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Comment by tomComb | Hacker News Reader

He says that Steel (and some other materials) are the most important issue because we don't yet have any proven good or easy way to reduce the CO2 impact of their production.

That leads me to the opposite of Gates' conclusion.

At this point there are many low hanging fruit, so until we have a good way to address steel production, we should keep the focus on those other measures.

We should certainly be doing research on the issue that he is focused on, but we shouldn't let ourselves get distracted by it.

Getting to zero carbon emissions overall (the goal he brings up to justify his focus) is a great long-term goal but I think our success in this challenge will be determined in the short and medium term.

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He doesn't say it's the most important issue.

He says it's "an important subject that deserves a lot more attention".

This isn’t something more research will solve. Metals exist in ores as oxides. To get pure metal you have to reduce them, and that oxygen had to go somewhere, bound to something. There is no net zero process that will magic away those pesky atoms.

Eh, its perfectly doable to make those atoms wind up as O2, it is just expensive. All we need to do to solve climate change, today, is accept a drastically lower standard of living. Hence why it isn't happening, (and won't happen until people start dying).

Judging from history, we are perfectly willing to let masses of people suffer and die in the streets rather than give up the luxuries the few can afford. We're already seeing this with increasing inequality, which should really be called decreasing equality since the trend has reversed direction, and we're on track to resume the norm of a small privileged class with a tiny middle class and masses of working and dying poor.

> accept a drastically lower standard of living

With sequestration costs at $100 - $300 per tonne for worst-case industries, climate change will cost trillions world-wide. That's a lot of money, but hardly a "drastically lower standard of living". Compare with Iraq war, or Apollo + Vietnam. Much less sacrifice than WW2.

Even at those optimistic costs that is $2-6,000 dollars per person (20 tonnes/American-year), 8 to 24k per family of four. I'd call that a drastically lower quality of living for an average American, to say nothing about a working person in the 3rd world who probably doesn't make 2,000USD in a year.

I'm not suggesting sequestering is going to be the end of society or the economy, just that people won't start sequestering until something is imminently threatening them.

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