Losing Earth: The Decade We Almost Stopped Climate Change

US emissions of CO2 have fallen much faster than Europe's. Europe likes to talk a lot but not to compromise. So while they could be fracking and displacing dirty energy sources, they instead use oil and coal where the US uses natural gas.

Don’t give up on tech. It’s technology that offers the best hope of solving these problems.

Consider applying your skills to the renewable energy sector, companies working on transport electrification, and other “clean tech” sectors. These are exciting growth industries and you’ll be making a difference.

If you want the honest but depressing answer: it's probably too late. Don't have kids unless you want them to have a worse life than you've had.

On the plus side, the worst consequences from climate change will occur after we're dead.

Just enjoy the rest of your life and try not to think about it too much. After all, that's what everyone else has been doing.

evangelize in high birthrate countries things like contraception and encourage education especially of women. The fewer people destroying virgin forests and becoming western style consumers the lesser the better for environmental health.

An earth of 7.5 billion is more sustainable than an earth of 10 billion. 7.5 will live better lives than a world of 10, given sociopolitical realities.

Keep your job if you like it or need it.

What you can do:

- Do not panic. A good life is important for work for improvement.

- Yes to all of your suggestions. You are vegan ? Good for you and the rest of the world.

- Tell other people how important and urgent change is.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCGJq0eQZoFSwgcqgxIE9MHw/vid...

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJRjK20fHylJyf-HiBtqI2w/vid...

https://lustysociety.org/

I remember reading that blog post a few years ago :

https://jancovici.com/en/climate-change/acting-individually/...

It is relatively practical and takes into account the ratio cost or difficulty vs impact

It boils down to using less energy for transportation or consumption (food or otherwise)

"I read this and I am completely confused about what to do with the rest of the time I have left."

It is a grave life error to assign excessive likelihood to the doomsayers. I've been reading about inevitable doom for 25 years now. Some of what I read as a kid dated to the 60s and the guaranteed dates of inevitable doom had already passed by the time I read them in the early 90s.

Even assuming they are completely 100% right about the problems, which is frankly a big assumption, they rarely, if ever, even remotely account for the fact that people and the economy change in reaction to problems.

Also, consider the possibility that this feeling of hopelessness is something that perhaps somebody wants to instill in you. Why? Who benefits? Are their hands as clean as you suppose? Are you sure? I'm a big fan of "follow the money"; where most people fuck that up is that they only want to follow the money sometimes, when it suits them. Nope... always follow it. "Follow the money" is almost always used wrong; you don't need it to debunk the people you already don't trust, you need it to vet the people you do. Doomsaying has been exceedingly profitable over the past ~60 years. (It's been profitable even farther back than that, but mass market doomsaying really took off somewhere around then, which is where the real money is.) Do not forget to take that into account.

(Also, as my post implies, don't assume I'm speaking just to the particular doom de jour, about which you might still have emotional reactions. I'm talking about nuclear war, population bombs, a multitude of claims we're running out of some resource, trash management issues, a wide variety of eschatological claims, all sorts of things I've read in the last 30 years. You may say "But jerf, some of those are still problems and may be problems in the future" and I say, I agree. I often like to say "Stand up. Point in a random direction. You are pointing at a problem." There are always problems and always will be problems. But we're not talking about problems... we're talking about doom. The doom has not happened. I believe fully in environmental problems both in the present and the future. I do not anywhere near fully believe in inevitable doom.)

Political action.

Effective greenhouse gas taxation is a single thing that could solve the issue with the current system and be efficient.

* It would have to be significantly higher than today.

* It would tax exported emissions.

* It would be well designed to avoid loopholes. It would include CO2 produced by food production (especially meat) and CO2 emissions from concrete.

> Are there any suggestions, from a personal stand point i.e. excluding a completely new economic model and government structure?

You've gone wrong at the very start. This isn't a problem that can be solved on an individual level, and the sad truth is that we do, in fact, need a new economic model. The sooner we own up to that the sooner we can move on with building it.

Improvise, adapt, overcome. Death is a natural part of life. Civilizations die too. It all happened before, and if we are as inventive as I think it will happen again in the distant future.

So be inventive.

You can read through https://www.drawdown.org/solutions check what you can do yourself and talk to your peers and your political representatives to bring about collective action.

Leverage.

You don't throw your foe to the ground with brute force alone. You take him off-balance, and move in with good timing and technique.

