CO2 already emitted will warm Earth beyond climate targets, study finds
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[1] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/dec/02/worlds-r...
[2] https://www.cnbc.com/2018/11/07/how-much-money-you-need-to-b...
[1]: https://oxfamilibrary.openrepository.com/bitstream/handle/10...
I think the real resistance, is the drug of indignation. Folks are manufacturing it all the time, latching onto anything they can find to get spun up about. With negligible attention to facts. Its the one constant in our brave new world.
Global PV production capacity is ~170GW per year, current fossil generation capacity in Africa is about 135GW. Not outlandish to get that replaced in short order while accounting for growth. Want it done faster? Build more PV manufacturing capacity. The product is glass and silicon with a hint of rare earths. PV panels are almost 100% recyclable.
Overbuilt renewables should be used to sequester atmospheric carbon instead of curtailing (throwing excess renewables away when unneeded). It’s going to take an incredible amount of energy to stick all of that burned carbon from the last 100 years back into the ground.
TLDR “You must construct additional pylons.”
Countries like Australia have massive amounts of underutilized renewable energy that are not being used to their fullest extent combined with an American like obsession with cars.
We should be focusing on areas where easy wins can be made rather than looking at countries with the highest level of emissions which is a pointless statistic when they all have different population counts.
A ton of quick wins that amount to minimal real changes to total emissions isn't going to stop the earth from heating too fast
On the other hand, your point about solar vs coal is wrong. It takes less time now to build a solar power plant than a coal power plant. Especially for developing countries that don't already have substantial port and/or rail infrastructure. And this applies somewhat to natural gas, too. It's diesel that they tend to run for this reason. Solar, and now solar + storage, can compete just fine with diesel (and solar + storage + diesel is a pretty resilient combination that also can be built out super fast, is very cheap to build and operate, and also happens to get you to like 80-90% carbonfree... so there's decent hope out there).
As far as solar goes, clearly coal is cheaper than solar in Nigeria because that's what they're mostly building now. Regulations and subsidies are what make solar cheaper than coal in the US.
Edit: To be clear, I'm completely in favor of coal being replaced by renewables. I'm just pointing this out to raise awareness of the economic realities that are incentivizing coal power in developing countries.
https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-...
https://www.irena.org/newsroom/pressreleases/2020/Jun/Renewa...
That said, I think this analysis misses two important factors when it comes to impoverished countries. Otherwise, you would see more solar there. Developing countries have much lower standards when it comes to building a new power plant, so don't need to pay for sulfur scrubbers. The other factor is that unskilled labor much cheaper there. Solar and wind require much higher-skill labor as there is much more maintenance that needs to be done.
Are you sure that the steam turbine (high RPM, balancing, thermal stress to blades, steam conditioning) is easier to maintain than a electric generator or an array of photovoltaics with control circuits?
https://www.abc.net.au/news/12990532
> The owners of Australia's newest coal-fired power station have written down the value of the asset to zero, wiping out a $1.2 billion investment in the face of an onslaught of renewable energy. ... The decision was booked in Sumitomo's September accounts, in which the company acknowledged the facility was worthless despite being barely 10 years old.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variable_renewable_energy#Comp...
I remember my department had a few very large grants for solar and wind integration studies. There is always some x profitable level to integrate into some portion of the grid. Before you actually start to lose money. Used to be around 30% in most cases a decade ago. Imagine it is bit asymptotic without improvements to the cost of energy storage. I would guess 40% in most cases now.
Found this: https://www.iea.org/articles/will-system-integration-of-rene...
Check out South Australia on OpenNEM [1]. Paired with natural gas and transmission, they're at an exceptionally high amount of renewables penetration [2] and have a very low cost of power in Australia [3]. They're also using a large, recently expanded, Tesla utility scale battery for ancillary/frequency response services [4] (previously profitably performed by natural gas generators), which is causing financial pain for those mentioned gas operators (who are having trouble profiting now on either the power provided or frequency response services).
