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Comment by astrodust | Hacker News Reader

At the rate we're setting up for a future where the entire ocean blooms, dies, and we're left with nothing.

Already jellyfish are taking over. We're killing off so many life forms we're essentially going back in time to the precambrian era.

Instead of looking for "quick fixes" like iron seeding, which has just as much a chance of going awry as Australia importing cane toads to deal with their crop insects, let's just curtail CO2 emissions.

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To stay below 2 degrees of warming via CO2 curtailment alone, serious curtailment would have had to start a generation ago. I wish that we had acted with urgency then, but we didn't. Now we need curtailment and active interventions.

Agreed. Many environmentalists like to argue that curtailment is the “proper” way to handle global warming. If the situation is half as dire as they are claiming it is, then that is simply not good enough.

The problem is the existence of these techniques will be used to justify inaction elsewhere. They also do nothing to tackle acidification.

And it’s not as if the world has been standing still over the last decades, huge progress has been made and many technologies are at the borderline of being economical or cheaper than the alternatives, and are continually falling in price. Once we push the boulder over the crest of the hill it will roll down unaided. The economy can change much quicker than we think.

Some of the active countermeasures contemplated, like ocean fertilization and accelerated olivine weathering, also tackle acidification if they work at scale. Solar radiation management does nothing to fix acidification though it can possibly interrupt feedback loops that would make acidification even worse.

I agree that many technologies for replacing fossil usage have now achieved or are close to economic superiority, and that change can come very rapidly with economic superiority. But I also think that reaching this point has taken too long and now we will need active measures as well as emissions cuts.

The problem is that while solar energy may have already achieved superiority over the net cost of finding, drilling-off and extracting hydrocarbons, solar energy is not going achieve superiority over hydrocarbons people already have. The cost of already found oil is just the cost of pumping it out of the ground and with easy fields, no energy source is going to beat that (the cheapest Saudi cost less $10/barrel to pump and that's light, easy to refine oil).

So, due to these different marginal costs, there's no way even completely practical, economical solar can stop fossil fuel usage quickly without active regulator intervention.

Yes, it's harder to out-compete fossil projects that have already been built, already paid off their capital costs, and incur just operational costs going forward. Some of those fossil projects (like Saudi oil fields that cost only $10/barrel) are not going to be economically forced into early retirement by any foreseeable lower-emissions energy source.

Note that there is also quite a bit of already-built fossil capacity that can be retired early by economic pressures. Not every big fossil project has operational costs as low as Saudi oil.

For example, the Navajo Generating Station is the largest American coal plant west of the Mississippi River. It was built in the 1970s. It has a stable, low cost for coal since it is supplied by the nearby dedicated Kayenta Mine. Just a few years ago it was planned to run until 2044. But the falling costs of gas and renewables have made it economically uncompetitive. It's now going to close at the end of 2019, 25 years early:

https://www.azcentral.com/story/money/business/energy/2017/0...

I agree on the broader point that fossil fuel emissions won't be curbed quickly without active regulator intervention. Since that intervention may arrive late-or-never in different nations, it's one of the reasons that I believe active carbon dioxide removal measures will be necessary in addition to emissions reduction efforts.

Since that intervention may arrive late-or-never in different nations, it's one of the reasons that I believe active carbon dioxide removal measures will be necessary in addition to emissions reduction efforts.

Both regulating carbon emissions and active carbon dioxide removal measures will, in the end, come down to some state or world body acting in a coordinated way to push money at this problem. It seems like people are imagining active removal would be easier in this fashion than basic regulation. Why?

If most countries decide to use basic regulation but, say, Russia, does not, then the other countries could use active removal to offset the Russian emissions. Not likely a world body is forcing Russia to do anything (although if Europe stopped using their gas, they would have a lot less power).

Find a way to build georedundant electricity links from stable solar fields in e.g. the Sahara or so, up to Europe, with a reliable capacity of ~ 1 TW or maybe even closer to 5 TW, along the feeding solar arrays, and we can use existing ways to store energy for nightly use to wean Europe of natural gas in about a decade.

The largest one build seems to be 10 GW between Xinjiang and Anhui. It's still quite a bit from the scale we'd need to wean of natural gas however.

My hope is that newly-built or soon-to-be-built O&G production sites will be converted to have CO2 capture and just export electricity or hydrogen. We have all the tech, it's just that someone needs to force O&G operators to do it.

Operators, by the way, love this concept. It means they can continue production basically forever, if they want. But there's a big economic disadvantage in being the first mover, which is why we need government regulations forcing it.

