That part that is taking time to get out and have people understand is that we can't do a thing about it. Some of the proposals out there are flat-out crazy. The very article you posted has a line that is just plain insane: "This means that to avoid disaster, we must confront capitalism." Sorry, that's a complete joke.
Here's the plain and simple truth: If all of humanity left the planet next week, and we took all of our technology and capitalism with us. In other words, Captain Kirk beams all of us up into somewhere in space. Even if we did that, it would still take somewhere in the order of 50K to 100K years for a 100 ppm drop in atmospheric CO2.
It is sad to see just how political climate change has become. The data is out there. The studies are out there. The understanding is out there. We need to stop talking about magically capturing CO2 out of the atmosphere and start talking about adaptation. That is the only thing we can do.
Switch our entire economy to renewable energy?
No. That won't fix it. It won't even slow it down.
Switch the entire world economy to the most optimal --yet to be invented-- forms of renewables?
Nope. That won't fix it.
In fact, we already know that, even if we were able to do it, not only would atmospheric CO2 concentration not drop, it would continue to rise.
We need to start having conversations about the truth, not the fantasy du jour, which is the endless loop we seem to be locked into. I get why, it has political value. The ignorant masses are driven into a self-righteous state where support for fantasy merchants actually feels like they are "saving the planet". The entire thing is a silly fantasy. Sorry.
I have written about this on HN before, complete with sources and data. If interested you can find my comments on multiple threads.
As you say, most fail to recognize the scale of the problem. It's a planetary scale issue. Fixing it would require more energy and resources than we could possibly imagine --we might not even have enough on the planet. Even worse, deploying such "solutions" at the scale (energy, materials, etc.) necessary to affect change on a human timeline (decades rather than tens of thousands of years) is far more likely to kill everything on earth than to save the planet. We really, truly, need to stop with this fantasy and come back to a manageable reality. Urgently. This is getting silly.
Basic concept:
In a closed system, you can't reverse something by using less energy than that which went into creating it.
Basic physics. From that principle there's only one possibly conclusion when it comes to climate change: We can't do a damn thing about it.
I firmly agree that we've crossed several tipping points and that adaptation is a large and necessary part of our response. You seem to ignore that there are degrees of badness here, though!
Limiting warming to 2 or 3 degrees C is going to result in a situation that's a heck of a lot better than what 6 or 7 degrees C looks like. When asked if we should adapt or spend money on renewables/carbon capture/etc, the answer should be "Yes". We should be doing all of these things.
> You seem to ignore that there are degrees of badness here, though!
No, I am not doing that. I devoted a little over a year to taking a deep dive into this subject. I really wanted to understand. This was a few years ago, when I started to get this feeling that climate change was becoming a religion. It quickly became obvious that both non-believers and zealots are nothing less than delusional. Nobody devotes one iota of work and effort towards understanding the subject and everyone jumps on their respective bandwagon.
If you study that data --very reliable data going back 800,000 years--, do a little analysis, and read just a few documents, it becomes very obvious that we can't stop it and we sure as heck can't slow it down.
That DOES NOT mean it will not regulate. The planet is far more powerful than we could ever hope to be. The way our planet regulates CO2 is through weather events. That's the first reality we need to understand and accept. We are going to have lots more hurricanes, rains, cyclones, etc.
Every time I post about this people respond with negative comments and not one person bothers to look at the data and documents. I have had this conversation with people with advanced degrees in science over the last several years. Not one person has come back with a scientifically sound dismissal of my hypothesis. It goes as follows:
We know, from ice core atmospheric sample data going back 800K years, without a shadow of a doubt, how the planet behaves without humanity around.
The rate of change of atmospheric CO2 without humanity around (or when we were a rounding error in the planetary context) is about 100 ppm in 50K to 100K years. For easy numbers, let's call it 1,000 years/1 ppm.
