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Comment by DoingIsLearning | Hacker News Reader

One thing that I struggle with, as someone who is not a policy maker, is understanding the proportion of carbon emissions associated with different activities, for example, what would be the carbon emissions savings of these different options:

- The yearly energy savings of optimizing millions of web pages to reduce server side and local energy consumption?

- Banning personal vehicle diesel engines for 12 Months?

- Not shipping tonnes of tropical food across the Oceans for 12 months?

- Everybody not buying new clothes for 12 Months?

- Everybody not buying a new electronic device for 12 months?

I am not claiming that we should all go amish and bankrupt entire sections of the economy, my point is, these are all direct ways to curb carbon emissions but I have no intuition of how big of a dent in the overall emissions each option would make.

What are the carbon emissions that, if curbed, would provide the most bang for buck if you will?

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I think we should create a carbon/pollution tax and let the invisible hand of the market figure that out - it's too complex and there are so many side effects to adjusting things by brute force!

A carbon tax implemented by a "world dictator" would work.

Any individual country implementing a carbon tax doesn't work because they put themselves at a big disadvantage, and goods and services go across country borders, taking with them almost-impossible to fairly calculate amounts of carbon.

The biggest things the world could do towards the "world dictator" approach would be:

* Have a consortium of countries implement a carbon tax, while taxing all inbound goods from countries that don't tax carbon.

* Adjust WTO rules to allow taxing imports based on estimated carbon content.

* Have the WTO decide which countries are "on track to meet carbon reduction targets". Allow taxes on imports from any country that isn't.

* Allow countries to "sue" another country for environmental damages. When they don't pay up, have a UN court able to threaten anything up to military action/takeover of the country's leadership to get payment.

Problem is free trade & WHO itself, it is easier to go back to tariffs, by making things more expensive people will consume less, you can also increase quality & add requirements that a product must reparable.

You really only need the US to implement it as they're the consumer kings of the world. You can't just go sell a million SUV's to the Russians or Europeans or Ethiopians because you didn't want to pay the carbon tax in the US.

Does that actually work?

I would think the invisible hand of the market would re-route all that pollution to areas without the tax and the earth wouldn't see that much difference. It's not like they're going to stop selling oil if the EU and US agree to stop burning so much of it.

I agree it's complex, but I think carbon taxes might be part of the complexity. If we're going to start messing about with markets, we should outright ban the offending activity and regulate harshly. If we're going to apply tokenomics to the problem and pretend we fixed it until we're too old to care, that seems worse somehow.

Or we can just do nothing and hope technology saves us. That's what the actual bet is whether we like it or not.

You can apply such a tax in various ways. If the company resides in the US, directly tax the company. If they are importing, tax the imported goods.

The worst thing that could happen would be some 'world dictator' making universal rules because then large companies could lobby one entity to shift the rules in their favor, and against ours.

> The worst thing that could happen would be some 'world dictator' making universal rules

Surely the worst thing would be to set up a Prisoners Dilemma trap where individual countries have a huge incentive to betray all the other countries by abandoning this tax and attracting all the large companies in the world to come and pollute there.

I'm not particularly concerned about a prisoner dillemma trap.

If one country did that, the immediate response from all other countries could simply be 'stop all trade with that country' or simply 'crank up the import taxes from them' until they shape up.

You also don't need anywhere near 100% agreement for this to be effective. A large company losing just a few key markets (US, Germany, UK, blah) could massively outweigh any benefit they could imagine by trying to game such a system.

Just look at how much bs China is making the biggest corporations in the world jump through to be able to do commerce there. And what do the companies do - they adapt and grovel to get to that market. This is just one of those hyper-capitalist talking points that has never been proven true but keeps coming back up. If you do X then all the companies will leave. Like there are infinite other Chinas or Americas out there.

We do know that when the price of oil goes up people buy smaller and more economical cars and when it goes down they do the opposite.

If the market re-routed around that by building electric cars for instance then isn't that exactly what we want?

The nice thing about fossil fuels is it's fairly easy to identify and tax extraction. The problem is those industries will fight tooth and nail against any attempt to tax them.

On the other hand I do wonder what happens if carbon taxes become a substantial proportion of government revenues. Then there could be a tension between raising revenue and reducing consumption.

There are very reasonable legislative proposals for a carbon tax (most preferably a "fee-and-dividend" [1]) which apply border adjustments to imported goods based on their carbon footprint.

