Climate change and the 75% problem | Hacker News Reader

Climate change and the 75% problem

gatesnotes.com

140 pointsadenadel158 comments

In reality, does anyone see anything other than a bad ending to all of this? I wish I could start a poll here, but does anyone really think there's still time? Really?

Political-economic forces, they're just not going to cave until it's too late. 10 years? Unless the economy fumbles soon Trump will have the next six of those. So, four left. Four damn years to change everything. I think a lot of the focus goes on reducing energy emissions because it's easy political blame gaming. But it's too late and it's not going to work. We're going to destroy the Earth while bickering about it.

Assume consumption will continue to rise, assume that oil will continue to own politicians. People will continue to consume, expect to maintain their standard of living off cheap goods shipped from China, heating for ever-larger homes, buying from companies with huge carbon footprints, and blaming others.

I think the reasonable thing to do is invest more in the cleanup scenario. But that doesn't score political gotcha points and it's not profitable /right now/, so that probably won't happen either.

For all the reasons you give, bad things are going to happen. We don't have time to stop that, but if we start now, we can mitigate the severity of those bad things that do happen and prevent others. The cleanup scenario isn't an option in any respect if the earth is really screwed.

We can give up, or we can take action. The choice is ours. I still think popular pressure can make a difference, it's how every progressive action yet has come about.

Many countries are already onboard, China is realising very quickly how important the environment is. The US public is on the side of reducing emissions, I think the only thing left is to convince US elites and we can get there.

Agreed. I wouldn't be so skeptical about the effects[0] if it wasn't because those researchers weren't being paid by big government, while recommending new taxes[1].

[0] it seems unlikely that humans have no influence on the environment. It equally seems improbable that we can predict sea levels half a century from now with any accuracy.

[1] before anybody puts words in my mouth, I reserve the same skepticsm for any other report coming out of the mouth of an institution which advocates it should have more funding...

[0] sounds like you're saying "my gut says its improbable that we can detect sea level rise 50 years ahead". Why does it seem that way? These scientists are using evidence for these estimates so they are not pulled out of the air.

[1] Are you going to remain skeptical without looking into it, seems more like you're dismissive rather than skeptical but maybe I am reading this wrong.? How could any researcher ever make the claim that something is a big issue and needs to be investigated further and fixed without triggering this skeptical reflex?

They're repeating the quasi-conspiracy theory that the reason climate scientists raise the issue of climate change is greed - they want more research money, so they can make more fake research, so they can get more money, because science is such a lucrative profession... sigh.

There's nothing more prestigious in science than being the one who proves the conventional wisdom of the scientific community is wrong. That's how you get your name in the history books. But this is lost on those who think of everything in terms of money.

"They" never look at the reverse situation though. The money to be made from government grants into scientific research pales in comparison to the profits made by the fossil fuel industry. An industry that a lot of the worlds most powerful people, corporations, and countries are heavily invested in.

Re: "it seems unlikely that humans have no influence on the environment. It equally seems improbable that we can predict sea levels half a century from now with any accuracy"

Shouldn't there be evidence about how past climate predictions fared? Climate change has been a hot topic (pun somewhat intended) for decades. Since Carter's presidency at least. There should have been at least a few environmental predictions that we can verify in retrospect.

It's not going to be pretty, for sure, but we can still make a difference. Not emitting greenhouse gasses, as hard as it is, is still far cheaper than cleaning the mess afterwards.

It's hard to see how things can change right now, but if we can get the majority on board, I think we can see radical change happening quite quickly. The key point is that people must realize radical changes are required, now. Buying organic and recycling a few things isn't going to cut it.

Global warming isn't a black and white issue. Generally speaking each fraction of a degree the planet warms is worse than the last and even if we don't have much chance of actually containing warming at 2 degrees, let along 1.5, not letting warming go from 3.0 to 3.5 is still incredibly important.

We will certainly need to invest in cleanup. But how much we'll have to invest can be multiple orders of magnitude larger or smaller depending on the investments we make now.

Maintaining anything like our lifestyle in a low-carbon world requires widespread electrical energy storage. (Nuclear plants cannot load-balance by starting and stopping. Fusion is unlikely to overcome this limitation in the foreseeable future.) Such technologies are in their infancy.

Political and economic reform may not be happening at the pace it needs to, but developing energy storage technology will go a long way towards being able to implement the reforms when people are willing to accept them.

The same argument applies to lab-grown meat and some kinds of carbon capture for industrial processes that necessarily release CO2, particularly cement and steel production. Ensuring that we have the technology makes it easier to use it when people are willing to.

> I wish I could start a poll here, but does anyone really think there's still time? Really?

Climate change is not a black & white thing; it's a gradient of bad things. No, we're not going to avoid heavy costs (sea level rise, higher disasters, etc.), but we can avoid making those costs even higher.

I'm not very optimistic about the outcome in the coming few decades. But I'm hopeful.

When places like Miami, Norfolk, and Shanghai will be consistently overrun by tides, or when food supplies come under severe pressure, my hope is that there will be some kind of major wake up call and cleanup act. With the major polluters (the US and China in particular) leading the way forward with funding, bespoke technology, and (hopefully) clawbacks on the main polluters.

My guess is that we won't do much until there is widespread suffering like dislocation of people or wars. And even then not much will be done until the polluting nations will feel the heat.

My hope is that at some point new energy sources like solar or fusion will make fossil fuels obsolete so the problem may just go away.

Even then we won't do anything, we won't need to.

Huge numbers of people will die, and that will fix the problem.

There are two knobs:

1. climate impact per capita

2. quantity of capita

Through inaction, on a long enough timeline, #2 will sort itself out. It's just ugly and involves a lot of suffering.

That's life.

You described tragedy not life. Life (intelligent) can escape tragedy. That fatalistic attitude towards huge numbers of people dying is degenerate. Its a common attitude but not one that's good for anything but apathy.

I disagree.

