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Comment by kerkeslager | Hacker News Reader

> The perfect is the enemy of the good.

The bad is also the enemy of the good.

Nuclear would be an example of a good solution that isn't perfect. Natural gas is an example of bad solution, in that it doesn't actually fit the definition of a solution because it doesn't in any way contribute to solving the problem.

> Natural gas is roughly half as bad as coal, and it's an easy win, compared to the alternatives.

This is simply false. Given methane emissions, we don't actually know that it's better at all, let alone half as bad.

> If we sit around waiting for reduction of energy use and increase in renewables to save us, we are screwed.

Actually, we're pretty much screwed no matter what we do, which is why the marginal-improvement-that-might-not-even-be-an-improvement you're trying to say is acceptable, isn't acceptable.

> Gotta take what we can get for now, and continue fighting for even better solutions.

Is "fighting for even better solutions" what you think you're doing here?

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> This is simply false. Given methane emissions, we don't actually know that it's better at all, let alone half as bad.

Methane emissions have a much shorter residency time in the atmosphere than carbon. It's literally an order of magnitude difference: methane is significantly worse for a short period, but over the course of a century carbon dioxide is far worse. That lopsidedness gets even worse when you go out to a millenium. Thinking out to a century from now, it's appropriate to more or less ignore methane and focus on carbon dioxide.

> Actually, we're pretty much screwed no matter what we do, which is why the marginal improvement you're trying to say is acceptable, isn't acceptable.

"It's unacceptable for ten million people to die, so we shouldn't have a preference between ten and twenty million people dying!"

> Is "fighting for even better solutions" what you think you're doing here?

As someone who has actually worked full-time on climate solutions and whose carbon emissions are in the bottom 1% of Americans, it's presumptuous of you to assume that you're doing more for the climate because you're regurgitating an article you saw on the Facebook newsfeed.

I really respect anyone who's chosen to willingly sacrifice their lifestyle to reduce their carbon emissions. Very few people are actually willing to do that.

So I'm curious about your opinion. Do you think that promoting hope that what we're doing is enough is the right play at this point in time? Decades of warning from the scientific community have yielded effectively 0 progress on halting our exponential march towards ecological collapse. Sure, you can argue for marginal progress here and there. But when the likely end goal remains total collapse of civilization and possible extinction of our species, does it really matter?

I know we tend to think of panic and despair as something that prevents us from finding solutions, or even make the problem worse. But maybe pretending that we're going to mostly be OK and figure out climate change is just causing us to be complacent and procrastinate on the problem until it's too late. It may already be too late due to tipping points being triggered.

Like I said, I'd love to hear your thoughts, but I've increasingly started to believe that panic is an idea worth spreading. It may be the only way we can ever hope to collectively wake up and start making the sacrifices necessary to survive this extinction event.

Well, I used to worry a lot about my carbon footprint. Then I realized that it doesn't matter. I'm always just going to be that weird guy. I told Spanish colleagues I cringed when looking at upcoming transatlantic tickets because of environmental impact and they laughed! They thought I was joking. Honestly, I live in Ireland, Spain is likely to be destroyed, at least if you like producing food.

So I stopped worrying about it. There was a time for that and it's past.

However, more recently, I've been trying to live life like civilization has a decent chance of collapsing, and that has meant coppicing trees for heat, making a home out of materials that might be possible to produce directly (wood, not concrete) etc. - and that happens to be lower carbon. I worry about national defence but can only do so much.

But I still cringe at the thought of flying, especially for work trips of dubious benefit. I am terrified of positive feedback loops - Australian fires igniting coal seams, dark blue oceans at the same time we finish dumping all that energy turning solid water to liquid in tha Arctic, etc.

There was a time to stop the asteroid hitting Earth, but now you're better off trying to be on the other side when it hits.

I used to think like this. Constantly stressing about how I was going to get the hell out of the city and start homesteading to escape the coming collapse.

