Climate change: IPCC report is 'code red for humanity'

Good luck with that...

This is because the federal reserve's printed money goes basically into treasuries and stocks.

The rich save basically all of their money. If they decided to spend it on real-world goods, there would be huge inflation.

But it's probably all nil. The cost of building enough nuclear power plants with economy of scale is probably near the same as building enough solar and wind farms.

Exactly. You need look nowhere further than the french nuclear timeline for that to be clear: the country grew from 4.5GWe capacity to 49.5GWe between 1977 and 1987. 900MWe class reactors took 5~6 years to build, and the 1300MWe 7 to 8. And when you've worked out the kink, this can be parallelised massively (as long as you have sites to put them on), for about 20 years the country had a dozen reactors being built concurrently, the slowdown in construction times really started as the number of plants being built decreased: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/24/Chrono-p....

The design got more complex and there were teething issues with the N4, but Chooz took 16 years to enter service where the P3s took 8 years at most.

SMR's made in a factory seem like the only way to address that, but I have no idea if we can ramp SMR's to national viability in the next ten years.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/grist.org/article/monbiot-we-ca... https://books.google.com/books?id=vsPYv7jm-34C

https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plik:Dlouhe_strane_horni_nadrz... and another one

General concept: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydroelectricit...

If it would be actually climate emergency then we would be building in mountains all where reasonable. No matter the damage to some rare species, panorama and tourism.

Now, I'm sure these are soluble problems. I'm by no means anti-SMR. But most of the actual serious proposals I've heard discussed for decarbonization lean much more heavily on already-existing technologies such as solar panels, which are getting cheaper and more efficient every year and which we are putting in the grid right now.

Most of the time, when I hear people talking about SMRs, it's as an excuse to do nothing. "This research tech will solve the climate problem, so all we need to do now is wait for it to pay off." Like the original poster in this thread, who claimed that a lack of investment in nuclear somehow proves that things aren't really that bad.

Apparently, the IPCC does expect and hope for substantial increases in nuclear power as a portion of our energy supply [2][3], but "[a]chieving a rapid decarbonization of the electricity sector will require, at first, deploying proven technology," presumably because nuclear on its own is not enough, and because SMRs are too experimental to lean on in any substantial way.

[1]: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S036054422...

[2]: https://news.un.org/en/story/2019/10/1048732

[3]: https://www.world-nuclear.org/press/press-statements/the-ipc...

In fact, you don’t need to imagine it, you are living the dream.

> we would find a way to

In this case "people" and "we" just doesn't refer to the same cohort.

If you take the current pandemic as an example of what we do when under dire stress, I don't think we should be that confident. Yes, some people can perform astonishing feats, and yet other people can deny there's even a problem even when it's obvious.

I'm not sure that’s the case and I would encourage you to dig into what the worst or medium range scenario would mean. As I understand it, the _middle_ scenario predicts that a billion people would either die in a climate-related catastrophe or be displaced before 2050. That means that several ethnic or cultural groups would go through essentially genocide.

There are details like loss of water reserves in California and the impact on food access in the US, fish population collapse, climate-related migration from the densest populated areas in the world that are very concerning.

I’ve seen scientist give very clear alarms on several global issues (usually my father was making the point); I’ve personally made several myself, and every single time, the reaction was… dumbfounding: trying to minimise, negotiate, taking the most optimistic scenario as a worst case, delaying…

I have, unironically, witnessed several conversations that literally went:

“If you do that, you, your family and your way of life will die forever.

— You are exaggerating, that’s too scary.”

They did nothing, and soon later: exactly what the prediction said.

This is not only the most common scenario, it is the only scenario I’ve seen, with one exception: CFC and the Ozone layer. And that was because there’s a handful of industrials, who had clear alternatives that proved cheaper.

“Other people do nothing; I’d rather believe the reassuring story than evidence” is exactly how we end up with the bystander effect.

And the west IMO will reel in horror at even a single meltdown there and back off any plans to adopt nuclear the day that happens, wasting precious time we really don't have.

At some point we’re going to have to grapple with the fact many “concerned” groups don’t actually care about climate change. Instead they use it as a stalking horse for other political projects.

[1] https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=47776

[2] https://apnews.com/article/technology-government-and-politic...