Life is cyclic by nature and humans are currently in the late stages of a boom phase. Wether we intervene "intelligently" to defer or soften the bust is largely irrelevant in the grand scheme of things. There will eventually be a bust, the populations will collapse, and life will go on to repeat the cycle again.

I don't see this as apathetic at all. It's comforting, it can give significant hope to people who are so obsessed with preventing the inevitable bust as if it's the end of the world it paralyzes them in depression when faced with the overwhelming reality of the situation.

Let go, treat others kindly, adopt austerity measures if it makes you feel better about your impact on the planet, but know that regardless life will continue.

We've had a long period of steady, exponential growth, everything must balance out in the end - so I see no reason to expect there to not be a correspondingly far fall from this precarious tall cliff we've perched ourselves upon.

You really find it comforting that huge amounts of people can not be helped from perishing - that others perishing is "the fix" ? Is it not just guilt that could be comforted for choosing not to be a helper? I think the "hope" is that you will never find yourself in need of help.

"but know that regardless life will continue" - your message was the inverse - it was "know that regardless early death must continue"

This is bad philosophy and not based on good analysis, just simple curve fitting and some degree of jadedness. People and history are capable of surprises.

Get over it, the forest needs to burn down occasionally.

So let's all play with flamethrowers and smoke in it?

Oh well. Nothing we can do.

By all means, do what you can. I certainly do, in fact, I probably do more than most.

Do you think that things after Trump will be better? How much things improved when we changed from Bush to Obama, in most fundamental areas? We are talking about a different party, a different message, even a different skin color if you want. But still wars, economy, surveillance, care about climate and so on kept going in the same direction, and even got worse.

Something else will be a priority for our attention while the trends will keep going as usual, until is already too late to do something, or to force taking desperate measures (i.e. not fully understood geoengineering) that will do even more harm than doing nothing.

People in power don't need to fear the effects of climate change in their lifetimes, they can afford to live comfortably, and even profit over the ones that can't.

> In reality, does anyone see anything other than a bad ending to all of this?

Do I think we, collectively as humans, have the will and the actual resources to change everything about "our" modern way of life in 10 years? Nope. Not one bit. Should we stop trying? Nope, not one bit.

Do I think all living things will die? No. I do think large populations will die as a result of climate change, which means they will no longer be contributing to and accelerating the problem. I mean if 20% of the population (number out of thin air) die, that means the factories that generated the things those people were consuming wouldn't be needed, the food they would have eaten wouldn't be needed, etc. All resources those people were consuming, and the byproducts of creating those resources, would go away.

So, the "healing process" would start to accelerate and maybe after 100 years, we'll be back at the point where we get to do it all over again because we don't seem to collectively learn beyond what makes the most money the easiest way. "I know x is bad, but I gotta feed my family..." or "I refuse to see it as bad because that's my job and I don't want to feel badly about myself."

I think the sad fact that no one wants to really admit/mention is we are overpopulating the planet. I know, I know... "you could take the whole population of the US and put them in x state and they'll each have x acres," etc. But that doesn't take into account the factories generating pollution to create the things that sustain their lives, or the space it takes to grow the food to sustain them, etc.

I'm not a scientist nor a expert in this subject, but those are my layman impressions gathered over the last 45 years. People rarely change unless they are forced to, or it's too late. I hope I'm wrong.

I'm hugely pessimistic, but I haven't given up. Everyone frustrated by lack of action is another potential protester locking themselves up in front of a fracking plant or daubing graffiti and disabling a pump at a petrol station.

Realistically I don't think there will be much real or adequate government action until the system we have is creaking at the seams. Dealing with migration from poorer parts of the world, dealing with the cost and chaos of weather events like floods and storms. Some actually buying land 500 ft above sea level, away from population centres. Governments having to choose between martial law or reelection will change views on global throwaway consumerism surprisingly quickly.

I also expect to see a rebirth in spending on navies, troops and border guards amongst the developed nations.

Nonetheless there comes a point (as yet unknown) where it becomes a choice of fix it or watch Rome burn. It might even reach a last minute point where it's clearly cheaper to fix it than keep ignoring it. By that time costs could easily be an order of magnitude higher, and far more dependent on geo engineering that might generate its own unforeseen problems.

But every tiny act from individuals might, just might, contribute to a tipping point before it gets that far.

> ... is another potential protester locking themselves up in front of a fracking plant ...

Isn't fracking responsible for a massive drop in coal use though? The increased amount of natural gas available means that wholesale prices for it have dropped, which has made coal-powered energy plants increasingly less viable financially compared to natural gas power stations. And natural gas, fracking and all, is far less of an environmental problem than coal is with all its mountain-top removal strip mining and cancerous, radioactive soot.

There are things that can be done:

Passive solar design

Pedestrian friendly design

More small homes

The central problem is convincing people that what they do actually makes a difference and it doesn't have to mean they cut their own throats for the greater good. People don't act because they think it involves a high personal cost without really making difference.

It doesn't require government intervention to change that.

I'm optimistic about renewable energy coming online fairly quickly, even optimistic about the transportation sector undergoing a vast transformation with the right pushes.

I'm less optimistic about people consuming less. Unless market forces make it more costly to toss away material, we're going to need an entirely new way of manufacturing a lot of different types of things.

CEB is possibly going to be a great alternative for concrete brick construction if it takes off based on the Boring Company. I'm not quite certain of the technical nature, but I understand this uses a minimal amount of concrete added to a highly compressed block of earth. Adobe construction has been used quite a lot in the past. (Probably won't work so well for skyscrapers). That being said, there are supposed to be alternatives here but scale is the main concern. Steel looks like it is going to be the main thing for a long time.

Politics are cyclical in nature, the next cycle will shift and we will likely see a radical shift in a lot of these policies. Will it be enough? Hopefully, but probably not everything.

My main concern, and I think about this quite often, is the sheer magnitude of our consumption and waste we produce every single day. Landfills need to be adapted to capture methane for one. But more than that, more products need to be made with compostable material.