[1] https://opennem.org.au/energy/sa1/?range=7d&interval=30m
[2] https://www.afr.com/policy/energy-and-climate/coal-generatio...
[3] https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2019/dec/24/south...
Phoenix and Las Vegas come to mind - places where incident solar flux and electricity demand (due to heavy air conditioner use) almost perfectly coincide (peaks are separated by only ~50 minutes)
As soon as you need to store energy wind and solar become much more expensive.
It’s even cheaper in third-world countries (and China) due to the cost of labor.
[1] https://www.brookings.edu/opinions/the-real-costs-of-u-s-ene...
Nigeria is closer to the equator and has lower labor costs for installation, so their solar costs will be even cheaper.
Like every industry in the last decade, coal generators have also become more efficient.
I’d be shocked (heh) if solar power becomes more efficient given the Shockley-Quessier limit of PV cells which have a maximum efficiency in the best theoretical case with an infinite stacking of panels of 30%. Large synchronous machines on the other hand, in practice, can have a 95% efficiency.
Here’s a study without the “carbon pricing”: https://energy.mit.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/MITEI-WP-2...
Again coal is much cheaper.
I’m sympathetic to your agenda but it’s deceitful and unfair to presume agreement given the unique circumstances theses results affect conclusions. A place like Nigeria has to worry about what’s happening to their people in the next month rather than in the next 50 years, thus they’ll have different trade offs to make.
Please stop parroting this. Coal is cheaper than solar in the same way that a house with no down payment is free. The environmental debt from coal's CO2 emissions will far exceed costs of solar.
Except that rich europeans got the "house with no down payment" for centuries, but now expect poor africans to put down a down payment? That's going to be a hard sell to poor africans desperate to get out of poverty.
> The environmental debt from coal's CO2 emissions will far exceed costs of solar.
Expecting poor africans to give a shit is going to be a real hard sell. Especially when the climate problem is almost exclusively a rich european creation and poor africans had nothing to do with it.
Caring about climate is an enterprise of the privileged few. Unless we are willing to subsidize billions of poor africans and others around the world to the tune of trillions of dollars, I think africans and everyone else are going to go with the lowest hanging fruit. It's 2021 and hundreds of millions of africans live with electricity today. Think about that. It's insane. Considering the centuries of suffering they endured, if they have to burn down the planet to get some semblance of good life, then so be it. Let europe live in mud huts for a few centuries.
https://www.aa.com.tr/en/africa/600-million-africans-go-with...
This kind of vindictive rhetoric is probably something we should try to avoid in times like these. Even if you’re just “trying to make a point”.
Really our only chance of solving the climate is doubling down on high tech. Turning Europe back centuries would be clearly counterproductive.
I can just buy an AC and pay for electric heating. I'm not so sure that every African can do that.
What you said is 100% right, just the tone was a bit harsh. Since this site mostly has people from rich countries who refuse to learn history and accept any blame, you will be downvoted.
If we want to find out what's cheaper in order to decide what it is more reasonable to build, we can't rely on the fact that something is actually being built as an argument. It's the other way around - first we decide what's better, then do it, otherwise whatever we do would be right since we're doing that.
Or - in this case - if you assume that those calculations were made and it was found that the coal is cheaper - and that's why they're building coal plants - then there is a question of discrepancy (coal is more expensive lately than solar according to <sources>), which needs to be addressed, otherwise it might be assumed that a mistake was made.
> Regulations and subsidies are what make solar cheaper than coal in the US.
Doesn't coal industry also receive subsidies, and aren't those subsides comparable or bigger than subsidies for solar? I'm not sure; are you?
I didn’t follow the logic there. Are you saying everything everyone does is right?
I dig that, but it’s a strange thing to see in an argument.
We can't assume a proposition is correct if we're trying to figure out if it's correct or not.
The post I'm replying to was in effect "coal is cheaper since they're building coal plants". I disagree, and show why the logic is "illogical".