It's a simple matter to fit lines to the up and down slopes and get a rough measurement of what I call the natural rate of change. That is, the rate of change with humanity being insignificant.
That rate of change is the baseline from which anything else has to be measured. Examples:
"Let's shut down the entire United States and move to Mars"
Nope, won't work. That is not better than if humanity left the entire planet, which would give us 1 ppm every thousand years.
"Let's cover the entire ecuatorial band with solar panels and have wind turbines everywhere we can put them"
No, again, how is that better than all of humanity leaving the planet?
"Let's build huge filters and suck the CO2 out of the atmosphere in every city"
Nope. First of all, building something like that at a scale sufficiently large to actually make any kind of an impact on a shortened time scale (50 to 100 years) would require resources to build, operate and maintain the systems of an unimaginable scale. Just the processing and transportation of the construction materials to build the thing on every major city on this planet would likely emit more CO2 than the system could ever consume. And then you have to power it. No, solar won't do it.
And then, on top of that, all seven-going-on-eight billion of us are still on the planet, which means that we can't do better than the baseline 1K years for 1 ppm reduction.
"Let's use magic dust to seed the ocean and capture CO2"
I don't even want to imagine the disaster and CO2 contribution just mining, transporting and deploying this stuff would entail. We are far more likely to kill everything in the ocean than to fix a darn thing with the atmosphere.
And, once more, billions of us would still be here, which means we can't do any better than the baseline.
Here's the easiest-to-read paper I found on this. In fact, back in 2014-ish, when I read it, this is the document that launched me into a year-long deep dive into this subject. I always give credit to the authors. They were full-on believers on saving the planet with renewables and set out to, once and for all, prove it. They say so in the paper. What they discovered was precisely the opposite, and, as good scientists do, accepted the failure of their hypothesis and published the result. In this charged political environment this took huge balls.
To paraphrase: Even if we deploy the most optimal forms of renewables, not only will we not stop atmospheric CO2, it will continue to rise exponentially.
This paper stopped at that conclusion (because it was the answer to the hypothesis they were trying to prove). I wish they had continued or done another paper evaluating the reality of controlling CO2 through any other means. The conclusion would have been the same.
Thankfully a group out of Germany asked that question and published results about a year later (2015):
"Scientists from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany say that if we were to remove CO2 from the atmosphere at a rate of 2.5 times that of the current annual emissions, oceans would not recover to a low-emission state by 2700."
And that is a best case scenario. In reality, anyone who has ever done real work of any kind in the real world knows that these estimates are, at best, optimistic and in most cases a complete fantasy. It is useful to have a number of some kind just to get a sense of proportion. The 700 year estimate means "not measured in a scale corresponding to a human lifetime". Generations. And, if we go back to the baseline I introduced, the real number, with all of humanity still around and growing, the real number is in the high tens of thousands of years.
I know I am going to get pounded on any time I post this. The vast majority of people who believe or do not believe have done near zero work to actually understand the subject, they take the conclusions from whatever side of the argument they like and go with it. That's OK. I am one who decided to stop regurgitating what I was being told and actually go out and try to confirm it first. If I just make a few people take that scientifically necessary path of skepticism and do the work, mission accomplished.
Yes, we have to clean-up our act. No, we are not going to save the planet. There are plenty of reasons for which we should clean-up our act. And, yes, climate change is real. And, yes, of course, we made a significant contribution to the problem. We just need to stop pushing fantasies and address reality.
What do you think about off-planet solutions (like space mirrors, etc)? Dealing with temperature regulation would mitigate a lot of negative effects of hight CO2.
No opinion at this point other than a sense that, if we did the math, we might very well discover that we would burn so much fuel and produce so much CO2 in manufacturing and transporting everything we might need (and then launch it) that it could be a complete non-starter.
What really worries me about some of these ideas is that they could go horribly wrong. We are talking about changing the fundamental energy equation for an entire planet. We can't even control the ecological effects of our technology at the local level and we are actually convincing ourselves we can hit the mark with a planetary scale process? This is scary.
