So what can we - the average HN crowd - actually do?
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?
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
[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.
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.
I'll take a look at this essay and if you think of anything else let me know.
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.
Go put in 80 hour weeks at Tesla?
Vote Democrat?
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.