Firtly, thats a circular argument:"clearly bloodletting works because everyone is using it"
Secondary, the argument is meanongless without a timespan - for example a hydroelectric dam is the chepest source of electricity ever, but is very expensive upfront: no private investor wants to fund that because their returns will take decades. Channel tonnel is profitable now, but initial investort got wrecked, etc.
A hypothetical asset that lasts forever has infinite ROI but if it takes you 200 years to make your money back noone will invest.
If someone said a coal plant is being built in Nigeria, my first thought that this is being forced on them by creditors that probably already own a bunch of coal.
You don't have to go to bat for china, you know. Does the fact that they have so much manufacturing make their emissions ok? If those manufacturing emissions we're instead from the US, would you make the same note?
Ok, so Saudi Arabia is responsible for America's emissions. Russia is responsible for Europe's emissions. America is responsible for China's emissions.
But let's just keep playing word games to deflect responsibility from China and make sure it's all America's fault.
Well that's because china was late to industrialization ( by 150 years ) has come from a low emission base. And even if ignore the fact that a significant chunk of china's emissions are dedicated solely to manufacturing goods/junk for the west, if we completely stopped all emissions, it would still take china many decades of emissions to catch up to the emission's put out by the west the past 200 years or so.
> China's per capita emissions have risen from 5.25 tCO2/capita in 2007 to 8.12t in 2019 while the UK's have dropped to now just 5.45tCO2.
That's deceptive since much of UK's emissions was export to china via manufacturing. It's like your roommate "cleaning" his room by dump his trash in your room.
Just by something as basic as "standard of living", it's a certainty that the west, and especially the UK, accounts for far more emissions on a per capita basis. It's impossible that on a per capita basis, a brit has lower emission footprint that a chinese person, indian, african, etc.
Certainly, we aren't any better here in the US. I remember watching a documentary that said that if everyone on earth lived like us, it would take like 5 additional earth's resources.
Total UK emissions including imported emissions have been falling since 2007.
https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/nationalaccounts/uksectoracco...
This is an interesting point, but I don't get the cause and effect scenario here.
What bothers me is the ideological trap that fossil fuels are the only resources that can be exploited to bring people out of poverty.
Are we so lacking in innovation that we cannot come up with sustainable development models?
Meanwhile people are 'investing' in bitcoin, and pumping meme stocks.
At this point the amount of self harm in the population is so great that there is nothing to be done. Is this the curse of right wing populism? Why do disenfranchised people love voting for people that don't care about them? Trump didn't win the election but he still had lots of support even though he was only looking out for himself (and others like him) during his presidency.
Green investments are such an incredibly easy way to implement jobs programs yet people hate on them because they believe not subsidizing anything is more important than solving real problems like domestic underemployment. Yes, when I talk about green investments I am not even considering how you are doing something for the planet, I'm just talking about the economic impact of building up a domestic industry. For all intents and purposes you could also have spent money on maintaining roads or building lots of houses for all I care but when you listen to someone like Trump he would spend it on useless crap like coal. There are very little employment opportunities (if you ignore the work needed to undo the CO2 emissions) in a dying industry. But hey, it's got high visibility and is an emotional topic so lets shoot renewables down in favor of it even though you had more to benefit from the "green scam" (hyperbole) than coal.
China is doing an extreme amount of jobs programs. All those ghost cities are there to employ construction workers first, sell capital to wealthy individuals and eventually be populated by immigrants. They also loan money to developing countries and build infrastructure for them.
Well, yes. We Americans are fat, lazy and comfortable. 70 years of being on top will do that to you. But we are still voracious, even in old age, and will happily burn resources on our vanity, greed, and, perhaps worst of all, mere convenience. We are not willing to inconvenience ourselves to address global threats. (And that alone is enough to disqualify us from any kind of global leadership role.)
(In fact I believe it was a twin existential threat that led them to loose their minds. Global climate change requires of Democracy what I call a "voluntary contraction". This is impossible to accept by the many people in this culture who feel entitled to earn/consume even more than their parents, and their grandparents, because it's been that way for 80 years. Sustainability changes this; it means accepting that you'll have less material wealth than your parents. The other threat is more personal: politically correct thought policing from the left, complete with mob enforcement through cancel culture. Together these threats might be powerful enough to cause a delusion in which one is saved from reality by a reality TV star.)
