Tech Won’t Save Us. Shrinking Consumption Will | Hacker News Reader

Tech Won’t Save Us. Shrinking Consumption Will

thetyee.ca

174 pointsgennarro230 comments

The only thing this narrative will accomplish is failure. Nobody will support significant sacrifice to combat climate change. Luckily they don't have to.

Of course we won't be able to capture and store 37 gigatonnes of carbon annually. That's ludicrous.

The path is straightforward: electrify everything, and make the grid green. There are only three major industries that are difficult to electrify: cement, steel and air travel. Steel & air travel can use hydrogen. For cement, you use low carbon processes to get carbon emissions down to about 10% of previous, and then store the rest. That's just a hundreds of megatonnes, and that is feasible.

Electrifying (almost) everything will cost a lot of money up front, but will save a ton of money in the long run. And renewable energy is a lot cheaper. And will provide a ton of jobs. So consumption is going to go up, not down.

https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/electrify

It is true electryifying everything and going green on the grid is important, but do you think that when there’s oil available, no one’s going to use it? You can put laws in the big countries but what about the shady ones?

AFAIK, there is only a single country that isn't part of the global economy and thus isn't vulnerable to sanctions, and North Korea doesn't have any oil.

Carbon tariffs are one of those brilliantly awesome ideas that would solve a lot of issues like these.

Great point! We replied at the same time and I think we’re thinking the same way. :)

They still use, and export coal though.

Once the big countries seriously start to transition, they’ll need the shady countries to stop benefiting from oil as well. We’ll all end up paying poor countries to not use oil, and embargoing them if they keep it up - and that’ll be a worthy thing to pay for.

I've got one word for you: China.

The US can't just cut off China without serious second order effects rippling through the economy. Therefore, it won't happen. And, if you can't get China to cooperate, none of it matters. They're currently the largest emitter of greenhouse gasses, have publicly said they'll be increasing their emissions for some time, and have not committed to net zero before 2060.

China's emissions per capita are half that of the US, and it seems very reasonable that they would see an increase in carbon emissions as the average standard of living goes up. The US is only aiming for carbon neutral by 2050, and we have less work to do and more money to do it with. I'm no fan of China, but I think we're on the same page regarding renewables.

That's all well and good, but your real problem is that both of those pages fall well after the book is closed on being able to make a real difference. I also forgot to note that India has only committed to net zero emissions by 2070, and that's far too late to avoid serious issues.

Per capita emissions don't matter for the atmosphere, aggregate emissions do. Yes this makes big population a liability, but it is what it is.

They matter if we're asking whether China is on the US' side on this.

China's people shouldn't be forced to live in worse conditions because they live in more populous nation. You could split China into two countries with US-level emissions, and we'd be in exactly the same place globally.

> China's people shouldn't be forced to live in worse conditions because they live in more populous nation

According to the logic of degrowth, they should be forced to live in conditions that allow for net zero total emissions of the country they live in. If anything, it should be easier for them because they're a unitary dictatorship, so can degrow by edict. I can't see how not focusing on China in that regard can make sense, they're emitting more currently, they are rapidly increasing their emissions (unlike the US), and they have a great potential to increase it much higher because they have lots more people. Therefore any degrowth strategy should be first and foremost applied to curb their emissions, yet somehow the conversation is always derailed into useless per-capita emissions that do nothing to the planet.

> You could split China into two countries with US-level emissions

Well first of all, two wouldn't suffice. It's at least three, and I think it might even be four. And with a bunch of mini-Chinas, there'd be more competition for where manufacturing happens, and it could drive emissions down the same way that breaking up a monopoly drives price down.

By Wikipedia's 2019 numbers (14 Gt China/6.6 Gt US) you'd need 2.12 mini-Chinas.

The article I was remembering was https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-57018837 in which case the result of the division is 2.45. But in any case, since you can't have a fraction of a country in this context, you would indeed need 3 for each one to have lower emissions than the US.

As Oil loses economies of scale it’s only going to get more expensive not less. Meanwhile batteries, solar, and wind just keep getting cheaper. Future EV sales are going to come down to technology not subsides.

Also biofuels aren’t significant at current consumption levels, but could become so if we get close to net zero emissions.

