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Comment by fsloth | Hacker News Reader

Why was it a piece of cake to regulate CFC:s but no one has the vision to strive to control CO2 and methane. I'm 37 years old. I've been scared of CO2 accumualation in the atmosphere before I went to school and I'm no genious.

I can't understand why has it been so hard recognize and act on CO2.

And it's not only the industry and politicians. Green parties have been the craziest in actively blocking nuclear power.

Why has this been so hard to see?

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This article from 1990 in the NYT tries to account for the cost of banning CFC's[1]. At worst it's a few hundred billion USD.

We've spent way more than that on CO^2 via the Kyoto accords etc. Of course the problem isn't solved, but that's because it's a way bigger problem. We've acted even more on CO^2 than CFC's, but the problem of CFC's was much smaller and easier to solve.

1. http://www.nytimes.com/1990/07/17/science/grappling-with-the...

It's possible to replace CFC with other gases. Just replace some of the F with Cl or something. It's not easy because CFC are incredible good at not reacting with anything. They are so good that they can survive all the way up to the upper atmosphere to cause havoc. If you replace the F by Cl or something you must do a lot of research to ensure the good properties in the new molecule version. So it's a problem that can be solved with research, time and money.

The problem with CO2 is that a lot of the energy requirements are solved by the equations:

  coal/petrol/gas + O2 --> CO2 + H2O + energy
  energy --> money

Or to simplify it

  whatever  --> CO2 + money

And it's not possible to replace the CO2 in that equation. No amount of money, time , research can fix this. You only try to use a completely different method to produce energy.

But most of the alternative methods are more expensive than a good old coal plant (if you ignore the social cost of pollution and the dangers of coal extraction). I think that nuclear and hydroelectric are cheaper, but they also have some hidden cost.

Trees?

We'd need a lot of trees

In 2000, the IPCC gathered the available evidence for a special report which concluded that tree-planting could sequester (remove from the atmosphere) around 1.1–1.6 GT of CO2 per year. That compares to total global greenhouse gas emissions equivalent to 50 GT of CO2 in 2004.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2012/nov/29/planting...

Just to avoid confusion, that's 50GT due to human activities.

http://climatica.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/IPCC_WG3_... (FOLU is forestry and other land use)

It takes costs to plant those trees so that'd cut down on the "profit" part of the equation.

A combination of selfishness and outright bullshit. Have you ever noticed that the people who pour scorn on climate prediction and say it's all just playing with models and overactive imagination on the part of scientists are perfectly comfortable making dire economic predictions about the costs of mitigating climate change, despite economics' relative crudity? Have you ever seen an economic model that even aspires to the sophistication of climate models? Or economic metrics that were broken out to measure unemployment trends and glows of goods, labor and capital? such data exist but they're rarely more fine-grained than the state level and they're horribly crude because people feel an economic incentive to hoard that data for profit.

<ost of the so-called skeptics don't know any economics beyond basic things like how to find equilibrium pricing between supply and demand curves and some outdated macroeconomic myths, but they know that the majority of people don't get economics and can be easily scared with threats of recession. That's how we wound up with a President that claims climate change is a myth created by the Chinese to steal their jobs and a dominant party that's champing at the bit to sweep away any and all environmental regulation so they can make a quick buck.

Yep, also noticed most of the people screaming about those people are also adamantly against the one proven technology ready to tackle this problem. They'd rather watch our planet die.

I assume you're referring to nuclear power, which a) has its own environmental problems and b) is really expensive, to the point of not being cost-competitive.

In general, it seems the people who are complaining about government subsidies for renewable energy development have no problems with massive government subsidies to the nuclear power industry.

I'm not anti-nuclear, per se, but given the huge potential downsides and massive lead times of current nuclear projects I don't think it's at all "ready to tackle this problem". But we should absolutely fund research into technologies like MSR, thorium, etc. We do need something to replace base loads, and I don't think biomass is going to cut it.

Interestingly, energy from American nuclear reactors increased in price by somewhere between a factor of six[0] and a factor of ten[1], possibly as a result of Three Mile Island. French nuclear seems to be cheaper than wind and solar.

[0] http://www.vox.com/2016/2/29/11132930/nuclear-power-costs-us...

[1] http://web.archive.org/web/20170213025941/https://www.resear...

Perhaps the cheap nuclear power era in France will soon end.

