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Comment by tito | Hacker News Reader

Climate change will create the first trillionaire.

Find everything that eats fossil fuels and electrify it. Find everything that requires stable land and predictable weather and put it in a shipping container. Find every infrastructure investment that requires decades to pay off and decentralize it.

Instead of water line pipes, pull water out of the air. Instead of copper and fiber optic cables on telephone poles, use solar and satellites. Instead of refrigerated transportation, grow food in your pocket or your stomach. Instead of roads, take to the air.

We won't fix the climate out of kindness. Warren Buffet invested $$ Billions into wind farms because it makes his wallet feel better. Tim Cook just yesterday gave a speech that Apple said "We don't see climate change as risk, but opportunity", that's straight from the world's first trillion dollar company. [1] Elon Musk announced that SpaceX Starship will be pulling its fuel out of atmospheric carbon dioxide on Earth, and on Mars [2]

We'll need to completely reinvent society. Sustainable transportation, vertical agriculture, solar/wind/nuclear energy, air mining, an all-electric economy.

Topics: Direct Air Capture, making products out of atmospheric carbon dioxide, carbon removal. Check out all the companies in the space here: http://airminers.org

[1] https://www.macrumors.com/2019/10/22/tim-cook-talks-sustaina...

[2] https://youtu.be/sOpMrVnjYeY?t=3850

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FED money printing and the subsequent bubbles will create the first trillionaire.

Zimbabwe beat them to it

Good point. I am a 100 trillionaire in Zimbabwe dollars.

If anyone wants to start a business selling suitcases of money from hyperinflation countries, I really really want to buy one large suitcase full (preferably money with English writing from a known county, Zimbabwe seems a likely candidate!). Or perhaps prop money (although it needs to seem like a realistic Western currency). Or maybe zero dollar banknotes?

Discontent amongst world populations is growing, with wildfire riots increasingly breaking out. The root cause of this discontent is the gross inequality encouraged by (amongst other forces) contrepreneur culture. The near-term world is not going to be hospitable to the uber-rich, fortunately in my view. The world's masses are coming after them.

You wish.

Just like the early socialists of 19th century wished.

Many of his suggestions are outright harmful, like pulling water out of air. Same thinking got us in this mess in the first place, hey just pull out oil of the ground and burn it.

Oh yes and no I guess. A certain Schadenfreude would ensue for sure. But as I'm pretty sure it's too late to save our civilisation now, it'll be a lot of chaos & suffering for not much.

Is climate change really tied to wealth inequality or are you just looking for a way to rationalize your blood lust?

Well it's tied in one direction: poorer populations will suffer for the material benefit of richer ones. My nation is quite explicit about this - our government is on record as being happy for Pacific nations to lose their land as long as Australia continues 'economic growth'. And we'll even allow them to labour for us in exchange! The other direction is conceivable: more equal populations may be less liable to vanity status purchases, and less resistant to equitably-distributed change. Perhaps hard to prove either way.

Anyway, that's not much to do with my comment which was merely noting that disaster capitalists trying to make trillions from climate change may meet mass resistance.

As for my alleged blood lust - well I doubt the discontent will result in many billionaires being torn limb from limb. Though as many seem to think paying their fair share of tax would be pretty much equivalent, why not?

Naomi Klein’s most recent book has parts that argue that addressing wealth inequality is a must if we want to address climate change.

In her words, wealth equality is tied to a “climate justice” movement. Some points:

- If you tax the struggling lower middle and working classes to raise funds for climate action they will get justifiably angry that they’re being stressed when they didn’t really create this mess and have the lowest ability to pay. Eg. Frances ‘Yellow Jackets’ - The antidemocratic forces that are produced by wealth inequality have allowed fossil fuel industries to maintain the status quo despite popular support for climate action

I would argue the ones lusting for blood are those who, like decision-makers at Amazon, create abusive conditions for the people who work for the companies they manage.

I'm specifically referring to the disgraceful way workers are treated at Amazon shipping facilities.