It's a really, really bad idea to extrapolate price reductions in solar/wind into carbon free grids. Unfortunately there's a ridiculous wall of increasing overprovision required as you go deeper and deeper into renewables. Have a look at [0] if you can make the paper fall from the back of a truck, especially at Fig. 3. Assuming absolutely perfect grid able to transmit arbitrary amount of electricity and disregarding any real constraints, going purely by geophysical constraints on the amount of wind and sun available, continental US would need at least x7 as much wind+solar capacity as it does consume on average to have no more than one day of blackouts per year, assuming 12hrs of full consumption stored and immediately dispatchable. The only scenario in which that number goes to about x1 requires 32 days of full storage, which is just impossible with our current tech. And as you can imagine, in any real scenario that number would need to be several times higher. It's an absolutely ridiculous cost barrier that is not talked about enough and that effectively guarantees that we will be burning fossils for the foreseeable future.

[0]: https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2018/ee/c7ee0...

Not sure why you are downvoted you have a valid point with regards to over provisioning and storage.

I wonder how much dispatchable generation has to be kept around to only have two 12 hour blackouts per year due to lack of generation.

3 hours, some overbuilding and a good grid to get to 99.99% reliability (under an hour of blackouts).

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-26355-z

I don't see where that number comes from.

Also, "good grid" means "perfect national transmission", which is a wildly optimistic assumption. The US is currently split into multiple grids, with ties being able to handle less than 1% of their generation capacity.

Moreover, that's just the US. Here is what the link has to say about countries less blessed with landmass and latitude:

> Indeed, in smaller countries, substantial gaps (>30% of demand for >20 h per year; pale orange curves in Fig. 4) remain in systems even with 12 h of energy storage and annual generation that is 3x annual demand.

Or this, directly referring to extensive overbuilding required to meet demand:

> For instance, historical solar and wind resources data in Germany reveal that there were nearly 2 weeks in which dispatchable generation had to cover practically all of the demand because of a period with very low solar and wind power availability (called “dark doldrums”)27. Although with vast enough wind and solar capacity it might still be possible to meet demand in all hours, the required capacity increases exponentially after a point that depends on the renewable resources of that country, and it is this geophysically-dependent point that will largely determine the cost-effectiveness of highly-reliable, renewables-based electricity systems.

Those numbers are wildly off because among other things the use US generates 6% hydroelectric, and they didn’t try to minimize a cost function via location selection etc. Further large hydroelectric dams store months worth of their average output.

Also, demand and generation are positively correlated as people use less power on cloudy days and less AC in the winter. You can look at how much oversupply and storage people need to live off grid and realize that’s a worst case situation isn’t 7x oversupply or 30 days of storage it’s roughly 3x oversupply of solar and 3 days of storage. At grid scale that’s roughly 6c/kWh for solar plus batteries which last longer the less their used though that’s also a high when you add other energy sources and grid transmission.

The good news is markets are great at minimizing cost functions. In the near term lots of natural gas makes up the difference, but the cost breakdown is such that offsetting 1kWh of natural gas works out even if 50% of solar generation is wasted. Aka 2x oversupply of solar shows up from market forces it’s that cheap. Bring on storage and things start to look very solar heavy even with zero subsidy or price reductions.

Hydroelectric can't ramp up to a large fraction of national demand, for multiple unsurmountable reasons (like, you can't dump the water fast enough for one). Location selection doesn't matter that much as they don't try to optimise cost, they just look at aggregate output.

People living off grid still continue to consume the products of grid-enabled industries, from manufacturing to farming to logistics to infrastructure. Heating/cooling and lighting a cabin is much more trivial than paving a road coming to that cabin, feeding its inhabitants, building solar panels for them, or ensuring dense enough population to make research and manufacturing viable. In fact, we don't need to extrapolate minor part of personal consumption to the whole society, we have aggregate energy consumption numbers.

"Market forces" can't generate electricity on their own. Instead of taking the bottom-up view, fraught with wishful thinking and unstated assumptions, why not take the top down, working from the potential generation capacity under ideal assumptions? That's exactly what the paper I linked did, and the results are… not great for 100% renewable

> can’t ramp up

6% is already a large fraction of grid demand and that’s an average. It’s critical for finding anything that’s even vaguely accurate.

“Why no take the top down” because we want to minimize costs. It doesn’t matter how much over production happens vs how much energy storage happens, what matters is how much each costs.