Germany hasn't, unfortunately (it decided in 2011, shortly after Fukushima, to decommission all its nuclear power by 2022).

https://spectrum.ieee.org/china-closing-in-on-thorium-nuclea...

The nice thing is that it's easy to make heat with higher efficiency than going through electricity.

[0]https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/global-sustainabilit... [1]https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S135223102...

The problem with beef farming is that vast amounts of forest are burned or clear cut to allow cattle to graze. That alone raises the carbon footprint of beef. Grass on the pasture definitely doesn't sequester much carbon.

When we talk about wild ruminants, some regions that are used for cattle didn't have a bunch of ungulates on it before. South America for example didn't have huge herds of llamas roaming the lands.

In North America Bison herds were estimated to number about 10 million, but right now there's somewhere around 90 million cattle in the US. Even if cattle farming was drastically reduced, it's unlikely Bison numbers would return to their historic amount. Deer are the other part of the picture, and their numbers would sky rocket, given the opportunity. But that's where managing their numbers and reintroducing predators comes in.

Some references: https://www.osti.gov/etdeweb/servlets/purl/20224726 https://www.suro.cz/cz/vyzkum/vysledky/strategie-rizeni-napr...

While most of the mines are no longer active I'm sure there are still reserves that could be mined by modern methods (ideally without political prisoners doing the mining this time) and I'm sure there are more places like this.

Nuclear power requires millions in its initial investment. It has a not-insignificant profit margin over other power sources, but it also has a significant chance for large liabilities (more often due to changing laws than meltdowns). The result is an investment with an extremely high investment threshold (you don't build small nuke plants) with a decent short term prospect and a poor long term prospect that's extremely hard to get out of. This makes nuclear a really bad option for private investors when held up in comparison to tech and the like.

Meltdowns can happen and they're catastrophic but the bigger impediment is the unpredictable legal and fiscal liabilities involved. And, honestly, it's my personal opinion that a fair amount of these post-de-facto fiscal liabilities are extremely just and fairly applied - they're externalities we were ignoring decades ago.

This is a segment of the market where we need government funding and guarantees to get things done - and we should do so since nuclear is an extremely safe and clean option for power generation.

If that were the case, then this would not be required: https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/IF/IF10821

Hmmm https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-49823305

"Hinkley Point C nuclear plant to run £2.9bn over budget"

> Last week, prices for new wind power delivered by 2025 were set at prices as low as £40 per megawatt hour. By comparison, power from Hinkley Point C is expected to cost £92.50 per megawatt hour.

It's a tragedy of the commons scenario. I don't understand why politicians don't just do the hard/right thing. Supposedly that's why we have them. If they always just do the popular thing we could cut them out of the picture and go to direct democracy. I'm not advocating for that, but we need politicians to step up and do their jobs competently.

It would require a better interconnected grid, overbuilt renewables, and plenty of storage with some level of on demand generation like gas. A good percentage of baseload power like hydro and nuclear certainly help, but it's not required.

It's just a matter of how much are you willing to spend as opposed to something that's physically impossible.

I believe renewables + grid scale batteries are already cheaper than new nuclear and much lower risk and much faster to deploy. The momentum is in favor of widening that gap.

Telsa’s prototype in Australia was able to prove you can stabilise a grid at scale, profitably and with simple enough technology. In addition to Li-ion (that provides good response) you can have gravity-based capacity (essentially a crane), heat-storage (rocks kept at 4000ºC feeding a thermal power plant) and liquid-metal batteries. Two of those are mostly century-old tech redesigned for a word with cheap intermittent energy; the third seems like the best, most reliable, simplest, most scalable idea out of MIT from the last decade.

I have the impression that these represent enough options, with enough evidence that it will be profitable within a short lifespan, so I’m not even sure you want government support. But if they can facilitate permits, access to the grid, etc. why not get the help? All those will stabilise the grid no matter what source of power we have, so why not implement what we can at scale, see how it helps, and double it six months later if it works? After five years, we should have enough to tell how much wind and sun it can cover but I can’t see why it wouldn’t handle 100% of demand. All of those ideas can be any size, from a hand to a large city; all have many alternative elements to adapt to circumstances, price point; there are complementary and work well together.

Point being: carbon tax? That hits everyone to some extent, and arguably hits those least likely to care about climate change the most.