This prevents the tax from simply causing the production of the goods to move overseas, and also encourages your country's trade partners to adopt a carbon tax themselves (so they'll be exempt from the carbon tariff).

Such a policy is not attempting to distort the market so much as simply price in an externality that is currently causing the market to perform poorly. It says simply that, while I am still allowed to hop on a 3000-mile flight to visit San Fransisco for the weekend, I need to compensate you and your family (and everyone else in the country) for the associated damages.

On the other hand, because human civilization is so complex, outright bans and strict regulations on emissive activity are inevitably going to be ham-handed and will either be ineffectual or else too onerous to be politically viable in a democracy.

[1] https://energyinnovationact.org/

> apply border adjustments to imported goods based on their carbon footprint

The original question was how to find out the carbon footprint of goods.

That is true. But finding out those numbers is a much bigger problem for you or I than it is for a national government that can dedicate full-time research staff to producing sensible estimates.

So a benefit of this policy is that environmentally conscious private citizens no longer need to feebly grapple with such questions. You and I just optimize for personal expense and our own happiness while computing the carbon footprints of various things is the responsibility of institutions that actually have the resources to do it.

If a company is trying to obfuscate you could just have a high base rate you apply to them until they pass an audit to prove that they have an actually low footprint.

The closest thing to a carbon tax is the current system of carbon emissions trading. Which has it's fair share of criticisms as well:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_emission_trading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_emission_trading#Critic... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_the_Kyoto_Protoco...

Carbon emissions trading does have an impact on carbon emissions, but it also detracts from the fundamental issue at hand - overreliance on fossil fuels in key industries and the need for a fundamental shift in our infrastructure in how energy is produced/consumed - while the costs, ultimately, get deferred elsewhere e.g. individual consumers.

Measuring the effect of any tax is difficult, especially if it is hypothetical or only existed for 2 years, but Australia’s experience suggests that carbon taxes work (ie. they reduce carbon emissions). The biggest taxpayers were aluminium smelters, and the resources industry isn’t that mobile. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_pricing_in_Australia

The invisible hand is severely tied though.

I like the elegance, but am growing to believe voters are simply unwilling to implement it. Mainly because "taxes" are eternally unpopular. It's possible that the best solution is actually the most implementable solution, rather than the most optimal solution.

> Banning personal vehicle diesel engines

Diesel is not worse than petrol:

Diesel cars tend to have lower volumetric fuel consumption figures than comparable gasoline vehicles. However, the benefit in terms of CO2 emissions is significantly lower, as the combustion of 1 liter of diesel fuel releases approximately 13% more CO2 than for the same amount of gasoline.

> the combustion of 1 liter of diesel fuel releases approximately 13% more CO2 than for the same amount of gasoline

But with a liter of diesel (usually) you can make more kms than with a liter of gasoline. I'm not sure the CO2/km of each class of motor, though

imho both effects stem mostly from the fact that diesel has ~11% higher density than gasoline.

(ie. mileage and co2-output become more equal if measured against mass rather than volume)

I believe the issue with diesel is NO2, basically it may emit less but it's worse for us

https://www.theengineer.co.uk/fact-check-are-diesel-cars-rea...

> ..it's worse for us

Is diesel CO2+NO2 is worse than petrol CO2+NO2 for global warming?

Potentially Diesel has less CO2 emissions than Petrol if that is the point you want to insist on.

The major issue with Diesel is NO2 emissions, on top of respiratory issues directly attributed to NO2 in city centres, NO2 is also a reducer of human longevity. [0]

I would say anything that is slowly killing us and reducing our lifespan should be pretty high on our priorities list.

[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6801524/?report...

Barring biases for the outlet itself for a moment, Vox did a pretty good video on this issue within the context of electricity consumption.

https://www.vox.com/2020/9/10/21430916/2020-presidential-ele...

Even policy makers struggle with this. It's very hard to make a comprehensive, understandable model that connects all the dots across the board. So, that's what this piece is about.

And here's the actual graph from the video:

http://energyliteracy.com/

The argument presented here isn't to reduce consumption - although, in absolute terms, that directly impacts carbon emissions - but to strategically replace fossil fuel sources for clean energy (solar, wind, water,...). It's an interesting perspective because it avoids turning the discussion about "consumption reduction" into a debate about token use cases such as "millions of web pages need to consume less energy."