So...having actually worked for companies in aerospace making rockets that leave the planet...
The cost per kilogram to orbit today is likely around $2000. That same kilogram landing on the moon (I also worked on a device that will get to the moon's surface in a future Artemis mission and dealt with all the lander companies) is somewhere in the two million USD range.
And asteroid? And mining equipment? Well, it will be a lot more than that. 10x? 100x? No clue.
Let's assume the cost is the same. Lets' further assume we need, say, 50,000 kg in equipment, supplies and fuel/energy to get there, mine and bring it back.
At $2MM per kg this would mean a one-way trip cost of $100 billion dollars. Round trip? Let's call it $200 billion. My guess is that might bring back somewhere between 500 and 1,000 kg of whatever was mined.
This is all hypothetical, of course. Just having fun.
Let's say we mine gold. Current value per kg is about $60K. So, a thousand kilograms of gold brought back from an asteroid would yield $60 million dollars. That would represent a loss of $199,940,000,000 dollars.
Diamonds? They are worth about 1,000x more than gold per weight. That still represents a loss of $140 billion.
The same is the story with fabrication in space. Getting tools, equipment, energy production means and raw materials there and back cost tons of cash (literally). If it can be done in low orbit it's much more manageable, still tons of cash though. Try to move farther away from earth and costs go exponential very quickly.
Asteroid mining is one of those neat concepts that people keep talking about over the years. Fun and interesting, of course. I just don't see it ever making financial sense.
Minion on mars to build stuff on mars is a different matter. Well, it will still cost tons of cash to get everything there, but at least you don't have to bring it back!
That would be (if at all) for the first mission only. The 'bootstrap'. And in-situ utilizing the shit out of anything available to build as much as possible of the equipment up there. And why would I care about the money? That's just a few wars, peanuts so to speak. By stopping that shit alone you'd burn way less carbon! See? Wheee!
Anyways, read the book I suggested and see if it changes your assumptions, or not.
edit: Btw. nobody needs gold from space. Maybe infrastructure needs gold in space. Be it for reflectors, wires, chips... don't know. Don't care about your experience either, because that tends to lead to institutional blindness and inability to think 'out of the box'.
> Don't care about your experience either, because that tends to lead to institutional blindness and inability to think 'out of the box'
Very funny.
Hey, if you ever need surgery, repeat the above to your experienced surgeon and ask that they bring over some dumb-shit with a two year old degree who can thing out of the box. Sit back. Relax. Enjoy.
Not really, not when you consider the entire process.
Also, I did not say "turn CO2 back into hydrocarbons", that would be preposterous. No, it would take an unimaginable amount of energy to go out and take it out of the atmosphere and turn it into anything of any form.
The super simplistic example I use is: Take a bag of flour and let your building air conditioning system spread the dust all over the building. Now go pick up every single particle you released. And no, you can't open the windows and let outside wind clear out most of it. It's a closed building.
This is not a perfect analog, it is just an illustration of how it is very easy to create a mess and many, many times harder to clean it up.
>> In a closed system, you can't reverse something by using less energy than that which went into creating it.
>> Basic physics. From that principle there's only one possibly conclusion when it comes to climate change: We can't do a damn thing about it.
I agree that the climate crisis is grim and that geoengineering is not a cure all. I do not think your reasoning makes much sense. Say it takes 100x as much energy to capture C02 as to create it. If the energy it takes does not warm the atmosphere it is not a problem. For example, if solar energy was removed to C02 it would not contribute to the warming of the planet either by directly releasing heat or a greenhouse gas.
That's a perfectly good "had wavy" argument. However, once you start attaching numbers to such a thing you will quickly discover reality is not as nice and clean as writing two lines of text.
There's nothing grim about climate change reality. We just have to accept it, clean up our act to the extent possible and adapt. The planet has survived billions of years. We are insignificant. We either pretend we can fix it (which is a mistake) or understand that the planet can make us disappear in an instant.