Distributing the cost equally to the producer doesn't mean they carry over equally to consumer cost.

Don't forget that the people that would be implementing this are the same people who are currently voting to criminalize every element of the cryptocurrency ecosystem (including development of more efficient standards) while still leaving an exception for PoW miners.

I agree with you, and do so with my fiat (EVs, solar, no air travel unless absolutely necessary, vegetarian, etc). There are billions of global citizens who likely don’t agree with you (or us), who will happily consume regardless of the consequences (and either can’t or won’t pay for the per ton emissions).

The challenge is in changing the behavior of disinterested or adversarial parties in the face of political apathy. It’s going to get uncomfortable.

That first sentence is the problem with this world. Everyone says that they want to fix a problem until it comes time to take action. You're just lying to yourself and virtue signaling to everyone else if you're not making steps in your own life to actively make a change in your own behavior.

That second sentence will be the downfall of all free people. It's weak willed people like you who won't make changes in their own lives literally begging for government to take more power. Asking the government to force you to change your own behavior.

You're very naive to think this power you would give so freely will be used benevolently. You needn't look any further than the government's inaction to punish those big companies who are destroying our oceans, our economies, our rivers. No big company CEOs ever go to prison for destroying our planet because our politicians are bank rolled by them. There is the ruling class, then there is you me, and everyone else. These are the people you will surrender your freedoms to so cheerfully.

For example, in EU car manufacturers have to keep average CO2 emissions of new car sales below 95 g/km. VW buys a large amount (I believe it was around 37%) of their ID.3 electric car to reduce the average emissions of their newly sold cars.

So what you suggest is we take money from poor people and burn it. I fail to see how that will help.

Then we should question the assertion & by directly seeing giant sloths, one can know that giant sloths are indeed destroying the climate. However, we don't have any direct evidence that humans are causing the climate to change. We have direct evidence that solar cycles, geomagnetic field effects, & the general naturally occurring cycles do affect the climate directly, and always have throughout Earth's history. Instead, we have institutional funding directly incentivizing an opinion, which is "humans are the primary driver in climate change". If many scientists don't have that opinion, those scientists don't have a career.

We can use Bayesian inference to understand that the climates in other planets in the Solar System is also changing. Given that humans, to my knowledge, do not populate other planets in the Solar System, that makes the probability of natural cycles are the primary driver of climate change quite high. Given the potential & historically validated risk of tyrannical governments & class warfare causing genocide & mass effects on the broader population, hanging our hat on the small chance that the same people who lie all the time are now telling the truth in this one case, despite their contradictory actions, seems like an irrational choice.

I know that there's many people who want us all to just follow the self-imposed authority figures because they benefit from that arrangement, but that can become an epistemological bias in it's own right.

Likewise, this comment above adds very little to the discussion, because it seeks to distract from the central point, which is about people of power & wealth using lies, fear-mongering, shaming, & pseudo-intellectual arguments to gain even more power over everybody else.

> Can easily extend to individual consumers under a completely free-market solution.

Can also easily extend to the institutions directly responsible for the social conditions, such as the military, banking establishment, political figures, bureaucrats, technocrats, etc. The increasing consumptive behavior of these classes of people directly contradicts the "crisis" we are all facing.

If the people in power who caused these problems really are concerned about the "crisis", they should give up ALL of their power over others so the broader spirit of humanity can solve the problems that they have caused.

And my offer still stands. Give me Trillions of dollars of wealth & liquid cash and I will gladly save you from the problems that I say you created. I'll even include some statistics & Science in that package deal!

If you want to make a difference, do something local. That's where the biggest shifts are happening — and you're unlikely to encounter any real arguments. People tend to only have those arguments when they have an audience, e.g. Twitter, TV

Of course they are a political lobbying group! No shame in that, if they weren't they would be stupid.

Shouting and arguing is how human beings deliberate since the beginning of our species - and it's how plenty of things have gotten done historically.

Waiting until your age of enlightened and reasoned debate around climate issues comes ensures that you never have to take action at all, which, I suspect, might be your point.

I think the GP was that many things happen outside the normal consumer flow and the choices of impeach individual have a minimum direct impact.

Also, I’m not sure just forwarding the CO2 tax to the consumer is the best way to go, it still puts to responsibilities with the consumers instead of everyone.

