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jokoon

Don't solutions already exist?

There is a lot to do with engine size and vehicle size and weight, especially in the US.

Nuclear energy and trains are possible, even if they require electrifying the railroads.

Drastically reduce beef consumption is also a thing to do.

Not sure about those "carbon removal" techs. A lot of the CO2 tends to go in the atmosphere.

The biggest problem is a political one: You can't fight unemployment and inequality and try to reduce emissions. I can see ideology being a big problem when dealing with climate change. Although fighting climate change can also be an opportunity to steer away from an ideology of competition and go back to cooperation, because politically it WILL BE a nightmare. Things can also derail into complete anarchy where it becomes everyone for himself, where poor people will have to bear high temperatures.

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> The biggest problem is a political one: You can't fight unemployment and inequality and try to reduce emissions.

Why do you believe this is true? It seems to me like many efforts to reduce emissions are also likely to reduce inequality, some also increase employment. For instance:

* Make public transport free and increased capacity, good on all three counts

* CO2 tax on big emitters will reduce profits of these companies, which are usually high margin industries with few unskilled/low-pay workers

* Higher taxes on air travel affect poor people less than rich people

* Current trends point towards rich countries committing to subsidise emissions reductions in poor countries

> Nuclear energy and trains are possible, even if they require electrifying the railroads.

Note: this is not a great idea; trains release less than a third as much co2 as a truck and electrifying cross country rail would be very expensive. You need extremely high voltage for long distance transmission, which is incompatible with pantographs (the metal things that power trains/buses from overhead).

You'd essentially need to build dedicated HVDC lines alongside all trunk routes, with regular substations (which are immensely expensive for HVDC) to inject power into the lines. Cross country HVDC would be really great for the grid, but it would be better to build a dedicated solution and forget about the trains. For context, the transmission losses for electricity cause ~2x more CO2 than all trains.

There are just better things to spend money on. Even if we put cold war levels on investment into reducing CO2 theres still better things to do, like dealing with landfill emissions, land use, rehabilitating environments etc.

> Not sure about those "carbon removal" techs. A lot of the CO2 tends to go in the atmosphere.

One way of looking at it: exhaust gases are 29% CO2 (from oxygen being burnt). Air is .4% CO2. Removing CO2 from air is, bare minimum, 75x more complex than preventing it.

> You can't fight unemployment and inequality and try to reduce emissions. I can see ideology being a big problem when dealing with climate change.

IMO that is a profoundly unhelpful way of looking at it. The money spent on the Iraq war would be enough to buy enough batteries to store ALL US ELECTRICITY for full two days. People didn't think twice about sprinting into war. Renewable energy is a largely trivial cost. People need to be convinced to throw scraps at it before we scare them with real changes.

> Note: this is not a great idea; trains release less than a third as much co2 as a truck and electrifying cross country rail would be very expensive. You need extremely high voltage for long distance transmission, which is incompatible with pantographs (the metal things that power trains/buses from overhead).

> You'd essentially need to build dedicated HVDC lines alongside all trunk routes, with regular substations (which are immensely expensive for HVDC) to inject power into the lines. Cross country HVDC would be really great for the grid, but it would be better to build a dedicated solution and forget about the trains. For context, the transmission losses for electricity cause ~2x more CO2 than all trains.

You're not wrong that electrification has a significant upfront cost associated with it, but using DC for it is absolutely not the preferred method for good reasons. Most rail electrification across the world uses 25kV AC overheads, which needs feeder stations typically only every ~50Km. Newer installations are moving to an autotransformer system, where transmission is at 50 kV AC but the trains still receive 25 kV AC, which reduces losses even further and increases the distance between feeder stations to every ~100Km.

Additionally, electrification means that the benefits of moving generation towards less environmentally impacting sources has an immediate benefit on the trains, rather than waiting until the train is replaced. In the UK, over the last year CO2 emissions per passenger per mile have dropped by 10% in just the last year [0] due to a combination of electricity generation moving towards more renewable sources and newly electrified routes.