I mean, look at this pandemic. Had we not developed vaccines so quickly it would have been perfectly plausible for half the population of this plante to perish. Thinking we can control things at a planetary scale is pure ignorant hubris. We cannot. And we stand a far greater chance of killing everything on earth than to save the planet. The planet does not need saving.
> We really, truly, need to stop with this fantasy and come back to a manageable reality. Urgently. This is getting silly.
You're truly living in a fantasy world if you imagine it's possible to keep the current rate of CO2 production and just adapt to the effects in the long term.
We first need to transition the economy to renewables, drastically reduce production and consumption of many goods, get rid of the incentive structures that have kept things in this state. We could then hope to reach 0 emissions, which would mean maybe 2-4 degrees of warming. Catastrophic, but not world ending. To live in this world, we will indeed have to start looking at adaptation.
If we do it your way, with no reduction in emissions, bit focusing on adaptation, we'll be looking at 6-10 degrees of warming, which there would definitely be no adapting around.
Back in 2014-ish, when I read it, this is the document that launched me into a year-long deep dive into this subject. I always give credit to the authors. They were full-on believers on saving the planet with renewables and set out to, once and for all, prove it. They say so in the paper. What they discovered was precisely the opposite, and, as good scientists do, accepted the failure of their hypothesis and published the result. In this charged political environment this took huge balls.
The conclusion, paraphrasing:
Even if we deploy the most optimal forms of renewables, not only will we not stop atmospheric CO2, it will continue to rise exponentially.
> We could then hope to reach 0 emissions
No, we cannot. That is a fantasy.
For starters, we consume about 35 billion barrels of oil per year, nearly 100 million per day. Our very lives are so dependent on this stuff that we are not going to dent this level of consumption. Even if we cut it in half, this will not slow down atmospheric CO2 contributions enough.
And, not, a conversion to electric transportation will not make this happen. There are 1.5 billion vehicles in the world. Replacing that entire fleet with electric powered vehicles will likely take somewhere in the order of 50 years, if even possible. We also have to manufacture 1.5 new electric vehicles to replace them, which means producing massive amounts of CO2 and consuming equally massive amounts of resources.
And then we have to CHARGE 1.5 billion vehicles per day, every day, all around the world. The global power generation system cannot handle this. In the US alone we would need somewhere in the order of one hundred giga-watt class nuclear power plants just to be able to deliver the kind of power (not energy, power is the problem) we would need to handle our entire fleet going electric. Even if I am off by 75%, we need 25 new nuclear power plants, along with changes to our power distribution infrastructure to be able to handle it all. We did not build an infrastructure that has a 100% excess generation and transportation capacity. Most power plants operate very close to full capacity.
And then there's the reality of what would happen if we reached 0 emissions (again, impossible, we have forest fires that release more CO2 in a few weeks than the entire fleet of automobiles in the US).
Let's say for a moment that we could actually reach zero emissions world wide. You do understand that if it is only the US or the US and Europe it is pointless, right? You do understand that seven billion people cooking food every day by burning something will produce a massive amount of CO2, right? Analyze any process, making clothes, preparing food, transporting and processing our excrement in towns and cities, you will quickly discover zero emissions is an absolute fantasy.
Let's ignore all of that reality and actually believe we can get to zero emission world wide. The entirety of humanity, zero emissions. Like we do not exist.
Do we actually know what will happen if we could achieve this fantasy?
These are atmospheric composition records extracted from ice core samples going back 800K years. In other words, we have good reliable and accurate data of a scenario, hundreds of thousands of years in duration, when humanity was "zero emissions" due to either being insignificant or not actually existing as we do today (7 billion people and our toys).
What does this data say?
It says that, if we did achieve zero emissions it would take about 100,000 years for a 100 ppm reduction in atmospheric CO2 concentration.