Here's the thing. Environmentalists have been warning about climate change for generations now. Calling for replacements for fossil fuel and for drastic cuts in emmissions and consumption. Basically nobody acted. And now the situation is becoming dire. Suddenly curtailmennt is off the table because it's no longer enough? It's never even been tried or seriously considered. Pretty much no developed country is on track for reducing CO2 emmissions by a large enough fraction. And yet, somehow, we're now expecting those self same countries to become proficient at geo engineering on a scale massive enough to revert climate change? It's a farce.

OK, so here's the thing from a politician's point of view:

If you do something fairly extreme for curtailment, like a tax on fuel that motorists really notice, the other party will get voted in and they'll undo it. Now you've got kicked out of office, with no environmental benefit to show for it.

And if you go further with something like a ban on pet dogs or ban on meat-eating? Same thing but faster and with more certainty.

Indeed,

The problem is that, given we're failing the straightforward task of curtailment even now, what are the chances that we can successfully achieve curtailment and sequestering in the required time-frame?

Curtailment is a large task but we know what to do. Sequestering would also be a large task but what to do is uncertain. Curtailment so far has been a corrupt circus with "pledges" and other indirect inducements ("carbon credits") being most of what was done. These indirect inducements primarily served as speculative vehicles and advertising gloss.

And here, I just google'd up what you'd expect: A bitcoin-based platform for trading carbon credit. Now you can use the certainty of damaging the environment to make a promise to repair it.

https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/ibm-and-veridium-transf...

Coal consumption has already peaked in the USA, France, UK, Canada, (probably) China, and a number of other countries. Emissions intensity and absolute emissions from the electricity sector has already peaked in multiple countries. The cost of electrifying automobiles and generating low-emissions renewable electricity is much lower than a generation ago.

On the other hand, global fossil fuel use has not peaked yet. Global population has not peaked yet. Many countries have worse cost-and-schedule problems with attempted deployments of nuclear reactors than they did 40 years ago. We are barely reaching "maybe starting to flatten out emissions" -- actually trending down toward zero is just a mirage in the distance at present. The opportunity to stabilize the climate just by cutting emissions is now in the past.

I feel like humanity is moving toward making the changes it needs, and has a better toolset for those changes than before, but is changing much slower and later than it should have. We're out of completely safe options and have to try to navigate between various risky options. I can understand the perspective of people who feel like we're acting too late and there is no chance of industrial civilization surviving into the 22nd century, even though I don't share that perspective.

On the other hand, global fossil fuel use has not peaked yet. Global population has not peaked yet.

Indeed, but if solar power is now the preferred energy source, solar power could be being used for all new energy need as well as help us cut back on fossil fuel's original usage.

But it's not. That's a world-killing problem.

What we're out of is laize faire options. Neither sequestering nor dramatic winding down of fossil fuel consumption is going to happen without a world level authority dictating things. Sadly, that seems unlikely.

Solar power is not the preferred energy source before we figured out storage. Just because the marginal cost of adding a watt of solar is currently lower than adding a watt of coal that doesn't mean that we can switch off coal plants and replace them with solar.

> Sadly, that seems unlikely.

Although it seems unlikely today, a military coalition to enforce stricter emissions standards may be something that comes together in the future.

Unfortunately the only parties interested in winding down fossil fuel use are Europe and China. If Europe is further disrupted by the infusion of right-wing politics, that might leave China going it alone.

At some point this will tip from "wouldn't it be nice" to "this is a battle for survival". A tactical strike on coal plants or other sources of egregious carbon emission seems ridiculous today, but it might be no different than striking a nuclear weapons lab is, something that's got the potential to cause immense harm that needs to be eliminated.

That's not a bright future at all.

When you say that coal consumption has already peaked in the USA, how do you know that? What is to say that next year we won't be using more coal per day than we are now?

Coal consumption for power in 2017 was 36% lower than in 2008:

https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=36812

Coal consumption in 2018 is on track for a 4% decline below 2017:

https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/steo/report/coal.php

That same short-term outlook predicts a further 5% drop in 2019 over 2018.

It is at least physically possible that the US could consume more coal in 2019 than in 2018, though only a sucker would take that bet. But it's not even in the realm of possibility for the US to consume an all-time-high amount of coal in 2019, greater than 2008. Too many coal plants have already been shut down and scrapped since 2008. It takes years to build a new plant. There would be years of advance warning if the US were going to reach a new peak of coal consumption, because there would have to be a large wave of new coal plant construction first.

Renewable energy saw a ~30% growth from 2008 to 2017, but in percentage points of the total energy consumption, that's only a 5%-point increase. The remaining 30%-point reduction in coal consumption was covered primarily by increased natural gas usage.

We're out of completely safe options and have to try to navigate between various risky options.

Another way to put this - we're not out of safe options if we're not doing the safe options. We may need to do risky options once we are fully engaged in doing the safe option but today, now, we have not yet acquired the ability to even do the safe options consistently.