"France’s Nuclear Storm: Many Power Plants Down Due to Quality Concerns"

by Lee Buchsbaum - Power Magazine - (12/01/2016)

http://www.powermag.com/frances-nuclear-storm-many-power-pla...

France went from 10% to 80% nuclear in 20 years and without increasing costs relative to the rest of the EU. Show me another generation technology capable of the same.

CFCs were a smaller problem, with cost effective alternatives available. So its more feasible to avoid The tragedy of the commons. In the case of CO2 and methane, its harder to move to more costly approaches given that you know that your competitor is not doing so (and possibly does not feel they can do so) and so would have a cost advantage over you, possibly putting at risk your actual economic viability.

There is often a reluctance to support more costly non-CO2 producing approaches to energy production given that those approaches have been around longest and are often cheapest.

Some renewable energy technologies are gaining market acceptance and are cost-competitive with hydrocarbons, but unless Tesla and its peers take off in a big way, hydrocarbons unfortunately aren't going away.

Don't underestimate how hard it is to fight against an adversary with money.

"Green" parties and organizations are infiltrated by double-game lobbyists and influencers from all fronts trying to save their own industry's interests.

What's the easiest way to defeat an adversary? Play it against itself. The same way governments will want to make rebellious opposition groups into violent terrorists, it makes all the sense in the world to make ecologists into irrational, counter-productive idealists.

What kind of powerful (=wealthy) organization benefits short to mid-term from reducing pollution? I fail to see any. The issue of ecology is IMO the hardest fight humanity has had to fight.

It wasn't a piece of cake at all, and tons of people still complain about not being able to get Freon (or get it illegally)

Does anyone else automatically down vote any account with throwaway in the name?

I don't know if you're saying that you do or not, but as far as anecdote goes: yes, lots of people do. I don't really care, and my points get to stand on their own merit.

Why would anyone do that?

I don't, but the primary reasons to use a throwaway account are if you want to discuss something deeply personal without giving yourself away, or hide your identity so you can BS or insult people. It's easy enough to be anonymous on HN and still have a persistent identity; if someone resorts to burner accounts others are going to assume it's for trolling.

I've had this account for more than 3 years as you can see. I can't help if people incorrectly assume it's a burner because of the name. I considered it throwaway at first, but I don't care to bother to change it at this point. And like I said, it lets my points stand on their own merit, which I consider a positive.

I have to admit I don't bother to pay much attention to the exact handles on throwaway accounts.

> Why was it a piece of cake to regulate CFC:s but no one has the vision to strive to control CO2 and methane.

Because for ordinary people, the CFC story is a wonderful one. Multi-national co-operation has halted and begun to roll back a serious environmental degredation.

For a small number of people who are slightly less rich thatn they might otherwise have been, though, it was a catastrophe, something that must never be allowed to happen again; much like the public health victories areound tobacco and lead, it energised a small slice of the world to make sure that future efforts (in the current case, the damagfe of greenhouse gases) are never again repeated. No matter what the cost.

I'm not sure that this is the whole story - rather, the risk of CFCs was so obvious that nobody could convincingly argue against it. To this day, going outside in Tasmania burns you noticeably faster than anywhere else in the world.

Global warming, on the other hand, is a slow death by a thousand cuts. Extreme weather events grow more frequent, fishing becomes less productive, desertification takes more land, the sea rises a little higher, and so on - and the endgame is more complicated and less understandable, too. It's easier to ignore.

Nuclear waste is something which needs to be dealt with over the course of multiple human lifetimes. I don't think creating something like that is responsible.

And the radioactivity of mining coal (coal mines produce more than nuclear plants), ruined water, and ruined air are somehow better? Not like the CO2 magically decays or something. Future generations will have to deal with less clean air, less clean water, more CO2, higher ocean levels, etc.

From my reading of it, nuclear waste is a thorny political issue, not a technical issue. There's pleny of reasonable solution.

One of my favorites was mixing it into molten glass, pouring that into a steel torpedo shaped tube, and dropping them in the ocean near a subduction zone where there's a few inches of silt per year.

By the time they hit they have enough speed to sink in 10s of eet, won't rupture any time soon, but when they do they will be buried even deeper by silt. Of course eventually they will enter the subduction zone.

Primarily due lack of a sufficiently cheap and convenient high energy density storage... though we are getting closer now with all the modern research on batteries thanks to the economic incentive to power ever thinner and power hungry smartphones.