I've seen a lot of recent food shops / juiceshops here in Austin that now provide compostable cups / silverware / packaging where nothing is provided in Sytofoam or plastic (all plant based material). It appears to be scalable and something I would love to see elsewhere with manufacturing / packaging.

Though I can also imagine a world where people will want to be able to get whatever they need nearly instantly. Maybe 3D metal printing will accelerate at larger scales and take into account better recycling / raw material breakdowns. That being said, it's argued that 3D printing is more environmentally sustainable as an additive manufacturing process rather than the traditional subtractive process of cutting and breaking down material to form and producing waste.

> A U.S. Department of Energy study confirmed that utilizing additive manufacturing can reduce material needs and costs by up to 90%. Along with waste savings, the DOE also found that 3-D printing can save energy, especially when a component that was previously made by combining several smaller parts is consolidated into one. > https://www1.eere.energy.gov/manufacturing/pdfs/additive_man...

I'm pessimistic about governments solving it through policy, but optimistic about science solving it. I'm particularly interested in technologies that sequester CO2, and I think this is a fantastic way to start setting prices for a carbon tax when things get worse. If all else fails, I've seen proposals for geoengineering that could work out in a reasonably short amount of time.

I'd prefer if we solved it through being responsible (plant more trees, stop cutting down the rainforest, move to renewable energy, etc), but I'm not all that worried in general.

We will wait until the very last minute to do anything significant, reacting rather than anticipating. Then, when the effects of climate change are completely undeniable, we will try work-arounds other than solving the underlying cause.

My thought is that we will eventually try to put a thin reflective material into space (or manufacture it in space in 20-40 years) to create some sort of semi-permanent sun-shield that reflects 2-5% of the sunlight we receive. It would have to be massive in area, but think of your car's sun visor on a hot day.

Putting particles into the atmosphere to do the same thing would also do the job but it could affect other things and cause more abnormal weather.

I don't see our use of fossil fuels or consumption of livestock slowing down. People make exceptions for themselves because they are the center and most important part of their own experience. "You can't get a man to understand something when his job depends on him not understanding it" - Upton Sinclair.

Also it's worth saying that Bill Gates should be able to do better than a tiny 1 billion (1/96th of his wealth) given the dire situation we are in. Actions taken earlier will have a larger impact toward mitigating climate change. 1 billion is like him tossing a penny at the problem. I'm sure Microsoft has contributed a large amount of CO2 to the atmosphere over time as well.

Any mitigation action we take is worthwhile as it will reduce risks and future costs. I'm not optimistic we'll do enough to prevent serious change. But we can't give up on mitigation strategies as they could still make the difference between 'really bad' and catastrophic.

My suggestion is that every product should include environmental fact sheet, so that consumers could make better decisions. Every product should be tracked through the supply chain and every process including energy production and transportation would be included in the final product fact sheet.

If consumers would buy more environmentally friendly products, markets would direct every producer and supplier to be more environmentally friendly, without any other government intervention or sanctions. Just make it mandatory to be transparent and to include this information in every product. Put warning labels on products that have missing information.

Not just that. Companies should have to pay for their emissions. Like how we have to pay local government to take our garbage, companies should have to pay to pollute the planet. It's insane that Starbucks et al can produce as much waste as they want without any requirement to pay for the damage.

Good luck getting the oil industry to pay for their externalities

This is already happening with the EU cap-n-trade scheme. Because it was designed to ratchet, it initially had nearly no effect - but in two years quotas will have dropped 21% from the ones set in 2005; by 2030 they will force CO2-equivalent emissions down 43%.

Companies that emit CO2-equivalent emissions now will either need to retool to lower emissions, or they need to buy emissions certificates from other companies that have retooled.

The end result is much simpler than introducing additional labeling of products for consumers to interpret. Instead, the externalities are removed and prices signal the total cost of production, as they should.

https://ec.europa.eu/clima/policies/ets_en

The challenge isn't the oil industry, it's regular people. A carbon tax would just make gas more expensive and people don't want that. Keep in mind that in order to be effective we're not talking about "people just pay more," we're talking about "the price is so much higher, people buy a lot less gas."

How about a revenue-neutral carbon fee and dividend in which households receive the fees that are levied on polluters? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fee_and_dividend

That won't work.

Imagine a collection of average households, not much different from one another. Each household could spend 10 thousand dollars improving insulation, and with the cap and div scheme it would be paid back in 5 years. After 5 years you are net ahead, so that seems reasonable, right?

Except that with the improvements the money they make back is now less, because the total amount of money that gets paid into the cap-and-div is less, so they have essentially lost money, even though the system is supposed to the revenue neutral.

Granted in the real world it would be more complicated because not every household is the same, but the system would still not give us a free lunch.

I would rephrase it as "the price is so much higher, suppliers are forced to develop alternative products to satisfy demand". Energy suppliers have been given massive subsidies for decades because they don't have to factor in the negative externalities. A carbon cost should be a part of the balance sheet in the way raw materials are. Given that, suppliers will have to innovate their way to bring price back down to equilibrium, or go out of business.

Option one: build solar panels. Option two: poor people no longer drive, and their standard of living falls. Capitalism, if given a pricing signal to "reduce emissions," will pick a completely merciless combination of the two.

Well, good. Our collective standard of living needs to fall in order for the planet to survive.

If you don’t want it to hit poor people specifically you can subsidize the tax for them.

Well, there's always option three: keep things going and pray for a technical miracle. That's the default choice and probably the road we're on.

Option three: improve mass transit, to move more people per fuel unit.

Option four: reduce need to drive around by bringing services closer to people and promoting remote working etc.

Option five: remove need to drive for shopping and such by creating "bus for stuff", you order things and get them delivered (near) home.

Option six: convert existing vehicles to electric (probably needs some form of battery innovation and might not be cheap even if price is offset by the raw metals salvaged from the engine).

