Carbon dioxide peaks near 420 parts per million at Mauna Loa observatory
research.noaa.gov
research.noaa.gov
I'd love to be wrong on this one. But the sky turned orange for a week last year, as wildfires tragically demolished entire communities just 35 minutes by car from where I sit. EPA didn't know how to classify the air quality. There were so many fires up and down the West Coast last year they started simply numbering them, or labeling them as whole collections. Here in the PNW we've had a shockingly hot and dry spring, with ominous implications for this summer.
I'll leave you with this: check out 'The Carbon Farming Solution'. It's an incredibly well-researched book. It's in my wheelhouse, but I think it would appeal to a lot of you here (and yes, I've mentioned it a bunch of times before.) It goes both wide and deep on many aspects of land-use change, and is sober and realistic in what we can hope to achieve through better land-stewardship, and rethinking our food system.
1: http://carbonfarmingsolution.com
2: Please don't waste time arguing with me about how 'there have always been wildfires'. What we're facing now is incomparable to the annual burns that used to happen here hundreds of years ago – though prescribed burns to reduce fuel load are certainly something we should be trying to do.
If global reaction to climate change is any guide we'll ignore warnings about climate change as we have since the 70s and earlier.
> There were so many fires up and down the West Coast last year
As someone living in Western Oregon I'm really afraid what our air is going to be like come September given that the drought is worse this year than last. I have air filters at the ready.
We invented new vaccine technologies to beat the pandemic. Yes, many people died but civilization did not collapse.
Climate change will not solve itself like this. It will keep reducing food supply and habitable land, causing mass migrations that sooner or later will end in wars. Trying to wait it out is suicide.
Well, it will but in 10,000 years, so noone will be around for that except neo-cavemen or something
The global food supply is increasing:
* See production numbers for key crops - all are still increasing.
* See famine and hunger numbers all are still decreasing.
* See the problem of soil depletion.
* Consider that crops are temperature-sensitive, and continued warming of the planet will be turning currently food-rich areas into zones where crops cannot be grown.
This is probably the opposite of what is likely to happen, warmth is likely to enrich the food productivity of more northerly countries which tend to be politically more stable and have less distribution and corruption problems, resulting in more net food production, not less.
> See the problem of soil depletion.
Not related to the carbon dioxide issue.
If you poison the carbon dioxide issue with unrelated or poorly-thought out assertations, you risk discrediting it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desertification
Have you seen the size of Africa?
You are literally a character from futurama proposing to drop a giant ice cube into sea to cool it down.
It's not perfect. A better test would be a bona fide alien invasion.
But the similarities were in:
- High stakes - millions of lives are as high as you can get outside an actual existential risk
- Global coordination needed for effective response
- Cooperation of every individual needed for effective response
In a way, COVID was a more pressing situation, and to the degree we've failed at both global coordination and individual cooperation, it suggests we'll do even worse with climate change.
Some of the things the pandemic revealed are:
- People don't trust the experts and authorities, way beyond the extent of reasonable doubt.
- There's an infinite supply of pundits willing to sow doubt about the seriousness of the problem.
- We can be staring death in the face, seeing our kin fall left and right, and many of us still reject effective means of mitigating the problem, seeing them as an "attack on their freedoms".
mRNA vaccines have been great. But multiple conventional vaccines were developed about as fast and we’d probably do fine just with those.
The technology was there, and ready enough that Moderna even reportedly designed their vaccine in "2 days" in January 2020 after SARS-CoV-2 was fully sequenced.[1] There's a bit more to making a Covid vaccine than cutting off the ~3,000 nucleotides (~10%) that encode the S protein and printing them + packaging them into nanolipid particles, but the rest is mostly a set of known tricks to do things like keeping the mRNA from folding onto itself and increasing its GC-content for easier transcription.[2]
The ~11 months between January and December were spent testing and getting approvals, not developing new technologies.
[1] https://globalnews.ca/news/7492076/moderna-coronavirus-vacci...
[2] https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/reverse-engineering-source...
And I think we might, once we start trying.
And I’ve been quick pessimistic on this issue. In 2010 I determined our society was default dead.
It still is….but it’s looking more and more likely we move the cost curves on carbon capture and can actually just pay to remove the excess and solve the problem.
It takes more energy to remove carbon than it did to put it in the air, so getting all of that carbon out will take, basically, some multiple of all of the energy output of every power plant, every mile driven, every building built, in the past 200 years. We basically have to "undo" the past 200 years of civilization a few times over.
In no way does carbon removal make sense if we don't stop pushing that stuff in the air first. I'm glad Stripe is investing in it, and it makes perfect sense for them to do so and it's amazing of them, because we WILL need it, but only if the world doesn't end first.
