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Comment by rland | Hacker News Reader

I'm not necessarily worried about climate change per se. It will result in hardship for many, for sure. Temperature changes will render some areas uninhabitable, it will cause mass migration, and probably destabilize the world politically.

What am more worried about is the direct wholesale destruction of the biosphere. There are absolutely bonkers numbers about extinction, ocean acidification, runaway permafrost melt that actually could choke out a majority of people.

Worse still, these effects aren't easily solvable by stopping emissions, or blocking out the sun with mylar sheets, or any of the "low hanging" technological fruit -- the stuff that could be solved with today's space technology or electric car tech.

In order to actually solve these "deeper" problems, we will need an absolutely massive bio-engineering effort that is probably only possible with some kind of entropic breakthrough.

Evolution is basically hyper-organization, a point of locally super low entropy that only happens by hundreds of millions of years of energy expenditure. When a species dies, it's not those individuals, it's every one of those individuals that ever lived that dies. All that concentration of local entropy, destroyed forever. It's like using every GPU on planet earth to train a hyper-smart GPT-4, for many human lifetimes -- and then hitting rm -rf on the weights.

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You mean the Holocene extinction event which is directly tied to climate change? It's one big connected system.

Also the low hanging tech you talk about is a compete cluster bomb of terrible ripple effects. They don't solve the issue only kick the can down the road while causing massive other problems.

isn't this a bit like saying i'm not afraid of being homeless, what i am afraid of is having no where to sleep and keeping warm in cold weather.

We don't talk about birth control enough. Some parts of the world have exploding populations, and while they don't consume much CO2 at the moment, they will - either as a result of the migrations they do, or through development.

We need to reduce the number of humans on Earth.

So we need to "limit population growth" among "some parts of the world" - is it fair to guess that you mean here subsaharan Africa and south Asia? - because they don't consume much CO2 but will? No mention of the parts of the world that, uh, do consume much CO2, and will continue to do so?

Why don’t we just limit it all around? Why does someone need to have 4 kids which then, in rich countries, forces them to get a bigger car, use more energy, cool a bigger home, etc.

You don't need to limit it, as quality of life increases people have less children. Population growth rate is on a steady decline worldwide, and has or will plateau in developed countries in the near future.

Just implement carbon taxes based on the cost of removing CO2 from the atmosphere (probably $200-$500/tonne).

This is going to mean about a 5-10% cost of living increase for the typical Westerner - affordable, and beneficial because it will also mean much less air pollution.

It would also mean that the 2nd/3rd world would build up with renewable energy and electric transport from the ground up, instead of with fossil fuel infrastructure which will be difficult to replace.

It’s a nice idea, but all consumption taxes are unpopular and federal tax revenues are just thrown into one big pile. Can we just spend a trillion a year to remove the CO2 instead?

CO2 removal (and storage) at scale is impossible. We would basically have to recreate the Azolla event: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azolla_event

We already have condensed carbon - in the ground, stable, in the form of coal, natural gas, and oil.

We need to just stop digging it out and burning it.

There's really no getting around the need for a direct and transparent price on carbon. The health benefits from lower air pollution alone would probably pay for the transition itself.

For example, at just about $15/tonne, coal is immediately dead (doubled in price) as an electricity source:

https://www.resources.org/common-resources/calculating-vario...

Whereas current techniques are coming in at about $500/tonne for CO2 removal.

Both can be done at the same time lol! Realistically those populations are gonna grow at a crazy rate. Every country needs to adopt a minimal growth rate and be rewarded for being sustainable.

Per-capita CO2 usage is not really a relevant measure. What matters a lot more is CO2 efficiency.

That can be determined by CO2 per unit of GDP, and CO2 per scientific article.

For example, Pakistan has about the same level of scientific output as Slovakia [1], and 28x the GDP. Pakistan's population is 40x that of Slovakia.

Slovakia's per-capita CO2 output is 7.1 tonnes, vs Pakistan 0.87 tonnes.

But actually, per unit of CO2, Slovakia is substantially more efficient than Pakistan in terms of economic and scientific output: Slovakia is 4.9x more efficient than Pakistan at scientific output per unit of CO2, and 1.8x as efficient for GDP.

You can see similar things across the world when comparing highly efficient Western countries to inefficient 2nd and 3rd world countries.

But its true that Western countries must decarbonise electricity generation and transport, and then support/force others to do the same.

[1] https://www.natureindex.com/country-outputs/generate/All/glo...

This is why cap and trade systems are much less fair than a global carbon tax. Countries, individuals, businesses should be able to emit CO2 if they think that the return is justified against the cost. Meanwhile, low-value and inefficient output should be eliminated as much as possible.

You're assuming that GDP and papers per CO2 emitted are good measures of efficiency, and therefore of what are good uses of CO2.

This is a false assumption. The reason African countries don't produce as many papers is not that they're less "efficient" than anyone else, it's the geopolitical history of the region. Likewise for GDP.

I wanted to comment on what you said about a global carbon tax for countries, individuals and businesses though. I really don't think that's a good way to go. I'm assuming you mean a significant carbon tax, because a small tax wouldn't do much in the time we need it to.

A carbon tax for corporations banks everything on the hope that it will be profitable to move away from fossil fuels in the near future. The cost of failure is a catastrophic global crisis. How do you financially factor that in? How much profit does an activity need to generate for it to be worth causing a global catastrophe? The cost is immeasurable, so you can't put a price on it. Not to mention you might create perverse incentives. An oil company might decide it's financially worth it to emit tons of CO2, pay a fine, cause sea levels to rise, and then corner the market on building inland. There is literally no monetary value that justifies the trajectory we're on.

For individuals, a significant carbon tax means rich people get to emit CO2, and poor people don't. Rich people get to sail on their yachts, and poor people starve because they have to pay more for food.

At a national scale, it's even worse. Rich countries that got rich off of fossil fuels get to keep emitting CO2 as they see fit. Poor countries that were exploited by the rich countries for slaves or resources have to beg for help.