Just a few examples of the obvious options. The truly clever smart options take more analysis (and a smarter mind than mine) to figure out.

The point: the search space for "reduce emissions (driving) because price of gas is insane" is very large, going full solar or poor don't drive are not really the only options.

This has happened.

The UK had an escalating fuel tax in the late 90s, early 00s. At some point when petrol was around 99p a litre there were demonstrations and rolling go-slows on motorways. I think the demos may have also blockaded refineries. Stupidly, government caved and the escalator tax was neutered. Now fuel is around £1.30 a litre.

It was subtle at first, but by the time of the demos there was a noticeable effect on the roads. For the first time in living memory (mine anyway) they were getting quieter. Most people in my circle didn't seem that fussed by it, they just drove a bit less.

No idea if there was "someone" like an oil company was behind the initial idea of or organising of the demos.

I can't see any politician (at least in the majority party) going for this due to the initial impact it would have on the economy by driving prices up significantly on everything.

Maybe if a very left-wing Democratic party was the majority & the Republicans were in the minority this could work. Huge incentive for those that care enough about global pollution to make it more important than the economy. That seems to be the Democrats at this time. I'm not even sure if 100% of them would get behind it.

Since most of the Republican party doesn't take climate change as serious as their Democrats, they could get behind it by knowing the economy would suffer for a while & they could use it as political ammo.

Would be curious to hear if anyone thinks this could work politically, especially truly independent minds in-tuned to "both sides".

The whole point is force people to pay the actual price for the good (services) they are getting.

This will force people to abandon extremely polluting habits out of economic necessity.

Which has already happened once in recent history. People seem to have short memories. When gas hit $4 per gallon back during the Bush era, it had a very real effect both on the types of cars people were buying as well as the amount they were willing to travel

Starbuck pays to have their trash picked up. And the more trash they generate, the more they pay.

Granted, maybe they should pay more, but they can't literally produce as much waste as they want and pay nothing.

And the reason that makes sense is it isn't just about "punish the evil corporations!". If the emissions had a price, the price of the product would reflect that.

They game theory just doesnt work out for this idea. You are basically punishing those who care. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EsBvI9oSD1g

This is a legit blockchain application.

The power required to track the entire human industrial supply chain using a block-chain algorithm would be so incredible that it would quickly dwarf any possible gains. It would in fact be a significant percentage of all total power consumption in the world.

That's an absurd claim. It doesn't have to be incentivized through block rewards, but rather through multiple governments passing laws that they submit a certain amount of mining power. The hash rate could be orders of magnitude less than the current Bitcoin hash rate and still be secure against transactional fraud.

In fact it doesn't even need to be proof of work based, as long as all entities permitted to operate on the chain are known.

If the authority for verifying and authenticating entities is centralized, you don't need a blockchain. A centralized, publicly-readable database is the same thing.

But then we cannot use buzzwords...

Where did I say anything about centralization?

"all entities permitted to operate on the chain"

Who does the permitting?

Just because a single entity boots up a blockchain doesn't make it centralized. Satoshi set the initial rules for Bitcoin - does that make it centralized?

If there are 196 countries in the world they could all be registered as valid entities using their respective public keys. New entities could be added is through a soft fork of mining/processing nodes that add public keys to the list, and thus would be distributed consensus like other blockchains.

Indeed. Here is a reasonable introduction by people who have a deep background in environmental footprinting: https://lca-net.com/blog/what-will-distributed-ledger-techno...

You're assuming this fact sheet would make a difference in the buying behavior of an average consumer.

Being "green" is not enough. You also have to be a conscious consumer of electricity. If 40% of the online green electricity is going to heating and lighting the empty houses of the rich, that is still not good. Excessive consumerism is still bad even if the entire process uses entirely green energy.

Further, this fact sheet should be accessible through an API, rolled up per company, person, and family, and exposed through easy to use applications so anyone could easily know the environmental footprint of any entity.

Awareness is the first step to solving any problem, and measurement and reporting would facilitate this. Perhaps we need more draconian laws that would force this on all corporations and individuals, considering the dire consequences.

Here's a crazy idea: the environmental fact sheet should be the price tag. Price the environmental impact of a product into the product.

The money raised should go to you, right?

That seems backwards. If the externalities of manufacturing the product are going to hurt me, the manufacturer should be paying me a discount.

It doesn’t matter where a tax is actually applied - it’ll be split between the seller and purchaser regardless (the exact split depends on the elasticity of the market).

Ok, how about where the externalities of manufacturing the product hurts someone in Florida, and you in California are the one buying the product?

I think the manufacturer should be the one paying, not the customer.

The customer always pays, as all the manufacturers money comes from customers.

They wouldn't be manufacturing it if there were no demand for it.

Yeah but supply might dry up if manufacturers had to pay for damages out of their own pockets.

You mean economic growth is a mirage?

Well if it's going to take several trillion dollars to deal with effects of climate change, then however much money we thought we had saved by going with fossil fuels over cleaner but more expensive energy sources was actually overstated by several trillion dollars. I don't think that covers all economic growth though. And if a manufacturer pollutes the crap out of a river and gets people sick, I would deduct the costs borne by the people downstream from the profits of the company, at least when counting "economic growth". I suspect in terms of GDP it's a positive, because of the business created for doctors and lawyers.

You get the benefit of the product, otherwise you wouldn't be paying for it. You should pay the rest of the world for the damage that was done to it for your benefit.

If people would make rational choices based on knowledge there would be no obesity (you have amount of calories on product labels).

People are aware that catastrophe is coming but they are in denial. It's just better to not think about it, like with death, you know it will come but you don't think about it, just carry with your life. And I can see the same exact thing with global warming when I talk to different people. It's better to think that I can't do nothing than think I can do something but I will need to change my style of life.

There are things one can do to live longer but they require sacrifices, do not eat bad stuff, exercise etc. For a lot of people price is too high. The problem is that in case of global warming those people are making choices for other people also.