The world is like a guy with advanced cancer. He has let his cancer grow rampant for two decades and he's now infested. Doctors say he has a few years to live. He needs chemo and surgery NOW. Maybe, just maybe, with extreme luck and the most skilled doctors, he'll make it. Like cancer, emissions reproduce and grow and every minute counts (growing cancer → arctic methane emissions).
Carbon removal is... his gym membership. Yeah, it will be great for him to get in shape in order to have a healthy and happy future...but the miserable bastard has to survive first.
Yea, industrialized societies supposedly need copious amounts of young people for the economic system to function, but how about just less young people until we find an answer?
(I won't be back to debate. I'm not an expert on anything. It just seems like more people in the world add to the global warming problem, especially in industrialized countries.)
So this can be solved with political means, but not with prohibitions.
So those exact countries which had a declining fertility rate for ages now and, additionally, contain a rather small percentage of the world population?
> I won't be back to debate
I dislike this a lot, too be honest. Simply dropping a very divisive stance like this and then basically adding "but don't bother arguing" feels very disingenuous to me.
The exponentiality of the changes are hard to grasp, but people grasp cancer and that both luck, very skilled doctors, and future tech is needed to treat advanced stages.
Ten years ago I thought that:
* We wouldn’t be able to get renewae costs down fast enough
* Even if we did, we’d have emitted so much that the earth’s own systems would keep things going unless we got to zero
I didn’t see a realistic way out. Default dead, and almost certainly just dead.
But since then the cost curve on renewables has come down much faster than predicted. And further we are starting to bring the cost curve down on carbon extraction.
You’re right we need to get to zero. And I don’t mean to take that as a given. But I focussed on extraction because without that we’re still doomed even if we get to zero.
But the progress so far has come despite an ineffectual political response and a general lack of urgency from civil society. But both are turning around a bit, with carbon taxes, the stripe initiative, etc. So I think we may be able to move even faster on the cost curves.
Hence why I think we have moved from “basically no chance” to “some chance”. And that’s very optimistic to me, because humanity is pretty good at doing stuff if it focusses and success is actually possible rather than impossible.
I think the more apt cancer analogy is surgery:chemo = emissions halting:carbon removal
You need the first part, as you say. But without the second part you still die in the end.
It doesn't take just reducing calories input to daily needs (zero net carbon emmisions), they will stay obese and still at the risk of heart attack. They need to go below recommended calories to go into negative cal balance in order to loose weight.
Zero net emmisions is a good start but its not enough as all it means is that we are maintaining status-quo ie warming up.
We're undeniably impacted by climate change right this very second. You can take a drive along the Eastern coast of the United States and see water flooding the yards of homes that are all for sale. Likewise everyone I've heard of buying costal or near sea-level property has had a hell of a time getting a mortgage because it's hard to find flood insurance.
You can watch the Arctic melt almost before your eyes [0]. If that doesn't shock someone right now, then I doubt the first blue ocean event will make a difference either.
Coral reefs are being critically threatened right now from ocean acidification, you can watch them die.
Arctic winds leaking out of the North as the polar vortex fails wreaked havoc across Texas.
The Sierra snow pack, essential for the maintenance of the fresh water supply for both California and Nevada continues to worsen and worsen with what are becoming rare years of it returning.
Record drought in the West causes continually devastating wildfires which are also sources of massive CO2 emissions.
All these are just a few off the top of my head that I've noticed.
Just like pandemic, which still has its fair share of deniers, there will be non-trivial subsets of the population that adamantly deny that climate change is happening even if the entire Midwest were to turn into a dust bowl again. Demagogue after demagogue will emerge to point the finger at some group of people.
But I full agree with your sentiment. Compared to climate change, solving pandemic should have been a cakewalk. If we had solved pandemic quickly I would still be skeptical about climate change because it is so much harder to stop. But since we utterly failed to address pandemic, it is already far too late to image we have any change to alter the path climate change is taking.
Maybe denial is ultimately the best approach for those that can't move towards horrific acceptance.
I was speaking about this to a friend and he recommended to read book called Drawdown to lift me out of despair. The book is published in the library and all of it is available at https://drawdown.org/. It was great to see that the work to fix or at least slow things down is already underway. But of course by no means guaranteed to succeed. Especially since that collection of essays did kind of dance around the biggest challenge of industrial rapacious capitalism really being incompatible with caretaking of the entire planet in a fair and balanced way.
On that note, somehow right after reading The Drawdown I stumbled on (I think via HN maybe?) Kim Stanley Robinson's The Ministry for the Future (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ministry_for_the_Future) which I swear takes a lot of the stuff from The Drawdown and lays out a path to turning things around that includes a lot of people saying no to the current way of doing things and finally caring for the environment. It was interesting to see the pleas of Mary to the bankers who the book makes a great case are actually the rulers of the world with the quotes of USA's central bankers from just a couple of days where they explicitly state that climate is not within their purview.
