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Comment by zackmorris | Hacker News Reader

I'm shocked that the article didn't mention this, but the mass die-offs we're seeing are because the world's coral reefs will be dead by 2050:

https://www.independent.co.uk/environment/environment-90-per...

https://www.businessinsider.com/great-barrier-reef-could-dis...

https://www.forbes.com/sites/trevornace/2020/02/24/70-90-per...

The effect of this is that 500 million pacific islanders will be forced to flee to Southeast Asia as their primary food source dies, which will lead to widespread political instability and possibly war. Not to mention that since 25% of sea life depends on reefs, their death will have catastrophic ripple effects throughout the ocean.

All due to runaway global warming acidifying the ocean with CO2. This was well-understood and warned about decades ago (I learned about it as a kid in the 1980s).

I sure wish a tech billionaire would do something about this. Their inaction on countless fronts, in fact their complacency in undermining progress on environmental causes in global politics, is one of the thousand reasons I got out of tech.

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>I sure wish a tech billionaire would do something about this.

I sure wish VOTERS would "do something" about this, where "something" = vote for the party/parties that actually champion or at least acknowledge the importance of dealing with AGW/CO2 increasing vs actively denying and supporting continuing the current anti-free market policies destroying so much future beauty and potential. This should have been so straightforward, we want net neutral CO2 ASAP and then net negative as soon as feasible, so all that's needed is to legislate that emitting a ton of CO2 (or equivalent) is priced at the cost of rapid industrial removal of a ton of CO2+margin. We could just make all our energy usage net neutral in a matter of months/years by finally establishing a Free Market there and then let humanity sort out the best way to reduce the cost of that. But instead it's a mixture of full denial or, even more frustrating, so-called "greens" bitching about other people's luxury energy usage and engaging in worthless moralizing bullshit about $Cause_Of_The_Day (like Ebil Big Tech) rather then just working to deal with the problem as efficiently as possible and focusing moral arguments purely on the harm of AGW.

>Their inaction on countless fronts, in fact their complacency in undermining progress on environmental causes in global politics, is one of the thousand reasons I got out of tech.

I'd say the inaction on countless fronts of people like you who just shove all responsibility off onto nameless godkings rather then actually internalize that democracy means we're responsible as well has been a far bigger threat. Tech has been relatively green, and far more active at green efforts then most industries. It's ludicrous to see you pinning so much on "tech billionaires" vs, say, oil/coal billionaires.

Sure, but in many cases the politicians who are statistically able to win office are about as likely to do something meaningful (and not just symbolic) about these issues as the tech billionaires are.

If the ~50% of Americans who choose not to vote, actually did, that would by definition change the politicians who are "able to win."

Something I heard a long time ago is they basically 'are' voting. The vote is they do not care. I personally think it is a bad position to take, but it is not 'wrong'.

can't reply to the sibling but they are not voting "they don't care", they just plain don't care. If you do care but can't pick among the bad choices, you go through the actions and spoil your ballot or where applicable write in your choice. This is a lot of work for nothing beyond showing you care.

What makes you think those non-voters would vote in favor of policies to solve climate change? I bet each one of them would be just as likely to be a climate change skeptic as the Americans who currently vote.

How many people aren't voting because they feel their vote doesn't count. I'm not a US citizen, but my wife is. She usually doesn't vote or only votes because I talk her into it. Her reasoning is that our state will be carried by a democrat anyways. It doesn't matter if they win by 51% or 100%. Between electoral college and first-past-the-post it's no wonder few people vote.

That is sad beyond words and is the cause of the current state of things.

It's probably how a lot of democrats think in red states.

Well, this is a very liberal in a very blue state

It's a sadly common view.

One thing I'd tell your wife is that down ticket races are very important, particularly state legislatures. I know my district will be carried by a dem, but that doesn't mean there aren't distinctions between which dem I want.

> We could just make all our energy usage net neutral in a matter of months/years by finally establishing a Free Market there and then let humanity sort out the best way to reduce the cost of that.

You really think that making business tens or hundreds of times more expensive to take part in will just solve the problem, rather than businesses going under and simply not being able to exist anymore? You don't think any other country will capitalize on this, emit all they want, and sell the products we can't make? You think we'll be able to tariff that enough that it makes up for it?