There is no political will to change things, as every politician knows that the costs for that would be too high today. So that's why they think it's better to postpone this decisions, automatically making the cost a lot higher. There is also believe that someone will figure out a way to stop global warming in his basement and will save the humanity from itself. The problem is a lot more complex than just CO2, it's about the current economic model of the modern society in which we live. Constant growth and resource exploitation are not sustainable for long term.

How negatively would that impact the environment? More importantly how will you deal with people who will read such a fact sheet as how to "own the libs" and buy the worst environmental products?

The method to calculate there fact sheets (or environmental footprints) is called life cycle assessment, and has been trying to come up with labels for a long time. There have been large projects by Walmart and Tesco, for example, to label all their products. The problem is data availability.

This is an area where the Hacker News community can help. There is an initiative to replace the closed-source databases used to calculate such labels called BONSAI: https://bonsai.uno/; https://github.com/BONSAMURAIS/bonsai (I am one of the volunteers). We are doing the best we can, but could really benefit from people with expertise in

* Semantic web/RDF (to design and populate the larger database)

* Text processing (to use the web as a source of data on production and consumption)

* Machine learning/remote sensing (to understand the spatial pattern of industry)

There is also an active community focused on energy data and modelling: https://openmod-initiative.org/

> Cattle are a huge source of methane; in fact, if they were a country, they would be the third-largest emitter of greenhouse gases!

Imagine how opposed to a carbon tax the beef industry would be.

Legit question, though - are cattle actually carbon-neutral? I mean, where does their carbon come from? Eating plants, that were grown specifically to feed the cattle.

Which gets to another question, since I'm not bothering to research before asking... how much worse is methane than CO2 as a greenhouse gas, per carbon atom involved? Because that's basically what cows do. They convert atmospheric CO2 (via plants) into atmospheric methane (via farts).

From wikipedia: Methane has a large effect but for a relatively brief period, having an estimated lifetime of 9 years in the atmosphere, whereas carbon dioxide has a small effect for a long period, having an estimated lifetime of over 100 years.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_methane#Methane_as...

Based on this, it suggests that cattle, while problematic, are carbon-neutral and have been for a long time. I did bother to google about the number of cattle on Earth, which has bee stable at around one billion since the 1970s. The sharp increases in both global population and global wealth haven't changed that for decades.

So unless I'm missing something (which is very possible), the amount of methane in the atmosphere from cattle is probably static rather than growing, and the amount of carbon consumed by said cattle is also static.

Methane has reached a steady state. However, if CO2 lasts 100 years, and methane -> CO2 takes 9 years, only in 2079 will we have equilibrium.

Right now 1billion cows are producing greenhouse gases, but <<1b cows worth of greenhouse gases generated in 1918 are "expiring."

Well, yeah. How many cattle did we have then? The numbers I found go back to 1960, which was about 750M. Has it doubled in the last century, or quadrupled?

Either way, though, it doesn't seem the problem is getting worse, at least. The question is, can we make it better? Can we reduce the level of greenhouse gasses related to cattle, short of just reducing the number of cattle, which seems more like wishful thinking than a plan.

My thought from earlier is to act to reduce the amount of corn-feeding and encourage pasture feeding, which takes external carbon (fuel and fertilizer from corn farming) out of the equation. Grazing cattle are typically raised on land that isn't useful for more lucrative farming, living on wild pasture or scrub.

The problem is that the methane is a much more (30x) potent, although shorter term (10 year decay lifetime) than CO2. So although CO2 is absorbed methane is produced.

Methane is a far more potent greenhouse gas than co2, traps about 30x more heat per molecule. On the flip side, it’s half life in the atmosphere until it gets re-absorbed by the earth is on the order of decades, while co2 is on the order of millennia, so if you take the long view it’s not as bad.

(Also without searching first) Methane is something like 50 times more effective as a greenhouse gas. That's after allowing for the fact it dissipates far more quickly, initially it's even more.

So even though it's a small part of emissions it's a significant constituent of climate change.

  CARBON SEQUESTRATION AND GREENHOUSE GAS MITIGATION
  POTENTIAL OF COMPOSTING AND SOIL AMENDMENTS ON CA RANGELANDS
    California’s Fourth Climate Change Assessment
  
    Whendee et al 
    Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and
    Management, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720.

  ASSESSMENT OF CALIFORNIA CROP AND LIVESTOCK POTENTIAL
  ADAPTATION TO CLIMATE CHANGE
    California’s Fourth Climate Change Assessment

    Josué Medellín-Azuara et al
    UC Davis, UC Merced

About 30x worse: https://blogs.princeton.edu/research/2014/03/26/a-more-poten...

As far as carbon neutrality goes, you’re drawing a conclusion about the value based only on the first derivative. If you hold livestock numbers constant (they’re increasing, alas, but let’s not worry about that yet) then there will be a rough equilibrium. However, the gas is in the atmosphere for some time until it gets fixed back into the soil, and continues to have a warming effect in the meantime.

Any carbon tax has to punish emissions. Net zero emissions isn’t enough anymore.

Actually, they're not increasing. I looked it up. The number of cattle in the world has held steady (about one billion) since the 1970s. Given that the population has from about 4B to 7B in that time, and incomes have increased substantially as well, it suggests that beef consumption is level (which means per-capita consumption is shrinking).

And given a 9 year lifespan for methane, it's probably been stable for a long time.

Now, if you're taking the position that "net zero emissions isn't enough" as justification for a carbon tax, you need to focus on the goal. Is it carbon reduction, or puritanical punishment? Need to ask that, because there's a lot of people who want the latter but claim the former.

If the goal is carbon reduction, then a carbon tax is only a means to an end, and we have to ask if it will be effective. Can we carbon-tax beef enough to see a major reduction in its consumption, leading to a major reduction in the number of cattle? (Oh, and you'd better carbon-tax dairy while you're at it.) Does this seem like a reasonable conclusion? And if people aren't eating beef, what else will they eat instead, and what are its carbon costs?