If your goal is solving climate change, well, the leverage isn't really in the technical solution, but in the political economy. We need a redesign. That's problem one.

But if it's the power structure that needs changing, what affects it? Knowledge. Signalling. Valuation. And then you get into things that you can potentially change as a tech worker, by pushing for information systems that change our valuation metrics to match a philosophy of sustainability. And that positions actors who wish to take sustainable actions to have the leverage to realize it.

That, I think, is the trick to feeling OK about it. At the end of the day, it's a war fought in an abstract, everyday sense: Build up your sense of morality and build your career around those principles. You might not be the hero, but you won't be the villain.

I don't believe the CO2 levels we currently have (and are projected to have) in the atmosphere is a real threat. I don't believe the doomsday scenarios, apparently caused through cow farts and burning natural gas or from combustion engines. Energy must be expended to release CO2, and the energy is almost 0 in comparison to the energy needed to raise sea levels by say, 10 feet. We are talking millions of nuclear bombs worth of energy needed to accomplish that. There is something off with this. I don't believe the tiny amount of CO2 in our atmosphere will enable the sun to heat the planet to the doomsday levels. Predictions were made since the 80s, 90s, 00's that said our coastal cities should be literally destroyed by now... except that they aren't.

There are a lot of people who stand to profit from the climate change lobby: professors, alternate energy producers, politicians, government, media. They all want money invested in THEIR pet projects. And conveniently, it serves as a great distraction from issues on the horizon that WILL have a guaranteed negative affect on your children's quality of life, but I wont get into that, since what I'm writing is divisive enough as it is.

When it comes to the climate, you will be fine, we will be fine, our kids will be fine, the sky will not fall, the seas will not swallow up our cities (excluding regular weather), America will not become a desert (unless that super-volcano blows). It is sensationalism.

Read Donna Haraway, "Staying With the Trouble" for one take on how we can respond.

There still are solutions. They, however, require that the environmental movement accept large scale engineering efforts aimed at adjusting our environment. Which runs counter to their instincts.

See https://www.researchgate.net/publication/312505967_Olivine_W... for one approach. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_fertilization for another. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_engineering lists several more.

Move north and develop a taste for jellyfish.

Perhaps the memoirs of terminal cancer patients would be instructive. However, they benefit from frequentist statistics. We've only got Bayes for our experiment.

I go through cycles of being horribly depressed about the climate, and about mine and my family's future. In fact, I'm not even going to read this article because I know it'll set me off. I've learned that the only way to cope is to do everything I can personally (eat less meat, drive less, work from home, buy second hand , save energy, vote green, encourage my children and family and those around me to do the same) and then basically just get on with life and enjoy it as much as possible. If the worst happens, there's nothing we can do to prepare, not really. If some moonshot magical tech saves the day there's not much we can do to help or hinder that either. Focus on being the best person you can be, be a force for good, live life and appreciate what you have right now. Soak up fresh air and culture. If the world is consumed by fire in the next 50 years you'll be glad you did. And if it isn't, you'll still be glad.

As far as I can tell, we are reasonably certain that the effects of climate change will be very bad. It’s hard to say exactly what will happen, though.

The truly apocalyptic predictions are just not very likely. We are not going to be boiled alive or turn into Venus or whatever. It’s not going to get so hot that all plant matter catches on fire.

If you are in the United States, participate in Republican primaries in support of Republican politicians who acknowledge that climate change is a problem that we cannot ignore and need to start seriously acting on.

There are in fact Republican politicians who support effective measures to address climate change that are compatible with traditional Republican market-based, conservative principles, such as a revenue neutral carbon tax, but they are greatly outnumbered by the ones who think climate change is fake or is just natural cycles that will swing the other way on their own and that we cannot influence anyway.

I feel much the same.

I think the concerns about climate change are wildly overstated for the developed world. There are some more concerns when subsistence farming is the primary way of living, but humans (and humanity) adapt, and we adapt with great alacrity.

I agree with your assessment on the difficulty of the problem. Where I differ is my (somewhat optimistic, admittedly) view that an existential climate crisis is the kind of exogenous shock needed to force humanity to cooperate against a "common enemy" so to speak.

We've had models before with the CFC / Montreal Treaty, and on a national scale with WW2, and the Sputnik / Apollo missions.

There are very few problems humanity cannot solve by coordinated effort. The trick is to force that coordination, and I don't see that happening in the near future.