But now, I feel like that's a waste of time. There's no "other side" of the coming catastrophe to run to. When the gears of global industrial civilization grind to a halt, the resulting chaos will only allow the ruthless or the lucky to survive. And even if you do survive, the world you'll be struggling in isn't something I want to be a part of.

Not to mention tipping points already triggered will likely keep the world warming to the point where humans just can't survive at all and we go extinct. If that's not the case, and our species survives for millions of years, then we've already used up all the easily accessible resources, and won't ever get back to space faring civilization, and eventually we'll go extinct.

The only way out is forward. We either beat this thing and make it out the other side as something greater, more unified, and more enlightened than we've ever been, or our story ends.

We're not going to stop the asteroid, but maybe we can all wake up soon enough to act to soften the blow just enough to survive. We don't have a lot of time.

I worry you're right but I see a range of possible outcomes and yeah, human extinction isn't one I think we'd manage (by definition). but "simultaneous world breadbasket failure" .. maybe. If nobody takes your lovely permaculture smallholding from you that is.

This is a dumb take. Differences at the margin still matter and just because we continue to emit doesn't mean you can abdicate yourself of personal responsibility.

Nice to see the hn ethos of attacking ideas, not people, in action.

It's more like a death row inmate worrying about another cigarette.

Anyway, like I said my current life is fairly low impact. Remote work helps a lot. But it doesn't make any difference, especially inasmuch as me not buying fossil fuels made infinitesimally cheaper for someone else to. It will stay that way until we price emissions appropriately.

Converting a few acres of sheep grazing land to forest could make this chunk of my lifs carbon negative, for that matter. Lamb is especially bad.

I said it was a dumb take, which is an attack on the idea. Saying that one is responsible for ones own impact on the planet isn't a personal attack either.

This is like someone saying that, since other people litter, there's no harm in me littering too. Sure, your individual action doesn't matter but collective action does.

Similarly, by your logic, why should I vote? After all, it is extremely improbable that my vote will have any impact on an election.

Depressingly accurate. We bought a property somewhere in the US that is likely to be least impacted by climate change. Efforts should still be made, but prepare for the worst.

Suspect we agree on a lot. Aim for the best, prepare for the worst, etc. We decided it was wise to seek another citizenship.

I may be misreading/misinterpreting their comments, but the gist I got was that while natural gas isn't great, it is better than coal. And if we only focused on going for great, we'd still be coal only.

I might be misreading, but I don't think they were advocating avoiding solar/wind/etc. (just that they weren't easy wins).

This is about where I stand. If there's a cheap and easy way to reduce carbon emissions that is already happening because of existing market forces, at the very least we shouldn't stand in its way. I'd even support government subsidies of it, if it helps it kill off coal, but it already seems like it'll do so without any help.

Best would be strong climate change policies that set the price of carbon at its actual (high) cost, and that would naturally drive people from coal to gas and gas to low-carbon approaches, but that doesn't seem like it's in the cards in the short term.

The real best approach would be going all in on nuclear but it's not a political possibility right now.

Carbon neutral or at least very close to it is essentially obtainable now, we just lack the political will.

I think the point is that it's not worth celebrating as a win, because the shift wasn't driven by a desire to reduce emissions. It was driven by the fact that gas is cheaper. It's just a nice coincidence that it's lower emissions.

Sure, this is better than nothing, and every little bit counts, but it shouldn't give anyone hope that the tides are changing.

Same. Not sure why you're getting downvoted.

People have been saying we need to avoid scaring people for decades, and look where we are. Panic now, helpfully, to avoid panic later when we are more helpless.

I don't know what other options we have for effective systemic change, and would love to hear from anyone who has a better model. Clearly everything we've tried up until now has not worked.

I'm not sure there's a switch we can flip that turns people from apathetic to supporting a panic-driven set of aggressive and durable legislation to address climate change. The effects of climate change are too long term and stochastic for voters to link policy with their everyday lived experience. Even in Australia at this very moment, only about half of people think Australia should do more about climate change, and it's unclear how many of them would actually prioritize that over other things they value.

I personally believe that a key switch we can try flipping is universal basic income. The reasoning is not obvious.