There is actually more wealth to be gained for the average person because green investments can be an effective domestic jobs program. Central bank money is merely increasing the relative value of wealthy people's assets. So it's a net loss for the working class. If wealth inequality grows by 2x they owe the rich twice as much. If that money could be channeled in a way that pays the income of workers and actually gets spent it would mean that economic growth will come back and incomes will grow over time instead of stagnating.
The issue here is probably that there are so many people on earth you'd have to invest in so many places that you'd be a poor country before getting any returns.
Solar is cheaper & quicker to build & run than coal plants. And it can be built incrementally and start generating power and profits very quickly, compared to traditional power plants, which are large construction projects that don't generate power or profit until after they're completed.
I sure know which one I want to bet the future of the planet on.
This doesn't mean you can't have nuclear, but it's no longer necessarily.
https://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/renewables/germanys-energie...
Acemoglu and Robinson's concept of "extractive elites" is useful here.[1]
1. http://whynationsfail.com/blog/2012/5/1/who-are-the-extracti...
It is _faster_ and _cheaper_ for Nigeria to build a solar plant right now. [0] We've crossed over that line.
[0] https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/a34372005/solar-che...
The richest 760 million people are responsible for half of all CO2 emissions.
I am imagine that includes the cars, big homes, the electricity, and all the products that we buy from China.
I’m not sure what you want us to do with that information. There’s nothing actionable in that observation.
We should’ve stopped using coal two decades ago. I’m sure we can spend all night talking about this, but it’s all been said before.
Making sure my manufacturered imports are carbon neutral will be difficult. All the other indirect emissions will also be hard to account for.
Not sure why you're calling this out. Container shipping is very efficient.
We have to look at the entire supply chain if we want to reduce our emissions.
Coal is on the way out and nothing can stop that now.
I think this is only because historically, the only realistic way to produce energy for a lot of nations was by burning fossil fuels. No poor nation 70 years ago would be able to construct a nuclear plant or build a massive dam. Now, we have renewable sources available for a much lower upfront cost than what was available historically.
If yes, it sounds like something to keep in mind, i.e. it's not like we still have much of a CO2e budget remaining or time to waste (we'll have to take back out of the air what we put in from X years ago onwards), but at the same time it will also take many many years to get to dangerous warming levels (if we stopped emitting on an extremely optimistic schedule) and at some point between "in a while" and "in a few centuries" we have to suck those greenhouse gasses back out of the air to not have this effect run its full course. So this isn't "turns out we're doomed after all" as the headline suggests, just a further-into-the-future calculation that tells us what kinda already made sense (the long tail until settling on a new temperature average).
And yes, the tail effects of global warming beyond our usual time horizon of 2030/2050 were already known.
It's also a while out. We have bigger issues today than "who's gonna suck back out some CO2 once we cut emissions sufficiently". We'll get to that in due time.
For what it's worth, if you have unavoidable emissions today that you want to compensate, and want to also fund the people working on CO2 capturing technology, see https://climeworks.shop for a pay-what-you-want option. I don't really believe in planting trees (which is way cheaper per ton of CO2 it claims to absolve you of), and these machines apparently emit "only" 10kg for every 100kg of CO2 captured (90% effective sounds reasonable), and it's accounted for who claimed which share of the machine's captured volume so it sounds directly effective to me. It's just that the scale is peanuts and will remain so until public bodies and companies start to run out of emission reduction options and decide to use it - but at that point we better have this tech geared up.
Maybe this is a stupid question, but isn't the necessary tech "planting trees"?
So, yes, it’s an option. But it’s a slow option we’d need to start implementing immediately if we wanted it bear fruit.
