Unfortunately modern agriculture is so fubar that it's hard to claim that as true. There are huge fossil fuel energy inputs from everything from chemical fertilisers, herbicides, transportation and processing. Not to mention the damage to the ecosystem that the massive mono-cultures this drives.
Methane is a far more potent greenhouse gas than co2, traps about 30x more heat per molecule. On the flip side, it’s half life in the atmosphere until it gets re-absorbed by the earth is on the order of decades, while co2 is on the order of millennia, so if you take the long view it’s not as bad.
In the steady state cows are carbon neutral. CO2 form the air forms grass, cows turn grass into methane, methane decays into CO2, repeat. But increasing the number of cows increases the amount of methane in the air at any given time and methane is a much more potent greenhouse gas than CO2. Likewise, reducing the number of cows would lead to a reduction in the amount of greenhouse gas in the air.
Methane in the atmosphere has a fairly short half life of 7 years so the effects of increasing or decreasing the number of cows is felt relatively quickly.
The problem is that the methane is a much more (30x) potent, although shorter term (10 year decay lifetime) than CO2. So although CO2 is absorbed methane is produced.
CARBON SEQUESTRATION AND GREENHOUSE GAS MITIGATION
POTENTIAL OF COMPOSTING AND SOIL AMENDMENTS ON CA RANGELANDS
California’s Fourth Climate Change Assessment
Whendee et al
Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and
Management, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720.
-
ASSESSMENT OF CALIFORNIA CROP AND LIVESTOCK POTENTIAL
ADAPTATION TO CLIMATE CHANGE
California’s Fourth Climate Change Assessment
Josué Medellín-Azuara et al
UC Davis, UC Merced
OK, but the carbon in that methane (CH4) comes from plant sources, which comes from the air. So that is net carbon neutral (except to the degree that methane is a stronger greehouse gas than the carbon and hydrogen it is composed of).
It's not clear to me that these issues don't simply boil down to energy problems.
The limiting case: an endless source of free energy. Using this, it seems obvious that any carbon-emitting procedure can be mitigated, by capturing the emissions and storing them.
The question is whether concrete, cement and so on are viable building materials under this model; whether meat is viable; and so on.
Essentially, these are uncaptured externalities. If you tax the emissions at a higher rate than it costs to capture them, they will be captured, the question is whether demand decreases as a result of increases in cost.
He starts by claiming that only 25% of greenhouse gases come from making electricity; a fact that is technically true but very misleading. He then goes on to name the contributors of the other 75% and almost all of them (with the exception of methane from farming) produce carbon through using energy in the form of fossil fuels.
Solving the energy production problem solves the vast majority of these other problems.
The linked article indicates that only a small amount of seaweed needs to be added to their diet to be effective and that seaweed is easy to grow, so it doesn’t sound like it would take long to scale.
Remote work tackles so much of this: Less cars on the road. Less cars being created. Smaller roads. Less gas/electric on transport. Fewer offices/smaller. Significantly less stress. Less stress eating. Fewer cows consumed.
Not only remote work but also just working less in general. I don’t see why we as a sosciety can’t go to working 4 or even 3 days a week and still maintain the same standards of living. Or even improving those standards.
Because wages for most people are tied to labor and time, and when you decrease the amount of time worked, you produce less labor. Convincing people with money to pay you more for less work is futile.
Why the hell would I pay more money to a contractor to work on my home for half the time? I don't understand this thinking. Believe it or not, there are people in the world that want to get shit done.
I am wary of all this talk about breakthroughs. It diverts attention from the hard choices we have to make. Namely change diet, drastically reduce consumption, emphasise circular economy etc. Those breakthroughs may never come.
There's something about the way most people talk about climate change that strikes me as really off. They talk about consumption and growth being the root cause of the problem. They also have a way of talking about wealth that makes it sounds like it means nothing.
There's something wrong with that world view. I'm unconvinced that the solutions to climate change are going to revolve around lack of growth and curtailing consumption. It seems more likely that they will come from applying wealth to the problem. Growth and wealth are tightly linked. Saying that we'll solve this problem by curtailing growth seems to me that we'll solve it without wealth - I don't think that will happen.
Readit News
Political-economic forces, they're just not going to cave until it's too late. 10 years? Unless the economy fumbles soon Trump will have the next six of those. So, four left. Four damn years to change everything. I think a lot of the focus goes on reducing energy emissions because it's easy political blame gaming. But it's too late and it's not going to work. We're going to destroy the Earth while bickering about it.
Assume consumption will continue to rise, assume that oil will continue to own politicians. People will continue to consume, expect to maintain their standard of living off cheap goods shipped from China, heating for ever-larger homes, buying from companies with huge carbon footprints, and blaming others.