> the cost of rapid industrial removal of a ton of CO2+margin.

It's not like this is actually being done at scale yet. Do we really think gigantic fans and energy-intensive machinery for CO2 capture are going to work? Shouldn't that energy be being used to replace coal / gas / fossil fuel electricity production first and foremost, and battery (/battery-like technologies, like pumping water behind a dam and other potential-energy schemes) rather than burning the energy off?

Doesn't it make more sense to look at ways of improving the reefs, like making artificial reefs with geo-engineering projects, iron fertilization, etc? Don't plants do a better job of capturing carbon? Maybe we should embrace rapidly-growing invasive alpha species like Japanese Knotweed, Kudzu, etc. and just mow it on down and let it regrow? Shouldn't we spend more money on massive-scale tree planting, soil redistribution, and anti-desertification efforts that we actually know how to do at scale, rather than some pie-in-the-sky unproven carbon capture mechanisms that can somehow only be fueled by strangling everyone's productivity to an unreasonable extent?

I agree with you but it’s not just about voting. It’s about activism and putting pressure on the government too.

Eh, I don't want to paint with too broad a brush, but have you talked to some of the voters? Last pre-covid party I was to I had a conversation with a global warming "skeptic". In an attempt to understand better, I listened more than I talked and it is .. illuminating, scary, annoying and a whole lot of other emotions that are difficult to put into words here.

Point is, voting relies heavily on educated populace. I am not certain we have it now. Maybe we need to reconsider kings ( today's billionaires ) and hope they are not into torture..

I think by regressing to a prior social system will just put us in the same spot. We need to move forward.

When you have a bad president you're going to be put through four years of hell - when you have a bad king you're going to be put through four decades of hell. Additionally kingship, no matter how well designed before hand, degenerates into nepotism since part of the assumption with kings is near absolute power. The dreamt of "Philosopher King" will never happen.

Putting the power into few hands is extremely dangerous. I think the ideal situation is pretty close to what we've got now - trust most people to choose the smartest people in the room, then ignore most people and listen to those people. We just need to work on flushing out decades of corruption that seeped into the system.

Power corrupts even the best of the minds, and ultimate power corrupts... ultimately. Those kings would be in danger of ending up as another North Korea - evil dynasties ruling forever.

One big problem is, if you are on top, life can be relatively great even in utter catastrophe, at least when looked through optic of usual sociopath/psychopath that usually end up on top. It can actually help if your goals are perverted enough. No real motivation to fight for the environment.

On other hand, wishing for corruption to be magically removed 'because it would be great and we really need it now' is so naive its painful. We're steadily heading in opposite direction, there is regulatory capture, US foreign policies are run by war equipment manufacturers, and current president is a topic on its own.

To sum it up, we're fucked, our kids are fucked so much more - this hurts pretty badly. Enlightened AI might be solution, but I would expect it wouldn't be done neutral, and anyway that's a pipe dream currently.

I agree - we're in a terrible situation right now... So, how do we solve it and dig our way out of the hole?

I'm not suggesting that we can wish corruption away - I'm not even trying to imply that doing it will be easy. I just think it's the only way to return to sane governance. There are some ways we could increase voter representation like IRV & abolishing the electoral college. Increased representation makes it harder for crooks to stay in power, but even getting that through is a struggle (otherwise we would've done if when we realized it was better than what we have now).

And, in the meantime, we need to work with what we've got.

The voters won't be willing to make the sacrifices necessary to solve the problem, once they realize how much it would impact them. They won't be willing to dramatically lower their quality of life to save some Pacific islanders who live thousands of miles away.

One of the biggest problems is that the damage caused by reducing emissions falls disproportionately on the poor voters in developed countries. Look at what caused the yellow jacket protests in France -- a hike in diesel taxes. People are already in a mood to protest economic inequality in a general sense, and fighting climate change will make that inequality worse. It's not going to fly in the current political climate, not even in the EU where people are generally more sympathetic to the climate problem than elsewhere.

The outcome of social unrest caused by unpopular climate policy will be the reversal of that policy. Therefore any attempt to solve climate change that leads to social unrest will be unproductive.