Most blood seems to be spilled by those with money wanting more.

One could argue that the arms business spills more blood than everything else put together ...

I'm pessimistic about governments coming together and coordinating an expensive effort to avert climate change. I also think the world is on a course to become increasingly divided and rivalrous, such that collaboration would be less likely, and nations less willing to compromise on their economic competitiveness.

I think if there is an effort made (which there will probably have to be), it'll be something cheap and dirty, like stratospheric aerosol injection.

Same here regarding govts coming together. I think individuals have a huge role to play. The rise of the climate hackers.

The reason there seems to be so much rivalry today is because only the shitty, attention grabbing and warmongering leaders and nations get all the attention.

In the meanwhile, you have most nations around the world living and making progress peacefully. Nations that can be easily convinced by some form of aid or assistance to get on the bandwagon.

Don't be fooled by the news media. Most peoples of the world just want to live and let live. However, if the leadership of the US continues to be dominated by anti-science racist right-wingers, I am sorry to say, this won't happen. That is probably the biggest threat to any progress, not inter-government cooperation.

> anti-science racist right-wingers... is probably the biggest threat to any progress

don't really know what race has to do with it, but big international banks are a bigger threat since they won't let any nation unplug from the global economy. follow the money.

Racism is a strong indicator of lack of integrity and a belief in the scientific process. If you believe that people are less intelligent because of the color of their skin (despite numerous scientific evidence failing to show any correlation between race and intelligence) it’s a good indicator that you don’t believe in the scientific method.

It won't be governments that avert climate change, it'll be individuals acting in their own self-interest.

This might be violent (everybody kills their neighbors, reducing the population and hence greenhouse emissions), or it might be economic (as fossil fuel prices rise, renewables become increasingly price-competitive, such that some people end up making a lot of money electrifying the world). Personally I'm rooting for the economic solution.

> Personally I'm rooting for the economic solution.

An impossibility because so called 'economic growth' (which is no more than global entropy increase) is coming to an end as degraded ecosystems worldwide fall into collapse. Climate change is only the most salient of literally thousands of distributed causes of this, but the overview is: the physical loans taken out on our global systems over the past two centuries are coming to maturity. It's payback time.

> Find everything that eats fossil fuels and electrify it

You start off with a free lunch fallacy.

Open an led bulb sometime. You’ll find a large heat sink, at least one fiberglass circuit board, 30-100 electronics components with their own printing / cases / production footprints, ROHS-exempt parts have heavy metals like lead and mercury, you’ll find metal stampings and plastic coated wire, there will be plastic lenses and injection molded mounts, there will be LEDs themselves of course which have tens of thousands of hours time into their design that come from specialized facilities... all the production and shipping and testing and development that goes into each bulb.

... remember old light bulbs? Glass, a wire, a metal thread.

Remember the argument that LED bulbs will last 10 years? They don’t. Tell me... which one do you think will be better in a landfill?

I still think it’s the right move to go with LED bulbs overall - but I’ve been around the world, I’d like to think I have a sense of scale.

When I see people write “just make it electric” i think of things like but not limited to my bulb example and I’m confident that person doesn’t understand much on making things at scale.

Never said it would be easy. But fossil fuel powered light bulbs aren't the long term solution, and renewable-powered bulbs definitely are.

One thing I've never been able to figure out is that given Crispr, why it wouldn't be possible to engineer an organism that can suck much more CO2 out of the air than any existing tree / algae could. Even more ideal if we can make a good building material out of the engineered plant to sequester Carbon.

It's easy to see how the manual selection process would work here - plant a bunch of trees, see how much O2 each produces and pick Top N and repeat. Of course, this needs thousands of years to run manually because the improvement with each generation would be minimal.

Is the issue that we don't know what gene(s) control photo-synthesis?

Not my area of expertise, but I would assume that there is an efficiency limit, much like there is for solar panels.

