Comment by Robotbeat | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Robotbeat | Hacker News Reader

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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, 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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...

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