I don't know. I got children and I get really depressed about shit they will have to deal with. My parents were similarly depressed when they were my age now, and I was my children age now, and nothing got done.
Wishing us all lots and lots of luck.
> But the sky turned orange for a week last year, as wildfires
California doesn't and can't manage its forests properly, so orange skies are expected annually. Very little to do with climate change.
The useful part in the article:
What's interesting in the article is that CO2 levels increased during a pandemic shutdown. That should be investigated to see why.
Climate scientists dream of the chance to collect measurement samples during cessation of human activities like this pandemic (same with the grounding of US aircraft during 9/11.)
1,000-2,000ppm Complaints of drowsiness and poor air.
2,000-5,000 ppm Headaches, sleepiness and stagnant, stale, stuffy air. Poor concentration, loss of attention, increased heart rate and slight nausea may also be present.
5,000 Workplace exposure limit (as 8-hour TWA) in most jurisdictions.
>40,000 ppm Exposure may lead to serious oxygen deprivation resulting in permanent brain damage, coma, even death.
https://www.kane.co.uk/knowledge-centre/what-are-safe-levels...
So we’d expect this site to be nearer 250 given its ideal location away from humans and industry?
They also have stats on the ratio of O2 to N2, which has been falling over the same period. People argue that plants will produce more oxygen to make up for the new CO2 in the air, but here we see that combustion is winning out. https://gml.noaa.gov/obop/mlo/programs/coop/scripps/o2/o2.ht...
E.g. if we saw 250ppm at sea level, we’d expect to see around 3% reduction in ppm counts per 1000 ft altitude. This observatory is at 11,000ft so we’d expect 250ppm sea level to give us 82ppm not >400
(There might be a tiny effect due to the fact that CO2 is heavier than air, so as you go up you might expect the CO2 to mostly have settled against the bottom of the atmosphere. I suspect as long as you're in the troposphere, there's sufficient mixing to make it uniform, though.)
Mauna Loa observatory is at about 4200 meters, or 0.6 atmospheres. At that atmospheric height, CO2 should generally be within ~10ppm of the concentration anywhere above the atmospheric boundary layer (BL).
Below the BL, CO2 can be trapped by topography or temperature inversions, or in general, not be as well-mixed vertically. The height of the BL varies with time and location but generally that's a few hundred meters.
Well above 0.6 atmospheres -- say, 0.2 atmospheres, or > 12km up -- the CO2 concentration in ppm can decrease noticeably more.
Read the article. Look at the chart. The seasonal fluctuations are much, much less significant than the rising trend.
> Cause plants breath it in during sprint and exhale it out in fall (I don't remember if this is correct, or just my own misguided idea).
Plants absorb CO2 to grow, making leaves, branches, plant material and whatnot. In the fall, leaves fall off trees, grasses die, and are metabolized by fungi and bacteria, releasing CO2.
I have my own CO2 meter inside, which I watch with some curiosity. I've observed that CO2 levels vary far more where my sensor is located, inside in an urban environment, and I was surprised to see that the CO2 levels are so steady elsewhere. [1] measured CO2 levels in an outdoor urban environments and found that sometimes the CO2 levels were about 20 times what they were at other times, 16 units vs 0.8 units. I say this as a curious observation, not as an attempt to argue against anything you said.
[1] http://www.co2science.org/subject/u/summaries/urbanco2dome.p...
Hopefully we can stop it around 600 or so.
So yes, your grandchildren may well live in a world where the freshest possible outdoor air is such that it makes humans feel sluggish and lethargic, like a stuffy indoor conference room today.
The growth curve so far has not been linear...
Very interesting.
Time series plot (just need to click the Submit button to the left) https://gml.noaa.gov/dv/iadv/graph.php?code=MLO&program=ccgg...
>Located near the town of False Pass, the tip of an unnamed peninsula overlooking Ikatan Bay is exactly 2,259.28 miles (3,636.44 kilometers) from a part of Tunnels Beach on the island of Kauai.
So yes, thousands of miles.
Or a few miles to a quite lively island. I think the OPs point was that the observatory isn't actually far away from civilization, but instead rather close to it.
Here's a plot of a few CO2 swings versus latitude (https://scrippsco2.ucsd.edu/graphics_gallery/other_stations/...) -- the northern one, at Point Barrow, Alaska, hovers around the same value as Mauna Loa, but swings harder due to stronger influence from Northern hemisphere vegetation.
You almost want to believe it fake, but you see how many data points are there and for how long the measurements have been taken.
The trend is so strong - I wonder what would Michael Crichton (ugh) say about it.
I worked for an algae biotech company and while we did "dope" our ponds with CO2, providing ample mixing to get more sunlight and supplementing the ponds with plentiful nutrients (the "big 3" but also trace elements of a number of more obscure inputs) had dramatically larger impacts on growth rates.