Even China has just recently established a national CO2 trading scheme.

If you have make a carbon emission high product, you rather change the production country (to a less controlled country, where you even can trow your waste water into a river) then to research the next 20 years on new technology.

And the income from the tax goes to insurance company's and Rent rather then to green projects..it's just another tax without any meaning:

https://www.bafu.admin.ch/bafu/en/home/topics/climate/info-s...

I know that's not quite what you meant, but I think it's probably more feasible to have multiple specific things like that than an overall tax somehow?

Even for companies, forcing them to account for their carbon footprint, auditing it, etc. just seems like it'd be more 'busywork' and open to loopholes to me than 'just' taxing specific purchases or activities.

Canada implemented it at the federal level in 2018.

It is probably the closest implementation to the bill proposed to the congress this fall:

https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/house-bill/2307...

Until you look at per capita consumption.

Use carbon capture to generate fuel from the air. Yes it's expensive compared to regular diesel, but for use-cases with low consumption like emergency generators that really shouldn't be a huge issue.

For emergency generators, that would be enough. For everything else we use oil for, not so much.

Also see my reply here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28127454

The evidence is not there to suggest fatalism yet, and even if it were, the impacts occur on a spectrum.

This isn't going to be easy not because it's technically difficult but because you're going to end up asking humanity to give up much the lifestyle it's grown accustomed to over the last 150 years.

Doing this would result in mass deaths. Food transportation would collapse within hours. And mechanized farming would be unfeasible anyway. Death toll would be in billions.

That is nonstarter.

And that is without part "people would freeze to death in unheated homes" applying in many places.

If you mean "reduce dependency on them slowly over years/decades" then it would more reasonable but it is not "just ban".

… in the 1990s, not today. Doing that today would just hand the world to China.

The Iraq disaster and electing a humiliating clown and con man as president have taken quite a toll on US power.

Meanwhile the rest of the world has grown.

The US is just no longer what it was, and doesn’t have nearly the “soft” power it once did. The huge military is of little help on this issue.

We have a clear tech path that leads to cheaper and more abundant energy, we just need to choose it and stop listening to the fossil fuel interests that don't want the transition to happen.

Technology development accelerates the more we produce it. Accelerate the purchase of storage and renewable tech, and the quicker we will get to a future of abundant clean energy.

> It's not rocket science. The whole "this is impossible" stuff is just bullshit from the people who don't want to do it. Most of the moonshot stuff is trying to come up with a technical solution to the political issues, and that's hard.

If all recorded history is anything to go by, the moonshots are probably our best realistic hope, because technology is easier than politics. The "people who don't want to" use existing solutions have all the power and it's going to be very hard to convince them to change their minds; they're protected by the common folk because they have the "high ground" of having their interests be aligned with short-term interests of regular people, while the required changes will necessarily inconvenience everyone in the short term.

No, we shouldn't be counting on new technologies to get us out of this, but it's still by far the most likely outcome out of possible futures where we do get out of this.

In our market economy designed to get people to consume cars, your foregoing car ownership actually just makes it a little more comfortable for all the car owners out there sharing the road with you. You reduce traffic for them, reduce the wear on the infrastructure, you drive down the price of cars and gas, and you free up a parking space.

Of course this is all on the infinitesimal scale of your own individual influence on the world, its ecosystem, and the economy you live in, but so is your actual reduction in fossil fuel consumption if you give up driving.

Point is, there needs to be something a lot bigger than your individual choice as a consumer. We need an economy that prices in the environmental impact of cars, and I’m pretty sure we need the state for that.

Rubber, synthetic clothing, plastics, do not get used up and ejected directly into the atmosphere. There is some energy use in manufacture, probably some chemistry that may emit some CO2. But it is absolutely dwarfed by the massive amount of gasoline fuel ejected directly into the atmosphere by driving.

The store in a bike frame is probably the most carbon intensive part of a bike. For every pound of steel, two pounds of CO2 is currently emitted in manufacture (but this will probably go to zero in the future).

For a 20-60 pound bike frame, that's the equivalent of only three gallons of gasoline. Three gallons. Because as a gallon of gasoline combusts, it picks up extra oxygen atoms and ends up being 20 pounds of CO2.

