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Climate Change is first and foremost a political problem. I'm not saying that innovation and engineering can't address the issue. But we actually have plenty of good tools to reduce our carbon footprint that our politics just will not allow us to implement. Can you imagine forcing construction of Nuclear Power Plants, restricting meat consumption, and policies that heavily disincentivize population growth? Absolutely not. But people are hoping Engineers find magic bullets so that our leaders don't have to take drastic action.

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It only becomes politically viable if the engineering (and therefore monetarily, etc) viable.

“Vasectomies for everyone, and you have to wear a hair shirt and abandon your house to live with 20 other people in an area dense enough for you to walk to your job, which is harvesting potatoes from an urban organic farm fertilized with human feces” is one possible solution to stopping climate change, but it isn’t politically viable.

“Your truck is electric now, and your electricity comes from wind, nuclear, and solar power, including on the roof of your existing home. You travel via High Speed Rail or electric airplane. Steel is made using hydrogen. You use cutting edge low-latency satellite Internet to telecommute. We figured out how to reduce emissions of cattle using seaweed supplements.”

…is politically viable. So engineering is necessary for the amount of feasible political capital we have to be spent on climate action.

Engineering is essential to enabling political action.

Exactly. Without engineering better technology, the only real solution to climate change is that everyone goes back to pre-Industrial Revolution living standards.

Well, not everyone. Only those who live through the implementation phase. Probably only a small minority will have to go back to pre-Industrial Revolution living standards.

I think a major issue is that the viability of solutions is compared on a short term cost basis that ignores externalities.

As an example: on a very short term basis, it is easier and cheaper to pile your trash in your basement, or to not brush your teeth. The value of those things only becomes very apparent after a day or more.

On a short term basis, fossil fuel based solutions are really great, flexible, stable, and cheap. We have to do something different despite that, because that short term basis doesn't tell the full story.

Exactly, but the engineering is already done. We already have nuclear power, we already have adequate meat substitutes, we have high efficiency wind mills, we have high efficiency solar panels. We have high capacity batteries and high efficiency motors for our cars.

There literally is no essential challenge left in engineering. Frankly, just nuclear power could have been enough to dodge this whole fiasco 50 years ago if it wasn't so much more expensive than oil.

To demand even more from engineering is madness. To implement all of these things at the scale needed is politics, nothing else.

Agreed 100%: it's a basic economic problem- climate change is a classic tragedy of the commons scenario, largely caused by fossil fuels being too cheap, with easy-to-dismiss externalities.

Only political intervention (carbon taxes, green subsidies) could cause a decline in use.

Except that carbon taxes that are only implemented in one country cause fossil fuel demand by that country to decline, which makes it even cheaper for countries without carbon taxes.

I wonder if instead of a carbon tax, there should be a tax that funds a fossil fuel 1:N storage requirement. You burn a gallon of gas, you need to store a gallon of gas in the strategic reserve. That way the tax is paid, we eventually figure out how many gallons were accessible (because we eventually run out), and the price goes up for all countries even those that are not taxing carbon.

Alternatively, rather than extracting and storing the gas, the tax could fund the purchase of estimated reserves that are left unexploited.

I assume the oil companies would also love this method.

Well, everyone's going to hate the answer, but we'll be having to both incentivize decarbonization, and pressure countries to stop pumping and selling oil and gas. And that's meant in the extreme way, at some point we will have to go to war with these countries.

Why not just levy a carbon tariff on imports? Ban fossil fuel production, export, and import domestically and then replace most tariffs with a carbon tariff. Also, make decarbonization look awesome by investing in cheap decarbonization tech. Convince these countries to decarbonize by making it easy, cheap, and sexy while making it basically a precondition of trade. And combine this with substantial decarbonization foreign aid. All much cheaper & better than war.

This is one big reason I think “Degrowth”/austerity approaches to decarbonization are actually counterproductive: they make decarbonization look super unattractive to countries that want to develop, particularly if they have substantial fossil fuel reserves.

People don't use energy because it's sexy, they use it because they need or want things that cost energy and they pay according to their need.

The concern is not importing carbon, the concern is countries using the energy themselves. For every Tesla there's a thousand little diesel trucks driving around on the african continent, and that number will only go up, especially if western demand for oil goes down.

I don't think the 'attractiveness' of decarbonization has any consequence at all. Just look at Texas, one of the most oil dependent, climate change denying anti-green states there is, yet they're also the largest producer of renewable wind energy, and are closing their coal plants. That's got nothing to do with attractiveness, it's just economics. Selling wind power is simply profitable.

Vice versa, no one cares more about the planet than the rich people of the world. You won't find more green movement startups, solar panels on roofs, high efficiency buildings, electric cars and even vegetarians in any other slice of the population. Yet those same nature lovers are also the ones who do the most international flights. With each round trip burning as much fuel as a regular person would in a year of commuting to work. It's got nothing to do with attractiveness, they want to, there's no other way, they can afford to, so they do it.