Sure, maybe the risky options will be necessary but if efforts to do the safe get pissed away with corrupt deceptions, how are we expecting efforts to do the risky efforts won't suffer the safe fate?

That some amount of CO2 production is being reduced almost at random isn't much of an argument that human society has the ability to choose a path and follow it effectively. How many fake versions of sequestering do you think scammers will come up with if the money ever appears?

A regulatory body capable of doing CO2 reduction might have the competence to then regulate sequestering. Random activity by supposedly concerned citizens or something just invites abuse.

If we assume that global emissions will continue to grow at the current rate, or increase exponentially, the situation appears more dire than it really is. Renewable energy is getting cheaper every year, and fossil fuels are getting more expensive. Some sources of c02 fixation are more efficient when the c02 levels in the air are higher. Also as energy gets to be cheaper overall, the cost of sequestering goes down.

Think about it, a generation ago the ozone layer was the most we did. The rest was impossibly deep in humanity subconscious. And to add the club of rome report came out before most of us were even born...

I still can't believe that ozone depleting CFCs and putting toxic lead in gasoline were the the inventions of the same guy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Midgley_Jr.

Given more time I'm sure he would have come up with other world destroying chemicals.

Oh yeah, THAT "most impacting" guy in human history..

One active intervention would be a permanent individual gasoline-rationing program. No sells, no trades, decreasing allotments year-by-year. Thus encouraging -planned- driving, -smaller- vehicles.

The world needs to declare a WAR ON CO2 and put it on a war-time footing. Further considerations of tinkering around with an environment we've already de-stabilized only shows we haven't learned our lesson. We don't know enough to know what's safe... except the way things were.

> let's just curtail CO2 emissions

We are though. Most people I talk to don't know that the US peaked CO2 emissions ten years ago and it's been falling every since - in per capita, per GDP, and absolute terms.

It's not even nearly enough. According to the recent UN report, we need cut global net emissions by 50% in the next 12 years, and get to zero net CO2 by 2050. This is a slow-motion catastrophe and people aren't nearly worried enough to take the steps necessary to avert it.

http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/10/un-says-climate-genoc...

https://www.vox.com/2016/10/4/13118594/2-degrees-no-more-fos...

It seems obvious to me that this is unrealistic - that we're not going to do the cuts that we "need"; People will not get worried enough to take the steps necessary to avert it, it's simply not going to happen, and it's wishful thinking to expect that people will change their behaviour so much before they have immediate first-hand horrible effects (and those effects won't happen before it's too late). If that is our plan, then why not just wish for rainbow-farting unicorns to fix our ecosystem, it's just as likely to happen but more effective? Everything we know about people's psychology, social structures and politics seems to indicate that if the global population will be given a choice between those reductions and a slow-motion catastrophe, they'll pick policies that result in this catastrophe. Such reductions won't be made unilaterally or willingly, they might happen only if enforced with extreme violence (i.e. short-term threats instead of long-term horrible expectations) but no one sufficiently powerful seems willing to fight internal unrest or threaten international wars to enforce drastic measures for the sake of preventing climate change.

So we have to start with an assumption that emission cuts of the required scale are not going to happen (or, at least, are not going to happen soon enough), and look for more realistic alternatives than convincing 7 billion people to voluntarily downshift their lifestyle by 2050. Large scale carbon sequestration is one such alternative option.

But that UN report is based on predictions we know with 100% certainty to be incorrect. That's politics, not science. Science says "learn to do math before telling everyone the world is ending".

[citation needed]

All models are wrong. Some are useful.

Basically every organization that has looked at the issue and built a serious model has reached the same conclusion. From early studies done by engineers at oil and gas companies, to research undertaken by skeptics, the message is the same: we're not in Kansas anymore, and we're running out of time to turn around.

https://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/30/opinion/the-conversion-of...

Which organizations are those? Ones that are funded based on how much hysteria they whip up to justify stealing from people? I don't care about organizations opinions or statements, I care about the math. When the math is clearly incorrect, and we keep being told the world is ending because the incorrect math says so, there's a problem. Climate hysterians hate Monckton, and rage about how evil and wrong he is because "his opinions do not match the scientific consensus", but none of them refute the simple, factual errors he brought up. Mathematical errors that have been confirmed by mathematicians: https://mythesmanciesetmathematiques.wordpress.com/2016/09/1...

All of the models you mention use the completely incorrect math for feedbacks that will worsen warming caused by CO2. They literally all use the 3K per doubling figure. Despite it being proven wrong mathematically, and proven wrong historically as these models have all been wrong for the last 20 years of observed data.

reference on monckton for others: https://www.skepticalscience.com/Monckton_Myths_arg.htm

Yes, precisely like that. He makes a simple, objective claim that a specific formula used in the models is used incorrectly, and the self proclaimed "skeptics" who see themselves as the arbiters of science can make no objective response. Instead the compile a list of strawmen and ignore that the very references they are using to "debunk" those strawmen are the ones proven wrong by the corrected math in question.