Legislative solutions don't have any of these problem. Ban yachts. Subsidize food. Ban cars. Stop oil extraction. Build public transit. Decrease meat production. Embargo countries that keep emitting CO2. Yeah, these are hard things to do, but they're the only thing we can reliably do. Taking the awful system that got us to where we're at today, adding incentives around it to fix it, and hoping that it works well enough within 10 years so that we don't drive ourselves to extinction is not a good plan. I personally think the economic system we have today is inherently unfixable, but even if you think there is a way of using it for good, are you willing to bet the Earth that we'll find the right configuration for it in time to stop global catastrophe? I wouldn't take that bet

Not this again, fine I'll choose not fighting climate change. The deniers won (not you). The Bitcoin guys can keep their paperclip maximizer on, people get to keep their ICEs and gas heaters.

>A carbon tax for corporations banks everything on the hope that it will be profitable to move away from fossil fuels in the near future.

It's almost profitable today without even pricing in externalities.

>The cost of failure is a catastrophic global crisis. How do you financially factor that in? How much profit does an activity need to generate for it to be worth causing a global catastrophe? The cost is immeasurable, so you can't put a price on it.

Failed econ 101... It doesn't matter how high the damage is. The same way it doesn't matter how important food and water is. Food and water is still affordable. Why? Because the value provided by water/food isn't what matters, it's the cost of the next cheapest alternative. If someone sells bottled water for $5000 and someone else for $0.25 I don't have to pay the "death penalty" because I cannot afford the expensive water. It's the same thing with CO2 emissions. A single ton of CO2 could do infinite damage and therefore the price would have to be infinite, that is, if it were impossible to reverse CO2 pollution. It's expensive to extract CO2 from the air but the maximum cost is $600 per ton, that alone reduces the minimum price needed to $600 even though the modeled damage caused by CO2 pollution is infinite.

>For individuals, a significant carbon tax means rich people get to emit CO2, and poor people don't. Rich people get to sail on their yachts, and poor people starve because they have to pay more for food.

What the fucking hell? We are literally taxing the polluters in this case. We are making it expensive for rich people to pollute, we are literally shouting in their face and saying, "You must pay dearly for your pollution, rich prick". We are taking money out of their damn pockets so they have less to spend on pollution. Compare that to the alternative which involves no punishment.

>Legislative solutions don't have any of these problem. Ban yachts. Subsidize food. Ban cars.

You run into the incompetent politician problem, also, you are making the mistake that politicians even give a damn about climate change. In Germany the CDU doesn't give a crap, they will take a CO2 tax shoved down their throat by the greens and never touch it but they themselves are never going to ban yachts or cars.

I hope this planet burns down because everyone involved, including myself, deserves it.

>Subsidize food

If the goal is reducing carbon emissions, this is one of the most counterproductive policies imaginable.

In almost all countries in the global North, the pop. growth rate is already far below replacement. There's nothing nefarious, contrary to your insinuation, about focusing on populations that are actually increasing.

Its not just a matter of birth control. In many of these countries, there are ingrained patriarchal practices which lead to men pushing for their family unit (which sometimes includes multiple wives) to simply have as many children as possible.

In other cases, its a ponzi scheme, where people have an excessive number of children in order to ensure their own livelihood in old age.

The solution is probably to stop sending all forms of food aid, to stop interfering in local and regional conflicts, and to replace all aid with education, abortion and contraception for women.

For example, in countries like Somalia, about half of the population rely on food aid for survival [1], but the fertility rate is 6.07 children per woman. The population is forecast to double in the next 25 years [2].

It would seem reasonable to me that if we are offering food aid, that we also require all recipients to undertake long-term contraception.

[1] https://www.dw.com/en/somalia-people-depend-on-food-aid-to-p...

[2] https://www.populationpyramid.net/somalia/2021/

Telling people to have fewer children in an area where few children make it to adulthood due to factors like poor healthcare, war, crime, etc... is kind of cruel and likely to be ineffective. There's a lot of evidence that simply improving the standards of living will reduce birthrates naturally.

It's better to attack the cause than the effect.

Humans ARE the cause.

I'm leaning more towards solar activity and H2O myself.

The sun is "cooling" over the short term, we still have record temperatures.

Thank you! There's lots of evidence that living beings of all kinds actually feel compelled to reproduce _more_ when faced with stressful selective pressures.

We don't have a population problem, we have a crisis in greed and hypercompounding concentration of capital and dominating, ineffective forms of power. We have a status quo that abhors any idea of slowing down, even though studies show slowing down would naturally reduce rates of energy consumption and carbon emissions. We have a trickle-down rent extraction problem that's pushing people and communities around the world to the brink.

I'm curious how you correlate Bezos and Gates having money as causing environmental degradation.

I mean at a minimum their CO2 usage must be astronomical. Likely some of the highest per capita CO2 usage of any human beings ever.

Of course they also use their money to invest in development projects which will I would imagine have significant environmental effects.

In the case of Gates he has been widely criticized by people like Vandana Shiva for his agricultural ambitions pushing chemical intensive agriculture all over the developing world, which Shiva says will have massive negative environmental effects.

Gates also pushes in I believe the WTO for stronger intellectual property restrictions, which has a side effect of more products in the landfill as they are harder to repair.

Bezos has constructed a machine which consumes huge amounts of CO2 (Amazon) in the form of delivery trucks and a flood of cheap flimsy goods which consume energy when constructed and soon end up in landfills.

There’s a lot that billionaires do, by virtue of the power they have in this world, which damages the environment.

> In the case of Gates he has been widely criticized by people like Vandana Shiva for his agricultural ambitions pushing chemical intensive agriculture all over the developing world, which Shiva says will have massive negative environmental effects.

The alternative being more labor intensive agriculture (so requiring more people) and less buffer in case of a bad harvest (so potential famine and instability).

> Gates also pushes in I believe the WTO for stronger intellectual property restrictions, which has a side effect of more products in the landfill as they are harder to repair.

The alternative is a slowdown in research and development since now the research you paid millions for in payroll and time can now be copied by your competitor with one or two engineers.

Shiva argues that the methods pushed by industry are what weaken food security. Patent protected seeds that cannot legally be collected put big industry between farmers and their food production.