I'm increasingly convinced that geoengineering is the only way to ameliorate the effects of climate change.

I think this is a fair point, but are there perhaps compromises where quality of life doesn't have to go down? Solar panels on homes with government subsidies where fossil fuels are still heavily used for electricity. Investments (BIG ones) in public/metro transportation.

I agree with human psychology being a limiting factor here, but I think there are also ways we can work with it, by saying that life quality doesn't have to go down or can even improve, rather than the current all or nothing approach.

I don't see a way to halt, much less reverse, global climate change without making massive sacrifices to the quality of life people enjoy in developed countries.

We will pay the money it takes to protect our cities from floods and cool our buildings and deal with the other impacts, and people in poor countries will be left to deal with the problem on their own. That's not what should happen, but that's what will happen.

>fighting climate change will make that inequality worse.

That's weird, because it's the very rich and industrial processes that actually emit most of the greenhouse gasses.

I sympathize with what you're saying, because I also agree that voters should make informed choices, and never vote for any politician representing the status quo. Unfortunately, the US and rest of the world have to move through a process. Think of it like addiction: we are still in the denial stage. We haven't hit rock bottom yet, but unfortunately when we do, it will be too late. Most species will be extinct and we'll be starving.

That said, I have to disagree with you on where to place blame. The vast majority of us (6 billion at least) are just running the rat race to provide for our families. Let me be explicitly clear about this: a person's responsibility to change the world is at least proportional to the resources available to them.

I just looked, and each part per million of CO2 represents 7.82 gigaton of CO2. So if we conservatively say that the industrial revolution has taken us from 300 ppm to 400 ppm, then that extra 100 ppm represents 782 gigatons of CO2. There are talks of a global $50 carbon tax credit for each ton of CO2 sequestered. So that represents an externality cost on the environment and our health from existing CO2 levels of $39.1 trillion. That's twice the US GDP.

Now, there are pushes to get back to 350 ppm from groups like 350.org. So that would cost something like $20 trillion, roughly the US GDP, or our national debt. In fact, a real argument can be made that the $21 trillion in misplaced funding from the Pentagon audit, the US national debt and CO2 cost to our environment are all connected. We had that money, but the debt was created so that we couldn't put it towards goals like environmentalism. This was all planned, starting before 1980 when Ronald Reagan took office and symbolically got us to start looking backwards by doing things like removing the solar panels from the White House that Jimmy Carter had installed.

Now that we know all this, I don't think that we can settle for anything less than a tech billionaire opening the floodgates on carbon sequestration. We need real solar-powered devices that take excess energy and store it in things like calcium carbonate and graphite. It looks like it currently costs at least $100 to capture 1 ton of CO2 directly from the atmosphere. At 10 cents equivalent for solar power, that's 1000 kwh per ton. That's the amount of electricity a house uses in a month. I'm having trouble finding exact values for these numbers, but these are the orders of magnitude we should be thinking in terms of.

https://cleantechnica.com/2016/01/19/carbon-capture-expensiv...

https://blogs.ei.columbia.edu/2018/11/27/carbon-dioxide-remo...

These numbers are so staggering, that there's literally nothing we can do on a personal level to change them. We need powerful people to think beyond quarterly profits and start doing something tangible with their money.

Which is what I would do if I had won the internet lottery.

Edit: typos and I stumbled onto this, can someone in-the-know please update us on the state of carbon tax credits in the US: https://qz.com/1203803/donald-trump-signed-a-landmark-bill-t...

Edit 2: Yes I'm calling any tech billionaire who does nothing good with their money a poser.

>This was all planned

I generally agree with you on a lot of points, but I felt that this unsubstantiated portion took a lot away from the other parts.

I mean, academia has been pleading with politicians to do something about global warming for my entire life to no avail.

If we use Hanlon's razor and attribute the rich and powerful's incompetence on this issue to stupidity instead of malice, then forgive me if I don't find that comforting.

Except it's not so black/white but much more nuanced and gray. Assuming and asserting otherwise is disingenuous and distancing an is part of how trump was elected in the first place.