Think of a 20 pound plate for weight lifting, and that's a gallon of gasoline once it's burned.

All the other stuff in life--rubber, clothing, plastics--are almost a rounding error compared to the daily commutes we make in cars in the US.

Lesson: get on that bike as soon as possible, and if you can't, at least get an EV.

But be mindful that not all plant calories are equal, especially those that are air freighted (more of a problem in NW Europe which airfreights a lot of fresh fruit and veg in from African countries than the US).

Take trains not planes wherever possible, and avoid long haul flights entirely if you can: one return long-haul flight can undo all the good of a year's worth of biking.

Just because the problem is practically unsolvable does not equal it cannot be said out loud. Carbon above ground is going to increase and at most we can lower the speed of extraction, and until we have (sun-based energy) methods at scale to bring carbon back underground we will have to live with ever increasing CO2 levels.

A change in trend to more getting buried than brought up (full stop first is impractical, plus methods will have to be developed and tested step by step) is not even on the horizon of the most optimistic scenarios.

There are lots of people equating making the statement with "you say we should just do nothing" (I did not tell anyone about what they should/can/cannot do?) or with comments like yours, which is strange but very human.

McDonald's process is likely also one of the most energy-efficient ways of producing these foods - they have incentives set right for that.

This is where things get a bit tricky: people like to paint a dichotomy between factory farming and small family operations, and God knows factory farms are indeed strip-mining the soil. But if we were to suddenly replace them with family operations, how much would we need to still feed everyone? I suspect the answer is, "way too much", and thus any working solution will have to be somewhere in the middle between the two extremes.

There are extreme efficiencies coming from the methods and the scales at which industry operates - we can't, and shouldn't, throw that all away. This conversation begs for being zoomed into, details cry out for consideration. Is industrial farming energy-efficient? Yes. Emissions-efficient? No. Can the former be improved without sacrificing the latter? Probably. Can large-scale farming be done sustainably with respect to soil use, without destroying efficiency? It's possible. Definitely worth looking into.

> Point being: people’s habits need to change across the board, but yet they argue that policy makers have no right dictating what they can/can’t do…

Yeah, that's part of why we are in this mess. I don't see a democratic way out of this; people won't vote for the right things until we're already all falling off the cliff, and marketers can no longer confuse regular people with disinformation.

Currently, I think our options boil down to one or more of:

- Governments getting more authoritarian and forcing businesses and consumers alike to adopt a much less carbon-intensive lifestyle;

- New technologies pop up that allow politicians and/or businesses to have their cake and eat it too - offer less carbon-intensive way of doing the things that are already being done. Renewables and electric vehicles are two examples of this - despite initial troubles and active resistance, they crossed the threshold after which the market wants them, and it's politically safe to mandate them.

That's why I'm very much bullish on all technological projects in climate space, and very angry at the "you can't solve social problems with technology" bullshit - new technology is a tried and true method of solving problems which are economically or politically untenable. New inventions offer new options to politicians and shareholders - which is what we need to have when our combined incentives paint the social process into a stalemate.

Unlike digging up carbon from below ground any activity involving only the carbon already above ground does not make the problem nearly as much worse, if at all.

Unless you mean the energy cost for that farming, which is mostly based on using fossil fuels? Which I don't think is a problem specific to animal farming (which of course should be reformed for ethical and health reasons alone) but to almost all farming all over the world. "Plant farming" is not carbon neutral either because it too requires a lot of fossil fuel input. So I don't think mixing problems and targeting only and specifically animal farming, which should be targeted for different reasons, is not helpful because it misdiagnoses the hearth of the problem of current farming techniques relying on ancient deeply buried sun energy instead of only using current sun energy (like the plants themselves do, but our processes don't).

Absolutely. Any logic followed to the extreme will yield extreme results. It could, however, be argued without much difficulty that people that exist have more rights than people that never will exist, so expecting someone to commit suicide (an extremely angst filled action that is also likely to cause an incredible amount of suffering within the person's close social circles) is not really at all comparable to asking them to not procreate - something that may not happen anyway for a number of reasons, and which does not inflict any particular amount of extra suffering.

It could also be argued that we don't really need to be eight billion, so some/most of us not procreating does not imply that there will be no future generations.

And, it could also be argued that all other life forms on earth are not worthless, and their well being alone - sans humans - could be worth preserving a reasonable climate for.