On the energy generation side, it's taken pretty advanced tech to get efficiencies upto acceptable levels in Solar and Wind.

Nuclear unfortunately has proven to have drastic fast acting negative externalities on failure (mass evacuation, increase in cancer rates) and tbe Industry has consistently shown lack of competence in preventing failure. So it's no surprise people have soured on it.

Given the trajectory of tech development, I'm fairly confident we'll get there - hopefully before we screw up our climate too much.

In fighting to ban CFCs, advocates could point to immediate impacts. Solar UV intensity in southern South America was occasionally hitting hazardous levels. And who wants skin cancer?

With CO2 emissions, serious impacts are all long-term, across multiple generations. On short time scales, it's nontrivial to detect effects, and methodology and measurements are readily disputed.

The truly insidious aspect, though, is how thoroughly committed to massive and persistent change the climate system becomes, before any serious impacts are apparent.

There is far more money involved, and unlike CFCs there are no easy plug and play substitutes.

Nuclear power is not a panacea. It looks good on paper but in practice there are tons of hidden costs and failures can be catastrophic. It also pretty much demands hefty regulation, which further adds to the cost in both monetary and social ways.

Finally there is a whole geopolitical order built around fossil fuels. Changing our energy system would fundamentally alter the power balance of the world.

Solar, wind, hydro, geothermal, and nuclear add up to well more than current usage. Nuclear could be phased out as storage or distributed grid matured. With modifications to standards of living expectations we could live renewably as a species and save oil and gas for plastics and other materials that require hydrocarbon feedstock. The trouble is that this would result in a much lower consumption world. And lots of people in the are rich as a result unneccessary consumption.

"modifications to standard of living expectations" are purely untenable and ultimately destructive to everything that defines human society. If you really want to get people to oppose you, try to guilt trip them, tell them they have to be too cold all winter and too hot all summer, tell them they can never travel again, cram them into tiny apartments where they can hear every bodily function their neighbor performs.

The solution to resource depletion and pollution is to give people what they want in a way that's actually sustainable. Build thicker walls and floors to block sound and conserve energy. Design more efficient lighting and appliances. Develop renewable energy. Etc.

Everything non-essential to human survival is everything that makes us human.

I would make one quibble. The hard constraint is the sustainable part, the planet doesn't care about our intangible needs. I'm not saying that everyone should live in massive planned urban districts, but on average we have to use less than X energy across Y people, and we are very far away from averaging X/Y per capita.

Right, there is an equation of some kind that dictates the energy balance we can sustain. I'm suggesting that there are more terms to that equation that we can adjust, and that the term of "what people want" is the most difficult. We can find ways to increase the planet's energy budget, we can find ways to increase efficiency, we can even find ways to make people desire more efficient behaviors.

My main concern, and maybe I misread your first comment, is that forcing or guilt-tripping or shaming people into less fulfilling lifestyles is not going to be very productive, IMO.

"Right, there is an equation of some kind that dictates the energy balance we can sustain"

CO2 produced/energy * energy/person * people on Earth

I know it feels like I'm oversimplifying it, but of course this equation just reduces to the total amount of CO2 produced by humans. There is a ceiling to the rate we can produce it that is compatible with life as we know it on this planet, and we are over that ceiling.

We can tune each of those. CO2/energy - solar, wind, and short term bridge of nuclear; energy/person - more remote work, car sharing, more insulation; # of people - vaccines, birth control access, and other programs to slow population growth.

You have to understand, I believe there is a very harsh reality that we have limited time to solve this problem before we are facing an irrecoverable disaster. Best regards.

Oh come, that's the same sort of argument people were trotting out 25 years ago. Could we at least address the significant changes that have taken place in energy production and so on over that period? The power balance of the world is in flux right now, please stop trying to handwave the problem away, it's insulting to everyone who has invested time in understanding the upsides and downsides of alternative energy sources, the costs and benefits of their deployment, and so on.

Because it's harder to feel urgency when the heat is slooowly turned up on you? Until it's too late.

CO2 is a natural element that is everywhere. To stop producing it requires never driving anything but an electric car, never flying a plane, and using energy from only "green" sources. That is just not a transition the world can make over night. Doing so would decimate economies, and people would probably end up starving. Currently gasoline is by far the most efficient way to store energy on a small scale. but if people couldn't drive tractors where would the food come from? If people couldn't drive trucks how would food be transported?