She argues for a more resilient food system through seed collection and sharing, biodynamic farming practices that promote healthy disease resistant soil, and an end to fossil fuel inputs in farming.

She is advocating for a stronger food system less susceptible to disease and economic disruption.

Regarding intellectual property restrictions: I’m sorry but you’ve bought in to the widely held belief that patents promote innovation. Of course the main function of the patent is to strictly regulate innovation. Large corporations buy up every new idea they can, and use their patent portfolios to threaten anyone who might dare tread on their turf.

Economically, a world without patents would have more smaller incremental investments as innovation occurs in parallel across many companies in industry. With patents, much fewer players buy up rights to yesterday’s ideas and prevent a sea of competition.

Think of the 3D printer. $50,000 when release under patent. $25,000 12 years later when still under patent. $2,000 from many companies three years after the patents expired. $250 and available worldwide from hundreds of companies ten years after the patents expired. There was a LOT of innovation that occurred in the 3D printing space in that decade after the patents expired!

I’m sorry I’m in a rush but here is some further reading:

https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=284

https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/africaatlse/2013/03/08/neoliberal-pl...

https://inmotionmagazine.com/global/vshiva4_int.html

http://www.dklevine.com/general/intellectual/againstfinal.ht...

What do patents (which I oppose, btw) have to do with environmental degradation? and Bill Gates being rich?

I believe patents reduce the likelihood of companies building things with compatible, interchangeable parts which makes them harder to repair and thus they are disposed of sooner. I also think it leads to less durable goods such that they come to need repair sooner. For my 3D printer for example compatible parts are available from a number of suppliers and it is easy to repair. Now look at power tools. Proprietary batteries and chargers that change year over year so customers always need to throw out old tools and buy new ones. I assume the battery connectors are patent protected though adapters from China are starting to hit the market anyway. Still grey markets are a bandaid over the real problems.

Shiva has interesting arguments.

> Economically, a world without patents would have more smaller incremental investments as innovation occurs in parallel across many companies in industry.

And a complete stagnation in some areas due to the cost barrier of certain research since, as soon as the product will be out someone will start to improve it incrementally without having to recoup the R&D costs.

A few things:

The world would be vastly better without patents in my opinion. Faster innovation, cheaper goods, less environmental waste. Medical technology would be better and cheaper. High technology like MRI machines would become cheaper, health care would become cheaper, etc. Really massive benefits.

It could be that there are certain fields where patents actually help to some degree. In other words an artificial monopoly is the only way to secure enough funds to cross some threshold for viability. Well, fine. We shouldn’t throw out all of the benefits of open innovation just because a few areas will need help. We can recognize what those areas are and provide government funding for investment, like in health care. Then we still get all the benefits of open innovation and we can distort the market with cash injections instead of planet wide distortions on copying.

> Medical technology would be better and cheaper

That's the first sector where research will grind to a halt. It's extremely costly to bring something to the finish line due to regulations. Think drug research where testing and clinical trials take years. But once the molecule has been synthesized, it's trivial to do so at scale. So what smarter players will do is simply wait for someone to spend years on R&D then copy at the finish line and flood the market.

> We can recognize what those areas are and provide government funding for investment, like in health care

So bureaucrats will have even more say in who/what project gets funding. See how wonderful that has been for the EU tech sector.

e-ink is another area where progress is glacial because of the way a certain patents holder has decided to monetize.

This has been covered repeatedly on HN. There's no evidence of this. Electrophoresis is slow because of the laws of physics! That's why a 2007 kindle panel's update speed is the same as a 2021 kindle but the contrast ratio and cost is vastly superior since those are things that aren't violating physics! Companies like ClearInk are trying different methods to get faster speed but to achieve that they are forced to sacrifice bistability. Not sure why this factually incorrect trope about patents keeps getting repeated. You can look at my comment history to see that I've been trying to address this issue repeatedly.

We are talking about two issues - progress and existing availability:

1. Improvement on panels - you are right, physics is holding us back here. It is debatable whether cross-licensing so prevalent elsewhere in the industry would help. Even then I'd say Eink is holding industry back because they've closed avenues for other companies to iterate on Eink's core patents. (Again maybe good for Eink, but not good for everyone else)

2. Variety, use, licensing of existing technology - here Eink corporation is holding everyone else back.

They decide on what to manufacture and how to sell it. How can this be good for the consumer / small time startup?

There is plenty of anecdata on how hard it is to make a new product with Eink. They are very protective of their technology. LG can't just decide to make 32inch eink panels and license the tech from Eink.

Eink practically holds a monopoly in their niche.

They've bought most of their competitors in eink industry. SiPix was one of them. They are heavily pushing for vertical integration.

My argument is that with more open patent situation in e-ink world, we would see more/different manufacturers, we would see more interesting devices with different sizes/ratios at a lower cost.

PS I own 10+ e-ink readers in sizes from 5 inches to 13.3 inches and everything in between that Eink has allowed makers to use.

I am convinced that with more competition we would see better variety in large size e-ink device market.

I have an open mind, and would love to see an example of some company being a sole patent holder/monopoly for 20+ years in some industry being good for everyone else.

> I'd say Eink is holding industry back because they've closed avenues for other companies to iterate on Eink's core patents.

As I mentioned in my past comments, I work in the display industry and the only people I've heard the above comment from are people who are not in the display industry. It is the equivalent of someone outside software development making an accusation like Microsoft is holding back operating system development because of Microsoft's patents. I hope you can see the point. If not, perhaps you could give some evidence.

The rest of your post (monopoly, lack of competition, lack of variety) is based on the same fundamental claim you've made above.

It is good to hear from someone in the display industry!

Please do provide some evidence. (not a snark)

So often here on HN we hear from experts in some field that common wisdom is wrong but we do not see the evidence. (HFT insiders come to mind)

I have been hearing the lamentations on the consumer side of eink for over 10 years .

My observation is that there is a dearth of competition and innovation in e-ink display industry.

What are the causes? Physics okay, but what else?

