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Comment by mistrial9 | Hacker News Reader

in the 2007 time-frame, the US National Snow and Ice Science Center showed up en-masse in California and were flipping out about ice changes, semi-desperate to find some way to communicate to the public about it. Post-"Inconvenient Truth" and early days of Twitter, the idea that if "somehow, someway, people could know about this" things would get better faster, was the knee-jerk idea amongst people who were immersed in details.

Twelve years later.. and .. recurrent headlines on YNews ? US EPA being dismantled, with the legal authority to regulate air pollution at the center of it.. Mixed signals from the other world economies, while posturing for trade routes through the Northern passage, and billions bet on small changes in oil prices each day .. Whats to worry about.

Is it that goof founder of 360-dot-org that said something like "Do something, just do something" ? Panic and gossip are clearly not enough.

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The trouble is that if the "we" who are doing something does not include China and the rest of the world in coordination, then it is just sacrificing local economics in vain.

The idea that the rest of the world is going to follow suit automatically based only on morals is far from obvious.

It doesn't seem that anyone in the mainstream has really found a way to come to grips with this, that at its core any solution is a global coordination problem. (Even putting aside that half the US has found it more politically useful to deny the problem entirely.)

You not helping makes the problem worse, and you helping makes it better. I wouldn't call that work done in vain.

That's what trade policy is supposed to be about. If the rest of world agrees to a particular standard you make that standard a condition of trade.

This sounds entirely tractable. Institute a carbon tax. In addition, create a tariff on all imports from countries that don’t have an equivalent bona fide carbon tax at the same or higher rate, and set the tariff such that it recovers 150% of the deficiency in taxes vs emissions. The tax needs to be transitive: if countries A and B don’t cooperate and country A reexports something from country B, the tariff needs to account for B’s failure as well.

Make the carbon tax revenue neutral, and pitch it as leveling the playing field and a boon to the local economy.

Sure, there are tons of details to work out, but I think this should be doable.

How do you decide the baseline emissions for the tax and tariffs, internationally? China emits about half the carbon as the USA, per capita. So is the USA willing to pay tax to China unidirectionally, until we get to their level? Does China need to keep their current per capita levels to avoid extra tariffs?

How, roughly, could this work politically at a global level, in a way that also works within the politics of each individual country?

china measured emission are about half of usa measured emission. china non measured emissions are another story. soot is yet another story, because not all co2 is created equally efficiently.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-climatechange-insig...

oh, and there's all the other shit china does of course https://nationalpost.com/news/world/scientists-discover-chin...

but somehow people dodge the issue every time with 'but the usa per capita' as if these measurement are really comparable.

e: wow, struck a nerve there? sourced with articles, even. now let's wait for dang to come and say this is 'unsubstantive'

If that is true, then the situation seems intractable. The Chinese government won't want to pay for anything beyond it's official figures, but the rest of the world has no interest in those bogus figures being used.

I think it’s possible to get a decent overall estimate of emissions in a given area by measuring local variations in CO2 levels.

There are no payments between countries. It's a tax and an import tariff on countries that don't have the tax (or an equivalent like tax and trade).

William Nordhaus has done the math, you can read his papers for more details and appropriate levels. Of course the fact that we didn't implement in 2015 when he did his calculations means that the appropriate levels are higher than they were then.

You can start blaming China once there is a single country on Earth on track to stay within the 1.5° carbon budget. Until then you should talk to your own politicians why they aren't doing anything.

> Until then you should talk to your own politicians why they aren't doing anything.

I would love to. But unfortunately the climate problem isn't even a small part of the political dialogue here.

Greta Thunberg was alone when she started protesting.

I grew up in New Zealand, and now live in America.

In New Zealand, people with high carbon lifestyles say "well regardless of what we do, nothing matters if Americans don't change"

Now I live in America, where people with high carbon lifestyles say "well regardless of what we do, nothing matters if the Chinese don't change"

And I'm sure in China they say the same thing back to the US.

It's fun shifting the blame.

> It's fun shifting the blame.

I don't think blame is a useful concept at all. The question is, within the complex world of economics and politics, starting from the point we are at today, what would a pragmatic solution look like, that is actually possible?

It is far from obvious that the best solution is to make local sacrifices, then hoping the world will follow. It might be that we all (in the world) need to agree to make sacrifices together first, put some rules and treaties in place, and then start improving together in coordination.