I'm not rejecting the position, but I'm trying to think it through.

> Actually, they're not increasing. I looked it up

> And given a 9 year lifespan for methane

Can you please provide your sources? If this is true, it's not that worrying...

Someone else referenced wikipedia on methane in the thread somewhere. Surprised me, too.

For cattle, got the numbers from the industry, which doesn't seem to have a particular agenda in this link... http://beef2live.com/story-world-cattle-inventory-year-0-111...

According to this[1] the half life of methane in the atmosphere is 7 years.

[1]https://phys.org/tags/methane/

For estimating emissions, a better proxy is probably the mass of all the cattle in the world.

There might not be more individual cattle, but they've been engineered to grow bigger - and, by extension, eat bigger meals, poop bigger poops, and fart bigger farts.

Has that actually changed much in the past several decades, though?

By about 30% between 1975 and 2005.

https://www.beefmagazine.com/genetics/0201-increased-beef-co...

Looking more into this, it seems to me a carbon tax is not an effective approach at all. Instead, we should be looking at the cattle/feed lifecycle. Encourage totally or mostly pasture-fed beef, and discourage corn feeding. That could be done in part by more strictly limiting use of antibiotics, which are used to make cattle tolerate the corn-feed diet without it completely wrecking their digestive systems.

This would raise the price of beef, sure, but more importantly, it would help break the use of farmed (and heavily subsidized) corn, and the use of antibiotics, which are problematic for reasons that have nothing to do with beef. This gets us to actually solving the carbon problem, not just blunt-object punishment.

Atmospheric methane is short-lived compared to CO2 however.

> where does their carbon come from? Eating plants

For Betty the cow on a small homestead sure.

Unfortunately modern agriculture is so fubar that it's hard to claim that as true. There are huge fossil fuel energy inputs from everything from chemical fertilisers, herbicides, transportation and processing. Not to mention the damage to the ecosystem that the massive mono-cultures this drives.

I live in the midwest, home of the most sophisticated factory farming operations in the world. Chicken and hog factories are way more FUBAR than large cattle operations. Cattle are range animals; they need to move around, so they're usually in pasture for at least part of their diet. In Wisconsin dairy farm country, you see pastures full of cows all the time. And I recently drove through the giant beef farm areas of western Nebraska, which was enlightening. It's dry, arid, sandy land, generally unsuitable for farming. Nothing but scrub grass. Cattle are fine with that. So while the herds are large, the areas they live in are large as well.

Chickens and hogs, on the other hand, those are gross. They're kept in confinement, and fed mostly grain. They can't really graze the way cattle do, not at scale.

> Legit question, though - are cattle actually carbon-neutral?

The vast majority of beef produced is not carbon neutral. From the Beef Cattle Research Council [1] of Canada (not exactly an anti-beef organization):

"Presently, the economic conditions are favorable for the production of beef from grain in many regions of the world, largely because of the availability of inexpensive fossil fuels"

The plants you are referring to are produced with massive amounts of fossil fuel. By one estimate, each steer "consumes" 284 gallons of oil via feed during its lifetime [2]

On top of this, cows are one of the most inefficient ways to turn energy inputs into protein (10x less efficient than other types of meat, 100x less efficient than grain protein), primarily due to large size of the animals must be grown to before slaughter, which uses wastes a lot of energy. [3]

There is a large variance between the ratio of input energy to protein output of various types of meat, with lamb (57:1) and beef (40:1) being the least efficient, and broiler chickens (4:1) being the most efficient [4]

1. http://www.beefresearch.ca/research-topic.cfm/environmental-...

2. https://www.nytimes.com/2002/03/31/magazine/power-steer.html

3. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/beef-uses-ten-...

4. https://academic.oup.com/ajcn/article/78/3/660S/4690010

These are really great links, thanks! This put me on a different solution path - reducing the amount of corn-feeding and making cattle feed (especially beef cattle) primarily natural pasture. Get fuel and fertilizer out of the chain.

Glad you found them informative. A solution would have to figure out how to get off the fossil fuels without sending the price of the end product through the ceiling.

That is part of the rationale for the current endeavors into creating lab grown meat and passable plant-based meat alternatives.

Food is cheaper now than it's ever been in history. I'm not too horrified about the idea that the price of beef might rise a bit. (As an aside, for a while I used a CSA that raised heritage breed turkeys in addition to the regular old white turkeys that are 99.9% of the market. Heritage turkey cost twice as much, because it's literally twice as expensive to raise, per pound. Delicious, though.)

Unfortunately, I think a lot of the anti-meat push is the sort of hairshirt puritanism that is part of the American cultural heritage. Enjoying things is sin.

In the steady state cows are carbon neutral. CO2 form the air forms grass, cows turn grass into methane, methane decays into CO2, repeat. But increasing the number of cows increases the amount of methane in the air at any given time and methane is a much more potent greenhouse gas than CO2. Likewise, reducing the number of cows would lead to a reduction in the amount of greenhouse gas in the air.

Methane in the atmosphere has a fairly short half life of 7 years so the effects of increasing or decreasing the number of cows is felt relatively quickly.

Except animal agriculture is not that simple.

There isn't enough arable farmland in the world to just let cattle and animals graze free range. They're not just eating grass.

Instead they are eating soy beans, corn, hay that is grown with huge inputs of fossil fuels and fertilizer - made worse by effectively converting that fossil fuel into atmospheric methane.

This results in animal products having the highest CO2 equivalent of any food, especially beef and dairy.

http://css.umich.edu/sites/default/files/Carbon_Footprint_Fa...

http://www.onegreenplanet.org/environment/how-fossil-fuels-a...

One calorie of animal produced requires at least 10 times the plant calorie input.

Some quotes from the above article:

"Feed production accounts for around 75 percent of fossil fuel use in livestock production, so this one is the big kahuna."

