How Much Do You Know About Solving Global Warming? | Hacker News Reader

How Much Do You Know About Solving Global Warming?

nytimes.com

54 pointssmb0639 comments

This is feel-good non-sense, in that it ignores the elephants in the room. It's the equivalent of micro-optimization trivia on Stack Overflow, when most programs are bounded by Amdahl's Law.

People driving >20 miles a day for work/groceries/school, exponential economic growth, and exponential demand for consumer goods are what's driving climate change. Exponential population growth is, as well, but at least there's some end in sight for it.

Whether or not you compost, or throw away your food isn't going to change much - not to mention that most food waste is outside of my control.

For instance, I don't throw away 50% of the food I buy - it gets thrown away by farmers, transport companies, and the grocery store long before it gets to my table.

Well put.

Likely best thing anyone can do for the environment right now is to vote for politicians that want to balance the budget. Deficits are artificially increasing consumption at the expense of our children's environmental and financial future.

Furthermore, no one wants admit it but mass immigration is undeniably horrible for the environment. Not only does consumption of each immigrant increase by a factor of 20x by moving to a developed nation. It also drains 3rd world countries from the ambitious people it needs to develop into a stable and prosperous nation.

The best thing we could do for the environment is to mandate a 20-hour working week. Or, alternatively, a crippling carbon tax, with the proceeds spent on carbon sequestration.

Impossible to enforce.

Trivial. Mandate any time >20h/week to be overtime. Mandate overtime rates to be double. For salaried employees, the hourly rate is Annual/1000h. Construct a legal system wherein employees can easily sue employers for wage theft.

Most employers will voluntarily cut their hours.

Will this cause dramatic economic upheaval? Yes, absolutely. The uncomfortable truth is that we can't cut our carbon emissions without drastically changing our way of life. (And putting your wilted kale in the compost bin isn't it.)

He was almost assuredly talking about enforcing carbon tax. Enforcing working hours limits has already been accomplished in many countries.

Enforcing a carbon tax is trivial, since fossil fuel extraction is centralized. It does, however, require heavy tariffs against goods imported from countries that don't have carbon taxes.

A carbon tax would be very easy to implement in most countries since almost all carbon is extracted from the ground by just a handful of major corporations.

Consumption wont decrease unless your goal is to just make everyone poor.

Employers would simply double their work force and employees would have two jobs. Companies are always going to scale to meet market demands so if the goal is to benefit the environment this wont work. Deficits however are creating consumption despite a lack of market demand. That's why balancing the budget is so beneficial.

My goal is to reduce economic output. Of course that will make everyone poorer. Our climate can't support its entire population living at the level of wealth currently enjoyed by first world countries.

It can't even support the population of first world countries living at the level of wealth currently enjoyed by first world countries.

Electric sedans and solar panels are fine and all, but the vast majority of the crap we buy comes here on ship, and is hauled across the continent on gasoline trucks.

We can either make everyone poorer by taxing goods that require transportation (Which is nearly all of them), or by forcing everyone to do less work. There is no other solution.

Stopping deficit spending will slow down economic growth by single percentage points. It will also make everyone poorer - but by a much smaller margin. It also won't be enough.

We are currently in a situation where we can't just be happy with stopping the rate of emission growth - if we want to avoid catastrophic warming, we have to drastically reduce carbon emissions. Not fifty years from now, not thirty years from now, but within the next decade. [1]

We can reduce our GDP, or the climate can reduce it for us.

[1] http://www.wri.org/sites/default/files/WRI13-IPCCinfographic...

This is far to authoritarian for my taste.

You could double up fuel taxes. That would make commutes shorter.

It won't, though. You still need to get to work, and there's still going to be a shortage of housing near workplaces.

The number of office workers that can, and will opt to work remotely, because they will spend an extra ~$3/day on commuting will be a drop in the bucket.

Not a big fan of "mandate a 20-hour working week", but a carbon tax should be leveraged such that the tax can fund work to offset each unit of CO2 created, which compared to today's taxes, would indeed be crippling.

There are many ways we can benefit the environment without taxing and creating industry the free market can't support such as not borrowing our children's money in order to consume more. Why not do those things first?

How is it a problem to better understand which solutions are more effective than specific others? None are perfect, true. But the first line says there's no magic bullet.

The point of this article, and I guess the book, is not to directly change specific behaviours, rather to educate about system thinking. Certainly, I had never heard of the Kigali accord and went away (presumably) better informed about the impact of refrigerants on greenhouse gases.