I do agree - climate change is a massive problem with thousands of facets, trillions of dollars at stake, and stakeholders including everyone from all global citizens, all global creatures/environments, and all businesses/governments. It's truly the biggest crisis we've ever faced as a species.

In my view, on rich vs poor nations, if China handled its emissions much earlier and more aggressively, we'd still have massive historical emissions and massive per capita emissions in North America and Europe. Rich people tend to decry those not using renewables and not transitioning quickly, however it's easier to transition/decarbonize with EVs and solar PV and energy efficiency when your economy is already developed. Long commutes, western diets, leisure travel, copious heating and air conditioning, and many other factors are not present in other countries which still have "dirty" economies with longer ways to go to both energize their entire populace AND to clean up said energy sources. So, westerners should look in the mirror before they criticize those people just getting electricity or their first car in the last decade.

The rays of hope I see for climate change come from the potential for energizing nations to skip over total fossil fuel dependence in their industrialization and modernization schemes. Furthermore, there are bright spots in electric buses (huge wave of these will come in next decade), in renewable deployments (~2/3 of capacity additions in recent years in USA), and in overall business movement towards low carbon solutions. While national and state policy-makers could move more quickly, surely, there is a lot of innovation occurring in the private and local levels.

Long term, even if we decarbonize very quickly due to technological innovations and S-curves, I foresee needing to use environmental engineering techniques to cool the planet. While risky, I think the level of economic and societal harm from the heating/expansions of the oceans and further ice melt will necessitate some sort of artificial cooling of the planet.

While some may deem this as unethical or playing God with our planet, IMO we've already irrevocably changed our planet's heat content. We need to not only pull our foots of the accelerator, reducing emissions of GH gases, but we also need to put our foots on the brake, somehow cooling the planet and/or sequestering previous emissions. If we don't take these latter steps, no amount of decarbonization will prevent catastrophes of hurricanes, fires, flooding, desertification, and sea-level-rise in the next countless generations.

I am trying to build exactly this. Check out http://kindandgreennews.com Its been live for about 2 months and I am looking to build up the community. Currently you have to notify me by email to give you a login, but I am planning to add the "sign up" feature within a month.

Animal welfare/rights is most important to me, but I realize that its all connected and can be brought about mostly by investing in clean tech, clean meat, and fighting climate change.

Bret Victor has an exploration of this question[0] (2015) that I have found helpful.

[0]: http://worrydream.com/ClimateChange/

I agree, would love to find HN for cleantech.

I went through this search recently - companies at the nexus of software and cleantech in the bay area, here was my shortlist so you can see what kinds of things these companies are working on: AutoGrid, Bidgely, Ohm Connect, Tesla, Utility API, Omnidian, Stem, Advanced Microgrid Solutions

If you're thinking of starting something yourself, energy seems to be an especially idiosyncratic industry that I think doesn't lend itself easily to outside in solutions, it really pays to work in it for a couple years to soak up the knowledge. You'll find tons of opportunities once you're on the inside.

A few of the better opportunities that come to mind from my point of view: 1. Software & analytics based EE and DR (Bidgely, Autogrid, Ohmconnect, First Fuel) 2. Grid analytics, especially around citing and incorporating renewables, controlling batteries to maximize value to the grid and owner (AMS, Stem, Tesla) 3. Customer acquisition for cleantech products - small scale (helping sell devices to homes) and large scale (helping developing projects)

All of these things have significant software and analytics bent and will be key parts of the solution

Optimize your programs for energy consumption.

Here a paper to start your research: "Energy Efficiency across Programming Languages How Does Energy, Time, and Memory Relate?" http://greenlab.di.uminho.pt/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/pape...

We have a solution - reduce carbon/methane emissions. Why bet the bank on a technology that hasn't been invented yet? If you said to somebody with 100 billion dollars: capture as much carbon as you can. What would they do? I would just plant trees for that money. Sure, we need basic research on carbon sequestration, but we need fundamental breakthroughs to make it happen. Time, we don't have.

While I don't really know much about the area, one option that I hear has possible potential is forests and then convert them to biochar. Downside is that you obviously need huge quantities of land that some would want to use for farming etc.

I'm not a physicist, but isn't the second law of thermodynamics puts a limit on what we can do with the excess energy, most of which are being absorbed by the oceans.

Besides most of the damage is already done.