If you really want to do a high level analysis you need to cover a wide range of major inputs. Hydro flexibility and the costs to increase that flexibility, as in how much can it ramp up and how much can it average over a year. Next is the actual cost of Wind in each location for various turbines and the time of day for production this varies quite a bit and becomes a massive optimization problem. Next is solar production at each location as well as how panels are aimed in various wealthier conditions, again a major optimization problem. Next actual energy output vs demand, Aka actually modeling what happens to both for various weather events. Next is cost of grid storage capacity, as in how much capital needs to sit around. Next is how much to utilize grid storage as in a charge vs discharge cycle, the first vs second are different for each technology and a mix of several is likely. Next grid interconnect costs as in how much does flexibility cost both in dollars and resistive losses. Next optimized Solar and wind capacity vs grid demand as in at each set of seasonal and weather conditions to minimize costs. Finally changes to costs over time or based on deployment.

It’s possible to model all of that, but in turns out that’s what markets do. The bottom up approach isn’t wishful thinking it’s what actually happens as people build A due to A being profitable up to point X when building B is more profitable etc etc.

The book I linked includes a realistic model incorporating existing hydro, significant rooftop solar, et cetera. It requires a 20% overbuild.

https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/electrify

Hydroelectricity is very limited in its maximum instantaneous output, you can't feed half a grid with it, there is just nowhere to put all that water to without massive flooding, so it's a bit of a moot point. Rooftop solar doesn't matter for the top down approach in that paper, they don't make any assumptions about PV location and assume perfect grid, so rooftop PV won't make it any better. So seeing a top down, intentionally optimistic approach arriving at a number much higher than that book's author's, I am very sceptical of the book's results.

Totally agree, Carbon taxes will push free economy faster. Reducing consumption will never solve 100% the problem. It will only postpone bad things for few years.

If we started reducing emissions in the 90s it might have worked, but at this stage we need to go down to net zero emissions to succeed. And we can't reduce to zero.

It's all adjustable. Just make Carbon Tax progressive.

Until 2025 anything dirty - tax is 3% for import

2028 tax is 6%

2030 - 12% etc...

Also rollout new target for next Phases. To get rid of coal first, Gas after, ICE cars, inefficient heating, metal production...

You can make it more complex to include coal in formula etc. So if energy production contains 15% of coal then tax this economy. If that doesn't work in few years double the tax. Very simple and efficient.

it make sense to make it social, and invest this tax into low income homes upgrades for electricity(solar), heat production(geotermal).

That basically makes the Carbon/dirty production a luxury.

> That basically makes the Carbon/dirty production a luxury

Unfortunately this is very far from the reality. It's the rich that own Teslas, and the poor that need to use a diesel car to commute to work because they can't afford to live in the city center. Carbon taxes affect the poor more than the rich.

There’s plenty of much cheaper electric cars made in Europe.

Though I agree, this works with incentives added from governments. But then there will be carbon taxes to spend so that works I think.

Most poor people rarely have new cars; until you can buy a used but functional 400€ EV, carbon taxes will be harder on the working poor.

Public transport is nice, and it could cover some of that, but it will never be available everywhere and at all times.

I quite like the idea of progressive carbon taxes btw. Everyone has an annual allowance for basic living necessities-this may include eg driving their old car to work or hearing their house.

Anything on top - air travel, second homes, big cars etc - you pay for the carbon.

Maybe doesn’t sound like it’s converting to 0, but at least it differentiates between optional and essential fossil fuel use (or socialises the cost of carbon removal if you prefer).

The basic idea isn't bad, assuming it's implemented in a sensible way.

However, the most likely result will be higher fuel prices -- until the lack of income starts hurting governments and "carbon taxes" are added on top of electricity prices instead, regardlessif the energy is green or not.

Try googling [carbon tax rebate], it might be interesting.

that's why it's better to do it in phases. In 2023 there are several projects of $20-25k EV car with mileage good to go to any suburbs. With EV been a cheaper source compares to Disel it's no brainer. Timing is a king in this transition.

What opens such a lucrative pricing for car manufactures? battery production improvements on a scale created by the demand. By applying import tax in 2025 you can set a clear target for companies that yet doesn't have such plans despite tech enabling advancements.

