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Comment by diafygi | Hacker News Reader

Howdy rayiner, our paths have crossed several times on HN regarding mass surveillance and privacy, and I always mostly respected your points of view, even if different from my own. However, I'm really worried about this reply on climate change. So many of your arguments can be easily refuted or aren't relevant. I'm worried you've fallen prey to climate denier FUD traps (or worse your profile is being used by shills).

Could we have a conversation offline? I'd like to learn more about your situation and what has brought you to this reply. Feel free to send me an email and we can schedule a time to talk.

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What a bizarre, patronising, and dishonest reply this is.

rayiner has simply correctly pointed out that the markets follow consumer preference and that those preferences place low value on renewable energy & sustainability.

No one is calling man-made climate change into question.

I agree with his post, more or less. It could probably have been delivered in a less confrontational manner. rayiner has often made posts with lawyer style arguments defending questionable behavior by governments and corporations. In this case he is deflecting blame from the companies that originate the carbon emissions saying that they're just fulfilling a free market demand, as if it's impossible for companies to behave ethically without government or consumer coercion.

If you disagree with one of my points, please reply here so people can have the benefit of the public debate. I’m certainly no climate change denier (I worked at Northwestern’s environmental law clinic, though my focus there was water pollution).

Okie dokie, replies below. However, I still would like to learn more about from where your views originated, so I hope you don't mind if I email you.

> Blaming the “companies” and “lobbyists” is such a cop-out. The companies are just giving people what they want. If people demanded a shift to a climate friendly lifestyle tomorrow, Exxon would have no choice but to follow suit.

As we've seen with Russian propaganda efforts, the firehose of falsehoods can be extremely effective at keeping people in the dark or convincing them of something not in their best interest. People demanding a shift requires education around the topic, and Exxon literally prevented research on the topic from coming out for decades.

> Looking at the major trends of the last several decades. People moving to brand new sunbelt suburbs where they drive everywhere in SUVs. Buying disposable clothes, electronics, etc., made in China and shipped over the ocean. Even the token attempts at being environmentally conscious are ridiculous. I go to Whole Foods here in Maryland and everything is grown in f—king California. It’s a joke.

I'm very confused what point you're trying to make here. That systems or not optimizing for environmental impact? Of course they aren't. They are optimizing based on the incentives they are following. People move to suburbs and drive SUVs to feel safer and more wealthy. People move to the sunbelt because the winter sucks. People buy disposable clothes and stuff is shipped from China because it's cheaper to do so. It's really expensive to grow produce in Maryland, so you ship it from California.

> Nobody is willing to make the lifestyle changes it would take to have a real impact on climate change. And it’s not unique to the US. Canada and Australia have similar carbon footprints per capita, suggesting it’s more a combination of material wealth and low density. Blaming corporations instead of the people for all that is asinine.

You're right, asking someone to give up their lifestyle sucks. However, you're equating changing lifestyle with fighting climate change. That's where we disagree. The goal of fighting climate change isn't to get people to change their lifestyles, it's to stop sequestered carbon from entering the carbon cycle. One way to do that is to ask people to stop being so excessive (e.g. changing lifestyle), but nowadays we have so many more options.

Most climate change solutions nowadays start with the assumption that we shouldn't ask people to change lifestyles, and just deploy carbon-free infrastructure that is a drop-in replacement for existing carbon-intense infrastructure. Solar, Wind, EVs, batteries, biofuels, etc. all never ask you to stop buying disposable shirts from China. All they do is replace the power that powers the factory and the fuel that is used to ship it to you with sources that don't add carbon the carbon cycle. So that when you are living your life in your disposable shirt and eating your California avocados, you're not contributing to climate change anymore.

> And what are our best and brightest from Stanford, etc., doing? Figuring out carbon recapture? No, working at Google figuring out how to more effectively advertise disposable consumer goods that are shipped over from China, used a few times, and shipped back to China for disposal.