> For every Tesla there's a thousand little diesel trucks driving around on the african continent

Nah, this isn't accurate. Tesla has sold over 1.5 million vehicles (probably will get over 2 million by the end of this year)[0]. There's only approximately 30-40 million cars in the entire continent of Africa[1]. (And expand this to "little diesel trucks" isn't going to change the math much, and probably there's fewer of those.)

Tesla is also scaling up, producing almost a million vehicles per year right now... over 180,000 last quarter, and they have 1 new factory in China that is expanding and 2 totally new factories (in Texas and Germany). So Tesla will soon be producing about as many new vehicles as all the new car sales in Africa (which has ~1 million new car sales per year [1]). And Tesla is just one provider.

More cost-optimized electric vehicles, like are super popular in China (the Hong Guang Mini EV is $4500 [2]), are likely to be the big sellers in Africa.

[0] https://insideevs.com/news/499678/tesla-model-3y-million-sal...

[1] https://lmc-auto.com/news-and-insights/african-auto-market-m...

[2] https://www.bbc.com/news/business-56178802

Alright, so you're right there's a good chance Africa will have a largely electrified car fleet by the end of this decade. It doesn't ease my heart on the entire oil industry though, as personal transport / commute is just one piece of the pie. We still have transportation of goods and materials, which is something that's hardly electrified at all (I suppose rail is? though I'm pretty sure the big heavy ones are still diesel powered).

And they still need to generate that power, and if oil really does become cheap enough for them, wouldn't they still buy it to turn it into electricity?

For countries without actual oil reserves, fossil fuels are pretty expensive. So I think it will really depend on where in Africa you’re talking about.

> To implement all of these things at the scale needed is politics

In America, where actual implementation of technology is carried out by private companies, this is simply not true.

This is like saying that the engineering work on the internet was "done" in 1996, and the work of driving adoption of the internet at scale was "just politics".

You can quibble over the definition of "engineering" but the fact remains that there are millions of person-hours of work to be done by people with the job title "engineer" in order to transition off of fossil fuels.

No one's going to be paying anyone to "engineer" this transition if there's no incentives. You can be as american as you like, but that won't change the fact that oil is basically free. You can't compete with free in a free market.

Oil is nothing like "basically free," and many renewable energy technologies are successfully competing with coal and even natural gas, in an environment where fossil fuels are more heavily subsidized than renewable energy technologies.

You can be as cynical as you want, but that won't change the fact that the transition to renewable energy is already more than a decade in progress and accelerating.

In my perception the price of oil is only constrained by the oil industry carefully matching their output to the demand. Am I wrong in this? Surely the Saudi's are not driving their gold plated lamborghini's because they really wanted them and spent all their savings hard won from razor thin margins.

I'm not normally cynical, but we have to be realistic when talking about the climate. The truth is we haven't really started the transition to renewable energy, we're just investing in renewable energy where it's convenient. The only thing we're really making strides in is greening up the electric grid, but the electric grid is just a piece of the pie of our total energy expenditure.

At some point everything you use and touch and see as a consumer is going to be green, your light, your heating, your car, maybe even the food you eat. And then we look at the grand scheme of things, and you'll find that you merely went down to 50% maybe 60%. And what's worse, to achieve that prices of almost everything had to be doubled, and the producers of oil simply tuned down their prices to appeal to less privileged nations, and those are both flourishing and buying almost as much oil as they were the US and Europe.

It depends on what oil. Margins in Saudi fields like Ghawar are enormous and costs are as low as $5 a barrel. By contrast American shale oil extracted via fracking can cost up to $30 a barrel.

Thanks, so at $30 that would be about $0.017/kWh right? The most competitive high efficiency windmills right now are producing at $0.030/kWh. So the most expensive form of extracting oil is about twice as cheap as the cheapest form of renewable energy right now.

I'm not sure if I'm being downvoted because of my hyperbole, or my negativity or people really disagree with me. I'm really not trying to be negative, I just feel that it's important we're spending our effort where it's most needed, and that's political change.

If you put a 50% subsidy on wind energy, you might put the fracking industry out of business, or if you put a 100% carbon tax on oil, same effect. That's a simple thing we could do right now, just a couple words on paper and it would change the world for the better more than any engineering project right now (except maybe fusion).

Not really accurate. $30/barrel is $0.017/kWh in terms of THERMAL energy, but that’s high entropy whereas wind energy is low entropy (electricity). To get that oil’s thermal energy into low entropy energy, you need to burn it and run some sort of heat engine, which throws about half to two-thirds of the energy away, so in low-entropy equivalent (ie electrical or mechanical energy), that oil costs $0.034-0.051/kWh.