Remember that organisms can't just pull CO2 out of the air for free. Plants do it via photosynthesis, which requires the sun's energy. There is a maximum amount of energy falling on each organism, and I would guess that there is some theoretical limit to the efficiency of photosynthesis that is well below that limit.

Yup I agree with you almost entirely. The only thing I was thinking of was if evolution would optimize for the amount of energy a plant receives vs other things like survival, reproduction etc and how much efficiency we can gain by optimizing purely for photosynthesis.

Also I don’t know if plants are adapted to the high CO2 atmosphere yet so even if evolution optimized the ability of a plant to photosynthesize, given this happened in relatively low CO2 environments like forests and without man made climate change, it’s possible that human intervention can improve it.

>One thing I've never been able to figure out is that given Crispr, why it wouldn't be possible to engineer an organism that can suck much more CO2 out of the air than any existing tree / algae could.

Jurassic Park Effect.

Just because we can doesn't mean we should. CRISPR is pretty unknown and releasing man-made organism we don't know every little thing about could topple the ecosystem incredibly quickly. Not to mention how incredibly divisive it would be to do so.

trees have been optimizing that problem for a long time already, and then if you don't bury the tree and prevent decomposition, you don't really solve anything but create a short term buffer.

How long for a "full" tree to decompose?

using the lumber in high rises (through gluelam construction) is cheaper than steel and is carbon negative.. virtuous cycle indeed.

The answer is pretty simple: carbon fuels release energy when burned. This means an organism reversing the operation needs to absorb energy (in the case of photosynthesis, solar energy). Sunlight is not that energy-dense, and concentrating that energy too much would burn the plant anyway.

This is being worked on. The problem is we are terrible at engineering biosystems, CRISPR currently works mainly to knockout genes rather than the kind of enhanced evolution you describe, and upscaling a solution to the point it can have a planetary impact is non-trivial.

This is the correct answer. We are abysmal at engineering biosystems. As Stewart Brand says "We are as gods and we must get good at it".

Re: upscaling, I was reading another article on HN about a specific species of plant when grown in sufficiently large quantities (6x size of Texas I think) would basically bring us down to carbon neutral. We can probably scrounge up that land if the world works together but who knows.

Re: engineering biosystems, I imagine engineering native plants (if possible) has much fewer ecosystem wide chain effects) than using gene drives to eliminate mosquitoes or whatever.

Re: crispr, I see photos of glow in the dark monkeys and super muscular dogs, so as a layman it seems like cutting a gene and vaguely throwing the desired gene near the cut location seems to work. We don’t have as many ethical implications about rapidly iterating on plants as we do on animals, so it seems like if an experiment doesn’t work, just repeat 1000x until it works would do it. People talk about off-target effects etc. but you won’t really know unless you try I guess.

There's actually a tree that does. Paulownia. Reason is that it is also the only nitrogen fixing tree, so it can grow at a much more rapid rate.

As I understand it, algae growth is generally limited by iron, so just removing the limiting factor can increase growth and pull more CO2 out of the air. There has been at least one rogue geoengineering project along those lines - https://csi.asu.edu/ideas/the-first-of-the-geohackers/

Maybe we don't actually need genetic engineering - maybe we can just build big algae ponds and feed them iron supplements. Basically build algae heaven, open source it and random groups across the globe can start doing it.

I don't really see that happening. Most of the things you've suggested would require large amounts on energy to produce. I don't see energy getting cheaper over the next 50-100 years. It seems to me that climate change and reduced dependency on fossil fuels we lead to reduced globalization and population reduction.

The cost of energy will go near zero. The marginal cost of an electron captured with solar is free.

Solar is starting to beat fossil fuel installations already, below $0.05 USD per kWh.

This was not predicted even by the biggest cheerleaders even 10 years ago: "In 2017, the solar industry achieved SunShot’s original 2020 cost target of $0.06 per kilowatt-hour for utility-scale photovoltaic (PV) solar power three years ahead of schedule, dropping from about $0.28 to $0.06 per kilowatt-hour (kWh)." [1]

Sunshot goal for 2030 is $0.03 per kWh.