That is the baseline. Zero emissions == 1,000 years for a 1 ppm drop.
Now, go back and evaluate any proposed solution from this baseline.
"Cover the entire equatorial band with solar panels?"
Nope. This would violate the zero emissions scenario, therefore creating a situation where we would not be able to achieve a 1 ppm drop in a thousand years.
"Convert the entire transportation fleet to electricity?"
Nope. We would contribute even more CO2 and it would take somewhere in the order of 50 years. We would need to build thousands of new power generation plants. And, of course, there is no way to predict what the population of our planet would be, we are at seven billion today. Eight billion? Nine? Ten? More cooking. More clothing. More housing. More food. More everything. More CO2.
It does not take an advanced degree in math and physics to look at this and quickly understand the entire thing is a huge fantasy. This does not mean climate change is not real. It is very real. And this does not mean we should clean-up our act. We should. Yet not for some religious blind belief that we are going to save the planet. We cannot. And, if we act on some of the nonsense being pushed around we are bound to do more harm than good. Climate change has become a horrifically powerful political tool because both believers and zealots are following their "leader" blindly off the cliff. There's delusion on both ends of the scale. Some of us are in the middle saying "No! Stop! This is crazy!". Our voices, for the most part, are being drowned out by the delusion. I can only hope someone listens.
As other already pointed out, Earth isn't a closed system! That fundamental misunderstanding of you invalidates your whole reasoning.
About 173,000 TW of energy strikes earth continuously. We have all the technology and we have all the resources we need to rapidly limit greenhouse gas emissions to sustainable levels and to start to remove CO2 from the atmosphere.
The only thing that is lacking is political will. This is our great tragedy.
> About 173,000 TW of energy strikes earth continuously. We have all the technology and we have all the resources we need to rapidly limit greenhouse gas emissions to sustainable levels and to start to remove CO2 from the atmosphere.
No, we don't. Great sounding assertion, no analysis whatsoever.
And then do this math. Let's use your number, "173,000 TW of energy" coming into our blue marble in space.
BTW, the Watt is a unit of POWER, not energy. Ignoring that minor detail for a second...
How is petroleum made?
Dead plants + dead animals + dead insects + possibly other stuff + lots of solar energy + millions of years
How much energy goes into creating one gallon of oil?
n<followed by an unimaginably large number of zeros>
How was it possible for humanity to affect such a dramatic change in atmospheric CO2 concentration?
Well, we burned oil.
Why was that so effective?
Because burning one gallon of oil, to put it in simple terms, is like burning an entire chunk of a forest...and we can burn a gallon of oil much faster than the equivalent forest area would burn. In other words, we can burn the result of a massive amount of raw matter, combined with a massive amount of solar energy and millions of years to produce it, in mere seconds.
In fact, one estimate says that one gallon of gasoline (not oil, that's worse) required some 98 tons of plants to produce:
""Can you imagine loading 40 acres worth of wheat – stalks, roots and all – into the tank of your car or SUV every 20 miles?" asks ecologist Jeff Dukes, whose study will be published in the November issue of the journal Climatic Change.""
So, by burning one gallon of gasoline, we are burning the equivalent of some 40 acres of plant matter in roughly 20 minutes on every vehicle on earth (seat of the pants average, it's likely worse than that).
Wow! OK, how many gallons of oil do we burn per year?
Barrels. We burn about 35 BILLION barrels per year:
Going back to my "it's a closed system" observation. All we have is some amount of energy coming in and some being lost to space. No magical vacuum cleaner to help us fix anything. And we have resources, minerals, etc. under and above ground. That's it.
What you have to balance in an equation when evaluating a proposed solution is the amount of energy it took to create the materials we used to be able to release so much CO2 into the atmosphere. It will not take less energy to claw it back, in any form. It will take more. Even if we found parity and it took the same amount of energy, it would be an impossibly large number. Even if we found a magical juju bean that could do it for 1/10 the the energy, it would still be an unimaginably large number, not to mention what it would take to go mine, process, transport, deploy and clean-up the magical juju beans.