  EPA: It’s as if you’re sitting in your car, in your garage, with the engine running and the door closed, and you’ve slipped into unconsciousness. And that’s it.

  McAvoy: What if someone comes and opens the door?

  EPA: You’re already dead.

  McAvoy: What if the person got there in time?

  EPA: Then you’d be saved.

  McAvoy: OK. So now what’s the CO2 equivalent of the getting there on time?

  EPA: Shutting off the car 20 years ago.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6CXRaTnKDXA

Physics/Chemistry: Solid carbon (e.g coal) is more energy-dense than CO2 (per molecular weight unit). This is why you can gain energy from burning coal. To go the other way round you need to add this energy back in to break the very stable double-bonds in the CO2 molecule. This energy is what makes it expensive and there is no way around (except finding a really cheap energy source, but then you probably wouldn't burn coal in the first place)

There is a cost-effective way: Planting trees, cutting them down and turning the wood to charcoal. You'd need huge areas dedicated to such forests. You'd also need to "unburn" most of the coal and oil we burned so far. That's a mind-boggling amount of matter we're talking about here.

But who would pay for that? If there were the political will we would long have passed a simple carbon tax that, after some adjustment period, would be tied to the price of unburning a ton of CO2.

The thing that prevents this from materialising is that it requires energy. For the most part, we get energy from.. converting solid carbon to CO2. Unfortunately, due to 2nd law of thermodynamics, this conversion always incurs a loss of energy in the form of heat.

We can also get energy from other sources, such as solar radiation, but I think you get the gist - the most cost-effective way to carbon capture is not to release the carbon in the first place.

There are tons of ways of doing it, but all of them necessarily cost more energy than you extracted from the fossil fuel. So, from an energy economics point of view, first we stop extracting the so-called "unburnable" fossil fuels - end conventional and shale oil exploration and phase out their extraction. Then, with our spare renewable energy, we can start condensing fuel out of the atmosphere; there are several processes for this, including one the US Navy is pioneering for at-sea refuelling of planes on nuclear carriers.

There is the Carbon Prize which is part of the way there [0]:

> A $20 Million global competition to develop breakthrough technologies that will convert CO₂ emissions from power plants and industrial facilities into valuable products like building materials, alternative fuels and other items that we use every day. Teams will be scored on how much CO₂ they convert and the net value of their products.

[0]: https://carbon.xprize.org/

Atmospheric concentrations are low so you need to harvest a lot of air. To put in context the earth has ~2E9 km^3 air, if you wanted to process every cubic meter of air in the world once in 10 years you'd have a system that could process ~6km^3/s , using air flowing at 30kph(18mph) would require ~800km^2 of collecting area.

One source of such an incentive could be a cap-and-trade emissions trading scheme with strict caps [0], in which air-capturers are granted emissions rights they can sell.

The EU's ETS [1] is currently the biggest carbon market, regulating about 40% of EU emissions.

It does not grant rights to capturers that take CO2 out of the atmosphere - only to those that reduce the emissions at some plant or factory. Apparently this choice is partly because it's not clear how to make sure that the carbon sink is stable - that the CO2 won't get out again. [2]

Lets assume you could get emissions rights for removing CO2. Would this provide the incentive we want?

The current price for emissions rights is 15€ per 1000 tons of CO2 [3], so an operation to sequester all of the EU's emissions (3.4 * 10^9 t, 2014, [4]) would get a revenue of at most 50 million euro / year. Probably much less since the market would get flooded.

Why is this price so low? The ETS' cap could be too low. Also, the ETS does not really cap emissions at all. Only certain industries, like power or aluminium manufacturing need to present certificates [1b], hence the 40%. Also, industries which would be 'at risk' to leave the EU if they were forced to pay, get free certificates [5] - arguably these would pay the most for rights.

Overall the EU does seem to be doing something right though, since the overall emissions are going down [4]. But the ETS does not seem to internalize the carbon externality.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emissions_trading

[1] https://ec.europa.eu/clima/policies/ets_en

[1b] https://ec.europa.eu/clima/sites/clima/files/factsheet_ets_e...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_Emission_Tradin...

[3] https://www.theice.com/products/197/EUA-Futures/data?marketI...

[4] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EN.ATM.CO2E.PC?location...

[5] https://ec.europa.eu/clima/policies/ets/allowances/leakage_e...