I think the reasonable thing to do is invest more in the cleanup scenario. But that doesn't score political gotcha points and it's not profitable /right now/, so that probably won't happen either.
We will certainly need to invest in cleanup. But how much we'll have to invest can be multiple orders of magnitude larger or smaller depending on the investments we make now.
My thought is that we will eventually try to put a thin reflective material into space (or manufacture it in space in 20-40 years) to create some sort of semi-permanent sun-shield that reflects 2-5% of the sunlight we receive. It would have to be massive in area, but think of your car's sun visor on a hot day.
Putting particles into the atmosphere to do the same thing would also do the job but it could affect other things and cause more abnormal weather.
I don't see our use of fossil fuels or consumption of livestock slowing down. People make exceptions for themselves because they are the center and most important part of their own experience. "You can't get a man to understand something when his job depends on him not understanding it" - Upton Sinclair.
Also it's worth saying that Bill Gates should be able to do better than a tiny 1 billion (1/96th of his wealth) given the dire situation we are in. Actions taken earlier will have a larger impact toward mitigating climate change. 1 billion is like him tossing a penny at the problem. I'm sure Microsoft has contributed a large amount of CO2 to the atmosphere over time as well.
Many countries are already onboard, China is realising very quickly how important the environment is. The US public is on the side of reducing emissions, I think the only thing left is to convince US elites and we can get there.
Realistically I don't think there will be much real or adequate government action until the system we have is creaking at the seams. Dealing with migration from poorer parts of the world, dealing with the cost and chaos of weather events like floods and storms. Some actually buying land 500 ft above sea level, away from population centres. Governments having to choose between martial law or reelection will change views on global throwaway consumerism surprisingly quickly.
I also expect to see a rebirth in spending on navies, troops and border guards amongst the developed nations.
Nonetheless there comes a point (as yet unknown) where it becomes a choice of fix it or watch Rome burn. It might even reach a last minute point where it's clearly cheaper to fix it than keep ignoring it. By that time costs could easily be an order of magnitude higher, and far more dependent on geo engineering that might generate its own unforeseen problems.
But every tiny act from individuals might, just might, contribute to a tipping point before it gets that far.
Isn't fracking responsible for a massive drop in coal use though? The increased amount of natural gas available means that wholesale prices for it have dropped, which has made coal-powered energy plants increasingly less viable financially compared to natural gas power stations. And natural gas, fracking and all, is far less of an environmental problem than coal is with all its mountain-top removal strip mining and cancerous, radioactive soot.
Climate change is not a black & white thing; it's a gradient of bad things. No, we're not going to avoid heavy costs (sea level rise, higher disasters, etc.), but we can avoid making those costs even higher.
Political and economic reform may not be happening at the pace it needs to, but developing energy storage technology will go a long way towards being able to implement the reforms when people are willing to accept them.
The same argument applies to lab-grown meat and some kinds of carbon capture for industrial processes that necessarily release CO2, particularly cement and steel production. Ensuring that we have the technology makes it easier to use it when people are willing to.
My hope is that at some point new energy sources like solar or fusion will make fossil fuels obsolete so the problem may just go away.
Huge numbers of people will die, and that will fix the problem.
There are two knobs:
1. climate impact per capita
2. quantity of capita
Through inaction, on a long enough timeline, #2 will sort itself out. It's just ugly and involves a lot of suffering.
That's life.
I'd prefer if we solved it through being responsible (plant more trees, stop cutting down the rainforest, move to renewable energy, etc), but I'm not all that worried in general.
I'm less optimistic about people consuming less. Unless market forces make it more costly to toss away material, we're going to need an entirely new way of manufacturing a lot of different types of things.
CEB is possibly going to be a great alternative for concrete brick construction if it takes off based on the Boring Company. I'm not quite certain of the technical nature, but I understand this uses a minimal amount of concrete added to a highly compressed block of earth. Adobe construction has been used quite a lot in the past. (Probably won't work so well for skyscrapers). That being said, there are supposed to be alternatives here but scale is the main concern. Steel looks like it is going to be the main thing for a long time.
Politics are cyclical in nature, the next cycle will shift and we will likely see a radical shift in a lot of these policies. Will it be enough? Hopefully, but probably not everything.
I've seen a lot of recent food shops / juiceshops here in Austin that now provide compostable cups / silverware / packaging where nothing is provided in Sytofoam or plastic (all plant based material). It appears to be scalable and something I would love to see elsewhere with manufacturing / packaging.
