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Comment by tito | Hacker News Reader

Climate change will create the first trillionaire.

Find every machine that eats fossil fuels and electrify it. Find every crop that requires stable land and predictable weather and farm it in a shipping container. Find every underlying infrastructure that requires decades to pay off and decentralize it.

Instead of water line pipes, pull water out of the air. Instead of fiber optic cables make LEO satellites. Instead of refrigerated transportation, grow food in your pocket or your stomach. Instead of roads, take to the air. Instead of high power transmission lines that cause fires and burn down trees, build island-mode ready microgrids.

Build a better world, a template for all worlds to come.

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I, on the other hand, believe that fighting climate change will be a great wealth equalizer. The development of cheap energy in the form of wind and solar power, and also the need for centralization in the fight against climate change (which will require an increase in taxes against those with money: the rich) will eliminate many current power structures in our current economic system, and will make many aspects of the 'usefulness' of wealth: the ability to travel quickly and in ... extreme ... comfort, access to exotic foods at any time, and the ability to use huge amounts of energy, will all become extremely limited or will be available to everyone, at least up to the point that it matters anymore.

These things that you describe must happen will never be accomplished by private companies because they are all wealth destructive behaviors, and the organization that does is will not make profit off of these endeavors: nobody can afford to buy the stuff being described anymore, at least in the United States. I know that I certainly can't afford to change out all of my homes infrastructure in preparation for climate change, and almost everyone that lives around me is in a worse financial situation than I'm in.

The process will be completed by governments, not by private corporations. This is probably part of the reason that corporations and the extremely wealthy fight against the knowledge of climate change in the public sphere: it will eliminate their 'monarchic' power structures and replace them with the highly effective centralized power structures that we had pre-Reagan.

Nice, I like the part about equalizing! Fast travel, cheap energy, exotic food for all.

> which will require an increase in taxes against those with money: the rich

Unfortunately they will do what they always do and make the poor and middle class carry the bulk of the tax burden while just throwing a sail or two on their super yachts after the biofuel conversion.

Most of your proposal are unrealistic. For example:

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

You need a lot of energy to transform water into vapor and you need to remove and dispose the same amount of energy to transform vapor into liquid water. Every three months there is a new Kickstarter scam that propose something like this. Sometimes it's an overoptimistic idealist, sometimes it's a plain scam, sometimes it's difficult to be sure. After a few months and a few millions in development, they just reinvent a dehumidifier with a fancy box.

> Find every crop that requires stable land and predictable weather and farm it in a shipping container.

The current farms cover approximately 40% of the land surface. So you need to build a huge number of shipping containers. Will they have a transparent top to get free light? What about irrigation? Why is it better to use shipping container instead of the current method? Is this just a grrenhouse

WATER: Traditional municipal water pipes aren't perfect either. They're expensive to install and maintain, and it takes energy to pump all that water around and maintain pressure. Think about Flint [1], think about the upcoming shortage of groundwater in India. The cost of traditional water infrastructure is higher than estimated. There is real need for air capture of water.

Here's an interesting project to follow, perhaps you have seen it already: "The winner of the Water Abundance XPrize creates enough water for 100 people every day by making an artificial cloud inside a shipping container." [2]

FARMS: That's exactly right, agriculture uses much of our land today. Most of that is livestock. "Livestock is the world’s largest user of land resources, with grazing land and cropland dedicated to the production of feed representing almost 80 % of all agricultural land." [2] So much of meat production will be made using cellular agriculture. Livestock is way too resource intensive, cattle will go extinct. And the rest of it, well 2-dimensional farming seems inefficient so let's see what building up looks like. A single shipping container can hold many acres worth of short crops that can be grown on top of eachother.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flint_water_crisis

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

[3] http://www.fao.org/animal-production/en/

About [2]: It was discussed in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18301190 (122 points | Oct 25, 2018 | 129 comments). Some takeaway of the comments:

They don't extract water from air, they partially burn (gasify) biomass to produce water, carbon dioxide and charcoal. They extract the water from the fumes where it is more concentrated. (It's strange that they can dump all the heat, they need some good coolers.)

The cost is 1/2 of the cost of the desalinization, 2 times the cost of calling a water truck for the town, and 100 times the cost of tap water in a city. But the cost they quote is only the cost of the equipment, they don't include maintenance and they don't include the cost of the biomass.