We'll I'm just the best and brightest from UT-Austin, so not Stanford, but I did make the career switch from traditional tech to cleantech. And every time one of these threads come up I try to post that you, too, can make the switch from Google to cleantech. However, every time that happens, there are pessimists like yourself who shit all over my call for help. That's okay though, the capitalist in me kind of sees this as an opportunity. The fewer competitors I have in my particular niche, the more money I make. So I guess I should be partially thanking you for slowing down the climate change tech enlightenment :)

The US per-capita power consumption is 10kw. That's 10kw of continuous draw every minute, every day. And that's not household use, that's per capital.. so a household of 4 is using about 1 megawatt-hours /day.

Where do you plan to find that in your non-lifestyle change world? Solar? That's 8000sqft of installed solar with the highest efficiency panels. That needs to be coupled with hundreds of kwh storage. Total cost : hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Good luck on that.

The numbers cited here seemed high to me, so I checked them. Primary energy consumption in the US[1] ~1 * 10 ^ 20 Joules. Divided by population and number of seconds in a year[2] is about 10000 Joules per person-second, so about 10kW per person. A kilowatt of peak solar power requires about 8 square meters of panels[3]. Since the sun doesn't shine all the time and you don't get peak output all the time 750 square meters per person doesn't seem terribly unrealistic.

That being said, there is a lot of space where nobody lives in the US. There are some 28000 square meters per person in the US. Dedicating about 3% of that to solar panels doesn't seem impossible.

Some energy saving is also possible without changing the average lifestyle too much. Insulating homes helps quite a bit. Electric cars are more efficient that gas cars.

[1] https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/?page=us_energy_home

[2] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=10%5E20+joules+%2F+(3....

[3] https://www.quora.com/How-much-solar-energy-can-be-tapped-in...

>Since the sun doesn't shine all the time and you don't get peak output all the time 750 square meters per person doesn't seem terribly unrealistic.

At current prices, that much PV capacity would cost around 25 trillion dollars. That price doesn't include any storage capacity.

The climate is changing far too rapidly for us to hope for science fiction solutions. We need a major reduction in emissions now, which means both a vast increase in renewable production and a vast reduction in overall consumption.

You only need a third of that to get the same amount of electricity out of them as by burning 10 kW of fossil fuels. Spread over 20 to 30 years that's suddenly not so much anymore. How much does the US spend on energy each year now? How much to secure the imports?

You forgot that this is primary energy consumption you two are writing about. 10 kW of primary energy consumption if replaced with solar requires only about a third of that to yield the same results since about two thirds are heat losses when converting fossil fuels to useable energy.

Jesus, that's incredible. If we regard modern automation as effectively replacing slave labor, that's the equivalent of having 100 human slaves doing hard physical graft on behalf of each and every person 24 hours a day.

> Where do you plan to find that in your non-lifestyle change world?

Nuclear.

You mean that nucular radioactive stuff emitted by my microwave? Not in my backyard.

> As we've seen with Russian propaganda efforts, the firehose of falsehoods can be extremely effective at keeping people in the dark or convincing them of something not in their best interest. People demanding a shift requires education around the topic, and Exxon literally prevented research on the topic from coming out for decades.

We have the research now, but people aren't changing their behavior.

> I'm very confused what point you're trying to make here. That systems or not optimizing for environmental impact? Of course they aren't. They are optimizing based on the incentives they are following. People move to suburbs and drive SUVs to feel safer and more wealthy. People move to the sunbelt because the winter sucks. People buy disposable clothes and stuff is shipped from China because it's cheaper to do so. It's really expensive to grow produce in Maryland, so you ship it from California.

And that is what causes climate change. Exxon is just giving people what they want. The blame rests with people who want a lifestyle that's incompatible with avoiding climate change, not the companies that simply are feeding consumer demand.

> All they do is replace the power that powers the factory and the fuel that is used to ship it to you with sources that don't add carbon the carbon cycle. So that when you are living your life in your disposable shirt and eating your California avocados, you're not contributing to climate change anymore.