[1] https://www.energy.gov/eere/solar/sunshot-2030

Someone is going to cover the Sahara with solar panels and make some serious cash. Bonus points for automating the production of solar panels out of sand.

Call it "Sand to Solar". Some of the best ideas start out as jokes, I googled for this because I was curious:

"New technology allows heated sand to generate electricity, presenting a viable new option for investors to focus on."

https://oilandenergyinvestor.com/acq/new-energy-from-sand-wh...

I wasted more time than I care to think reading that article. There is no mention of how the technology works. A vague reference to an academic project in the UAE. Most of the article is just filler fluff. This is a marketing article to investors for this authors "wealth building energy advantage".

If you're curious, try googling for "SandShifter", here's an energy.gov profile:

https://www.energy.gov/eere/solar/project-profile-csp-energy...

https://www.osti.gov/biblio/1183706-solar-holdings-final-tec...

Okay, how about the copper that transports that electron to somewhere it can do useful work? How about the 1800C furnace that melts sand into the silicon for the solar panel? How about the diesel fuel that the massive mining trucks used to haul the copper ore out of the mine are fueled with (these things are heavy and get something like 8 gallons to the mile (not a typo) good luck running them on batteries)?

Those things aren't going to zero anytime soon.

This is just pointless smug contrarianism, I hope you're just in a bad mood and don't really believe or think this way regularly. Mining trucks are excellent candidates for battery electrification, Volvo is already building and selling them.

What other things do you think are never happening that are infact already happening?

I really doubt it makes sense to use electric vehicles for mining, but I could be wrong. I guess we'll be able to see in the coming years what fraction of mining vehicles are electric.

But what is wrong about what I stated? It's obviously impossible for solar to approach $0 because of the large material costs inherent in manufacturing solar panels and transporting electricity. This is not contrarianism, it's realism. We probably use more energy per capita than is sustainable, and eventually we will have to change that.

Also solar panels wear out. I could see a case being made for the cost going to zero if you amortize it, but you can only amortize it over about 25 years, after which you have to replace the panels. This sets a floor on the price.

> I really doubt it makes sense to use electric vehicles for mining, but I could be wrong. I guess we'll be able to see in the coming years what fraction of mining vehicles are electric.

They're slow-moving, inherently massive and heavy, and travel relatively short distances per round-trip. So they don't care much about battery weight, size or limited range, and appreciate the massive torque from low RPMs.

It's kind of an ideal case for a battery-swapping BEV system. Just wait for the battery costs and energy densities to both improve and this will be a no-brainer. They can charge the drained battery on the grid from cheaper/cleaner sources while the other is busy hauling a load.

Of course if the terrain is such that the mine is on the top of a mountain ascended empty but descended full, you don't even need battery swapping, it'll recharge on the descent.

Nobody wants to spend money owning and operating those diesel engines if they don't have to. When the BEV option is available and makes business sense they'll switch immediately. They'll require little maintenance, and you don't need specially trained technicians to swap batteries and order new ones when they need replacing.

While I wanted to agreee it's just contrarianism, he has a point. Mine electrification is going to come very, very slowly. There are 2 principal reasons,

1) mines run on a 24/7 schedule. There is not enough down time to charge batteries in a shift and with how completely filthy machines get we need better solutions for battery swapping in mining before that becomes an option, and

2) because (like the mine I am at right now) a non-negligible number of mines are far from grids or clean power sources, a lot of battery power would come from fossil fuels burned near the mine.

There is interest, but most of the actual use seems fairly superficial (public image boosts).

Transporting energy long distances seems like such a waste. There's the cost of transporting fossil fuels or power lines for electricity.

What economics would it take for your mine to have its own solar or nuclear powered microgrid. What about when fossil fuel supplies are unreliable or interrupted.