(We produce enough CO2 that it takes 40 billion hardwood trees growing for 40 years to sequester as much CO2 as we make in a year. We’d have to plant a lot of trees, and then not touch them for years, to affect the course of things)
Hence why you need to cut them down and bury.
And, BTW, trees don't stop growing. They keep adding mass in their trunks. Literally the first google hit for "do trees stop growing": https://earthsky.org/earth/what-makes-a-tree-stop-growing
Edit: guess what? They even grow faster as they get older! https://www.npr.org/2014/01/16/262479807/old-trees-grow-fast...
Anyway, the land we have is limited. You literally can't cover the planet in one big forest to capture the gigatons of carbon we have released. You have to do active forest management and store the carbon somewhere stable, for example as biochar.
Basically we see plateaus where large increments of reagent do nothing, then a massive abrupt shift as the buffering potential of the system fails.
It's been disolving a lot of CO2 for us, but at some point, it'll reach an equilibrium and our air concentration of CO2 will go up much faster
I'm the kind of person that annoys all the Germans by driving 95km/h on highways because it cuts fuel emissions nearly in half compared to the recommended speed of 130km/h. We don't even pay for fuel, that's paid by my SO's employer, it's purely because it adds like 10% of time on most trips (those 2-3 minutes are negligible) and allows me to visit family without feeling as bad about individual transport (public transport isn't really an option here for trips further than the next city over, extremely poor connections even by German standards). Or wear extra clothing and put a blanket over my legs while working and see how low we can put the heater. Or not heat the bedroom at all during fall/spring and take a hot water bottle up to get warm under the blanket (must be way more efficient than heating the whole room up). In short, yep I'm with you on not gambling on these estimates. But I'm also for nuance and being realistic lest someone claims that "ökos" / climate weirdos hugely exaggerated again and it's all not so bad. I find it tricky.
I tried to do the same thing. Yes, individual actions have CO2e costs. It's not you, nor me, nor all of HN together that even can do anything impactful. Setting an example at best. (But then simply presenting a united coherent "yes carbon tax, yes ASAP, yes 125 USD/t" to everybody we discuss this with would probably help more.)
That said, irrational alarmism is its own kind of hell.
That said, I was actually just writing about the topic of planting trees :)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25680156
> For what it's worth, if you have unavoidable emissions today that you want to compensate, and want to also fund the people working on CO2 capturing technology, see https://climeworks.shop for a pay-what-you-want option. I don't really believe in planting trees (which is way cheaper per ton of CO2 it claims to absolve you of), and these machines apparently emit "only" 10kg for every 100kg of CO2 captured (90% effective sounds reasonable), and it's accounted for who claimed which share of the machine's captured volume so it sounds directly effective to me. It's just that the scale is peanuts and will remain so until public bodies and companies start to run out of emission reduction options and decide to use it - but at that point we better have this tech geared up.
I do need to sleep still tonight (0230 here) so I won't now type out (on mobile) the reasons I don't think trees are a reliable option. And by tomorrow it won't matter anymore, nobody will read it (I don't like the ephemerality of HN/reddit threads.) So these are my 2ct, hope I could clarify my reasoning as I will go sleep now.
Currently I prefer reforestation (or even better yet restoration of swamplands), because it's partly EU funded, so there's a small multiplier effect, and there's still a lot of land for "low hanging" forests, which help with local climate patterns a bit.
I'm aware of what >>we<< need to do, and I'm already working on the better heating/insulation part. But individual action is nothing compared to advocacy in terms of impact.
EU reforestation, google autocompleted it halfway to eu funding for reforestation :o
"During the current 2014-2020 funding period the programme will contribute approximately €3.4 billion more.
The LIFE programme is divided into two sub-programmes, one for environment (representing 75% of the overall financial envelope) and one for climate action (representing 25% of the envelope)."
https://lifereforest.com/life-programme/
"Some EUR 8.2 billion has been earmarked for the 2015-2020 period (27% for reforestation, 18% to make forests more resilient and 18% for damage prevention)."
https://www.europarl.europa.eu/factsheets/en/sheet/105/the-e...
