How climate change is rapidly taking the planet apart
flassbeck-economics.com
flassbeck-economics.com
Bret Victor's essay on what a technologist can do about climate is a well-reasoned perspective targeted at people in the tech industry, and it's at least a start. What else?
What works is the economic argument, the best environmental choice has to become the cheapest one, and that's something technology can do.
When solar power is cheaper than coal, coal power plants will shut down very quickly and be replaced by solar power plants.
When electric cars are cheaper than ICE cars, noone is going to buy the latter, and vehicle pollution will quickly disappear as well.
The problem is: once we stop, were have decades more build up that catches up.
Really, actually reading the science, I'm starting to think the Fermi paradox is solved.
When you say "cheaper," anything we do today is cheaper than massive human death.
I'll take a look at this essay and if you think of anything else let me know.
Aircraft emissions, because they are made at high altitude, have a climate impact that is leveraged by a factor commonly estimated to be 2.7 higher than the same emissions if made at ground-level.[1]
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypermobility_%28travel%29
edit: also relevant https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O133ppiVnWY
Also, electric planes are theoretically coming.
But if you must make the comparison, automobiles are obviously more efficient than aircraft per passenger for shorter distances. You wouldn't burn anywhere near the amount of fuel a jet uses taxiing to drive a comparable distance, to illustrate the extreme end of the spectrum favoring automobiles.
Actually teasing out where exactly the inflexion point lies depends on the specific vehicles being compared, occupancy levels, and distance being traveled. These things have been studied and compared, Google it if you're actually interested in knowing when to drive instead of fly. It's far more prudent to simply cut down or eliminate air travel altogether, IMHO.
There are other difficult to measure impacts from flying. For example, most people I encounter in the SF Bay area like to travel frivolously by air and broadcast to the world that they're doing so in their in-person conversations and social media posts. This amounts to advertising and promoting more frivolous air travel throughout their audiences, and wouldn't really be feasible if they hadn't taken the flight in the first place. There's a greater collateral damage with air travel, because it's so accessible and convenient, all it takes is a photo of a wing or some beautiful destination you flew to and anyone who sees the photo in your friend circle can likely afford to repeat the activity - there are effectively no barriers. Social networking has exacerbated this effect _tremendously_, it's somewhat horrifying.
The key is the frivolous word in the GP comment. Aircraft actually are fairly efficient, it's just that the mileage of a single flight is a substantial fraction of most people's total annual driving. That old Jevons paradox again.
As for electric aircraft: think "powered glider" rather than "emissions-free 747". Roughly half an airliner's takeoff weight is fuel, and that's burnt up over the course of the flight. Battery storage densities are on the order of 1/100th to 1/50th of petrol or kerosene (latter is essentially jet fuel). The trend's been slight on improvement, and though there've been some battery-powered aircraft, they're comparable to a very-small-engined aircraft with a tiny fuel tank -- think 20-40hp and less than a gallon of fuel (about 15-30 kW and 2-3 litres, for rational people).
If I remember correctly, he said that the energy use per-person in a (full) commercial aircraft flying from A to B is half as much as the energy use per-car if you drove from A to B.
This means that if two people carpool from A to B, you're as efficient per-person as flying from A to B; if four people carpool, it's twice as efficient per-person as flying.
Please call me out if I'm wrong or if I misunderstood the passage from Without Hot Air.
EDIT: Source: See table 5.3 on https://www.withouthotair.com/c5/page_36.shtml
1. Aircraft have heaviest fuel use during takeoff and ascent. Short flights are the least efficient. I'm not aware of a good modeling for this, but you might consider that there's a fixed takeoff/landing/taxi cycle and a variable cruise component to most flights. Also, larger aircraft (at capacity) tend to be more efficient than smaller ones, though that's a fairly varyable dynamic.
2. Automobiles offer numerous other capaibilities (and limitations). Generally, more cargo, and more direct transit. With airport delays adding 1-3 hours to a flight, that's 150 miles / 240 km of ground travel possible at highway speeds.
3. More luggage capacity / fewer restrictions. You can carry items on a car you couldn't on an airplane.
4. Point-to-point service. Aircraft fly to airports. Cars drive to specific addresses. That's another consideration in on-ground time, possibly several hours, in a flight. Autos start looking viable for trips of 200-250 mi / 320 - 350 km.