Just a little bit of thought and high school math quickly reveals we are being sold fantasy after fantasy. We can't fix this. We need to start talking about adapting. There is no Superman.
About your first link from 2014: renewable energy is already cheaper.
About your second link: no one has claimed that we all damage already done is reversible.
Apparently I have to teach you that power is energy per unit of time, that is we have 173,000 TJ/s. And then we can do some simple calculation from energy equivalence of 35 billion barrels of oil (213,000,000 TJ) and find that corresponds to about 20 minutes of sunlight hitting Earth. Or calculating from power instead, we burn 6.75 GW of oil, or about 3e-11 of the incoming sun power. There's plenty of energy available, and nowadays sun energy is cheaper than coal. You don't even need high school math for this.
So, as you see, the "not closed system", is kind of relevant. What is irrelevant is how much plant matter that is required to produce said oil. No one, absolutely no one, has suggested that we should make new oil by burying plant matter for a long time.
Nice bit of high school math after a google search. Good job. Pointless though.
You are pointing at solar energy coming into the planet as if it were some magical juju bean that can solve all of our problems. Well, it isn't. Had you actually read the report from which you got some of this information you would know just how wrong you are in trying to reduce the entirety of reality into a single variable: Solar energy. The whole idea is preposterous.
In your attempt to look smart and convert power to energy using a google search you fail to understand the key difference between power and energy in real life.
Using a simple example: The solar array I built in the back of my house can produce a theoretical maximum of 14,000 W any given instant (power). Assuming that is true (not even close), this means I could collect a theoretical 104 kW hours of energy over eight hours (also not true). Talking about energy is pointless because we do not use energy, we use power, we use the instantaneous version of, in this case, using electrons to do some work.
If you add-up the energy production capacity of all the power plants in the US (multiply their power output by 24 hours and add them all up) you can easily believe we have enough to charge 300 million electric cars. And that would be wrong. We do not have enough POWER generating capacity to support such a fleet. The energy calculation isn't correct because you can't use it to deliver power beyond the instantaneous power delivery capacity we have. The only way this would be true is if our future electric cars sat there for 24 hours to charge.
And then there's the reality that converting solar energy to anything useful is a horribly inefficient process. My 13 kW array covers about 80 square meters. That is a theoretical 80 kW (round numbers) of solar energy. At best, with all conditions being perfect, I have generated 11 kW. My average peak over several years in operation is about 8 kW. So 10% of the energy that hits it, at the PEAK moment in the day, much worse on either side of that curve. Counting energy, when what you need is power is a fantasy.
Oher solar energy conversion processes are even worse, as an example, geothermal is about 2% efficient, at best.
Do not reduce reality to a single variable. It isn't. It is a complex multivariate problem.
> About your first link from 2014: renewable energy is already cheaper.
You probably didn't even read it. Did you? The paper has NOTHING to do with cost. It has everything to do with "can we achieve zero emissions with renewables". And that means all renewables, not just solar. The answer is a solid "no".
> About your second link: no one has claimed that we all damage already done is reversible.
No idea what you are saying. You probably didn't read that either.
No, I don’t read the old, long papers after a short glance seeing that their initial assumptions are wrong or the subject doesn’t seem to relevant. If you have a point to make, make it. Then you can cite papers if say your numbers need some backing by actual research.
I really get the feeling that you don’t understand how power relates to energy. What are you trying to say about peak power capacity and charging of cars? You do know that not all cars are driven at exactly the same time or are charged at exactly the same time?
Also, of course we need to increase our electricity production if more things, like cars, are going to be run on electricity.
The efficiency of solar panels doesn’t matter much. You remember that ratio between incoming energy and energy usage? We have a lot of zeros to take from. It doesn’t matter that the average solar panel only converts about a fifth of incoming energy, because the incoming energy is abundant and completely free. The same argument can be made about geothermal. And the same argument can be made about storing energy as hydrogen. Yes, the conversation will be inefficient, but that doesn’t matter because you do it sunny, windy days, electricity will be more or less free.