Appreciate the thoughtful questions, and inquisitive responses! Great to see people figure out how we might push these closer to zero. We'll need to lower the costs of manufacturing solar panels and transporting electricity + raise the lifetime of panels.

> Mining trucks are excellent candidates for battery electrification, Volvo is already building and selling them.

For near zero? Where?

Mining trucks are going electric. They actually make energy when loaded and going down a hill.

https://hackaday.com/2019/08/22/electric-dump-truck-produces...

Furnaces have been run off of solar (parabolic mirrors) for quite some time.

While it sounds like an excellent candidate in all mines, one must keep in mind that the majority of mines tend to move ore/waste rock upwards. In those other, rarer cases (for instance: mountain top mining), electrification of the haulage fleet makes good sense.

Good to know, thanks! Seems obvious this is the way to go. Excited to see growth in this space in the future.

> How about the 1800C furnace that melts sand into the silicon for the solar panel

I wonder if a process similar to that used for molten salt batteries, using reflected, concentrated sunlight, could be used to melt sand into what is needed for more solar panels, electronics etc, and use the stored energy while it cools off, essentially combining the processes? And of course for other [s]melting processes powered by fossil fuels today?

Hmm, after doing a bit of research: the melting point for saltpeter (used in molten salt storage [0]) is only 550°F, while silicon's is 2,577°F... would a reflecting solar array be able to reach those temperatures? If I'm reading this [1] correctly, you could only practically get to 3,698.33°F (really close to your example of a 1,800°C furnace) if you collected all the sunlight falling onto earth. It's got to be much worse than that though in practice, because to focus all of it onto a single point would require beaming reflections from the perimeter a long distance through air, and also around the curvature of the earth...

So, we need to build this on the moon or in orbit? Oooh, Futurama actually showed us what could go wrong here [2].

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_thermal_energy#Molten_sa...

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concentrated_solar_power#Ideal...

[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0qksm5cRtcU

Why not just use an electrical furnace and power that with solar power?

The furnaces for making crude silicon are already powered by electricity. So are the Siemens process reactors for refining silicon into solar and electronic grades. So are the Czochralski crystal pullers used to turn refined silicon into mono-crystalline boules for manufacturing wafers.

"Silicon processing: from quartz to crystalline silicon solar cells"

https://www.pyrometallurgy.co.za/Pyro2011/Papers/083-Xakalas...

> Those things aren't going to zero anytime soon.

Not with that attitude

even if there were tens or even hundreds of UNIVAC installations, who’s going to run the telegraph lines for all the teletype terminals this would require??

> Solar is starting to beat fossil fuel installations already, below $0.05 USD per kWh.

I read that over and over, but it's like comparing apples and oranges.

Depends upon your country.

Countries with significant lake hydroelectricity (not run-of-river) can "store" the solar power (no batteries needed) by reducing flow during the daytime (and increasing flow at nighttime if required).

This is because hydroelectric dams are essentially stores of electricity. No need for pumping or other expensive storage schemes, is your already have one!

Does your current price of PV include storage?

Also the PV cells made mainly from China are currently manufactured using coal power plant. But what would be the price of photovoltaics if only renewable energies were used? My guess is it will be much higher.

I have never understood what people are trying to argue when they make this point. It would be like an oncologist arguing against surgery that would inhibit a tumour on the basis that it wouldn't eradicate it.

Hey, I work at a nuclear fission company. We think we can get our electricity prices to around $0.0025 / kWh by around 2045. This represents a ~20x reduction from off-peak cost in Ontario where I live, and ~150x reduction from average electricity prices in Germany.

Also, w.r.t. population, the way I see it our population is growing very quickly whether we like it or not (look at Africa). I think there's a good opportunity for us to support a population much larger than we have right now with improved sustainable energy tech.

(Solar panels are also getting cheaper, and will probably run around $0.02/kWh in the near future if iteration continues, and are probably capable of supporting us up to 20 billion people as well)

Hmm, Hinkley C is signed up at a strike price of £92.50/MWh, in 2012 Pounds. A 400x reduction when so much of the cost of nuclear is safety, waste management and decommissioning? That's surprising to say the least.