To put it more succinctly, it's more interesting to consider the origin of the electricity coming out of the socket in a datacenter or housing then how it gets used by hardware plugged into those sockets.

I'll give you a for instance. Suppose you have to pick a host for your personal website and you're mindful about energy consumption. So, you're considering Digital Ocean: What type of energy is powering their datacenters? Turns out they don't really communicate about that, but intrepid users have figured it out (data februari 2020):

https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions/what-kind-o...

So, if you choose NYC1 as your region when you pick a droplet, that's assumed to be powered by 100% wind energy.

Same with people who visit your website. Suppose, in some utopian way, 100% of your visitors have solar, batteries and are off the grid, then their daily visits to your website will have a reduced impact as well. Why reduced and not net-zero? Because the intermediate network infrastructure between NYC1 and, say, a visitor living in California, needs to be powered as well and there's no guarantee traffic won't be handled by fossil fuel powered network nodes at this point in time.

Oblique mention of Project Drawdown that tries to tackle such questions (albeit at a slightly more abstract level) methodically [1]

[1] https://drawdown.org/

Diesel cars have significantly lower carbon emissions than petrol cars and even than some electric car usage when accounting for the energy production. Diesels are even the best placed to run on biofuels.

Why single them out?

The issue with diesel engines is the fuel does not burn as cleanly in terms of particulate matter. Biodiesel and dinosaur diesel are both the same in this. For the last 15 years or so new diesel cars in Europe have been required to have a diesel particulate filter with the aim of reducing this.

Unlike a catalytic converter though, eventually (after 150,000km or so) they will become blocked up and cause a noticeable drop in power or cause engine fault codes. At that point you need to replace it, which could be a few thousand Euro for a new DPF, or the more common option is to remove it. This is illegal in most EU countries, but also a blind eye is turned to it - even in places with strict emissions checks like the UK.

AdBlue is a modern way of reducing this even more, but there are already devices you can buy that will trick the ECU into thinking your tank of AdBlue is full when its actually empty.

Combined with other common issues like injectors wearing out, as a diesel engine gets old it will burn fuel a lot dirtier than a similar aged petrol engine.

None of that has anything to do with carbon emissions, which do not increase with poor maintenance (unlike NOx or particulates). And they're all manageable issues, unlike the carbon emissions of petrol engines.

That's true, but diesel engines are only really less polluting in terms of CO2 due to using a lower amount of fuel consumed. If your goal is to reduce that, then as you say biofuels are the right answer.

However any mass adoption to biofuels would require different engine (existing engines will work fine on a low blend of biofuels, but very few will work on 10P%). For cars, why would you stick with a biodiesel engine which is more complicated and has higher levels of other pollutants, than some sort of biogasoline engine?

Engines running on biofuels equivalent to benzine are still significantly less efficient than diesels. They also require significant modifications, whereas diesels run on vegetable oils with little to no change.

Hemp oil powering diesels is possibly the most efficient locomotion path we have, only really competing with electricity generated with little carbon emissions.

The cost of things gives you a reasonable idea of the environmental impact. Energy intensive products and services have to pay for all that fuel.

This is why cities produce more CO2 than rural areas. Potentially it is more efficient to live in a city but city dwellers are richer and hence spend and consume more.

I went to a talk by the economist Jeffrey Sachs a few years ago where he said the sustainable level of spending around the world was about $10K USD PPP. Not much room for a Tesla in that budget.

I am also curious about this. I heard that something like one trans-Atlantic flight is worth 2 years of veganism. And that 10 or so freight ships produce as much pollution as the whole of Europe. These are vague statements, and the reality is certainly more nuanced, but it would be nice to have a sense for what the big issues are. For example: Would giving up coffee, with its links to deforestation, be tremendously beneficial or only marginally?

"And that 10 or so freight ships produce as much pollution as the whole of Europe."

This one is highly misleading. They may produce some very specific pollution more than entire Europe together, but pollution overall will be clearly lower.

Emissions of just C02 is about 4000 megatonnes in just EU ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_di... )

4000 / 10 / 365 = 1.1 megatone per day.

I am not expert on ships, but emitting 1 100 000 000 t of C02 per day seems unlikely.

As always, it's complex.

Most freight ships will burn marine fuels such a 'bunker fuel' when they are offshore not near ports, largely due to the health risk of increased PM in the air near ports.