Finally, I’m sorry you think my argument is too simple. But calling it magical juju doesn’t refute it. The amount of solar radiation hitting earth is a very well established, and easy to understand, scientific fact. And if you remember, that fact was used to refute your statement that earth should be seen as a closed system. You didn’t even try to defend that statement, so I hope you never try to use it again without embarrassment.
It is a closed system. Energy in -> Energy out. No magic.
What this means is that we don't get to claim "and then a miracle occurs" when proposing a solutions. This is exactly what all so-called solutions boil down to. Including what you are talking about.
You are citing the total energy landing on a hemisphere and completely ignoring that we can't harvest even a small fraction of that. Solar energy is very, very far from free. I built a 13 kW array on my property, I can assure you it was not free. I can also assure likely produced far more CO2 than it will ever save us. This is where you need to understand manufacturing and construction. I won't even go into the shit I had to go through with the County of Los Angeles. I have 64,000 POUNDS of concrete anchoring this array to the ground --which LA County forced upon me. How much CO2 do you think it cost to produce, transport and install that? How about the non-trivial structure it is mounted on? I could go on.
This idea that solar energy is free is just plain silly.
You are refusing to read one of the most scientifically honest papers ever done on the question of whether or not solar energy (actually, all renewables combined) can stop atmospheric CO2 build-up and reverse it and you actually want to school me on having a valid argument.
And, speaking of energy vs. power. Lots of sunlight falls above and below latitudes where converting it into other usable forms of energy is just pointless. If you want to be honest about solar energy, well, you have to do the math. It isn't what you think it is. Do you even have solar?
Here's the output of my 13 kW array on an average day:
Do you see what happens? No, it isn't magical juju beans. You can't quote some theoretical number and actually believe this stuff is usable.
Besides, you could convert the entire planet to the most optimal forms of solar and wind power and you would still do nothing to stop atmospheric CO2 accumulation. Not sure why you are even arguing about solar. It's pointless.
> I really get the feeling that you don’t understand how power relates to energy. What are you trying to say about peak power capacity and charging of cars? You do know that not all cars are driven at exactly the same time or are charged at exactly the same time?
That's very funny. I have a nasty habit. I do not open my mouth unless I know what I am talking about. Which means I go way --ridiculously so-- out of my way to research things as far as necessary in order to understand and verify my claims. In the case of cars charging in the US, I actually developed a mathematical model that included behavioral elements and charging cars across our various time zones.
This, for example, is one of the outputs of the analysis:
This includes considering such things as a portion of the fleet fast-charging while others slow charge. I considers the effect of people going to work and coming home at different times across our six time zones, etc. I am not typing stuff I pull out of my ass my friend. You can either make the effort to understand and attempt to do your own math or just ignore it and believe whatever you might wish.
The only thing that would be better than this model would be to write more complex behavioral simulation code and take into account far more variables than I did. I'll do that one day when I have the time. I don't think the end-result will be radically different from the simpler model.
Like I said, unlike most people, I go very far towards actually understanding things before I open my mouth.
Back to my nasty habit. I said I do not open my mouth unless I know what I am talking about and I do enough research to confirm it. This also means I am constantly checking my assumptions.
Back to energy and electric vehicles. I told you that my models predicted a requirement for a massive increase in energy generation capacity to be able to go to full electric vehicles. I then shared an image from one of my simulation model run calculations. This one:
It shows a "new energy" need in the range of roughly 900 to 1,400 GW. Unimaginable. Right? That's over a thousand 1 GW class nuclear power plants.
I am delusional. Right?