Not only that, but some solar farms have costs as low as $0.016-$0.018/kWh before subsidies: https://www.pv-tech.org/bids-of-us0-0162-kwh-emerge-as-saudi...

Alright, so under some conditions the worst price for oil is competitive with the best price for solar. I know it's important to correct me, and obviously I should've expanded on the fact that it's thermal energy to make it more fair, but nit picking on my argument doesn't change the story. Apparently Saudi Arabia can get oil at $5/barrel, so that's a factor 6 we're still off by.

I fully agree, if it can be done in Saudi Arabia, it can probably also be done in Death Valley or some other nice sunny area reasonably close to a large population, and it will help a lot. I just fear that regardless of what we or anyone wants to pay, Saudi Arabia is still going to be wanting to sell it as long as it's over $5/barrel.

The regime that makes $5/barrel costs feasible is not politically stable at $5/barrel. The real social minimum acceptable price for oil in Saudi Arabia is MUCH higher than $5/barrel.

That's thermal energy not electricity out.

Natural gas is a better point, at 5.4 cents per kwh of baseload it squishes any renewables (3 cents/kwh for solar in a desert doesn't provide round the clock energy anywhere in the world).

It's also very clean in anything but co2

Even better is to solar, wind, and gas.

There are far more sources of co2 emissions than just electricity and meat production. There's a lot to engineer to become carbon neutral, especially if we want to do it at a reasonable cost.

And to whatever extent climate change is expected to result in horrible reductions in quality of life, that's the extent to which we should be willing to throw money at the problem. Although, exactly how that money is thrown and to who and on what basis, is usually where we run into problems...

Do you think it is possible to maintain solar/wind for an extended period of time given the reliance on rare earth minerals that it would create? Also one argument that I haven't heard answered is how to handle the non-biodegradable old solar panels/windmills that need to be replaced. These things definitely can be implemented but are they sustainable? Not a rhetorical question, I'd actually like to hear some opinions on this.

"reliance on rare earth minerals" There are plenty in the ground. Some in hard to get to (politically/socially) places. They can be recovered from devices if that is a design criterion.

Windmills are generally made from metals which are recyclable, silicon is the major ingredient of solar cells - most common mineral on the planet. But they can be recycled too.

There is a lot of toxic waste generated using current technology, these are developing technologies which gives us a opportunity.

Having a fetish for the free market will not help. All this requires planning, and markets do not make plans.

If there will be hell if airline fuel or pickup trucks have even small taxation, then they are always more advantageous compared to the alternatives, because they get a "free pass" for using a harmful but cheap energy source, and it doesn't matter what the engineer does.

Lead free gasoline didn't happen without regulation.

Gas taxes are unpopular. But EPA fuel economy standards are popular! So use fuel economy standards to make all new cars at least PHEV. Increase gas tax only when almost all cars on the road can use electricity.

This might be conflating two issues. Gas taxes aren't really about reducing GHG, they're about funding infrastructure. So the CAFE standards actually hurt infrastructure investment.

I'm not saying taxes can't be dual purpose, but we need to be cognizant of the primary intent and also to understand the blowback of policies, like how EPA fuel economy standards can affect other systems.

There will be a driven kilometers based tax for electric vehicles, to finance road maintenance.

In the U.S. there's a federal pilot program for a vehicle-miles-traveled tax, but the proposal I saw wasn't meant to start until 2026. Some states have also instituted a kWh fee at the utility line. There's some administrative hurdles that needs to be worked out though, like the mechanism to track mileage. It's tougher than the gas tax because it's levied on each driver rather than on a relatively small number of wholesalers.

This is a pattern I've been noticing a lot lately. It is very tempting for an engineer who sees a problem to assume it is a technical problem, because then it has an engineering solution. Unfortunately most of the biggest problems are not technical problems, they are political problems for which there are only political solutions. It is extremely frustrating for an engineer - someone who solves problems for a living - to be confronted with a problem they are powerless to address, especially if the solution is "obvious".

The classic example of this how people are constantly trying to come up with revolutionary new public transportation systems [0], which inevitably turn out to be suspiciously similar to a train, only worse. They see the failures of public transportation in the US and assume it must be because there is some problem with the technology. But technology is never the problem, politics is.

[0] http://www.cat-bus.com/2017/12/gadgetbahn/

You could just as easily say the opposite though?

It's a pattern I've been noticing a lot lately. It is very tempting for a person who sees a problem to assume it is a political problem, because then it has a political solution. Unfortunately most of the biggest problems are not political problems, they are engineering problems for which there are only engineering solutions.

Geoengineering is not off the table. Reducing or blocking total sunlight by 1% can have dramatic changes to any global warming. Other techniques also exist.

I think people seriously underestimate what engineering can accomplish. They also over-estimate what politics can accomplish.... The climate change deals we were talking about were hundreds of billions of dollars, which can buy quite a lot of R&D.