It sounds so Machiavellian but, if we are already making the economic sacrifices (that other countries aren't, but would like us to), I wonder if we aren't even losing potential bargaining power in coordinating globally?

> It is far from obvious that the best solution is to make local sacrifices, then hoping the world will follow.

case in point: Europe. taxes over taxes over taxes has pushed energy cost to the point production is non competitive https://businesstech.co.za/news/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/G...

net result: local decade long slump plus most heavy industry moved to countries that have less energy cost and less regulation, so it's not clear if the world is actually better off, since you also get pollution from naval transport

"what would a pragmatic solution look like, that is actually possible?"

William Nordhaus' climate club:

https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.15000001

https://issues.org/climate-clubs-to-overcome-free-riding/

I believe in China and India they would point out that the West allowed itself to emit pollutants unchecked during its period of rapid economic growth, and it would be ridiculous to ask the East not to do the same. It's more complicated than just passing the buck.

Can we stop with this "growing phase" mythology of high carbon emissions? The US didn't "grow out of it" we out-sourced it to China and India. China and India can't "grow out of it" unless they find someone else that can take it over for them (and I don't think there's enough production capacity in the remaining parts of the world to do this). This article[1] does a pretty good job showing the complexity of this.

The idea that eventually every industrial nation can mature and "grow out of" carbon production makes the ludicrous claim that somehow industrial production magically requires less CO2 over all in the long run. Sure this would be possible if processes could all become more efficient and overall output experience 0 growth, but continued growth is essential for current economic models.

We all know we are living in a global economy, but then talk about resources and waste as if they are local problems. The truth is modern global Capitalism requires perpetual growth and increase production and consumption. We all like getting paid and living in a prosperous society but that money cannot come in a sustainable world. Where do you derive profit from a truly sustainable system?

[1] https://www.carbonbrief.org/mapped-worlds-largest-co2-import...

Depends on what you mean I think. Yes growing out of pollutants is a myth. But it's not wrong to say that India and China are in a period of rapid economic growth where they catch up to their industrialized peers. You might argue that the West never went through such a phase at all, because it was ahead of the rest of the world for all of modern history, but I think that's splitting hairs. In any case, my point was trying to be descriptive about what arguments I think you'd realistically hear, rather than to stake a position either way on the arguments.

IMHO, local sacrifices is a dead end approach because it expects coordinated good will from billions of people. This won't happen: people are as bad as they are allowed to be. The solution should be going after the popular business model that makes consumers buy new items because the old ones break: this applies to everything, from cars to toothbrushes; it even seems to apply to newly built houses now. The manufacturer can't care less if an average buyer has to leave 3 cars behind because those cars were designed to break, as long as it brings profit. Axe this business model, bankrupt these manufacturers by holding them accountable to how much of their products end up thrown away and we'll see how reliable products will take their spot. No more useless waste, no more icebergs of plastic in the ocean, no more need to burn gigatons of coal to make all these intentionally flawed items. I'm sure everybody sees this solution, but nobody has balls to implement it because blaming individual people is easy and safe.

The entire world got together and signed a treaty to coordinate. You might not think it's perfect, but it exists.

Do what?

Normal people can't do anything worthwhile.

Unless you're in a position to personally bankroll the research and buildout of fusion power (hi, Jeff) the only thing you can do at this late date is get in the face of your government representatives: Jam up their phone lines, sit in at their offices, back primary challengers who will address the problem.

I’ve been to a number of museum presentations, general audience scientific talks, etc recently where the speaker presents the evidence for climate change, future predictions, etc., and their main takeaway is “try to drive your car less and check out this website to see how you can curb your CO2 emissions!”.

It makes me so mad.

They're not wrong, though.

I agree that changing your lifestyle is not terribly useful compared to pestering politicians, but you can actually do a number of things to delay the catastrophe. The easiest are probably eating less beef and flying less. Not taking that transatlantic flight saves about as much carbon as the average European emits in a year.

We could just build fission power plants, they're reasonably safe, not too expensive and we know how to store the waste safely, heck - we've built a place to store it, but until there is political will to overcome the NIMBYism of not wanting to live in the next potential Pripyat (no matter how remote that risk is) nothing will change, except the climate of course.

We could also just build renewables.

