If there is anything covid has taught me its that collective action isn't something we can rely on and is a lot more wishful thinking about the state of humanity rather than a sober look at the reality. Governments need to tax CO2 emissions on the business side and pour the money into carbon capture technology in the private space through investment and perhaps some sort of bounty program (you get $x for each ton you capture). The greatest hope I see for the future of humanity is the incentive for a brilliant mind/leader to become the next Bezos/Musk via climate change technology and to do that the incentives have to be setup to make it happen. I'm past hoping for people to do the right things en masse.
Believe it or not, western countries have reduced carbon emissions over the last ~15 years, in both absolute and per capita terms (despite a growing population). The only countries that are growing their carbon emissions are developing countries; mainly China, India and Russia.
China is particularly troubling since they make up 28% of all emissions (US is 15%) and they have both a growing population and growing emissions per capita.
And it's not that China is producing emissions during manufacturing goods the entire world consumes. Take a look at "China: Consumption-based accounting: how do emissions compare when we adjust for trade?" and you'll see ~90% of their emissions are for consumption [2]
> Annual consumption-based emissions are domestic emissions adjusted for trade. If a country imports goods the CO₂ emissions needed to produce such goods are added to its domestic emissions; if it exports goods then this is subtracted.
2018 had 8.96 bn carbon tons in consumption out of a total of 9.96 bn total tons (~90% consumption)
The good news is that China is good at collective action. The bad news is, they're China.
> Believe it or not, western countries have reduced carbon emissions over the last ~15 years, in both absolute and per capita terms (despite a growing population). The only countries that are growing their carbon emissions are developing countries; mainly China, India and Russia.
One American is emitting 15 Indians worth of carbon emissions.
In terms of your claim that "western countries have reduced carbon emissions" it is important to realize that increasingly developed countries have been outsourcing most of their high polluting industries. https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2017/4/18/1533104...
"During the early 2000s, these “emissions transfers” were growing at a stunning pace, nearly 11 percent per year, as more and more Western manufacturing was shifting to Asia. Factories making computers, electronics, apparel, and furniture would close in the US, open up in China, and then ship their products back home to the US. Americans got the goods; China got the pollution (and the jobs)."
> In terms of your claim that "western countries have reduced carbon emissions" it is important to realize that increasingly developed countries have been outsourcing most of their high polluting industries. https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2017/4/18/1533104...
Now, isolate those Indians who are living in India with an American standard of living (big house, car(s), frequent flyer), and I'm sure emissions will look a little bit more even. There are probably a lot more people living in poverty and not emitting much in India than in the U.S., it doesn't mean the situation per capita is better for these poor people in India that might lack electricity and plumbing (but on paper are living carbon neutral). Another case where the median might be better than the mean.
Per-capita is irrelevant. Total CO2 is the problem. The US is on the right trajectory, and all signs point towards de-carbonization intensifying with technology maturing as we speak (EVs, offshore wind, solar price plummeting, new homes being better insulated + heat pumps).
Per capita and development status IS relevant. How can you expect nations like India who still have populations in poverty, still have huge rural-urban migration, to be able to focus as much on green energy than a mature nation like Europe USA?
The bigger humanitarian crisis in India is the sheer amount of poverty, not the impending climate crisis.
> One American is emitting 15 Indians worth of carbon emissions.
> it is important to realize that increasingly developed countries have been outsourcing most of their high polluting industries.
Neither of these points apply to the OP. They did not make the claim that the US emits more than India per capita. Secondly, your rebuttal of the point that "western countries have reduced carbon emissions" is not a rebuttal at all -- the OP specifically addressed this point in their comment if you read it. 90% of China's emission are directly caused by consumption, not manufacturing or export.
Of course the per-capita carbon footprint of the USA is unfairly high, and the result of a consumerist culture with poor urban planning, a legacy of racialized housing discrimination, etc. Although these are all very important concerns, they are ethical concerns. And the climate simply does not care about ethics.
The fact is that western countries are decreasing emissions and decarbonizing infrastructure, while China is still building coal plants for domestic consumption and attempting to export coal projects to poorer countries abroad in order to expand geopolitical soft power. If you believe that high levels of climate change have the potential to cause mass suffering around the world -- and particularly in the Global South -- then you must agree that the risk and harm involved in expanding coal outweighs the ethical concerns regarding per-capita carbon disparity.
That said, the Paris Accords specifically allow developing countries (China included) more time to lower their emissions compared to Western countries, precisely to account for inequitable per-capita carbon footprints. All western countries are on the right path -- the only question is if they're decarbonizing fast enough. The question for China is: will it even start decarbonizing soon enough?
China produces most of the world's solar panels and has amassed a wealth of research and development potential for renewable energy. The fact that they choose to continue building coal plants is inextricably tied up in political and geopolitical reasons.
As far as India goes, they have made a tremendous effort to meet their climate goals and the world owes them a huge debt.
The West lowered their CO2 production by moving all manufacturing to China, so this isn't too surprising. Also, China, like most of the world except for Afrika, has a shrinking population (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birth_rate).
China needs to start building nuclear power plants and replace all those coal plants.
China is launching thorium-fueled molten-salt reactors starting with a 2-gigawatt prototype in September; they plan on building lots of smaller ones for production. I'm hoping this replaces coal pretty quickly.
China has 1.4 billion people. You would expect them to have about ~20% share of emissions in a perfectly fair world, instead they have 28%. Since 1751, they have emitted 12.5% of all emissions while having an even larger share of the global population.
The US has 315 million people. You would expect them to have 4.5% share of emissions in a fair world. Instead, they have 15%. Since 1751, they have emitted 25% of all emissions.
That doesn’t make the ”CO2 outsourcing” claim untrue. For the 1990-2008 period, the paper[1] cited as the source for the graph in question notes:
> Collectively, the net CO2 emission reduction of ∼2% (0.3 Gt CO2) in Annex B countries from 1990 to 2008 is much smaller than the additional net emission transfer of 1.2 Gt CO2 from non-Annex B to Annex B countries (equivalent to subtracting the net emission transfers in 2008 from 1990 in Fig. 2).
The situation may have improved since then[2], but already in 2008, China’s consumption share of its own emissions was 80%. This figure in itself neither proves or disproves whether developed nations have outsourced their emissions.
I just straight-out don't believe that. Maybe this is by some incredibly narrow definition of CO2 production, whereby if the produce of a factory is first shipped to a harbor by a Chinese company before leaving China, it counts as 'internal'?
This study is a bit old and I’m ignoring their “technology based” method because I don’t think the climate cares if a country would have emitted less if they had equivalent tech[*] , but it shows Chinas consumption based emissions is about 84% of its production based emissions. I.e., 84% of the emissions generated in China were for products/services consumed in China.
To your point, though, the article corroborates the emissions export claim. (The US is shown as a next exporter in emissions, with consumption based emissions ~13% higher than production emissions). Both points can be simultaneously true.
[*]for the sake of this discussion, at least. I can understand the relevance for creating policy though
Most of the world does not have a shrinking population. The birth rates may be below replacement, but populations are still growing as the age structure shifts. Japan has achieved true negative population growth.
Every country in the developed world plus the former Warsaw pact members have negative natural population growth. They're being propped up by immigrants, that's why they're populations are growing. For example France has about 67 million people but the number of natives is estimated to be around 50 million. Which would be about their population in 1971, 50 years ago. Similar story with the UK, Switzerland, the US, etc. In Japan it's just visible because they have negligible immigration plus even lower birth rates.
I've counted. 235 countries and territories. 30 are downright decreasing.
Plus:
> As of 2010, about 48% (3.3 billion people) of the world population lives in nations with sub-replacement fertility.[2] Nonetheless most of these countries still have growing populations due to immigration, population momentum and increase of the life expectancy
That was back in 2010 and fertility rates are only going down plus Covid has accelerated this so I'm willing to bet real money 50%+ of the world's population is living in countries with net natural population loss due to low fertility rates.
These things are very localized, look at the world map on that page to see where this growth is concentrated.
It isn't all bad. The aging population will have to be supported by fewer people, which is obviously a problem, and one that can really only be solved by asking the elderly to work to a greater age.
On the flip side, Japan has incredibly dense cities with tiny houses. As the population drops to half its current level there will also be more space for living decently, with bigger houses, more green spaces, etc. It's not at all impossible that in such a situation, women may choose to have more children again.
That's at best a temporary situation though. If births are below replacement rate, at some point the population will also drop. People aren't going to age indefinitely.
The blue countries are below replacement rate, and represent most of the world. Green countries are at replacement rate. The rest is above, and are all in Africa except for Afghanistan and Iraq.
Not sure what your point is here, but whatever it may be, I feel sure it is not helpful wrt to climate policy in the world's largest emitter. If you have some other axe to grind, maybe take it elsewhere.
China is dominant in industries that are currently significant in renewables. Especially solar PV. They already have the largest EV fleet, including buses.
The next industry to really matter will be energy storage. China is positioning to dominate in batteries too. If they do, good luck to them. Not because I love everything about China, but because somebody needs to scale this and if China does, then that's good for energy transition.
>> they have a growing population
Currently about +0.3% per annum. Which puts them around the lower 30th percentile of countries by population growth.
China is certainly large, but it is not growing much and should soon be shrinking.
> The only countries that are growing their carbon emissions are developing countries; mainly China, India and Russia
Developed nations have polluted the planet for decades, with highest rates of energy consumption per capita. They have failed to build systems and processess that enables sustainable living. They have lived their excess and now lecture the world that their "90% of emissions are from consumption"
One group of people have taken the world for granted. Now want everyone else to bear the cost. Typical.
It's not lecturing. It's pointing out that there is no realistic scenario in which western countries can prevent CO2 from getting to dangerous levels. Even if emissions went to zero, it would only push the timeline back a few years
This is the problem I have with people who claim to care about the catastrophic impact of climate change. It's more about claiming moral victory over western countries than it is about actually working to reduce the CO2 in the environment. If someone was about to destroy the world, wouldn't your main focus be on preventing that to happen rather than Monday morning quarterbacking the last 100 years of industrialization?
I agree with you, and to add to your remarks, I suspect if most first world countries implemented a sufficiently strict border adjustment ("carbon tariff") for trade with China, etc it would probably do quite a lot to motivate developed nations to improve as well.
Anyway, I find the criticisms of the West to be both ignorant and tiring. Tiring because the "blame the West for everything" meme is so worn out and ignorant because there's a pretty stark difference between pioneering industrialization centuries before mature climate science and China's ratcheting up pollution knowing full-well the consequences.
The US emits about twice the CO2 per year as India, 3x Russia, 4x Japan, 6x Germany, 7x South Korea, 8x Canada, 10x Mexico, 12x Australia, 13x UK, 14x France, and 18x Taiwan.
By your logic then shouldn't most first world countries also implement a strict carbon tariff on the US?
Maybe they should. But I can't help but comment that you're abusing statistics here. Smaller population countries like Canada and Australia pollute more per capita than the US. Also, the carbon tariff should ideally be applied on an activity-specific basis, not at the national level.
> But I can't help but comment that you're abusing statistics here.
Actually, that was kind of the point. For problems dealing with scarce resources that are shared planet wide (such as the atmosphere or oceans) any fair system to determine how those resources are allocated needs to take into account population, but enforcement of any such allocation has to be done by country. The atmosphere doesn't care about our arbitrary political boundaries, but for enforcement they matter.
Too many people make the mistake of thinking that both enforcement and allocation should be by country.
> Smaller population countries like Canada and Australia pollute more per capita than the US.
Australia does indeed emit more per capita than the US, about 4% more. Canada emits about 4% less. The only countries ahead of the US per capita besides Australia are Qatar, Trinidad and Tobago, Kuwait, Brunei, Bahrain, UAE, New Caledonia, the Dutch part of Sint Maarten, Saudi Arabia, and Kazakhstan.
South Korea is about 25% less. Taiwan and Russia are about 30% less than the US per capita. Germany and Japan are about 40% less. The UK and France are about 65% less. Mexico around 72% less. (China is about 55% less).
> Also, the carbon tariff should ideally be applied on an activity-specific basis, not at the national level.
Correct. The way this would probably best be handled if we had a world government would be a revenue neutral carbon tax on everything. But we don't, so we have to cobble together something else.
I don’t think this makes sense because American productivity depends so much on pollution outsourced to countries like India. For example, if US cars are assembled “greenly” from components that are manufactured dirtily, then it hardly seems meaningful to brag that America’s productivity is “greener”. And do bear in mind that I’m not one of the folks who are determined to make the US out to be the bad guy in every thread.
We don't export a lot of electricity. We do export a decent amount of agriculture, but my understanding is we don't export a ton of meat - which is where the majority of the carbon comes from.
Yes, I'm fully on board with that. No country should enjoy a competitive advantage because they externalize costs onto the environment. I don't think the US is a particularly grievous culprit on the global stage, but if everyone implements fair border adjustments then it's moot.
A good amount of emissions from China go into the goods produced for western countries (such as the U.S.). The pollution has been outsourced and externalized.
That's exactly the point of a border adjustment. China out-competes with clean manufacturing because it is more willing to pollute. Western countries should tax goods that are manufactured in polluting countries so they don't enjoy a competitive advantage over clean alternatives. This is probably "necessary but insufficient" sort of thing, but it solves the problem you're highlighting.
> But the US is worse when it comes to CO2 emmited per capita. That means that US should also be taxed.
China - as all nations - has a responsibility based on its population scale (ie its total emissions output), not just its per capita output. The total output matters far more than per capita, as we're dealing with a matter of planetary survival, not whether it's fair that Monaco has higher emissions output per capita than China.
Other nations are not responsible for China having those 1.4 billion people. China bears that responsibility. Other nations are obviously not responsible for the US having its per capita emissions output, either.
Estonia having 4x the per capita emissions output of the US wouldn't pose a terminal risk for the planet. And sure, maybe it's fair to argue a tax to incentivize per capita behavior of high per capita emissions nations. And what to do about China's total output risk, given it's going to destroy the planet (whereas smaller nations do not pose that risk)? The logical thing would be to apply taxes to both, in a way the keeps the planet from getting destroyed: it means China can never be allowed to have parity with smaller nations that have high per capita outputs.
China, with its 1.4 billion people, would pose a terminal risk for the globe if it reaches per capita emissions output parity with the US (actually it's already approaching that risk now, and it's merely half way to parity). Taxes don't mean much if half the planet is wrecked. China has a different responsibility than Estonia does given China can all by itself destroy the world with its emissions. I use Estonia merely as an example to highlight the point, very obviously the US has a responsibility as well based on its scale. Sure, we can focus a tax in on Estonia in that case, however it's by far not our most pressing matter.
China going from ~28% of global emissions to ~45%, is a very pressing matter. The globe can't afford China to increase at all at this point.
If a country had four billion people, it similarly wouldn't be reasonable for it to reach emissions parity with the US: it would kill everyone in doing so.
The equation of fairness must also consider the scale of the threat being posed, as it's also not fair if one outsized population nation gets to destroy the planet because it has 1.4 billion people. One can live in fantasy (where fairness means every nation gets equal emissions output per capita), or live in reality. In reality it matters how many people you have and what their per capita emissions are. Reality is course the dimension where we can all die from the emissions output of a nation the scale of China.
What matters is fantasy when it isn't politically feasible. The only consensus for an emissions regulatory framework is going to be based on per capita. Growing populous countries with the most say will never agree to anything else which is counter to their interests, i.e. China could propose a framework based on de-growth since the PRC population is set to decline to less than 1B by the end of the century, but western countries that rely on growth via immigration would never be up for it even if ultimately de-growth is the more pragmatic solution. Reality is also going to be that emission standards will be based on historic per capita emissions since developing countries will need to catch up on new infra emissions which western nations hide in historic emission data. Reality is global warming is less politically existential than poverty and development for domestic politics for many countries, as long as it kills others more than yourself, even if it ultimately kills everyone. This highlights the even more unpalatable reality that there are climate change winners and losers.
Climate change discussions remind me of covid19 policy wank and panic control but stretched out over decades. Many of us were fairly confident covid19 was going to be a pandemic we’ll have to live with, that’s just reality when most of the world do not have capability to respond properly. There’s a lot of interventions and technologies leading countries can export to mitigate, but ultimately everyone has to come to an understanding that we can’t stop climate change due to political realities.
We've known the consequences since at least the 70s. Industry has done everything they could to cover it up and propagandize the population into believing otherwise.
> China's ratcheting up pollution knowing full-well the consequences
That if they didn't their population would remain poor, and lacking access to healthcare, food, and water? And in an even worse situation when climate change finally hit? Are you suggesting that if China hadn't concentrated on development, the developed countries would be currently falling over themselves to fix the problem?
My recommendation which China is already seems to be taking is to go for nuclear power and solar in that order. Maybe add some hydropower to the mix but they have a plenty of it.
The chief problem is that they're not ramping up nuclear quickly enough, and it's hard to deploy in desert west of the country.
And thanks to our persistent self-sabotage there's civil unrest related to these power plants.
The nuclear is to be used to ramp production of solar PV and batteries cleanly, then decommissioned. Timeframe would be 25 years.
Decommissioning of current old reactors is a problem already but there's really no alternative - ramping solar PV with standard energy sources would be bad. A lot of reactors are expected to shut down by 2025...
You framed Chinese development as compassion for Chinese citizens. I pointed out that the Chinese government doesn't much care about the welfare of its citizens.
I don't think I said "compassion" anywhere. But today they do obviously care about having an economically strong nation with a good standard of living. It's what will help keep them in power.
We're not talking about today, we're not just talking about the last ~50+ years. And moreover, even today they are pretty happy infringing on many other rights of their citizens.
Politicization threw a wrench into COVID and it’s doing the same to climate change. Years of media gaslighting, fear mongering, and authoritarian tactics have left us in a social reality where nobody cares any longer what the talking heads in the media or shouting on social media have to say.
I would argue that the problem is that we care far to much about what the talking heads in the media and the shouting on social media. That's the source of misinformation and inaction on climate change.
This may be country dependent. In the US, the Supreme Court has been clear that there is no hate speech limitation to the 1st amendment, for example. But there are limits to lying, as in perjury and libel cases.
It's difficult to judge speech even by contemporary standards. There tend to be high bars for bad speech, clearly harmful, E.G. fire in a crowd when there isn't fire.
How easy is it to prove something is a lie, rather than a very selective viewpoint or opinion? What if someone chooses to believe a set of sources biased to their preferred outcome?
We should also be lucky to encounter and hopefully have laws against hate speech; the slippery slope stuff that's subjectively icky but not quite across that line is more insidious.
> It's pointing out that there is no realistic scenario in which western countries can prevent CO2 from getting to dangerous levels.
Sure there is. We've had two experiments where we saw this happen:
April 2020 - for a very short time when Western economies took a major hit, emissions dipped quite substantially.
In 2008 - The global financial crisis, which did impact the world, started in the US and again caused on of the only major notable dips in emissions we've seen.
It's very clear that US consumption and economic activity is directly tied to GHG emissions globally. If just the US had decided to remain in our April 2020 depressed economic state, and cooled from there, we would have seen a downward trend in emissions.
Maybe you would argue that economic shrinking is not "realistic" (in which case we are most certainly doomed, unless we run out of fossil fuels before we cross certain boundaries). The common argument is people won't tolerate a radical change in lifestyles... but that change is coming either way. However extreme the changes need to prevent catastrophic climate change, they are certainly less extreme then letting climate change run it's course.
I personally believe we will not chose this path, but don't pretend that this path doesn't exist. As the center of the global economy the United States fully has the capability to reduce global emissions.