One is painful in the lifestyle, one in the wallet, and both are drops in the bucket compared to changes on a civilizational level.
Which isn't to say you or anyone shouldn't pursue your own sense of moral behavior, quite the opposite in fact.
I would even say that using a normal amount of, say, electricity, but offsetting it with carbon capture, has one advantage: using a subnormal amount makes power fractionally cheaper for others.
But by how much? Well... by about the amount of difference any one set of human actions makes.
I'm not cold. I am someone who easily gets cold: I sit still 14 out of 16 hours every day, and I'm also way too selfish to let myself be cold all day every day.
It would neither be sustainable nor a good example for others.
No, I'm warm, sometimes too warm, and the room is currently at 17°C. Still a far cry from climate neutral of course, but a (to me) respectable percentage better than the 21-22°C I used to require as recently as last winter (I just hadn't looked into layering my clothing before, it was surprisingly simple to lower my thermal need by 5°C).
> an individual choosing to [do uncommon things]
Not only does it make me feel better, it also means I have first-hand experience to tell others what they could do and what impact it has had for me. The 2 extra minutes a 20-minute trip takes are mostly peanuts while saving a sizable amount of CO2 as well as money (most people pay for their fuel). I will still drive fast when I am in a rush, but for all regular trips you can choose to do this without leaving much earlier at all.
I think that perspective might help others consider their own choices. If nobody did this, it would be weird and abnormal. Now that they hear my experience, it's less so. I'm still an outlier, but it takes only one more person to set a trend.
This is of course an optimistic view and I'm well aware of that, but the alternative is doom and gloom, saying we realistically won't do anything anyway, why bother. I dunno, just seems nicer to me to try rather than accept failure beforehand. I can only do what I can do, and this is something I can do (walk the walk, then talk the talk).
(Anecdotal addition)
A friend became vegetarian for climate reasons. They drive on the highway at a literal 200km/h (125mph). Knowing that I also eat less meat and do other things towards the climate, upon hearing how fast I drive and what impact a 25% speed reduction already has, I noticed that they at least looked rather thoughtful for a minute. Will they change their habits? That's not up to me and I don't ask after it, but they at least thought about it and it will be a more conscious choice now. They might also be less likely to boast about their driving habit as they previously did, less normalizing such things.
Perhaps also not, what do I know. I just notice that a lot of people around me are making better choices in one area or another. Some use more plastic to better preserve food; it's often a trade-off. I use more clothing to preserve heat. I'm just happy that people are sharing ideas and trying new things.
Sure, it's nothing of what we'll have to sequester, but - as I already mentioned - currently it's quite a low hanging fruit.
I have a configurable display that shows average fuel consumption per 100km, momentary fuel consumption per 100km, kilometers remaining with available fuel, or some other value that I forgot about.
It's always set to the momentary fuel consumption and I have a good idea about how much things like grades (in/declines), wind, acceleration, etc. impact the consumption. The consumption per 100km is not the best measure for acceleration or idling (more useful would be something like "ml used in last 10 seconds"), but it give me some indication. Using the cruise control to accelerate (when safe; e.g. on steep uphill highway on-ramps you need to shift down and put that pedal down to get to a more safe merging speed) it's limited to about 8-9l/100km which is pretty good (many Germans consider such amounts normal for their cruising speed, let alone accelerating).
So any warming effect will only last centuries, not thousands of years.
Earth’s climate has never and will never “eventually settle” regardless of the existence of humans.
Within a few thousand years, there are already cycles visible. If that's what you refer to, then I just mean to generalize that cycle to a new average. E.g. if we cycled between 19°C and 21°C every 11 years due to the solar cycle, then that would be shifted to 21-23°C instead. (I'm making these numbers up, they're just examples of what kind of effect I mean.)
Beyond those thousands of years, even if we're considering the sustainability of our climate even if we had never discovered the use of fire in the first place, yeah there is no "eventually settle" of course. It will change depending on things like the sun burning out, asteroids hitting, other geological shifts, changes in who inhabits the world, etc. That seems beyond the scope of the discussion, we can't simply change that by changing our habits.
