Why We Stink at Tackling Climate Change
nautil.us
nautil.us
So what can you do about it?
You can get a job fighting climate change! Solar, wind, batteries, and EVs are now competitive against fossil-based incumbents, so now the biggest issue is scaling them up. That means tons and tons of problem solving, which means great software and engineering jobs and startup opportunities!
If you think about it, the switch to renewables means we need to deal with situations where the sun isn't shining and the wind isn't blowing, yet still keep the lights on. That means you have to build in a ton of storage and load control and electrify as much as you can (transportation, heating, etc.). All that new infrastructure needs to have good communication and analysis, which means software! Something like half of the impact of the energy transition will be done through software optimizing the deployment and operation of clean energy assets.
I've posted about this many times[1], so please check out my previous comments on links for finding climate impact work. It's mostly about (A) browsing sector-specific conferences and looking at the expo and speakers' companies for ones that interest you, and (B) showing up to energy meetups just to meet people working in the space. If you're in the bay area, I run a calendar of all the clean energy-related events (https://bayareaenergyevents.com), so I encourage you to just start showing up :)
My favorite climate change joke is, "They say we won't act until it's too late... Luckily, it's too late!"
Why not turn the fatalism and anxiety you feel into a paycheck?
I don't want to sound mean, but the only anxiety I am beginning to feel lately is that more and more people are turning to fighting a gas that all of us exhale, some of them fanatically and violently, and they seem to ultimately agree that we must wind down the economy to beat it. I don't want to lose everything that gave us wealth, progress, medical breakthroughs and freedom for the sole reason that some people are afraid of a warmer climate.
So, what do I do about it?
The energy transition is a bigger economic opportunity that the Internet (Bloomberg estimates it at something like $10+ trillion). So you doing nothing is more money for me. Thanks I guess?
So where exactly do you think this money is coming from? It'll come out of your pocket (and mine) due to laws that force us to invest in new technology.
I noticed you didn't really address my core assumption that you don't believe in climate change. So you don't think it's a problem, right? Can you talk a little more about from where you derive that conclusion? It's so rare nowadays to hear someone straight up deny climate change is a problem when there's so much scientific and economic analysis saying the opposite.
So do I, I have no issues with that. I bought a Tesla Model S 2 years ago because I don't like noise and pollution and it's a cool car. This has nothing to do with buying "to save the planet" or mandated CO2 reductions and EV quotas though, which is what is coming soon and I oppose.
> I noticed you didn't really address my core assumption that you don't believe in climate change.
Why do you make such assumptions? To discredit and offend someone you are discussing with?
> It's so rare nowadays to hear someone straight up deny climate change
It can't be so rare if you accuse people of doing this all the time.
Solar energy doesn't have to worry about entropy: energy from the sun is beating down on us whether we tap it or not. The money will come from the fact that energy produces value. Renewables have been progressing over the past decades to compete with existing carbon infrastructure. To suggest renewables are only hoisted up by policy is to disregard that the oil industry is heavily subsidized & the states currently has a president who will claim "clean beautiful coal"
It is indeed magical thinking. "$200,000 worth of Tesla batteries, which collectively weigh over 20,000 pounds, are needed to store the energy equivalent of one barrel of oil. A barrel of oil, meanwhile, weighs 300 pounds and can be stored in a $20 tank. Those are the realities of today’s lithium batteries. Even a 200% improvement in underlying battery economics and technology won’t close such a gap."
Meanwhile the battery industry currently uses 42 percent of global cobalt production, a critical metal for Lithium-ion cells. 70% comes from the Congo where kids do their bit against 'climate change'.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/cobalt-children-mining-democrat...
The point isn't to wind down the economy to beat it, it's to find alternate ways of keeping the economy going while beating it. Green energy solutions are not winding down the economy, if anything it is supplementing it.
Off-topic in the context of climate change, but that's an oversimplification at best. Not enough CO2 in the body will kill you just as readily as too much.
There were some/articles studies that were putting part of the “blame” for the recent Syrian Civil War on climate change (as far as I remember increased aridity caused by climate change had forced many rural Syrians onto the cities where they couldn’t all find jobs, hence the conflict) and as such I’m pretty sure that future climate change-induced wars will take care of our “wealth, progress and medical breakthroughs” unless we manage to somehow slow the rate of change.