Can you give any clue on how?

The trend of solar and wind continuing the inexorable march downward seems much more certain.

· Liquid fueled MSR, safety is best of any other source. So, we think regulators will lower barriers over time as we prove this.

· Waste management is easier since our waste will be ~5x less mass per kg fuel (~500x less mass per kWh energy), and also returns to natural radioactivity much faster (one or two centuries). We actually plan to sell most of the fission products as useful materials.

· As of now, our reactors are planned to be mostly stainless steel. Most of the lifetime mass-throughput of current GI-GIII fission plants is concrete and steel, of which we have basically none of the concrete and much less steel because no pressure vessel. So, decommissioning is much easier and probably will be internally profitable.

You're right about the last part, because solar will almost definitely get at least 2x cheaper than it is today, and within not more than a few decades.

My perception is biased (ofc), but in my view it's actually very likely that we will reach or surpass our goal, though, so I personally wouldn't bet on renewables.

Thanks. There's been quite the resurgence of interest in salt since it just about disappeared in the 70s or 80s.

I hope you manage it - though I tend to think we'll have a mix of sources rather than making renewables irrelevant. That may be reserve from having heard the "too cheap to meter" slogan a time or two too often. :) Even properly competitive nuclear will make decarbonising far easier, as I'm not at all convinced by grid scale battery, so I hope someone manages...

Yeah, I agree with you completely.

I think we will probably get fission to like 4/5 of the world energy supply and 95% of electricity within our lifetimes.

Solar panels are a great thing to have on your house if you can afford them and want the security in the case of some kind of grid problem. They're also good if you need energy in the middle of nowhere. We want to put fission reactors in most remote communities, even small ones, but if small enough groups of people are going out into uninhabited places it doesn't make sense, so solar panels are better.

I don't really see any utility in wind energy at all, other than in areas where solar doesn't make sense.

Batteries are a really environmentally bad idea for non-transport/device energy supply, because of density. So I think it's best we avoid intermittent sources for most of the grid power.

I'm excited about nuclear, but it seems like we will eventually run out of uranium fuel unless we switch to breeder reactors. Am I off on this? This is assuming that nuclear usage grows to become a larger portion of our total energy use. I see nuclear as potentially solving a lot of our problems, but it seems to have some difficulties as well.

I'm more skeptical that we can support such a large population. Right now we make heavy use of fertilizer, which is produced from natural gas and by mining phosphates. Probably we could avoid using natural gas, but this would require using more energy, so I'm not sure how sustainable this is long-term.

You're absolutely right, U235 reserves are only enough to last a couple hundred years at current consumption and exploration. We could probably sustain a long time with burner LWRs but it will require massive investment.

Breeders however (whether you go with Th-U or U-Pu fuel) both should be able to take us to at least another 10,000 present-equivalent years on a wholly nuclear powered economy.

You're also right to suspect fertilizer, I feel the same way. I've seen some of the phosphate mines around the world and it's kind of horrifying, so I'm hoping asteroid mining can fix our metal extraction problem.

I heard C-Type asteroids have plenty of phosphorus, but I'm definitely not an expert on asteroid mining. If they do, though, it will likely be enough to sustain us for quadrillions of human-years (humans * years) because the asteroid belt is just so damn massive compared to the Earth's crust.

Wow that's really exciting, I need to pay more attention to nuclear.

You mean geo-engineering specifically, or just a transition to a renewable economy?

Olivine weathering and ocean cloud seeding both seem like reasonably likely solutions that each cost on the order of 10's of billions. Major doubts that addressing carbon will be a big money maker.

But obviously the carbon economy is huge, so the renewable economy will at least that big.

In terms of "What's a Promising Area to Work On", I'm excited about all of it. I've expanded my description to include the renewable economy as well as the carbon economy.