Besides, if we have any chance of surviving as a multi-planetary species for billions of years, we need to know how to do terraforming.

I agree. Ill extend this. Climate change is an engineering problem, especially when time constraints are not considered. However, if we want to work at a fast rate to reduce climate change, it is certainly a political problem. That is just because the wheels of invention and innovation take time. It is an engineering problem, but because of quick demand for reducing carbon emissions, it is a political problem.

I think that the problem is not that people over-estimate what politics can accomplish, the problem is that people (correctly) believe that they have approximately zero influence on politics, and therefore try to look for alternative solutions.

So the solution sounds like we need more engineers in political power, or to decentralize political power away from those who specialize in obtaining it?

To me, all problems are technical. You could probably fit most political problems in game theory.

> But technology is never the problem, politics is.

I agree with you argumentation but I do not see why 'some/many technological problems are political problems' means 'all technological problems are political problems'.

I've also noticed the opposite pattern on HN: Folks arguing that a problem cannot be a technological problem, because in their society/country, it is a political problem. First example that comes to mind is healthcare in the US - just because there's some political debt around healthcare in US, doesn't mean there are interesting technological problems to be had elsewhere.

That line was meant to refer narrowly to the Gadgetbahn example. In public transportation the problem is almost always political because the technology has been mature for more than a century. I won't claim that things are so clear cut in every situation, but I do think this is a common trap.

But because in practice people will flake, the only alternative may be a technical solution. If you can't fix "stupid", Plan B may be to engineer around it.

Political problems are when people can't agree on what they want. For example some fraction of the population wants to be on standard time year round, another part wants to be on DST year round, and a third part wants to alternate. What one group would call a solution, the others would call a problem, and the only option is some negotiated consensus.

For real problems though, where the affects are real and calculable, there is no such thing as a political solution. If you find yourself saying "we have the means to do this, but we can't get people to do it" then you should ask why not? It's too expensive compared to alternatives? Use technology to reduce costs. It's not safe enough? Use technology to add safety systems. It requires too much effort? Use technology to make it easier. And so on and so forth.

Politics can't make a real problem go away, it can only avoid or hide the issue. Forcing people to use a more expensive power source doesn't solve the cost problem, it just chooses to ignore it. Maybe with subsidies you can reduce the cost on the books, but that just hides the cost elsewhere in a more easily ignored form. Banning something may avoid the costs, but it also removes the benefits. If you distribute the problem out over enough people, or concentrate the problem on a sufficiently small and isolated minority, you can reach a point where most of society doesn't care about the problem, but it's still there and unsolved.

Thinking of things as political problems leads to innaction. It is easy to scapegoat the persistence of a problem on the other side refusing to cooperate, rather than addressing the shortcomings of your proposal. Further, there is a strong incentive never to actually fix the problem as once you do, the issue that unites your constituency behind you will no longer be present. Finally, political solutions promote false dichotomies - our solution is better than theirs so you should support our solution, and any criticism of our solution will just be cannon fodder for the other side to use to promote theirs.

Yes, many people will sometimes propose technical solutions that are dumb and in no way an improvement over the current situation, but that does not mean technical solutions do not exist. A monorail isn't a better public transit option than a train, but the fact is there are real, unsolved technical issues with public transit that make construction and operation in many cases expensive and inconvenient, and just waving a pen won't make it inexpensive and convenient. I don't know what a better solution will look like, but it is entirely rational to search for one.

Technology often is the problem, or more concretely we can use technology to make the solution cheaper, which makes it more plausible for politicians to implement. Politicians already use x amount of money trying to prevent climate change. If technology was advanced enough that x is enough to prevent climate change completely, we could then solve the problem with a technological solution (assuming politicians are willing).

I don't think the tech is nearly cheap enough yet.

Politically I don't think any significant action will be taken fast enough or even at all. Even if one country does take significant action, there is no way the entire world is going to get on board unless there is strong financial incentive.

Instead our only hope is an engineered solution - which might not even be reversing it at this point but more how to survive and thrive in a different world.

Your efficiency gains will just get eaten up by Jevon's Paradox[1] unless accompanied by a political solution.

1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

Perhaps parent commenter is referring to carbon capture or something similar?

Jevons paradox isn’t a physical law. It’s an observation.

If your technical solution involves making coal or oil more valuable by increasing the amount of work it can do (or reducing the cost to extract it), that is Jevons Paradox. If it’s wholesale replacing it with something else, then Jevons Paradox need not apply.

It's really clear that Jevon's paradox does not currently apply to decarbonizatiom and increased energy availability.

As our GDP is rising, energy usage is going down. Our efficiency is increasing, with better gas mileage, more efficient lighting, etc, and total energy use is going down.