There are many ways in between reproducing ever more humans and not reproducing at all. For example if people really want to have children, they can adopt children instead of making even more ones. There are sooo many children in the world, who do not have a bright future, whom one could adopt. If one really loves children for the reason of seeing them grow up, develop, learn, become good human beings, then adopting one should not be a big problem compared to making one.

Then there could be a rule similar to the following: First child is OK to make, second child needs to be adopted. If the second child is not adopted, but instead made, then there are financial penalties for that.

In any case, how do you propose to get back to perhaps half of current population?

Is this supposed to be any kind of counter argument? "Parents could simply kill their children."? Seriously?

But maybe there are enough countries to form a pact, with enough alternative producers available to make this effective.

Another reply talks about sanctions and I think I broadly agree that tariffs and levies could be applied but I'm not sure how this amounts to much more than "normal" protectionism. It makes everything more expensive locally, and local sacrifice increases.

To ignore public buy-in will only breed another generation of malcontents. I don't want an "ecological Brexit" where half the populations gets swayed into giving up... Sorry. "Taking back control" [from an unelected environment].

The issue is that the impacts (lots of death) will be for generations down the line and will not really affect us today at all.

Personal choice effectively means screwing the future generations, because most people don't actually care about them. But those future generations are never given any choice at all.

What a… onesided view of the world. Do you think other countries are built on the foundation of being under the boot and up for restructuring themselves for someone’s agenda?

Should we stop calling out Saudi Arabia and China because they are built in a certain way? Are we Europeans not allowed to say no to a tax, because we were built on serfdoms?

MURICA!

What's the name for the epistemic dark arts practice of attaching an ominous-sounding label to an argument, so it can be dismissed without consideration?

If we wait to act until the eventual result is in our face, then we are no different than animals that try to outrun a flood, if so then what is the purpose being self aware? Freedom eh?

You've have thought stopping the country from burning, sinking under the sea and being ruined by drought might be higher on the US populations agenda but perhaps they all want to go the way of the dinosaurs…

Climate deniers aren't new, but I suspect once people start experiencing what carbon tariffs actually mean, there will be a surge.

People like this are lost. I'm sure there's a way back, but seeing the recent damage of Brexit, Trump, QAnon, seeing how far people can disassociate from simple logic, it's probably a better use of resource to stop more people following them than try to convert them back.

1400 degree to make the cement part of concrete.

You could may be reach this by solar concentration, but currently we do burn stuff to make concrete.

With meat the important thing is to know the turnaround time, eg. how much time does it take for an animal to reach adult size. Bigger animals tend to have longer lives. More lifetime means more food, water, energy.

Beef has really long turnaround time, pork is not much better, poultry is quite good, insects are really hard to beat. Eggs are also a great source of protein. Having your own chicken coop is not a bad idea, if you have the space for it.

Cement is problematic because the CO2 comes from the process even if you use non-CO2 emitting fuels for heating up the raw materials, which eventually become cement. Alternative to cement is to use wood for construction, which I think is quite popular in the US.

Humans tend to be on their own barring social pressures carbon neutral. The biggest expenses being food and water, if these aforementioned practices are applied. It gets even better if these young can work to reduce the impact of the warming.

We'll need a lot of manpower to pull off the necessary changes. Just due to the scale of it. Well educated people too. We're on at least one to two generations of lag in education related to physics, chemistry, agriculture, material science, civil engineering, process engineering, general ecology, social engineering... And the old will start to wear down and think in old patterns.

Additionally further down the list is "live together in higher density" and "buy locally made things" bits.

I'd disagree on the facts though. There's already such a wild difference in carbon intensity between two humans, that it would be ridiculous to suggest that the first step would be to remove humans rather than the activities that make that difference (and are sometimes wasteful, inefficient or counterproductive)

So even though aviation is a small part of it all, it is one of the individual actions able to have outsized impact, usually for leisure or at least often for non-essential reasons.

"Cumulative emissions from descendants, decreases substantially if national emissions decrease."

So doing all the other ones actually lowers that one.

And even then it only makes sense if no-one else has more kids to compensate, so it's a personal action that will cut your personal carbon, but like most things in this area not something that works unless we all do it (globally)

Why would we have to reduce the population below a number which is sustainable? Nobody is advocating that.