Alternatively if we run into a economic crisis of unprecedented scale, which looks reasonably possible, we'll also see reduction in emissions without having to worry about "choosing" this path.
> It's very clear that US consumption and economic activity is directly tied to GHG emissions globally.
This is true today, but it will not be true in the future.
In the past and today, it was the contention both of fossil fuel interests and of degrowthers that emissions and economic activity are inseparable.
However, we are showing that that's not true. If you look back since 2008, sure, the big economic contractions showed big drops in emissions. But also, with economic expansion, we are lowering emissions, just at a lower rate.
And in fact, the true decoupling of GHG and GDP will involve a spectacular amount of economic activity. A huge number of jobs for everything from the obvious like deploying wind turbines and batteries and solar panels and expanding grid distribution and transmission, to less obvious stuff like insulating homes and installing heat pumps in place of natural gas.
There is another path, with massive economic growth, that results in complete decoupling of GHG and GDP. This is the easiest path in terms of lifestyle changes, but the most difficult path in terms of upsetting entrenched powerful interests.
> There is another path, with massive economic growth, that results in complete decoupling of GHG and GDP. This is the easiest path in terms of lifestyle changes, but the most difficult path in terms of upsetting entrenched powerful interests.
People have been fantasizing about this my entire life and all we've seen in more environmental destruction, and accelerated GHG emissions. I remember hearing things like this all the time in 2006 when an Inconvenient Truth was big. At the time I thought "that sounds reasonable and the only test will be time".
Here we are, likely already past some crucial boundary conditions with no immediate signs that we'll achieve any of the new targets we have set (since we've already missed all the old ones).
> This is true today, but it will not be true in the future.
How much time do you think we have? In 2000 maybe this was a reasonable argument, but even if emissions dropped to zero today we still have already signed up for plenty of climate change.
Despite vigorous GDP growth, which is showing the decoupling of GDP and emissions. (Total US emissions have also dropped over the past 15 years, but I am having trouble finding a clean graph of that quickly)
I do not believe, and scientists do not believe, that we are past help, or that we have locked in so much change that everything is hopeless. See, for example, this interview:
We know that RCP8.5 isn't going to happen. But we also know that our actions now have big big consequences.
We have a huge opportunity to change our future, right now. That window of opportunity is closing quickly.
Everything we do it reduce emissions now will make the future a much much better place. We really do have the opportunity to change our behavior and keep a planet that is as welcoming to us as it is today.
If you honestly don't believe this, I suggest skimming the (massive) SR15 report form the IPCC. It's getting out of date in terms of the technology available today that wasn't when it was written, but it should provide you with a lot of hope and a lot of reason to take action now:
Because we have continually outsourced our emissions to China while still reaping the financial benefits of expoiting resources in those countries. I know there are studies that try to account for this but they still fail to look at the bigger picture of resources we have outsourced.
Cheap and large scale manufacturing in China has meant enormous benefits for the US economy. We see a decoupling of GDP and energy because we are playing tricks with accounting.
> We really do have the opportunity to change our behavior and keep a planet that is as welcoming to us as it is today.
First we are absolutely locked into increasing global warming from emissions, so we have without question given up on a planet as welcoming as today.
We do have an opportunity to change our behavior, I have repeatedly said that, but that means actually reducing fossil fuel usage, globally and immediately.
As I have said, the US can reduce global emissions because we have seen the US do this twice: April 2020 and 2008.
> a lot of hope and a lot of reason to take action now
There's reason to take action now, but since you won't even accept the notion that you might have to reduce your standard of living, at least until renewables catch up again, means we are not going to change our path.
I had these exact conversations in 2006, and very similar ones in the 1990s (though people were less sure of the extreme risks then). The IPCC reports have been for years considered by many to be far too optimistic, and again those people have been proven correct over and over again (until recently they didn't consider positive feed backs and also assume scalable CCS).
At what point would you admit you are wrong? I'll admit I'm wrong if we see three years of decreasing global emissions starting this year and reduced global emissions by 20% in the next 5 years. These aren't enough to get us to our required goals, but if I see this I'll still be shocked and admit I've been too skeptical. Currently I believe this would only happen with a catastrophic financial crisis (which may be the only way we can avoid climate catastrophe).
> Because we have continually outsourced our emissions to China while still reaping the financial benefits of expoiting resources in those countries.
That's simply not true. The chart I linked is CO2 accounting based on consumption, not US production, it takes into account Chinese emissions for US consumption.
> There's reason to take action now, but since you won't even accept the notion that you might have to reduce your standard of living,
Sorry, what? What do you know about what I want to do? My preferred life would be considered a "reduced standard of living" to many Americans, because I want to live car-free in a walkable neighborhood.
> At what point will you admit you are wrong?
When there's evidence that a position I have taken is wrong. Start sending me data!!
Will you admit that emissions have decreased, even accounting for moving production to China? Will you admit that we have cleaner energy sources ready to deploy that will replace fossil fuels, if we choose to do so? Will you admit that we can develop alternatives to industrial processes that generate non-fossil-fuel emissions? Will you admit that we can switch disastrous land use policies that reduce the ability of the ecosystem to sequester CO2?
These are all possible without a drastic reduction in the quality of life. The question is how quickly we can make that transition. At this stage in the game, nihilism is as bad as denialism. We need to make drastic drastic change, and I am doing so in my personal life, but personal action is no substitute for changing the system.
In response to this point, which is frequently brought up:
> The chart I linked is CO2 accounting based on consumption, not US production, it takes into account Chinese emissions for US consumption.
While it is certainly the case that measuring consumption is much better than measuring production, it fails to account for a lot emissions.
For example in the manufacture of solar PV, the solar panels themselves are counted, but since the companies manufacturing and processing the silicon need for these are in China selling to other Chinese companies, that is not counted even though all those fossil fuels used are used exclusively for the benefit of American companies.
That doesn't even address the issue of US companies bringing in capital for various foreign investments. If VCs make money in a Chinese company and then reinvest in your startup that money in our economy was generated with fossil fuels.
The best proxy to GHG emissions is still dollars, both on individual and nation state levels.
> Will you admit that we have cleaner energy sources ready to deploy that will replace fossil fuels, if we choose to do so?
This is not an issue of willing. "Green" energy has only been used to supplement fossil fuel usage.
We are building renewables as fast as we can and it's not enough because so far it's not replacing anything.
The only way to reduced GHG emission is to reduce fossil fuel usage, immediately. We've made tremendous expansion of renewable energy and it has not touched fossil fuel usage. If we stop fossil fuel usage today, or drastically reduce it, we will experience incredible global economic pangs.
> nihilism is as bad as denialism
There is an important form of Nihilism that many existentialists talk about which is the nihilism of pretending your action had meaning. Putting on a tie and going to work, pretending that work is real and meaningful when you know that ultimately your life is meaningless.
There's a great irony that if everyone collectively agreed we are doomed, our economic activity and emissions would likely also cool down. Our frenzied consumer activity is driven by an ideology that says tomorrow will always be better. If we let go of that we likely would live more relaxed lives in the developed world.
And, again, all I am saying is the only way to reduce GHG is to globally reduce emissions and we are not doing that at all. You can claim that the US is somehow separate from China's emissions, but you can see a global dip in emissions in 2008. I can think of no better experiment on the interconnected nature of emissions than to see how a housing crisis in the US becomes a global economic down turn which sees the most promising drop in emissions we have ever seen.
Arguably the only other solution is accelerationism, where we push economic systems to collapse faster... which is maybe what you're really going for.
> For example in the manufacture of solar PV, the solar panels themselves are counted, but since the companies manufacturing and processing the silicon need for these are in China selling to other Chinese companies, that is not counted even though all those fossil fuels used are used exclusively for the benefit of American companies.
This is simply inaccurate. US consumption CO2 numbers account for US purchase of solar panels.
Though I appreciate that there are some link here, you are still making backwards-looking statements rather than stating limitations about what could be. For example, this link:
Is of what was in terms of energy. Will it be that way in the future? Only if we let corruption and entrenched fossil fuel interests prevent cheaper options from being deployed.
Renewable expansion is just barely getting started. To declare "game over" already is fatalism and not founded by any sort of data.
Dollars are not CO2 emissions. CO2 is emissions. Our economic systems are constructed by law and convention, and technology is completely changeable.
I see lots of feelings and emotions in your post about frenzy, but we need all that frenzy. We need action and change, desperately. Economic collapse will not save us, because emitting 25% of our current emissions is not good enough.
The only solution is compete transition of the economy in all sectors. Massive change. I say get on board or get out of the way.
> US consumption CO2 numbers account for US purchase of solar panels.
That's what I said, but they don't account for the manufacture of raw materials produced and sold in China to aid in the manufacture of these panels, nor of the associated infrastructure causes. They therefore underestimate the export co2.
> Is of what was in terms of energy. Will it be that way in the future? Only if we let corruption and entrenched fossil fuel interests prevent cheaper options from being deployed.
Energy is effectively the same as economic activity. You are correct that if we could magically replace all of the fossil fuel usage with renewables we would be at zero emissions. But again, all sources of energy production have been rising.
> Dollars are not CO2 emissions. CO2 is emissions. Our economic systems are constructed by law and convention, and technology is completely changeable.
Again you are correct that dollars are not CO2 emissions, but dollars are a good proxy for energy (read Smil's Energy and Civilization if you need a reference for that), and currently the vast majority of our energy needs are met with CO2 emitting fuel sources.
> The only solution is compete transition of the economy in all sectors. Massive change. I say get on board or get out of the way.
Do you really not see the contradiction regarding the problem at hand and your solution? A complete transition of the economy is a incredibly destructive, insanely energy intensive process. Unless energy was already mostly renewable such a solution will only lead to the problem being worse.
I guess I'll get out of the way since this conversation has only further convinced me of how bleak our situation is.
> And, again, all I am saying is the only way to reduce GHG is to globally reduce emissions and we are not doing that at all. You can claim that the US is somehow separate from China's emissions, but you can see a global dip in emissions in 2008. I can think of no better experiment on the interconnected nature of emissions than to see how a housing crisis in the US becomes a global economic down turn which sees the most promising drop in emissions we have ever seen.
The underlying phenomenon here is not economic activity. It's that a decrease in economic activity is a proxy for a decrease in things such as pleasure transport, heating/cooling, food consumption, and other things. Decoupling these activities from emissions is what this entire thread is talking about; for example, taking a train and walking for a vacation requires much fewer emissions than flying to your destination and renting a car. It may be in vogue in environmental circles to decry growth and capitalism as two factors behind emissions, but there's nothing that precludes growth or capitalism to transition into a new lower-power regime. The problem has nothing to do with the economic systems as much as it has to do with entrenched economic actors that continue to aggressively lobby governments to convince them _not_ to pass the regulations necessary to spur innovation to decrease emissions.
To leave with a pithy saying: There's two ways to quiet a crowded room, either ask everyone to speak quietly or ask everyone to leave. Halting growth is similar to the latter option, decreasing emissions is similar to the former.
> Decoupling these activities from emissions is what this entire thread is talking about;
And my entire point, is that after 30+ years of trying to reduce emissions by adding renewables we have failed to see this happen. There is no evidence that we are getting any closer now. If any global fossil fuel usage had decline, we could say it might be being replaced with renewables, but all evidence we have shows that renewables just supplement our existing and growing needs for energy.
To go with your metaphor, we've been asking everyone to be quiet for 30+ years and the room is getting louder. If we need that room quiet or we'll get kicked out of the house for good, it's getting time to ask people to leave.
If it's this difficult to get folks to transition to lower energy-use regimes, I think it would be even more difficult to get folks to abandon growth-based economics. Unless the worst happens and our economic systems collapse due to climate events. That's what I would consider the worst case, though.
What does "growth based" economics even mean? I think it's an incoherent concept, and have never gotten the same answer from two different people on the matter. Growth of GDP? Growth of energy use? Growth of carbon emissions? Growth of population? These different types of "growth" get substituted in, silently, to move an argument forward, but if one looks at details and tries to be specific, everything falls apart.
I agree with you. In my last post I'm using "growth based" to represent the status quo, nothing more (I'm not trying to say anything about why it is growth based.) If I were writing more carefully I should have simply called it out as the status quo instead of calling it "growth based".
We haven't spent 30 years trying to reduce emissions with renewables, we've spent 3 years doing pilot projects to drive down their costs.
And we are, today, at the point where we can deploy them. Around 2016-2018, we passed an economic inflection point for new energy deployments, and in 2023 we will have been through the five year periods over which utilities typically plan, and hopefully we will have sued enough of them to force use of accurate and up to date data in their economic planning models.
Only then will we actually start to try to use renewables to decrease emissions in any sort of full force.
And with the tiny trial balloons up until now, and via increased energy efficiency, we have been increasing GDP per CO2 for years, despite your refusal to believe the data.
These are basic facts. If your conclusions requires rejecting basic facts, then the conclusions are not sound.
Zero is not the limit, emissions can go negative. India has said it already [1]
> Developed nations should not talk about Net Zero, but focus on removing carbon from the atmosphere they add. “Net negative is what they need to talk about,” Singh said.
No emissions can't go negative. It doesn't matter what India says. That's a comically unrealistic claim, especially given we're heading to 10 billion people.
India, China and Africa's emissions expansion over the coming decades guarantee that if the popular climate scientist claims are correct, there is only a dire outcome possible at this point. You can take the developed countries to zero and the world (as we know it) still ends the same.
The developed countries - which it's important to note are a small, nearly contracting minority share of global population - are never going to zero (much less negative). So the realistic scenario is actually far worse than any fantasy zero scenario would indicate.
Just China and India alone will be enough to destroy the planet when it comes to emissions. In the next three decades, their emissions will not contract, they will expand massively. The developed countries as a whole will struggle to significantly reduce their emissions from where they are now. And that's that, the end.
Everything else about how developed nations should immediately cut back while eg China pushes the planet off a cliff, is nothing more than virtue signaling on the way to the graveyard.
And if you ask the virtue signalers for math to show how China can keep rapidly expanding its emissions and everything is going to work out fine, they will immediately turn tail and run away as fast as they can, or otherwise desperately change the subject. I've been trying for years to get anyone to demonstrate how China can continue to expand so fast that it ends up having 3x or 4x the emissions of the US, and how that can be defeated as a problem. Nobody dares to engage the actual conversation, because they know what it means, they know the virtue signaling premise (the world can still be saved, if only the developed countries fall on the sword) is a giant lie.
The virtue signaling fake-save-the-world-go-to-zero premise is so laughably absurd at this point, that what we're going to see next will be extraordinary fantasy elements come into play. They'll start talking about increasingly dumb solutions, like that we'll magically warp China's emissions away using quantum AI buzz-word buzz-word buzz-word technology (and we'll do it within just a few decades). The years will keep sliding by, China's emissions will keep soaring higher, the save-the-world fantasy ideas will keep getting dumber.
If the climate scientists are right, the outcome is already set, short of utilizing a fantasy premise to get to zero or negative net for the entire globe very rapidly (none of which is feasible).
A wildly optimistic outcome would be for the developed nations overall to cut emissions by 1/3 in the next ~30 years. That's not going to happen, but let's do a little bit of pretending for fun. China is set to fill that in all by itself over those decades. Now add in the rest of the developing world and three billion additional people hungry for an affluent lifestyle.
But one might say: I'm not proposing any solutions! That's right, there aren't any. Unless China can be convinced (they can't be, see: coal power plant construction) to immediately stop its emissions climb, while everybody else in the developing world also immediately gives up chasing a first world lifestyle (which I also don't fault them for in the least, they should pursue that) and combined with somehow that magically the developed world instantly slashes its emissions output by an impossible amount in the span of a few decades. All of those things has to happen, you need three fantasy outcomes to happen simultaneously to avoid the dire outcome.
Unlike the climate hypocrites on both sides, I'm not asking the developing nations to not seek a developed lifestyle (as a solution). I'm not saying they should fall on the sword either. I'm not asking them to want anything less than what developed nations want. I'm recognizing reality for what it is: there is no positive outcome possible, if the climate scientists are right about their increasingly dire models.
I don't understand this. Your claim is that it's literally impossible to complete industrialization with non-polluting technologies? Why? Is there something inherent to the energy that fossil fuels provide beyond their cost and ease of access?
> they know the virtue signaling premise (the world can still be saved, if only the developed countries fall on the sword) is a giant lie.
If it's cost alone, the answer is straightforward, especially as your premise already includes the developed world "falling on its sword": countries that polluted their way through industrialization heavily subsidize the clean version of that economic process in countries that have yet to do so.
This is obviously devilishly complicated from a geopolitical perspective, and I'm not necessarily recommending it. But the idea that the developed world has no levers to pull here is nonsense.
If it comes to it, if we overcome the greedy capitalist and nationalistic, imperialistic hangups, we could do it at cost in our best self interest to educate and industrialize the global south cleanly. Prevents war there, poverty, hunger and all sorts of refugee problems.
With their own hands, them owning the fruits of their labor.
My optimistic side agree with you but my inner cynic thinks that’s equivalent to saying “if we just get past our human hangups we could do it”. While being technically true, it’s hard to see a likely path given the current state of human affairs.
Twitter would also stop being a cesspool and start betting a forum of enlightened discourse if we could just put aside out psychological flaws but I’m not holding my breath for that, either.
> It's pointing out that there is no realistic scenario in which western countries can prevent CO2 from getting to dangerous levels.
There is one scenario, which isn’t probable. That is for western countries to pay a retrospective “sin” tax that gets distributed to other countries to fund climate action programs with better oversight. After all, if some countries benefited a lot from polluting in the past, it would be fair to expect them to pay up too.
>After all, if some countries benefited a lot from polluting in the past, it would be fair to expect them to pay up too.
Largely the entire globe has benefited from the industrial revolution. If the west is obligated to pay a retrospective sin tax, does the west also then jack up the prices on every technology that comes from that development when exporting to developing countries? For example, should students from developing countries get to come to the US and learn the latest knowledge and take that home and then jumping their country forward through decades of technology research? Should every immigrant into western countries pay huge fees to buy into the modern world, since they are not descended from those who are paying the sin taxes?
Also, do these sin taxes require that developing countries that receive these fund then guarantee not to emit CO2?
I disagree. Imagine everything that goes into the manufacture of an Apple M1 SoC. You have to get the raw materials, the design tools, the invention of the transistor, likely hundreds of thousands of hours, if not millions of hours, of engineering time to go from vacuum tubes, to transistors, to fab design, to computer science, to chip design, etc. Sure, if you isolate just the inventions along the path from the invention of fire to Apple selling their M1 based systems, it seems modest. But you can't just arbitrarily claim that X invention happened in the absence of the world in which it was invented.
During the industrial revolution there were no clean alternatives and there wasn't a clear understanding of the consequences. While indirect, modern developing nations greatly benefit from the existence of modern technologies developed by those who have already gone through this, and they are capable of learning from the mistakes of the west.
I really think the idea, that as a species, we need to redo the entirety of the industrial revolution individually for every nation is completely ridiculous. It would be one thing if it was contextualized as just infrastructure ramp up, but that's not the reality of this. (also why is China, the worlds second largest economy, always bundled in with developing nations?)
> That is for western countries to pay a retrospective “sin” tax that gets distributed to other countries to fund climate action programs with better oversight
This line of thought is doomed for failure, geopolitical "oversight" doesn't mean anything, that money won't go to productive climate action programs, no matter how much people want them too. In my mind the only pragmatic way the west can influence developing nations CO2 output is by subsidizing clean energy technologies to be more competitive in an international market, or at least something to that effect.