Though I can also imagine a world where people will want to be able to get whatever they need nearly instantly. Maybe 3D metal printing will accelerate at larger scales and take into account better recycling / raw material breakdowns. That being said, it's argued that 3D printing is more environmentally sustainable as an additive manufacturing process rather than the traditional subtractive process of cutting and breaking down material to form and producing waste.
> A U.S. Department of Energy study confirmed that utilizing additive manufacturing can reduce material needs and costs by up to 90%. Along with waste savings, the DOE also found that 3-D printing can save energy, especially when a component that was previously made by combining several smaller parts is consolidated into one. > https://www1.eere.energy.gov/manufacturing/pdfs/additive_man...
It's hard to see how things can change right now, but if we can get the majority on board, I think we can see radical change happening quite quickly. The key point is that people must realize radical changes are required, now. Buying organic and recycling a few things isn't going to cut it.
When places like Miami, Norfolk, and Shanghai will be consistently overrun by tides, or when food supplies come under severe pressure, my hope is that there will be some kind of major wake up call and cleanup act. With the major polluters (the US and China in particular) leading the way forward with funding, bespoke technology, and (hopefully) clawbacks on the main polluters.
Passive solar design
Pedestrian friendly design
More small homes
The central problem is convincing people that what they do actually makes a difference and it doesn't have to mean they cut their own throats for the greater good. People don't act because they think it involves a high personal cost without really making difference.
It doesn't require government intervention to change that.
Something else will be a priority for our attention while the trends will keep going as usual, until is already too late to do something, or to force taking desperate measures (i.e. not fully understood geoengineering) that will do even more harm than doing nothing.
People in power don't need to fear the effects of climate change in their lifetimes, they can afford to live comfortably, and even profit over the ones that can't.
Do I think we, collectively as humans, have the will and the actual resources to change everything about "our" modern way of life in 10 years? Nope. Not one bit. Should we stop trying? Nope, not one bit.
Do I think all living things will die? No. I do think large populations will die as a result of climate change, which means they will no longer be contributing to and accelerating the problem. I mean if 20% of the population (number out of thin air) die, that means the factories that generated the things those people were consuming wouldn't be needed, the food they would have eaten wouldn't be needed, etc. All resources those people were consuming, and the byproducts of creating those resources, would go away.
So, the "healing process" would start to accelerate and maybe after 100 years, we'll be back at the point where we get to do it all over again because we don't seem to collectively learn beyond what makes the most money the easiest way. "I know x is bad, but I gotta feed my family..." or "I refuse to see it as bad because that's my job and I don't want to feel badly about myself."
I think the sad fact that no one wants to really admit/mention is we are overpopulating the planet. I know, I know... "you could take the whole population of the US and put them in x state and they'll each have x acres," etc. But that doesn't take into account the factories generating pollution to create the things that sustain their lives, or the space it takes to grow the food to sustain them, etc.
I'm not a scientist nor a expert in this subject, but those are my layman impressions gathered over the last 45 years. People rarely change unless they are forced to, or it's too late. I hope I'm wrong.
[0] it seems unlikely that humans have no influence on the environment. It equally seems improbable that we can predict sea levels half a century from now with any accuracy.
[1] before anybody puts words in my mouth, I reserve the same skepticsm for any other report coming out of the mouth of an institution which advocates it should have more funding...
[1] Are you going to remain skeptical without looking into it, seems more like you're dismissive rather than skeptical but maybe I am reading this wrong.? How could any researcher ever make the claim that something is a big issue and needs to be investigated further and fixed without triggering this skeptical reflex?
Shouldn't there be evidence about how past climate predictions fared? Climate change has been a hot topic (pun somewhat intended) for decades. Since Carter's presidency at least. There should have been at least a few environmental predictions that we can verify in retrospect.
If consumers would buy more environmentally friendly products, markets would direct every producer and supplier to be more environmentally friendly, without any other government intervention or sanctions. Just make it mandatory to be transparent and to include this information in every product. Put warning labels on products that have missing information.
Granted, maybe they should pay more, but they can't literally produce as much waste as they want and pay nothing.
This is an area where the Hacker News community can help. There is an initiative to replace the closed-source databases used to calculate such labels called BONSAI: https://bonsai.uno/; https://github.com/BONSAMURAIS/bonsai (I am one of the volunteers). We are doing the best we can, but could really benefit from people with expertise in
* Semantic web/RDF (to design and populate the larger database) * Text processing (to use the web as a source of data on production and consumption) * Machine learning/remote sensing (to understand the spatial pattern of industry)
There is also an active community focused on energy data and modelling: https://openmod-initiative.org/
People are aware that catastrophe is coming but they are in denial. It's just better to not think about it, like with death, you know it will come but you don't think about it, just carry with your life. And I can see the same exact thing with global warming when I talk to different people. It's better to think that I can't do nothing than think I can do something but I will need to change my style of life.