To be blunt: we've fucked it up already, and anything we do to "fix" world ecology at this stage is going to be characterized as something like terraforming. We aren't ever going back to "normal" in our lifetime or our grandkids'.
I agree that it seems likely that we'll have to do some sort of geo-engineering in the future. But if you mean that as an excuse to not even try and just let future generations undo everything with hopefully better tech and a world in chaos, then I vehemently disagree. I don't even have kids nor plan on ever having any, it's just immoral (and perhaps it's my way of finding purpose in life to help fix a problem humanity is facing).
1. Electrify everything.
2. Lots of nuclear (fission), with fusion sooner rather than later.
3. Carbon capture.
Well, not quite. If we had started back when climate change became clear mid-20th century, #3 wouldn't have been needed. But now, it is indeed the only option, and it will be very expensive. And the more we delay, the more expensive it'll become. We are basically screwing over future generations who will have to pay our debts.
By definition this would be keynesian gold digging. Pay people to do something that has very little economic benefits for the individual doing it and it's not in competition with any other private industry. It's basically an extreme example of a luxury.
People who have the most power to reduce carbon emission are the same people who are least eager to do so.
The future of energy is in storage.
Sometime in the future, coal and oil will run out. We, as a society, have to develop sustainable means of generating energy.
5. Let the economy stall, it will at some point anyway.
There's also a point 6, which is reduce and then stabilize the global population at sustainable levels. Having fewer humans around is simply the easiest way to consume less while allowing a reasonable standard of living.
Humans are by nature pro-growth. Any policy which works against that needs to account for it, which they never do.
Also populations stabilize when you reach a certain standard of living, which is exactly why the environmental mentality should be pro-growth – get to that point as soon as possible, and use that extra manpower to get to carbon neutral as soon as possible with the three things I listed. You don't need 4, 5, and 6. Simpler plans are always better.
Populations don't stabilize due to growth. They stabilize when the standard of living reaches a point where having many children stops making sense. If only there was a way we could share our prosperity with everyone.... hmm. Is that called capitalism? Why, no, it is not.
We're not a virus on the Earth; we're cancer. Cancer only kills people if it grows too fast. For example, many men die with prostate cancer, while relatively few die of it.
Blanket statements like this almost never help. They readily fall in danger of presenting a moralistic or normalizing argument in debate, which require zero baseline. If you're going to debate people you need to provide an actual solution that doesn't just say, "stop what you're doing", "you're the problem", etc...
Conservation may have worked sometime in the 60's or earlier, however, economies would've stalled and our present would likely be quite different. It is possible to engineer our way out of climate change, but it will take the best minds being 100% committed to it and incentives that align to it.
Guess what the best way to get to a post-scarcity economy is? You guessed it, growth. Innovation. Progress. Not stalling it.
I may have agreed with you before capitalism pissed away our future. But, we just don't have the time left, and we must sacrifice in the short term to save the long term. These are facts. If we don't take drastic action now, climate change will abolish capitalism for us in a few decades. Is that what you want?
We're neither a virus nor a cancer. We're the only thing that matters. The earth doesn't care if it dies. It doesn't have feelings. The last [insert endangered species here] doesn't know that it is the last of its kind, it doesn't care either. The only reason these things matter is because people care. The solution is therefore never going to be "make people's lives worse".
If humanity can't accept the temporary reduction of some people's standard of living to save civilization, then there is no hope. Therefore, I choose to believe you are wrong here.
Incidentally, the people who have made everyone's life worse aren't those who are going to fix the situation. They're those who kept borrowing from future generations to make their lives better.
> If humanity can't accept the temporary reduction of some people's standard of living to save civilization, then there is no hope
Citation very much needed. You asserting that we need to reduce certain people's SoL is not the same as demonstrating such, and neither you nor anyone else has done so.
Don't know who you're referring to with your last statement, but OK.