The perfect need not get in the way of the good.

>This is feel-good non-sense

Says the person who didn't get 100% correct answers.

This is a negative outlook to me and misses the point of taking actions that are 'responsible'. I mean that, composting itself might not save the world but the action people take and the culture it creates of consciousness and responsibility will.

Which would have the bigger impact: encouraging more car-pooling, or the reduced car emissions from electric vehicles?

Although the book only looks at ride-sharing in the United States and Canada, it presumes pretty modest gains, so the benefits of car-pooling don’t even come close to the emissions savings from electric cars.

With the benefit of hindsight the question is more clearly phrased as:

"Which would have the bigger impact: simply asking people to do more car-pooling, or actually making the switch to electric vehicles from ICE vehicles?"

The question sneakily turns out to be about what's (assumed) easier to get people to do, not which action, undertaken on equal scale, has greater benefits. (But then why are wind farms preferred over solar on a later question, considering how much more frequently NIMBY opposition arises toward wind farms?)

Maybe it's just me, but I think this test avoids some questions I expected there, and does so in a very contrived manner.

"Switch to Electric" is favorably compared to "Hitch a Ride", and then "Hop on the Bus" is unfavorably compared to "Ships ahoy".

The overall impression I take is something like: "just wait and see, some guys are working on hard engineering problems wrt ships and planes, you save for your Tesla while eating plants and you'll be doing your part".

no doubt. if you politically object to anything on that list, you merely need to compare it to something higher up and force people into a binary choice. "Which would be better"?

Relatively speaking, I think far more attention has been given to reducing emissions from passenger cars than from shipping, even though it's a much smaller source of CO2. So it's an interesting comparison.

I think you're mistaken that passenger cars are the smaller part. I'm struggling to find a clear source but pg 45 of this [1] shows passenger cars as 50% of total transportation energy (including road freight and shipping, I think) and page 35 projects passenger cars as 43%, compared to 8% for shipping, of CO2 emissions in 2050. You might be mixing up CO2 emissions with Sulfur emissions [2]

[1] https://www.iea.org/publications/freepublications/publicatio... [2] https://www.quora.com/Is-it-true-that-the-15-biggest-ships-i...

Is it much smaller? I'm having trouble finding good numbers, but what I can find seems to put cars and ships at a similar level.

Great practice if you're making day-to-day decisions for hundreds of thousands of households!

I didn't realize onshore wind was going to be bigger than solar. I wish they had some references.

Solar farms are an anti-pattern. Solar will be much larger than wind because it makes the grid obsolete, doesn't require employees maintain, and has no moving parts. Solar (both active and passive) is king IMHO.

Not sure what you mean by active / passive solar.

There are some economies of scale, even for photovoltaics, so calling PV solar farms an anti-pattern is extreme. Then there's concentrated solar thermal, which has extremely strong scale merit and therefore requires farm-scale to be cost-effective.

And yet you only get peak power from solar when the sun is normal to the panel. We need power at other times too.

This page, linked at the bottom of the article, has a table each line of which links to a page with references: http://www.drawdown.org/solutions-summary-by-rank

The sheer number of changes required, and their impact relative to the problem suggests to me the inevitability of serious consequences. I think I may be more interested in investing in technologies that help people cope with the coming changes. Seems more practical than investing in technologies that invite people to spend more of their money to avoid a tragedy of the commons.

A lot of these feel like trick questions. Which offers more bang for the buck: improving airplane efficiency, or building a global network of high-speed rail?

It matters a lot how much we are improving efficiency, and how complete the "global network of high speed rail" is.

A teleport will fix this...

Depends on the energy required to run it.

Long before you use it for people, teleportation would unlock other capabilities and efficiencies. For example, consider what would happen for nuclear power replacing fossil fuels if we could safely teleport nuclear waste to a sealed cavern on the moon.

It's a relatively small payload (compared to transporting humans and goods) and you don't really care if an imperfect teleporting process only allows you to squeeze it through as a stream of molecular toothpaste.

This list ducks the most important question: "Is it possible to reduce greenhouse gas emissions without everyone on Earth mastering every technical detail of modern industry?"

The answer is, of course, yes.

I'm guessing that these are contentious to some degree, or at least need context. I think this format would work better if it made the case for the right answer, or against your answer.

It's an advertisement for a book, here's the list of scenarios they've evaluated with some more information on each of them:

http://www.drawdown.org/solutions

This list assumes, of course, that we don't want to change our lifestyle. I don't see innovation and optimization alone keeping us below 2C.

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