Western countries can use some of the wealth they made by getting us into this situation in the first place [1] to pay for green energy projects in developing countries, so developing countries can develop without having to go the same massive CO2 emitting route that Western countries took.
[1] CO2 stays in the atmosphere for several hundred years or more. The US is the source of 25% of what is in there now, and the EU-28 another 22%.
Wealth is not gobs of gold that Western countries sit on. Wealth is the ability to produce energy and turn it into creature's comforts, on a massive scale.
There is no development without massive growth in energy consumption. Please point to a single developed country on this Earth that has CO2 emissions per capita smaller than what Paris accords call for, which, depending on the source, is somewhere between 1.5-2.5 CO2 t/year/capita.
To limit emissions all countries must converge to a low energy lifestyle. There is no more developing for poor countries, and there is harsh un-developing for erst rich countries.
then Western countries subsidizing developing countries sustainable energy should be on the table. If it is purely to stop climate change, and western countries have unfairly exploited the world for centuries, then they should share a larger portion of the burden of a solution
I think this is one thing that frustrates me about these conversations, they are still very Americentric. What matters is that we reduce atmospheric CO2. Every major country has the technical and economic means to invest and innovate on clean technology and CCS systems (because honestly we need negative production of CO2, not zero). You can't just rely on America to save everyone on the planet. I don't care if it comes from China, Germany, France, Australia, India, or wherever. It just matters that it gets done. We already know who's to blame. It's like a fire that's started and we're arguing about who's job it is to put out. This isn't spilt milk. The longer we wait the more damage is done and with compounding interest. We can talk about blame and solve the issue but this can't just dominate the conversation. Everyone needs to fix the issue. Full stop. This is because everyone is in danger.
I don't think the suggestion is that developing countries should get to pollute their way into modernity the way the West did. As you point out, the planet won't care whether the extra pollution comes from a place of historical "fairness". But acknowledgement of the fairness element here does imply a straightforward (though far from simple) solution: massive transfers from those who've already dumped their pollutants into the atmosphere to those who are still in the development phase where they need to. Ignoring geopolitical realities and playing the global benevolent optimizer for a minute, this is a pretty clear-cut way to make sure that the externalities and benefits of pollution-driven development are borne evenly, while not ignoring the realities of the planet's response to pollution.
I'm not necessarily endorsing this policy. Just pointing out that the dichotomy you're setting up is a false one.
> If someone was about to destroy the world, wouldn't your main focus be on preventing that to happen rather than Monday morning quarterbacking the last 100 years of industrialization?
You have more responsibility for what you have agency to actually do. We have more ability to lower our emissions than to lower China's.
Beyond that, per-capita they still emit much less and may naturally level off to a level similar to ours depending on coal/gas mix in generation, etc. We don't need to focus only on right handed people's emissions just because left-handed people only emit 10% as much carbon in aggregate. Can you imagine a big campaign saying left-handed people should do anything they want, dump CFCs into the air etc., until right-handed people get their act together and achieve less or equal overall impact as left-handed people, and that only then it is ok to consider left-handed people?
> It's more about claiming moral victory over western countries
In my experience it's more about justifying the continued unfettered use of fossil fuels to drive progress in developing nations. Sure, it sounds like 1st world blaming, but I think it's more about defending the right of poorer peoples to advance their standard of living in the near term.
I'm not agreeing with it or defending it, but when I've encountered it in real life that is how it came across.
Going carbon negative unfortunately for us is very energy intensive. (The pie in the sky chemical ways to attack it such as simulating geology are likely bunk or too slow.)
So intensive that we could be lacking even uranium to do it in a century barring some huge discoveries (biotech, or maybe nanotechnology) or improvements in fusion power.
Can't do it on renewables in the reasonable timeframe - we don't have the production for it and that scale of production will certainly output more GHG.
So yeah, it's a bit hard to attack. Surviving the warming is just as tricky.
Current CCS rates are about $60/ton. Given that each PPM represents about 8 billion tons of atmospheric CO2, that's $480B for each PPM reduction. Obviously not great.
But what if that number drops to $30 per ton? $10? If we get the best minds in the world on it, it might be possible. At $10, a $1T investment takes us down 12.5 ppm. That's five years worth of emissions.
It's a monstrous challenge. But it's not completely unimaginable.
Followup. Your comment gave me a crazy idea. I've now thought about it enough to share.
To incentivize carbon removal, the US Treasury commits to spending 10 megabucks per year to buy carbon bricks synthesized via CCS.
Brick price is 10 megabucks / number produced.
Starting spot price (ceiling) is for bricks is somehow determined. Plus whatever sane market rules are deemed appropriate.
The provenance of these bricks is easily confirmed. By some combo of isotopes, inspections, and affidavits. So that sellers can't easily use non-atmospheric carbon.
Some kind of practical form factor is determined for the carbon bricks.
Carbon bricks become yet another currency.
--
Said another way:
US Treasury mints gold coins from gold bullion.
Compute farms mint bitcoin from electricity.
Carbon scrubbers will mint carbon bricks from atmospheric carbon.
Whereas bitcoin is inflationary, bricks are deflationary. Like US dollars.
Harness the Cobra Effect. Since all bricks produced will be bought, more production is incentivized.
Another aspect of this is that it could maybe exploit modern monetary policy. Price of bricks getting too high? Maybe 'ease' a few more into circulation by buying them with new dollars.
It is not all or nothing, and we are past several points of no-return. All of the countries need to act 10 years ago, 'but Bobby is peeing in the pool more than I do' is not going to cut it. It is stupid, misleading, and counter-productive.
How about this? All developing countries would welcome the "developed" nation's Trillion Dollar investments in future sustainability as an act of taking accountability for how they exploited other nations.
Per capita emissions from the US are still ludicrously high when compared to developing countries. Not a single one of those western countries is taking accountability for what they did and exploited over the last 2 centuries. If western countries really cared then they already would've worked with developing countries long time ago and they still can i.e. if they cared.
I'm not saying that developing countries should be allowed to do the same, but this "pointing out the data" indicates more towards "developing nation's work is done here, now we'll stay the same as it is and others do all the work" rather co-operation in my opinion.
>This is the problem I have with people who claim to care about the catastrophic impact of climate change. It's more about claiming moral victory over western countries than it is about actually working to reduce the CO2 in the environment. If someone was about to destroy the world, wouldn't your main focus be one preventing that to happen?
Here is a better idea.
How about developed nations, with their might of research, resources and human capital, put aside economic growth for a while and steer the world towards a sustainable future.
Its not about moral victories.
The approach of developed nations has been wrong. You see people like Trump and lose all hope for humanity.
There is only so much a developing country can do when you have scenarios where India has 4 times the population of USA, yet per capita Carbon production is 7 times less.
Still, it is the developing nations who have been most successful in meeting climate targets, be it in renewable energy or reduction in per capita carbon generation.
Sure, I like to whine and point out the moral failures of the developed world, but it is rightly deserved so. Because developing countries also act on climate change, in spite of knowing the effects it has on their economies.
But god forbid angering an American voter by talking about being responsible for climate change.
The data shows that Western world growth reduces CO2 on both per capita and absolute levels. As things renew and develop they are cleaner and more efficient. I’m not sure why you’d want to stop that, unless you care more about moral victories than climate change itself.
In fact it's just plain wrong to divide the world this way between 'developed' and 'developing'. There is no inherent progress towards 'development' and no natural staging of these things towards lower CO2 emissions or advancement generally. The reality is that the world economy is combined and uneven.
Environmental laws and protections put in place in western countries are one of the many things that leads to the wholesale export of industries into places where regulations are laxer or unenforced. The dirty work is sent elsewhere.
Considered as a whole, there is no "third wave" economy, and mass industrialism has never left us. The world's industrial working class is larger than it has ever been. Industrial production is bigger than it's ever been. Industrial pollution is larger than it has ever been, by far. And all of this is tied into a world economy facilitated by global trade.
This should be entirely obvious to people who work in a tech sector where almost all hardware is produced in China.
So it is nonsense to try to divide responsibilities between "developed" and the "developing" world. The whole world continues to be "developing."
And the distribution of wealth itself isn't close to even either, there are areas within the "developed" world that look very similar to the "undeveloped" or "developing" world in terms of living standards.
This didn't happen purely because Western countries became more aware of their impact on the environment. As countries develop, their population growth rate slows. Their technology improves and they can spend energy more efficiently.
In the US's case, there was a large gain from switching from coal to natural gas for power generation. Not because it was better environmentally, but because it was cheaper. It's disingenuous for the US to go "Look at all we've done" when half the country is in firm denial that there's even a problem.
> They have failed to build systems and processess that enables sustainable living.
Mainly because they haven't tried. It simply wasn't a priority or necessity.
But looking forward, there's two options: (1) we invent new technology to sustain a high-energy civilisation - the only realistic scenario is that this invention comes from the developed world; (2) we revert to low-energy (pre 20th century) civilization.
When looking at the delayed and cost overruns of the California high speed rail, and the slow adoption solar and wind on the west coast USA, and the slow development of batter technology, and the reverted carbon tax in Australia. I would say we very much tried (1) and failed. In particular I would say politicians failed us because they were too busy handing out favorable legislation for the wealthy class, who very much relied on business as usual to keep their wealth growing.
I hold no hope that a new technology will save us, while the politicians act this way. Remember that the White house used to have solar water heaters, but they were removed under Regan.
You're trying to turn a practical problem into a moral problem. Blaming the United States' (or anyone else's) past involvement is only useful insofar as it reduces CO2.
Well, kind of. From their point of view, it sounds a bit like: "I got there first and I industrialized and got rich, oh, by the way, I made you give up resources I needed for that, for free or at reduced prices, through gunboat diplomacy or outright conquest. You don't get to do the same because you were slow (even better, actively stopped from doing so in many cases)".
Nuclear is more dense, but much more difficult. But generally yes, the density of hydrocarbons for their application is unbeatable and will continue to be until we find something else.
This is true, but also so what? I’m serious. So what? What’s your point? Fuck all y’all I want burn coal because you did? What’s next? Demanding to play with gasoline and open flames, because someone else did?
This is childish behavior that focuses more on trying to trying to score some sort of shame points rather than say… survival. I hate[+] to be the one tell you, but those very people you think you’re supporting, are the very ones least capable of protecting themselves from climate disruption.
Now that we know, it is better to help the next generation live better without giving a pass because “that’s not fair, you got to do it” which is more akin to children’s logic.
Both China and India are nuclear powers with massive industrial bases, high technology and advanced militaries. Especially China.
The "hobbit perspective" of ignoring the problem won't work. If China ends up in a lot of pain due to climate change, EVERYONE will feel their pain. They won't lie down and take it, and if that means pushing others down so they can stay up, they'll do it no questions asked.
When we're all under water and biodiversity drops like in the Permian extinction, will it matter if "they did it first"/"we were right - they were wrong"?
It seems like western countries are penalized for having birthrates and population under control when the "per capita" emissions numbers are used, vs absolute output (which is declining in West).
China and soon India are the two countries that make me feel hopeless about controlling CO2. I get that's not "fair", but the planet doesn't care about fairness.
No they are not. Birth rates have declined in India and China as well. However, all those people have to live ssomewhere. So, per capita emissions are more than fair and accurate. If that is not the right way to look at it then how about the US (second highest level of total CO2 emissions behind China) reduce it to the level of, say, Lichtenstein.
The planet may not care about fariness, but developed countries can do.
As a compensation for years of above average pollution, let them spend some decades in negative pollution (removing carbon from the atmosphere) to offset for all the suffering they have caused.
I am worried about China too, but as an Indian, I can assure you that everyone in India is climate conscious and the govt. is doing its best to reach its pledges and targets.
Statistically, China is leading the world in solar installations and EV car sales. Admittedly sales figures don't always align with political will/intent, but China seems pretty far along the path towards controlling CO2 adjusting for how much of their footprint is externalized carbon from producing goods for the West, and the "bootstrap factor" that they are on a far faster growth/adoption curve overall than most of the West.
For what it is worth, politically on the record, China has some very strong goals stated, and those installation/sales statistics indicate some aggression towards meeting them.
I think a lot of the worry about China is misplaced for one reason or another. (Especially with the shell game of especially US politics outsourcing so much industrial work to China and then directly blaming China for emissions that should rightfully be accounted for in US corporation bottom lines and blaming China for the outsourcing in the first place as if it weren't done precisely because of that carbon emissions shell game and the gross [fig., lol] profits on the bottom line.)
India seems to be one of the countries with most to lose from climate change. If the wheat growing belt migrates north sufficiently - as it may - India will have enormous problems feeding itself.
Problem is not with the belt, problem is with water storage (aka snow caps) in Himalayas. If they are gone, then desertification and mass starvation is pretty much assured
The US produces much more economic output per ton of CO2 created than China. Carbon efficiency of economic output is a key metric that we should be optimizing for. This allows us to grow the economy on a per capita basis while still reducing absolute carbon emissions.
"Economic output per ton of CO2" looks like a red herring to me. To borrow a phrase from elsewhere in this thread, the climate doesn't care about economic output.
I'm not saying we won't see costs from decarbonising. We will. I'm saying that worrying too much about the economics will significantly impede the necessary work (as it has done for the past 50 years). It's quite likely that the current financial system is the wrong tool for the job in fixing this problem, now.
Why does it matter? You should care about the absolute numbers. The amount of CO2 the earth can reasonably sustain doesn't go up as the global population grows...
China is more or less a single political body. If you're talking about large scale political coordination to prevent climate events, then it makes sense to focus on the largest autonomous contributor
A problem in which everyone is supposed to suffer a little to prevent greater collective suffering in the future.
It has one important characteristic: everyone would rather not suffer and let some else suffer. When problems are like that, there is need for coordination, for people to agree on what is a fair amount of suffering for each actor.
I happen to agree that CO2 per capita is a much better measure of what is fair, especially when comparing the US and China, both countries that are growing very little in population
Another important characteristic is that one tribe has already enjoyed (and continues to enjoy) significant quality of life enhancements due to much higher consumption of fossil fuel per capita.
Politically, you’re simply not going to get anywhere with asking everyone to suffer “a little”.
Also, the whole detached single family house with 2 car garage on quarter acre lot has to go, but Americans are not going to give it up, and other countries’ people aspiring for it are certainly not going to give it up.
Those comments about some economies going carbon negative are making more sense when you see it as a coordination problem with the fairness issue.
Its like, China should grow its carbon consumption by no more than X, and we will go 0 and capture. That is quite possibly a fair way, and still cooperation from all the parties
But how much of this is due to Western nations essentially outsourcing emissions to China by shifting manufacturing etc. there?
The per-capita emissions are important because countries with high per-capita emissions likely have a lot of low-hanging fruit.
I mean reducing per-capita emissions in the USA could be done by improving public transport etc. whereas in China it would likely be condemning millions of people to poverty.
I always wonder where this belief comes from. The stuff we buy from China doesn't take that much energy to create compared to, say, driving 10 miles to the grocery store a few times a week.
Consumption-based CO2 inventories, that allocate emissions based on the country of the final end-user, are remarkably close to production-based inventories.
For the US, highly geographically resolved, consumption-based CO2 estimates show that most of our energy goes to suburban land use patterns: tons of transport fuel for lots of driving, and high heating/cooling costs due to detached, poorly insulated buildings. The typical city dweller has a carbon footprint 1/3 of the surrounding suburbanites, and the difference in consumption isn't about the things they buy from China:
There are actually industries which China dominates where the cost of energy is the main driving factor, like aluminium production. The thing is that as far as anyone can tell it makes zero economic sense for that to be made in China in such a polluting way - the only way that they could undercut countries with cheap green electricity to the extent they do is through massive Chinese government subsidies.
>tons of transport fuel for lots of driving, and high heating/cooling costs due to detached, poorly insulated buildings.
We have fixes for these don't we? Electric cars + solar panels could go a long way towards reducing this emissions source. I wonder if the government just aggressively subsidies solar + electric so much so that alternatives go out of business that we might just accelerate the solution to this problem.
The core issue is that people want the suburban lifestyle and they will not downgrade unless the government incentivizes them to or they are forced to due to climate disaster at their doorstep.
We need to drastically scale up battery production to make this happen on a quick enough time scale. Solar panel production is scaling at roughly the appropriate speed, but for cars we will need some people to lessen their driving needs if we want to keep pace with climate goals that are compatible with 1.5C of warming.
Which leads to my second point. I'm not convinced that as many people want the suburban lifestyle as are forced into it. My preference would be to have a non-suburban lifestyle, but it has been banned in most of the US. Our entire legal, tax, and governmental infrastructure is set up to prioritize and prefer suburbia, and it's been that way since WW2. My evidence that more people want alternatives to suburban lifestyles is that suburbia has to legislate its existence. Single family home owners fight super hard against allowing row houses or apartments, and that's the main impediment to their creation, not market forces.
An alternative to scaling battery production for cars is to electrify the highway system so that cars don't need huge batteries to go long distances. A side-benefit of that is it shifts energy use from overnight charging to daytime charging (since that's mostly when people drive around), which would be more compatible energy availability if we convert over to mostly-solar.
> The stuff we buy from China doesn't take that much energy to create compared to, say, driving 10 miles to the grocery store a few times a week.
Transporting the said item overseas, through customs, driven on a truck and a UPS van to my home is less than uhhh what?? Why are we comparing driving 10 miles to grocery store a few times a week?
If you want to objectively compare, you need to analyze kWh of energy spent in the entire supply chain per unit of production whether it is a USB cable from China or a tea pot from a local ceramic shop.
The biggest source of US emissions is driving. About a third. Transporting goods is a tiny tiny fraction of that, as overall transportation emissions account for only slightly more than that.
Driving really is the worst possible thing to do, and we have enshrined mandatory car use in the way that we have laid out our roads, where we allow housing and jobs to be placed, and by banning placement of daily needs next to homes.
EU emissions per capita are a fraction of US emissions, ans most of that comes from how we force people to live in the US.
Read the second part of my comment. It's about 10% from trade based manufacturing. Of course this is difficult to measure, but I think its safe to say the lion's share of CO2 emissions are from consumption.
> And it's not that China is producing emissions during manufacturing goods the entire world consumes. Take a look at "China: Consumption-based accounting: how do emissions compare when we adjust for trade?" and you'll see ~90% of their emissions are for consumption [2]
Still their per-capita emissions are lower, which is kind of what really matters given nations and borders are essentially a social construction, personal consumption/emissions are not.
As I mentioned previously, reducing China's total emissions would require reducing their per-capita emissions to such a low amount it would essentially be condemning much of the population to live in abject poverty (especially as large parts of the nation has not yet industrialised).
Given the far, far higher per-capita emissions of countries like the USA, Canada, Australia, Saudi Arabia etc. it wouldn't surprise me if China refused to slow economic development in order to reduce emissions.
This is a big factor. China for example has excellent fabrication and assembly services for PCBs. Does anyone know any services in the West that compete with the likes of JLCPCB?
I'm looking at how China's currently pummeling their tech sector for the sake of the party* and am hoping that they'll apply the same decisioning to their emissions-heavy industries as well.
Doubt it'll happen, but I can be wishful with my thoughts.