Who's going to pay for it?

perhaps those who wish to survive, after the initial wave of effects begin to be felt

likely individuals, not governments. We bought our way into this problem.

But the number of people who will is very obviously tiny. For any well-off individual, it's cheaper to buy their way out of the downsides. Everyone else is wondering about rent and (in the US) healthcare with a lot more immediacy.

We can see this from the low takeup of carbon offsets.

As one example, imagine that someone invents a process to manufacture gasoline using carbon extracted from the air, at a price that's cost competitive with gasoline extracted from the ground.

Any car running on that as fuel would immediately become carbon-neutral, and it could be produced anywhere on the planet. Almost overnight you could make the entire automotive industry carbon neutral (burning this gasoline would merely return the carbon into the air that was sequestered when the gas was produced) without needing to replace all the cars on the road.

Who would pay for it? Everyone. Individuals would buy manufactured gasoline to power their cars. Governments all over the world would subsidize its production both for environmental reasons (to meet Paris targets), and for energy security to reduce their dependence on oil imports.

That would be a license to print money and could probably produce a trillionaire.

Exactly. Elon Musk announced a few weeks ago that SpaceX Starship will be fueled from atmospheric carbon. They're building a process to pull carbon fuel out of the air on Earth -- and on Mars.

Relevant quote on YouTube from Starship Update, queued up here: https://youtu.be/sOpMrVnjYeY?t=3850

Sure, that would be great. Processes to do this exist - at higher energy costs. The thermodynamic hill is heavily against you on this.

Cheap fusion or safe cheap thorium reactors would also be great. But an awful lot of smart people have bounced off those problems without success.

Yes, once you sort out the industrial process the price of manufactured gasoline would be driven by the local price of electricity at the production site.

Thermodynamics isn't the only thing to consider. There are parts of the world where spot electricity rates routinely go negative, because it's cheaper to pay a consumer to absorb excess electricity than it is to shut off a power plant. A process like this could absorb excess electricity when there's an excess of electricity.

You don't need to talk about fusion or thorium reactors when the cost of solar is low and falling, and we haven't _nearly_ saturated the planets capacity for generating electricity through solar. A combined facility that generated electricity through solar, then either sold electricity or manufactured gasoline (whichever is better in the moment)

There is already a process for it and it's called biodiesel [0]. It has its own range of problems and is not as sexy as the electric cars (that depend on rare earth metals for production of batteries with limited recyclability BTW), but could be much more sustainable long-term.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biodiesel

There's a tipping point where it becomes unprofitable to keep existing gas stations open. Then due to lack of available fueling options ICE vehicles rapidly decline. The same thing could happen with financing - as soon as lease payments and average electricity costs are less than monthly fuel costs, the incentive to go ICE will rapidly decline. Especially if range is similar to gas. Not quite there yet.

This could start an ice age

Yes, it could. Actually that's one concern I have looking forward past the current climate crisis: that the current push to solve climate change will spin up a huge industry of carbon capture and sequestration, which will turn the word's economy carbon negative. Atmospheric carbon plummets -- as fast as it's currently rising -- and we put the Earth into an ice age.

Basically humanity has reached the point where we need to learn to regulate our global carbon emissions to keep the atmosphere at a steady state. We're just now starting to figure out how to down-regulate our carbon emissions; after that we'll need to figure out how to up-regulate it in a controlled way.

You either pay to fix the problem, or you pay treat the symptoms with insurance premiums.

You pay no matter what.

>Instead of water line pipes, pull water out of the air.

I thought this story was put to bed a long time ago? [0]

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LVsqIjAeeXw

Check it out, this is a different implementation that works!

"A new device that sits inside a shipping container can use clean energy to almost instantly bring clean drinking water anywhere–the rooftop of an apartment building in Nairobi, a disaster zone after a hurricane in Manila, a rural village in Zimbabwe–by pulling water from the air."

https://www.fastcompany.com/90253718/a-device-that-can-pull-...