Well, I decided to, once again, check my assumptions and math. They make sense to me. And then, looking around some more, I came across this from earlier this year:
Here you have Elon Musk saying (paraphrasing) "If we convert all of our transportation to electric, electricity demand more than doubles". He goes on to explain that it isn't just about generation, it is, as I said, about transportation as well (which really means it is about POWER, not energy).
So, what does "more than doubles" mean?
Well, let's start with what our current energy generation capacity is in the US:
Elon's "more than doubles" means we need more than 1,200 GW in new energy generation capacity. Interestingly enough, my model gave a range of between 900 GW and 1,400 GW. I created these models about five years ago.
We don't get to use all the solar energy landing on the planet. Not even close.
Why?
Because, if you did, you would kill every single forest and all of agriculture. You would kill every single animal. You would likely kill the oceans. You might kill bacteria, insects and seriously disrupt weather. I can't even think about all the variables that would be deeply disturbed if humanity decided we are going to attempt to use a big chunk of what solar energy lands on the planet.
And blocking it from space? Seriously? Again, refer to the prior paragraph, let's go ahead and kill everything on earth.
These ideas might sound good after a beer or two but are nothing less than laughable once someone sits down and really puts pen to paper.
We are proposing to mess with forces we can't possibly understand. I have said this many times, we can't even take care of small-scale ecosystems and we are actually lending credence to nut-cases suggesting such things as deploying devices in space to block the sun. Wonderful.
"In a closed system, you can't reverse something by using less energy than that which went into creating it."
You can do it elsewhere, though. And by different means.
Sahara is really big, really empty and has a lot of sunlight. If we had some at least semiefficient method of dumping carbon from the air back to solid form using electricity, the whole mankind could pay Niger or Chad or Libya or Algeria to rent 100 000 sqkm of dry desert, build a huge solar power station there and bury the resulting carbon mass in large, kilometer-deep trenches covered by stone and sand.
This further proves my point. People never bother to even attempt to do the math. People "know" the truth and "believe" in climate change and "solutions", yet nobody seems to have any interest in actually confirming what they are being told.
It's as bad as anti-vaxxers believing the government is installing tiny remote control radios in vaccines to control our minds. It really is that crazy, if not more.
Here's the plain and simple truth: If all of humanity left the planet next week, and we took all of our technology and capitalism with us. In other words, Captain Kirk beams all of us up into somewhere in space. Even if we did that, it would still take somewhere in the order of 50K to 100K years for a 100 ppm drop in atmospheric CO2.
It is sad to see just how political climate change has become. The data is out there. The studies are out there. The understanding is out there. We need to stop talking about magically capturing CO2 out of the atmosphere and start talking about adaptation. That is the only thing we can do.
Switch our entire economy to renewable energy?
No. That won't fix it. It won't even slow it down.
Switch the entire world economy to the most optimal --yet to be invented-- forms of renewables?
Nope. That won't fix it.
In fact, we already know that, even if we were able to do it, not only would atmospheric CO2 concentration not drop, it would continue to rise.
We need to start having conversations about the truth, not the fantasy du jour, which is the endless loop we seem to be locked into. I get why, it has political value. The ignorant masses are driven into a self-righteous state where support for fantasy merchants actually feels like they are "saving the planet". The entire thing is a silly fantasy. Sorry.
I have written about this on HN before, complete with sources and data. If interested you can find my comments on multiple threads.
As you say, most fail to recognize the scale of the problem. It's a planetary scale issue. Fixing it would require more energy and resources than we could possibly imagine --we might not even have enough on the planet. Even worse, deploying such "solutions" at the scale (energy, materials, etc.) necessary to affect change on a human timeline (decades rather than tens of thousands of years) is far more likely to kill everything on earth than to save the planet. We really, truly, need to stop with this fantasy and come back to a manageable reality. Urgently. This is getting silly.
Basic concept:
In a closed system, you can't reverse something by using less energy than that which went into creating it.
Basic physics. From that principle there's only one possibly conclusion when it comes to climate change: We can't do a damn thing about it.