Hacker News Reader

Comment by alistproducer2 | Hacker News Reader

Even if it turns out the 2% of scientist who doubt man made global warming are right, you would think that it would at least be worth trying to save the world. This failure is not on regular people, it's on the people who know better and are in positions of power yet failed to fight hard enough, make winning arguments and treat the fight with the urgency it deserved.

If people can be convinced to vote for taxes on themselves to build stadiums in cities that already have one, I don't believe for a second that it is a lost cause to convince people of a tax to literally help save the fucking world.

View on HN

> you would think that it would at least be worth trying to save the world

Not if "saving the world" means spending trillions of dollars on things that (a) might well not fix the problem, and (b) could be better spent on other things with a much more certain payoff. For example, bringing people out of poverty and building up our infrastructure so it is more robust against any kind of disruption. Especially if doing those things makes it a lot easier to adapt to whatever happens to the climate anyway.

Yeah, that "trillions of dollars" is a baseless assumption that's just pulled out of somebody's behind. There's this assumption that it's going to cost so much, when in reality, renewable energy and storage are shaping up to be cheaper than fossil fuels in the coming decades.

Pretty much the worst case spending on mitigation plans is 3% of GDP. Less than we spend on the military. And that's worst case. Over the long run, most mitigation analyses have us saving money.

I think that these baseless assumptions about the cost of mitigation are just as much a problem as the denial. A good amount of the denial comes from people that assume that they'll have to give up driving and eating meat. Another good amount of the denalism comes from dark money that influences political thought. That dark money is hard to eliminate, but we need to stop the speculation that fighting climate change means a significantly lower quality of life.

"renewable energy and storage are shaping up to be cheaper than fossil fuels in the coming decades."

If they actually become cheaper, there won't be any government action necessary to make people adopt them.

There's been a ton of government action to build the early industry, though, in the form of subsidies. It's something that we've seen in aerospace, the history of the semiconductor industry, and even in a ton of biotech. Government subsidies fund the early risky research, and often the military provides the early price-insensitive customers of new expensive technologies. With renewables, tax credits have been very influential in widening the market of early entrants.

Right, going forward, the need of government action is going to be considerably less necessary. But new technologies have a certain cost disadvantage, and government support helps to cross that gap quicker. Especially, when new power plants have to compete with 30 year old coal plants, which are cheap to operate but very dirty.

But the crossover point seems to be very near - here in Germany a big offshore wind project failed to qualify for government support, but the driving company decided to go ahead nevertheless, as they plant to be cost efficient enough without any support. So this is very good news.

The government still subsidizes fossil fuels. https://www.treasury.gov/open/Documents/USA%20FFSR%20progres...

> that "trillions of dollars" is a baseless assumption that's just pulled out of somebody's behind

No, it isn't. It's what is quoted by the people advocating mitigation.

> most mitigation analyses have us saving money

Because they claim that the savings from adopting all these clean energy technologies will more than outweigh the costs of switching to them. Which is based on...assumptions pulled out of somebody's behind. Or, if you prefer, economic models that have no track record of predictive success.

In other words, mitigation means we pay the costs, and then we find out whether all those models that said the savings would make up for it were right, or not. Yeah, sure, let's bet the entire world economy on that.

>No, it isn't. It's what is quoted by the people advocating mitigation.

Citation, please! I'll start with Wikipedia's page, of course:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_change_mitigation#Cost...

>Which is based on...assumptions pulled out of somebody's behind.

No, absolutely not. They are based on data. And projections.

However, if you're going to assert that it's impossible to know anything, than my estimates are just as good as yours, and I say it's going to save us $100 trillion/year! Tada!

Economic models are subject to manipulation, just as a business model is, but that doesn't mean that none of them have any credibility.

The credible answers, the ones where somebody has tried to make honest efforts, have mitigation costs as a tiny percentage of current GDP. In the US, that could be easily paid for by the amount of government waste in defense.

> if you're going to assert that it's impossible to know anything

I made no such assertion. I said that the economic models have no track record of successful predictions. We should not be making huge bets based on models that have no track record of successful predictions.

The difficulty is that it is also a huge bet to continue "business as usual". Not making significant changes is also a choice, and based on the best science (indeed, imperfect models) we have so far, it does not look good...