I used "progressive" to use same principle. You have same brakets, but instead of money tax payer/importer checks emission points. If you are within average, you're good, no taxes, slightly higher - some taxes, dirty economy, very high tax.

And with phases we can just change what is normal. So that government put the automatic pressure on most dirty economies, but also will show the path to the rest.

Tangential, but is that a conventional use of 'progressive?' I'm more familiar with seeing it used to describe the idea of having a tax rate that increases with higher, well, income most often.

I like the idea of smoothly ramping up taxes over time, in general. It seems to be the most obvious solution to the objection "this will shock the market," and that sort of thing. But due to the lack of a better term, I always want to call it "adiabatic taxation" (stealing the word from physics), but I think this is just a me thing.

You are right, in tax policy "progressive" has a specific meaning, which is to increase with increasing income or consumption. Starting a tax low and increasing it over time would be considered a "phase-in".

It should be possible to reduce emissions by 90% and capture the rest by 2050. After that we may be able to go net negative.

I think we’re going to see a lot of shrinking consumption, but not directly because of climate change, but because of pure economic costs (some of which will be due in part to climate change).

Everything is getting more expensive. More and more people (especially youth) can’t afford a house etc. Some of them will choose to consume less, some will be forced to.

Costs of goods is a real behaviour changer. As externalities like climate change affect costs, behaviour will change. Will it be too late though?

I think this is the only viable path forward.

We simply cannot sustain a society where everyone is a voracious consumer anymore. Some people will have to simply settle for watching others consume things like cars, fancy homes, foreign travel, etc. and fantasize about it, similar to how people in old days would read travel books and fantasize about far away places they’ll never see. That’s basically the direction we’re heading with social media.

As long as you keep people healthy and sufficiently entertained they will have no desire for that excess consumption that harms the planet. They’ll have daydreams, but they will learn to accept that’s as far as they can go. And they’ll feel good about it, because they will know they are not harming the planet.

But how to convince the 1% to dramatically cut back their wasteful ways?

https://thehill.com/changing-america/sustainability/climate-...

> Everything is getting more expensive.

because IP owners are increasing their 'margins' (increasing the extraction of surplus value, and thus increased labor exploitation) by charging more and more economic rents.

One thing always bothered me: how can something be cheap (after initial investments) and create lots of jobs in the long run at the same time? I mean what is the money for fossil energy spent on, if not either raw materials or people part of the supply chain?

I agree. When individual projects promise to be cheap AND make a lot of jobs, I'm distrustful.

However, low cost energy will enable more jobs than it costs. That's not a per-project thing, though.

Labor is a significant portion of the cost of green energy. For example putting solar on your roof is more than 50% installation costs.

Fossil fuels are mostly capital costs.

The book goes into this, along with everything else.

https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/electrify

Jevon's Paradox, as mentioned in the article, has a corollary: if you have decreased the cost of using a resource so much that new products are created to exploit it... then you have new products, which create job demand in different sectors.

For example, graphene production is gradually exiting the lab these days. Graphene is still really expensive. But in small quantities it can be blended to add strength to concrete, which already makes new kinds of concrete products possible - a small transitional step, improving existing construction methods. But as it gets cheaper, we might start to see all-graphene objects with completely new applications, which then transform entire categories of goods and services - a light, strong material using a plentiful resource. If graphene lives up to the ballyhoo, it'd be Plastics 2, Greener This Time.

The question of "enough jobs to go around" is something that can be expressed through capital deployment. When there is a hot new sector, capital rushes into it. So the profits in one sector can end up being harnessed by the others to finance their development, given functioning capital markets providing appropriate liquidity(hardly a constant throughout history). There are a lot of things we could be financing that don't have the right time horizons or paths to investment for our financial system, and we can't change our workforce allocations instantly.

Edit: I consistently misspelled "graphene"

Steel I wouldn't even consider particularly hard to electrify. Most steel, at least in the US, is from scrap metal sources melted in an electric arc furnace, and all of the iron ore smelting furnaces built in the last few decades actually use a mix of hydrogen (and carbon monoxide) already, usually with natural gas as the feedstock. The same technique works well even with >90% hydrogen (steel only contains a small amount of carbon).