Show me you're willing to be convinced, and I'll give you every citation you need.
We know how to generate power with minimal CO2 emissions, but we don't do it at the necessary scale. We know how to recycle, but we don't actually do that, either, and it takes energy. And, capturing carbon... well, if you want to put the carbon genie back in the bottle, you have to either expend energy to do it, or violate the laws of thermodynamics. One cuts into the amount of energy you can consume, while the other is an impossibility. All this is just making the argument that we need to share the technology to do these things as broadly as possible, including throughout the global south.
Do you or do you not believe there's a finite amount of energy we can expend and still remain sustainable? Essentially, we're limited to biomass (which puts carbon back in the air that was taken out of the air previously), nuclear, gravity (hydroelectric, more or less), and solar (solar panels, wind). To go past that, we need to get into fossil fuels, and be very, very careful we don't exceed the ability of the Earth to absorb the CO2 we put in the air. Unfortunately, we're coming close to exceeding the capacity of the Earth to absorb any nontrivial amount of CO2 and still remain broadly habitable, which is why we're having significant warming over the past several decades. As you said, humans are very pro-growth, which means we're really bad at respecting these sorts of limits. So, we need to remove the temptation to do so ASAP if we are to succeed.
As for innovation, you just told me we have all the technology necessary to go net zero carbon, so, who cares about innovation in the short term? Do you want to watch the collapse of global civilization on your iPhone 15, or something?
Honestly, as long as you're going to sit there and tell me we can capitalism our way out of a problem that was caused by capitalism, you're not convincing me that you can be convinced otherwise. You're literally espousing a position that capitalists refer to as "capitalist realism," which is essentially "we can't conceive of any alternative to capitalism, so, there is no alternative!"
You know the definition of insanity, right? Tell me again why it makes sense that we're going to capitalism our way out of this?
You rightly point out this is an energy problem. That is why we need to go full tilt on nuclear. Nuclear can generate vast amounts of energy with near zero CO2 emission and also without requiring vast swaths of land (solar), localized geological features (hydro), etc.
Finally, I haven't proposed we "solve this with capitalism". Please go back and re-read my first comment, where I say we need to solve this with:
1. Electrify everything.
2. Lots of nuclear (fission), with fusion sooner rather than later.
3. Carbon capture.
Nowhere is capitalism stipulated. Of course, I do actually think capitalism is the way to go, because it is the best system we've ever invented for promoting efficiency, which is obviously a good thing in this discussion. But that was not the point I was making.
Electric cars seem to be viable, so it's really only interesting for planes right now.
Algae capturing carbon and falling to the bottom of the ocean seems so obvious and so easy and scalable!
Right now, people can afford to spend national budgets paying for global benefits (co2 reduction). When things get difficult, those programs will be the first to go...
Yeah. I don't see that happening.
It's not real. It's a hoax. Even if it's real, it's not nearly as bad as they say, and it'll cost too much and kill jobs. Even if it's as bad as they say, it's too late to do anything about it, we're powerless.
The (probably out of date) IPCC guideline is to stay under 2900 emitted, and the 37.1 is how much is emitted per year, so those numbers don't have to take absorption into account.
Therefore, the difference is 611, or about 16.5 years from whenever that measurement was taken. So, roughly - 2036. The world needs to be carbon neutral by 2036, according to that math. (And those numbers are behind the science in more recent articles, which are implying overshoot and that 2 degrees is inevitable.)
Not enough people have been paying attention.
But i guess 15 years is not enough for you.
Well, it's simple. Look at BP scientist model in the late 70's and look how much we diverged. 40 years, if the model is false you will see it fast no?
Since you're a skeptic, you have to follow the rule: look at the evidence that say you're wrong before looking at the evidence that say you're right. Luckily, those models can be the evidence of both at the same time, so you only have to do your own research twice!
What's the alternative, to only act when you have 100% certainty about anything? Would doing absolutely nothing between the beginning of 2020 and now have resulted in better or worse outcomes for Covid?