Basically, I think we live in a world now where almost everyone is stuck in tunnel vision for surviving today. For example, we have studies now that show significant drops in IQ when people are stressed about how they're going to be paying bills. If the vast majority is struggling financially, they literally might be made dumber and less able to think about complex problems.

If we change the rules in a way that effectively says, nobody is getting left behind and nobody is dying of poverty, then maybe, that will be enough to give the masses the breathing room to look up and see long term risks bearing down upon us.

Maybe not, but I think it's worth a shot.

That's why I'm all in on Andrew Yang. He's the only candidate who gives me a semblance of hope for waking everyone up so that we can try to solve these problems.

I also see this connection. On a game theoretical level, it doesn't pay off for the individual to make a personal effort, unless the right incentives are in place.

The status quo would be a great opportunity for a drastic policy switch: introduce correct pricing of resources (nomore externalizing) and "recycle" the generated income as an UBI.

If you do the pricing only (even if just small amounts), you get yellow vests. If you do the UBI only, you would likely just boost consumption and even aggravate the ecological problem.

But combined, it could be the solution the world is looking for.

Society is in no way set up to support UBI. Everyone gets $1000 and then rent, food, and everything else become more expensive.

Instead focus should be on guaranteeing necessities like healthcare with Medicare For All, relinquishing student loan debt, and making public college free to attend. Bernie is the only one focused on universal coverage for all of these things.

Yang supports Universal Healthcare as a key attachment to UBI. [1]

He does care about the student loan problem, but has a less aggressive and more nuanced plan than blanket forgiveness. [2]

Traditional college is not a necessity for most people. We should be pushing for more trade school participation like most of Europe does and train people for skilled labor that won't be automated any time soon. [3]

Most importantly, Bernie doesn't seem to even want to acknowledge the coming wave of automation. And somehow, he thinks that a $15 minimum wage won't just accelerate the drive to automate jobs. Higher wages also does nothing to help stay at home parents or caretakers (mostly women) who find themselves completely dependent on their breadwinner.

1 https://www.yang2020.com/policies/medicare-for-all/

2 https://www.yang2020.com/policies/student-loan-debt/

3 https://www.yang2020.com/policies/promoting-vocational-educa...

Realistically, the solution has to be to lie and link every natural disaster that could plausibly be related to the climate to the climate.

I hate to say that, but thats what needs to be done if we want to compel action.

I think we are stick from a policy standpoint. We have some climate engineering ideas that might work, with the certainty of side effects. Those might keep civilization chugging long enough for fossil fuels to become scarce enough to price themselves out of existence. Even alternative power sources have waste heat, so we have to taper power usage no matter the source, but that is a much longe term problem.

> Decades of warning from the scientific community have yielded effectively 0 progress on halting our exponential march towards ecological collapse.

This kind of doomsday fatalism is both factually incorrect and unhelpful. Between 2005 and 2015, a single decade, the US doubled its use of renewable energy [1]. co2 emissions from energy peaked in 2006 and have gently decreased since then [2]. Compared to significant upward slope before then, and the continued growth of the economy and population, that's a significant improvement. From 2000 to 2008, the number of people bicycling to work increased by 60% [3]. (It's still small in absolute terms, but this is a change that requires significant effort and lifestyle changes at the individual level.) In 2008, 30% of Americans felt dealing with climate change should be a top Presidential and Congressional priority. By 2018, that number was 44%, despite continued well-funded climate denial campaigns.

The world is a giant ship with 8+ billion each with their own oar in the water. A vessel like that turns very slowly and with a danger on the horizon as complex and difficult to understand as climate change, we should not expect everyone to wake up overnight and be all-in on fixing the problem. But almost every trend shows that people are waking up, changing their habits, and shifting their priorities in the right direction. The ship is turning.

Is it turning fast enough to avoid hitting the iceberg? No. But is it plowing full steam ahead? Not that either.

> But when the likely end goal remains total collapse of civilization and possible extinction of our species, does it really matter?

