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Comment by gunnr15 | Hacker News Reader

‪What industry is contributing to climate change the most? Where is a good place to find data on this?‬

I host over 30TB of excellent climate date here: https://mirrors.sorengard.com/azimuth.

These datasets were collected from various government agencies as part of a larger collaboration with John Baez and a couple of other scientists from the Azimuth Climate Data Project: http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/azimuth_backup_project/

My server has a 1Gbps connection and can support sustained downloads of very large files. Unfortunately, the data isn’t well documented, but I’m working on improving that in the future. It’s organized roughly according to the agency it’s sourced from on a directory basis.

The archive includes datasets from NASA, NOAA, EPA, USGS, NCDC, CDC, EIA, FDA, USDA, DOE, and various subdepartments thereof.

Self hosting is important, but it seems like the wide disimmenation of this data would be helped by also making it available in torrent form as well.

Wouldn't his be an excellent use case for IPFS as well?

let me know if this gets torrented i could seed it ad infinitum

https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/global-greenhouse-gas-emiss...:

* Electricity and Heat Production (25% of 2010 global greenhouse gas emissions)

* Agriculture, Forestry, and Other Land Use (24% of 2010 global greenhouse gas emissions)

* Industry (21% of 2010 global greenhouse gas emissions)

* Transportation (14% of 2010 global greenhouse gas emissions)

(Top 4 only, accounting for 74% of emissions)

The way the pie is shared is a huge problem. It means that we're collectively responsible, thus everybody will ask the others to do something, we'll need consensus.

It'd be easier if there were only one source of problems because all the others would look at him. Here we'd just need "finger pointing".

84%?

I can't answer on where to best find this data, but it is compounded by many industries. Particularly, manufacturing and the transportation of raw materials that are transformed into products by other manufacturers and then distributed to distribution centers, and then again distributed to local regions and retailers. This, for every last little thing. If you want to talk just plastic bottles, we consume 1 million bottles a minute. In the summer, when working outside or when I used to work in smoldering hot factories, I would drink about 4 large sports drinks a day during an 8-12 hour shift (there were 2500+ employees and never shutdown). Now add just vehicle emissions. Everyone driving to and from work, or to buy all the things. You drive and purchase a banana. That banana probably traveled 2k-3k miles in fossil fuel powered transportation. It's a compounding problem, of all the things. https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.forbes.com/sites/trevornace...

Don't forget all the factory farming and raising cattle to feed billions of people - methane emissions from cows are very significant.

I had such an holy fuck moment and turned part-time vegetarian when I learned livestock are fed the very same vegetable protein I could eat.

Couple this with the (probably false) rule of thumb that 90% of the energy is lost at each step in the food chain. The beef I eat could literally feed ten people if they ate the vegetable proteins instead[1], with nearly no loss of quality of life for me. It's very hard to rationalise eating large amounts of beef at that point.

That said, I still do enjoy it at times, but as the expensive luxury it is, not an everyday staple.

[1] If not directly, then in the long run by reduced emissions etc.

All the ones that make your life comfortable and convenient.

The fact that this comment is greyed out is quite telling.

well, all that makes our present life "being what it is". It doesn't mean that you can't have another way of living, that is quantitatively as comfortable and convenient.

This is a relatively well-researched list: http://www.drawdown.org/solutions-summary-by-rank

That's a list of the potential reduction in emissions various solutions offer. You'd need to add together all the solutions relating to electricity generation (for example) to determine the impact of electricity generation as a whole. (And that's assuming that the listed solutions combined will address the whole of the problem, which I doubt.)

I don't really agree with the proposed list. It is listed based on the reduction certain solutions could potentially offer, but the limits of the reductions they offer are not correct. So for example, the impact of cement is way higher but their proposed solution isn't carbon negative or carbon neutral concrete but just a reduction in the carbon footprint. So if they were optimistic about the outcome, the order in the list would greatly changed.

They limit themselves to only those solutions which have been vetted by the scientific process, and that could be readily implemented with currently available technology. In a way you're right that that's not an optimistic take, but in another way there's a lot of optimism there: they show that adding up the impacts of only that limited set of solutions could already achieve drawdown!

See https://www.carbontracker.org/ and their 2014 report for some good information. The target audience is the financial sector, but its still readable if you are careful about the infographics.

https://www.carbontracker.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/Unb...

how does that align with the CRBN ETF?

But that report is only looking at fossil fuel reserves, rather than industries that consume those fossil fuels, thereby releasing greenhouse gases and causing climate change.

Further, there are other sources of greenhouse gases not related to fossil fuels, principally agriculture/livestock.

I found this chart to help a lot:

http://www.wri.org/resources/charts-graphs/world-greenhouse-...

Although the data is from 2005. Personally I was surprised by the impact of concrete (it says 5% but some estimates are 9%).

What percentage of the greenhouse effect do these industries contribute? Everyone focusses on CO2, but its greenhouse effect is minimal.

bitcoin

A good reason it should be banned.

Oh please bitcoin doesn’t even approach the carbon emissions of the US military. Nobody ever points that out.

It's certainly not helping to add another, growing source of heat/electricity to the mix.

Question was: what contributes to climate change the most, not what marginal growing source of heat / energy consumption is not helping.

Is bitcoin worse than facebook or google ?

Worse than both combined, multiplied by at least 6:

Facebook: ~2TWh(https://www.statista.com/statistics/580087/energy-use-of-fac...)

Google: ~6TWh (https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/www.google.com/en...)

Bitcoin: ~50TWh (https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption)

I can only imagine it is agriculture. No facts to back that up though. Raising crops and livestock is energy intense though

Capitalism?

Maybe the "industry" is called capitalism and where one part might spew massive carbon in whatever form to the world, another part provides fake data, fake arguments and fake theories to say "it's okay"/"it will work out"/"it's a conspiracy!!" and the other publicizes these till everyone forgets.

Interesting. So communist countries must be carbon neutral.

Your reasoning is akin to a logical fallacy, capitalism being what contributes the most to climate change does not mean that anything that is not capitalism is carbon neutral.

Then there are other option than capitalism/communism to consider. Look at the only carbon neutral (actually carbon positive) country on the planet: Bhutan. Neither communism nor capitalism are at play in this incredible achievement, but IINM it's Driglam namzha[1].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Driglam_namzha

It sounds like the problem is irresponsible people, not capitalism per se.

Well capitalism is about concentration of wealth in little group of individuals. This little groups holds much power and power corrupts, hence the irresponsible people in position of power is a consequence of capitalism.

Of cours this is not the only cause, but this one is significant. From what I gather the underlying issue is one of culture of self and selfishness.

So if the culture was non selfish, why would capitalism be a problem? The wealthy capitalists would use their power for good. Thus, capitalism is orthogonal to the issue.

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