The actual number could be fine tuned through tax breaks. Give childless couples an X% tax break. Single child families a Y% tax break. 2 child families no tax break. 3 child families a tax penalty. 4 child families a larger penalty.

I really don't see the problem here? It's not like having a large population is in itself a noble goal that makes life better for people.

Only if you assume the average is two children per couple and a replacement reproduction rate, which doesn't fit the reality I know. We have a huge population in the billions precisely because that's not what is going on.

If we drop to something below exponential growth rates, this is not a tragedy.

Can industry exists without consumers? If you don't buy any cars then you have an impact. If you don't buy a new laptop/phone each year you have an impact on electronic industry. If you don't order online a 1$ gadget daily you have an effect.

You are the customer of the transports industry, you live in a concrete and steel building, you buy the devices made with extracted lithium or gold, power generators are running for every one of those … and for heating your house.

The problem is difficult because no one is responsible, but our entire civilization as such is responsible.

Yeah, we could probably make marketing people accountable for over consumerism. But they are just materialization of the ugly side of our civilization.

That's not quite true. Individual action leads to societal change. Climate change will never be treated as an emergency until we believe that it is, and until it makes us change our individual behavior to show that it is. The other problem is that this behavior change needs to start at the top. We need to see that our elected leaders are treating this like an emergency. Unfortunately that will never happen because of a certain political party in the US that ignores science and delights in human misery.

https://slate.com/technology/2018/10/carbon-footprint-climat...

  Psychologists Bibb Latane and John Darley tested this exact scenario in a now-classic study. Participants filled out a survey in a quiet room, which suddenly began to fill with smoke (from a vent set up by the experimenters). When alone, participants left the room and reported the apparent fire. But in the presence of others who ignored the smoke, participants carried on as though nothing were wrong.

Industrial is the largest energy consumer by sector, but doesn't pale in comparison to transportation, commercial and residential. If anything C19 has brought residential up to industrial levels.

However all that delay just makes the problem harder to fix.

So the choice really is simple.

Find a way to make your government representatives take the issue seriously, or accept the 'catastrophic train wreck' that is just some decades away.

  > Carbon tax is a scam.

We can do all the efforts we can, if the big corps don't act properly, it will be for nothing.

Where have you been? You missed oil comapnies spending billions to misinform people, the corruption, the carteling, ghe cover-ups, the greenwashing and everything else?

The problem is, outside of urban areas there simply is no alternative to owning a car because public transport has never been built or torn down.

Most poorer people would get money in such a system.

Using X costs you Y Using XX costs you YYY Using XXX costs you YYYYYY

This way water, electricity would still be cheap for most and would incentivise to stop overusing it.

You could still get a cheap flight once a year, but you won't be able to fly every weekend.

Instead, we should try for environmental regulation to be as unnoticeable to the individual as possible.

The unwarranted fetishization of restricted living is a central part of the green movement's image problem.

To reduce transportation emissions worldwide, there needs to be greater emphasis on alternative modes of transports to cars, electric or not.

- Long distances should be covered by train/bus.

- Medium distances by metro/bus/tram/whatever works in a given city’s geography and layout.

- short distances by cycling/walking.

- an EV when you need the flexibility of a car.

One issue with EVs is that they aren't necessarily a feasible option for a lot of households due to their cost. Putting a market incentive in place would lead to a hundred different ways of reducing our CO2 emissions from driving, not limited by the ingenuity of one person or organization. More people working from home, more carpooling, distributed co-working spaces, more use of public transportation, even shifting how we design and zone our towns and cities, are a few things I can think of.

I strongly recommend that anyone who wants to take a very direct, immediate, simple action to move the USA toward having a carbon fee and dividend policy* take a look at this (or at the very least, send it to your environmentally concerned friends and family): https://citizensclimatelobby.org/senate/

(*a tax on carbon, where, that get returned to all citizens so as to reduce or even eliminate impact on lower income families)

In 50-75 years we will probably be looking back in horror at the missed opportunity to avoid the ongoing economic collapse, the massive famine, starvation, and plagues that will follow on COVID, and the continuous wars as refugees flood from the front lines of climate collapse to places where the impacts aren't as severe and immediate.