My hypothesis is that it is caused by Eink corporation choosing to go after a big slice of a relatively small pie. They are trying to grow this pie very slowly in a controlled matter not willing to sacrifice any market share.

I would love to hear otherwise.

Why are we as consumers only now getting one choice of a 20+ inch eink screen?

Analogy would be Mac:PC in the 1980s and their experiences with compatibles. Both Apple and IBM regretted allowing compatible devices. There is also Xerox and before-mentioned 3D printing.

So to me it seems E-ink has taken those lessons(closed system good/open bad) to heart.

I'm confused by your comment. You're making a claim that E-Ink is suppressing innovation. I state that doesn't seem to be the case in my industry, ie: the display industry. And you're asking me for evidence? Shouldn't the person making a claim that a company is suppressing innovation (ie: you) be the one to provide evidence? This is equivalent to someone saying Microsoft is suppressing innovation in operating systems. I would then respond saying I know a bit about operating systems and I don't see that. Then that person saying where is the proof that there isn't suppression by Microsoft. Do you see how your comment comes across?

> Why are we as consumers only now getting one choice of a 20+ inch eink screen?

You as a consumer can buy a mile of E Ink fpl if you like. They'll sell it to you. Then you can go and figure out how to laminate a >20" TFT backplane to it. Good luck getting that size in less than 1 million unit MOQ quantities especially now with all the backplane shortages. Good luck trying to convince VCs to fund your display startup with the billions you'll need to construct a physical factory. If they say they'd rather fund an AI, machine learning, internet services startup, tell us what convincing argument you'd use to convince them otherwise. No snark. Genuinely interested to see how you'll solve this problem that we in the display industry genuinely face.

I am making a claim that there has been insufficient progress in e-ink space.

I would love to hear your expert opinion on the causes.

We have not had the explosion in devices and the reduction in prices that has happened in other areas(scanners, various types of printers including 3D,LCD monitors, digital cameras, mobile phones, etc etc). E-ink is stagnating, this has been the constant lament on mobileread forums for 10 years.

Eink corporation usually gets the blame. Maybe they shouldn't and it would be interesting to hear it.

People want high quality color, people want lower prices, and we are not getting it.

https://wiki.mobileread.com/wiki/EBook_Reader_Matrix is rather limited.

Only recently we've had some larger devices. Why is only Dasung able to offer a very limited sized monitors and at a very high price to the consumer?

When/if ever will we have $200 e-ink monitors?

> I am making a claim that there has been insufficient progress in e-ink space.

Insufficient progress? How does one know what is sufficient progress? To provide an analogy to software, you're saying the equivalent of there has been insufficient progress in Linux desktop.

Perhaps E Ink set too high an expectation? I never thought they'd even reach their current level of achievement. In my opinion, they're achieving about as much as what they can achieve with the physics of their material and the level of demand the market provides to them. For example, the most common request I've heard is when are they going to have bistable color. The response I would have is they had that at SID2019 but then nobody wanted to pay $2000 for a 16 color display that peaked at 16" diagonal. That's not 16-bit color, that's 16 colors! So they pivoted to adjust to what the market was willing to accept which was about $100 for a 7 color 6" display. That's what the market was willing to buy. Last I heard even that's thin pickings with no high volume products. In the display industry, if you're not able to sell at least a million displays a month, you're a niche player who won't be able to support having a factory with a fully tuned production line. Backplane vendors will treat you like a red haired stepchild and you'll be perpetually on the bottom of their manufacturing queue.

> E-ink is stagnating, this has been the constant lament on mobileread forums for 10 years.

Physics is a bitch ain't it? Perhaps you can invent a way for a fast moving pigment particle to achieve bistable and consistent positioning. You have access to E Ink displays after all, you could invent your own drive scheme if you believe they aren't doing the best that physics allows.

> People want high quality color, people want lower prices, and we are not getting it.

Yes, I want a $100 iPhone 12 and a $1000 ferrari and I'm not getting it. Why is that?

> Only recently we've had some larger devices. Why is only Dasung able to offer a very limited sized monitors and at a very high price to the consumer?

Volume. How many people are buying? Not a million a month? Then who wants to make it? Price correlates with volume. If you want prices to go down, go find a million buyers and put down the order so that manufacturers can afford to build up a production line for that device.

> When/if ever will we have $200 e-ink monitors?

When a million people a month are buying it.

>The alternative is a slowdown in research and development since now the research you paid millions for in payroll and time can now be copied by your competitor with one or two engineers.

I'm not going to argue regarding the merit of IP laws, but most analysis indicates that market players ignore most intellectual property, and that replication costs for technology are roughly 60-70% of the cost of the initial research. So you spend a bit more, but end up with a first mover advantage; in network-effect or capital intensive industries, these normally end up being determinative of overall success.

But layer that on with other R&D incentives placed in the market. Canadian SR&ED credits subsidize research costs by 15-35%, for instance, so the total delta between first mover and copy-cat implementations drops further.

The assumption that IP laws actually increase R&D rates is NOT something that is shown by the academic literature.

The rate of innovation to me seems key. In my view, the rate of innovation for 3D printing shot through the roof after the patents expired. Do you have any reading recommendations you care to share? Thanks!

> their CO2 usage must be astronomical

Why? Does money produce CO2?

> which Shiva says

Never heard of Shiva.

> chemical intensive agriculture

About half the planet will die without chemical fertilizers.

> I believe

I need better than that.

> Besos has

Amazon (not Bezos' wealth) has displaced a number of other companies that provided goods to consumers. I haven't seen any evidence that Amazon produces, on the net, more CO2 than them. It arguably produces less, because it replaces innumerable car trips to the mall with one truck that drives far fewer miles per delivery.

> by virtue of the power they have

Doesn't remotely compare to the power government wields and accretes daily. Bill Gates has zero power over my life.

If you are genuinely curious, you might try this book [1].

On the other hand, if you were genuinely curious, you could have figured out who Vandana Shiva was.

[1]: https://www.sciencedirect.com/book/9780128176740/inequality-...

I checked your link. Shiva is not mentioned on the front page, and is not in the author index.

