Hacker News Reader

Comment by alexpotato | Hacker News Reader

This reminds me of a conversation I had with the AC repairman last year.

Backstory: we have an old AC unit that uses freon.

The repairman mentioned that freon is no longer available for new AC units. I asked if you could still buy freon and he said yes, existing supplies were grandfathered in.

I then commented that the price of freon must have sky-rocketed and he said: "yes, it did for a while but then it became cheaper to just get a new unit rather than fill up an old unit with freon."

I would imagine that as the price of IPv4 addresses crosses some threshold, people will just start going to IPv6.

As Michael Crichton once said in one of his books: "There was no subsidy that caused people to switch from horses to cars". They were just cheaper and easier to operate.

View on HN

I find the CFC situation to be rather interesting because it not only made it illegal to intentionally release them into the atmosphere (which would, if anything, just cause people to release them from things like old fridges and ACs even more frequently so as not to be caught with the "prohibited substance"), but by stopping production and keeping it legal to continue to use, created a market for recovering/reselling/reusing that helps to keep them out of the atmosphere.

It's the difference between saying "it's bad for the environment so don't release it", and "it's rare and valuable so don't let it escape, but recover, resell, and reuse" --- not everyone believes in global warming or cares as much about the former, but the latter is a powerful motivation.

Can we do that with carbon? It's rare and valuable, let's try to contain it as much as possible! We're basically releasing TONS of what is basically black gold to the sky!!

Unfortunately coal is not rare and not very valuable and pricing in the massive externalities to make it so is "bad for jobs".

If carbon was placed under a cap and trade system, where it had a price, and entities which emit CO2 pay for that privilege, then that externality won't be so external, those who do the most damage pay the highest price, and those who can perform carbon capture and storage can realise a revenue stream.

> I would imagine that as the price of IPv4 addresses crosses some threshold, people will just start going to IPv6.

Instead we see "carrier grade NAT" and I end up with IP addresses like 10.X.X.X on some of my cellular devices...

'If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.' -- Henry Ford

A mix of the two seems more likely -- ipv6-only to the device, with nat64/dns64 used to handle ipv4 traffic.

T-Mobile has been ipv6-only for devices supporting 464xlat since 2014.

Henry Ford didn't actually say that, though it was in line with his thinking, perhaps.

https://hbr.org/2011/08/henry-ford-never-said-the-fast

The article didn't say Ford didn't say the phrase but that there's no evidence Ford ever said that. So, the truth is (as with many historical things) that no one really knows the truth.

Stackexchange already did that line of thinking (and cite this article). Enlightening comments. https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/37637/did-henry...

I know someone who was hoarding banned freon and selling it on the side. The government eventually had caught on that people were doing it, but they also understood that punishing people even harder for selling it wouldn't work. So instead they started to provide incentives to convert refrigeration units to not use that kind of freon. It's been a few years so not sure how effective that was, but I thought it was interesting.

See ebay listings for how you can buy R-12 by stating you are a reseller:

https://www.ebay.com/itm/R12-Refrigerant-12-Virgin-Pure-R-12...

>An EPA certificate is required to purchase R12 Refrigerant "OR" a statement saying you are purchasing this for "Resale Only". The "Resale Only" statement can be in the form of an e-mail.

Pretty easy for Joe Handyman to buy.

Yeah I like the strong warning of needing a certification then the "OR just say it's for resale" part.

In my case it was in a different (European) country. I think they may be slightly more strict there.

Yes, it's easy to buy, but as I mentioned in another comment here, the price compels everyone to be cautious in using it and not let it escape. You can even find plenty of DIY videos on YouTube of people building their own refrigerant recovery machines (basically a compressor and a tank), so I'd say everyone recognises the importance of not just venting it into the atmosphere.

The last time I heard, the EPA certificate is itself very easy to obtain too; the fee is around $20, and it's a short open-book multiple-choice exam. Not really a hindrance considering that a gauge set and vacuum pump, which is obligatory if you intend to do anything with refrigeration, costs far more.

This is how I feel climate change will be tackled (whether too late or not). It will just become cheaper to go green and being green is just a side effect.

Yet initiatives like Carbon tax have been shot down (Australia) by big money, putting dangerous delays into the schedule.

I think carbon taxes are the opposite of what the OP is talking about. Carbon taxes are artificial barriers to using fossil fuels.

On the other hand, when technology improves so that electric cars cost less per mile than gasoline cars, people won't necessarily buy them to be green, they'll buy them because they're a cheaper form of transportation that happens to be greener.

Same with wind and solar power. When a solar farm on 10 acres of land can produce more energy than a coal plant on the same 10 acres, then power companies will build them instead of coal - not to be "green", but to make more money.

Fair point, and an important one!