Action against companies is an extension of action against consumption, not an alternative.

I'll just mention though that I think there is some double dipping going on here:

"Every" Norwegian seems to be happily thinking that they are using green hydropower, while at the same time the green certificates are sold to Germany.

Not saying this to discourage you guys, what you do makes green power more viable. Edit: The problem is Norwegians are living happy lives thinking they aren't contributing from power at least and nobody is telling.

I only want to help lit a fire under the feet of Norwegians :-)

And personally I could accept a small extra fee to get certified nuclear power ;-)

Edit 2: feel free to correct me if I am wrong.

That said I am also a conservative and I think I know a bit about conservatives; if one want conservatives to change as fast as possible phrase it in a way that sounds reasonable to the conservative mind:

- it is economically smart on individual level

- "repairing things is the traditional thing to do" and "it feels good to be in control"

- "industry should look for ways to save resources to stay competitive and increase yield on investment for shareholders" (sorry, English is not my first language, if this reads as a parody it is not meant as)

- "take advantage of the green wave". Competitive advantage: Point out that wealthy consumers will, on average, choose the greener product if they are otherwise equal. (Maybe poor ones will too, but we are here to sell this idea, aren't we ;-)

- On a national level: we need to get independence from China

- "reach individual monetary independence faster by making smart choices"

Doing this instead of continuing to make a partisan issue about it should go a long way I think. That is, if getting the results is more important than "being right".

People are already making money this way: just yesterday I heard a close friend explaining enthusiastically (I'll translate it on the fly from my native language as well as adding my explanation of why I think this was potent):

- a US jeans company had gotten hold of "the last real loom that wasn't sent to China" (local business argument)

- "hired the old operators to teach the how to use it" (traditional argument),

- "picked it apart - about a million pieces - and restored it" (self sufficient etc argument)

- and are now selling expensive pants - but it is real jeans (the actual sales argument)

This is soo wrong:

>The AFOLU sector is responsible for just under a quarter (~10 – 12 GtCO2eq / yr) of anthropogenic GHG emissions mainly from deforestation and agricultural emissions from livestock, soil and nutrient management (robust evidence; high agreement)[11.2]. Anthropogenic forest degradation and biomass burning (forest fires and agricultural burning) also represent relevant contributions. > >Annual GHG emissions from agricultural production in 2000 – 2010 were estimated at 5.0 – 5.8 GtCO2eq / yr while annual GHG flux from land use and land-use change activities accounted for approximately 4.3 – 5.5 GtCO2eq / yr. > >Leveraging the mitigation potential in the sector is extremely important in meeting emission reduction targets (robust evidence; high agreement) [11.9].

https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/02/ipcc_wg3_ar5...

>(...) nonsensical if you look at the math that is used to justify it.

Please enlighten me!

Technical summary of "Special Report on Climate Change and Land": https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/sites/4/2020/07/03_T...

Also, quoting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_Report_on_Climate_Chan...

>According to the August 8 Carbon Brief in-depth article on the SRCCL, Chapter 2 provides data on livestock methane emissions, about 66% is agricultural methane" and "about 33% of global methane emissions" come from livestock.[22][23]:38

i dont think this is true, at least booking.com has very small decrease in numbers

No I'm not and this is what makes the situation worse.

When people get richer they consume more. This is not only about CO2 per se but all resources. Global population growth has been a driver for both CO2 emissions and demand on all resources, but this is also compounded by reduction in poverty.

Imagine a world where all humans consumed as much as a Western European, or even worse an American, today: This would be much, much worse than our current situation.

So unless we want to live in 1984 meets The Matrix in order to drastically limit consumption of resources then we need to get the population down so that every human can enjoy a good life in a thriving environment.

I must say I don't understand why there seems to be a taboo on this.

> asking the culprits to curb their crazy consumption/pollution and leave the rest of the world alone.

It's not "us vs them". We are all on the same boat. The poorest do not want to remain poor, and rightly so. Everyone should have the right to reach highest living standard possible.

That said I have said no to dogs myself - mostly because of cost and the constant need to be looled after - and the animal we do have is a rodent that we got second hand, meaning that food cost is leftover carrot shavings etc + a bit of hay

That's some of it, although some others seem to emotionally reject any information about climate change, which is more concerning (especially when those people end up in positions of political power).