"An article from the Food Revolution Network, called on David Pimentel, a Cornell ecologist who specializes in agriculture and energy to break down the number of fossil fuels needed to produce the food that livestock consume. According to Pimentel, the process of growing the 35 million hectares of corn, 31.1 million hectares of soybeans allotted for livestock feed in the U.S. (these numbers do not include the soy harvested in South America that feed U.S. livestock), requires an enormous amount of fossil fuel energy in the form of agrochemicals."

“Growing the corn used to feed livestock takes vast quantities of chemical fertilizer, which in turn takes vast quantities of oil. Because of this dependence on petroleum,” Pimentel tells Food Revolution Network, “a typical steer will in effect consume 284 gallons of oil in his lifetime.”

"Worldwide, we currently use an average of 180 millions of tons of fertilizer to grow livestock feed and as the population grows and the demand for meat increases, it is projected we’ll need 230 million tons or 7.3 BILLIONS of gallons by 2050."

Yes, but none of that is irreducible the way cow methane production is. If we solve clean electricity somehow (fusion?) and switch to electric tractors and split water to get the hydrogen for Haber-Bosch then cows methane emissions would remain, which I think was Bill Gate's point in bringing them up.

*Has been. Koch Industries, the company of huge climate change denying lobbyists the Koch brothers has some major investments in cattle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koch_Industries#Matador_Cattle...

That's just one easy example; the beef industry has long been associated with the oil industry by simple virtue of being relatively co-located in states like Texas and Oklahoma.

OK, but the carbon in that methane (CH4) comes from plant sources, which comes from the air. So that is net carbon neutral (except to the degree that methane is a stronger greehouse gas than the carbon and hydrogen it is composed of).

It's not clear to me that these issues don't simply boil down to energy problems.

The limiting case: an endless source of free energy. Using this, it seems obvious that any carbon-emitting procedure can be mitigated, by capturing the emissions and storing them.

The question is whether concrete, cement and so on are viable building materials under this model; whether meat is viable; and so on.

Essentially, these are uncaptured externalities. If you tax the emissions at a higher rate than it costs to capture them, they will be captured, the question is whether demand decreases as a result of increases in cost.

Exactly. Gates is being too cute by half here.

He starts by claiming that only 25% of greenhouse gases come from making electricity; a fact that is technically true but very misleading. He then goes on to name the contributors of the other 75% and almost all of them (with the exception of methane from farming) produce carbon through using energy in the form of fossil fuels.

Solving the energy production problem solves the vast majority of these other problems.

This is interesting for cattles, think I saw it here a few weeks back. https://www.independent.co.uk/environment/cows-seaweed-metha...

I wonder how long it would take to scale up production of seaweed/algae if that turns out to be effective.

The linked article indicates that only a small amount of seaweed needs to be added to their diet to be effective and that seaweed is easy to grow, so it doesn’t sound like it would take long to scale.

Not that it would eliminate the gains, but cows and seaweed are generally far apart geographically. Therefore you would need to ship the seaweed product to where the cows are.

Remote work tackles so much of this: Less cars on the road. Less cars being created. Smaller roads. Less gas/electric on transport. Fewer offices/smaller. Significantly less stress. Less stress eating. Fewer cows consumed.

Less clothes. Less showers. :)

Not only remote work but also just working less in general. I don’t see why we as a sosciety can’t go to working 4 or even 3 days a week and still maintain the same standards of living. Or even improving those standards.

Because wages for most people are tied to labor and time, and when you decrease the amount of time worked, you produce less labor. Convincing people with money to pay you more for less work is futile.

Why the hell would I pay more money to a contractor to work on my home for half the time? I don't understand this thinking. Believe it or not, there are people in the world that want to get shit done.

Paying per hour is a great way to increase hours on something. If your really into the free market you should understand the incentive structure. Many workers have different intensities of working.

> Why the hell would I pay more money to a contractor to work on my home for half the time?

I lost you hear. Isn't it how it works actually? You usually pay premium if you want something to be done faster.

Mainstream immersive VR would help greatly to make more and more remote work possible.

Actually it's not that simple.

Is it more environmentally friendly for 100 people to work in one office or for 100 people to work in 100 homes?

Is it better to heat or cool one office of 100 people or to heat or cool 100 homes?

I am wary of all this talk about breakthroughs. It diverts attention from the hard choices we have to make. Namely change diet, drastically reduce consumption, emphasise circular economy etc. Those breakthroughs may never come.

There's something about the way most people talk about climate change that strikes me as really off. They talk about consumption and growth being the root cause of the problem. They also have a way of talking about wealth that makes it sounds like it means nothing.

There's something wrong with that world view. I'm unconvinced that the solutions to climate change are going to revolve around lack of growth and curtailing consumption. It seems more likely that they will come from applying wealth to the problem. Growth and wealth are tightly linked. Saying that we'll solve this problem by curtailing growth seems to me that we'll solve it without wealth - I don't think that will happen.

Investing in alternatives is laudable but Bill Gates should support the only credible path to avert an unlivable earth: a worldwide progressive ban on fossil fuels and plastics made with fossil fuels. Then invest billions in alternatives.

Saw this last night: http://www.anotesark.com/ Had never heard of Kiribati (pronounced roughly Kiribahs). That country could be the canary in the coal mine for the rest of us. Glad there are people such as Gates who are not waiting around.

Wow took the quiz at the end. Switching to plant base diet for 1 yr is only half as effective as not doing a transatlantic flight. In the future I think we’ll agree to not take so many self indulgent vacations to other countries far away or have some sort of global ‘travel credit’ system to keep track

vegans will be the only people allowed to travel :D

Bill's putting his money where his mouth is with investments in Beyond Meat and Memphis Meats (meat alternative startups).

There are cow backpacks. We can harness the energy from cows and we have an alternative clean energy source. We'd be tackling an electricity problem and the cattle issue.

I'm not making this up: https://www.fastcompany.com/3028933/these-backpacks-for-cows...

We would make a progress on some environmental challenges by simply taxing externalities and letting the market do it's work.