I'm sure you're aware that one of the "engineers from oil and gas companies" that I mentioned is Dr. Flannery, an author of the literal bible of computational numerical methods [1]. I'm sure you're aware that Monckton has no formal mathematical training and that his complaints against terrestrial climate models include the "fact" that they didn't predict warming on Pluto.

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

>I'm sure you're aware that one of the "engineers from oil and gas companies" that I mentioned is Dr. Flannery, an author of the literal bible of computational numerical methods

As soon as you get him to address the error, let me know.

>I'm sure you're aware that Monckton has no formal mathematical training

Good thing it has been confirmed by mathematicians like I pointed out then huh?

>that his complaints against terrestrial climate models include the "fact" that they didn't predict warming on Pluto.

I am not interested in strawmen, I am interested in the simple, verifiable, objective claim being made. Every single climate model used to promote climate change hysteria uses the same feedback equation. They all make the same error, using the temperature difference rather than the temperature as they should. Using the correct data to calculate the feedback, those climate models produce only 2 degrees warming by 1200ppm CO2 rather than the 6 the IPCC is promoting. And they match with the last 20 years of data, while using the wrong figures as the IPCC promoted predictions do gave us hugely overestimated warming for the past 20 years. No amount of "I don't like things I pretend that guy said before" changes this. Math does not care about what anyone says or how anyone feels. The entire warming hysteria relies on the feedbacks, the IPCC and CIMP both agree that direct warming is only 1k, and claim feedbacks make it 3k. Without the incorrectly calculated feedback, there's simply no justifying the hysteria.

But the decline hasn’t been monotonic. There have been several years of the past ten where absolute and per-capita CO2 emissions in the US have increased year-over-year.

Just because you've taken the foot off the accelerator, doesn't mean that we're going to stop before we drive off a cliff.

I've yet to see a plan for a transition to a carbon-neutral economy, even on a 30-year timeline.

There isn’t. There won’t be. Fair warning, this is a cynical, but honest comment, and it’s not defeatist, but acceptance of our collective nature.

I’ve roughly gauged most of our species moves on climate accurately so far.

I bet that We are going to go full bore on geo engineering. It’s the perfect eco-poli-socio fix, and is a perfect storm to fill a lot of our mental blind spots.

Geo engineering is jobs, and economic spending. It’s great PR, and it’s a BIG moonshot style project, so the optics are stupendous. Which politician wouldn’t like to say “we secured billions in funding for jobs protecting our environment, by creating factories that absorb carbon from the air”

It doesn’t even have to work, for people to sell it.

Create a military industrial complex style system with geo engineering at its root, and soon humanity will be performing biospheric surgery.

There’s a specific vein of cynical realism, that acknowledges both humanities ingenuity and it’s emtrapment to its darker natures.

We will stick to a carbon positive economy, because no one can turn around and tell the world “its over, the good days are gone, and now when we price environmental costs to everything, the markets will tank.”

Too many goods are cheap because externalities aren’t priced in. A price rise in plastic costs will end product lines and packaging.

This will push people to alternatives which are worse (paper takes more water than plastic, and decays causing eventual spoilage and replacement.)

Plastic releases little CO2 into the air and its environment negatives are minimal if deposed of in a landfill. If CO2 and other external pollution sources were highly taxed, plastic prices could even go down as burning oil for energy is phased out and non-taxed oil used for plastics drops in price.

Sure, local commodity price changes are not predictable. But the point I am making still stands.

If only there weren't other countries that we import goods from. If I drive a car made in Canada, Mexico, China, and the US what do I contribute as a consumer to CO2 production?

But this achievement is less even impressive than a "OK, we've done the US, now let's look at other countries"

The problem is that the US can export it's carbon-intensive industries and even consume new carbon intensive entities produced by other countries. For example, US investors certainly consume a modest fraction of bitcoins mined in China and bitcoins wind-up consuming not just a lot of energy but also form a new source sort of carbon-intensive production.

Solar and wind power are becoming competitive with oil in general but this can never by itself halt hydrocarbon-energy production 'cause as it's relative price drops, there's always a practical use for hydrocarbon-energy close to the source, where pumping it out of the ground is nearly free.

The United States fully intends to reverse course on that and fire up coal plants in order to something something jobs.

The reason it was falling was because of strict emissions standards and a strong EPA, both of which are basically gone.

That's just angsting about short term partisan politics. The trends remain positive for the longer term. Don't let whatever Trump says this week blind you to the long term.