I'm time people will solve these problems. However it's best not to worry because co2 is a natural element that the environment naturally soaks up. I don't think CFCs are naturally absorbed either

True, what you can do is plant trees and stop cutting trees. Plant trees that suck more CO2.

Amazon rainforest is being cut enormously. About 90% of cut Amazon is solely for beef production and soy exports for USA beef production.

Of course, the enormous convenient life of average USA citizen might need more government control (24/7 AC, cars everywhere, heavy reliance on animal agriculture etc.) and that stuff costs but it is long-term investment. Of course, no one sees 100 years as long-term, 100 years is invisible. Huge amount of forest also cut for palm oil. The new plant oil that ends up everywhere (sunflower oil turned out more expensive in this millenia).

I've heard from many parents that they don't care if their lifestyle habits promote the business-as-usual culture.

Wasn't Amazon forest deemed net producer of CO2 some time ago?

If we get a direction of such a large processes wrong, how the hell are we so sure that CO2 level is even a source of problem instead of being a result?

It still produces less CO2. This will of course not be a fact if fire rate increases.

It's a feedback loop. The warmer it gets more CO2 gets produced, not just by humans but by nature. The melting of ice caps will produce about 100 years of human CO2 equivalent methane (CO2 yearly production of 2016, I believe).

Humans are the source of the problem. They can remove themselves from the equation but it requires a less convenient life for most.

Just use logical first principles. Wood is basically a bunch lignin and cellulose. Those are just a bunch of C, H, and O in different configurations. The more wood that exists somewhere, the more C, H, and O are sequestered in it. All forests are seasonally more trap or sink. Look at global seasonal CO2 concentration maps (if those haven't been taken down from the EPA website). Forests grow and make leaves during some seasons. They tend to have forest fires during others. Finally, many shed leaves and those rot and release CO2 during other seasons. On the net, though, they trap carbon dioxide, which plants specifically consume in addition to water to make glucose during photosynthesis.

Many, many, many comments on HN use logical first principles and turn out to be wrong.

And many have been right. The burden is on you to provide counter-evidence. If you have reason to believe he's wrong please post it, otherwise your comment is just spreading FUD.

Source for your stats on exports to the US from Brazil for Beef and Soy, and the corresponding deforestation of the Amazon. Far as I can tell Brazil exports less than a tenth of what Australia, Canada and New Zealand do to the US.

http://www.thecattlesite.com/news/50023/cme-how-much-brazili...

>Although the maximum limit of Brazilian beef exported to the US could be 64,508 mt, based on market competition it is very unrealistic to think Brazil would overtake the full quota. Longer term (in 2020) these TRQ’s are scheduled to change, and could give Brazil a higher volume ceiling.

>To put this in perspective, in 2015 the US imported 570,740 mt of beef from Australia, 299,955 mt tons from New Zealand, and 285,036 mt from Canada (to name our top 3 sources) for an annual total of 1.5 million mt.

I'd imagine Asia is the major importer of Brazilian Beef, I could be wrong, but don't think so

Soy. I wrote soy exports. Not "beef production exports".

Brazil (with Argentina) is main soy exporter for most of the worlds livestock.

In the documents below you can find clear numbers of how much hectares is used for pasture, corn, soybean etc. and how much stays forest.

The cause of that deforestation is clear, it is soybean + corn + beef = animal agriculture. Brazil has one of the highest rates of deforestation in the world.

http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/758171468768828889...

https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/bitstream/handle/10986/1...

Yep, except again none of these detail the exports of Soy or Beef to the US. You said USA importation was the cause but it appears that Soy beans too are being exported to Asia not the US.

China buys about 60 percent of soybeans traded globally.

In 2011, China accounted for 43% of Brazilian (top destination) and 25% of Argentinean soy exports

http://wwf.panda.org/what_we_do/footprint/agriculture/soy/fa...

Now would you care to back up your statement

>About 90% of cut Amazon is solely for beef production and soy exports for USA beef production.

Nothing you've supplied comes close to asserting this statement

Yes, I apologize, my statement refers to 90% of cut Amazon. Not that 90% of it is cut for USA.

As for the beef and soy exports it's not enough to check just the exports number. The most important number is beef consumption. Per capita the US has a pretty small consumption. But compared to EU or China, the US is leading, extremely in absolute amounts.

http://beef2live.com/story-world-beef-consumption-per-capita...

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