AFAIK, the FACE studies do show faster growth with more CO2, but it's only observable at concentrations ~200ppm over ambient. [https://nph.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1469-8137....]
In many parts of the world water is also pretty important. We know that global warming will change global air currents, but is pretty difficult to predict how this will affect precipitation.
NASA Earth Observatory:
https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/146296/global-green...
Which is why you more often see stuff like deserts greening when they were dead before. The Amazon rainforest isn't going to 2x in height.
That's extreme.
It’s definitely not the kind of thing where I would engage in hand wringing over human stupidity. It sucks and it’s unfair, but it’s the situation we have to deal with.
Are we really so against the wall that we cannot come up with something better than the economically suicidal shutdowns?
on my side of the pond we've committed to a 50% reduction in emissions by 2030 as compared to 1990... that's just 9 years, and we are _still_ at 1990 levels or thereabouts, meaning we have done essentially _nothing_ in 30 years.
I'd damn well say we're against the wall.
CO2 emissions went down during the early pandemic, but quickly started climbing back towards normal again.[0] In 2020 overall, global emissions fell 6.4%[1]. If we maintained that trajectory, it still wouldn't be enough to stop climate change.
[0]https://time.com/5943530/covid-19-co2-emissions-climate-chan... [1]https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/jun/08/carbon-d...
"Cuts" means cuts in the release of new CO2, it doesn't mean that this has to be accomplished through shutting down the economy - you misunderstood the statement.
We're not going to deal with it. We're going to continue partying for another 200 years. Then we're all going to get woozy and stupid. Then the population will crater. I don't think humanity will go away entirely, but I don't see a reason to be optimistic about the next 500 or 1000 years. This is the peak.
The way I see it it's gonna be all about energy. There are absolutely insane amounts of it everywhere, and all our power generation is like nothing compared to what's going on at planetary, cosmic scales. The question is are gonna be able to tap into it, and make use of it? If so, all our problems will seem silly, but for that to happen we need to keep up the innovation, keep up improving technology, keep the economy running and don't fall into the trap of regressing into a dark age.
If we just shut down everything and go back into the woods, we're definitely gonna be at the whim of whatever is going to happen and there will be nothing we can do about it.
It is what it is; mother nature doesn't give a fuck about us and never will. Preventing climate change would be incredibly painful, as is letting it happen.
On the other hand, stopping it would basically involve a war on developing countries to forcibly prevent them from developing further. Most developed countries have already leveled off their CO2 emissions or are headed downward.
Increased CO2 will harm the developing world more than anywhere else, but those places are also the least interested in putting in the effort to stop the effects.
Why not instead just give them the developed tech and the expertise? Instead of sending tanks, send wind turbines and photovoltaics and release all the IP on them. Instead of suppressing development, let them leapfrog the carbon-intensive technologies.
The way I see it, not doing it is naive, and borders on trying to make the problem worse on purpose.
> What IP is being held back?
Design specs, software specs, for all the things between "sunlight" and "DC electricity", as well as tools to manufacture those things, and the tools to manufacture those...
My point is that we have to give them the technology without making them dependent on the west for maintenance. Short-term, they need to know how to operate, fix, and jury-rig it themselves. Mid-term, they need to know how to manufacture it out of components bought on the global market. Long-term, they need to be able to manufacture them themselves from scratch. To get there, they cannot be hamstrung by IP licensing making them pay through the roof and/or ask for permission to do anything with green technologies.
2020 we simply began getting worse at a slower rate. But ANY emissions of fossil fuels come from outside the carbon cycle and make the carbon worse.
My usual (U.S. centric) suggestions when this topic comes up are to greatly expand solar and wind energy production, finance transcontinental high-voltage DC lines so that we can trade power with Africa/Asia/Europe and even out the day/night imbalance (we can keep fossil fuel plants around as an emergency backup and just not use them), electrify the interstate freeway system so that EVs can charge without stopping and make cross-country road trips without having to haul around huge batteries, and we should expand EV tax credits to cover conversions of existing vehicles as well as new vehicles.
We also need more battery production, especially of technologies like lithium iron phosphate (or whatever replaces it in the future) which are good enough and aren't bottlenecked on expensive materials like cobalt and nickel.
None of these things require people to change their behavior, though it would help if they did. It's probably also not enough to save us from pretty severe climate problems in the future, but at this point I think that's more-or-less unavoidable so we should just do the best we can right now.
I'm sure this will eventually shift - as far as i know multiple golf states are heavily investing in "green tech", not sure what the US elite is doing, but i hope that a critical mass will be hit at some point.
Until then there will be no governmental push to save earth because the richest elites writes the laws, and unless their wealth isn't dependent on dirty energy they will rather kill everyone on earth than give up their generational wealth.
Stupid when the tech is literally ready and prices are falling so much.