The issue with fuels as unrefined as 'bunker fuel' (the thing is practically crude) is that they emmit a really high concentration of other gas other than CO2, namely SO2 and NO2.

> "SO2 shipping emissions are projected to increase and by 2020 exceed SO2 emissions from all land-based sources such as power plants in the EU, which over the past several decades have been reduced dramatically at great cost to industry." [0]

CO2 is obviously our major pollutant but Sulphur dioxide (SO2) is a major green-house gas contributor. The frustrating thing about bunker fuel is that it is used offshore purely because it is cheaper and there is no regulation curbing it. As with almost all things environmental related we go back to the hidden long-term costs of having something cheap in the short-term.

[0]https://www.transportenvironment.org/publications/sulphur-ma...

> CO2 is obviously our major pollutant but Sulphur dioxide (SO2) is a major green-house gas contributor.

SO2 appears to actually have a negative greenhouse gas effect: https://www.carbonbrief.org/sulfur-emissions-may-have-slowed...

> SO2 appears to actually have a negative greenhouse gas effect

You make it sound more factual than it is, it's a computer model projection.

From the same paper you linked:

> "Although the new paper acknowledges the that the slow-down could be a result of natural variability in the climate system"

Which is currently the consensus agreement on this.

Bunker fuel is what's left after crude oil has had all the lighter fractions cracked off:

Small molecules like those in propane, naphtha, gasoline for cars, and jet fuel have relatively low boiling points, and they are removed at the start of the fractional distillation process. Heavier petroleum products like diesel fuel and lubricating oil are much less volatile and distill out more slowly, while bunker oil is literally the bottom of the barrel; in oil distilling, the only things denser than bunker fuel are carbon black feedstock and bituminous residue (asphalt), which is used for paving roads and sealing roofs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_oil

thought note that "Shipping emissions in total emit more SO2 that all power plants in EU" is drastically different than "10 largest ships pollute more than entire Europe"

And yes, something should be done with pollution generated by shipping industry. Though I wonder what else you can do with bunker fuel. Store it?

Yeah no estimate is available for this as of now.

But developers continue to write inefficient code even if other consequences are obvious:

* If using cloud, often inefficient software will lead to higher expenses than developer time.

* On mobile devices battery life is important

* On mobile networks bundle sizes matter

Heating, cooling, and transportation probably dominate your personal carbon footprint.

What about eating meat?

By removing meat more people would starve. Now that can be a good thing because fewer people means less energy consumption, however you still need to make that moral argument that starvation is an acceptable solution for reducing energy consumption.

I've missed something. If I stop eating meat then people will starve? Are you talking about the meat farmers?

I’m talking about that the society as a whole will produce less food if we all would go vegan.

It would be a big change for sure, but maybe less of a problem than you imagine:

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-of-calories-from-an...

Also there's the fact that, per calorie, producing beef requires an order of magnitude more arable land than producing <insert-your-favorite-vegetable-here>, since cattle eat so much more than humans do.

See my reply here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24514430

Only a small percentage of US beef production is grass fed and worldwide grazing systems supply about 9 percent of the world's production of beef, the rest are crop fed in addition!

https://news.cornell.edu/stories/1997/08/us-could-feed-800-m...

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aad401

See my reply https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24517049

So you _do_ actually support the cessation of a large majority of meat production?

The real killer is beef. Simply replacing beef with almost anything else will have huge impacts (see page by FAO). If elimination is too much of an effort to make for our kids, doing it n% of the time will still bring n% improvements.

I might add that the generation of my parents (born in the 40's) ate meat once or twice a week, at least during the 40's and 50's, and they turned out fine.

http://www.fao.org/gleam/results/en/

The thing is that soil used for grazing cattle can’t be used for planting vegetables efficiently.

There is a reason why we have different farming, because of different soil quality.

So the effect would be to reduce the area of where we can produce food.

And if you would remove cattle you no longer have natural fertilizer. Mineral fertilizer has a big environmental impact on ground water.

> The thing is that soil used for grazing cattle can’t be used for planting vegetables efficiently.

This is true, but it's not how modern meat is produced. A lot of high-quality land is used to produce meat that could be used to produce vegan food, no?

I wouldn't be surprised, but do you have any statistics?

What you are missing is that a lot of land is used to grow feed for animals too.

Grazing systems supply about 9 percent of the world's production of beef, the rest are crop fed in addition!

See my reply https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24517049

(This may be a good place for me to clear some misconceptions I have about farming; treat this comment as an application of Cunningham's Law.)