> you could have

If someone is indulging in Appeal to Authority, it is incumbent upon them to provide a reference, not the reader.

> it is incumbent upon them to provide a reference, not the reader.

According to who? This is not a debate class. If you are motivated to understand another you may well want to look up what they are saying. What are you adding when you reply with “never heard of her” instead of doing a quick search?

I regularly put sources in my comments but this time I was in the middle of other things.

> According to who?

To have claims to be taken seriously, back it up. That's expected of anyone making a claim.

You keep using passive language “it is incumbent” and “that’s expected of anyone”. You haven’t told me who is doing the expecting, but it’s you.

In a debate, sure, the other party isn’t going to do any work to understand you unless they can use it to make you look bad.

But if two curious people are talking, either party will do work to fill in the blanks. And I’m afraid you’re treating this as a debate.

> Why? Does money produce CO2?

Seems pretty obvious, no? Private jets, multiple huge residences all over the world (full of air conditioners, furniture, manicured lawns etc).

I won't make the Amazon argument, but I'd be surprised if their personal emissions aren't many many times more than the average American.

"many times" is probably accurate. Enough to make a significant effect? Nope.

Gates also invests heavily in environmental technologies.

Gates, at least, purchases carbon offsets.

Bill Gates spoke about this in his 60 minutes interview, he spends millions a year on carbon offsetting alone.

Just think of the private flights, to begin with

I expect the vast bulk of his flights are for him and his staff on his charity foundation flights, not joyriding. Those jets are passenger jets for a reason. Otherwise, they'd be flying commercial.

https://jacobinmag.com/2021/05/rich-people-climate-change-co...

Think of the obscene amounts of pressure people face when "hustling" to pay rent. It burns people out and pushes them to sacrifice. All because of concentrated purchasing power and artificially scarcity of time and housing.

Hustling is literally "going fast to get stuff done within a short amount of time". In order to go fast it takes energy. People are wasting energy to perform obligatory busywork for impatient people who have more money than them and are also performing obligatory busywork for people who have even more money. It's a viscous compounding of sacrifice.

I'm not pointing at Bill Gates, I'm talking about the larger network effect of time-crunch-pressure-relationships. Everyone knows there's a gun at the end of the line, if you were to stop paying rent and try to stay put in your home you'd be stepping out of line. Poor people know this more viscerally and immediately than rich people, but rich people know it just the same and are also terrified.

Eurozone is barely growing, where are all those people shouting hurray for a dysfunctional monetary union?

That meme is not backed up by the statistics. Childhood mortality has fallen all across the planet.

For example in Somalia only 12% of children will die before age 5:

https://knoema.com/atlas/Somalia/Child-mortality-rate#:~:tex....

Thus for the average woman in Somalia with 6 children, statistically, none of her children will actually die.

If childhood mortality was such a major issue, then the population would be stable - instead of doubling every two decades.

Childhood mortality is also likely to be worsened by having multiple children, since it reduces the number of resources available per child.

5 is a bit too young for a child soldier. Gotta wait until they are 10. 5 is also too young to have kids.

Also, that woman with 6 children has roughly a 50/50 chance of at least one of them dying before age 5.

> Thus for the average woman in Somalia with 6 children, statistically, none of her children will actually die.

If deaths are evenly distributed at 12%, there's a 54% (1-0.88^6) chance a woman will have at least one child die.

If a woman has 3 children at those odds, there is a 99.8% chance at least one child will live. If she has 4 children, it goes up to 99.997%. Having 6 children is clearly an overcompensation given this level of risk (99.9997% of one or more out of 6 living.)

It may be tangled up in the number of children. Spreading resources over more children may put them all further into that 12% category?

Anyway it seems to be true that child mortality has dropped across the board. US child mortality used to be almost 50% (in 1800). Now its around 0.7%. Somalia is about where the US was in 1925.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1041693/united-states-al...

> Telling people to have fewer children in an area where few children make it to adulthood ...

Are you arguing for more or fewer children?

Seems plainly obvious the birthrate is too high.

I'm saying you're going to be fighting against a strategy that has been used since the dawn of Homo Sapiens to counter high childhood mortality rates. It is an uphill battle, especially in a country without a stable government.

Fighting climate change is an uphill battle (steeper).

While we are at it, why not declare national emergency, and implement a one child policy in the high per-capita carbon emitters?

Like Australia and US?

Somalia - 0.1 Metric ton of CO2 per person per year

US - 15 Metric ton of CO2 PPPY

Those countries are already below population replacement rate, not counting immigrants.

You can achieve the same thing in those countries much more humanely by simply limiting immigration intake to high-HDI countries only (where the CO2 differential from the migration is smaller, and fertility rates are closer), and limiting the overall level of immigration.

Secondly instead of a one-child policy, Western welfare states could just modify their welfare systems to not reward single mothers for having children (by not paying people extra or giving preferential access to public housing).

Exactly, we thought food aid would solve hunger, instead it caused population explosion and more hunger. Some cultures just breed to capacity.

You might want to consider increasing the level of development.

> In other cases, its a ponzi scheme, where people have an excessive number of children in order to ensure their own livelihood in old age.

That's also the arguments used by countries like Canada to justify out of control immigration quotas.

> It would seem reasonable to me that if we are offering food aid, that we also require all recipients to undertake long-term contraception.

"We can save your family from starving, but you have to agree to enroll in our long-term contraception program first."

That's what is sounds like to me, at least.

I think you'll find that most of the organizations promoting climate apocalypse agree with your ideas about population control.

Interestingly, they proposed population control before promoting the climate agenda. Many view fear of a climate apocalypse as a vehicle to advance the preexisting agenda.

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

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

https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-forgotten-le...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rockefeller_Foundation#Eugenic...

I also see climate change being adopted by people to advance their unrelated causes.

For example, AOC's "Green New Deal" proposal was full of social justice programs. Socialism is often put forward as the solution to climate change, although socialist countries have a very poor track record of environmental stewardship.

Free markets, on the other hand, produce the necessary surplus needed to address environmentalism, i.e. free market countries can afford to address it. Marginal economies cannot.