Trends are whatever people make them and many people don't appreciate both the fragility and reversibility of "progress".

Things don't just work out, they get worked out. Telling people to stop worrying, relax and become lazy and complacent is extremely counterproductive.

I'm not saying to "relax and become lazy and complacent". I'm saying that attitude that nothing can be done, because we happen to have a crap president at the moment, is far more counterproductive.

Yes, the EPA is taking a beating. But within my lifetime, the EPA didn't even exist. We did something about it. The EPA can and will be rebuilt. The benefits of solar/wind power are real market benefits, and will triumph, despite the desperate resistance of the coal industry. Etc.

Do you think the United States is capable of reliably thinking about the long term and electing a President that does the same? As long as the planet can be impacted in such a large way by myopic leaders, I don't see what can be done.

We don't need all of them to be sober, responsible thinkers. Just a majority of them.

I was afraid that the new administration would follow through on its promise to increase American coal use and extraction. Fortunately, it has not.

https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/steo/report/coal.php

https://www.utilitydive.com/news/westmoreland-chapter-11-mar...

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/mission-coal-bankruptcy-marks-5...

Wait, are you saying Trump lied to them?

It's not a lie if you believe your own bluster.

Pro-coal government action in other countries has managed to delay and diminish coal retirements there, so I wouldn't consider it impossible that it could happen in the USA too. I'm grateful that the economics are so steeply tilted against coal in the USA and that few politicians appear to have the stomach for large direct subsidies to keep coal plants profitable here.

I was under the impression that we've "done well" because natural gas generation has come online like crazy and proves more economical than coal and INCIDENTALLY cleaner to burn.

I'm not sure how long (absent intelligent policy) til we hit peak natural gas and the balance naturally shifts back towards dirty energy sources.

I.e. policy helps, but economics had as much to do with it

Solar power and large scale battery storage are still dropping in price though - I would assume that by the time we hit peak natural gas, the more dirty energy sources will not be economically attractive as solar will be simply cheaper even without any incentives.

Fracked gas is about as bad as or dirtier than coal.

Source? That sound very unlikely, unless we are talking about CO2 only. But then keep in mind the total CO2 emissions. Coal needs more workers, more machines and more transportation.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-13053040

Yeah - no.

Coal CO2 emissions are almost double natgas' [1]. While it is true that natgas is mainly CH4, a highly potent GG, its atmospheric lifetime is about 8 yrs. Further, the only way the methane would be getting into the air is via leaks in upstream/midstream processes. Today, hardly any of this leaks (EPA estimates leak rate of 1.4%).

Now addressing fracking, the drilling and fracturing process are the cause of little to no environmental impact/damage. The culprit is wastewater injection. This is the unknown, and while the EPA found no evidence of widespread or systemic pollution of water resources due to the fracking process (which includes WWI before the well is capped), it did highlight the potential in several stages of production for contamination to occur.

Now that said, the damage natgas causes, from E&P (especially) to burn, pales in comparison to coal's at any stage.

I think it would be beneficial for HN users to spend some time in the energy industry before making baseless claims.

[1] https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=73&t=11

Baseless? https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-13053040

That study starts with the ridiculous assumption of a 3.6 -7.9% leak rate in fracked gas. By their own admission, the data they used was spotty for leak rates during drill completion, and transport. Study is also outdated (2011) with regards to technological improvements of frack wells.

A leak rate confirmed by NOAA and Lawrence Berkeley: https://cleantechnica.com/2013/12/01/natural-gas-production-...

There's also a defence of the original study https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10584-012-0401-0#...

Even with a lot of political will to increase coal, the economics won't permit it. Natural gas, and now renewables in many circumstances, are the clear economic winners.

And the reason it was falling is natural gas / hydraulic fracking, which emits far less carbon for the energy produced.

The EPA can lay claim to many environmental successes, but this isn't one of them.

The main reason it is falling is because of natural gas substituting for coal in the power sector and that will continue to happen due to the low prices for natural gas.

Not exactly. The sharpest drop happened "thanks to" the financial crisis, and after that, it has been bouncing up and down depending on the year. The overall trend is downwards though. But not enough, by far.

> "quick fixes" like iron seeding, which has just as much a chance of going awry as Australia importing cane toads to deal with their crop insects

The iron particles aren't going to breed and make more iron particles.

> let's just curtail CO2 emissions

So we shouldn't aim for zero (or even less)? Because 'curtail' will never reach zero.

Fucking around with the ocean on a scale that's going to move the needle on CO2 in the atmosphere has a very high probability of serious unintended consequences.

Iron particles won't replicate, but the chemistry of the ocean could change dramatically. We don't know what happens at scale, and we probably don't want to find out.

Find another solution.