We need extreme global bans on all dirty energy 30 years ago, and stop using trillions of subsidies for family dynasties, military black budgets, and other black boxes that siphon money from everyone to a hidden elite in offshore tax havens - and instead take those money and subsidise saving earth / gren tech / neo manhattan like projects.
Unfortunately the oligarchs, and especially the tech elites will rather flee to New Zealand and live alone in bunker than imagine any happy ending. It's dark.
Maybe they don't count on the transition being possible and to be fair i don't either. The amount of energy stored in fossil fuels is so massive, so portable, so cheap that even with a revolution in batteries and tech everyone in the world will pretty much have to live as third worlders - unless fusion and batteries undergo a deus ex machina like event.
Elections do matter. And while I don't like the idea of being in the "technology will save us" camp, we're at least at the point where renewable energy and electric vehicles can compete on their merits even when ignoring climate costs.
However, I am terrified of some recent science indicating that carbon levels ~1200 ppm may prevent marine stratus clouds from forming, which would result in an additional 8 degrees C of warming very quickly (on top of the ~4 degrees we already expect at that level of carbon). [0]
In fact, there is evidence in the geological record that this terrifying increase in warming at not-that-high levels of carbon concentration is real, and has happened before. More terrifying, the estimated carbon ppm at that time was only 600.[1]
I don't know what the error bars are on the caltech climate study; 1200 seems like maybe I won't be around for it but 600 I definitely will be.
[0] https://www.caltech.edu/about/news/high-cosub2sub-levels-can... [1]https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/03/extreme...
I get the sense that most people concerned about this trend hold out a lot of hope for technology. But cuts as large as Keeling is talking about will take sustained cuts to consumption. In other words, rich countries actually consuming less, despite the economic consequences. It could take the form of rationing. Maybe consumption taxes. Maybe something more unusual. And that's never been on the table in any meaningful way.
I agree.
Yesterday, the size of humanity was insignificantly small compared to the size of the earth's environment -- resources available to support a reasonable standard of living were so abundant as to be effectively infinite.
Today, after the successful growth throughout the last few centuries, the size of humanity is comparable in some respects to the size of parts of the environment. the environment is no longer infinite, it is finite and will increasingly constrain human activity.
Beliefs that are held dear in parts of the rich world (emphasis on individual rights and freedom, consumerism, unregulated population growth, population fueled economic growth to increase the pie rather than reallocating the pie) that were good enough yesterday may no longer be a particularly adaptive way to run society today and tomorrow.
The bad news is, though the peak happens every year around now, the peak has increased linearly every year for the last 25 years and there doesn't appear to be any change in that trend.
We're hosting the AirMiners Launchpad to help early startup teams and solo-founders get off the ground: http://launchpad.airminers.org
If you've already got a founding team and idea, YCombinator has an RFS for carbon removal startups: http://carbon.ycombinator.com
Not to detract from the seriousness of the increasing CO2 level, but doesn't _every_ year set a new record for CO2 level?
[0] https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/201...
If you're cooking something at a low temperature, but you accidentally turn the heat up really high, do you adjust the temp as soon as you realize what's going on in order to prevent over-cooking, or do you just let it ride and see what happens, high risk of over-cooking be damned?
https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-chinas-carbon-emissions...
[0] http://raypeat.com/articles/articles/genes-carbon-dioxide-ad...
I've heard that ~4000 ppm is noticeable and can impair, but it's impossible to get the level that high, even in a closed room with no ventilation.
I have noticed sometimes when it gets around 1200, I start to get headaches which are almost always relieved by either opening the windows, or going outside (having the dog sleeping in my office doesn't help either, she definitely helps bump up the CO2 numbers!).
The highest I've ever seen it is around 1500.
However, I remember ~1000ppm being the level where studies also said that people start to report headaches. It appears to vary from person to person; both of your observations (you at 1200, GP claiming 1100 is no problem for them) are likely correct, but I wouldn't trust either observation. Just google/ddg it if you want to know what can happen at different CO2 levels.
1. Use sustainable materials for construction (8% CO2).
2. Use thick layer of sustainable insulation and climate battery to reduce need for heating and cooling to 0 (10% CO2).
3. Use cheap suspended light rail system connected to every house to reduce commuting time, road kills, and CO2 emissions (12% CO2).
4. Generate energy and protect coastal line by massive wave electricity generator.
And so on.
>reduce need for heating and cooling to 0
>light rail system connected to every house
>massive wave electricity generator
Ummm, all of these except maybe #1 are far less viable than the proven alternatives. The issue isn't a technological one, it's an adoption, regulation, and funding problem.
For example, climate battery is a very simple thing. In our climate, temperature of earth at depth of 2m is 7°C all year round for $0. By additional insulation and insolation, this temperature can be raised to 20-20°C, to have comfortable temperature in a house all year round for $0. Nobody interested in that, because nobody will buy a house without a powerful heating system.