> For example, AOC's "Green New Deal" proposal was full of social justice programs. Socialism is often put forward as the solution to climate change, although socialist countries have a very poor track record of environmental stewardship.

Which "socialist" countries are those? Do you mean (ex-)communist countries instead? Socialism != communism.

A better argument you could make is name a socialist country (use whatever definition of socialism works for you) that has a better environmental track record.

I live in India, even after working hard and making good money it's not possible to live a comfortable live here. There's no space for you, everything is packed up in tiny spaces.

Yet some people keep reproducing here, it's true birth rate has fallen in educated people but there are simply too many people at the bottom here in India so our population isn't going to come done anytime soon

India's women fertility rate is already below replacement level if you consider the gender imbalance.

Yes but even at current population level with 1.5 kid per women, it's still very difficult to achieve quality life for everyone

Agreed. Yet the term should be foster a sustainable birth rate. A country like Japan is doing this right. Importing migrants from overcrowded countries will only increase the overall number of people reproducing.

There's definitely a sweet spot the world should hit.

>Some parts of the world have exploding populations, and while they don't consume much CO2 at the moment, they will

A, the "kicking the ladder" argument. We had a good run in the West over-consuming and producting Co2, and we continue to be at the top (including the Co2 we outsource to our global outsourced factories for our consumption), but others shouldn't.

Before we talk about over-population in e.g. Africa and India, why not talk about cutting down on consumption in the US (#2 co2 global producer with just 5% of the global population - and that's even not including the co2 produced in China for products the US companies ordered/will consume/sell).

Giving a good example how more people can live with less?

Else it's "let us keep our mega-polluting way of life and you better stop having kids so we are not inconvenienced".

(It's also often accompanied with quotes from westerners not having children "for the planet", when they just do it for their career, or to avoid any obstacles like kids on their personal "journey" to consumption and fun).

> A, the "kicking the ladder" argument. We had a good run in the West over-consuming and producing Co2, and we continue to be at the top (including the Co2 we outsource to our global outsourced factories for our consumption), but others shouldn't.

Developing economies don't have to imitate everything the west did. Solar technology and cheap battery storage can be built from scratch instead of retrofitted.

Indeed. And there's a good argument to be made that industrialized countries have an obligation to help building that infrastructure.

Isn't this the canonical historical justification for colonialism?

That colonialist barons are helping the local population by improving infrastructure for them? (While massively enriching themselves)

I don't think that really worked out well. The exploited wealth (both from resources and labour) arguably contributed to our current position, where unlimited greed at others' expense and total exploitation and destruction of the planet's resources is seen as noble.

Continuing this theme with modern-day Western corporations seeking further profit extraction is a tragedy.

So you would rather that industrialized countries did nothing and just watched everyone else suffer?

If only industrialized countries did nothing - it would be a miracle for the developing countries!

Instead, industrialized countries push for their own agendas, plunder them for their resources, install their lackeys into power, play "divide and conquer" games with local populations, force them into unfavorable for the country deals, impose penalties and embargos whenever the developing country doesn't cave in to their demands, and so on...

I actually tend to agree on this part. Commercial colonialism is a real problem and we should force companies operating in developing countries to comply with strict ethical rules. Or else make operating there unprofitable.

I'm more inclined to think of reducing trade barriers for such nations, of enforcing strict ethic rules for multi-national corporations and foreign nation-state actors.

Yes; going there and building this new infrastructure is counterproductive. It creates dependencies and introduces moral hazards. That's not the way to do it.

The emphasis here is on help building the infrastructure, be it with knowledge, resources or context. Not to force progress, but to support it. Not to maintain strongholds on existing technologies using copyright and patents, but instead share knowledge and make it available.

Antinatalists like to solve every problem by getting rid of people.

Funnily enough, we could solve a big problem by getting rid of them (anti-natalists, that is).

i don't why this is being downvoted. He's abosultely right, if you want to reduce CO2, you need to reduce the number things that cause it: Humans.

The alternative: Asking each human to reduce their C02 output won't get you very, especially since most of our individual output is more influence by govt policy rather than our own actions, for instance: commute distances, etc.

Perhaps we could alter government policy then?

Microplastics and other chemicals infiltrating our food and water supply has had a negative effect on male sperm efficacy. We also see population replacement weening in highly developed nations such as the US and Japan. Perhaps there are systems at play beyond our ken. We are merely part of the ecosystem, not its master.

Good news everyone!

> We need to reduce the number of humans on Earth.

I'm happy to point out that this is not the case.

We're already peak child and the next two billion will not come from population growth but from population replacement[0] (Thanks, Hans. RIP, I loved you), where children replace the people in previous cohorts that never made it to reproductive age.

The number of humans will reduce rather drastically in the next fifty years. Many countries on earth already and most countries on earth in about twenty years will have problems maintaining their population as it is. Fertility has been dropping all over the globe, with a few exceptions in sub-Saharan Africa.

No, really. There's nothing we can do about the people we already have and there are barely any new babies arriving.

What we do need to worry about is population migrations. We need to make it easier for people to migrate. We need to set up political and social infrastructure to welcome people from places that climate change has made inhospitable.

Since most of the world will be suffering from over aging and from a lack of births, these migrants will be dearly needed.

So, no need to talk about birth control, let's talk about immigration reform instead!

[0] https://www.gapminder.org/

> The number of humans will reduce rather drastically in the next fifty years.

It doesn't look like it. The UN predicts the population will be ~10.5 billion in 2070. Of course, there is a large range of uncertainty. [1]

Given sustainability limits, the cost to the environment (and to humans) of going from 10 to 11 billion is a lot worse than the cost of going from 5 to 6 billion, say. (For example, there's only so many fish in the sea.)

[1] https://population.un.org/wpp/Graphs/Probabilistic/POP/TOT/9...

> The number of humans will reduce rather drastically in the next fifty years.

Sorry, I should have been more exact in my choice of words with this regard, mea culpa.

Yes, total human population is expected to grow. But this growth is limited to very few places, especially found in sub-Saharan Africa (and strangely: the USA). If you look at places like West Asia, Northern Europe, Southern Europe, the more-developed-group of countries or the middle-income group of countries you will see that all across the board population is expected to fall within 50 years.