[0]: https://dataportal.orr.gov.uk/media/1531/rail-emissions-2018...

I was talking specifically about using nuclear to electrify transcontinental lines in the US. Those routes have sections hundreds of kilometers long that are basically desolate.

> IMO that is a profoundly unhelpful way of looking at it.

Agreed.

> The money spent on the Iraq war [& Afghanistan, etc.] would be enough to buy enough batteries to store ALL US ELECTRICITY for full two days.

Or, a base-version Tesla Model 3 for every driving-age resident of the US. Given that they're manufactured in the US, you'd be reducing emissions and hiring however many tens? (hundreds?) of thousands of people in the manufacturing sector.

We don't even need to be that creative to feed two birds with one scone.

Fighting environmentalv issues with extra consumption may not be a good idea. Manufacturing a vehicle pollutes a lot. Up to 50% of the enviromental costs of a vehicle seem to happen at manufacturing time.

https://archive.attn.com/stories/13637/hidden-environmental-...

> Fighting environmental issues

I’m not talking about fighting “environmental issues” — I’m explicitly talking about a) global climate change, which has little to do with ~75% of the environmental impacts of an electric vehicle, and b) not spending $trillions fighting wars due to Western society’s unslakable thirst for oil. [1]

Let’s not goalpost this — mining & refining metals (etc.) is dirty business, and we should clean it up, but to be clear: it has a very limited impact on climate change.

> extra consumption

Extra consumption? I proposed taking the trillions of dollars spent on military equipment, plus fuel for planes, aircraft carriers, and other ships, tanks, etc., not to mention the deaths of thousands of people — war is “consumption” to an absurd degree — and replacing all that with domestic EVs.

Don’t tell me that’s “extra consumption”. If anything it’s a dramatic reduction in consumption.

[1] Whether you believe the war in Iraq was fought for oil or not, oil is a causative factor: without the presence of oil in the Middle East, and the riches its trade brings to the states in the area, it’s unlikely we’d be fighting there.

I've read easily over 100 articles and forum discussions on this topic, and it's rare to encounter someone who believes the main problem we have is political.

I too believe this overlooked dimension is the most important, and have some ideas for your consideration that I hope may strengthen this perspective.

1. "...You can't fight unemployment and inequality and try to reduce emissions" - I would argue that this is an obvious complication, but I don't believe that it is an impossibility, under current conditions. It seems to me that the net amount of productivity and wealth on the planet is overwhelmingly sufficient to satisfy this issue on a material basis, but the problem is more so distribution of wealth and technology (and all the obvious complications that come along with that, of course). If this wasn't the case, then I would agree that your "can't" assertion would be correct, but luckily this seems to not be the case.

2. It is true that the problem is political, but I would argue that there are lower levels of abstraction that more accurately communicate the essence of the problem:

2a. Politics inherently derives from public consensus, even in authoritarian states (if to a lesser degree). From anything I've seen, there is nothing remotely approaching public consensus on climate change, both what to do about it, or even whether it's a real thing. It seems to me that the science is conclusive enough that consensus should be much higher than it is, so what might explain this anomaly?

2c. Public consensus inherently derives from human psychology, and I see very little evidence that humans think primarily in a logical manner, in groups or on an individual basis. In fact, there is ample evidence, both anecdotal and clinical, suggesting they do the very opposite of that.

[Politics] --> [Public Concensus] --> [Human Psychology]

I believe (speculatively, of course) that these ideas better describe the reality of the situation we find ourselves in, but I see next to no discussion on it. I'd very much like for these ideas to get into the mainstream for discussion, but other than beating them like a dead horse on HN and elsewhere, I'm not sure how this can be accomplished.

It's encouraging to encounter someone else who seems to notice this aspect of the problem, so at the very least it may be useful to try to discuss and improve the overall idea, in hopes that the message might eventually become strong enough to get some traction in the zeitgeist.

EDIT:

Two academics I've found who work most closely in this domain are Jonathan Haidt [1] and Daniel Kahneman [2], any suggestions of others to look into are appreciated.

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

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Kahneman

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