> it is also a huge bet to continue "business as usual"

Yes, but that's true for a lot of reasons that have nothing to do with climate change. I'm simply saying that if we're going to redirect a large amount of resources, we should redirect them to actions that will have a positive impact regardless of things in the future that we can't predict. As I said in my original post in this subthread, I think two important such actions are bringing people out of poverty (since the wealthier people are, the better able they are to adapt to change) and making our infrastructure more robust.

This! Also much of the military spend is oil related...

Trillions of dollars sounds much - unless you consider that just Apple alone is worth 3/4 of a trillion dollars.

And in reality, you need to consider the costs we are paying for energy already. How much is spent on coal and oil? How much do the various power plants cost? A large part of the western power infrastructure is at an age, were plants have to be replaced anyway soon. The additional cost for "clean" energy is surprisingly low, if not already negative.

> The additional cost for "clean" energy is surprisingly low

Only if it can supply reliable base load power. Which it can't, unless you include nuclear power in "clean energy". Which most clean energy advocates don't appear to be doing.

The trick is in the mix. 100% clean energy (wind, solar, hydro) might be somewhat of a challenge. But it is rather easy to raise its share of the total energy production to about 80%. The rest would be provided mostly by gas, and perhaps a very few coal plants, which would run only in absolute emergency times. This would reduce our carbon footprint considerably. And for this, the additional cost is very small, if not already money can be saved. When we are at 80% renewable, we can then discuss the technical and financial requirements for the rest.

"We have to get to 80%, then we can talk about cost"? Is this like the "we have to do it to find out if we can afford it" version of "we have to pass it to find out what's in it"?

No. Up to 80% the cost of renewables is, what you pay to set up the solar cells or wind generators. And these costs are known and quite competitive (if not cheaper already) to building a new coal plant, and definitely cheaper than building a nuclear plant. If there is enough controllable power generation in the other 20%, by todays technology that would be gas power plants mostly, this is about how far smart grids can deal with the varying nature of the renewables. Only going beyond 80% there are significant additional costs for storage. But as battery costs are significantly falling, it makes only sense to discuss the costs, when we really need them and then know the true numbers, as this is quite a few years in the future.

I think the idea of enormous batteries storing megawatts of power is potentially more dangerous than nuclear plants. At least reactors have control rods, but what do you do with a huge battery with an internal short? And compared to stores of coal, oil, or gas, at least they won't spontaneously combust like batteries have the potential to.

No, there is no comparison. Large battery storage are not a single large battery, but is split in small units. So, if there is a short, a few cells, at worst one rack of batteries burns down, the other batteries in the storage facility are physically separate.

Fukushima has shown us, how severely things can go wrong. The reactor was completely shut down, but that didn't help much. Even with the control rods deployed, these reactors had a thermal load of several megawatts, and when the cooling failed to keep up with this load, 2 of the reactor cores melted, and the landscape around was contaminated. Pure luck that it wasn't worse and most of the radioactivity went out to the ocean.

> Fukushima has shown us, how severely things can go wrong.

It should be emphasized, though, that this had nothing to do with the reactor; it was bad siting of the backup generators and switchgear for decay heat cooling. Other reactors in the same complex that did not suffer from this problem had no issues.

Also, newer reactor designs do not need a backup generator for decay heat cooling, so they are not vulnerable to this failure mode at all.

> it is rather easy to raise its share of the total energy production to about 80%

I know advocates claim this, but I am highly skeptical. The problem is capacity factor: yes, you might be able to build enough wind farms and solar panels (hydro is pretty much already built out--every site that is feasible for hydroelectric power in significant quantity already has a dam) so that their nominal capacity, if they were all running 24-7 at their rated output, exceeds 80% of total world energy usage. But they won't ever be running 24-7 at their rated output; not even close. Typical capacity factors, AFAIK, are less than 30% for these sources. Whereas nuclear plants (and fossil fuel plants, but we're assuming those are out of bounds since we're talking about clean energy) can run close to 24-7 at their rated output; typical capacity factors exceed 95%.

It is also quite possible and affordable to produce 80% taking the 30% capacity factor into account. Germany is already at 30% of all electricity being produced by renewables. The capacity factor only tells you how many you need to build.

That a nuclear power plant runs 24/7 causes also a lot of problems, because energy consumption heavily changes over the course of a day, especially at night there is little demand, and you cannot throttle a nuclear power plant quickly enough. That is why Belgium built illumination systems for all their highways, just to get rid of surplus nuclear power at night.