There are some areas where Jevons paradox applies, but it's where the majority of use of something is gated by cost. Most of our energy consumption is not limited by that these days, in that most people aren't keeping the house colder at winter than they'd like it to save money, or driving less than they'd like because of gas costs.

Where Jevons paradox causes lots of problems is with road building. Because by changing the fundamental geography, you're changing the demand side of the equation a ton.

White certificates are a good example of a political solution that directly stops this paradox: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_certificates

Unless culture marks overconsumption as bad

We are the proverbial boiling frog. Coronavirus has shown us that the world can act swiftly and forcefully to alter behaviors when we know there is a threat out there even if it is invisible. Climate change being gradual, diffuse , occasional and unpredictable in its immediate effects means that it’s easy to push off to tomorrow. If every beach condo tower around the world started falling to the ground at a predictable pace and we had a condo destruction tracker at the top of the news every night - we might get somewhere. But the way it is now it seems like an explainable one off situation.

IMHO, if one country does take significant action, the country now has strong incentive to advocate the same change for neighbors (because otherwise it's just losing out on competition), and these neighboring countries' activists and politicians can now point to the first country as an example.

It's already happening in limited scale: for example, more and more countries plan to ban ICE vehicles altogether. The more countries join the idea, the more "normalized" the idea becomes, which will force vehicle makers to take notes (because what's the point of designing vehicles if you can't sell them to most consumers), at which point the "battle" is won.

So, "one country taking initiative", while not being enough in itself, is a perfectly viable way of starting political change.

Indeed this is not an engineering problem.

The most frustrating part of this all is that we are still mostly only talking about climate change, when our ecological disaster is that we have simultaneously crossed or are soon crossing most planetary boundaries (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetary_boundaries) at the same time.

Looking at only CO2 levels makes the solution seem technical: just start using better tech. Or worse: placing hope on geoengineering which is only about alleviating one boundary at the expense of most of the others.

But if you look at the facts that we have been for many decades exploiting nature faster than nature can regenerate, and that all economic growth has come hand in hand with more environmental stress, the root problem and the only solution becomes pretty obvious: heavy global tax to all nature exploitation and after that inevitably halts most economic growth, a redistribution of wealth and social restructuring.

We have no hope to have a livable planet the next century unless us westerners learn to not want more stuff, but learn to live with much, much less.

One thing though, most material we need has been extracted already. New cars using old steel doesn't require more stress on the biosphere for metal.

Engineering can indeed be useful to increase re- and upcycling in the future.

But given that recycling rate is at the moment for most materials miniscule, and our economic system can only work with global exponential growth, it alone can't be the solution – it's only valuable combined with also stopping growth in rich countries.

Let's just state it plainly: unless there's a major change of priorities amongst the populace of Western countries, a political solution in the West is either going to be very slow, or it will have to include undemocratic methods.

The developing world won't have resources to do much and most of the totalitarian regimes won't care until it's too late.

Magic bullets are more likely than political solutions.

population growth is a dog whistle, that particular factor is directly correlated to human development which is what we need to tackle. besides, we have enough resources for reasonable usage even with growing populations.

> population growth is a dog whistle, that particular factor is directly correlated to human development which is what we need to tackle

Pretty sure that's what the gp was referring to. It's not a dog whistle if that's your understanding of it.

Nah, we need to break the population taboo to escape from the pyramid scheme of 'the economy demands endless growth on a finite planet'

No idea how we do that. Tearing down capitalism without a clear plan could kill almost as many as climate change itself (We're starting to wake up to just how fragile our modern 'life support system' of global supply chains is - we really don't want to find out how it handles massive revolutions or widespread war!)

But it's pretty clear that for every child not born (especially in the most wealthy and wasteful parts of the world), that's a whole lot of energy not used, miles not travelled, and meat not eaten.

And if if you expect the next century to be really grim as we feel the full force of uncontrolled climate change, then do you really want to bring kids into the world?

Suffering is a part of life. I helped bring one child into the world, and one is enough. We’ll help them towards autonomy and emotional maturity (a far better indicator of adulthood than advertisers of luxuries would have us believe).

I’d like to make more space for other life on earth for a more robust, resilient ecosystem. I’m not hung up on my genetics carrying on forever, but I do like the idea of human life carrying on awhile, passing down stories over the next several millennia.

What might it feel like to communicate with and learn from dolphins, whales, elephants, ravens, … fungi, trees? We may not need any technology for that; a culture shift might be enough.

>Tearing down capitalism without a clear plan could kill almost as many as climate change itself

I am an entity that has an understanding of capitalism that is 3 planes above the average homo sapiens.