> Iron particles [...] Find another solution.

Technically, seeding the ocean with iron particles is a suspension, not a solution. Luckily, the common technique is to use Iron(II) sulfate, which mixed with water does create a solution!

Not doing anything has a certainty of turning the ocean to a mild acid, with disastrous effects that are already becoming visible in coral bleaching and shellfish die offs. And carbon that is already in the atmosphere and not yet dissolved is only going to make it worse.

We are at the point of choosing between what disasters we will suffer, rather than figuring out how to not have a disaster.

Why are we so concerned about ocean acidification from CO2, when past CO2 levels were far higher than now and all of the shellfish species that currently exist lived back then too? Wouldn't it be a good idea to consider the massive quantities of known toxins we pump into the oceans rather than fixating on a red herring?

another [citation needed] for @deialtrous. existing research, such as here: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2951451/

says:

> Bivalves grown under near preindustrial CO2 levels displayed thicker, more robust shells than individuals grown at present CO2 concentrations, whereas bivalves exposed to CO2 levels expected later this century had shells that were malformed and eroded. These results suggest that the ocean acidification that has occurred during the past two centuries may be inhibiting the development and survival of larval shellfish and contributing to global declines of some bivalve populations.

i'm not sure where the claim "all of the shellfish species that currently exist lived back then too" is coming from, although it is correct that CO2 was higher in the past (https://www.skepticalscience.com/co2-higher-in-past.htm)

Look at the study, not just the summary. What does "preindustrial levels" mean? Preindustrial includes over 4 billion years, including years with no life on earth. It includes the absolute highest and absolute lowest levels of atmospheric CO2 ever in the history of the planet. They chose a very low level that would give them the biggest results, and compared it to a hypothetical future level which isn't actually possible to achieve because there's not enough carbon stored in all the fossil fuels on the planet to get close to it if we burned every drop. Yes, record low atmospheric CO2 means shellfish have slightly thicker shells. Does that have an actual benefit for shellfish, much less entire global ecology? Those low CO2 levels are unquestionably bad for other things, like plants, and humans. Shellfish survived previous high CO2 levels just fine, we have the fossils, they existed. They can go ahead and have slightly thinner shells, while we have more plants and more food.

Also, we're talking about coral bleaching and it being blamed on CO2 despite absolutely no evidence, and despite the fact that some coral reefs are seeing normal growth, while others which are in major pollution streams from Asian rivers are seeing bleaching events. But it has to be CO2 because Al Gore says so! Ignore the billions of tons of toxic waste being pumped into the Ocean by China and India and Africa! Europeans and North Americans are the problem with their evil CO2! They need to become poor like everyone else to save the planet!

Your question assumes that the oceans had to have been acidic because CO2 was high. This assumption is wrong.

You don't get acidification as long as CO2 levels change slowly enough that it mixes down to the bottom of the ocean and then gets buffered by calcium bicarbonate being dissolved there and mixing back to the top. But this mixing takes place on the scale of a thousand years. This is no big deal for CO2 level changes taking place over geological time. But it doesn't help shellfish with sudden increases of CO2 taking place on a scale of decades or centuries.

Another geo-engineering idea is to speed up this mixing by pumping air deep down into the oceans. Personally (as a PhD geoscientist), I think that taking CO2 out of the air, compressing it to a liquid, and re-injecting it back into the geologic formations that the oil came from in the first place, is the procedure for getting rid of CO2 that is least likely to screw things up even more. It would just go back where it came from (many caveats, but basically can work).

Start raising a tax on CO2 emissions and at the same time start paying people to put it in the ground. Raise the price on both each year and you could reach equilibrium pretty fast. Should have started 20 years ago, but now is better than never. Maybe start at increasing it at $10 dollars a ton/year. $10/ton is about $4 per barrel of oil. If people saw that sequestering CO2 would pay $100 a ton in a decade the research and excitement around the ideas would be huge and likely encourage many breakthroughs. Isolated solar and wind farms extracting CO2 from the air and pumping it underground could be a huge business.

Edit: $10/ton CO2 is more like $4 a barrel than the $2 I originally wrote. Source: https://pyrolysium.org/how-much-co2-produced-by-burning-one-...

You can say that if you like, but I tend to err on the side of scientific evidence. Even the hysterians most scary claims merely suggest that we "are headed for" ocean PH levels that are "unheard of in 25 million years". And yet the shellfish people are trying to tell us will die from slightly thinner shells have been around for a couple of hundred million years.

Getting worldwide collaboration on c02 emission should be actively worked on, but we can't expect it to succeed. We need other technological strategies to augment diplomatic strategies.

Sure we could curtail CO2 emissions, but that means lowering people's quality of life which is a hard sell.