I doubt the 95% capacity factor for nuclear plants - perhaps for freshly built stations. Nuclear appears to be very reliable, but there are actually quite a lot of issues. One is, that for technical reasons, a nuclear power plant might have to be shut down entirely with no forewarning. This happens quite regular and has to be compensated for by the grid. Currently 50% of the German power plants are down for maintenance, and about 25% of the French, which caused electricity shortages in France last winter. And nuclear plants even are sensitive to the weather, because in hot summers or dry winters there might not be enough cooling water in the rivers that support their cooling needs.

Even ignoring climate change, our use of fossil fuels is extremely harmful to people. It's also extremely helpful, but we can do better. Fossil fuels only look cheap because we hide so many of the costs. When you look up the cost per kWh of electricity generated from coal, that number doesn't include the death and diseases it causes, nor the economic impact from contaminating ecosystems. Price that stuff in and the alternatives look a lot better. Add in climate change and it's better still.

This is the sophisticated version of the 'do nothing' argument. It's not a good argument in any form. If the greenland ice mass melts billions of people who live on the edge of the sea are at risk. If rising ocean temperatures continue to degrade coral reefs, a big part of the world's food supply is at risk. how does bringing people out of poverty offset that?

> how does bringing people out of poverty offset that?

By giving them the ability to adapt. Most of The Netherlands is below sea level, and has been for centuries. They responded by adapting: building dikes and levees and other systems for water management. They could do this because they had enough wealth to do so. The more wealth we create, the more the world as a whole has the ability to adapt.

If we knew for certain that putting all that wealth into CO2 mitigation instead of bringing people out of poverty would keep things static indefinitely, it might perhaps be worth considering mitigation (though you will note that nobody who advocates mitigation asks all the poor people what they would prefer). But we don't know that, not even close. We have to assume that things will change no matter what we do. Given that, our only realistic option is adaptation.

In a vacuum, with no costs associated maybe. But we're talking about vast amounts of money being taken from people and redistributed, huge egos vying for political power, and a host of other reasons that make it more complicated than if 2% are wrong or not. Even those 2% may not be doubting "man made global warming" but other aspects about it that make them want to act like...scientists, and question theories and findings and not jump into the global warming pool head-first like so many.

Incidentally, and this is food for thought not an opinion of any sort, I'm almost 50 years old, and I've now been a part of 3 global climate scares. One cooling; one warming; now both after previously warming, but none of the predictions have come to pass, except the world has become infinitely friendlier to it than we were when I was a kid, which were the days of the crying indian commercial, 10 MPG behemoth cars, and a shiny new EPA.

3 global climate scares - none of which have come to pass. Please, fact-less nonsense. Global warming is coming to pass. That is a fact. The arctic is warming significantly. A fact. Not a scare story. The consequences are scary and uncertain. Have you ever heard of positive feedback effects? They can happen, we don't know. The release of methane in the arctic leading to runaway global warming - can we be sure it won't happen? References: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clathrate_gun_hypothesis https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2016/climate-trends-con...

On the one hand, as scientists we are ethically bound to the scientific method, in effect promising to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but — which means that we must include all the doubts, the caveats, the ifs, ands, and buts. On the other hand, we are not just scientists but human beings as well. And like most people we’d like to see the world a better place, which in this context translates into our working to reduce the risk of potentially disastrous climatic change. To do that we need to get some broad based support, to capture the public’s imagination. That, of course, entails getting loads of media coverage. So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have. This ‘double ethical bind’ we frequently find ourselves in cannot be solved by any formula. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest. I hope that means being both.

--Stephen Schneider in APS News, Aug/Sep 1996, p. 5, http://www.aps.org/publications/apsnews/199608/upload/aug96....

That global cooling thing was a media scare, not science:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_cooling#/media/File%3...

The current climate change fear is, at worst, both.

> trying to save the world

The world wont end, it will just change... happens all the time. Seriously 99.9% of all species that have walked the Earth are extinct. Humans are not exempt from that process, there is nothing to save here, the Earth will continue on just as it always has.

Nihilism is never a good look.

I dont think it's really nihilism I just dont believe humans will fix this issue (if they even can). But life will certainly go on, it just might not be us here on Earth.

you are, actually, too optimistic.

Even In the 1990s, people knew that environmental efforts were going to fail and people have already started trying techniques to terraform the planet.

https://books.google.co.in/books?id=nArq-K7ZiacC&pg=PA420&dq...