Ok, let's be serious. Capitalism requires endless nominal growth (not real growth) because of the way our currency and debt system works. When there is a shortage of money, people start hoarding it, therefore the money supply must keep growing to meet hoarding demand otherwise people stop using money as a medium of exchange. Fiat is issued via debt. To maintain money supply growth the amount of debt in the system must grow. Thus we get endless debt growth. The easiest solution to deal with this is to just let the population grow forever as young people take on debt voluntarily or they purchase products and the companies take debt instead. If you have a nominally shrinking economy either because of a lack of population growth or a recession then the process has been interrupted. Private money creation via debt cannot keep up with the necessary increase in the money supply. It follows that the government has to take the debt on instead. The government must borrow money and do fiscal stimulus until 2% inflation has been reached at which point the economy is growing nominally again. This does not require real growth. We can go one step further and allow public money creation tied to inflation. 0% debt forever with no monthly payments. At this point debt doesn't matter anymore and we can kick the can down forever without real growth. Technically it isn't even debt at this point, it is just an account with a negative balance that tracks how much public money has been issued.

No it's much simpler. To maximize profits you need real growth, as that maximizes profits. If you don't maximize profits then someone else will and you will lose. This effectively means that capitalism requires infinite growth.

> But people are hoping Engineers find magic bullets so that our leaders don't have to take drastic action.

And engineers are hoping that politicians will just adopt their ideas without further work on the part of the engineers. Who's being more unreasonable in this situation, do you think?

This whole thread is riven with the attitude, sometimes more explicit and sometimes less, that in effect the engineering work to stop climate change is pointless: we have the tools, but that implacable demon Political Viability has condemned, and will always condemn our good works to eternal obscurity - as though the responsibility of the engineer ends when the tool is designed!

Which, to be fair, might be the case: the role of the engineer is to express the forms of nature and human craft in ever-more-useful ways. But as humans in a human culture, faced with the grim realities of climate change, can we really say that our responsibility ends with tool-making? Or do we have the additional responsibility to work to see those tools actually used for the common good?

These are neither the engineering nor political problems at the core of climate change, however.

The biggest, at least in the US, is land use and allowing housing to be built close to jobs, in multi-use zoning, that allows people to go about their day without a car. That's the political third rail that even environmentalists fear to touch. Suburbia is unsustainable and we must allow more urbanization, and that will make all the rest of the challenges far easier than even stopping population growth. Because urbanized populations consume far less resources, need far less carbon even with current technologies. And it will make the transition to renewables much easier.

Meat is an order of magnitude less impact than our bad land use, at least in the US.

And nuclear is a lost cause. Even if we double our construction rate every year, it's not going to catch the tail of storage, solar, and wind in the time span we need to shift off carbon. And our current nuclear fleet is aged and ready to be decommissioned, even replacing our current nuclear fleet would require huge growth in an industry that doesn't know how to complete projects, much less scale and get cheaper. This is not a political problem, it's an industry problem.

Population growth, similarly, isn't much related to our immediate climate action. We need static change in the next two decades, and telling everybody that there are no more kids entering the workforce in order to actually execute this transition would be disastrous. Say no more children are born for the next 20 years, and population drops, I don't know, 20%. I don't see that she distribution being set up to tackle the future challenges of the world. Population growth is already peaking, and the best thing to accelerate that is to industrialize the high population growth countries with green industries, and urbanize their populations.

Gonna need a citation on that one. Commuting doesn’t hold a candle in CO2 production compared to industrial manufacturing and agriculture

I'm mainly focused on California, with a bit of a look at the US. Transportation is the biggest single sector source of emissions, and completely dwarfs agriculture:

CA (41% of emissions): https://ww2.arb.ca.gov/ghg-inventory-data

US (29% of emissions, PDF page 3): https://www.epa.gov/sites/production/files/2021-04/documents...

Industry is a big emitter as wel, but it also dwarfs agriculture. And since California is such a major agricultural exporter, it's not like it's offloading their agriculture emissions.

When I see people talking about meat as a big contributor to emissions, I assume that they are trying to drive a political wedge to stop any climate action. Not eating meat has a small effect for the climate, but causes absolutely massive political and cultural backlash. And it's quite likely that we will become carbon negative by 205-2060 without decreasing meat consumption.

That’s because those statistics are ignoring CO2 from economic activity. A Californian buys a computer manufacturered in Asia and these statistic only count the CO2 created to move it from the harbor to their house. All the CO2 from manufacturing, mining, and transporting it across the ocean are ignored.

So I take it that you agree that transportation dwarfs agriculture?

As far as Foreign imports of consumer goods accounting for a huge chunk of our carbon, that claim has never held up when I investigated it. In particular, Our World in Data had some fantastic plots showing that, though I don't have time to locate them at the moment.

Could I turn the tables on you and ask for some substantiation of the claim that import of consumer goods is a major source of emissions attributable in the US? Because the amount of carbon that goes into making a computer seems pretty trivial compared to that of making a car, and from burning a gallon+ a day.