For first world countries? Sure. For developing countries, we are talking mass starvation and death.

I guess that could be considered "lowering people's quality of life" though.

The global rate of extreme poverty has dropped from 29% 20 years ago to less than 9% today. You need a solid argument for how these actions would reverse the incredible drop in poverty and start us in the other direction, not just the usual factually wrong conventional wisdom.

Extrme poverty is a razors edge from just poverty, and that growth has been driven by magic substances like plastic.

A classic example of economic growth innovation in price sensitive India is the single use detergent sachet- each of those represents an improvement in cleanliness and hygiene for people who couldn’t afford it before.

Now increase the cost of plastic, even marginally and that change reverberates down the product chain.

Everything from medicine packaging, to Saran Wrap to those single use sachets change in price.

However, the correct point is that if we don’t do anything, what will happen to that number? Is it truly conceivable that climate change will not send more people into poverty eventually?

Why do you think the plastic production has much to do with CO2 emissions? While it takes energy to produce the oil and transform it into plastic, if that energy is CO2 free, producing plastic won't put CO2 into the atmosphere. Unless there is some trick to plastic manufacturing that requires blasts CO2 into the air like steel production does that I am not aware of.

> A classic example of economic growth innovation in price sensitive India is the single use detergent sachet- each of those represents an improvement in cleanliness and hygiene for people who couldn’t afford it before.

Maybe I'm not western enough, but I can't understand that thing. How is a single-use detergent sachet an improvement over good ol' powder? Do you have any articles discussing it?

The thing is, it's not just "a razor's edge from just poverty". If you use Hans Rosling's four-part income definition, "just poverty" represents a 4x increase in income from "extreme poverty". For Americans who might make hundreds of dollars a day, the difference between a dollar a day and four dollars a day may not seem like much. But imagine instead what it would be like to change from $100k/year to $400k/year. That's the ratio, but the effects are even greater than that.

It's access to some rudimentary health care. It's maybe a bicycle for transportation. It's a gas stove so you no longer have to use firewood to cook (speaking of deforestation...). It's maybe getting a cash-paying job so you can quadruple your income again.

Well, we've had a massive increase in annual co2 emissions since 20 years ago. I would posit that the decrease in poverty is a direct result in our burning more energy for short term production.

It's not only that, but I think it's a major factor. I'm only extremely slow internet so I can't look up the table, but I think our annual rate of emissions are 30-50% higher than in 1998. Could be wrong there though.

Studies on happiness--as hard as that is to objectively study--show it is more closely related to social status than absolute and total consumption.

In other words, the SUV or sports car apparently has more to do with making people happy by making them look to be of higher social status than the actual utility of those goods.

This is also demonstrated in the South Park episode Smug, which criticizes hybrids. From a public policy perspective, the greatest reduction in CO2 comes from getting people into economical cars (like a 42+mpg --or higher in EU models--Civic) rather than in necessarily Hybrids or electrics which not everyone can afford. The greatest co2/$ reduced is actually going from average to a civic-like car.

Perhaps cultural changes away from materialism, as well as effective public policy may be important in reducing global warming.

But what we get is more "War on Poverty" style bureaucracies and activism which has become a self-perpetuating and wasteful industry of its own.

You can cut emissions even more by eliminating the need for cars, but as that would put a huge dent in the automotive-central industrial complex that is the United State, nothing short of apocalyptic conditions are going to make that happen.

> Studies on happiness--as hard as that is to objectively study--show it is more closely related to social status than absolute and total consumption.

> In other words, the SUV or sports car apparently has more to do with making people happy by making them look to be of higher social status than the actual utility of those goods.

The first statement doesn't imply the second. Low social status can make someone unhappy, but that doesn't imply that consuming more doesn't make them happy.

In fact, I'm not even sure how much "materialism" is to blame for global warming. I know plenty of people who care more about "experiences" than "material goods" -- and in turn massively contribute to global warming by flying a lot. Equally, I don't view someone as wanting to live in a reasonably sized home in suburbia as necessarily materialistic, even though living there can introduce huge CO2 emissions from driving a lot.

For talking about links between wealth and happiness, it matters greatly what absolute level of wealth you are talking about. Within first world countries, the link between between wealth and happiness is weak. But when comparing between countries that are rich versus on the brink of starvation, the correlation is one of the strongest known.

This may seem contradictory makes sense if you think of it in terms of Maslow's hierarchy of needs. If you are at the base level of meeting your physiological needs for food and shelter, wealth directly helps you meet those needs and makes them happier. If you can take care of that, the law and order that brings you safety is again correlated with being in a wealthier society. But beyond that, the correlation vanishes because wealth doesn't give you love, esteem or self-actualization.