As we're running out of time we ideally need both to happen, but it's good that green tech is becoming increasingly more financially viable. As a little gem, just about all reports from the SA Tesla battery installation make for simply fantastic reading.

Cars are a red herring. Even gasoline and diesel car aren't really contributing that much to world pollution compared to the real culprits, such as ocean liners and huge cargo ships. These ships alone pollute more than all the cars on Earth.

What do you think about going after the things that are actually harmful, instead of following a red herring? I mean, sure, cars should of course be dealt with also, but if you really want to lower carbon emissions fast, then shouldn't we go for the big fish first?

> These ships alone pollute more than all the cars on Earth.

Do you have a link to figures that show this?

I was intrigued - seems it could be because ships use heavy oil

https://www.quora.com/Is-it-true-that-the-15-biggest-ships-i...

> https://www.quora.com/Is-it-true-that-the-15-biggest-ships-i....

Thanks for the link. So it isn't carbon emissions that exceed those of cars but SOx and NOx (which are still a problem).

Carbon taxes aren't artificial barriers. There are real costs to emitting carbon. Putting a price on negative externalities helps align incentives properly so the people making the coal plant have to consider the full costs of their actions.

Why not talk to the coal plant owner directly? Or how about the other 100(!) private citizens living around the world who control the companies that are responsible 70% of the greenhouse emissions of the entire Earth?

> Why not talk to the coal plant owner directly?

Well, merely talking to them isn't going to achieve any change, so the plan is to tax them?

Talking to them doesn't change the economic incentives. No matter how stern of a talking to I give them, they'll still be making a large personal profit at the expense of a larger cost spread across everyone else.

Do you think no one has tried talking to any of these people about climate change yet?

> When a solar farm on 10 acres of land can produce more energy than a coal plant on the same 10 acres

This is energetically impossible, I'm afraid. Even if you count the area of the plant plus the area of its corresponding mine and the transport links between them. Because the energy density of coal is so incredibly high.

On the other hand, now that Drax has switched to burning wood, you might get more energy efficiency from the same (huge) area of woodland by direct solar farming instead. Annoyingly I can't find any numbers, other than an estimate that if Drax was limited to domestic wood (rather than importing it from the US, using oil-fired shipping) it would consume every tree in the UK within a year.

> Carbon taxes are artificial barriers to using fossil fuels.

> On the other hand, when technology improves so that electric cars cost less per mile than gasoline cars, people won't necessarily buy them to be green, they'll buy them because they're a cheaper form of transportation that happens to be greener.

Carbon taxes are like trash disposal fees. If your business dumps trash into the landfill or carbon into the atmosphere, the public should not have to subsidize your business by paying for that. You should pay to manage your own waste.

Gas cars are cheaper than electric at least partly because we're all subsidizing them by allowing them to dump waste for free into the air that we all own, and paying on their behalf for all the damages that causes (asthma, climate change, flooding, etc). A carbon tax would remove that subsidy and make fossil fuels compete on a level playing field.

And yes, once the subsidy is removed, the market can sort it out.

Politicians trying to save the environment: Policitian #1: Um, I can't think of anything. Can you? Policitian #2: I got it! Let's make a new tax! It'll annoy these guys, while we'll insure our state jobs, and it'll make state finances look a ton better for all posterity! Policitian #1: Yeah, that sounds really great and all, umm, but will it fix the problem with greenhouse gases? Policitian #2: Don't be silly! This is as good a reason to make the state richer than any.

Hopefully we don't all die in wildfires, food and clean water shortages before then.

Millions of people are displaced yearly by war. It'll just be by climate change too. It's not new for us. It's just more of the same awfulness.

Humanity will be fine. We just will have to learn to live without all the cool stuff we like, like polar bears and butterflies and Amsterdam.

> We just will have to learn to live without all the cool stuff we like

Like arable land.

You lose arable land at the equator and gain it closer to the poles. Studies don’t generally see a large net decrease in arable land due to climate change.

Erosion is the bigger problem, 1/3rd of all arable land lost over the last 40 years. [1]

[1] - https://www.businessinsider.com/earth-has-lost-a-third-of-ar...

In the next 40 we will lose the rest of it. It's going to make a lot of folks very hungry, have you read "the road"? I would rather not live there, thank you very much.

In idle moments, I daydream of a wager where people who are concerned about climate change bet with those who are unconcerned. If climate change turns out to be mild, the unconcerned get the money. If it's severe, they die.

Why would such a bet be useful then?

You are in serious denial.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/06/climate/biodiversity-exti...

What's happening right now is absolutely unprecedented and it will kill a lot of people. It's demoralizing how even within a crowd that's supposed to value science we have people waving away what's happening right now.