Also, for evidence of the inherent sustainability of urban areas over suburban areas, check out these maps:

https://coolclimate.berkeley.edu/maps

I forget if they account for carbon from imported goods or not, but it's a consumption based inventory, rather than the typical production based inventory.

I found a bit of time to do some digging. My conclusion: US transportation is about 7x the emissions of the products we import from China.

The embodied carbon in Chinese exports peaked in 2008, and has been decreasing, the most recent estimate I found was 1.4Gt in 2015 [1]. This is already less than the US transportation emissions of 1.7Gt in 2015 (from the EPA PDF I linked above).

And the US share of that 1.4Gt is only about 18% (409/2273B$ [2]), for about 0.25Gt of CO2 equivalents.

[1] Fig 1C https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/201...

[2] https://wits.worldbank.org/CountryProfile/en/Country/CHN/Yea...

By your analysis Hong Kong’s share of that 1.4 Gt would be 14.5%, which hardly seems reasonable.

Cold you say more about that? You seem to be saying that you don't believe that HK is the second largest export market, but that's not my analysis, that's the numbers available from pretty much any source you can find.

Not trying to poke holes in your theory because it's been enlightening to me, but wouldn't it make more sense to look at the global statistics? I think since it's a global problem, it might be a mistake to take an overly US-centric (or worse yet, CA-centric) perspective.

In that context of global use, industry (29.4%, if you add industrial and cement/chemical processes) does exceed road transport (11.9%) and total transport (16.2%). For that matter, agriculture (18.4%) is still higher than transport. I think the GP claim that transport "doesn't hold a candle" to ag/industrial emissions is a bit aggressive, but it's not as lopsided worldwide as the data you shared either. To be fair, the data is 5 years old so maybe the proportions have changed.

https://ourworldindata.org/emissions-by-sector

Good questions!

I think policy at a particular level of government should be devoted to the domain that it controls.

So at the local government level, I advocate for the most influential policy, based on the numbers of what's being emitted there. In my small coastal community, replacing natural gas with heat pumps has a huuuuge impact on emissions. In most of the SF Bay, land use and allowing housing near jobs is by far the most impactful change.

If we are setting policy globally, sure, focus on global numbers, but we don't really set policy globally. Individual governments make broad promises for reductions, but it would be a mistake for a government to base their actions on global numbers rather than their own numbers.

I don't think that decarbonization is solvable through personal actions, but when I'm looking to change my personal impact, I look at what my actions are doing, not what the average person's actions are doing.

This seems like a bit of contradictory logic to me regarding focusing on local policy and then stating that hyper-local decisions aren't enough to solve the problem. It's hard for me to ascertain from your response where the effective policy threshold is set. From your perspective is it at the personal, local, state, nation-state, or global level where it's sufficient to solve the problem?

Policy can be (and is) created globally. I think we can impart global climate policy, but only to the level the individual state actors are willing to hold others accountable. If your local community bans natural gas fired heating, but also doesn't hold people accountable for breaking that standard it's not going to be an effective policy. Global policy is very much the same.

In the US, local policy is the best we have for changing land use at the moment. I'd love nothing more than for states or the feds to wrest control away from municipalities and counties, since local levels do not have a good understanding of land use. However, acting on the local level does not preclude acting at higher levels. It's just that both changing policy and changing who controls the policy might be a bigger challenge than working within the current separation of powers.

And even though local communities only change small parts of a system it's still changing the system, and demonstrating to other cities what is possible. My planning commissioners think that apartments "destroy" neighborhoods. When they see nearby communities adopting apartments without neighborhoods getting destroyed, it makes change more likely.

One thing about setting policy at a higher level is that it would still have the same effect that lower levels should enact to optimize their decarbonization path. Even if global policy is the same, different regions have different decarbonization paths.

I can't imagine that there will ever be a political solution.

Let's say that 100 years from now we have solved climate change. What will history show? I doubt that the western powers plus China, India, Nigeria, Congo, Pakistan, etc all came together to successfully agree upon and implement a plan. That's what a political solution would require and I don't understand why anyone thinks it would ever happen.

Instead, I bet we will look back and see a few revolutionary tech breakthroughs which, with some government backing, provided most of the solution.

Engineers need to run for office.

This ruins the human.

It is an opportunity to grow. Embrace the struggle.

That's like saying jumping in to a wood chipper is an opportunity to learn how to navigate the inside of a wood chipper...sure, I guess, but what comes out ain't your good intentions, just mulch.

I concede not everyone has the necessary emotional fortitude for the difficulty level of some challenges. It’s an acquired state.

I'm arguing that anyone who is fit for politics is by definition already a bad person, and any good person that goes in to politics either gets out accomplishing nothing after a short time, or turning in to a ghoul by staying inside.

You can't make deals with the devil and keep your soul.