And I'd say most airline travel could also be electrified directly, although it'll take cleansheet designs. Cement might be the hardest because it will produce CO2 even if you produce the clinker electrically with clean electricity.

Could steel become a carbon sink if we use atmospheric carbon in the smelting?

There are (at least) four potential solutions for air travel: batteries, hydrogen or using fuels synthesized using either atmospheric carbon directly or indirectly via plants. I dislike the massive arable land requirements of bio-fuels, so I hope one of the other three wins. I'd bet on synthetic fuels but all three are fine.

Air travel is at the stage cars were in the 90s. We had prototype EV's and prototype Hydrogen fuel cell vehicles, and didn't know which would win. Both were crazy expensive, and both had too many compromises to seem acceptable.

Exponential growth is coming to an end, one way or another. Our consumption of the biosphere and drastic impact on the carrying capacity of this planet cannot be fixed by simply changing energy sources. Problems are way deeper than that.

How did you arrive at the 'carrying capacity' of the planet?

The same way doomsday preachers arrive at the date of Armageddon.

Never before has humanity been planetary scale. This presents obvious new problems that could previously have been mitigated by migration. No longer, it's a global system operating under unified logic. The defects in that logic cannot be escaped.

And you'd think people understood exponential growth after covid. But then I remembered that a sizeable part of the US electorate doesn't think it's real

It's probably less than where infinite growth takes us.

Do you have a peer reviewed scientific paper that shows any of it?

Do you even know what Growth is?

Since you are in HN, I'm guessing you also know the 2nd law of Thermodynamics?

"Earth Overshoot Day" [0] is as good a place to start as any if you're serious about answering the question.

They try to calculate, in some detail, at what point in the year the current civilization has used the earth's annual "ability to regenerate" across a range of areas, and convert it into a calendar date. So if we're using twice the earth's annual regeneration, overshoot day would be about July 1. Etc.

Spider off that and you can find some good resources on how it's calculated. Needless to say, it's not a pretty picture at the moment.

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

Earth shoot day depends on the life style of people.

Thus, I don't think it can be used to describe a maximum capacity earth could sustain

That's like saying that the tendency of wolves to eat prey can't be used to describe a maximum capacity of wolves given an amount of prey. Maybe we could support more wolves if they starved a little? Or if they started eating pets in addition to wild prey? Or if they expanded their range?

Knowing the maximum capacity that our Earth seems to be capable of sustaining based on current utilization is an important number, and isn't worthy of such a short-sighted dismissal. If lifestyles do change such that the maximum capacity increases, that's a huge win to be able to track.

It's an important number. I am not dismissing it in general. We don't need to starve more than we have to starve now if we live less wasteful.

That said, when it comes to looking at the maximum capacity earth could sustain, it rather seems short sighted to not consider life style changes while even the article being commented is about shrinking consumption.

So, the Earth Overshoot Day people know exactly the model of the Universe that they can accurately measure (let alone predict) all these things?

Where is your 'scientific thinking' in questioning all these things?

The year is 2300. The iPhone 279 is released, which is better than the iPhone 278. It's also smaller, and both the 278 and 279 are perfectly recyclable. Even more importantly, the apps available for both have improved over the past year.

Voila, continuing exponential growth.

We can't have exponential population growth, but infinite exponential economic growth? Dollars are just numbers in a computer. Increased economic growth can mean better resource usage rather than more resource usage.

The really interesting thing about electrification is that it’s going to lead to more choice and economic freedom for people, which ironically goes against political narratives on climate change. To make the grid renewable will require early retirement of stranded fossil fuel generating assets. This will be resisted by utilities because they’ve already financed these assets and are paying off loans based on them. The key to accomplishing more renewables is to open up generation to more market competition. Because photovoltaics are now the cheapest way to generate electricity, and storage costs are dropping at a rate similar to solar ten years ago, most new generation will be renewable. We see this with states that allow municipalities to directly purchase electricity. For example, Marin county CA allows residents to purchase 60% renewable energy at competitive rates, or 100% for $0.01 more per kWh, or residents can opt-out and buy power from PG&E. The more we can decouple utilities from generation, the faster we’ll see grid scale renewables, and the more electrification will make sense.

All good points. I think we will have to contend with either paying for peaker plants to mostly sit idle, or an increase in blackouts that will coincide with a cloudy windless week.