And most transport and heating does not use electricity, so the problem is actually worse than 27.6% of normal supply.
I think climate change is the biggest current threat to humanity, and almost nobody is taking it as seriously as they should. Even the ongoing protests in London are a massive under-reaction. But how many of those environmentalists actually support a solution that isn't "wind down the economy?" Germany began a complete shutdown their nuclear power plants in response to a reactor containment failure in Japan that killed nobody directly, and even with the worst case assumptions, statistically caused few hundred excess cancer deaths at most. This is 0% of the deaths that will be caused when one of the alternative "wind down the economy" or "uncontrolled temperature rise" plans triggers World War 3.
Solar and wind plus storage is way cheaper than nuclear (and that gap is widening over time, not shrinking), so there's not much reason to include it in a pitch for getting a job fighting climate change unless the audience is primarily PhD physicists and researchers.
Here I disagree. We're trying to colonise Mars, but at the same time believe a somewhat warmer climate is an existential threat to humanity. How is that logical?
Climate change will not destroy humanity, civilisation, or even the planet. We will adapt easily. Look to the 20th century for examples of actual threats to humanity...
> This is 0% of the deaths that will be caused when one of the alternative "wind down the economy" or "uncontrolled temperature rise" plans triggers World War 3
Exactly, only that these aren't the only possible triggers for a WW3.
That’s an interesting non sequitur. How does the potential for colonization of Mars say anything about how big of a threat climate change is?
I'll have to write it in a more straightforward manner, since it's apparently a non sequitur if you don't understand it: if we are optimistic about living on a planet as hostile as Mars, how can we be pessimistic about surviving a temperature increase of a few degrees on Earth?
Going to Mars has no deadline, and barely any stakes. If it proves practically unachievable, it’s a failed dream, or maybe just an indefinitely delayed dream; no big deal. Earth is already inhabited by millions of species, and if it becomes even one percent less hospitable, that’s an existential crisis.
No, it's not. This is just the typical scaremongering and dramatisation I'm getting so tired of. Every populated region on Earth becomes much more than one percent less hospitable every winter and there is no crisis, especially not an existential one. We can cope very well with minor changes in weather and climate and we will. Stop obsessing about climate doom scenarios, it's silly.
No, winter is part of the baseline. Life has evolved to to survive during winter, and societies have been built to handle it. We do not have ecosystem collapses or widespread climate refugees every winter. Permanent and unprecedented changes cause completely different problems than a few months of winter.
So I've had plenty of experiences with environmentalists over my life and heard many crazy stories, e.g. one of her friends really thought that honey is harmless for children but sugar essentially poison.
Despite all this, even the most radical and craziest person I've ever heard of does not fit the description of an environmentalist that you attribute to this subculture as a whole. There are radicals like VHEMT but these are in a ridiculously small minority. The vast majority of all environmentalist believe that it is perfectly possible for a large number of humans on earth to life in harmony together with nature while sustaining high standards of living. It's all about reasonable consumption and studying ecological lifetime calculations of products.
Where I grew up, Swabia in Germany, is a pretty good example of reasonable & realistic environmental politics. I used to make fun of many of her claims, proudly eating my bacon sandwich and visiting by plane, but it turns out in retrospective that she and her friends were right about most of the issues that most of the things my mother has been fighting for are now in the party programs of all major parties.
So you don't care about it because you don't care about the people as well as species that are already impacted by climate change? Just because you're afraid of having to change your lifestyle? What you should do about it is maybe stop freaking out first about your lifestyle, progress doesn't require screwing climate....
Then a good way to proceed would probably to study why we are all freaking out. The basics for why too much CO2 is a problem are actually quite simple and might be accessible to you experimentally if you so choose.
(What the exact consequences are is more complicated and we have uncertainties on the results, so that might be harder.)
edit: (While some of the models are actually open-source and you can download them, running and understanding them in a useful manner is a full-time job.)