First of all, saying China's actions against tech sector is for the sake of the ccp, or that ccp simply felt they are too big is a narrow way to look at it. And makes the regulatory actions as a political game and not legitimate. You need to look at case by case. I argue each case has a legit issue, and in many of the cases, government is enforcing the laws that already exists but weren't enforced earlier. Chinese government didn't place any regulatory burden on tech sector earlier. But as the tech sector grew, there have been significant issues: 1) consolidation of power and use dominate market power to negatively affect the competition 2) Vast collection of personal data, commercializing personal data detriment to privacy 3) Use of algorithms and big data to detriment of consumers or workers. Ex: Tests shows that Didi chuxing show more expensive prices on a device you use to order multiple times before than a device you have not for the same trip. meituan's delivery algorithm drives delivery workers to the extreme. The delivery algorithm also gets harder if you work harder, resulting in ever intensive work condition, and they penalizes you each time you can't meet the algorithm.
I can present my points for supporting each of the regulatory actions but I won't go into details here. Overall, my view is that these regulatory actions are overdue. It doesn't mean we don't want tech sector. The society is a web of relationships between entities. Any time an entity that has a lot of advantage over another party, I argue that the red line should at least be that the more powerful entity shouldn't use its power to the detriment of the weaker party. The role of the government and laws should be to at least be to prevent that from happening. In terms of tech, the relationship is tech company vs its competitors, vs consumers, vs workers. In these relationships, a tech company can have significantly more advantaged because data it collected, characteristics of a digital business, network effects and capital. And if the weaker party is negatively affected because of the interaction between the powerful entity and the power difference, that should be a sign that public power should step in to either protect the weaker party or increase weaker party's power.
In regards to environment. I can list specific actions Chinese government took just recently: 1) A carbon credit and trading system is operational. The first batch of companies required to tally carbon credits and purchase credits include 2000 companies in the power generation sector, covering an emission of 4 billion tons of co2 annually. Steel, metal, cement, petro-chemical sectors will also be included as the plan progresses(https://www.reuters.com/article/china-carbon-market-0714-wed...) 2) Government is ordering more crude steel capacity reduction, can you imagine any country where the government is forcing businesses to reduce production and capacity 3) Aug 1, government removed export tax benefit for 23 types of steel, and placed export tariffs up to 40% on a few types of steel. Does any other country has self imposed export tariffs? The purpose looks like reduce exports of energy heavy, pollution heavy, and low margin metal products. Aiding steel capacity reduction. (http://finance.people.com.cn/n1/2021/0801/c1004-32177024.htm...) 4) Many state owned companies, such as state grid, petrochina now have even more green development tasks and initiatives. For example, more ultra high voltage DC powerlines are being built. This removes one of the primary adoption blocker for more renewables in china. One of the successful development model is villages in the western provinces are building solar farms, the revenue from power sales are dividend given to the local people, increasing renewables at the same time increasing people's income. And some villages in the dessert, have found its even possible to grow plants under solar panel's shade where before the sun was too strong. Now they have agriculture + solar energy development parks. Solar, wind, hydro installation are all increasing. In terms of industry and private sector, EV sales continue to grow, I believe EVs in China, given the quality of the products, market competition and gains in infrastructure, is starting to reach the consumer acceptance. Sales of Chinese companies in green sector, such as CATL is growing by a lot, stocks reaching all time high.
The natural gas industry in Russia emits a lot of CO2 by itself.
Generally the fossil fuel industry is one of the largest emitters if CO2 by itself. That is why countries like Russia and Saudi Arabia are among the top CO2 emitters in the world.
Chinese emissions are primarily because of a choice to exploit its thermal coal reserves for power generation instead of going nuclear. Probably was cheaper and faster to go that way - but it was definitely a choice.
As far as I can tell from an American perspective, the US has always done what was cheapest and fastest, and we still do. I sure wouldn’t expect China to do anything different.
China only recently has a 3G reactor design that is 100% Chinese IP. The state-owned enterprise that handles nuclear reactor construction is on the U.S. entity list.
Would having to curb CO2 emissions stunt Indian / African economic development more than the effects of climate change will? Those two areas are particularly vulnerable to the worst of the impacts as I understand it (extreme heat, food supply disruption, etc.)
Poverty and hunger are downstream of climate shocks, not separate from it. Drought and other extreme weather events are powerful historical causes of war and famine.
The GP question is whether that dynamic is canceled out by the economic benefits of polluting energy technologies.
> China is particularly troubling since they make up 28% of all emissions (US is 15%) and they have both a growing population and growing emissions per capita.
You seem to have discovered that the lifestyle of western countries is unsustainable (and the US is particularly bad). It does not make it China's fault.
"China is particularly troubling since they make up 28% of all emissions (US is 15%) and they have both a growing population and growing emissions per capita"
If you calculate emissions per capita (US 350m - China 1b) then the US still beats China handily...just saying.
This is a good point, and China has basically already risen to European levels of energy use and emissions. For the services available to the typical Chinese person, I wouldn't expect this to rise a ton more, unless China adopts US-style car-dependent land use for the majority of its population. Look at the difference in consumption between car-dependent city planning and the urban cores where cars are not a necessity:
That's a bigger difference than the US-China difference.
But even if China does decide to go that route, they have two other advantages over the US: 1) the housing growth will come from new builds that are far better insulated, and use heat pumps rather than fossil fuel heat, and 2) they will be able to grow the car fleet with EVs, rather than having a huge existing fleet of ICE.
Russia is one of the few countries building nuclear.
"A share of nuclear power plants (branches of Rosenergoatom Concern, part of ROSATOM’s Electric Power Division) in the energy mix of Russia was 20.28% in 2020. In 2019, this indicator was 19.04%."
"CO2 emissions decreased by -2.13% over the previous year (2015), representing a decrease by -36,108,200 tons over 2015, when CO2 emissions were 1,698,007,500 tons.
CO2 emissions per capita in the Russian Federation are equivalent to 11.44 tons per person (based on a population of 145,275,383 in 2016), a decrease by -0.27% over the figure of 11.71 CO2 tons per person registered in 2015; this represents a change of -2.3% in CO2 emissions per capita."
We have decreased ours and they have increased theirs but we are still buying more and more shit from them - their emissions are our emissions - while the demand side exists the supply will too - it will just be supplied from somewhere else...
Blaming China and India is the typical Republican talking point about climate change.
There is a reason Noam Chomsky has called the Republican party the most dangerous organization in the world because of how they promote Western inaction on climate change.
A "western country" can not "conveniently" cut their carbon emissions, and still buy shit manufactured overseas, and pretend everything is hunkey-dorey.
> China is particularly troubling since they make up 28% of all emissions (US is 15%) and they have both a growing population and growing emissions per capita.
That is just providing proof that we cannot eradicate poverty on the planet without destroying it in the process with 8 billion human beings. And this is just CO2 emissions but the issue is with consumption of resources in general: What is happening is simply that consumption of resources increases when people are lifted out of poverty (quite obviously since that's pretty much poverty means).
The only sustainable way for human development is to bring global population down at the same time at global standard of living increases.
Not sure why you are being devoted. Having say, half our current population would have made this problem considerably easier.
People do seem to cut back their baby making as they move from agricultural to industrial, it’s just a much slower process than we would prefer to help with this issue.
Would make little difference. Majority of consumption is coming from small percentage of the world's population. If everyone on the planet consumed at the rate of the top 1% we'd need 10s of earths.
Plus it's also dog whistle. Who should decrease the population? Western white people?
You are talking about communities subsistence farming with large families, and trying to reduce the size of those families through pushing them to industrialise. but what does it matter? those current families no matter how large, don't consume anything.
> If everyone on the planet consumed at the rate of the top 1% we'd need 10s of earths.
But that's exactly the point. Although it's a bit more than the top 1%, more like top 10-15%.
What do you think eradicating poverty and global development means? Exactly that: A developed world means a world consuming the same as, say, Europeans do.
This only works if population is reduced, even drastically reduced because, quite obviously, it does not work with 8+ billion people.
> Who should decrease the population? Western white people?
Who should remain dirt poor? Brown people?
This is ridiculous.
This is a global issue. Poverty should be eradicated globally, the global population should reduce. Do not make it a racial, if not racist, issue.
I think the developed nations can learn a lot from those who currently consume orders of magnitude less. About values and worth and happiness. And equally can invest back much of what they took from them historically into helping them develop in a sustainable way. Not through some sort of white saviour nonsense or though some drive to sell them stuff in the long term, but though financial reparations and cancelling debt, coupled with releasing IP, patents and removing any other protectionist policies.
> Governments need to tax CO2 emissions on the business side and pour the money into carbon capture technology in the private space through investment and perhaps some sort of bounty program
Unfortunately, getting this proposed, passed without mutilation, and enforced is also a collective action problem.
Though I agree with your implied point that decentralized solutions should be the baseline, especially as they don't preclude coordinated action if that somehow becomes possible. To do otherwise is to pointlessly leave a powerful, relatively easy-to-deploy policy tool on the table for essentially religious reasons.
Unfortunately, there's a pretty powerful contingent of superstitious economic illiterates in our politics that see market-based solutions as automatically suspect, in the same way that there are powerful scientific illiterates that see nuclear as "unclean" (which is basically "unholy" laundered by modernity).
> I'm past hoping for people to do the right things en masse
What scares me is that there doesn't even seem to be a constituency for bold action on climate. I used to at least be comforted by the political left carrying the torch, but the most recent iteration of the party has a "climate policy" that just dresses up the same old unrelated economic wishlist in climate rhetoric like a skinsuit (again, any proposal that doesn't emphasize nuclear is unserious; the Green New Deal explicitly rejects it)
In the US, I expect solar and wind plus storage is cheaper than nuclear. It doesn’t really matter though, if you put high enough taxes on carbon the market will sort it out. The government shouldn’t be picking individual technologies, because they are likely to fuck it up.
I used to think as you do about nuclear, but I've become convinced that old nuclear technology is too expensive to compete with renewables OR fossil fuels, and new nuclear technology cannot scale up enough to matter before 2050 (when the worst effects of climate change will either have been averted or made inevitable).
I still absolutely believe it is worth investing in nuclear just in case I'm wrong, and it would be nice to explore the universe later using e.g. cold fusion if our civilization survives this crisis, but I do not think we should rely on or expect nuclear power to make any significant contribution to addressing the climate crisis on the very tight timeline necessary.
> What scares me is that there doesn't even seem to be a constituency for bold action on climate. I used to at least be comforted by the political left carrying the torch, but the most recent iteration of the party has a "climate policy" that just dresses up the same old unrelated economic wishlist in climate rhetoric like a skinsuit
The left != the party (by which I assume you mean the Democrats)
A sizeable fraction of the population understands that climate change is an enormous problem and when polled has said solving it should be a priority (no numbers or poll link offhand, sorry). They are also routinely told that they are terrible people if they don't support the party that at least acknowledges climate change in their rhetoric over the one that for all I can tell is 100% committed to turning the planet into one big oil spill.
Don't confuse the actions of the politicians with what the populace actually cares about. Something like 70% wants universal government-run healthcare (yeah, even the people who watch Fox news[1]) but even with Democratic majorities in congress the politicians can't seem to scrounge the two craps to even pretend like they want to make it happen.
> If there is anything covid has taught me its that collective action isn't something we can rely on and is a lot more wishful thinking about the state of humanity rather than a sober look at the reality.
If climate change plays out the way the pandemic has, I think we will have collective action, but it'll be uneven and fall short. We'll avoid the most dire outcomes, but blow right past acceptable outcomes. Many, many will die who could have been saved, the cost will be enormous, but we'll successfully avoid the absolute worst cases. I don't know if we call that a successful failure or a failed success.
It'll play out like the recycling/renewables industry. Some people will do things that are easy and catchy, there will be some net gains, but much of it will eventually turn to barely break-even or worse, like the unsustainable single-stream recycling or trendy-but-usually-fails-before-breaking-even things like reusable straws.
The world is just going to change and we'll either figure out how to live with it (probably) or we won't (if there's a mass biome collapse that leaves us foodless, unless we can generate 9B people's worth of food from bacteria or something).
If the pandemic is anything to go by, the collective action will harm the common people (especially the poor) while the elites get to play by entirely separate rules! While there's no doubt that sacrifices in quality of life are going to have to be made I think it's very important that the elites are seen to suffer as much as the common man otherwise the inevitable result will be increasingly ungovernable countries.
Absolutely -- inequality has brought us to this pass, continues to be an obstacle, and will make the consequences far worse. Should we, as individuals, eat less meat, drive more fuel efficient vehicles, fly less, and other such activities to reduce our carbon output? Yes, but as many have pointed out in this and other discussions, that doesn't come anywhere close to being enough. It's the dynamic of the rich scolding people for a Starbucks latte habit, writ large.
Should the elite aggressively pivot their companies to carbon neutral strategies, divest their substantial investments from greenhouse gas producing holdings, put their political muscle toward laws that will get us off our current disastrous path, and fund this change via taxes on their wealth? Yes, and this would do far, far more to change things for the better.
If you can figure out how to make this happen, well you'll be some kind of sociological and political genius.
In democratic nations, government actions are collective action, and so they have the same problem. In non-democratic nations those in charge are often the beneficiaries of the status quo. I'm not hopeful for government action either. People want a quick fix with little loss in living standard and few changes. That tells me that either we won't notice the incremental changes enough to act, and we'll ride this to the end, or we'll wake up and suddenly fund a massive but cheap climate engineering project that will work, but have unintended consequences, like iron fertilization of the oceans for albedo impacts. Worst case we go snowball earth and kill everything instead of just ourselves.
It’s great folly to think climate change can be solved by “waking people up” and that whole endeavor probably just makes things worse. It becomes a red/blue issue where nearly half the population take opposing sides, like mindless zombies. A solution, if we are to find one, will not come from the many but from the few, maybe just a single person or invention. Emerging economies pollute, necessarily. That’s the real problem. Surely it feels good to some people to say “I told you so!”, to see oneself on some noble crusade to enlighten the masses about the troubles that are to come. But it’s not at all productive in fact it’s the opposite. Not everyone has the ears to hear. The good side has to accept that sad truth and give up on the political squabbling. Spend energy thinking about solutions that don’t require building consensus with the guys in jack up trucks and the poor third world nations that pollute to survive.
> A solution, if we are to find one, will not come from the many but from the few, maybe just a single person or invention.
This is going to sound harsh, but to me this argument seems like a mental contortion to absolve yourself from doing anything and not feel bad about it.
In the past 20 years we have seen significant progress in slowing down, or even reducing for some countries, the emission of CO2. It is not enough, but it's definitely significant.
This happened thanks to the many, via awareness campaign and political pressure. And this bought us some precious time.
Even if you truly believe the solution will come from a Messiah appearing with a techno-miracle, you should still push to wake people up: The more people are truly aware of the problem, the more will be interested in working in climate-related tech, giving us more chance for "that single invention" to appear. And you also want the mass to be enlightened about this to continue trying to slow down the train, giving more time for technological breakthrough to appear before we are completely screwed.
> In the past 20 years we have seen significant progress in slowing down, or even reducing for some countries, the emission of CO2. It is not enough, but it's definitely significant. This happened thanks to the many, via awareness campaign and political pressure.
I’m guessing this has nothing to do with awareness campaigns and everything to do with the relative price of coal, natural gas, and renewables. People just did whatever was cheapest, and that meant switching away from coal.
The solution is not authoritarianism. We have plenty of that now and got here because of that. We have not just governmental authoritarianism, but also in business. In fact, business authoritarianism is arguably why we are here.
> The greatest hope I see for the future of humanity is the incentive for a brilliant mind/leader to become the next Bezos/Musk via climate change technology
> ...isn't something we can rely on and is a lot more wishful thinking about the state of humanity rather than a sober look at the reality.
I don't mean for this to sound too critical but how do you square these two concepts?
The idea of a great inventor/scientist/theorist is to me kind of obsolete. It existed in a time of much more low-hanging fruit but today most scientific/theoretic progress is slow and the collective result of many groups slow, focused, and methodical work. Even before, even the greats stood on the shoulders of myriad giants.
The idea of hoping for a "great leader" who is solely capable of "fixing" things is to my mind a very concerning and alarming idea.
Even if you may not think that... the idea that "one good idea" is enough to solve our problems immediately, or even just quickly enough, feels like escapism to me. No matter how good of an engineering solution is achieved there will be a slow and painful process of rolling it out fraught with cultural and political questions. It doesn't behoove us to push that off, even if the engineering questions feel more essential. It's an inevitable problem. We should consider it earlier rather than later.
Came here to say this. I also want to add that there are no solutions with the West's current consumption habits. If we all switch to electric cars today, oil might be doing okay, but we'll still be exploiting workers and raiding resources in environmentally costly lithium mines. This is not a technical issue. This is a political issue. The question we should be asking is how we reduce our consumption and how to increase our reciprocity with the environment, not at an individual level, but at a systemic and societal level. And here's the hard part: this isn't done through innovation. This is done through reducing the capitalist pressures to consume and produce. This is driven locally, slowly, and radically by pushing back against what capitalism has done.
Digging up lithium is nowhere near the same as mining fossil fuels. You're literally just washing rock with water and you can clean the water afterwards.
Isn't it funny how COVID has caused the government-inclined to want more government and the government-disinclined to want less government? Almost as if this complex issue about which we still don't have all the facts has just made people feel that their prior beliefs have been confirmed? I wonder if there's a phrase for a bias like that.
Are you saying that Covid has had zero net effect on people's political inclinations? That the stark lesson in the importance of coordinated action has only hit home amongst those who were already "government inclined"? Because I don't that's true.
I would put it more broadly. COVID was put in service of continuing culture wars and political infighting, like literally everything else. People hate each so much they would rather have death (for them or for themselves) than agree. It's crazy. Everything politicized, even goddamn PPE and vaccination.
> those who were already "government inclined"
It isn't so much "government inclined", or even left versus right, it's in-tribe vs out-tribe. Some tribes, clearly, have only become more entrenched and delusional.
Isn't it funny how the "government-disinclined" that don't want to wear masks generally support Florida laws that makes it illegal for businesses to mandate masks?
A 200% value-added tax on fossil fuels that rises by 10% every year would provide the capital.
EDIT: To clarify, this is not a suggestion to raise capital from the tax as much as it's to raise capital from the use of fossil fuels. It's a suggestion for an increasingly punitive financial cost to force behavioural changes.
We have an infinite money printing machine. We don't need access to any capital. That's not what the carbon tax is about. We need to change behavior. We need everyone that uses carbon to pay for its use (including the externalities) so that they stop using it as much as they are. This is why poor people can't be exempt. This is why the rich can't just pay for it. We all need a massive increase in the cost of everything that touches carbon (read everything) so we start driving to the next city once per year instead of every weekend, so that we start eating a BLT once a month instead of twice a week (a lot of heart issues down here in the south for a reason), and the list goes on.
A carbon tax is a non starter in democratic countries because we have seen over and over again that raising the price of motor fuel is political suicide. Canada had to back off on a program that offered a carbon tax back as a rebate. Similar outcome in France with Yellow vest protest movement. Many countries have tried to get rid of fuel subsidies only to spark middle class street protests. In the US the main election issue in 2022 will be "inflation" which for many voters is the price of gas. Carbon taxes simply do not work in the real world.
> We need to change behavior. We need everyone that uses carbon to pay for its use (including the externalities) so that they stop using it as much as they are. This is why poor people can't be exempt. This is why the rich can't just pay for it. We all need a massive increase in the cost of everything that touches carbon (read everything)
This is a pro-climate and anti-human policy. Do you care more about human beings or the amount of CO2 in the air?
There are still billions of people who have no electricity. Let's get them closer to our standard of living before we make everything more expensive for them.