This groups of countries will have a desperate worker shortage in the given time frame and we should start thinking how we can accommodate the needs of both immigrants and residents alike.

Fertility is already falling, rapidly. There's not much that we can do in that regard (some countries are even trying to raise total fertility). We will not get rid of the people we already have. (Well, not in any way, shape or form that is ethically and worth further discussion).

I agree that we need to have a good and hard think about our resource management. We need to reduce waste. We need to reduce our footprint. We need to stop the predatory ecosystem exploitation we're currently practicing. We're moving very fast towards a cliff.

>> The number of humans will reduce rather drastically in the next fifty years.

I really should be more careful how to phrase my argument. Thanks for pointing it out.

> Since most of the world will be suffering from over aging and from a lack of births, these migrants will be dearly needed.

Needed for what exactly? Wouldn't this keep the value of human labor low and thus slow down automation?

We don't talk about birth control much because:

(1) the majority of CO2 emission is happening in North America, China, Europe, and industrial part of Asia, none of which exhibits high birth rate.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-co-emissions-by-re...

(2) Birth control is already being tackled with in developing countries. It's just not being talked much in the context of global warming, because (1).

(3) Talking about population when the majority of CO2 is emitted by a small number of wealthy countries (with low birthrate) seems like focusing on the wrong thing. Especially since almost all arguing about it online are living in one of those wealthy countries. Yes, it would be really convenient for me if climate problem could be solved by telling Africans to get their shit together, but it's not happening that way.

How is birth rate being tackled?? Yes, it’s dropping, but not because of any active effort to drop it.

China?

Like this? https://www.gatesfoundation.org/our-work/programs/global-dev...

I mean, if you're saying "We should do more," then I wholeheartedly agree. I just don't think it will make a meaningful dent on CO2 emission in the short to mid term.

About That Overpopulation https://slate.com/technology/2013/01/world-population-may-ac...

The Bomb That Didn't Explode: Why Our Fears About Population Growth Didn't Come True

https://www.npr.org/2020/03/09/813801640/the-bomb-that-didnt...

And a debate :

https://www.wilsoncenter.org/sites/default/files/media/docum...

You go first then?

The 'good' news is that nature is mostly self-regulating. It will be more than happy to cull our numbers until we reach something approaching sustainability (or much lower than that). Climate change per se won't kill you, but other humans competing for the same space or resource most certainly will and that's how it has been since forever.

The last couple of hundred years are an anomaly but this exponential increase simply can not go on without running headlong into some kind of wall, be it our effect on the environment, resource starvation, lack of space (in a way also a resource) and so on.

the question is : will it cull all species proportionally or will it cull a few species completely (including us)...

That's a difficult to answer question but you can take - small - comfort in the fact that humans as a species are incredibly adaptable and have managed to eke out a living where many other species failed.

To balance that out: our 'modern' way of living is pretty fragile and unless our numbers go down most likely completely unsustainable over millennia at numbers > a few billion unless we manage to move off-planet.

>nature is mostly self-regulating

The problem with this is that the nature can stay hostile for much longer than humans can stay alive. We literally built a civilisation on top of the corpses of creatures that survived much longer than we ever walked on the earth upright.

I am sure that in some very distant feature the archaeologist and biologist of some species will have a boon on our remains, I don't really doubt that, but the problem is that we are facing huge opportunity for de dinosaur experience.

> The problem with this is that the nature can stay hostile for much longer than humans can stay alive.

Seems to me, as a species we are smart enough to recognize we are all playing guided by game theory, we should be smart enough to step outside of game theory's limitations for mass negotiations. We should able to work within natures limits by group bargaining toward more environmental approaches. Yet we can't. Not even a little. We aren't even close. This has been a well known issue for decades, and nothing, nothing even close to what is needed has been done. Capitalism failed us, democracy failed us, the US failed us, our parents and our children failed us. Not even close to a passing grade.

I imagine I'm not going to make many friends for saying this, but... This was a test. We failed. Why should humans get to survive to the next round? Why are we so sure we are good? All I see is distractions, destruction, pollution and consumption... maybe that's on me cause I had a bad day... We destroyed the planet, killed the majority of insects, and the majority of vertebrates, toxified all the lakes and streams, over fished the oceans then dumped DDT, PCBs, VX nerve agent, and radioactive waste. We aren't done. We keep going. More more more. Now other countries are just coming on the scene and they want some polluting rights too.

Indeed “global warning” is not much of a concern. CO2 levels aren’t even that concerning, both levels have been significantly higher in the past (and supported life), and pose minimal risk. We can adapt to it, but would cause some hardship. We are also exiting an ice age, who knows what’s really earths “norm” over hundreds of thousands of years.

My real concern are things like man made chemicals, pesticides. Which have made it into every component of our food and water supply. To put it in perspective, I have a very rural farm - no row crops for tens of miles. There are so few bugs it’s spooky. There are significantly fewer birds. My Bees die most years, even in warmer weather.

There’s also estrogen in our water ways, micro plastics, etc

The reason that’s the “real concern” is it can take out all humans very very quickly. Like a generation, where as global warming is survivable.

While the co2 levels and temps have been higher in the past, rate of change is the most important factor here. You incorrectly assess the risk by ignoring the fact that it took tens of thousands of years to move those numbers.

The problem is that most of our food chain is going to have major issues adapting at a speed that matches the rate of change. Pesticides and chemicals are certainly problematic as well, but moving the global needle so much over a 100-250 year timeline is a huge issue.

> You incorrectly assess the risk by ignoring the fact that it took tens of thousands of years to move those numbers.

We have no evidence of prior exiting of ice ages. Also, The sun and magnetosphere play a much larger role in earth temps than anything we do.

Higher CO2 and slight (<4C) should increase overall yields, local production will be the primary issue.

> The sun and magnetosphere play a much larger role in earth temps than anything we do

If by "earth temps" you mean contributors to global warming, no, that is not correct: https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2015-whats-warming-the-wo...