Climate change and policy around it, due to its economic implications, is complex and hard to do without costing lots of middle class people their life styles.

> 500 million pacific islanders will be forced to flee to Southeast Asia

How the heck did you come up with this number? The entire population of Oceania excluding Australia, New Zealand and Papua New Guinea is 3 million.

What do you consider Indonesia and the Philippines?

Indonesia and the Philippines pretty universally considered southeast asia and not pacific island nations. They are in-fact the majority of southeast asia, which they are supposedly fleeing to?

Also, they're quite developed countries and to the relatively small extent their food consumption is fish, it comes from trade and commercial fishing, not subsistence fishing, so their food supply will be no more impacted than any other asian country. And even that impact will look more like more seafood coming from fish farms as commercial fishing becomes less viable, as we've seen in China.

There are people, predominantly in the pacific islands proper, who rely on subsistence fishing and the decline of fish stocks will be hugely disruptive for them. It's still a big tragedy, but the number is more like a couple hundred thousand. I don't think it helps the debate to exaggerate by three orders of magnitude.

> Indonesia and the Philippines pretty universally considered southeast asia

"...will be forced to flee Southeast asia"

OP says it right there in the same sentence you quoted...

Uhh the quote is "will be forced to flee to Southeast Asia"?

Not "Pacific Islanders" — the term Pacific Islanders refers to residents of Oceania, and does not include Indonesia or the Philippines.

Indonesia and the Philippines are island nations. Their population is 273 million and 110 million respectively.

The action is placed in 2050 and nothing prevents the actual population to change their numbers in the next years, is just a way to say lottazillions of people

Can’t speak for the parent of your post, so I don’t know if the numbers add up, but population of Indonesia alone is 270 million. And the country is spread out amongst many islands. That’s just one country of many.

Indonesia is South East Asia.

I think the more pertinent question is how much of Indonesia's diet depends on the reefs. It seems like the answer is "a lot", though it's hard to get a sense of it as a proportion:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indonesian_cuisine#Fish

eat fish != depend on reefs for fish. They have very developed commercial fishing not subsistence reef fishing.

The question is where the food chain starts.

It's not specific to reefs, although they may be hit hardest. Acidification and warming temperatures have much broader impacts on biodiverity. The point people miss is that fighting climate change is actually a fight to extend the amount of time before we have even more significant losses to biodiversity.

There are significant conflicts over water (https://reliefweb.int/report/world/editor-s-pick-10-violent-...). I'd expect those to extend to food too, and be acute in some regions.

I couldn't reply to the other poster (nogabebop23) that was making the point that they don't depend on reefs, but their point is moot because this is a global issue with different impacts at each latitude.

Yes the arbitrary labels and specific numbers can be quibbled with, but the point stands that there will be massive migration.

Maybe some references help to clear this up. GP apparently did get his geography mixed up.

The term Pacific Islander [1] seems to not include the Philippines and Indonesia, as these islands are generally considered to be part of South East Asia [2]. One logical connection is that the Philippines and Indonesia are tectonically on the Asian crust [3], while the islands to the east are on the oceanic crust.

Thus the original statement of 500 million people fleeing to southeast asia makes geographically no sense, but I guess the intent of the people of Indonesia, Philippines etc. being cut off of seafood remains clear.

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

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

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_Ocean#/media/File:Paci...

He’s accounting for the population growth by 2050.

Hey sorry for the mixup, you're right, I should have said from Southeast Asia. I didn't realize that Indonesia and the Philippines were part of it.

I was trying to make the point that the influx of refugees from Pacific island nations will destabilize regions like Korea and Vietnam which have already seen such terrible conflict. India's going to be underwater, so there's going to be a northward migration of something like 500 million people from there and elsewhere.

The endgame is that those countries will likely be communist and a mix of non-christian religions. So the US seems to be positioning itself as pro-Russia and anti-China in a divide-and-conquer strategy. I think that's shortsighted, because the 21st century won't have 20th century politics. I'd rather see our attention turn towards not screwing over the developing countries that provide our goods and services. We could like, trade with them rather than bomb them. Admittedly, I'm probably misreading this, and also don't want to detract from environmental discussion.