Well, guess you want both eternal exponential growth for everybody, as well as a healthy planet to live on, but without any sort of compromise whatsoever.
I don't think you really understand what cost means in this case. Or a compromise.
Thinking that cost just means paying more -> bad is a very simplistic way to look at things.
Cost, especially via taxation, means setting aside a part of our productivity as a planet towards making sure we don't destroy ourselves. Everybody should contribute because everyone has skin in the game. By taxing CO2 specifically, you force people towards choosing more sustainable choices automatically.
Understand that you can't have a completely free market and an environment in which you want to live.
That's not going to work. A lot of people (and industries) rely on cars to do their jobs. It's a lot of low-income households who rely most on cars because they live in remote areas due to housing costs and have to commute to city centers to find work. Such a tax would cause a huge backlash in large parts of the population in any country and the government who enacts it would be quickly disbanded. We need subsidies to pay for the transitions (pay for changing people's heating, buying them electric cars, etc.). Financing this shouldn't be a problem for most developed countries at the current interest rates.
I'm all in favor of subsidies to help the disadvantaged, as a general matter of principle. But fundamentally, disrupting people's lifestyles is the point. Yes, it's going to radically shift the economics of all kinds of things, including commuting. That's exactly what needs to happen. There's got to be a big rebalancing, which is hopefully the sort of thing that the free market is good at. What we need to do is make sure there are enough safety nets and wealth redistribution so that no one gets left behind - again, as a general principle, not just over this one issue.
All change is going to disproportionately impact the disadvantaged. But I don't think we can let that be an argument against change in general.
You are right, a carbon tax without a fair and progressive redistribution is doomed to fail. This is partially why we had the "yellow vest" mouvement in France
We definitely need public financing — and especially things like HVAC should be table-stakes since it's also an effective jobs program — but we also need those ever-increasing taxes. Most of those people commuting in remote areas use high-emission, low-mileage vehicles for fashion reasons and they can afford to do so because the costs of that lifestyle have been heavily subsidized for decades.
If we instituted a vehicle weight / mileage tax (to fund road repair as EVs cut into the already wildly inadequate gas tax) and send a message that gas prices will never be cheaper in the future, that would change rapidly because there wouldn't be any way to fool yourself into thinking that you could afford that huge SUV which has been keeping you broke for years. It takes a lot to disturb a deeply-entrenched status quo and I think taxes are key, but I would ramp them in slower: set a floor on the cost for a barrel of oil and increase it annually so the writing is on the wall but there's time to make major capital expenditures.
The political backlash is a real problem, especially with the knowledge that the simple solutions like giving people financial assistance for replacing high-emissions vehicles would be met with a well-funded deluge of bad faith attacks (you can just hear the “why are they giving away Teslas to people who didn't earn them!” ads now). I suspect continued subsidies for things like EVs and solar would be possible but I wonder whether there could also be a low-rate loan subsidy program, especially for homeowners and businesses looking to electrify things like heaters, boilers, etc.
That's why to be politically viable any carbon emissions tax would have to be phased in gradually over many years. That would give people adequate time to adjust their lifestyles and purchase more efficient vehicles. The average car in the US is 12 years old so the phase in period has to be longer than that.
> That's not going to work. A lot of people (and industries) rely on cars to do their jobs
Unfortunately economic contraction is going to essential if we are going to reduce GHG emissions. We've tried the "full steam ahead, green energy will catch up!" approach for decades and it emissions have only gotten worse.
Don't forget those same people that would suffer from not having cars will suffer even more under the worse case climate scenarios.
Hence absent a miracle technology that had all the benefits of fossil fuels and more but none of the drawbacks was the only solution. But since that has not yet happened, the situation is kind of bleak.
We don't need to raise capital. We don't need taxes to pay for the renewable and adaptive work we need to do. Taxes are strictly punitive and saying we need to raise taxes to raise funds is not only wrong, but delays action.
Further, the global financial system is based on the notion of perpetual and steady (if volatile) growth. That's the core tenet of the entire system, underpinning everything from inflation to basic employment.
By implication, this requires an infinite human population on Earth on an infinite timescale.
The still very young global financial system and everything in it is and always has been a Ponzi scheme.
Exactly this. There needs to more understanding about the negative consequences of inflationary monetary system. Absolutely scarce money, i.e. bitcoin, is the only solution to this problem. Scarce money forces to innovate in order to grow.
I do see your point, and I've thought about this consequence a lot.
I sincerely don't think it would cause a financial collapse, as ridiculous as that might sound.
200% plus 10% compounding per annum is the lowest I think we could reasonably go in order to be in with a chance of reaching peak carbon by 2030.
It forces deeply painful changes on the world, but no more painful than is necessary to avoid the collapse of civilisation.
The problem until now is that people haven't been given the justification to go along with the astronomical task being asked (i.e. Stop burning fossil fuels immediately or we all die).
If COVID, and the 2008 crisis, have taught me anything it's that the economy is unbelievably fragile to shocks. Trying to levy huge taxes in a democracy is DOA for that reason. Most Americans will do just about anything to avoid another recession -- that's food off their tables.
One interesting question: say we tried that MIT economist's plan where you have a hefty carbon tax but give the entire thing back as a tax rebate[1]. That'd get a direct deposit/check arriving (hopefully frequently) and send a message that the faster you lower your emissions, the more other people are giving you free money. People don't like paying taxes but they allow love to get the better side of a deal.
This is exactly how Canada's federal carbon tax is structured.
Citizens get rebates based on income, so poorer individuals get larger rebates as a percent of income and can actually come out ahead even with rising prices due to the carbon tax.
More wealthy citizens will (due to lifestyle differences) pay more in taxes than they get back, but they also have the means to change their lifestyles/make different choices, so they could end up in a spot where they use less carbon and so also come out ahead.
It's a very simple mechanism to modify behaviour and does do in a relatively equitable way.
Quite frankly, that is why democracy will fail us. Most Americans will do just about anything to avoid their income falling for 10-20 years but do just about nothing to avoid the global climate from torpedoing the world's biomes, food production systems, weather patterns, coastlines and coastal cities, decimating species diversity, etc. over 10-100 years.
We could be saved by technological or business breakthrough from an individual, or we could be saved by authoritarianism, but the preference you just described is why we're probably fucked if we hope for a political solution in western democracies (at least the US).
The so-called "invisible hand" has already gotten the US on the right trajectory, with the government nudging it along. That's all we can hope for, along with 330 million people making better decisions.
> collective action isn't something we can rely on and is a lot more wishful thinking about the state of humanity rather than a sober look at the reality
I understand that is a popular worry these days (and I understand why some might feel that way, given how troubling recent history is) but I think the news from history is much better than that - it's actually very good: In just the last half-century: Civil rights, women's rights, the overthrow of non-democratic regimes worldwide (E. Europe, S. Africa, S. Korea, etc. etc.), etc. In fact, the current reactionary (for lack of a better word) movement - the one that obstructs progress on Covid and climate change, among other things - is collective action to a significant extent.
It's interesting to me that as the tools for collective action have improved by orders of magnitude (i.e., the Internet and its applications), those tools are instead used to spread a message to depress action. More interesting is that the message only spreads on one side of the political world - the reactionaries aren't telling each other how useless and impossible their goals are.
Whatever the reason, it's very convenient for the status quo, for the people in power, that the public disavows their own ability to challenge them.
> The greatest hope I see for the future of humanity is the incentive for a brilliant mind/leader to become the next Bezos/Musk
From my perspective, what a depressing and self-demeaning outlook. We don't need some 'great person' to do it for us; we can do it. We can do it, right now, which means to first stop telling each other that we can't. Nothing can stop us, literally, except us not trying.
For centuries, the American story has been that we can accomplish anything together, that any person can make a difference. It's the faith behind Silicon Valley startups too. We've revolutionized politics, government, freedom, prosperity, technology ...
> collective action isn't something we can rely on
> Governments need to tax CO2 emissions on the business side
Getting the government to do anything that impacts the profits of powerful companies will itself require heroic amounts of well-organized collective action.
> the incentive for a brilliant mind/leader to become the next Bezos/Musk via climate change technology
The problem is political, not technical. Moreover, people who become billionaires are averse to questioning the economic systems that prevent us from being able to take collective action to tackle climate change (and other systemic problems), because it has served them so well. That's why they build bunkers and space ships in the hope of personal salvation. They ain't going to fix this for us. It's collective action or apocalypse.
Interestingly, covid seems to have taught me the opposite. When covid hit, the time-to-market of a new vaccine was 10-15 years. The collective action of governments divided this number literally by ten. Despite all the bad words we've heard about bad policies and mistakes done by governments, I think we should be proud of what humankind has achieved during covid (granted, some governments have done and still do very poorly but let's not enter this kind of discussion).
As a consequence, I am quite optimistic about what we could do if the effects of climate chang were as obvious as those of covid (which unfortunately is not the case). And in that respect, I believe in both government action and the intervention of brilliant minds/leaders. We'll need (and have) both.
The collective actions of governments did nothing there. What happened is we got exceedingly lucky the research was already there for 30-odd years and interested parties pumped money into it like there was no tomorrow.
Most governments since COVID started faffed about endlessly and took really poor measures all around for what it looked like eternity (with a few notable exceptions). Eventually they got around getting it half-right and here we are, massive death tolls that could have probably been avoided with earlier lockdowns, properly enforced mask wearing and so on.
At the same time a lot of countries where education has been and is poor are full with people who eschieve vaccination for the dumbest reasons possible and see in this manifestations of their freedoms (of spreading further a potentially deadly disease).
This pandemic brought the worst out of people and in a few situations the best.
No, human kind cannot rely on collective actions because human beings are way too selfish to do something for the greater good. And we can see it because we are in this point in time with climate change, the final hour - and still there are a LOT of people denying climate change just as there are people denying COVID is a problem.
I don't share your vision. Things are always obvious in the hindsight, but in reality, at least in Western Europe we did quite well. The challenges that governments faced were huge and numerous (if you account for social, economical, technical and political aspects).
Of course we can always do better, but the reality is that today, we have dozens of millions of people double-vaxxed here, and we're making progress.
Even looking within western EU, things could have been done so much better - remember how poorly Italy handled the start of the pandemic? But the true disaster is in Eastern and to a lesser degree central EU, as well as India, Pakistan, etc. Not to mention the trainwreck that was in the USA and to a lesser degree South America.
Try to look outside the box, the world is more than just western EU.
In particular Operation Warp Speed significantly accelerated the pace of vaccine mass production by removing the financial risk for pharmaceutical companies.
The efficacy of the vaccines is really being called into question though. Gibraltar and Iceland are getting more cases after being 99 and 75% respectively. Iceland is actually getting record cases.
The government did very little to protect the most vulnerable and chose actions that massively disrupted people's lives. Shutting down schools was probably the most egregious of the many mistakes.
One of the major things government did to get the covid vaccine out faster was... wait for it .... be LESS involved and not apply rules and regulations they normally do.
> collective action isn't something we can rely on and is a lot more wishful thinking about the state of humanity rather than a sober look at the reality. Governments need to tax CO2 emissions
I fully agree, but if history has taught me anything about Western politics, it's that power and money reign supreme. The term of politicians only lasts a few years, and many will do everything they can to feather their cap during that time, doing the bidding of big business. And the top priority for many is to stay in power - changes to help the climate are expensive, and indeed getting more expensive the longer we delay, so few have what it takes to be bold and put policies in place that may be unpopular with a large segment of their constituents.
And then there is the economic arms race that is characteristic of our modern, divided world. Countries don't want to make hard decisions, because they know some others won't.
Honestly, it looks very, very grim. To have any hope of mitigating what's going to come, we need massive global action that is going to be to the short to medium-term detriment of many politicians, corporations, lobbying groups, and of course regular citizens too. I strongly hope I'm wrong, but I just can't see any future where any of that happens :(
As a programmer, I empathize with the impulse to go with the elegant, unified solution of carbon taxes.
The problem is that everybody gets hurt, in at least a short-term sense, by a carbon tax. And yes, a lot of people will understand that this is a necessary pain. But all the worst carbon offenders that might campaign against a climate policy would get hurt by the same thing at the same time, so they would provide a large lobbying voice to weaken or destroy what's hurting them (this example is about carbon taxes, but really any sort of universal punitive measure) as a policy.
Politically, punishments will remain effective for longer if they are targeted so that the opposition to them remains divided. It _might_ help if carbon taxes could be adopted on a per-industry basis, because polluters are nothing if not keen to avoid thinking about anything that they perceive as not their problem- it should be possible to avoid triggering any sort of sense of polluter-solidarity on their part.
Another possibility is offering positive financial incentives to stopping fossil fuel activity. The government could directly give cash to companies that stop pulling coal and oil out of the ground, or stop burning it. Fracking companies in particular should be given a ton of money if they convert to geothermal.
Ecologically sustainable changes will happen when it's cheap and/or comfortable to do, period.
Increasing the costs of carbon-based choices will just lead to civil unrest. I think this is already part of where recent problems in the US are coming from.
Carbon taxes and similar solutions implicitly assume that the individual making the carbon-positive choice is the one who should bear the cost. I feel a bit like it's you have decades of individuals and groups insulating themselves from real costs, through deception and ignorance, and then us deciding to pass those costs onto those who can't or don't want it anyway. Socialized risk, capitalized gain all over again.
You might say that nature is going to extract those costs one way or another, but this is one case where I think the moral responsibility is in spreading those costs out in ways that can be borne realistically.
Better for the average person worldwide to make the sustainable choices cheaper rather than increase the costs of the unsustainable choices, because then that's implicitly just increasing costs for everything in many situations.
The history of humanity is filled with stories where technologies require a full adherence to a set of rules to avoid externaliies. And since this cannot be done, it explains much of what's happening in the world today.
COVID-19 was a program of systemic action. The US had lockdowns, mask mandates and even soft vaccine mandates. None of this was enough to crush the virus. Why? Because systems are made of individuals who will decide whether or not they want to collaborate on solving a problem.
> None of this was enough to crush the virus. Why? Because systems are made of individuals who will decide whether or not they want to collaborate on solving a problem.
Many of the individuals currently refusing vaccines in the US didn't just decide, there was an active effort made to convince them not to get one:
> Had the US continued to vaccinate in the summer at the same rate as in the spring, the US would be near herd immunity by now. It took a lot of work by powerful people and institutions to prevent that outcome. It didn't just *happen.* It was *done.*
> COVID vaccine refusal was not some unprompted, spontaneous reaction among pro-Trump Americans. It was manufactured: first as part of a larger program of denial to cover for Trump's pandemic failures; then after Trump lost, in order to stoke feelings of victimhood and persecution.
> Had the US continued to vaccinate in the summer at the same rate as in the spring, the US would be near herd immunity by now.
This obsession in the media with herd immunity is strange. It's not even clear herd immunity with Delta and our current vaccines is attainable. Just look at Iceland where 65+% of cases are fully vaccinated (https://www.covid.is/data). UK has had high vaccination rates and is still surging (https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/).
We can certainly make the pandemic manageable - I'm not worried about hospitals toppling over in the Bay Area with its 80+% 12+ fully vaccinated rate, but covid is still on the upswing.
> People think that either (a) COVID itself is a hoax or not that bad, or (b) that the vaccines are a hoax
Granted this is the Bay Area I'm in but the folks I know that refuse to take a vaccine don't see it as a hoax. They are some combination of unconvinced of a low risk of long-term vaccine side-effects (by virtue of us having no actual long-term observations) and concluding P(risk_of_getting_covid) * expected_cost(covid | infected) < expected_cost(side_effects)
For some other analysis that this is more than just politics:
You have to admit that those unconvinced people doing that equation are unbelievably selfish, as they are certainly not including the cost of spreading COVID to an immunocompromised person in that last term.
The question being asked is "would you take a vaccine to save a neighbor's life?" and these people are answering no.
There was an effort to convince people not to vaccinate, but I think the bigger cause of anti-vaccination sentiment was contrarianism against and distrust of the effort to convince people to vaccinate. Years of government and media lies ranging from the Iraq War to distorted and propagandistic reporting of things that Trump had said resulted in millions of people justifiably feeling that the mainstream media, the government establishment, and the supposed "experts" that the media and government often trot out are all to be distrusted. It is a boy who cried wolf scenario.
That's why individuals should not have the freedom of choice. China's actions against the virus proved rather effective because the government actually has authority there. Western democracy is clearly weak when it comes to dealing with crisis of any kind.
Individuals always have the freedom of choice. Authoritarian governments only work when people choose to tolerate them. If the Chinese people lose faith in their government, we'll see how effectively it can manage a crisis...
In the US, many people don't have faith in strong centralized authorities. Becoming more authoritarian will only make that worse, not better. It is not a problem of political systems, it is a deeper cultural phenomenon.
>Western democracy is clearly weak when it comes to dealing with crisis of any kind.
Sounds like a feature to me. They're also "rather effective" at setting up reeducation camps in xijiang to deal with the "crisis" of "extremism and terrorism by Uygurs"[1]
> I'm past hoping for people to do the right things en masse.
This isn't either or: we can heavily incentivize creating climate change tech AND drive for a systemic change. It is IMO immoral to just give up on a sustainable political solution because it is hard: huge changes have happened in the past and can happen again.
>> collective action isn't something we can rely on
hmmm
>>Governments need to
You do understand that government is collective action, and you should not rely on it right?
> tax CO2 emissions on the business side
I am still opposed to Co2 taxation in most of the implementations proposed. it ends up just creating perverse incentives for companies to game the system, Just look at how destructive ewaste regulations have been for the environment were you have companies preventing the repair of their products to ensure they get "credit" for the destruction (aka recycle) of reparable electrics that then simply end up in some 3rd world nation for children to pick through
I just cation that you need to fully look at the unintended consequences of taxation and government regulation, the road to hell is paves with good intentions. If you think the world has problems, what until you see government solutions to those problems...
Bingo. Carbon taxes in Canada really function as yet another power grab, with the federal government promising to rebate the taxes back to Canadians.
In effect it's a case of "Just trust us with the money... we promise we'll give it back", which will obviously change as soon as more money is needed to fuel their insatiable appetite for spending. It's not even a question of "if", it's "when".
In practice, this means much higher home heating costs in areas where there aren't practical alternatives, higher transportation costs, higher costs for food production, and pretty much price inflation on any consumer goods that are transported by road, rail, or air... which is all of them.
It makes Canadian industry less competitive than ever at a time when GDP per capita is lagging badly behind the US.
Too much of a good thing... I can picture a scenario, admittedly science fiction for now, when carbon capture is so lucrative it's removed to an extent plants don't have enough of it. Not to say carbon capture is bad, just that humans + greed = unintended consequences, every time.
What technology has the convenience and cheapness of fossil fuels? The versatility and strength of plastics, the power of diesel, and the portability and ease of use of all the fossil fuels?
> I'm past hoping for people to do the right things en masse.
Getting people behind goals with long timelines is pretty much impossible. As you said, the pandemic demonstrated (and continues to demonstrate) how we behave and think.
> Governments need to tax CO2 emissions on the business side and pour the money into carbon capture technology
No. Sorry. You are buying into propaganda.
Put simply: We (humanity) cannot do a thing about atmospheric CO2 concentration.
This is a planetary-scale problem requiring resources and energy over tens of thousands of years, not a few dozen. It is unreasonable to think we can actually affect a planetary-scale problem in anything approaching a human time scale. Yet this is exactly what we are being sold. We are far more likely to kill all life on earth than to fix atmospheric CO2 concentration.