> travel

Would electric train be feasible? Could even have entire train cars dedicated to solar panels and batteries.

Solar panels that you can fit on a train won't provide a fraction of the energy required for the train. Luckily, we have a solution since 19th century: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railway_electrification_system

Solar panels on trains (or, really, just about anything that moves) is pointless. You can do it, but as a general guideline, you shouldn't - solar panels don't like moving. They're quite brittle in the efficient forms (silicon and glass), and while they can be made quite strong, that doesn't extend to "regular flexing and motion." Plus, anything that moves is likely to have terrible pointing of panels on a regular basis.

Just electrify the rail lines. There are strict sizing requirements for train cars such that they can fit through tunnels, so putting wires up just outside this and retracting the pickups for tunnels is perfectly doable. Most locomotives are diesel electric already, so they're not a big shift to convert to battery/electric, with some battery cars for the stretches that can't be electrified. Or just run the diesels for that chunk. It's still a huge win to electrify rail.

> It's still a huge win to electrify rail.

Alternatively, just ignore rail for now. It's ridiculously efficient (about 3-4x the efficiency of truck freight). If you phase-in a tax on carbon, more freight will immediately shift from truck to rail because of this comparative advantage... and it will provide incentive for small energy wins on rail, too.

Later, after we shift more cargo away from trucks and remaining trucks become more efficient, we can worry about fully making rail carbon neutral.

(And even then-- can ignore batteries for awhile in favor of just electrification of high-traffic segments).

Wow. I wasn't aware that so little rail is electrified in some countries. I was especially surprised about my own country Poland that has barely over 60% rail electrified, with European average being roughly similar. USA is below 2% vs China with over 60% electrification of the network of nearly exactly same length. I have no idea why almost nobody talks about that. I know rail is superbly efficient, but it still would be a huge win if USA could bring up their electrification to at least first world countries average.

Mexico and Canada have even more abysmal rates. I guess entire continent of North America was sleeping when the world started doing electric trains.

I always thought that nearly all rail was electrified and have trouble even imagining rails without wiring.

> There are only three major industries that are difficult to electrify: cement, steel and air travel.

Why isn’t agriculture difficult to electrify?

Because companies like John Deer can make a ton of money electrifying it

Assuming farmers are able to pay for new equipment. It'll take many decades before diesel tractors are completely gone.

It also assumes someone will pay for massive infrastructure upgrades on the countryside. The grids out here wouldn't be able to handle EV's with current levels of traffic. Charging tractors on top of that? Electric grain dryers? Harvesters? Chainsaws? Lawn mowers?

Synthetic fuels is the way forward until the power grids have been modernized -- or built at all; it's not like everyone using fossil fuels all live in electrified homes.

Yes, it'll take many decades to replace all of the ICE's, but those 70 year old tractors that are still used on small farms, but those tractors are only used for dozens of hours each year. It's the big tractors and combines on the big farms and in the big custom operations that are used for thousands of hours each year that do most of the emissions, and they're all less than 10 years old.

The grid is sized in kilowatts, not kilowatt-hours. With time-of-use pricing that cost-conscious farmers will definitely take use of to charge batteries while the price is cheap, the grid can handle a lot more energy than most think.

And local solar is a lot cheaper than grid expansion. Pretty much every farmer I know is putting up solar already. And they need the energy in the spring/summer/fall while the sun is shining, they need much less in the winter or while it is raining, so it's a good fit.

I agree with you about synthetic fuels. I predict that in 10 years time or so they will be price competitive with fossil fuels, but massively more expensive than electricity.

It's not just tractors. Looking around the area where I live, there are a large amount of lorries, escavators forklifts, grain dryers and other veichles, with 20+ expected years in them. Electrifying all that will require massive upgrades of the grid -- remember we're also assumibg we're electrifying heating of houses and personal transport etc. Sure solar will help a bit, but without synthetic fuels, agriculture is not going carbon neutral anytime soon.

Luckily, there's been a lot of progress within that area. Green petrol and diesel would give more maneuvering room, and not just for farmers, but society as a whole.

Haber-Bosch requires hydrogen not hydrocarbons.

“Of course we won’t be able to capture and store 37 gigatons”

A lot of current figures across many industries would have seemed ludicrous 100 years ago. I’m not sure anything is impossible anymore.