#3 and #4 are easy to implement too, but my English is too weak to explain it properly. #3 is like e-bike on zip line (google "bike zip"), but with 4 lines for additional safety and comfort. #4 is like a giant sink with generator installed at top of a drain.
Climate battery: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U4ntsXyiNBE
Light rail system connected to every house: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9EqWqVevZMQ , https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0js85Y1ImiE
Wave energy generator and coastal line protection (generator part): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2shxVXqtFZU
i know that might trigger some people but maybe it’s more realistic.
The biggest thing I'm doing at the moment is thinking how to improve this. My next career move should be to a company that reduces CO2 emissions. As a last resort, I'd invest some capital in a startup that does what I can't (I'm not a physicist or chemist that can make methane-free cows or work on GMO crops or improve solar panels' efficiency).
The company I currently work for is very small and we don't have any processes that are a significant contributor to global warming (we hardly travel, don't construct buildings, use considerable amounts of steel, those sorts of things), and my colleagues are already doing more than what one can expect from the average person anyway (both in business and privately) so not much influence I can have there. As a security consultancy, it's also not as if we've got the expertise to help other companies reduce theirs. I'm not sure this is what I want to do forever because while it doesn't hurt, it doesn't really help either.
Suggestions here would be very welcome if anyone else struggled with this kind of life choice.
But maybe that's just my Western experience.
But, if you want a responsive, accountable political system, you cannot also maintain enclaves of extreme wealth, power and privilege. People wouldn’t put up with it.
It's burning fossil fuel, transport and deforestation that causes climate change. For all you know, the worlds biggest miners are using renewable energy? I mean that could be theoretically possible.
We know they're not. Bitcoin miners seek out the cheapest energy, which is mostly fossil.
We know that even decommissioned fossil fuel power plants are being reopened for this purpose.
That's not some kind of SJW propaganda, you can read about it in the Wall Street Journal: https://www.wsj.com/articles/bitcoin-miners-are-giving-new-l...
You should be more concerned that your government hasn't banned coal power generation.
[1] https://www.resilience.org/stories/2021-01-03/solar-now-chea...
The problem needs to be solved at the source, burning fossil fuels needs to be stopped, today!
My understanding is that the cheapest electricity sources are a result of massive excess energy available far from population sources. These are often renewables including hydro, wind, solar, nuclear and geothermal. In some cases older coal plants with excess capacity will be cheap in the short term, but these are always going to suffer from material operating cost per Gigawatt to pay for fuel, unlike renewable alternatives which mostly require upfront investment but not ongoing fuel expense.
Once the capital is spent on renewable capacity it is a sunk cost and the marginal cost of electricity production is close to zero. That can never be the case for coal or othe fossil fuels that will always have some marginal fuel cost per unit of electricity produced.
If dirty coal and other hydrocarbons are the problem, lets tax or ban those.
Turning off bitcoin would immediately remove a sizable developed nation sized chunk of annual co2 production, and would negatively impact practically nobody in comparison.
People fixate on it because it would be a trivially easy win.
The tundra in Siberia holds methane equivalent to 100 years of 2020 emissions. When that stuff starts melting (and it's already exploding) the bitcoin experiment will be a drop in the ocean.
> Global warming isn't real.
To:
> Global warming is real, but it's not our fault.
To:
> Global warming is our fault, but it's too expensive to fix.
To, finally, sentiments like this. Summarized as:
> Global warming is out fault and we could fix it. But why bother, it's too far gone already.
At this point pessimism has set in. I'm just tired. COVID showed us that the capacity for personal sacrifice in western nations is very low indeed. I don't expect anyone will want to do anything about global warming if it threatens their job, hobbies, or investments. Long term consequences be damned.
We just don't have societal mechanisms that would do this. Look at veganism or similar movements (like the collective movement around quarantine, masks and vaccines). People just do not want to change, they do not want to think rationally or can't and they will mock everything that challenges their status quo.
We've made great technological strides in energy efficiency over the last few decades. From more efficient lighting and appliances to electric cars to cheaper clean energy sources like photovoltaics. By contrast, Bitcoin in a new technology that is not an efficiency improvement. In fact, it threatens to wipe out all that incremental progress. It's a heel-turn from a sector of the economy that, for a time, held the promise that it could find a way for us to address global warming through technological innovation.
What about mass international air travel? There are lots of novel things happening, why focus on bitcoin?
Besides, I don't work in the fracking industry, I work in the software industry. And it's painful to see my industry contributing to the problem in such a thoughtless way. Maybe if this was Fracking News and people were bashing on bitcoin you'd have a point.
What about banning people from going for a drive just for fun, or on a holiday via aircraft ?
It's a lot easier for governments to ban coal fire power stations and fracking replacing them with renewables and hydrogen storage.