This is NOT a guess on my part. This conclusion is well supported by data going back 800,000 years. The science is there and this conclusion has already been reached. The problem is that the issue of climate change has been politicized to the point where --much as is the case with certain aspects of the pandemic-- the scientific truth does not matter.
Most intelligent people with a modicum of science coursework are perfectly equipped to understand this conclusion. The problem is in pulling people away from what has effectively become indoctrination to have them take a few minutes to actually exercise critical thinking.
What if I told you a high school kid with basic math skill could understand this conclusion?
How many of those reading this would be open-minded enough to say: "OK. Show me. I am willing to do the work in the interest of learning if what I am have been led to believe is wrong.". In my experience people would rather stick to their beliefs, punitively issue a down-vote and move on rather than understand. In this way one is no different from anti-vaxers.
OK, so a few of you are interested in confirming this claim. Good news. It's easy.
Here's the first and simplest claim to confirm:
If all of humanity left the planet today and all of our technology was shutdown, it would take somewhere in the order of 50,000 years for atmospheric CO2 to drop 100 ppm.
How do you confirm this?
What if we had atmospheric CO2 data from before humanity industrialized to the point of being relevant?
We do! We have 800,000 years of very accurate atmospheric CO2 data extracted from ice core samples. Here it is:
You then fit straight lines to the graph in order to determine the rate of change of both atmospheric CO2 accumulation and decline. Here are my lines for the decline portion of the data:
Looking at it in rough strokes, it looks like it took, on average, somewhere around 25,000 years for a 100 ppm increase and, say, 50,000 years for a corresponding 100 ppm decrease. In some cases it took twice that time, I am just trying to generalize.
The planet did this entirely on its own...because we were not around or we were insignificant during this time period.
This is extremely valuable data and an equally valuable conclusion because it establishes an important baseline:
BASELINE: If humanity LEFT THE PLANET tomorrow, it would take about 50,000 years for a reduction of about 100 ppm in atmospheric CO2.
I'll repeat that: If we left the planet and all of our technology was shut down, you are looking at a minimum of 50,000 years for a meaningful "save the planet" change in CO2 concentration.
At this point the question becomes glaringly obvious:
How does anything LESS than leaving the planet even make a dent on CO2 at a human time scale?
Because of the baseline revealed by this data we know, without any doubt, that anything less than leaving the planet cannot possibly delivery a faster rate of change, a faster decline than 100 ppm in 50,000 years. It's a planetary-scale problem that requires planetary-scale time.
Any solution proposed by anyone must pass the simplest test: How is that more than humanity leaving the planet?
Solar panels all over the planet? How is that MORE than leaving the planet?
A billion electric vehicles? Same question.
No more fossil fuels? Nope.
In fact, Google Research boldly set out to show the world that a full migration to renewable energy sources could address the issue. To their credit, when they discovered just how wrong they were, they published the data. In this charged environment these researchers deserve a ton of respect. They went in --and say so themselves-- with a position of believing that renewables could save the planet. What they discovered instead was precisely what I understood through the simple exercise on this graph, that this is an impossibility. Their methodology was different from mine, the result was the same.
"we had shared the attitude of many stalwart environmentalists: We felt that with steady improvements to today’s renewable energy technologies, our society could stave off catastrophic climate change. We now know that to be a false hope"
"Trying to combat climate change exclusively with today’s renewable energy technologies simply won’t work"
"if all power plants and industrial facilities switch over to zero-carbon energy sources right now, we’ll still be left with a ruinous amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. It would take centuries for atmospheric levels to return to normal"
"<snip> to see whether a 55 percent emission cut by 2050 would bring the world back below that 350-ppm threshold. Our calculations revealed otherwise. Even if every renewable energy technology advanced as quickly as imagined and they were all applied globally, atmospheric CO2 levels wouldn’t just remain above 350 ppm; they would continue to rise exponentially due to continued fossil fuel use."
"Suppose for a moment that <snip> we had found cheap renewable energy technologies that could gradually replace all the world’s coal plants <snip> Even if that dream had come to pass, it still wouldn’t have solved climate change. This realization was frankly shocking"
Well worth reading. Like I said, these guys deserve a ton of respect for effectively saying "we were wrong, and here's why".
Why aren't we talking about this AT ALL?
This is reality. Not what we are being told by politicians and zealots.
Climate change has become a religion or a cult and science has been left far behind. Here are two ways to come to the same general conclusion. One uses a super-simple look at 800,000 years of atmospheric CO2 data. The other took a detailed look at mathematical climate and other models. The conclusion was the same: We can cover the planet with renewable energy sources and do NOTHING to atmospheric CO2, or worse.
I've been trying to elevate this to some level of consciousness here on HN any time the topic comes-up. It is often met with a pile of downvotes and attacks. Because, of course, they "know", even though none of the detractors bothered to devote even 1% of the time I have trying to understand reality in a sea of nonsense.
Frankly, I am not sure what else to do. In this charged political climate it is actually dangerous to stick your neck out too far. I am not denying climate change, I am simply saying "the emperor has no clothes" to all the nonsense we seem to be told to focus on.
I think we need to learn to live with whatever is coming. We can't do a thing about it. New industries will sprout to help us manage it. The planet will deal (and is dealing) with CO2 as it has for millions of years.
And that's the other set of questions that the graphs and some research can answer:
How did CO2 increase when humanity was not around to muck it up?
Continental scale forest fires burning for 25,000 years as well as other sources of CO2. The fires in CA right now are contributing more CO2 than (informed conjecture) the entire fleet of internal combustion vehicles in California, if not the country. It is hubris to think we can counter this and "save the planet". Truly laughable in some sense.
How did the planet bring it down?
Rain, storms, cyclones, hurricanes, and the regrowth of vegetation over 50,000+ years.
So, we have to learn to deal with changing weather patterns and perhaps start helping the planet a tiny bit by planting trees. Judiciously though, because more trees could also mean more fuel to burn. In other words, we could, if not careful, actually increase CO2 if we plant a billion trees and create the conditions for the mother of all forest fires.
Please push for promoting an understanding of the reality we are living rather than a the fantasy of thinking we can actually affect planetary-scale problems. We need to apply our minds, investment and effort towards transitioning into a high CO2 future rather than a fantasy that says we can control how an entire planetary ecosystem works in 50 years. It would be like believing we can "install" an atmosphere on Mars in 50 years. Yeah. Pretty crazy if you ask me.
This is a really poor take. At no point in our history is there anything approaching a sudden cessation of human industry and activity that is core to your thought experiment. You are comparing geologic, astronomical, and evolutionary changes that are incredibly gradual for the most part when compared to human activity. By using your exact same logic I can easily "prove" that the massive increase in CO2 that has happened in the past 150 years is impossible.
Your analogy is exactly like saying that since the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_Tunnel_State_Park took a million years to form, it's impossible for humanity to create 1000 foot tunnel in less than a million years.
> By using your exact same logic I can easily "prove" that the massive increase in CO2 that has happened in the past 150 years is impossible.
No. You cannot. You see, you are not asking the right questions and are giving in to folklore.
This is a fair question, yes:
How were we able to screw this up so badly in just 150 years? How is that even possible when we've only been significant, at an industrial scale, for just a few centuries?
This is an excellent question and one that should lead to further inquiry rather than dismissal. Well, I asked myself this very question years ago, as I begun my attempt to understand what was real and what was not.
The answer first requires that we understand how it is that atmospheric CO2 fluctuated by about 100 ppm on a roughly 100K year cycle when humanity was virtually insignificant.
The answer to this question is brutally simple:
Massive continental scale fires burning without any artificial controls, well, forever.
Over somewhere in the range of 25,000 years they provided enough CO2 to increase atmospheric concentration by 100 ppm.
This is a reality today. For all the political bullshit floating around, nobody is talking about the elephant in the room, in the form of wildfires.
Globally, wildfires today consume about 450 millions hectares of forest and other plant life. This translates into about 13.5 billion metric tonnes of carbon.
The entire industrial base of the world today produces about 10 billion tonnes of carbon a year.
Keep in mind that this is with humanity actively fighting forest fires to contain them to the extent possible. Right this minute we have a massive fire in northern CA, where an army of firefighters is battling the flames to gain control.
Not too many centuries ago humanity lacked the capability to go up against forest fires at any significant scale. And so, they burned and burned and burned. And, over tens of thousands of years, they regularly produced a 100 ppm increase in CO2 concentration.
And yet, this does not answer the question. Right? How did we do it so quickly?
Again, simple: We burned entire forests (and more) at a rate never before seen in the history of this planet. Except, this time, the forests came in the form of highly dense oil, petroleum. Petroleum is the result of millions of years of brewing dead plants, dead animals and other chemicals with an unimaginable amount of energy. The same is true of coal, peat and natural gas.
When we burn a gallon of oil we are, in effect burning an end product that is the result of compacting millions of trees and other biomass into the thick black good.
We were able to do in a few hundred years what it would normally take nature a lot longer. In fact, without us burning "forests" this way, it would have taken nature about 25,000 years for a 100 ppm increase in atmospheric CO2 concentration.
OK, then, why can't we reverse it just as fast then?
For one thing, Conservation of Energy and the realities of the task at hand.
Simple thought experiment:
You are on a spacecraft the size of a large modern warehouse, like a Home Depot. The idea is that there are no external inputs other than solar and other radiation. The air you have is it.
You make a pile of wood in the center of this space and light it up.
How much energy did it take you to start this fire? Very little. The energy it releases is in the wood. All you had to do is ignite it.
So now you have smoke, particulate matter and all kinds of gasses spreading all over your very large spacecraft. The particulate matter is coating everything. The gases are going everywhere.
You are now tasked with reversing your ecosystem to where it was before you burned the pile of wood.
Will it take more or less energy than that which the wood pile released when ignited?
More. A lot more. Ten times more. A hundred times more. A thousand times more. It is actually hard to even begin to calculate how much energy this cleansing this simple ecosystem would require. I can walk around your house spreading flour all over the place with very little effort. Removing that sugar requires far more energy and effort than what was expended causing the mess in the first place.
In super simple terms, that's the problem with CO2.
It is easy to create a mess by burning stuff. It takes no effort. If you light-up the entire Amazon forest and just let it burn you will generate more CO2 than likely generations of humans could possibly produce. Taking back that CO2, cleaning the mess, is a far more difficult, resource intensive task that requires an unimaginable amount of energy. To put it simply, it would likely be impossible.
So, no, my conclusion and the observations that led to this realization are not incongruent with how we contributed to the problem. It is really important to apply just a little bit of science to this before voicing opinion. If one is observant enough and understands natural processes, it really isn't that difficult to understand how we got here and the fact that we do not have the ability to get out. We have to live with it. Which is where we should be focusing, not on the "save the planet" bullshit that will lead to nothing good.
> It is really important to apply just a little bit of science to this before voicing opinion.
That is what you have done, as opposed to thousands of scientists and engineers and others that are applying a lot of science to this. Hence your generally poor conclusion from poor rigor and understanding.
There is no arguing that reducing and "fixing" anthropocentric climate change will require more energy expenditure than creating it in the first place. But that doesn't mean it is a priori impossible, and doesn't mean it will take 50,000 years to do so. This isn't a binary situation. It isn't "do nothing" or "repair all the damage done in a short amount of time". Those aren't the only options. This is hideously complex situation and problem and we likewise need a complex, multi-pronged approach going forward. CO2 reduction, mitigation, and fixation to start. Ecosystem collapse prevention and mitigation. Handling population. Massive education to handle people like you (and worse).
Just because we already have flour spread around the room, doesn't mean we can't clean it up, and certainly doesn't mean we should continue to spread more flour around the room (let alone at an increasing rate!)
You make a bunch of generalized comments and no argument whatsoever to counter anything I have claimed at all.
For example:
We know that, if we all left the planet today it would take somewhere in the order of 50K years for a 100 ppm drop in atmospheric CO2. That is impossible to dispute. We have the data going back 800,000 years. In other words, we know how this planet, as a system without significant human input, behaves.
That rate of change corresponds to 0.002 ppm per year, or 1 ppm every 500 years, which might be easier to visualize.
What we have out there being pushed from every angle is that we can achieve a 100 ppm reduction in atmospheric CO2 in, pick a number, 30 to 50 years.
OK. Let's take the longer timeline because it makes for easier math. 50 years for 100 ppm reduction in average atmospheric CO2 concentration.
That means we are claiming that we can achieve a rate of change that is ONE THOUSAND TIMES FASTER than if we all left the planet tomorrow.
Sorry, that is preposterous. It's silly without even doing any math. We are saying we can affect a planetary-scale metric at a rate that is 1000 times greater than if we were not around at all.
It is impossible.
One might say: Well, we added 100 ppm in just a few hundred years. Yes, of course, sure, but that is a very different process. You cannot compare burning millions of barrels of oil per day with what it would take to go and capture what that process produced and negate our influence. Physics just doesn't work that way.
Saying that thousands of scientists and engineers are working on this is also a misrepresentation. What people are working on is what governments and politics is funding. Nobody wants to stick their necks out because doing so would be career-ending. I mean, imagine someone in a funded research path coming out and basically saying that the entire narrative being pushed by our government is a fantasy. That's a sure way to go from scientist to full time Uber driver.
You need to understand that reality doesn't work in clear altruistic black and white terms. I mean, look at what happened with COVID and the vaccine and the craziness surrounding all of it. Science isn't this pure thing where the truth is always driving the narrative. There are people who realized how wrong they were about the vaccine in the hospital bed just days before they stopped breathing.
It is sometimes important to consider that you are not being told the truth. I don't mean this as a conspiracy or cover-up. Not at all. Things can derail simply because of the fact that, at the end of the day, money and power drives everything. If a university wants a hundred million dollar grant from politicians pushing the "sky is falling" narrative, they better fall in line. You won't find that in any contract, but it is very much a part of reality. In this way we have, sadly, corrupted science.
Don't take my word for it. Take the time to read this paper and then come back. Stop insulting me and using the "shoot the messenger" approach, this approach does not negate the validity or soundness of any of my arguments.
Read this. You will recognize the reputable source. Real science, not quackery. Then think about what you've been told and what you believe. Think about that this paper came out in 2014 and we have wasted at least that much time promoting absolute bullshit. Think about what we could have done instead.
I read that article back when it came out, and I read it again, and I don't think it supports you like you think it does.
"Research by James Hansen shows that reducing global CO2 levels requires both a drastic cut in emissions and some way of pulling CO2 from the atmosphere and storing it."
CO2 does take a long time to get pulled out by natural processes. The paper you keep linking literally talks about needing to finds ways to pull it out via other methods. That's what we need to find.
You are saying, "nope, can't do it", a very black-and-white term you claim to avoid.
You are picking a short sentence that does not at all represent the shocking conclusion these researchers reached. You missed the entire point of the article. I am not saying it supports my conclusion. This is not what they were trying to prove. At all.
Let's assume absolutely everything I said is complete and utter nonsense. What is this article good for? Why am I bringing it up?
Because, for decades, we have been told that renewable energy is the secret to gaining control of atmospheric CO2 concentration and climate change. We are STILL being told this is the case. We have thrown silly amounts of money at it based on this "truth" parroted by anyone and everyone who bought the hook, line and sinker.
And yet, at least since 2014, we have known that this is completely false. Quoting:
"Even if every renewable energy technology advanced as quickly as imagined and they were all applied globally, atmospheric CO2 levels wouldn’t just remain above 350 ppm; they would continue to rise exponentially due to continued fossil fuel use.
So our best-case scenario, which was based on our most optimistic forecasts for renewable energy, would still result in severe climate change, with all its dire consequences: shifting climatic zones, freshwater shortages, eroding coasts, and
ocean acidification, among others. Our reckoning showed that reversing the trend would require both radical technological advances in cheap zero-carbon energy, as well as a method of extracting CO2 from the atmosphere and sequestering the carbon.
Those calculations cast our work at Google’s RE<C program in a sobering new light. Suppose for a moment that it
had achieved the most extraordinary success possible, and that we had found cheap renewable energy technologies that
could gradually replace all the world’s coal plants—a situation roughly equivalent to the energy innovation study’s best-case scenario. Even if that dream had come to pass, it still wouldn’t have solved climate change. This realization was frankly shocking"
That's the conclusion. That's where they stopped. The business that is magic pixie dust is the next step, carbon sequestration. Their research, and this paper, did not go into that part of it.
In other words, to paraphrase, they said "We can't fix it unless we can go out and grab the carbon out of the atmosphere".
When I read that, years ago, I went into a mode any good engineer knows well: Problem solving. The revelation was that the "save the planet with renewable energy" plan was nothing but lies. That was shocking to me. I installed a 13 kW solar array on my property thinking that I was going to be part of a solution. It turned out to be a shocking lie.
And so, I started to dig. And dig I did, for over a year. I can't possibly lay out everything in detail here, I've been thinking of organizing it and putting it up on a website. And this isn't pull-out-of-my-ass conclusions. Math, physics, chemistry, science, reliable data from the most reliable universities, government organizations and researchers.
The problem is that everyone is on the bandwagon.
Anyone who took basic college physics can understand that what we are being sold is complete and utter nonsense. Thinking we can control the planet is hubris at best, a delusion. We can muck it up, sure, but going into the atmosphere to capture CO2 at a planetary scale to do in 50 years when powerful natural processes require a thousand times more is just silly.
And yes, I am saying, no, it can't be done. I have seen nothing that suggests this is possible. Not even remotely. And everyone who argues with me will spend time on personal attacks and very conveniently ignores the science. I have yet to run into someone who can present a single viable technique or technology, along with the science and math to support it, that can "save the planet". When you look at these "solution" as an engineer what you discover, 100% of the time, is that the scale and breath of resources and energy they would require could very well dwarf all the energy we produce on the planet. You generally discover these "solutions" will require burning so much fuel that we would likely double our CO2 output trying to fix the problem. In other words, the very definition of an exercise in futility. Chemical solutions require destroying entire ecosystems to mine pixie dust that has to be processed, transported and then distributed at a planetary scale. Please. This is ridiculous.
And then there's the doomsday scenarios. The planet isn't going anywhere. The planet knows how to fix balance things, it has been doing that for billions of years. We need to stop talking about saving it and start talking about adapting to it.
Not to go too far, here in California we are dealing with an absolutely massive forest fire. If I read correctly, it is the largest fire ever recorded in this state (or something like that). The carbon output of this fire alone is likely to exceed all emissions of all ground transportation in the US for the entire year.
And we think we can control the planet? C'mon.
One of the solutions that has been proposed is massive reforestation. Plant billions, trillions of trees. Let's ignore the energy and resource analysis for a moment (this would require burning massive amounts of fuel as well as equally massive amounts of water, nutrients, etc.). Yes, trees take CO2 and make tree parts out of it. Sounds like a great idea. Not a new idea at all, this is precisely what one of the ways the planet reacts to increased CO2. We would be doing more of it.
What's the problem?
Imagine we had a billion new trees in California (no sure that's possible). What you would have would be a billion more fuel sticks. And, probabilistically speaking, a far greater possibility of an hellish fire we cannot even imagine. We could wake up, twenty years from now, proud of having a billion new trees, only to live the reality of having created a horrific ecological disaster for having the hubris to think we can actually control the environment to our liking.
If I were to summarize my intent in wanting to have this conversation it is that we need to start talking about the reality of this problem rather than fantastic pixie-dust solutions. Only when we do that will we create an environment where it could just be possible to gain the understanding necessary to benefit both the planet and humanity. We are just passengers on this spacecraft. We just shit all over it. Sadly cleaning it isn't going to be that simple. And the nonsense we are talking about --like the idea that renewable energy will stop global warming, hence referencing the paper-- is between lies and pointless. We need to release our scientists from political pressure and start talking about the real problem we are facing.