Bill Gates has funded the development of a new nuclear reactor design that is much smaller and safer than current ones and uses the huge current US stockpile of depleted uranium as a fuel source. He was going to build it in China, as the US permitting process is very difficult (impossible?), put that is no longer possible with the current US/China political environment. Environmentalists have been fighting nuclear power since the beginning of the movement and that is what has really caused the continuation of the burning of carbon to fuel the modern world. Due to the environmental groups (and the rest of the media) constant propaganda against nuclear, almost everyone is irrationally fearful of nuclear power plants and therefor building new ones has little chance of getting support, even if the environmental groups see the error of opposing nuclear at this point and change their position.

Many people and groups pushing for changes to combat climate change want to change much more about society than just how much carbon dioxide is emitted. They want to use the fear of climate catastrophe to push other political agendas that the majority of people in the US do not support. If the world had just focused on the fact that rising CO2 would cause ocean acidification, which is a very simple and easy to understand consequence of rising CO2 levels, I think the world could have come together to decide on an acceptable level and make a plan to get to that level. A similar global proposal was done with CFCs when ozone depletion became an issue. Making the issue more scary by saying the world is going to heat up and everyone is going to die, using very complicated climate models, is a lot harder to prove. Many people are not going to be convinced, as we have seen.

While I support nuclear as part of the mix for clean energy, it's very important to understand that nuclear is NOT failing due to "propaganda" alone. The problem is the cost, in particular the capital cost. You see similar costs globally, even in places where environmental opposition to nuclear is basically a non factor like China.

Given current costs (check the Lazard decks) and likely trends, it's pretty possible that nuclear would lose out to renewables + storage + CO2 capture even with a global carbon tax forcing CO2 neutrality.

I also don't think it helps our cause to cast all opposition to nuclear power as ignorant paranoia. While the impact was thankfully minimal, Fukushima should have never happened in the first place. I personally changed my views on how much we can trust governments to properly regulate this infrastructure as a result.

Basically it's left me hoping that some of the more novel new nuclear concepts work out. I'm definitely cheering for NuScale.

Fukushima was built in the early 1970's from an early 1960's design. Nuclear power had barley started to be developed and then all development stopped. Of course there are many reasons for that, but if we had continued to develop new nuclear tech from the 70's till today, imagine how many extremely safe and inexpensive reactor concepts could have been developed.

This is, of course, a long and complicated topic, not very amenable to forum discussion. Maybe it was a good idea that nuclear power was not developed, not because it was physically dangerous, but because giving the human race that much more access to power/energy at that point in history may have had a bad outcome. We may have needed slow down the industrial revolution's exponential advance for a bit.

From what I read the root cause at Fukushima was improper risk assessment resulting in too low of a sea wall and not putting the gensets on piers. At least one engineer understood the mistake but was unable to overcome the bureaucracy to do anything about it.

So while I agree with you about how "new nuclear" could be dramatically safer, I still have concerns about how this stuff is regulated and operated. It's also why I'm in particular gung ho about small reactors, as there even if the risk estimates are messed up, the scale itself alievates many concerns.

Your final point/speculation is an interesting one. I've not heard this perspective before but it does seem plausible to me.

> All due to runaway global warming acidifying the ocean with CO2

Err, what? My understanding is ocean acidification is a contributing factor, but that the primary cause of coral bleaching is the warming directly, not acidification [0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Coral_Bleaching.jpg

Warming is the primary cause of coral die offs right now, but acidification will hit a tipping point pretty soon where it becomes nigh on impossible to get calcium ions out of solution. Pretty much anything that lives in the ocean and has a skeleton is in for a rough time - as well as everything that depends on them.

I'm not necessarily skeptical of the overall trend, but I'd be very interested in a citation on this.

I have little hope that we will reduce emissions in time or in sufficient quantity to save the coral reefs. My remaining hope is that projects like Project Vesta will help reverse ocean acidification https://projectvesta.org/

Would a hot war in East Asia be enough for the same effect? Hypothetically of course

Well a nuclear exchange between India and Pakistan would cool the Earth temporarily, but it wouldn't help long term: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/10/191002144251.h...

I would expect ocean acidification would actually get worse, since the effects would mimic the 'Year without a Summer' so people would be releasing more carbon to heat their homes.