The article states it(technological advance) wouldn't be fast enough to save us.

> The only thing this narrative will accomplish is failure. Nobody will support significant sacrifice to combat climate change. Luckily they don't have to.

This gets even more true when you start talking about the developing world. I'm sure Africans are going to stay poor to help deal with a problem largely created by the Europeans and Americans that have been abusing that continent for centuries. There is not a "fuck you" big enough.

I call the approach in this article "abstinence-based environmental solutions" by analogy with "abstinence-based" sex education, and it will be about as successful as trying to shame teenagers into not having sex.

This approach to sex education results teens hiding their sexuality, not using condoms or birth control, and getting more STDs and teen pregnancies. The analogous approach to fixing environmental problems will get us a lot of fake "greenwashing" and a continuation of the current CO2 growth trajectory.

Attempting to force austerity on us will result in a massive populist backlash and the election (or installation) of explicitly anti-environmental quasi-fascist or economic libertarian leaders.

Or ecofascist movements, which acknowledge that we humans have shit the bed, but whose ecofascist solution to climate change is just to mobilize the military to enforce our ownership and exclusive control over our temperate lands, in the face of ecomigrants, who we'll just shut out. We'll strengthen border enforcement and lock out the ecomigrants fleeing droughts and floods from the Global South. Much of the world population will find themselves faced with inhospitable climate, lack of opportunity, no future in the temperate zones.

Yeah, that is definitely a possibility and I've already heard rumblings of it in the alt-right orbit. Bannon is a little bit there.

The way I see it, there is one and only one climate change solution: develop alternative sources of energy that are cheaper than coal, oil, and gas, and can scale more easily. Nothing else will work. If we can't do that we should prepare for much higher CO2 levels and all that comes with it.

The good news is that solar/wind plus batteries could actually get us there if those costs keep falling rapidly as they have over the last decade. In the longer term I would not totally count out nuclear fission or fusion, though in the short term I think it would take too long to scale up the former and the latter is simply still R&D.

I thought it was possible to make cement that could absorb CO2?

> The only thing this narrative will accomplish is failure. Nobody will support significant sacrifice to combat climate change. Luckily they don't have to.

What makes you so sure about that? The Covid pandemic indicates to me that people will indeed accept significant sacrifices if the goal is seen as worthwhile. In fact, thinking about it makes me angry. The younger generations have dutifully gotten vaccinated and suffered through closures to the benefit of the older generations who are the ones most at risk of getting sick or dying from Covid. Yet the older generations, to which most politicians belong, won't lift a finger to help avert the ongoing climate change disaster. In many countries today, you are a Bad Person (TM) for being in public without wearing a face mask. Why can't the same be true for being seen driving SUVs? Surely, if we can fine people for not wearing masks, we can fine them for driving ridiculously large vehicles too.

To your point about "Electrifying everything will cost a lot of money ...", solar cells are at about $0.30 / W (used) and it's either possible or will be possible soon to get LiFePO4 batteries at $0.05 / Wh.

For a 30KWh home (the US average), that system will cost the consumer under $3k (assuming 8 hour days of sun, just in hardware, neglecting incidentals and labor, etc.). The average consumer in the US spends about $1-$1.5k per year on electricity. So building a solar battery system, in theory, would make its money back in 2-3 years.

There might be more savings depending on the area and incentives.

Carbon austerity is a political and human-nature non-starter. Kelp forests and phytoplankton blooms across expanses of the ocean are the only viable alternative to capture and sequester (by sinking) enormous quantities of carbon to get us to net carbon negative faster than anything else. This will require robots to help us seed and farm huge areas of the ocean.

Electrification saves money over the long term. So any solution which costs money is less feasible than electrification.

And work remotely to reduce oil consumption, and reduce the power requirements for lighting and computing, and increase population density for greater efficiency.

You can't efficiency to net-zero. It helps, but it can't be the primary mechanism.

The perfect shouldn't be the enemy of the good. And net-zero won't be the same as zero. With newer technologies like synthetic fuel based on renewables, efficiency can get us to net zero.

That's a pretty funny definition of efficiency. Synthetic fuel based on renewables is about 10% efficient grid-to-wheel vs 90%+ efficiency for battery electric.

Synthetic fuels will be a crucial part of net zero, but aren't efficient or cheap.

