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Comment by blisterpeanuts | Hacker News Reader

Yikes! At least it's good for the plants.

I feel optimistic, however. We are on the cusp of really efficient solar panels and excellent batteries that will finally make it practical to power homes and offices from sunlight most of the time.

Electric vehicles are ramping up and it's very likely that in 20 years, the average passenger car on the road will be electric, or at least plug-in hybrid with 100 mpg or better.

Ultimately, we'll stop burning so much stuff. Will it be too late, or will the relatively sudden dropoff in CO2 production affect the PPM? Should be interesting to watch, for those of us who live long enough.

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> At least it's good for the plants.

There are plants (for example hop and wheat [1]) that cannot grow well at high CO2 concentrations.

[1] http://science.sciencemag.org/content/328/5980/899.abstract

That may be the key. Save the hops.

SAVE THE BEER

"I feel optimistic, however. We are on the cusp of really efficient solar panels and excellent batteries that will finally make it practical to power homes and offices from sunlight most of the time. Electric vehicles are ramping up and it's very likely that in 20 years, the average passenger car on the road will be electric, or at least plug-in hybrid with 100 mpg or better."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

Efficiency gains and new technologies will not, in the long run, mitigate the externalities of resource consumption.

The driver is population. That's the only lever that could possibly be effective.

If you're frustrated and confused as to how the reactionary wing of politics in the US could be so willfully blind to the facts or "the science", understand that deep down they know - this is just a classic race for resources and even more deep down a fight for kin group survival.

You might think they're dummies but there is a deep human memory of reproductive calculus at work. They know that at the very end of this line of thinking is a one-child-policy. Or worse.

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