Why a tech billionaire? We as humans just need to eat less animal food, and reduce our emissions as low as possible.

We need to start to understand as humankind that we're a pest to other life on this planet, be it animals, plants, naval lifeforms or anything else, us included (maybe except tardigrades, extremophiles and deep-sea creatures).

We need to reduce our numbers, and sustain that. Or embrace Musk's ideas.

Population isn’t the problem, first world consumption and the expansion of the first world are. This isn’t an abstract problem where people in developing countries need to have less children. This is a problem where we need to personally reduce our carbon footprints.

I hope he was sarcastic.

>I sure wish a tech billionaire would do something about this.

The only way a tech billionaire can stop it is to facilitate the development of low carbon energy sources and industrials.

This is literally part of Tesla's mission. There are huge numbers of investors pushing hard on CCS, battery, solar, wind, grid etc.

Biotech and ag-tech are pushing hard on technology to lower the carbon footprint of faming.

And industrials are looking hard are low carbon steel, aluminum and cement manufacturing (huge co2 footprint here).

The climate change freight train is in motion. Technology is the ONLY WAY OUT.

"I sure wish a tech billionaire would do something about this. Their inaction on countless fronts, in fact their complacency in undermining progress on environmental causes in global politics, is one of the thousand reasons I got out of tech."

- Which industries (and organizations) are you still in at this point?

I've come to realize over the course of 20 years pursuing a career in tech, that work itself is the primary impediment standing in the way of ever working on my dreams. Sure, someone can moonlight and try to change the world. But 99 people of out 100 will never even come close. There's nothing more pathetic than a visionary with no access to resources.

Right now I am working with a guy in the solar industry, doing handyman work around his house until we come out of quarantine. It's hard work physically, but I find my mental health has recovered and my motivation and work capacity have never been higher.

I'm basically living the ending of the movie Office Space and searching for spiritual meaning. I donate plasma to make rent, and am looking into apps like Bacon (Uber for hourly jobs) as a way to transition out of obligation-based employment. Work should be a straight-up time-for-money exchange. Taking advantage of our work ethic and patriotism, saddling us to someone else's vision of meaningful work, is one of the great travesties undermining the American Dream. I learned this the hard way moving furniture for 3 years in my early 20s to support my web business because "someone has to do it". No, someone doesn't have to do it. Stand up for yourself and leave if your job stinks. Let the free market adjust wages to what they should be, double or quadruple what they are now. Don't get suckered into indentured servitude.

Soooo you still live in our society? Including using bottled water? Cloth from overseas? Consuming highly processed food?

You are very much dependent.

Whats the difference between me, working in tech, having a good job, great money and being able to put everything i earn in my own land and become independent with something between 40 and 50 versus you? Stoped working, doing small jobs barely making it, not having any money for any sustainable development on your own?

If you are not doing it, everyone else will do.

Either you understand and accept that the world is going to look different in 50 years and you are ready for it with the minimum footprint you need or you go more extreme to try to change something.

And even if you do know that you might not change the world, if you would sacrifice for the society, the money you would earn in tech would allow you, as a single person, to funnel the money from the economy where you want to. You would do more good then tthe other person who is now doing your job and who is just spending and consuming it somehow.

And just to clarify another thing: In tech you are able to go to your boss and work half time and even then you would have more possibilities then in any other job.

I agree with you 1000%. Now let me ask you, are you willing and able to put your life savings towards saving the planet? Will you make a $10,000 or $100,000 donation to groups like 350.org?

I do regret not following my instincts and going all-in on the stock market and Bitcoin, etc though. I had $20,000 in the bank after a lucrative contract when Bitcoin was $10. I've been following AAPL since it was $12 per share after the dot bomb. Conservatively, I'd have at least a bazillion dollars had I simply not listened to everyone who talked me out of investing.

For anyone reading this, if you want to change the world, it's time to pull your money out of your investments and make large anonymous donations to groups with a good track record on the environment (or human rights, or whatever floats your boat). This pump and dump scam that the global elite are doing to inflate the stock market is about to pop. Don't give them your winnings. Pull out now and do something positive with your money.