5. There are larger autos availabe. Five adults in a small compact might not be reasonable, but might consider an SUV or van. And efficient choice here would make up for lower fuel economy with higher passenger capacity.
Aircraft still generally win on safety on a pro-rated distance basis.
Yeah, that is precise reason of dino's extinction - they decided to have fewer kids due to climate change.
Minnesota farmland, though, may have a comeback.
My only hope is that I can retire from a career of ignoring climate change to a tropical, palm-treed Duluth.
Write better, optimized code :) That consumes less CPU power (and so produces less heat while working).
Oh, and that Pockemon thing ... you know, right? Heating problems at data centers ... and so on
Engineering responsibility, that's how this entity was named in my university.
Or conversely, it's possibly, just as an outside and highly improbable guess, that reducing the costs and power consumption of individual computing devices might:
1. Allow them to proliferate such that rather than IBM's famous 1950 market for five computers, there's a market for five billion.
2. Which are collectively backed by football-pitch sized datacenters around the world, running said Pokemon games and Pr0nTube servers.
Just maybe. Could happen. You never know.
[1] https://psmag.com/conservation-in-the-age-of-climate-change-...
Milk cows are the most efficient means of converting a rocky hillside into human-consumable proteins.
How many new tech companies are doing things which feed into a consumerist culture which doesn't care about long-term impact because it's always BUY BUY BUY? It's all about making fuck you money, which really is fuck everyone else money. That's ugly and seeing as how it's one of the driving forces of the tech industry...well, some of us are guilty.
We are all deeply embedded in a culture with massive issues and to fix that we have to reexamine our own actions which are contributing to it.
What can you do? Educate yourself, educate all your friends and anyone else you talk to, vote for politicians who take this seriously and urge dramatic immediate action, use any resources or connections you have to get this understood by the people who hold and wield power. The situation is rapidly slipping from bad to almost unimaginably dystopian.
The dream hasn't gone %100 yet, but it has replaced a big chunk already. Year by year it replaces more and more paper and in person travelling.
You may think it isn't the case, but I have a story of a friend doing a psychology internship. The small office she works for has her schlep paper testing kits, patient charts and so on back and forth in between offices. And since they are shared they have often have to deliver them back and forth more than multiple copies would let them prevent. The main reason why its still paper is because her boss is in her 60s. But my friend has started to convince her boss to start digitizing. Now with hippa compliant google drive and pdf files replacing testing manuals and patient charts, they will save a ton of gas energy and time alone. It will be huge for them.
And that is one simple example.
It doesn't require everyone to cooperate, just us and those like us. Especially if we can capture the imagination of other similar people around us.
Local examples of living well and doing good have more impact than we think. This requires a change in popular culture right? How does that happen? It's not with polarizing media campaigns. People are influenced by people around them that they admire. Live well, save the world, and be noisy about it. People will notice.
Politicians and also scientists still avoid to say this aloud but without sufficiency there will be not enough change. The window of efficiency has passed.
Go put in 80 hour weeks at Tesla?
Vote Democrat?
But really, population control is the big one, and it's hard to talk about because, what are you going to do? Western birthrates are already very low. But try to convince a Zambian to not have 9 children... The usual solution is education, but that #1 Takes a generation or two, #2 Is a gamble in the first place, and #3 Goes hand-in-hand with expanded industrial production.
It's pretty much only sub-saharan african countries that have a birth-rate above 3. Zambia is at 5.59, and was at 7.41 at the most in 1975.
World population is starting to plateau, with the number of children no longer growing. What I take from the video is that the primary concerns are reducing extreme poverty and infant mortality in Africa on one hand, which will result in a reduced birth rate. And on the other hand, moving the most wealthy to technology and lifestyles with lower environmental impact (solar power, electric cars, and I'm not sure what else), so that as the developing world adopts a wealthier lifestyle there is not a proportionate increase in environmental damage.
And of course as George Monbiot said...
“(Population is) an important issue…most greens will not discuss. Is this sensitivity or is it cowardice? Perhaps a bit of both.”
“…if we accept the UN’s projection that global population will grow by roughly 50 per cent and then stop. This means it will become 50 per cent harder to stop runaway climate change, 50 per cent harder to feed the world, 50 per cent harder to prevent the overuse of resources.”