This is simply not true and you are very unlikely to find any reputable scientific source saying that. It is and will be a catastrophe. People have died and more will die. It has and will cause more political uprisings.

But humanity as a species will almost certainly survive and as the reality of the problem becomes more and more apparent, we will put more and more resources into dealing with it. It's going to be bad, yes. But we (as a species and civilization) survived the Last Glacial Period, the Neolithic decline, the Plague of Justinian, the Black Death, multiple cholera pandemics, the fall of the Roman Empire, and the Spanish flu pandemic.

We survived all of those with only a fraction of the technology, knowledge, and resources that we have today. Climate change is an entirely solvable problem with the capacity we have right now and we can and will solve as the necessity of doing so becomes more apparent and accepted.

Only a hundred years ago, nearly 5% of the entire human population was wiped out by Spanish flu and today flu innoculation is a minor inconvenience for most and the pandemic is a footnote in history. We've kept humans alive in the hottest deserts, the coldest tundra, across oceans, and on the fucking moon. We are like cockroaches but smarter and better organized.

[1]: https://www.energy.gov/eere/articles/4-charts-show-renewable...

[2]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/183943/us-carbon-dioxide...

[3]: https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2014/cb14-86....

[4]: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/04/19/how-america...

> The world is a giant ship with 8+ billion each with their own oar in the water.

I agree with most of what you said, except for this. We are much more like a modern cruise ship with a few thousand people on the button for the engine, heading full power towards the iceberg because there's some sweets they want in the same direction. If one of them doesn't collect enough sweets, they usually get sent down to the oars.

There are also 7-8 billion other people with oars in the water, pulling in several different directions, getting told either that they will also get some of the sweets if they row towards the iceberg, or that we wouldn't be in this mess if the just rowed against the engines harder. Obviously, the rowers can't change the direction of the ship - they can either hope that the people controlling the engine change their mind, or they can leave their oars and go take down the engine people en masse.

Point being, the vast majority of people, even pulling together, can't do anything to reverse global warming through direct action. We need to organize and take political action to force governments and companies to act if we are to have any real impact. Of course this will in turn affect us as well (less stuff, less meat, less AC and so many others), but the change must come from the top down at this point. At this point, even if entire countries chose spontaneously to buy half the stuff and eat half the meat, that would probably not have a significant impact on CO2 emissions, given that production would likely continue and switch to more exports.

In my metaphor, I consider both direct action and political action to be "rowing". It's all about what the 8 billion people put their attention, time, and labor into.

Change must and will happen at all levels. While those at the top have more power, they are also dramatically outnumbered. Those at the bottom have greater power if they are organized (which is why those at the top spend so much time trying to keep them disorganized and divided).

> This kind of doomsday fatalism is both factually incorrect and unhelpful. Between 2005 and 2015, a single decade, the US doubled its use of renewable energy [1]. co2 emissions from energy peaked in 2006 and have gently decreased since then [2]. Compared to significant upward slope before then, and the continued growth of the economy and population, that's a significant improvement. From 2000 to 2008, the number of people bicycling to work increased by 60% [3]. (It's still small in absolute terms, but this is a change that requires significant effort and lifestyle changes at the individual level.)

You're basically using a sophist trick here, where you keep taking the rate of change until you get the the positive outcome you want. The problem (global temperature) is still a problem, so you look at the thing causing rise. That (carbon) still rising, so you look at the rate that carbon is rising. That (carbon emissions) is still rising, so you look at a) the rate carbon emissions are increasing, or b) narrow it to the US, where carbon emissions are decreasing. And then if you focus on that, everything looks peachy! Nevermind that the actual problem is still there and getting worse!

> In 2008, 30% of Americans felt dealing with climate change should be a top Presidential and Congressional priority. By 2018, that number was 44%, despite continued well-funded climate denial campaigns.

It takes a special kind of optimism to see a glass 44% full and say it's half full.

> Is it turning fast enough to avoid hitting the iceberg? No. But is it plowing full steam ahead? Not that either.