If you read this paper when it came out and did not immediately understand we have been lied to mercilessly, well, I can only conclude you didn't in fact read it or you chose to read into it a conclusion that does not exist.
None of what you have said is new to people that know anything about climate change (which, isn't as nearly many as I'd like!). A switch to renewables isn't fixing anything, it is merely stopping even worse damage, and giving us a way to have energy that doesn't increase carbon. On top of that, we must sequester carbon. This isn't a question of adaptation, but survival. Sure, the planet is going to be fine, and life will be fine. Humanity? Not so much. Definitely not civilization. At +12C or so, humans, without physical adaptations, are pretty much goners. Civilization is going to struggle this century, how bad it is depends on the solutions we can figure out.
Planting trees is just the first step, the second is to use them to keep their carbon locked away, because whether they burn or rot they put their carbon back in the atmosphere unless we do something to prevent that. Build with wood, build lots of things with wood! And then plant more!
The problems are insanely difficult, and that's why we've been screaming for decades to start doing something. I'm glad you, at least, have finally listened. Of course, you came to the opposite conclusion of "oh well, nothing to be done!"
> None of what you have said is new to people that know anything about climate change
And yet we keep talking about solar panels and wind.
> A switch to renewables isn't fixing anything, it is merely stopping even worse damage, and giving us a way to have energy that doesn't increase carbon.
No. That is precisely the point. The Google researchers went into their project CONVINCED of what you just said and came out of it shocked when they realized they were 100% wrong.
The conclusion was that, even if we use the most optimal forms of renewable energy (something that is likely ten years away, BTW) at a global scale, not only will we not stop atmospheric CO2 concentration increases, it will continue to rise exponentially.
Again (not yelling, just emphasis):
IF WE COVER THE WORLD WITH RENEWABLE ENERGY SOURCES AND STOP USING FOSSIL SOURCES ATMOSPHERIC CO2 WILL CONTINUE TO RISE EXPONENTIALLY.
This is a massive finding. And one that is being summarily ignored by politicians and anyone pushing fake solutions.
Look, I am not saying that we should not cleanup our act. We definitely have to. All I am saying is that we should not lie about why we should do this. After all, I installed a 13 kW solar array and will likely expand it to 20 kW next year, with capacity for more beyond that. I will, once more options become available and it makes sense, switch to electric vehicles.
So, yes, we should be cleaner. Yet, we need to understand that this is not going to save the planet. It isn't even going to dent the rate of atmospheric CO2 growth.
> Civilization is going to struggle this century, how bad it is depends on the solutions we can figure out.
I'll argue humanity might struggle with this for centuries. If I am right in my conclusion that it is impossible to bend down the the rate of change of atmospheric CO2 much below the natural "no humans on earth" scenario, well, it's 1 ppm every 500 years or so --only if we all leave the planet.
That's the key value of the analysis I did on historical ice core data. It reveals the planet can, at best, bring it down 1 ppm every 500 years if, and only if, we are not burning a hundred million barrels of oil per day worldwide (roughly what we consume). That's what I mean by "a time when humanity was not significant". During those 800,000 years humans on earth did not number in the billions and we certainly did not burn 100M barrels of oil or anything equivalent to that each and every day.
And so, any purported solution must explain and prove how it will push down the curve, the slope, from 1 ppm in 500 years to 100 ppm in 50 years. A factor of a thousand. And, one must not forget, the scale is planetary. It is easy to conduct experiments in a lab or warehouse and achieve results. Quite a
different scenario when these experiments have contact with reality.
> The problems are insanely difficult
Yes!
> that's why we've been screaming for decades to start doing something.
Yes! And at least since the Google paper we have known we have been screaming about a false solution. If we invested trillions of dollars on renewables the Titanic would still sink. That's my point. We have been having the wrong conversation.
> I'm glad you, at least, have finally listened. Of course, you came to the opposite conclusion of "oh well, nothing to be done!"
I think you are completely misinterpreting my conclusion and my intent. Also my position on this.
This last statement makes it sound like I was a denier and I finally listened. Not so at all. I was pushing the same kinds of agendas as most until the Google paper compelled me to devote over a year to reading piles of papers and actually doing the math to verify claims.
This did not turn me into a climate change denier. That would be impossible. My life is about science and engineering. The data clearly shows what's going on.
I am NOT saying "oh well, nothing to be done!". I don't think you'll find one quotable sentence where I say this.
I am saying we can't do anything about the rate of change, bending the curve, if you will. We do not have the technology, energy and resources to affect a thousand-fold improvement in rate of change (from 1 ppm in 500 years to 100 ppm in 50 years).
I am also saying we need to stop wasting time and money on fake solutions. We could bankrupt our nation or multiple nations going after full-out renewable energy everywhere and we would, most definitely, come out of the other side of that with a collective "Oh, shit! What have we done!" as we discover that atmospheric CO2 continues to rise exponentially and we blew our resources --and decades-- on a non-solution.
I am saying we need to start having the right conversation. Part of which must include the idea that it is delusional to think we are going to have control of a planetary scale problem on anything even close to a human time scale. We made a mess. It will take a massive amount of time to clean it.
This isn't about denying climate change or proposing we do nothing. This is about desperately wanting to start having the right conversation because the one we are having is based on a delusion.
Here's what I don't know (and hope to be true): If we stopped the delusion and threw our resources at research aimed at coming up with a viable carbon capture technology --I mean billions of dollars. Could we come up with something that help? It this even possible?
There's some basic science and math that can be applied to proving whether or not this is even realistically possible or attainable. I keep referring to the principle of conservation of energy because it is the single most "lets get real" heartless lesson in Physics.
Take the idea you floated about planting trees and building a lot more stuff from wood. Sounds good.
Have you done the math on what this actually means as a process? What I mean by this are things like:
- How many trees do we need to actually make a difference?
- It is even possible to plant these many trees?
- How much does the forest fire risk increase if we were to plant that many trees?
- What would be the consequences of adding fuel to the existing forest population?
- How much fuel do we need to burn plant trees?
- How much fuel do we need to support and maintain these new forests as they grow?
- How much fuel do we need to burn to make sure the forests don't burn?
- How much carbon do we produce when we harvest?
- How much carbon do we produce when we process the lumber (not a trivial amount, BTW)?
- How much carbon do we produce in all of the ancillary processes (manufacturing nails, brackets, etc.)?
- How much carbon do we produce building stuff from wood?
- What are the ecosystem effects of all of the above, to include other flora and fauna?
- etc?
This is the kind of analysis that is lacking when anyone makes simple statements like "lets plant more trees" or "lets seed the oceans with magic beads" or "lets build city-scale HEPA filters". All fine and wonderful, but the math is the math and, at the end of the day, what is being proposed must pass physics. I have yet to find ONE case where the physics makes any sense at all. Laboratory scale? Sure. Planetary scale? Not one. Can't find one. I looked, believe me.
That's what I mean when I ask if it is even possible. We don't need to dump trillions of dollars into something to determine if it is possible. We know enough science to be able to estimate basic outcomes. We don't need calculations that are correct within 5% to confirm if something works.
What I would want to see is something that, for example, can capture twice as much carbon as the solutions entire process will produce. We can't make anything without producing carbon and other substances, so that's inescapable. The process, then, has to capture its own "new" carbon and, at the same time, double that in order to actually claim to make a dent on the 1 ppm / 500 year natural rate of change. If it only captures 10% more than it produces it isn't a solution at all in that this will not even dent the 1 ppm/500 year slope. A forest fire alone can take out the effect of a 10% solution.
That is a very difficult hurdle. And, as far as I know, nobody has shown this to be possible.
I don't know the answers. I do not claim to know them. All I am saying is the emperor has no clothes and we are delusional. We need to start talking about reality and hold everyone accountable.
What we are doing is almost the equivalent of saying we can take a bus full of people from Los Angeles to New York City on a single 20 gallon tank of gas without refueling. Everyone gets on the bus and nobody bothers to ask anyone to do the math and prove this to be possible. And 200 miles later everyone learns they have to walk home.
So, no it isn't "oh well, nothing to be done!". It's "WAKE THE FUCK UP! WE ARE NOT HAVING THE RIGHT DISCUSSIONS AT ALL! THIS IS DELUSIONAL. WE ARE ON THE WRONG PATH!". Yes, in that case I would be yelling.
I don't think we are too far apart. I have a feeling you might understand where I am coming from if you took the time to fire-up Excel and do the math --as I have-- on various purported solutions. Things break down very quickly once to demand solutions that actually pass the laws of physics.
For example, replacing our entire fleet of vehicles with electrics sounds wonderful...until you run the numbers for the entire process and realize we need to build somewhere between 50 to hundreds of 1 GW class nuclear power plants to be able to do this. And, if we don't go nuclear, the CO2 we would produce to power these cars might be shocking.
I appreciate the conversation. And, despite what it might sound like at times, I do want to be challenged. What I hate are personal attacks, which is what happens most of the time in these threads. Attackers don't do a single bit of reading, math and expend no effort to understand. Their world view on this subject amounts to just repeating the mantra rather than someone like me, who devoted over a year to actually trying to understand. In that sense they are purely religious believers, drones, if you will. And deniers? They are the worst. They truly have no clue and refuse to learn anything at all.
What I would LOVE is for someone to show me what I am missing and how I am wrong with math and physics. I truly want to understand what I might be missing. We already know that the renewable story is delusional. Fine. How about the other stuff? Am I wrong? How? Please! I want to know. No hand-wavy stuff. Science.
Math. Physics. This has never happened in the many years I have been having these conversations. I have had private discussions with PhD-level scientists in Physics and other disciplines, who, after reflection, end-up having the same questions I have. The most fundamental one being: Why are we doing this? Have we gone mad?
(can't reply to your other comment, for some reason - too deep for Hacker News? :) )
You keep saying "Why are we doing this?" I guess I don't understand what "this" is. You sound like you are being nihilistic.
The problem isn't "lets drive across the US on 20 gallons of gas", but rather "lets get across the US somehow". The math is brutal, yep, that's what we've been saying for decades. I happen to like civilization (mostly!), so I think I want to try to save it somehow.
Switching to zero emissions doesn't fix it, it stops the blood loss, but we still have the massive wound to deal with.
I can't help but feel that you are being condescending. Not sure how to react. Statements like "Glad you have caught up to the reality of the situation." are uncalled for. For now, I'll ignore it.
> You keep saying "Why are we doing this?" I guess I don't understand what "this" is.
"This" is many things. The simplest of which is an almost religious attachment to renewable energy as a savior. That is the way it is being sold. The mantra is that we need to switch to renewables as far and wide as possible and as quickly as possible to "save the planet".
So, yeah, why are we doing this when we know it will do absolutely nothing. It's a waste of money, time and resources.
I have no problem with pushing renewables to cleanup our act. Claiming that this will save the planet --which is how this is being sold-- is delusional at best.
> The problem isn't "lets drive across the US on 20 gallons of gas"
No, it is. Because when you do the math and check the purported solutions to see if they pass physics, what you discover it that they are ALL the equivalent of claiming we can drive a bus across the US with only 20 gallons in the tank.
That's the problem. That's another one of the meanings of "this". We are accepting lies as facts. We are making big decisions without demanding that the numbers pass basic process scrutiny. This --that-- is a problem.
> I happen to like civilization (mostly!), so I think I want to try to save it somehow.
Well, then demand that we stop focusing on the wrong thing. You are doing it yourself. You said:
> Switching to zero emissions doesn't fix it, it stops the blood loss
No, it does not. Not even close. When you look at the problem from a larger perspective you quickly realize these single variable "solutions" are false.
I am assuming you are speaking of vehicles, if you mean everything, even industrial processes, well, if there is such a thing as "more impossible" then that is "more impossible".
That's the problem. We are reducing everything to single variable magical solutions when reality is a complex multivariate problem.
Take a moment to list everything that has to happen to switch to zero emissions and quantify it all to the extent possible.
Then go back to my very original observation and answer the simplest question I asked:
How is going to zero emissions --which is impossible-- better than humanity leaving the planet today?
Any solution has to be OVER A THOUSAND TIMES BETTER than humanity leaving the planet. We know this. The natural rate of change is 1 ppm in 500 years. If we want to fix it in 50 years you have to be 1000 times better (actually, far more than that).
The problem keeps coming back to a very uncomfortable baseline. It's like Tsiolkovsky rocket equation. It takes a certain amount of energy to break away from earth's gravitational pull with a rocket. That's the baseline. Any solution that claims to be able to do it faster (in a rocket) either uses insanely more energy or is impossible (I also work in aerospace, helped get astronauts to the International Space Station and, with some luck, will have hardware on the moon in a few years --so, yeah, math and physics are kind of what I do). The baseline when it comes to atmospheric CO2 concentration the no-humans-on-earth scenarios. Anything that claims to be able to do better than that has to answer serious questions and show the math and physics will work on a planetary scale.
I don't know what your background might be. Maybe what I am saying is difficult to process because of this. Not a dig. I just don't know where you are coming from and if things like "Conservation of Energy" mean anything to you at all beyond a google search. I am trying to keep it super simple because I can't make the assumption that readers have the scientific background required for a different approach.
This one is current. It points to the dangers of massive reforestation and, in many ways, the hubris of thinking we can actually control (reduce) atmospheric CO2 concentration in anything approaching a human time scale:
"At Germany's Brennender Berg—literally "Burning Mountain" in German—the coal has been on fire since 1688. "
1688.
It is said that Chinese seam fires alone contribute over 1% of the total annual atmospheric CO2 generated.
This points to the hubris and danger of thinking we can actually control something at a planetary scale. Can you imagine if we planted a trillion trees and accidentally created more fires? Think back to my "if we left earth" observation.
I have looked at this from every angle, scientifically, not hand-wavy crap. I have a lot more than what can possibly be communicated in comments on HN. I should organize it and publish it on a website so it can be challenged by anyone who might care to do so.
This is not a single variable problem. "Magic pixie dust -> Less CO2" is the usual type of "solution" we are given and nobody bothers to ask about the other hundred or thousand variables that remain without published analysis. And yet everyone gets behind the pixie dust.
As you said. Not a simple problem at all. The sooner we start talking about this in real terms the better.
1. Humans have managed to fundamentally alter the global climate on a timescale of about 150 years.
2. Humans are incapable of fundamentally altering the climate on any significant scale compared to natural processes.
Pick one.
Yes, feedbacks can outpace what we're already emitting. Yes, we're in a dire situation that is going to take radical innovation and a huge surplus of zero carbon energy to basically reverse the exothermic process we used to burn millions of years of stored carbon with an endothermic process to draw it back down. But this doomer stuff isn't helpful. Anything we do to mitigate the rise of greenhouse gases, even if it is not a complete reversal (that's pretty much off the table) will give us time to innovate and change the outcome from extinction-level catastrophic to merely a drastic change in our way of life. Every bit counts. Trees, BECCs, direct air carbon capture, lowering emissions, albedo alteration, etc. The sad thing is I don't think you've researched that thoroughly, you're only got the parade of some scary facts. Indulging in overwhelming doom is just another emotional coping strategy to avoid responsibility, the same as outright denial.
Superlatively, humans have the capacity to instantly stop global warming by causing a nuclear winter. We already have the capability of kicking up enough dust that surface temperatures drop a dangerous amount.
We shouldn't do this, but humans can certainly do things much faster than "leave the earth alone for 50k years"
> Superlatively, humans have the capacity to instantly stop global warming by causing a nuclear winter. We already have the capability of kicking up enough dust that surface temperatures drop a dangerous amount.
Who's talking about global warming? This is about atmospheric CO2 concentration. It is related, yes, but reality isn't a single variable problem.
Stop global warming using a nuclear winter? Sure, that's a solution. And kill everything on the planet in the process. Brilliant.
> 1. Humans have managed to fundamentally alter the global climate on a timescale of about 150 years.
> 2. Humans are incapable of fundamentally altering the climate on any significant scale compared to natural processes.
> Pick one.
Please refer to my answer here, it addresses your question:
I hope you understand that it is impossible to provide a full treatment of this subject in a single comment. The comment you replied to did not answer your question. Fair enough. Thanks for raising the question. I address it in the above-linked answer to someone else.
The TLDR is simple:
We were able to do this in a few hundred years because we burned fuels (oil, coal, peat, natural gas) far more dense than the historically natural source of atmospheric CO2 increases: Forests.
The amount of biomatter that goes into making just one gallon of oil is hard to imagine. In fact, it is hard to imagine the time scale, pressure, heat and energy that goes into the process. Plants, animals, insects, all type of biomatter compressed and mutated into a black goo.
We came about and started to burn this black goo at a massive scale. Far more so than the other major CO2 producer, forest fires. And so, yes, in a few years we were able to pump an incredible amount of CO2 into the atmosphere, far more so than the natural order of things is able to deal with. And so CO2 ppm concentration increased rapidly.
On an annual basis, forest fires contribute over 13 billion tonnes of carbon, which is more our industrial processes produce. So, yes, burning stuff is what makes CO2. That's how the planet did it when we were insignificant and that's how we did it when we started to use incredibly dense fuels and burning it.
It is critically important to understand scale here. The world consumes somewhere in the order of 40 billion barrels of oil per year. If you were to translate that in to the equivalent biomass that went into creating it the number would be like fully burning every forest on the planet many once a day every day of the year, if not more.
Why is it that we cannot fix it in 150 years?
Because that process is massively more difficult.
First, it cannot be done with less energy than that which created the problem in the first place. It will be some fraction of the energy content of 40 billion barrels of oil per year.
Where is this energy going to come from? Not solar. Not wind. No way. This has already been proven. I am happy to provide you with a paper that discusses this fallacy if you are willing to read it.
Second, simple common sense. Grab several bags of flour, walk around Home Depot and fling flour everywhere. Now the manager demands to remove what you introduced into their building, shelves, products, etc. You would need a thousand people to accomplish that in anywhere near the time it took you to create the mess in the first place. You would need to expend far more energy doing so. You would also need far more resources (bags, shovels, vacuum cleaners, brushes, etc.) than the bags the flour came out of.
In other words, cleaning a mess is far more difficult than creating it.
We cannot clean this mess.
We have to talk about living with it.
To that point. Do you own a CO2 meter? You don't? Buy one and walk around with it. I have several. You are going to be surprised by what you learn.
We are being told that the sky will fall if we reach <pick a number> ppm. Your home and office environments are likely somewhere in the 650 ppm range and have been so for years, decades. Inside your car, 1,000 ppm isn't out of the question (no, not breathing into the meter). My point is that humanity has been living in >600ppm environments for decades, maybe even centuries (where old living and working conditions cleaner than today?). Guess what? We have not turned to mush. Not even close. This sky-is-falling thing, once you start to get analytical and step away from the sales pitches quickly starts to look like a huge red herring to benefit business or political objectives. Get a CO2 meter and tell me I am wrong. I am not.
To understand this subject you have to be willing to do some work. You can't just repeat what you are being told. You have to think and, yes, do a little bit of high school math. It really isn't that hard to get there. We are being manipulated and lied to. We need to focus on living with this, not be delusional and think we can save the planet, that's preposterous.
BTW, vertical farming is likely the future of mass food production. Do you know what they do in vertical farms to promote plant growth? They bring in canisters of compressed CO2 and release it into the farm environment. It turns out plants eat CO2 and make, well, plant matter out of it (again, high school science). One could very well argue that an increase in atmospheric CO2 might bring with it a boost in global plant-based food production and help end hunger world wide.