Climate change - carbon tax.

Trash Pollution - packaging and recycling tax.

Bill Gates lives in a house that is SIXTY SIX THOUSAND SQUARE FEET.

Bill Gates flies in a private jet.

Bill Gates has a lot of work to do just to get his carbon footprint in line with the average multimillionaire let alone the national average.

Bill Gates should realize that the fundamental challenge is getting people to consume less than they can.

Maybe his net blog post should detail his personal impact relative to the average citizen and what he is doing to make his impact below average.

We don't need more blog posts. We already know everything we need to know to plot a course of action.

Also he has saved 400 million lives. That's a whole lot of carbon footprint added, right?

Source ?

Did you read the post? He's part of a project putting up £100 million for climate change research and action. It's not just another post communicating how bad the situation is.

He isn't sacrificing. The $100 million will shortly be recovered by his investments. This is about as monumental as someone here donating $500.

In any case I can tell him what needs to be done for $0 - consume less

No change will come unless everyone sacrifices.

From wikipedia. How long will it take to recoup his $28 billion in donations?

"In 2007, its founders were ranked as the second most generous philanthropists in the US, and Warren Buffett the first. As of May 16, 2013, Bill Gates had donated US$28 billion to the foundation."

> How long will it take to recoup his $28 billion in donations?

He "donated" to his own charity which he and his wife controls.

But since you asked, about 5 years. His net worth was about $67 billion in 2013. Now it's about $95 billion.

It's incredible that someone could donate billions of dollars and do unequivocally great things, and people like you still think it's bad.

> It's incredible that someone could donate billions of dollars and do unequivocally great things, and people like you still think it's bad.

He did a lot of bad things as well. Microsoft the Monopoly set back computing by many years and was one of the most destructive forces for the past 30 years.

Gates must be spending a lot of money on PR to get his sainthood.

I'm sure zuckerburg and bezos are going to set up their own family charity to avoid taxes and "do good" too. Doesn't make them saints.

Isn’t it fantastic to be lectured from up on high by the hypocritical elite? Us dirty, common, poor people are the problem, and people like Gates could be assured of living in utopia for eternity if only we’d listen to their “Do as I say, not as I do” platitudes.

EDIT: His house is much larger than his and Melinda's needs. His blog easily uses 20x more energy than it needs (uBlock origin counts 19 attempted connections). He doesn't need to fly anywhere for conferences/meetings with the power of the Internet and teleconferencing. Is he a vegetarian/vegan again, or was that just something he tried in his 20s? He doesn't need to eat meat. He wants everyone else to sacrifice while he himself isn't willing to give up his lavish lifestyle. It's gross, hypocritical, and no amount of cashy-money donations make up for him not following his own preachings.

Right. I’m not saying climate change isn’t happening. But it’s clear that most celebrities don’t act as if they believe it is themselves. No compromises in their own lifestyles. My own carbon footprint probably isn’t 1% of 1% of 1% of the average super rich jetsetter like Gates or Bono or Al Gore. Leaders lead by example.

So, let it all burn, just to spite all those snubbing elites, right?

It's like people who live beyond their means are offended when some multimillionaire tells them to spend less and save more, "I don't see you doing that on your yacht!" Sure, but he doesn't need to.

Or maybe the people berating an overweight dietitian advising healthy diet. "Didn't work for you, did it?" Sure, doesn't mean it doesn't work in general.

Gates will be fine whatever happens. It is us, "dirty common poor people", who will suffer the consequences. The dirtier and commoner, the worse is the effect. Resenting him for trying to save you from yourself is childish, petty and disgusting.

I’ll be in Brussels this week

A 10,000 mile trip to save the environment, hmm

Travel, commerce, civilization isn't going to stop because of global warming. That's childish hyperbole to suggest one person traveling on a plane or train that's going to be going anyway somehow undermines the goal of getting the whole world to address this issue in a meaningful and serious way.

But addressing the issue in a meaningful and serious way will probably require people to travel A LOT less by air.

When did "global warming" become "climate change"? Did the boys in marketing decide its time to update.

'global warming' refers to the long-term trend of a rising average global temperature,

'Climate change', refers to the changes in the global climate which result from the increasing average global temperature. For example, changes in precipitation patterns, increased prevalence of droughts, heat waves, and other extreme weather, etc.

They're related, but they are different things.

Even though your question has been deservedly downvoted, it still deserves an answer. Global warming implies that our effect on the planet is restricted to an upward trend in global temperature. Although that's the principal result of human emissions, the issue manifests itself in many other ways, including but limited to: sea level rise, extreme weather events, substantial changes and extinction of flora and fauna, loss of coral reefs, loss of ice sheets, etc.

Climate change includes the broad ecological changes that stem from a warming planet, rather than a narrow focus on the warming itself.

'effect' on the planet.

4 hours of sleep doesn't do anyone any good.

When it became clear that the climate effects were going to go beyond warming, and that the warming part would be different in different parts of the world.

When it was realized that some politicians thought that global warming would imply that every place on earth is becoming strictly warmer all the time, and so the fact that we still get snow or cold snaps proves that global warming is not happening.

Yes, they did! Although both terms have been used frequently for over 50 years, Frank Lutz, Republican strategist, noted that " It’s time for us to start talking about “climate change” insteud of global warming and “conservation ” instead of preservation."

1. “Climate change’’ is less frightening than “global warming; ” As one focus group participant noted, climate change “sounds like you’re going fkom Pittsburgh to Fort Lauderdale.” While global warming has catastrophic connotations attached to it, climate change suggests a more controllable and less emotional challenge. "

From what we can see, it looks like Republicans adopted his recommendations.

http://web.archive.org/web/20121030085144/http://www.ewg.org...

They also tried "global ice age" in the 70s and 80s to push recycling.

The neat thing about science is that it admits when it's wrong and changes direction.

Not unless it gets scientists grant money. Cancer research is a great example of science not being able to change direction because the money is too good.

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