To put the rate of change thing into your metaphor. We're not slowing down. We're not even taking our foot off the gas--we're still pressing down harder on the gas pedal. What's decreasing is the rate at which we're pressing down harder on the gas pedal. We're still accelerating, we're just not accelerating as quickly!

I agree with the rest of your post: humans will likely not go extinct. But look at what you're comparing this to! The black death might not have been an extinction event, but it was still pretty horrible.

It is a long-term problem, which means sign of the highest derivative is what matters most. If acceleration is negative then eventually velocity will be too, and that means eventually we'll start lowering absolute values.

Since change at human scale is never a step function, signs of progress will always appear at higher derivatives firsts.

> It is a long-term problem, which means sign of the highest derivative is what matters most. If acceleration is negative then eventually velocity will be too, and that means eventually we'll start lowering absolute values.

And how many people will die first?

> The world is a giant ship with 8+ billion each with their own oar in the water. A vessel like that turns very slowly and with a danger on the horizon as complex and difficult to understand as climate change, we should not expect everyone to wake up overnight and be all-in on fixing the problem. But almost every trend shows that people are waking up, changing their habits, and shifting their priorities in the right direction.

We still subsidies fossil fuel extraction! When we stop doing that I'll think the ship is really turning. Other than that I think the bubble of people who care about this in increasing, but not having a huge impact on the direction we are actually moving.

panic is not an idea worth spreading, nothing constructive and plenty destructive comes from it

Sadly, I believe nothing will be done about climate change until something catastrophic begins to happen (e.g. millions of people start dying due directly to the effects of climate change). Climate change is way too abstract of a problem for humans to deal with given its large delayed time frames.

By the time that happens, we will likely all be dead and it will also be too late

What actions would a panicked person take and how might those actions help?

Spread fear and despair to everyone you're connected to.

Yes, we need to move rationally and carefully, but we're only going to do that when a tipping point of people start believing this is an existential threat akin to an incoming asteroid that they or their children will be destroyed by.

This is what's driving increasing movements like the Green New Deal. The closer we get to the impact, the more people notice, start freaking out, and demand action. The faster we can make the majority panic and demand change, the more likely we'll have time to do something effective.

Realistically though, it's probably already too late to save our civilization.

No, just stop eating meat and spread that message to everyone. You don’t need big acts of legislation.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-02409-7

To that I raise this: https://www.reddit.com/r/zerocarb/comments/am5fo3/environmen...

Vegetarianism could be fine if it's only with crops grown locally with not a whole lot of transportation involved, but that's not likely to happen anytime soon. Not to mention individuals have very little impact on the actual problem.

https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2017/jul/10...

Even if we grant that this is all we need to do (I don't believe it is), you can't honestly be suggesting that 8 billion people are going to wake up this year and decide to voluntarily sacrifice such a primal desire.

Without big acts of legislation, this will only become reality when lab grown meat becomes significantly cheaper and available. That could be decades away, which is too late.

No, please keep your doomsday cult to yourself.

invest heavily in solutions.

panic isn't always bad and i'm unsure where that idea came from.

Panic is a state suited to making decisions in an instant when seconds count based on very incomplete information and not much analysis.

Climate change may be happening quickly in geological time, but it's plenty slow enough to take the time to think rationally.

> Methane emissions have a much shorter residency time in the atmosphere than carbon. I

Except...methane has a shorter residency time is due to it turning into CO2 at a 7 year half-life, right? I keep hearing this from people who seemingly know a lot more than me about this stuff, and yet prima facie, it seems entirely wrong. It sounds equivalent to "we cause 7X the amount of short-term greenhouse effect, but eventually it drops down to 1X, and that's better than 1X from the get-go".

Does it turn into significantly less amount of CO2? How much less? If you can clear it up for me, I'd honestly really appreciate it.