I would love to and it feels like i'm sitting here waiting for everyone to stand up letting all the shit stay and start changing the world.

I started this by talking to people, changing my lifestyle etc. just to get more and more depressed about this topic.

Politics are not fast enough, there are enough people who really don't care and it doesn't feel anyone is starting it.

Im jumping between "saving the planet together" vs. "buying a small plot of land, building a small house on it, putting solar panels and solar thermy on the roof, buying/building a water reserva, building a storehouse and doing indoor farming and living my life until i'm dead".

My mental image of 'men eat meat' has changed the last 10 years for eating less etc. but then you talk to someone else and its the same simple/stupid talk as usual.

Solar is no savior. VERY few people understand solar and how it works enough to even understand that power output on hot summer days like we're having now is one of the worst environments for PV performance. (PV cell voltage is inversely proportional to temperature because God said so - you make many times more power on a clear, cold day.). Don't forget that cheap Chinese $#!+ solar panels (virtually all you can get, now) only last about 10-15 years, even though PV breakeven is at about 22 yrs out of quality panels 25 year life. We will be waste-deep in toxic solar panel carcasses in another few years, and there is no economical way to recycle them. I joined the solar industry wanting to see it succeed, but it never will, except on islands or similarly remote areas where you have to ship in generator fuel otherwise.

> I sure wish a tech billionaire would do something about this

No need to single out one group of people. We vote for shitty politicians, we give money to shitty corporations, we form tribes of "us vs them", we put more children on this world condemning (putting a human on the planet is worst thing you can do to it in terms of pollution), we don't do our part "because corporations are the biggest polluters" and think that absolves us of any evil. We are inactive. We'd rather shift the blame than do anything. We are complacent. We are all complicit. We are all to blame.

If the world is full of non-evil people, then why aren't they keeping the evil people in check?

"but the mass die-offs we're seeing are because the world's coral reefs will be dead by 2050"

I've argued this point before here but I don't believe that will happen by 2050 at all.

For several reasons, not the least of which is there are fossilized reefs from epochs with much much higher C02 levels (and temperatures) then we will see any time in the near future.

I was in Mexico last year. On the reefs. Diving. They were in good shape with lots of young corals and very little die off. Sunscreen and human activity are a threat.

Not getting into the whole debate on warming (I believe something is happening) but this coral die off claim I do not believe at all. Particularly the 30 years bit.

I mean, the internet is here if you'd like to learn the actual science. This is a topic we understand and have ample empirical evidence on. I'd start by considering that most species were also quite different during the high CO2 era.

And while I'm glad you had fun in Mexico and what you saw there looked healthy, that doesn't somehow erase the bleaching we see on reefs globally. That the coral is dying, rapidly, is not under contention. It's a clearly known fact.

The species may have been different but they were constructed with the same calcium skeletons that are claimed to be much under threat from acid producing C02. Yet they thrived and left fossil remains in environments that were much much much more C02 rich and warmer.

> I sure wish a tech billionaire would do something about this.

I've noticed in tech that a common hope that people in tech hold is that "the billionaires", in their infinite wisdom and generosity, will pull magical solutions out of their hats and save us all. Like you mention later, yeah, right.

> one of the thousand reasons I got out of tech

Not an option I've considered much, but it's almost tempting.

I think the only reason tech billionaires stay tech billionaires is because they don't act out of compassion.

>> that "the billionaires", in their infinite wisdom and generosity, will pull magical solutions out of their hats and save us all. Like you mention later, yeah, right.

I think its more that they have the means. Cant get anything done on a large scale without lots of moolah

> Cant get anything done on a large scale without lots of moolah

You can, but it requires collective action. But in order to have collective action, you need to win the propaganda war. I'm not sure that lots of moolah at this point can win the propaganda war against climate denialism.

It might not hurt to try some new approaches instead of just increasing the magnitude of the same message. I don't disagree though, propaganda is the key part of the puzzle that needs solving.

Meh people over-estimate the wealth of billionaires. A $1 billionaire can only buy 1000 houses in the bay area for example, and then make something like $6m/yr in rent from it.