This is actually something we can control and do without taking over people's freedoms.
Agriculture, fossil fuels, transportation and manufacturing for single use products are some of the highest order problems to me.
- citation needed
A store of value is a valid use case of a currency and Bitcoin has proven to be an amazing store of value compared with all fiat currencies that have been debased by their respective governments.
Bitcoin may also someday prove to be a viable unit of account in the future as it stabilizes and matures in price discovery, but fiat currencies by design will never be good stores of value.
Any Austrian school economist who understands the benefits of the Gold standard would tell you that the hard fixed supply of Bitcoin makes it a better currency for the people than any fiat currency.
My understanding is that close to 100% of gold is mined using non-renewable energy. 100% of gold is strip mined in a rape of the planet that leaves the land completely unusable.
Gold production is at least 10x as environmentally destructive as bitcoin, half of which is mined using renewable energy.
I vote we ban coal plants and strip mining and boycott any country that violates the pledge. If we are being objective we should focus our efforts on the largest sources of pollution. Energy production isn’t the problem. Dirty energy production is the problem.
Since Bitcoin miners are mobile and constantly seeking the lowest cost electricity, if we ban dirty electricity production, Bitcoin actually incentivizes the production and development of new clean energy sources by opening up remote options that were not previously viable.
you say that as if solutions can't be composed by aggregate
Bitcoin deserves to be a first-tier target for reducing carbon emissions. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t target other energy consumption too.
- Every member of mankind who chose to invest in Bitcoin for any meaningful length of time would argue it provided immense utility to them. At 150-200 million Hodlers, that is bigger than Japan.
- Every member of mankind who appreciates having an alternative to forced negative interest rates, or random haircuts to bank savings accounts (e.g. Gibraltor) appreciates having Bitcoin as an option
- A store of value that is impervious to the ravages of inflation and operates outside the domain of politicians or central banks is incredibly useful for mankind, but not maybe so useful to those who wish to rule over mankind
Bitcoin is:
- the people’s money
- peer-to-peer digital gold
- rules without rulers
- the hardest reserve currency ever invented (better than gold)
All that and it consumes less energy per year than YouTube or even hairdryers.
> Bitcoin deserves to be a first-tier target for reducing carbon emissions.
No, no it doesn’t
> That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t target other energy consumption too.
Yes, I agree completely - and we should prioritize the biggest and dirtiest energy consumption first if our goal is to address the real problem instead of virtue signaling.
There are a long list of polluting environmentally destructive activities much worse than Bitcoin such as Gold for example. 100% of Gold is strip-mined with non-renewable energy. Maybe we should convince the world’s central banks to dump their gold reserves for Bitcoin. Or maybe shut down the world’s hair dryer production because it uses more energy than Bitcoin.
There’s an idea.
Edit: figured I might as well look it up and be precise. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_the_Netherlands 900 TWh primary energy, 115 TWh electricity.
Now, just so we're clear, I'm not judging these people and I don't want to polarize COVID and the government response in any ways.
But if wearing a mask is seen as restrictive, imagine the societal changes required to truly address climate change.
Folks, the party is over. The response to climate change will make COVID measures seem like a day at the water park.
Fixing the american power grid for the challenges of the next 500 years is a multi-generational project that will cost way more than a few trillion dollars.
At least it cannot be that bad, can it, when we go to bed each night just worrying how we are going to sell meaningless products before meaningless deadlines to customers who do not even need them instead of putting our efforts into fixing our effing planet so our descendants will have a nice place to live in. Good night for now.
[Context]: I mostly reverse engineer malware and embedded systems. Most of what I do is malware for phones... and most of this malware is packaged as stupid games that nobody should be playing anyways. But hey... I get paid well. Good night for now.
People need to stop thinking about the free market as some kind of oracle. It's not. It's a collection of feedback loops between greedy optimizers. It drives people down the local gradient of profitability, which has only a minimal relationship with long-term social utility. It can, and will, drive us all off a cliff if there's enough money to be made stepping off the edge.
And yes, I'm with you here. I just don't see it as society deciding. If asked, most people will also be baffled how it is you and me get more than a climate scientist or a nuclear engineer. They also can't directly express their individual preferences on this using their wallets, because the market isn't structured in a way to allow that.
I couldn’t care less about good software engineers making more than “climate scientists” or “nuclear engineers” because those lines are more blurred than ever. If you’re in one of those roles and you can’t code, you’ll be obsolete within a matter of a few years.
Or rather, the cheaper option is chosen: companies just lie. This is what actually happened.
> A more informed customer base makes more informed decisions.
The market has already worked around this. We've created the marketing industry. The business world has learned how to bamboozle customers at scale. We're at the stage where spending a marginal dollar on marketing has a better ROI than spending it on improving the product.