I think that's correct afaik, and it reinforces what I was trying to say: most ghg emmissions come from the absolute wealthiest individuals on the planet who do not allocate these resources efficiently with respect to human welfare/pursuit of happiness.

A 4°C increase in temperature will lower people's quality of life a whole lot more than any minor inconvenience you'll have to endure in the short term.

If the government had any backbone at all they'd rally people around the idea of committing to it and getting it done. In World War II people lowered their "quality of life" to support the cause. It can be done.

The government of the people, by the people, for the people.

We get what we vote for, for need to vote for backbones.

That's not exactly how it works, of course. The people did not lower their quality of life to support the cause, per se, they did it to vanquish Those People. An actual enemy to focus on. And a pretty short timeline. Now you'd ask people to declare war on their own quality of life to fight a consequence which is necessarily vague over a timeline that likely exceeds the remaining lifespan of half of everyone alive today.

Good luck.

In the meantime I sure would like to try some mitigation techniques.

This is true, but I fear the time horizons are too long for mass human psychology. WWII was a short term emergency. That seems to be what springs people to action.

Incentives are another way. I still think a global carbon tax agreement would be a good idea: companies work together to implement carbon taxes and cut income taxes or a local equivalent. That helps eliminat the problem of production offshoring to cheaper carbon areas, and gived incentives to alternatives.

Actually making carbon economically unviable with our psychology works, obviously. I really, really hope we can figure out something else cheaper.

Finally, if we had a carbon sequestering method with no major side effects and clear costs, it would be psychologically easier to charge fossil burning industries and activities the cost of the CO2 emitted. Eg a fee of $30 per ton if that's the cost of sequestering. Of course, you'd need a way to measure the carbon impact of the sequestering, to make sure that process wasn't indirectly emitting carbon.

Reducing would also be highly useful, and I hope we will, but enpirically we don't seem to be built for it without some mechanism like what I described above. It's terrifying and dispiriting and I hope we figure out a way to work around our broken mass psychology.

Can't edit, but should have been "countries work together to implement carbon taxes", not companies.

Do all methods of curtailing CO2 emissions lower people's quality of life?

Yes or they don’t work.

I’ve spent way to much time as lay man trying to penetrate Econ speak to get the issue, but the crux seems to be this:

Currently markets and goods don’t price the cost of economic damage into products.

So plastics are cheap as hell because they don’t reflect clean up costs.

This means we have plastic straws which are so cheap on a per unit basis, that you can sell 100s in a single bundle.

Saran Wrap, packaging plastic, tooth brushes, phones, pens, toothpicks, mugs, wires, buttons, and billions of other items are extremely cheap.

Now imagine if ALL of them went up by a small amount.

Then recall, that for the developing world the difference between a 0.01 cent plastic cost and 0.05, is an increase in packaging cost for cheap goods like single use detergent sachets, or single use shampoo packets.

Of course, this will directly reduce usage of those goods, which is the intended purpose, but the fact is that those goods being cheap means people can grow faster without worrying about the issues which arise.

Carbon curtailment is fundamentally energy consumptive. We will spend more energy to capture carbon. We would have to create a system which is carbon negative in itself (after power and maintenance costs are calculated), and then pay for the whole thing,

Taxing goods to price externalities is probably the most efficient way to achieve it.

So if I buy a car that has much better gas mileage, my quality of life is lowered?

If I buy a product that has less packaging, so there's less waste, my quality of life is lowered?

If I take up bicycling, and as a result drive less, is my quality of life lowered?

If the hotel I stay at starts using containers of soap instead of single-use packets, is my quality of life lowered?

1) a car that truly gets fantastic gas mileage is small and aerodynamic to the point it loses many practical features of a traditional car

2) If the packaging results in greater spoilage, reduces stimulated demand, or is more expensive to produce than cheap plastic

3) more time to do things, less ability to transport equipment and goods

4) you're being moronic at this point

Those are all options and choices for a small fraction of humans at what is effectively the top of the pyramid.

In each case, those are choices made out of ZERO economic pressure. You can do that TODAY, without the need of us discussing carbon capture costs.

However, most people DOMT exercise that choice, either through necessity or preference.

For all of those people, an increase in oil prices mean that they have to choose between working and living in an affordable place. It means more Money out of the monthly budget which is not available for other things.

This is economically defined as a reduction in their quality of life.

Do consider that, For most of humanity, food, water, medicine, clothes are decisions separated by razor sharp margins. Owning a car is a distant dream.

Simply - If the cost of everything went up, and you thus has less disposable income to use, then your quality of life by definition has dropped.

Only based on the idea of QoL that comes from economics, where it's measured by money exchanged. That's the less important definition, IMO, just a poor approximation of real QoL.

Why should we sacrifice the welfare of human beings to prevent jellyfish from taking over the ocean?

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