“Even if there were no environmental pressures caused by population growth, we should still support the measures required to tackle it: universal sex education, universal access to contraceptives, better schooling and opportunities for poor women. Stabilising or even reducing the human population would ameliorate almost all environmental impacts.”
According to the linked video, the richest billion are responsible for 50% of global carbon emissions. The idea is that we had better have much better technology in place as the next richest 3 billion people start to drive and fly more over the next 50 years.
By the way, this is the kind of talk that makes me want to learn a few little somethings from doomsday preppers, stock up on guns, ammunition, water, and food that doesn't go bad for a century or more, and buy a surplus military subterranean missile silo to turn into a geothermal-supported bunker - because now I have a family, and that shit changes your outlook. And I'm fine being laughed at when nothing happens, but awful happy to be prepared when it does.
How about nuclear? It can power the world, it's carbon neutral, and modern reactors are physically incapable of meltdown. It seems to be the obvious solution, but those sounding the alarm over climate change tend to be the same groups that oppose nuclear.
That's what has troubled me when I've discussed this with people who clearly know much more than I do about climate. The underlying assumption often seems to be, "Since the science is unquestionable, then surely you must agree that massive government intervention is the only way to solve the problem."
Now that's something I'm pretty skeptical of, after seeing how so many well-intended government programs have not only failed to accomplish their goals but have been actively harmful.
Maybe government action is what's needed here. I don't know. But I sure don't want to assume that it's the answer.
In the eyes of some, this just makes me a skeptic and a denier.
I completely agree though. Emission cuts are just not going to happen fast enough under any even slightly politically plausible scenario. It's a fantasy.
A combination of massive government regulations and technological improvements got rid of that problem.
The problem is when people go like this: "Massive government intervention cannot solve anything. Scientists say there is a problem, and massive government intervention is proposed as a solution. Therefore the science must be wrong; ergo, there is no problem."
Please educate these people that they aren't making any sense, and then after that we can talk.
Local intervention can't work - heavy industry will just move to a local jurisdiction that doesn't have those interventions.
Even if you accept that nuclear is safe (which isn't as settled as many on HN seem to think!) there is still a pretty significant problem with nuclear proliferation.
The only alternative I can see is massive technological change to develop much, much more energy efficient industrial systems which are much, much cheaper than the existing systems. That would mean it was uneconomic to compete with them. But.. hoping for magic is a problematic solution.
While we are hoping for magic, maybe someone will develop a cheap, small, workable fusion reactor. That would be nice.
This is wrong on many levels.
Firstly, I said "much, much more efficient AND much, much cheaper". Both need to be true in order to combat the high costs of setting up an industrial production facility.
Secondly, I don't think either of these things are met. What are these more efficient and cheaper technologies for - say - producing cars, or plastic toys, or glass, or.. something.
Thirdly, these people benefiting from the status quo in industrial production.. which status quo is that exactly? The one where production moved to Mexico from the US 15 years ago? Or the one where it moved to factories in China? Or the current one where Chinese factory workers are losing jobs to increased automation?
Note that I'm not saying that the same people aren't keeping the money and power. I'm saying that they don't care about the place or means of production. They'll be just as happy to make money from cheap, efficient production as from expensive, polluting production.
A carbon tax, as long as it is in put into place before the problem gets out of hand, would probably solve the problem, but I would not consider that "massive" government intervention.
The kind of climate change caused by our greenhouse gas emissions is bad for the country as a whole. In an ideal free market, normal market forces would cause us to move away from causing this kind of climate change. Real markets are not ideal free markets. A carbon tax, by making greenhouse gas produces pay some of the costs that otherwise would be externalities shifted to others, brings the real market closer to an ideal free market.
If we wait too long then a carbon tax won't be enough and massive government intervention could become necessary. By "massive" I mean the government stepping in and making decisions like what fuels you must use, setting specific emission caps on specific emitters, and things like that.
The deepest and oldest problem of human species is their over-confident rush to interfere and "fix" vastly complex self-regulating ecosystems they do not fully understand.
What will it take to get to revolution and revolt?
I'm sure you have far better research, data and analytical ability than NASA and virtually every other scientific outfit on the planet.
If so, what would that data look like?
Because who wants to argue with such a person in a design meeting?
"Toe the line" is an idiomatic expression meaning ... to conform to a rule or standard ...