> I couldn’t care less about good software engineers making more than “climate scientists” or “nuclear engineers” because those lines are more blurred than ever. If you’re in one of those roles and you can’t code, you’ll be obsolete within a matter of a few years.
And I do care, because while I agree that coding is becoming essential for productive scientific and engineering work, it's not those people who get the good salaries. Guess what programmers are getting the most money? The ones building technology for advertising. Because of course they do. See my previous point: we've created an industry that can play customers like a fiddle, undoing the main feature of a free market that made it socially beneficial.
I've become tremendously cynical in the past decade regarding all the ecofriendly stuff I'm supposed to be doing. It always seems to come out that the effort I was committing to Thing X turned out to be either worthless or even worse than that.
Recycle my plastic bottles? Nope, they're just getting dumped into the Yangtze River. (I put the bottles in the trash now.)
Okay, but my sink faucet no longer drips, so that's good right? I guess, but that one container of almonds just wiped out whatever yearly water savings I achieved with the repair.
I would consider buying carbon offsets if I had any faith at all that they really truly represented a net reduction in atmospheric CO2. I don't have that faith. Way too easy to launder or fabricate.
It reminds me of the 90s, when grocery stores switched from "forest-destroying" paper bags to "ecofriendly" plastic bags. Then we all did a 180 on that. Now I'm paying for the bags--also they use roughly 3x the amount of plastic--and I still use them twice (once for the items, once as a trashcan liner), just like I did before.
Book recommendation that can dispel cynicism about the future: Enlightenment Now by Steven Pinker. Few years old at this point but still relevant and worth reading.
Because of reviews and Youtube and etc, companies are in an information economy where they depend on what the customers want/demand more than ever. So if those tools get leveraged more, then yes, the market responds and marketing for lying only goes so far before your brand is tarnished forever.
And I don't work in advertising - I still get paid very well as an engineer. And if someone wants to work in advertising, that's their choice and there are legitimate needs for that.
I do think the people working on upgrading the energy grid do have more utility at this point though.
If you’re not happy with the employment that gives you the income to pursue your hobbies and fund side ventures, why not join one of those climate companies or start one?
I see the "giant centralized hand" over in the East where they're heavily top-down management of the economy, and yet they're still building the most coal plants and driving those "externalized costs" you mentioned through the roof.
https://e360.yale.edu/features/despite-pledges-to-cut-emissi...
I guess you could generalize people that believe in the risks of climate changes as "people with an agenda". You could probably also generalize people who believe the opposite that way as well.
Given there is more money to be made (or less to be spent) in maintaining the status quo I'd say it is more motivations for an agenda in climate change denial.
> refer to nebulous externalized costs that they cannot actually quantify. How are you measuring these costs and what are they?
There are a whole range of possibilities here. Some are lower risk, but huge "costs" (world war III, runaway greenhouse effect). Other lower impact scenarios are more likely (more extreme weather conditions resulting in increased storm damage/flooding, uninhabitable areas due to heat/regular flooding, mass migration).
The costs of the worst case scenario are really off the scale. The costs of the less extreme scenario is extreme.
The problem is that for all our science, it's hard to predict the future. And how do you calculate the cost for something decades away that has such uncertainty? It's hard for individuals (or most companies) to build this into their financial models as they tend not to operate on those sorts of timelines, but it is something governments should be looking at.
> Because I see a lot of people making excuses for why we need a government to do everything
That's nice, but you were responding to my comment. I am not making excuses or asking the government to do "everything". I think I was clear in my previous comment, but I will try again: governments need to act to put a cost on negative externalities, which in turn will allow a market to develop, leading to private companies provide solutions for said market.
when you say it like this, it def sounds like a more reasonable proposition to debate. i mean we already basically capture that in our military R&D, don't we? like didn't they say that climate change needs to be contained to reasonable parameters and stuff, years ago? i'm sure they're funding lots of work and making contracts available. it's a matter of nation defense after all lol. and didn't Elon announce $100 million for a proven idea that works for sucking carbon out of the air?
https://www.xprize.org/prizes/elonmusk
seems like both public/private are poised to have an interest in solving big problems via technologies and that's great.
that's about the only existential or national defense externality I can think of that needs more funding. and it's already picking up steam. AI research is getting a boost too.
Not sure if that changes your vote, but FYI :)
[0] https://research.noaa.gov/Portals/0/easygalleryimages/1/864/...
A simmilar amount of hardship targeted at reducing emmisions would be far more effective at reducing emmisions (and less effective at reducing the spread of viral respiratory diseases)
[1] https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn20413-warmer-oceans-r...
[2] Petit, J. R., Jouzel, J., Raynaud, D., Barkov, N. I., Barnola, J.-M., Basile, I., … Stievenard, M. (1999). Nature, 399(6735), 429–436. doi:10.1038/20859 (https://doi.org/10.1038/20859)