You see, these things are not single variable problems or solutions. That's the main thing to focus on. There's always more to the story. Think.
Your entire diatribe here is not really responding to me, it's just more monologuing. Frankly, what you're pushing here is the next talking point after climate denial, which is sowing messages of futility. Anything to avoid doing something about the problem. Anything to protect the existing industries from change. Just sinking into comfortable fatalism. And you're using common denier-turned-fatalist talking points like talking about plant food, and little "appeal to the common man" bits like talking about high school math repeatedly. It sounds like PR talk. You obviously have not researched this thoroughly. Vertical farms are not cost effective compared to many, many other options. Plants are less nutritious under high CO2 conditions, becoming more empty carbohydrates by mass[1]. Plants also have an ideal range they're adapted to, and any CO2 fertilization effects tend to drop off rapidly past that threshold[2]. This is very easy information to find if you're actually tuned into the climate science, even casually. You are either reading bad sources and need to find better ones, or you're posting this kind of nonsense in bad faith.
As my wife is fond of saying "Your google search is not a substitute for my medical degree".
I really don't know where to go with your comment. You misrepresent everything I said and make claims that could only have come from a superficial google search and equally superficial reading.
Prime example, the second paper you link states, quoting:
"Most plants generally benefit from elevated atmospheric CO2 concentration through the “CO2 fertilization effect”, which boosts growth and yield [19, 23, 46, 52]. However, this positive CO2 fertilization effect strongly depends on the plant functional groups and species [7, 22, 53,54,55,56]. Even within the same species of winter wheat, the results from previous studies are inconsistent [22, 50, 57,58,59,60]. These contradictory results suggest that different plants and/or species may have different optimal CO2 concentrations for their growth.
Our results showed that the optimal CO2 concentrations occurred at 945, 915, and 1151 ppm for the aboveground biomass and at 915, 1178, and 1386 ppm for the total biomass of tall fescue, perennial ryegrass, and Kentucky bluegrass (Fig. 1), suggesting that a strong CO2 fertilization effect occurred at different optimal CO2 concentrations for these three perennial grasses."
They found optimal CO2 concentrations that are easily twice our current average atmospheric CO2 concentration. Your own link.
This is why massive indoor farms use CO2 injection.
> Vertical farms are not cost effective compared to many, many other options.
You clearly are not informed. Among other things, I have been developing technology for indoor farming, or more accurately, CEA (Controlled Environment Agriculture). I have many friends who own and run various kinds of CEA facilities. No, not everyone is growing weed. For example, one of my good friends runs one of the most successful indoor farm operations in Asia. We also have relationships in the Middle East, where certain geographies are absolutely hostile to growing food and indoor farming is the only path to food independence. During the pandemic countries like Singapore quickly discovered their dependence on the outside world for food was extreme, they quickly set national objectives to use technologies such as CEA to become far more independent.
You seem to be drawing no distinction between the following two possible outcomes:
1. Slow carbon emissions now despite the incredible amount we've already added and hope that the damage we've done is not enough to completely ruin the planet.
2. Do nothing and let emissions accelerate even further, create an even bigger problem than we've already created. Gamble to an even greater extent with our future.
Where in your incredibly long essay have you provided any reason to believe option 2 is better than option 1?
As far as I can tell, all you've done is prove we can't get back to pre-industrial levels quickly just by stopping emissions today. So what?
Who ever said the goal was to get back to pre-industrial levels? I think all climate science believers aim to do is reduce the extent of this incredible gamble and unintended experiment humanity has undertaken. Instead of gambling on a 1% odds of survival slot machine, climate scientists want to slow down and gamble on a 10% odds of survival slot machine. No one ever said we could move that probability back to 100% odds of survival slot machine.
To me your post comes across like someone on the Titanic saying 'Hey guys, we've looked at the data and situation, stop thinking these 20 lifeboats will be able to rescue us. Just give up.' when there are some people arguing that the ship isn't sinking at all, and others trying to quickly come up with ways to create more impromptu lifeboats, trying to figure out how to stop the ship from sinking, or trying to urge those that they can to get in the lifeboats, despite the fact some will still die. At the end of the day your post just encourages those who don't think the ship is sinking or those that think there's no point to try getting in a lifeboat or creating a new one out of furniture to just go back down below deck and listen to the violinists for another hour before drowning.
The problem is that you have not done any real research on the subject and you are trying to argue with someone who has devoted a non-trivial amount of time to truly trying to understand this and, more importantly, understand how I might be wrong. I want to be wrong, yet NOBODY has ever come up with an intelligent observation that invalidates this conclusion. Advance math and science are not required here.
First of all, where did I ever claim we need to get back to pre-industrial levels? Please don't put words in my mouth. The consensus seems to be that the objective should be a 100 ppm reduction from --roughly-- current levels. That will take 50,000 years, give or take a few tens of thousands of years. We can't fix it. Why? Because we can't fix it faster than leaving the planet. Any other imaginary 50-year solution will require planetary scale energy and resources we do not have. We are far more likely to kill all life on earth by trying some dumb "save the planet" solution than to fix a thing.
> Do nothing and let emissions accelerate even further, create an even bigger problem than we've already created. Gamble to an even greater extent with our future.
OK, how about not taking my word for it. Please read this paper. Really read it. Then come back to your statement.
I won't ruin the conclusion for you. I give huge credit to these researchers for daring to speak the truth. They actually say they went into this to prove, once and for all, to the entire world, that their renewable energy vision --one shared and still promoted globally-- was our savior. What they discovered is interesting and very much parallels my conclusion, yet they come at it from a very different perspective. If you are honestly open-minded and want to understand the subject, this is your starting point. This is the paper that launched me into a year-long quest to understand what's going on. Read it and come back to me.
> To me your post comes across like someone on the Titanic saying 'Hey guys, we've looked at the data and situation, stop thinking these 20 lifeboats will be able to rescue us. Just give up.'
Exactly the opposite. I am the guy saying: We can't save everyone. We don't have enough boats. We need to figure out if we can build more.
What zealots are saying is: We can save the Titanic with this magical cork.
That's the difference.
Read the paper. Please. It's from a very reputable source you will recognize and respect. No quackery. Real science.
We need to build more boats and stop this nonsense about saving the Titanic.
I think Musk deserves credit for recognizing that the USA is so car-centric that any effort to get people to use trains and busses would be met with enormous resistance, whereas popularizing electric variants of the most dominant form of transport can actually be impactful.
I would certainly like to see a marketing-savvy billionaire start a sustained campaign of "ride the train/bus." I've wondered for some time, both what that would look like and whether it could have a meaningful impact in any given metropolitan area.
(And rinse and repeat for other vital public goods, like parks, libraries, public health, and so on.)
He gives electric transportation and storage with one hand, and takes away with the promise of literally thousand of ultra-low-efficiency fuel (methane) burning rocket launches with the other.
Musk's main climate sin is sabotaging real mass transit with ridiculous low-throughout pipe-dreams: his cars in small tunnels.
This is as much a sin against functional cities as it is against the climate.
Rocket launches really aren't bad at all in comparison. He could take one every single day without the same level of damage as stopping a single new transit line.
Politicians and NIMBYs killed mass transit in the US long before Musk entered the picture. In fact, Boring Co is a direct reaction to mass transit projects routinely being turned to boondoggles by politics, corruption, mismanagement, and obstructionism — building mass transit via the traditional means is practically impossible.
I won't pretend that the Boring Co's loops are efficient or a real solution but I don't believe that pinning the blame on it is quite right.
General Motors did, with help from others in automobile, oil, and tyre industries:
The General Motors streetcar conspiracy refers to convictions of General Motors (GM) and other companies that were involved in monopolizing the sale of buses and supplies to National City Lines (NCL) and its subsidiaries, and to allegations that the defendants conspired to own or control transit systems, in violation of Section 1 of the Sherman Antitrust Act. The suit created lingering suspicions that the defendants had in fact plotted to dismantle streetcar systems in many cities in the United States as an attempt to monopolize surface transportation.
Between 1938 and 1950, National City Lines and its subsidiaries, American City Lines and Pacific City Lines—with investment from GM, Firestone Tire, Standard Oil of California (through a subsidiary), Federal Engineering, Phillips Petroleum, and Mack Trucks—gained control of additional transit systems in about 25 cities.[3] Systems included St. Louis, Baltimore, Los Angeles, and Oakland. NCL often converted streetcars to bus operations in that period, although electric traction was preserved or expanded in some locations. Other systems, such as San Diego's, were converted by outgrowths of the City Lines. Most of the companies involved were convicted in 1949 of conspiracy to monopolize interstate commerce in the sale of buses, fuel, and supplies to NCL subsidiaries, but were acquitted of conspiring to monopolize the transit industry.
Musk is proposing to make an expensive part, boring tunnels, cheaper. But then he also proposes a fundamentally boneheaded change that makes any improved efficiency there much worse: individual vehicles which are fundamentally unscalable.
So I wish he would keep the good part, cheaper tunnels, but not sabotage those tunnels with an unworkable vehicle proposal. It also gives a ton of power to the obstructionists to sabotage real transit projects and increase their costs, because they can say "let's try what Musk is proposing".
How are rocket launches "ultra low efficiency"? Compared to what? I mean, no one is putting stuff into orbit with any other technology.
Rocket engines are the most efficient heat engines in existence, and the energy efficiency of a rocket (in the sense of fraction of jet kinetic energy that ends up in the kinetic + change in potential energy of the thing put in orbit) can be very high.
It takes a lot of propellant to get to orbit. That isn't because rockets are ultra low efficiency, it's because it takes a lot of energy to get to orbit.
Whether we should include Mars as a distination for transport, or indeed incrementally faster broadband as good uses for energy are up for debate. But Elon does, so here we are. Light 'er up and let the hippies argue amongst themselves!
SpaceX may have the absolute bee's knees in rocket engine, but that assumes that leaving the atmosphere is what we need to do, and need to do now. People are mumbling 'mass transit' and 'intercontinental travel' with respect to Starship for crying out loud. It's completely insane.
High specific impulse can actually reduce efficiency, though. Consider: a rocket is most efficient at converting jet kinetic energy into the kinetic energy of the vehicle if the exhaust velocity = - vehicle velocity (so the jet is left stationary in the chosen frame of reference). An ideal (and unrealizable) rocket would have Isp that increases during the launch. It should initially be very low, then increase with time. Efficiency can (ideally) approach 100%.
But I wonder what you mean by efficiency of conversion of fuel "to transportation". Do you mean the irreducible minimum energy needed to achieve a given transportation task? Because the latter can be ZERO here on Earth: the energy needed to go from one place to another at the same elevation and latitude is zero: there is no change in kinetic and potential energy before and after. By your criterion, a terrestrial transportation system has 0% efficiency in this case (and extremely low efficiency in many more cases.)
> SpaceX may have the absolute bee's knees in rocket engine, but that assumes that leaving the atmosphere
Yes, tell me about what can be done in space without leaving the atmosphere. You seem to have written a veiled screed against space travel itself. It's not about efficiency at all.
Tough luck everyone, OP said he already pays too many taxes, so unfortunately climate action has to go on the back burner. But good news, at least while we are still alive he won’t feel like the government is taking took much.
You’re mocking a useful data point: governments operate by the consent of the governed - if you put too much pressure on people, they will replace you democratically or otherwise.
I am painfully aware. The person I replied to is obviously not the only one with that mindset, which is what makes this such a tough sell. At the same time, this is an absurdly shortsighted way of looking at the problem. I get that paying taxes suck, but if the consequence is unmitigated climate change, then maybe taxes are the lesser evil?
To me this whole thing is absolutely absurd, most everyone agrees that we need to do something about climate change, as long as it isn’t them having to change. This isn’t going to get us out of this, at some point we’ll have to realize that “it’s only the big corporations at fault and I’m just a humble innocent cog in the machine” isn’t true and we are all complicit in this. That we all have to do something about this. But hey, finding a scapegoat is always the nice and easy solution. Now we can lean back, pat ourselves on the shoulder because we have identified the problem.
We, collectively as humans, are borderline insane.
For example, even if the greens get majority in Germany, they'll be in a very tough spot. Their core electorate will think they're underdelivering. But their proposed measures won't be accepted by others.
And if a country doesn't, are we willing/able to go to war? Given that some countries will burn down forests that pollute their airspace, and the airspace of their neighbours it's pretty likely there will be those that refuse the tax.
You smack import taxes on them that correspond to the carbon tax that should have been + 10%. Then they can either do the carbon tax or have their exports made much, much more expensive.
If you can smack a tax on their imports, why not already do it? This only works if you are a union/trading-block/superpower with the leverage to do so - and as the world gets globally competitive morally punishing taxes will require more and more "fighting the invisible hand" i.e working against the interests of free trade.
To re-iterate the point that probably got my original post downvoted: It helps to have a large military-industrial complex to enforce embargos.
That was basically already lost in the 1990s, right after the Tienanmen Square massacre, when the US continued to treat China as WTO good guy (Most Favoured Nation), instead of acting swiftly to connect the negative economic consequences of human rights abuses to. (But US big farm lobbied against it, and eventually no one with power really gave a shit. Just like nowadays with Hong Kong or Xinjiang.)
On the other hand the embargo against Cuba, Russia, North Korea, Iran are pretty devastating for their economy. (Which might help absolutely zero percent in terms of human rights, but if the goal is to reduce GHG emissions, probably a lot of countries are willing to make pragmatic deals about technology to benefit from free trade than countries that are willing to change their whole political system.)
Exactly. He said “collective action” won’t work, then called for “collective action” among governments. In these thought analysis, an self-serving person is a good proxy for how any government will behave.
Seeing the Apple thing and the Australis thing and the EU thing, I'm happy humanity will kill itself by Climate Change.
We have built systems that make it impossible for evil to fail, it will always succeed. You can see it popping up everywhere - loss of privacy, climate change denialism, covid denialism, fascism everywhere, chinese extermination camps, ...
We will all die out and it is a good thing. We will all suffer terribly and that's good, we deserve that too.
Even assuming your take is right and humanity deserves the fate we're actively constructing, it's not just our fate. We're a hardy and clever species - by the time we are extinct from climate change, it'll be a hard environment for mammals in general. Even if you believe we deserve to go, it's still worth trying to fix things for those who can't.
We already have an ideal carbon capture technology optimized by Nature Inc. through a state of the art evolutionary algorithm running trillions of parallel processes for billions of years. It's called Trees (TM). With Trees (TM) the CO2 emissions problem has a simple two step solution that anyone can accomplish with ease:
If a whole forest grows and the whole forest dies, you’re right, no carbon is captured.
But if a whole forest is created and maintained, even as trees die and rot they build the biomass of the soil and undergrowth: every ton of life is carbon and heat energy captured - individuals live and die, but the overall biomass can increase, capturing carbon and energy in the form of healthy ecosystems.
As another commenter pointed out, if humanity just left earth tomorrow, it would take eons for CO2 ppm to fall, so we should be doing something proactive. Plus, planting and caring for trees is something everyone can do and gets us away from the “wait for a super villain billionaire to solve it” mentality.
Edit: thanks for the link to Azolla, hadn’t heard of that
The nasty thing about global warming is that it's weakening the jet stream. This causes places to one year have crazy amounts of years and the next drought. The rainy years, things grow like crazy! Lots of growth. On drought all that new growth dries up and is tinder for forest fires.
We need more trees for sure, but at the same time would would need to put huge efforts in forest fire prevention otherwise poof, all that hard work trees do sequestering CO2 literally goes up in smoke.
To offset our entire current greenhouse gas emissions with trees alone, we would have to increase earth's total plant biomass by 10% each year.
Given how slow most types of trees grow that seems completely unfeasible unless we give up most meat (taking space that we now use for growing animal feed).
(Yes, we have a lot of space in the desert, but studies show limited effect on global warming from planting anything there once you account for how well sand reflects heat back into space).
I'll save you the time (though you should watch it).
1. Much of the animal feed comes from agricultural byproducts. As an example, we eat corn on the cob, but much of the corn stalk is inedible to humans, but can be made into products for animals.
2. Much of the land used for animals is not suitable for growing crops. Some is, but it's not a 1:1 swapability factor.
What did Musk or Bezos build? What did they invent? Nothing. Everything built and invented was by their workers. The success of Amazon and SpaceX/Tesla is a form of collective action. The collective action of employees, and the collective action of government policy which provided the playground that Bezos and Musk play in.
If you've ever tried to organise a group lunch for a party of more than two, you've got some sense of how difficult it is to orchestrate group activities.
Whatever you think of Musk and Bezos, and I'm not much of a fan of either, they've both led organisations to transformational accomplishments.
That in itself is something, notable, and has been recognised throughout history.
The question of whether those accomplishements are good or worthwhile, or how reward and profit should be allocated, are separate ones.
Each human being emits 25 tons of CO2 per year just by breathing, should the businesses also be taxed based on their number of employees? People often forget the good parts about the little CO2 increase from the past century, I care a lot about environment (I'm a countryside person) but CO2 - many people forget it is the food of the plants that we need to eat - just takes all the place in the environmental debate and what I think are more important matters such as waste reduction, ocean cleaning, recycling, durable/fixable hardware... I'm hoping for people to do a cost/benefit analysis of the CO2 situation and start thinking rationally and work on what is actually bad for us, not just CO2 greenwhashing bs.
I feel we need a new, completely separate word for "net emissions", because too often the discussion gets confused around this point.
> Each human being emits 25 tons of CO2 per year just by breathing
In almost all cases we care about net emissions. Breathing is net carbon neutral.
What we really need is to tax the net carbon that's added to the "fast carbon loop" (the biosphere). That is, carbon that's being dug up from the ground.
Yes. Of course, the business would also receive a tax credit for all the CO2 being sequestered by employees eating food. /s
Also, your 25 tons number is wildly wrong. It's simple to work it out on the back of an envelope:
CO2 is a produced from O2 and sources of carbon in your food. C + O2 = CO2
The molecular mass of the Carbon in CO2 is 12, the total molelcular weight of CO2 is 44. So, 27% of the mass of the CO2 you breath out ultimately comes from your food.
25 tonnes of CO2 being breathed out a year would imply 18.5kg of Carbon being consumed per day.
Indeed, I feel developed countries have grown far too fond of brigades that end in legislation that no one understands but it placates the loudest people enough that no one actually checks to see if legislation even worked.
The vocal dissidents will attach their reputation to said legislation and become an apologist regardless of the legislation's efficacy - so we end up with a legislative body that doesn't have to fix anything, they just have to do something noticeable.
Reminds me of when there was legislation put out that blended gas and biofuel would get tax credits in order to increase biofuel (the greener energy) usage - instead paper plants that used exclusively biofuel started adding gasoline to their biofuel just to get the tax credit and no one cared.
It's my understanding that they attempted to close the loophole in 2009, (4 years after the credit was created), but it wasn't actually closed and no one cares anymore.
Obviously there are many other big issues, but the things you've listed don't have a (direct) impact on climate change specifically. There's lots of things going on that damage the environment in various ways and I agree that we should work on those too, but if we can't take action on climate change all that other stuff will sort of take care of itself when society as we know it ceases to exist.
Googling this number gives different answers for respiratory CO2 emissions per person. Various forms of wildlife obviously also emits CO2 and historically, this has not contributed to climate change prior to the last century. This is a moot point.
Maybe you believe that the temperature is going to rise infinitely because of CO2 emissions, I believe it's going to top at 2.5C degrees and that we can not only manage it but benefit from it.