We don't have time to develop all that technology: https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-why-the-ipcc-1-5c-repor.... According to new, revised estimates, having a 50/50 chance of limiting tempeature increaes to 1.5C leaves us with 14 years of carbon emissions at current levels. After which point the world economy has to hit zero carbon emissions. Meanwhile, carbon emissions are still going up: https://www.climatechangenews.com/files/2017/03/238eb46742db.... From 2000-2015, China added an amount of CO2 output that exceeds the entire US output. China continues to grow, while India is approaching where China was before 2000 and may have a similarly explosive growth in CO2 emissions in the next two decades.

Not only is there no solution that allows us to keep living the way we are living while averting climate change. There never was. Even if we had listened to the hippies and cut U.S. emissions by half starting in the 1960s, China's growth alone would have completely wiped out that savings multiple times over.

> We have the research now, but people aren't changing their behavior.

They are. Clean energy mandates are being passed in many states; climate change and the Green New Deal is a front and center topic in the Democratic presidential primary race; the Paris Climate Agreement passed on a global scale; China is electrifying transportation and building as much solar, wind, and nuclear as fast a possible; India is phasing out coal as fast a possible; and on and on.

A person as an individual isn't changing their behavior to a large extent, but people in aggregate are.

> And that is what causes climate change.

No, it's not. Again, climate change is caused by injecting sequestered carbon into the carbon cycle. Previously, it just so happened that the act of driving your SUV around did exactly that. However, more and more that's not true. As we electrify transportation and clean the grid, the act of driving around becomes less and less what causes climate change.

> We don't have time to develop all that technology

We already have the technology, it's just a matter of deploying it. Every auto manufacturer is releasing major electric models by next year. Clean energy generation in the U.S. is set to surpass coal generation this year. China is electrifying transportation and switching to clean energy (including nuclear) as fast as possible. India is building more solar than ever and accelerating that deployment.

As I'm sure you've seen, my favorite climate change joke is, "They say we won't act until it's too late... Luckily, it's too late!"

Climate change is my generation's great challenge. If we lose, we die. So, many of us are fighting with everything we have. Some are trying to get people to change behavior, some are trying to make drop-in replacements. But none of us are giving up. It sounds like you've already given up.

FYI, HN is limiting reply depth, so I doubt I can reply more. Please email me back if you can.

> Exxon is just giving people what they want. The blame rests with people who want a lifestyle that's incompatible with avoiding climate change, not the companies that simply are feeding consumer demand.

Well, Purdue Pharma is also only giving people what they want. In and of itself, that doesn't mean much.

Exxon is doing significantly more than just giving people what they want [1], as do many (most?) of the big dinosaurs of the established industries that currently make the world go round. Do we need to go into the vast efforts at influencing the public that such entities expend in order to maintain their domination and wealth? You have vastly more expertise on this subject, so I wouldn't be able to tell you anything new.

The world does need to advance, but advance to where? Thermodynamically, it must slow down or it will overheat and crash into the ceiling.

> Not only is there no solution that allows us to keep living the way we are living while averting climate change. There never was. Even if we had listened to the hippies and cut U.S. emissions by half starting in the 1960s, China's growth alone would have completely wiped out that savings multiple times over.

You don't know that, and it's a false dilemma anyway. People change their lifestyles all the time in response to their economic environment and incentives, as they have been doing throughout history.

I tend to listen more to the experts when they say something is possible. When they tell me in no uncertain terms that a very important problem has no solution, I listen more to the kids.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/23/climate/exxon-global-warm...

If anyone here needs an intervention it’s graycat

Doerr and Khosla probably soured SV on cleantech

Do not assume there are only two sides to this. There are those of us who are perfectly aware of the effects that humans have on climate change, while not really caring if the planet is destroyed or not.

I am not responsible for the planet and saving it. So please don't try to guilt me into taking responsibility for "saving" the planet. I've already done my part by not having children. It is up to parents and people who care enough about the species to save the planet and humanity. I'll be dead in a decade and not really bothered by this impending doom.

Planets, Nations and species die every day, given the vastness of the universe. It's admirable to try to save something, but the willingness to do so must come from within, free from external collective pressure mixed with shaming and guilt.

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