Most distributed battery storage (Stem, Advanced Microgrid, etc.) and building energy management companies (Carbon Lighthouse, Siemens, etc.) have software divisions that focus on data analysis tools for their customers (think energy dashboards and reports). Also, most grid operators (CAISO, etc.), utilities (PG&E, etc.), and utility vendors (AutoGrid, etc.) have software and data analysis divisions that focus on figuring out how we can keep the grid running while ramping up renewables. Finally, regulators (Dept of Energy, public utility commissions, city managers, etc.) are in desperate need of software and data science talent to help them understand all this new energy advancements that are going on (often at policy hearings utilities are saying one technical thing, distributed energy companies are saying another technical thing, and the panel of regulators have no idea what the technical implications of all this back-and-forth is).
Hope that helps! In addition to the (A) and (B) suggestions in my parent comment, you can try searching typical software job boards (Indeed, etc.) for your language of choice + keywords (clean energy, solar, renewables, smart grid, climate change, etc.). For example, "python solar" in San Francisco returns a bunch of results on indeed.com.
As in, are there predictions in temperature that have been made based on current models that we will hit by 2050 that we can measure in 2050 to see if the models are correct? Have such predictions been made before for, say, 2020 or 2030?
I don't dispute climate change, but my belief in it rests on authorities telling me it's true. It's not based on anything I myself could look at. I'd love to hear some predictions made now or in the past that we could observe whether they're true in the future.
Graph: https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/02/SPM.05-01-1....
Report: https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar5/syr/
It basically shows that if you assume we keep pulling carbon out of the ground (e.g. extracting and burning fossil fuels) we'll end up at +4.5C increase. That kind of change is likely an human extinction-level event (e.g. https://xkcd.com/1379/). The Paris agreements call for a max of +2C, which means we can only pull up about 25% of proven fossil reserves.
So we're going to have to leave 75% of proven fossil reserves in the ground. There's actually a term for this called the "Carbon Bubble", and it's expected to decimate the oil majors and sovereign oil and gas since most of their proven reserves on their balance sheets are going to end up being stranded. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_bubble
To nitpick, I think you mean burn them. Oil into plastics has minimal emissions.
If we had the scenario where we told world governments and corporations that the tipping point of no return is in one month, and if we don't do anything the planet is dead in 50 years, what could we do? If we said (just making these up): 1) limit flights to weekdays; 2) limit cruise ships [2]; 3) companies must allow remote work to reduce commutes. (I'm sure someone can and will come up with better examples). Can you imagine the blowback from airlines, etc? I imagine they will find some way to justify not participating, even though it literally means the death of the planet.
We have the technology and the know-how, it just isn't stronger than the pathological greed of corporations.
[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/climatechange/2009/05/911_contra... [2] https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2018/11/15/18096925/cruise-env...
It's sickening to know that rainforests are being bulldozed off by their hundreds of square kilometers every single day. And it's even more sickening that many think 'reforestation' is going to help this cause.
Rainforests are an ecosystem with thousands of different plants and trees, which contribute to a healthy and flourishing environment. Thinking that you can replace this with a few different species is not the way to approach this problem.
We really have to start looking at these issues from an individual point of view. We have to consider the fact that it might be our individual behavior that's going to inspire change in others.
World's Elite has proven time and time again that they do not care for the planet, not unless there is big money involved.
Eliminating plant and animal diversity is dangerous for various reasons, but has little to do with climate change.
As to deforestation as a mechanism of CO2 removal vis a vis climate change, there are more trees now than there have ever been.
> Thanks to our cultural evolution, we have cities, houses, and indoor plumbing. As a result, to the benefit of our health, we learned to use toilets. A primate with such behavioral flexibility, capable of going against millennia of natural selection, is nearly miraculous, yet an everyday event. Take heart. An originally arboreal primate species capable of being toilet-trained should also be capable of becoming planet-trained. In Aesop’s tale, remember, the tortoise triumphs. Because the hare and the tortoise are both part of ourselves, they can only win or lose together, which makes it all the more important that we get our hare-brained selves under control.
Personally, I find these heartening perspectives better than the pessimistic ones. And I have found that presenting such views to less informed friends makes them more motivated to take action and limit their consumption rather than the doom and gloom perspective.
I dunno. I for one is getting a little tired of all these optimistic endings. It almost sounds like - hey, nothing to worry about, the problem will solve itself. Renewables are getting cheaper and if you just skip one day a week of eating meat then everything will be just fine.
And then you look at the PPM chart and it just keeps going up.