Methane concentration: 2_000 ppb

CO2 concentration: 400_000 ppb

To elaborate a bit, an atom of carbon in CH4 is around 100x as bad as an atom of carbon in CO2; CH4 is primarily and quickly removed by breaking down into CO2. But the number of carbon atoms we release into the atmosphere as CH4 is much, much less than the number of carbon atoms we release into the atmosphere of CO2. We only care about CH4 because it's 100x as powerful a greenhouse gas as CO2. If we released the methane carbon directly as CO2 carbon, it'd be a measurable amount but dwarfed by other sources.

> But the number of carbon atoms we release into the atmosphere as CH4 is much, much less than the number of carbon atoms we release into the atmosphere of CO2

Parent's point is that we don't actually know how much methane is released into the atmosphere due to natural gas fracking.

> Methane emissions have a much shorter residency time in the atmosphere than carbon.

But even with a shorter residency time (I believe it is on the order of 5-7 years) the data that we have shows that methane concentration in the atmosphere [1] is still increasing at a similar rate as that of C02 [2]. Based on this it doesn't seem appropriate to ignore methane. Without better measures to track and prevent methane escaping in to the atmosphere we might not see that trend level off or start to decrease for a significant period of time.

[1] https://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends_ch4/

[2] https://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/

> over the course of a century carbon dioxide is far worse.

Note that the methane molecule isn't removed from the atmosphere after it's "residency time", it oxidises into CO2 and water vapour.

i.e. a Methane molecule causes much more warming over a short timescale, but measured over millenia it's about the same as CO2.

Also - over 100 years the global warming potential (GWP) of methane is 28-36x that of CO2.

https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/understanding-global-warmin...

While it's true that methane only lasts for a decade in the atmosphere, it decays in to co2 and water vapor so it's not as though it is better in the long run. It's very bad short term and as bad long term.

> Methane emissions have a much shorter residency time in the atmosphere than carbon. It's literally an order of magnitude difference: methane is significantly worse for a short period, but over the course of a century carbon dioxide is far worse. That lopsidedness gets even worse when you go out to a millenium. Thinking out to a century from now, it's appropriate to more or less ignore methane and focus on carbon dioxide.

1. Methane emissions capture heat energy in the atmosphere, and that heat energy doesn't just disappear after the methane is gone. Methane is also a long-term problem.

2. Methane's residency time ends when it decomposes into carbon dioxide.

Both of these are sort of irrelevant, because we can calculate the long-term effects of methane and see that it does make a significant difference.

> > Actually, we're pretty much screwed no matter what we do, which is why the marginal improvement you're trying to say is acceptable, isn't acceptable.

> "It's unacceptable for ten million people to die, so we shouldn't have a preference between ten and twenty million people dying!"

That's a straw man argument.

If we're parodying each others arguments, how's this for a parody of yours? "It's unacceptable for ten million people to die. Saving ten million people sounds hard though. There's something easy we can do, not sure if it will save any lives, but at least I'm doing something!"

> > Is "fighting for even better solutions" what you think you're doing here?

> As someone who has actually worked full-time on climate solutions and whose carbon emissions are in the bottom 1% of Americans, it's presumptuous of you to assume that you're doing more for the climate because you're regurgitating an article you saw on the Facebook newsfeed.

Good on you for what you're doing on here, but I'm not assuming anything or disagreeing with what you do in your personal life. I'm disagreeing with what you're doing here, on Hacker News, where you're promoting a half-assed non-solution to a catastrophic problem.

> 1. Methane emissions capture heat energy in the atmosphere, and that heat energy doesn't just disappear after the methane is gone.

No, that's completely wrong. Methane does not "capture" the heat. Earth is constantly radiating energy out to the rest of the universe. What methane, CO2 and other greenhouse gases do is to change the radiation properties of the atmosphere, resulting in reflecting some of the energy back to earth. This energy ultimately gets radiated out, but more greenhouse gases means more time before it does, which, assuming constant external irradiation from sun, results in higher steady state temperature. When the methane is gone, its effect on warming is gone.

> This is simply false. ...we don't actually know...

Impressive self contradiction in a single line!

> This is simply false. Given methane emissions, we don't actually know that it's better at all, let alone half as bad.

And we don’t know if it’s “bad” either.

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