I did a back of the envelope calculation or maybe better a guesstimate on this awhile back. At perfect conversion efficiency you could turn emitted CO2 back to carbon using 15-20 average sized nuclear power plants. If you realistically get 10% overall efficiency then maybe you need 200 of them. All that assumes you can actually build chemical cells that don't need continuous replacement. It also just compensates for current emissions, and doesn't turn the clock back. My numbers could be very wrong in either direction.

My takeaway was just like losing weight. It's more effective to eat less than to exercise. Here, it's bound to be better to burn less.

This was an electrochemical approach however. It's possible some bio guy will figure it out using photosynthesis.

Yes it looks as someone sunk it real hard? Or maybe has it been flagged?

There is a vocal minority of people don't believe the overwhelming scientific consensus about global warming, and they downvote, flag, and argue in these posts aggressively. Consequently, the topic gets the reputation of being "divisive". It's playbook how to make an important topic taboo, and an extraordinary success for the people that don't believe the overwhelming scientific consensus about the impact of modern human activity on the climate (or believe it, but profit from the status quo).

I think nothing will be politically viable until people, and large amounts of them, are hurt by encroaching waters or inhospitable land.

Problem I see is not climate change really. Real problem is not that we have problems, but the fact that we create problems. Unless human society transform into a more reactive structure, we will generate new problems or stand short in reacting naturally generated ones.

And one of those problems will see the end of us if not climate change. It is much like playing Russian roulette in the risk of extinction. We just may avert the climate change but some next problem will be our bullet.

People want more than they already have.

For sure without the industrial revolution, synthetic fertilizers and the green revolution we could not achieve such population, but turning back is no longer an option.

A group of scientist and environmental lobbyists worked hard so that by the late 70's everyone knew about the problem of rising CO2 emissions and the impending doom of a changing global climate. The issue required action and limitations on the use and burning of natural resources. That messed with the status quo too much so the people with the power at the time said fuck it. The 'it' being young people, their kids, and their kid's kids.

wondering the same thing, people flagging it?

Wow sinking so fast. Slot 47 RN, on its way to page 3.

Wow. People in power really dont want us to discuss this topic.

I am on the watch and in last 5 minutes this submission got 6 new votes but have fallen 8 places!

Before we attempt to solve climate crisis, first we should solve BIGOTRY CRISIS.

I have seen this happening before too. Why does HN allows anonymous flagging? I bet anything if it were unanimous we would able to frame bigots who only flag because of their stupid personal world view.

Has there been any efforts to make flagging more transparent-perhaps where I can contribute or should we raise a new issue on that?

came here looking for an answer. I've never seen a NYT article sink so fast...

Slot 143 Points 112 Comments 111

My first chunk of free time goes into making an automated bigotry-watcher for HN.

This is the purest bullshit I have seen in a while. Had I checked HN half an hour late, I would have never caught this.

This subthread may very well be contributing to the submission sinking: one of the factors involved is the "overheated discussion detector", which, as I understand it, takes into account rate of comments.

From the FAQ:

> How are stories ranked?

> The basic algorithm divides points by a power of the time since a story was submitted. Comments in comment threads are ranked the same way.

> Other factors affecting rank include user flags, anti-abuse software, software which downweights overheated discussions, and moderator intervention.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html

In general, comment threads like the one you've started generate more heat than light (19/116 comments as of this writing). If you think something odd is going on, contact the mods via the Contact link in the footer, as they're the ones who can actually view what's happening and do something about it.

Otherwise, the best thing you can do is make insightful, substantive comments to the thread yourself.

Y'all are way out in the weeds here.

This story tripped the overheated discussion detector, which we've just turned off. There actually aren't many flags, and one of the main reasons why it isn't ranked higher is that most of the upvotes were dropped by the anti-abuse software.

When users start speculative meta subthreads like this, it foments a kind of disconnected conspiracy thinking that we can't seem to help ourselves from. You can email us and get the answer to exactly what's going on in a few minutes! But that's not what most choose—we'd rather wring our hands and imagine demons. If we could do this a bit less, Hacker News would be more intellectually interesting.

You may want to keep scrolling and check the whole (and it's huge) post.

Funny, I do opposite. I have reading mode set to white on black.

I was delighted they had white on black, and saddened that it disappeared quickly. Fortunately "light text on dark BG" is a helpful Firefox plugin for this.

It hurts my eyes

Seems appropriate for a piece on the end of the world.