Social science is saying that scaring people doesn't work and I don't understand why. Don't we have the loss aversion? [0]
This situation has occurred earlier in history, an example being the attitude towards nuclear power. While some point at the accidents in Three Miles Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima as examples of why nuclear power is the spawn of Satan and should be banished from this earth, others see those same accidents in the light of the stalled development of nuclear technology due to the actions of those who do everything to stall those developments leading to ancient reactors being kept on-line because their successors have been stalled or cancelled.
Over the next 50 years these 3 things will occur:
1) Only electric vehicles on the ground, air and water
2) All meat for consumption grown in the lab, no farm animals raised
3) No coal plants
Won't this eliminate all major types of pollution?
If at this point, the planet still keeps warming? What are "they" going to blame it on then?
It's quite easy to see this is where technology is going. But yet I never hear anything about it. Just we have 10/12 years until we all die.
Also please don't just down vote me. I'm interested in knowing if there are cycles in warming due to the earth or the sun. I have come across youtube videos and articles that we are in-line for another ice age. I just wonder, if we'll ever get to a peak warm, will it reverse and we'll start cooling rapidly?
Current anthropogenic emissions may be causing melting of glaciers and warming for decades or hundreds of years to come. Chances are "they" will continue to accurately blame the 20th and 21st century emissions into the 22nd and 23rd.
I think that because I remember the scare of the ozone layer back in the 80s, early 90s.
Now according this article [0], in 2060 it will be completely healed.
Why can't it be said for climate change? I personally don't understand any negative connotations. I can only think it will be a positive outcome.
[0]: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/nov/05/ozone-la...
And if you look at the plots eg on page ES.23 you can see the expected effects of the Kigali amendment of 2016, where the replacement gases used instead of the previously stopped ones with large climate effects were also banned.
This is the only actually positive thing I've ever seen in the context of climate change. There are at least 0.3°C saved temperature increase until 2100 due to this change.
Of course the source of that problem was simpler and easier to fix, but still, this makes me a little happier. How can we repeat this success?
[0] https://ozone.unep.org/sites/default/files/Assessment_Panel/...
On living beings, most of them exhale CO2. Those who are already yelling to have fewer children (https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/jul/12/want-to-...) will go one step further.
This would be true AFAICT if we somehow managed to eat without any CO2 emissions. But agriculture is a huge driver of CO2 emissions and so are logistics, electricity for cooking etc.. So while the CO2 we exhale comes from the atmosphere through plants, animals and so on, we inevitably cause a lot of CO2 emissions as a side-effect in the process.
Even if we accept this as a "reasonable" assumption there is another huge flaw with this statistic. The assumption is that your children will be average polluters. So no matter how much you reduce your own CO2 footprint your children will always produce more CO2 than you. Except if you teach your children to reduce their CO2 footprint by not driving a car you reduce your CO2 footprint by 25% and the CO2 footprint of your children too. Your footprint including descendants goes down from 70 tons to 52.5. A 17.5 ton decrease!
If you do everything in this chart except not having children (assuming an electric car) your CO2 footprint goes down by 38% down from 70 tons to 44 tons. Notably this requires almost no changes in lifestyle. Just switching to renewables is enough.
This chart is harmful, it only serves to make people feel helpless and not take action against climate change.
Gas heating ? Methane unleashed ? Ice-free arctic ? ...
More importantly, if we go beyond about +2 degrees C, it's likely that positive feedbacks will take over and add several more degrees, with no more help from us. Feedbacks include ice cap melt (so less sunlight is reflected away), CO2 and methane emissions from melting permafrost, and forest fires brought on by drought.
We know this is likely, because you're right about those cycles. In geological history, there have been times when orbital variations caused a small initial heating, and shortly after we see a big rise in greenhouse gases and temperature.
That's why we're worried about fixing things really soon, before that kicks in.
(We are not currently in one of those natural warming cycles, btw.)
> If at this point, the planet still keeps warming? What are "they" going to blame it on then?
Who is "they"? I think you are a troll.
https://www.amazon.com/Climate-Wars-Fight-Survival-Overheats...
It will definitely change geopolitics for the foreseeable future.
That's it. I'm gonna call it "global heating" from now on.
But really, Republicans, though.
> Earth is warming mostly due to human activity
> Republicans (Boomer/GenX/Millennial): 18/2x/36
> Democrats: 75
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/05/14/many-republ...