> The thing is that soil used for grazing cattle can’t be used for planting vegetables efficiently.

Not planting vegetables efficiently != not planting them at all, right? Could the lower yield on such fields still come ahead of lower energy efficiency of meat (in terms of energy expended per calorie of final human food produced)?

> So the effect would be to reduce the area of where we can produce food.

Surely we can grow something human-edible there. Or could perhaps this land become earmarked for construction, while equivalent amount of very fertile land could be switched from construction to farming? AFAIK there's plenty of settlements built on land that would be better used for farming.

> And if you would remove cattle you no longer have natural fertilizer.

Is industrialized agriculture even using natural fertilizer? I was under impression modern fertilizers are made in chemical plants and their production doesn't involve animal excrement.

If it is not efficient it will cost more than it yields, a loss. According to FAO 70% of worlds land surface is not suitable for planting crops.

Cattle can transform grass, that we can't eat, to protein that we need. It is actually a good thing, especially if you can't grow anything there.

In Sweden we have something called ecological farming, it is certification, to be approved for ecological farming you can't use mineral fertilizers anywhere in your food production.

Ecological products are usually somewhat more expensive in the store.

Now there are of course lots of farms that is not classified as ecological and they can use mineral fertilizers or natural fertilizers.

About a third of all fertilizers for farming used in Sweden is natural.

Thank you for the answers!

> If it is not efficient it will cost more than it yields, a loss.

I was thinking about less efficient, but still profitable. I presume it's not a binary, and farms aren't operating barely above EROI of 1.

> According to FAO 70% of worlds land surface is not suitable for planting crops.

That's... super surprising to me. I would have expected something closer to 50-40%. Perhaps it hinges on the definition of "suitability"? I'll look into those stats.

> About a third of all fertilizers for farming used in Sweden is natural.

That's also surprising to me. Is this number so large because there are so many ecological farms in Sweden, or natural fertilizer is just so popular?

Sure, it is perhaps possible for planting crops in areas that is less suitable, I guess that the current economic system we have in the West makes that not feasible. That is why I'm in favor of tariffs on imported goods.

With more being produced within your country you can legislate higher requirements on production methods. And when food becomes more expensive to buy, the incentive to have high quality production increases.

In the west we no longer have the problem of food shortage, thus we can afford somewhat higher food prices. And of course if you produce more within your country, you can get better salaries.

Why Sweden uses that much natural fertilizer I can't really tell.

But I found something about high prices on synthetic (mineral or others like natural gas) fertilizers. This was something that started happening globally around 2008. Between September 2007 and September 2008 prices increased with 80 percent globally.

If you understand Swedish, 2008

https://www2.jordbruksverket.se/webdav/files/SJV/trycksaker/...

You really think your restaurant and supermarket beef is coming from grazing? Those cattle live in dense feedlots, where they are fed corn and soy.

Where I live (Sweden), yes actually, but I do understand that US are somewhat crazy.

Isn't corn production massively subsidized in the US? So it becomes cheaper to feed cattle with corn instead of grazing. Madness.

That type of meat production is not something I support.

Did some googling. The US is the #2 beef exporter, and Sweden is not in the top 15. Admittedly that doesn't necessarily tell me about domestic consumption.

http://www.worldstopexports.com/top-beef-exporting-countries...

Interestingly, the #1 exporter, Australia, has historically used a mix of grazing and feed grains. But they're expecting to grow more feed grains because grazing suffers during droughts, which are increasingly common. Apparently those grains are wheat and barley; corn is definitely an American obsession. I assume that will be grown on land that could otherwise be used to grow food for humans.

https://www.beefcentral.com/lotfeeding/grain-sector-faces-ne...

Nutritional and greenhouse gas impacts of removing animals from US agriculture

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5715743/

In the simulated system with no animals, estimated agricultural GHG decreased (28%), but did not fully counterbalance the animal contribution of GHG (49% in this model). This assessment suggests that removing animals from US agriculture would reduce agricultural GHG emissions, but would also create a food supply incapable of supporting the US population’s nutritional requirements.

Assuming agricultural emissions account for 9% of total US emissions (47), and assuming that emission estimates here are representative of national emissions, eliminating animal agriculture would decrease total US emissions by an estimated 2.6 percentage units.

And also don't forget to include Carbon emission emitted by natural event such as volcano eruptions

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