The places were biomass is cheap and there is plenty of biomass are the places where there is enough water to grow crops or trees. It's not efficient to buy wood just to burn it to extract the water. Moreover, growing the tree will consume much more water than the water that you can extract with this device. Also, it's cheaper to call a water truck than enough truck with all the wood to produce the same amount of water.

> A single shipping container can hold many acres worth of short crops that can be grown on top of each other.

The plants need sunlight. It is possible to replace it with artificial light, but it is more expensive. At industrial scales it is worth only for plants that have a very high ratio of price per weights, not simple crops.

Why do you keep copy and pasting the same post?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21324768

> Find every machine that eats fossil fuels and electrify it.

As I replied last time... you’re starting a free lunch fallacy, and it isn’t getting much better from there.

Every “replacement” tech you list has massive downsides - replace fiber with inescapable high latency satellites, much higher cost, a crazy carbon footprint to launch them in to space, less bandwidth? Why are you just making up “better” alternatives to things?

I wasn’t sure the last time I replied to you about LED bulbs and their landfill potential vs old glass and wire bulbs that you’ve ever made anything or have any sense of scale. I’m gathering more evidence for that theory though.

Climate change is the biggest opportunity civilization has ever seen, and I'm happy to share that view with others that might contribute.

Appreciate your thoughts on this! You make a great point about LED bulbs and their landfill potential.

You're totally right about the fixed costs of LEDs. Today they're very complex from a manufacturing and materials standpoint, and can create much more trouble at a landfill than old glass and wire bulbs. That's a huge opportunity for improvement.

Ultimately as a civilization we have to find solutions with the lowest fixed and variable costs. The variable cost of glass and wire bulbs is high. You're heating a wire and generating tons of lost heat. LEDs beat the pants of glass and wire bulbs in terms of efficiency. So we have to improve that up front manufacturing and landfill potential of LEDs.

My city runs on 100% hydroelectric. I use incandescent and halogen. They give off much better light anyway, and don't mess up blue light cycles / sleep.

> Climate change will create the first trillionaire.

Is that a good thing?

It is probably more correct to state that solutions that allow us to adapt-to or reverse the effects of greenhouse gases on our environment will result in trillions of dollars in value to humanity at large.

Whether that that value-creation gets concentrated or not is some combination of randomness, individual choices, and politics.

Better than the alternatives, which are:

* We end up in serious deprivation due to climate change

* We end up in serious deprivation due to the austerity measured imposed on industrial society to prevent climate change

everything described above is a good thing. Why do you care that someone will become insanely rich by improving lives for millions?

It's funny how my comment questioning the concentration of wealth as being a condemnation of business in principle.

Why are you on Hacker News if you don't think successfully solving enormous problems merits enormous payoff? Like, this is the YCombinator message board. It's about venture capital and discussion for middling-to-wildly-ambitious startups.

I don't think you are wrong for asking the question, but this isn't really the place to question whether investment and entrepreneurism is an efficient system.

There's a lot of internet out there. This one is for startups. Just let this one exist.

It's funny how my comment questioning the concentration of wealth as being a condemnation of business in principle.

Also, go pound sand. My comment has value, even if you don't see it.

> Climate change will create the first trillionaire.

Or it will break down every aspect of our current society until it is unrecognizable.

Your "technology will save us" attitude isn't a plan, it's more of a prayer.

Yes, that future society will be unrecognizable in many ways. Today, my lifestyle emits over 30 tons of carbon dioxide per year. That's the weight of almost 30 cars every year.

Any society that manages to do away with that will be completely different than today's.

Unrecognizable, here we come!

> Unrecognizable, here we come!

You seem to think things will get better. What evidence do you have of this, besides the fact that global security, political stability and climate change is all getting worse, fast.

> Climate change will create the first trillionaire.

Zimbabwe style.

Spot on!

>Climate change will create the first trillionaire.

I was cheering for those canucks a few years back, hoping they'd score an easy trillion with their groundbreaking product.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/china-pollutio...

Bring on the fad diet pills to fix CC and watch all of the lesser talented fraudsters pile behind. If economies cause CC, economies will uncause CC.

- that gives them enough room for plausible deniability

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