If we take all the wealth of the top 100 billionaries and put it towards the US annual budget, it wouldn't fund it for more than a year or two also and then you'd soon be out of billionaires as you go down the list.

Governments are the real 'wealthy' organizations out there.

More like $60m in rent, just FYI.

It's because we can no longer rely on our governments to act responsibly or arrive at a solution. We now have to rely on the world's billionaires and their generosity for help.

We no longer rely on our governments not because governments are inherently distrustful but due to a toxic hyper-libertarian philosophy that's been systematically trying to disable our governments and moving power toward the billionaires. The solution isn't to pray "Save us of wise and powerful billionaires" - the solution is to fix the governments.

Then hold our governments responsible. I don’t know why anyone would expect a private citizen, regardless of whether or not he happens to have more than $1 billion, to help with environmental catastrophes. In fact I’d expect them to help the least out of anyone, since they have the resources to simply escape if they face danger or scarcity.

There's no realistic escaping planet Earth. Indeed this is a reason so many wealthy people become philanthropists. When someone truly has enough wealth to be free of any monetary anxiety, their concerns tend towards survival/preservation. Both of self and sometimes of humanity. It's ultinately self serving, in that they recognize that humanity's problems can negatively impact their own situations. Broad economic, societal, and environmental failures are probably the biggest risks to their powerful positions. And some do indeed look to ways to escape planet Earth.

I'm not saying that governments don't need to act, just pointing out that the motivations of the wealthy may not be what you expect.

I have a theory that the highest priority most people with wealth (very reasonably) have is "never be financially insecure again" (propagated to their descendants), and that the more wealth somebody has beyond "sustain a comfortable lifestyle indefinitely off of dividends", the more of their money and mindspace they invest into protecting themselves against the long tail of circumstances that could affect that. Applied on a broad scale, with different value systems and mindsets, this explains both preppers ("Society might collapse, so I should do everything I can to ensure that my needs are met in that circumstance" with a little bit of "here's hoping it happens so I have an excuse to shoot someone" mixed in) and philanthropists ("Society might collapse, or even just fall apart to an extent that degrades my control over the means of production, so I should do as much as possible to keep that from happening").

At the extreme of wealth, an appropriately diversified portfolio takes both options into account. If you have $1 Billion and think there's a .1% chance that society will collapse soon and make your money worthless, you're perfectly justified in spending up to $1million to protect against that contingency.

> Then hold our governments responsible.

With today's rampant lobbying and propaganda driven news, that's a bit of a moot point. When critical questions are asked of those in power, they're dismissed as asking nasty questions and saying it's fake news. The propaganda is also created to keep citizens fighting against themselves rather than those in power. It's a losing position from a citizens point of view. Either the politicians have to willfully change things themselves, or you need to play the waiting game until the country deteriorates enough until it sparks revolts like in Belarus.

Bezos can't just "buy" the world a new coral reef - it will require government authority, coordination between specialists, and a lot of collective buy-in by private individuals.

Unfortunately, the US has endured a multi-decade war against the bureaucracies that sparked the Interstate Highway system, the Internet, and countless other achievements.

> All due to runaway global warming acidifying the ocean with CO2.

Doesn't an increase in water temperature release CO2 from the water, because warm water binds less CO2 than warm water? I remember this as one of the many serious effects of accerlating global warming (more CO2 in the atmosphere heats up global temperatures, thereby heats up ocean water, which releases even more CO2).

As CO2 acidifies water shouldn't global warming thus basify the oceans?

Wikipedia about CO2 [1] states that ocean absorbed CO2 from burned fossil fuels. While CO2 from fossil fules is a driver of global warming, the act of global warming itself should actually counteract the acidification of the oceans.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbonic_acid#Role_of_carbonic...

I think increased CO2 concentration in the atmosphere more than offsets the decreased solubility of CO2 in the ocean due to temperature rises. We are talking about a couple of degrees increase in surface sea temperatures, versus a much more significant increase in CO2 concentration. Also, we have to worry about increased temperatures releasing reservoirs of CO2. So while the direct action of warming might reduce ocean acidity, the causes of that warming, and the side effects, both increase acidity more than the warming reduces it.

Billionaire will not save anyone they are too busy enriching themselves.

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