Take a look at he geoengineering options.

This is how it's going to go down.

1) environmental attempts will fail.

2) various records will be breached, eventually a perceptual point will be crossed, but it will be far, far too late to save the planet.

3) poltical imperatives will change, soon after public imperatives change.

4) since the risk/reward from stoping environmental damage is now a divide by 0 operation, "can-do" individuals/groups (the same firms who created this mess), will pitch geo-engineering/terraforming

5) Governments will propose multi billion dollar programs to do this, farming out contracts for "jobs!"

Bonus) hacker news 2.0 will debate on various economic models to support such work, and people will say they hate big government, so let's give limited resource rights to these firms as compensation instead of government largesse.

They'll brand it as jobs creation, man against nature, and use it to capture more power and funding.

I've been right betting on my reasoning for non standard events before, and I can't see any reason this won't happen. Within a few deviations of the original plan.

This is actually my pitch for YC S23, Earth 2.3 it's a SAAS based volunteer program to head up extra-terra farming with a weekly delivery option. Looking for a CTO/co-founder.

If you're lying - and if the audience knows you're lying, but supports you anyway, you can certainly say anything and just turn on a dime. From CO2 is life to CO2 is death. For this plan yo work, the owners would have to sell the oil refineries and rigs now when you can get a better price, and only then change the rhetoric. The buyer would have to bet on milking the CO2 is life for a decade yet.

Milking CO2 for a decade seems very possible.

I wouldnt be surpried if they managed longer!

And beyond that its a matter of obfuscation, and investment vehicles, PR and the good scrubbing of time on memmory.

I do want to prevent as much of that scrubbing as possible though/

"The planet is fine. The people are f*ed!"

https://youtu.be/7W33HRc1A6c?t=142

You need viable solutions and cost/benefit analysis for how much warming is too much warming.

There is little to no consensus on all of that. There isn't a consensus on how sensitive the climate is to carbon and to what feedback loops exist. Even the IPCC ranges are fairly broad.

Then we don't know how much the warming will affect the actual climate and what the effects will be. What does earth at +5 degrees C even look like?

What if in 20 years solar, wind and battery tech is so cheap that natural gas and coal plants shut down. Everyone goes to electric cars, and carbon output plummets?

Well, we know that even if humanity vanished overnight, carbon dioxide driven warming will continue, just because of the time taken to remove co2 from the atmosphere.

We have increasingly better ideas of how the world will look like...and if we have ranges then we have an idea of how sensitive climate is to carbon.

All of which directly point to the fact that the world will warm, and it's a question of how fast. The question of how long this will go on, is beyond science because it's a political question - warming will stop years after we stop adding to the heat cycle.

I'm also a bit confused as to how you say "we don't know what the earth at +5 looks like", because countries (other than America) are already deploying resources to manage migration and movement, we know other countries and islands will disappear with sea level rises. I know my country has been grappling with water scarcity issues, and people don't argue about global warming, the same way they don't argue about evolution.

Matter of fact the only major country I know which actively engages and exports denialism is America. India and China are fighting for economic stability, but no one doubts that this is a crisis that has to be solved.

I'm confuxsed by your question, as most of these are answered to some degree or the other on the net or on Reddit. You could just head to a r/science climate AMA and get your answers.

"This failure is not on regular people"

Regular people are the ones who voted for those in power who declared that Global Warming was a hoax. Regular people are the ones who voted for leaders who prized returning to coal instead of advancing renewable energies.

I guess you're not a fan of democracy, then?

I never said I wasn't. That doesn't resolve the people who voted for Trump of what they voted for.

The 97% claim is bullshit: https://www.google.com.tw/amp/s/www.forbes.com/sites/alexeps...

I do believe that there is man made climate change, however, but this meme has to end.

"The warming is a whopping 0.8 degrees over the past 150 years, a warming that has tapered off to essentially nothing in the last decade and a half."

This article is bullshit.

As thee declared so, it must be...

Would you like to address the quote? Warming has not stopped in the last decade and a half. Quite the opposite.

If a tax would save the world I'd be all for it. But it won't.

Can you provide a link / info for the stadium tax decision? Interesting behavioural news

I'm aware of my own city that has done this... hundreds of millions in tax payer money to move the nba team downtown instead of across the river

http://www.bizjournals.com/sacramento/news/2014/05/20/downto...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com