You're completely misreprenting what I'm saying.

Yes, it will kill a lot of people. And it's a disaster. But humanity will adapt and be fine. Kind of like how humanity survived world wars doesn't discount how awful those wars were.

Yeah, that's denial. We're on the path to extinction if we don't seriously change something.

Oh don't be a doomer! Greta Thunberg is more optimistic than you! xD Oh wait, no she isn't. The end is nigh!

On the other hand, humans driving ourselves extinct might be the best long term scenario for the rest of life on Earth.

Realistically, the universe doesn't care one way or the other about us.

Yes, and so what? There's nothing else in the known universe that's capable of caring. The only good outcome seems to be us surviving.

Hahaha it won't be cheaper at all. At some point people will just realize that, hey, being alive is sweeter than being dead. :D

Fridge related trick:

In certain countries you could get carbon credits for closing down old factories that made old style CFC fridges, because of course those are not great for the environment.

So then some wily operators started building new "old factories" that they could get credits for in order to "convert" to new factories.

Story was told by a friend of mine in the industry at the time, I don't recall the finer details.

There's an initiative in Guatemala where land owners are paid an amount of money every year for each acre of their land that they reforest.

Naturally, land owners immediately started clear-cutting virgin rainforest, selling the lumber, and then collecting a payout from the government for planting pine trees that they'll raise for 10 years before they'll cut them down for lumber too.

Sounds like another example of the cobra effect: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobra_effect

That's a really interesting effect! Thank you for making me aware of it! However it should be noted that the reason it backfired, was because people exploited a weakness in the system, so to speak. It could even be that they did something illegal and fraudulent, since the bounties were obviously for animals that weren't bred in captivity, and for wild animals that were properly killed so they wouldn't be able to procreate. Thus the question remains on whether the measures had effective ways of dealing with such fraud, or whether that would make the whole thing more expensive than other measures.

A scheme in Northern Ireland (colloquially known as "Cash for Ash") was set up where heating properties using renewable fuels (mainly biomass) was subsidised, only the subsidy was priced higher than the cost for fuel causing people to heat empty properties just to claim the subsidy. The whole thing cost almost half a billion pounds.

There have been huge allegations of fraud and it even brought down NI's power-sharing executive (~ the regional government) in 2017.

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

I had an 88 Chevy Pickup Truck that used the old style freon (R12). Man that stuff worked so good. In 100 degree heat that truck would stay nice and cold. It took over 20 years before the alternatives were competitive.

Propane makes a good substitute for R12 with very little modifications. I wouldn't use it inside a home or anything like that, but I have used it to make older vehicles blow cold.

It's extremely good refrigerant. The biggest problem people have is that it ends up too cold and icing up the system.

It sounds dangerous, but it's really not. Propane is only flammable with the correct mixture of air. Otherwise you couldn't light it with a blow torch. Even if you have a leaky system it isn't going to leak fast enough to cause a issue. Also propane is significantly heavier then air so anything that leaks out is going to go to ground. And the amount of propane you use is not very significant.

Cars that end up having issues with propane are typically home built propane fuel conversions with no ventilation under the tanks or connections. The propane can then pool in the low places and build up enough to cause a explosion.

This might be the most amazing and interesting comment I've ever seen. Thank you :-)

What you say makes good sense too since many RVs have propane refrigerators. I've long wondered how it works exactly. Probably time for a DuckDuckGo search.

Propane fridges actually burn the propane for heat, so it's not using it as a "refrigerant", just as a heat source.

Those commonly use ammonia and hydrogen as the actual refrigerant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absorption_refrigerator

Would a propane tank pose any danger to occupants during/after an accident?

Proponents of propane as refrigerant claim that it's not more dangerous than the 10 gallons of gasoline in the gas tank. I'm not sure I agree. Since propane is heavier than air, it doesn't dissipate as quickly as, say, natural gas would.

And while its true that you need the right mixture of propane and air for it to ignite, with the right-mixture, you've got a fuel-air explosive formed right next to an ignition source (the car's engine and battery).

Like propane, gasoline fumes are also heavier than air. This becomes a problem in boats, where propane and/or gasoline fumes "collect" down in the hull with no natural ventilation path. Boats with propane stoves or gasoline motors need gas detectors and ventilation to ensure dangerous (suffocating or exploding) levels don't build up below decks...

Safe until it leaks.

R152A, also known as "canned air", is actually very usable in an R12 system without any modification: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3wkBnhcyO3Y

(That guy restores old refrigerators, so he probably knows a thing or two about refrigerant substitution...)

I used to work at a company that recovered and decommissioned freon. If some tech came by with a cylinder filled with R12 it would many times mysteriously disappear from storage. Probably because it sells for an insane price and is very rare in my region.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com