I mean, if the sun increases it’s energy output by 1% or 2% that would dramatically change our temperatures. Much much more than CO2..

Think of how much the earths tilt impacts weather of the seasons.

That being said, 1880 - 2020 is an almost meaningless range of time. Temperatures are seasonal and that’s only 140 data points per season. It may not even be statistically significant and our historic measurements weren’t necessarily super accurate.

We have had a lot ice melt during that timeframe (but it’s been melting for thousands of years). we are exiting an ice age, we should expect the temperatures to naturally increase. The sun could have increased output 10k years ago, but it’s taken this long for all the ice to melt.

I’m not claiming certain things such as CO2 don’t make an impact. I’m saying what you linked isn’t proof, it’s evidence. There’s still many unknowns and we can’t make absolute determinations.

For reference, I’ve worked on weather models.

Your assertions are at odds with the data and an entire field of professionals who dedicate their lives to analyzing it. What makes you think you know more than them?

I’ve implemented models for two well cited published papers. While I didn’t develop the model I implemented it. I’m familiar with those “professionals”.

These models are notoriously bad at generating predictions historically. Today, we have better modeling, BUT they rerun the models over and over again tweaking them to get the results they want. Then they don’t do corrections such as Bonferroni correction.

At the end of the day, the data isn’t there.

Finally, the funding and scientific community have a bias. Good luck trying to come out with a paper showing the community is not taking everything into account or has made a mistake.. you can only do that with new data, which takes years or decades

So I guess it's just a coincidence that the predictions about global temperature rise that the models have been making for decades are coming true? And, if anything, it's turning out that they have been too conservative in their estimates of the rate of warming?

Not just the food chain but the natural environment as well. Animals can migrate (theoretically, if they have somewhere to migrate to), but trees that sprouted in the right climate a hundred years ago might be in the wrong climate now. And animals that depend on those forests are going to be in trouble if they aren't healthy.

When changes happen on timescales that are slower than forests and ecosystems can naturally grow and spread that's not such a problem because you at least have a mostly-stable ecosystem at any given point in time.

I've recently read that the word "pesticide" is a weaponized term, in that you wouldn't label human medicine that way, but for ideological reasons this reframing is done to a plant's medicine.

OTH nobody would use medicine daily and call that a natural state of being (unless you're acutally or chronically sick).

Our food supply depends on these plant-medicines becuase without our cultivated crops aren't strong enough to survive or yield significantly less.

It’s not a plant medicine... it’s a killer of pests.

“Weaponized term” doesn’t necessarily matter. I own a farm and agree our food supply is necessary on them. BUT I think the feds need to look into this. There are likely safer pesticides than others. My farm uses none.

> OTH nobody would use medicine daily and call that a natural state of being (unless you're acutally or chronically sick).

Depending on source, roughly half of Americans regularly take prescription drugs. (Which I think is a crazy state of affairs.)

> OTH nobody would use medicine daily and call that a natural state of being

It's amazing how casually we throw around these "observations" which completely and conveniently memory hole our indigenous friends and neighbors, whose traditions of plant medicine nearly universally include routine relationships with plant medicines in sickness and in health.

Pesticide: Pest (meaning should be obvious) combined with the same ’cide’ as in homicide, regicide or genocide. The term is not weaponized, it refers to a weapon.

>CO2 levels aren’t even that concerning, both levels have been significantly higher

The sun grows stronger over millions of years (and it got colder over the last 200 years), however that doesn't matter because the earth is a balanced system where an equal amount of energy enters and leaves the system. The CO2 concentration will automatically adjust so that temperatures can fall within a narrow band.

Therefore it is completely unsurprising that CO2 levels have been higher in the past, they had to be higher to reach the same temperatures. If we reach historic CO2 levels today then we will also reach higher temperatures than in the past.

> When a species dies, it's not those individuals, it's every one of those individuals that ever lived that dies.

It is tragic that species go extinct. I believe 99.99% of all species in earth's 4 billion years has gone extinct. I forget who said it but like individual creatures live and die, species also have to live and die. But it also opens the door for new species. Without mass die offs, we don't have dinosaurs. Without mass die offs, we don't have mammals and humans.

> All that concentration of local entropy, destroyed forever

And look at what the previous destructions created. The beauty of today's nature stands on the graveyards of the natural world that came before it. Those species you mourn today only existed because previous species went extinct and open up the space for other species.

Not saying we should welcome species extinction, especially the ones human cause. But we should be mindful of the fact that past species extinctions is why the current species exist. It's not all one sided. There is "life after death".

Nature is an amazing library of knowledge (pharmaceutical, materials sciences, etc.) for problems we face. Driving species to extinction is the equivalent of burning the reference books.

>I'm not necessarily worried about climate change per se. It will result in hardship for many, for sure. Temperature changes will render some areas uninhabitable, it will cause mass migration, and probably destabilize the world politically. What am more worried about is the direct wholesale destruction of the biosphere.

How is the latter not just a byproduct of the former?

Because we are ravaging the biosphere in countless other ways than just altering the temperature and climate. "Just" would imply that those are the only causes of biosphere destruction.

If the world was just warming, it wouldn't be nearly so much of an issue, I don't think. We could just put a big mylar sheet and block part of the sun.

We could do that, I think, in about 20 years, if we really wanted to just get rid of this 1.5degC rise. But we can't, we have the ocean acidification, the desertification, the pollution, the acid rain, the plastic pollution. My point is that it's not really the temperature I'm worried about, it's the everything else.

Great comment. If layered and localized counter-entropy is, philosohically, the highest attainment of a mainly entropic universe, hitting rm -fr on a species is pretty much the only universal example of evil. The destruction of complexity is the undermining of the universe's attempt to observe itself through forms of processing that arise after billions of years. But of course, their destruction is probably an expected outcome. That doesn't make it any less evil from our puny perspective.

while true; do find / -type f | shuf | xargs rm; sleep 86400; done

But yes, biosphere collapse is a far more frightening scenario than humans having to rebuild for a few centuries...

99.9% of all species that ever existed went extinct before humans even came around. Nature is the biggest killer of them alle.

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