This is interesting to me because it’s such a cultural blindspot: the left-wing point of view is that energy efficiency is the only way forward, and the right-wing point of view is that more traditional fuels is the only way forward.

But solar panels seem to have a version or Moore’s law - and even a single doubling of efficiency from here would completely revolutionize our energy economy (and dramatically shake up world politics!). Two doublings and we have a green future. Three or more doublings and we suddenly have the biggest energy surplus in human history.

It might be a little slower than the computing revolution - but it also might not be. If this is 1980, and solar is at the Apple II phase, the next 30 years are going to be wild.

Solar panel efficiency does not have an analogue to Moore's law, and their efficiency physically cannot double two or more times.

Solar cell record efficiency is 46%, that only gives room for 1.12 doublings theoretically, and thermodynamics is nasty in the real world so we probably cannot even get past 1 doubling from here.

You are correct about thermodynamic efficiency. I interpreted it to be about economic efficiency. In which case one or more doublings of kWh output from dollar input is still a stretch but plausible.

Modern rooftop solar modules haven't even doubled efficiency from 40 years ago, but they have improved cost per kilowatt hour by more than 100x.

Yeah, I tend to agree with you here. The difference I see is that solar has already been heavily invested in and developed recently, so it's probably near the limit of today's material science.

My personal philosophy about technological progress is based heavily on the idea that material science is the principle barrier to what we can accomplish. That's why humanity's progress is recounted in "ages" named by material.

So, I think solar panels can get maybe 2-10x more economical, whereas other options like new hydrocarbon sources, fission, and fusion can probably all get at least 10x more economical than the maximum possible with solar, purely due to the physical limitations of the technology.

I can believe significant price improvements to come for solar, fission, and fusion since their fuel costs are zero or tiny. What new hydrocarbon sources could be 10x cheaper than coal or natural gas?

Well, I'm not really supposed to talk about this but we're working on a hydrocarbon byproduct of our fission reactors. Can't extrapolate but point is, there are unconventional ways to make hydrocarbons that become economically viable when they are a byproduct of an already profitable process.

> Climate change will create the first trillionaire.

> Elon Musk

There you go...

> Climate change will create the first trillionaire.

Never attribute to a changing world that which can be attributed to inflation.

so.... elon musk?

That AirMiners site takes 30 seconds to load.

Hmm, wonder why that is. Loads fast for me!

Siberia will be the next California ;-)

Wow! Here's a review of Siberia's climate by 2080: "Even under mild climate change, they estimate a five-fold increase in the potential human capacity."

https://www.newsweek.com/russia-siberia-habitable-climate-ch...

I remember a news crew interviewing Russian citizens on the street about climate change. One guy said, "I welcome global warming, it's f&cking cold here!"

Except permafrost melts into muskeg which is too expensive to farm or build roads on.

Too bad that will be offset by desertification and other negative changes elsewhere in the world.

I shall patent a automatic mozzie zapper

This is an ideological statement, which I do not believe is based in reality.

There have always been 'meta causes' of various kinds, and they didn't create billionaires.

If there were something very specific about the sector that created such conditions one might be inclined to agree, but I'm doubtful.

'Climate Change' is like 'AI' in that it will affect everyone, everywhere, in every industry, but there might very well be very few 'AI companies' that are huge, in much the same way there may be very few 'climate change' specific companies.

Consider that the 'climate change' movement is well afoot and has been for quite a long time ... and where are the billionaires?

Oil rights can be acquired at some scale, solar and wind, not really.

If someone advanced some nuclear tech, lobbied to get approval to build a lot of cookie-cutter plants built around America, had major subsidies, huge protective moats (i.e. $10B entry point to get in the game) tons of IP and know-how - like the 'Space X' of Nuclear - then maybe we could see a billionaire there.

But I don't see any companies or entities on the horizon, or on the theoretical horizon that would validate this claim. I think people might think it's true because the 'want to believe it's true' but that doesn't make it true or even more likely.

That said ... it's probably a 'promising area' to work in.

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