There are things one can do to live longer but they require sacrifices, do not eat bad stuff, exercise etc. For a lot of people price is too high. The problem is that in case of global warming those people are making choices for other people also.
There is no political will to change things, as every politician knows that the costs for that would be too high today. So that's why they think it's better to postpone this decisions, automatically making the cost a lot higher. There is also believe that someone will figure out a way to stop global warming in his basement and will save the humanity from itself. The problem is a lot more complex than just CO2, it's about the current economic model of the modern society in which we live. Constant growth and resource exploitation are not sustainable for long term.
Awareness is the first step to solving any problem, and measurement and reporting would facilitate this. Perhaps we need more draconian laws that would force this on all corporations and individuals, considering the dire consequences.
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Imagine how opposed to a carbon tax the beef industry would be.
That's just one easy example; the beef industry has long been associated with the oil industry by simple virtue of being relatively co-located in states like Texas and Oklahoma.
Which gets to another question, since I'm not bothering to research before asking... how much worse is methane than CO2 as a greenhouse gas, per carbon atom involved? Because that's basically what cows do. They convert atmospheric CO2 (via plants) into atmospheric methane (via farts).
As far as carbon neutrality goes, you’re drawing a conclusion about the value based only on the first derivative. If you hold livestock numbers constant (they’re increasing, alas, but let’s not worry about that yet) then there will be a rough equilibrium. However, the gas is in the atmosphere for some time until it gets fixed back into the soil, and continues to have a warming effect in the meantime.
Any carbon tax has to punish emissions. Net zero emissions isn’t enough anymore.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_methane#Methane_as...
The vast majority of beef produced is not carbon neutral. From the Beef Cattle Research Council [1] of Canada (not exactly an anti-beef organization):
"Presently, the economic conditions are favorable for the production of beef from grain in many regions of the world, largely because of the availability of inexpensive fossil fuels"
The plants you are referring to are produced with massive amounts of fossil fuel. By one estimate, each steer "consumes" 284 gallons of oil via feed during its lifetime [2]
On top of this, cows are one of the most inefficient ways to turn energy inputs into protein (10x less efficient than other types of meat, 100x less efficient than grain protein), primarily due to large size of the animals must be grown to before slaughter, which uses wastes a lot of energy. [3]
There is a large variance between the ratio of input energy to protein output of various types of meat, with lamb (57:1) and beef (40:1) being the least efficient, and broiler chickens (4:1) being the most efficient [4]
1. http://www.beefresearch.ca/research-topic.cfm/environmental-...
2. https://www.nytimes.com/2002/03/31/magazine/power-steer.html
3. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/beef-uses-ten-...
4. https://academic.oup.com/ajcn/article/78/3/660S/4690010
So even though it's a small part of emissions it's a significant constituent of climate change.
For Betty the cow on a small homestead sure.
Unfortunately modern agriculture is so fubar that it's hard to claim that as true. There are huge fossil fuel energy inputs from everything from chemical fertilisers, herbicides, transportation and processing. Not to mention the damage to the ecosystem that the massive mono-cultures this drives.
Methane in the atmosphere has a fairly short half life of 7 years so the effects of increasing or decreasing the number of cows is felt relatively quickly.
The limiting case: an endless source of free energy. Using this, it seems obvious that any carbon-emitting procedure can be mitigated, by capturing the emissions and storing them.
The question is whether concrete, cement and so on are viable building materials under this model; whether meat is viable; and so on.
Essentially, these are uncaptured externalities. If you tax the emissions at a higher rate than it costs to capture them, they will be captured, the question is whether demand decreases as a result of increases in cost.
He starts by claiming that only 25% of greenhouse gases come from making electricity; a fact that is technically true but very misleading. He then goes on to name the contributors of the other 75% and almost all of them (with the exception of methane from farming) produce carbon through using energy in the form of fossil fuels.
Solving the energy production problem solves the vast majority of these other problems.
Why the hell would I pay more money to a contractor to work on my home for half the time? I don't understand this thinking. Believe it or not, there are people in the world that want to get shit done.
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Is it more environmentally friendly for 100 people to work in one office or for 100 people to work in 100 homes?
Is it better to heat or cool one office of 100 people or to heat or cool 100 homes?
There's something wrong with that world view. I'm unconvinced that the solutions to climate change are going to revolve around lack of growth and curtailing consumption. It seems more likely that they will come from applying wealth to the problem. Growth and wealth are tightly linked. Saying that we'll solve this problem by curtailing growth seems to me that we'll solve it without wealth - I don't think that will happen.