Good people exist who can and do serve governance tours of duty, without the need to be or turning into sociopaths.

We fundamentally disagree it seems, although I appreciate the dialog. I hope we can agree we should do the best we can with what we have where we are.

And then people need to vote for them. Here is an organization trying to make that happen:

https://314action.org/

Does your average person want to vote for an engineer?

> Engineers need to run for office.

Like a certain Angela Merkel, who has a doctorate in quantum chemistry, but has been mostly sitting on the climate change problem as Germany's chancellor for the last 16 years.

I don't mean this in a derogatory fashion, I've enjoyed working with most all my coworkers, and I am speaking in generalities here relative to the overall population, engineers tend to be more anti-social and more out of touch of what the needs are for the general population, and even more so for underserved and minority populations, which would make them terrible choices for political positions.

They are excellent choices, however, for implementation teams. The real answer is we need more higher level engineers in gov IT.

Or politicians who seek advise and counsel from engineers. And then balance out the cost-benefit analysis.

Because engineers are fantastic at figuring out how to devise a procedural plan that will work and get the critical amount of buyin. And they rock at figuring out how to pay for it.

Look, engineers are tools (and don't get mad SEs, you aren't really engineers in the first place so this hardly applies to you). They are not leaders as a class, and shouldn't be running for office.

I disagree. Climate Change is first and foremost an economical problem. Our society developed our economy model around reducing costs in the production to maximize our profit. The Climate change doesn't play a role in that model. Creating rules and policies, just forces the Economy model to find a way to hack through them (sending production to different countries, planting trees somewhere else, etc)

How is population growth a direct cause of climate change? Sure it may be very loosely correlated. But why even mention it? Further more the population is in decline in almost all developed countries is it not? If it really is political it's crap like this that will be first on the "things to do" list purely for votes and accomplishing nothing (except destroying people's lives).

> How is population growth a direct cause of climate change

The carbon emitted is from human activity. More humans, more activity, more carbon.

Exactly, and the scary thing is not only do we emit more carbon every year, the rate of emission is also increasing, i.e. we are still on an exponential growth curve.

The population has grown 4 times everywhere but in Europe and US since 1950 and it keeps growing.

The problems with the land and resource use would be much smaller if the population had stayed more or less constant everywhere.

I am also certain that people would have been better of everywhere when the resources of the families would not have been put into bettering the well being of the households instead of maintaining the army of children.

This problem is political and is governed by religious powers and cultural inertia.

I wonder if there are any lessons to be learned from how acid rain and holes in the ozone were ultimately treated. There was definitely more signal in the empirical evidence of a problem, but those have been largely mitigated through regulation (and spending my summers doing HVAC work in the 80's and 90's, through some painful steps).

Anybody managed to create or organize a group of people proactively changing their lives (energy use reduction, waste reduction, more reuse etc).

If so how difficult would be to spread it a bit.

I strongly believe that if you make just enough of these simple apolitical day to day groups, it will flip the rest due to follower effect

Here's another worldview: Politics is downstream from technology. Politicians are followers, not leaders.

Another issue to go with my previous comment on this thread: when people (I’m not saying you) claim climate change is primarily a “political problem,” they’re often assuming a different political /system/ would solve it, including that socialism would solve the problem and (say) nationalizing the oil industry would help. I just don’t see this being the case. We HAVE examples where the oil industry is nationalized by a socialist government. Think Venezuela or the Soviet Union. In Venezuela, for instance, gasoline was/is DEEPLY subsidized for the consumer as a sort of social support. Nationalized industries end up wanting to stick around and in some ways are more prevented from disappearing than they would be with cutthroat capitalism. If abolishing capitalism has any strong effect on climate action, empirically the only way it has helped historically is by impoverishing people. I don’t think this is what people are going for when they say we have to abolish capitalism in order to solve climate change!

Or from a more positive perspective: There are good reasons to hold back excesses of capitalism and establish more social support, but to the degree it allows more people to live richer lives, that might actually make climate change WORSE.

What we need is the technology to make climate action politically feasible, ie without making people materially poorer.

We need climate change to be solved the same way ozone depletion was: ultimately by just swapping out something harmful for something with much less harm, but with the same overall capabilities.

>What we need is the technology to make climate action politically feasible, ie without making people materially poorer.

What if this isn't physically possible?

There is no law of physics which says it’s impossible. But if you have discovered one with solid and falsifiable evidence, it would be a breakthrough in physics!

But I wouldn’t book a trip to Sweden for a Nobel Prize just yet. Over 100 Petawatts of sunlight hits the Earth, which is a factor of 10,000 more than we’d need. And humanity already gathers and economically utilizes some solar energy beyond the Earth.

> Climate Change is first and foremost a political problem.

Politics can't deal with long-term non-greedy policies.

Therefore, it's not a political problem.

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