We're moving fast, but not fast enough.

https://www.utilitydive.com/news/hawaiian-electric-finalizes... (Hawaiian Electric finalizes largest-ever renewables procurement)

https://www.utilitydive.com/news/new-york-awards-record-1700... (New York awards record 1,700 MW offshore wind contracts)

https://www.utilitydive.com/news/regulators-unanimously-appr... (Regulators unanimously approve Georgia Power plan, increasing renewables 72% by 2024)

https://www.utilitydive.com/news/aep-plans-2b-15-gw-wind-pur... (AEP plans $2B, 1.5 GW wind purchase in Oklahoma)

https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2018/12/5/1812692... (Xcel Energy, one of the biggest utilities in the US, committed to going completely carbon-free by 2050 (and 80 percent carbon-free by 2030).)

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/jul/09/eon-uk-to-s... (E.ON UK to supply 3.3m customers with 100% renewable electricity)

I'm not convinced that 100% renewables will actually create a resilient network

Good thing we have a long, long, long way to go to get anywhere near to 100% renewables.

I was mostly being facetious. We probably don't have enough time left to build fission power plants (and certainly not fusion) before the level of CO2 in the atmosphere will lead inevitably to catastrophic consequences.

According to the IPCC, we have to cut global CO2 emissions by 50% before 2030. So your vast fleet of nuclear power plants might just barely be coming online by then. Maybe. If you started getting regulatory approval yesterday and nothing goes wrong at all.

The answer is some sort of sequestration tbh, I've long felt that the idea (even in say, 2005) that we could reduce our carbon output by 50% was unworkable - the only thing that is easy to move to zero carbon is electricity generation, everything else is an order of magnitude harder.

> We could just build fission power plants, they're reasonably safe, not too expensive and we know how to store the waste safely

I'm not convinced this is true. Obviously there is Chernobyl, but the failures and shortcomings seem to not only be understood but popularized by Western media and we can say "oh that was just the Soviet Union." Then Fukushima happened, in a country which seems to be far better than the US at building efficient, safe infrastructure. We could say that was a fluke and we will learn from it (and I'm sure we will), but how many more times will we need to learn to avoid the literal fallout of another nuclear disaster? Shit goes wrong sometimes and you can't predict it.

You can argue that it's still safer (obviously there are lots of nuclear power plants in the US that have had no huge disasters), but why not look at alternatives that are even safer?

The fukushima plant had a poor safety factor, in re the backup cooling power source. It's not as if the disaster happened in a vacuum, there was also a tsunami and the plant was not build outside of a potential tsunami zone.

What in America's past suggests that we would build and maintain plants better than Fukushima? Is it our mismanagement of waterways? Our disaster preparedness and response as evidenced after Hurricane Katrina? Our laser-sharp focus on energy policy in government?

Yes, Chernobyl was especially bad, and yes there were issues at Fukushima. I think we would avoid Chernobyl-level disasters, but I'm not convinced we would avoid Fukushima-level disasters.

All are systems engineering failures, we have a pretty good history of building resilient systems. I won't say that a fukushima couldn't happen in the US, but I'd say that the particulars of that disaster are unlikely to happen here (or anywhere else again).

We have very few nuclear plants in areas that are even seismically active anymore, much less have any meaningful tsunami risk.

As another commenter pointed out, a lot of the knowledge for developing nuclear power plants has faded since they were mostly built decades ago. And while they're smaller projects, looking around where I live (San Francisco) I see a leaning skyscraper, a bridge that was way, way overbudget and many years late and an ongoing debate about its longterm safety, and a transit center (also late and overbudget) that still hasn't opened due to safety concerns.

It seems obvious that it's possible to build safe nuclear power plants - we've done it. But I think it's like building airplanes. Despite flying being the safest way to travel, all the planes were built decades ago and our attempts to change that in the US, ie the 737-MAX, have shown obvious examples of corruption and incompetence that have led to unnecessary deaths.

I think where we disagree is whether or not the US government is competent enough to build a nuclear power plant today, not whether or not the project itself is viable. I realize my original comment doesn't reflect that, so I apologize for the poor communication on my part.

> not too expensive

The evidence does not bear out this part, unfortunately. It's not NIMBYism that has killed the reactors in South Carolina, or is on the way to killing Vogtle's expansion in George, that's just mere construction incompetence.

The time to start building nuclear was in 2000-2010; we started, perhaps too small to make a big difference, but in the end it was good that more weren't attempted because it was a gigantic failure and drew far too much money away from better projects.

The problem with nuclear power aren't accidents during operation, or NIMBYism, the problem is that we no longer know how to build it. (And once you start looking into the history of construction in the US, it was also often the case that we didn't know how to build them 40 years ago.)

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