> And renewable energy is a lot cheaper.

Add nuclear to the mix and you will get a lot more people onboard. "Renewables" consume a ridiculous amount of land with poor energy density.

Existing nuclear has its place. Shutting down existing plants is incredibly stupid. Building new plants is way too slow and way too expensive. Unless we get some magic new tech. I'm glad Bill Gates is putting money into researching that, but in the mean time we have to work with what we have. The book I linked (https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/electrify) has a good road map including nuclear.

To solar-ify the US, we'd need 40,000 square miles of land for panels, and one square mile for batteries. In a country with 3.6M square miles, that's not a ridiculous amount of land. We use far more than that for parking lots. And of course we'd use a mix rather than just solar, so we'll need even less land.

> Nobody will support significant sacrifice to combat climate change

I do. Among other reasons, because the damages will far outweigh the sacrifices, if we don't prevent the worst consequences of climate change. But what we also need is a shift in mindset: Optimize for happiness and not for economic growth.

> The path is straightforward: electrify everything, and make the grid green. There are only three major industries that are difficult to electrify: cement, steel and air travel. Steel & air travel can use hydrogen. For cement, you use low carbon processes to get carbon emissions down to about 10% of previous, and then store the rest. That's just a hundreds of megatonnes, and that is feasible.

Did you read the part about hydrogen in the article?

> I do. Among other reasons, because the damages will far outweigh the sacrifices, if we don't prevent the worst consequences of climate change. But what we also need is a shift in mindset: Optimize for happiness and not for economic growth.

I agree you but I agree more with OP, but would rephrase: there’s zero chance that a sufficient majority of people will agree with reducing consumption. Unfortunately it doesn’t matter at all what you and I think would be better. If we really do want to prevent the worst damage of climate change then we’re beyond the point where we can rely on an extremely radical population-wide attitude shift occurring in the next few years.

They're not going to have much choice in the matter, I'd guess.

We need net-zero. You can't efficiency and reduce to zero.

> Did you read the part about hydrogen in the article?

What about it? The solution is electrification, not a hydrogen economy. Except for possibly the small niches of steel and possibly flight.

I don’t think those pushing this line are asking for our voluntary sacrifice. They’re just preparing us to swallow what’s going to be done to us – If they can’t maintain high growth anymore, they’ll settle for lower growth and compensate by taking more from everyone else.

The people holding most of the wealth control all the levers needed to make this happen. They don’t need permission, just submission.

> The path is straightforward: electrify everything, and make the grid green.

Do solutions to deal with solar panels and wind turbine blades after they've reached their lifetime? Otherwise it feels like we're solving one problem by creating another, to me.

1. Replacing a massive problem with a much smaller problem is significant forward progress. We're replacing gigatonnes of annual CO2 causing an existential crisis with kilotonnes of inert industrial waste.

2. Why do you insist that panels and blades have to be recycled when approximately nothing else is?

3. The recyclability of turbine blades and solar panels is a problem being worked on. They are recyclable, just not economically so. If or when somebody solves the economics problem of recycling, then it'll be solved for blades and panels. If we insist on requiring recycling for blades and panels but nothing else then you are perpetuating obstructionism.

4. https://www.reuters.com/business/sustainable-business/end-wi...

In general I realized that most clean tech is difficult to recycle at this point, from this site[1]. I'm just trying to get the big picture, and hoping that we don't solve one problem by creating the next. In the end our waste ends up in the environment and in our food.

1. You are quite possibly right. Do you have a source supporting that the expected industrial waste is in the kilotonnes range? I'm not arguing it is not, I don't know.

2. It's just something that occured to me recently. It's not that just these things have to be recycled. It would be best if we did something about waste too.

3. and 4. Thanks for the link!

[1] https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2019/06/wooden-wind-turbin...

Making hydrogen work for intercontinental air travel is an absolutely massive engineering challenge with (as of now) horrible economics. Pure hydrogen is hard to store as it corrodes metal, bringing enough of it on a plane to be able to cross the Pacific in a reliable and cost effective manner stretches the limits of physics. Making the unit economics work with green hydrogen is again several times more difficult. We should not be handwavy about replacing global-scale, cheap and reliable systems like long-distance air travel. This is a multi-decade undertaking if we are pushing hard and get lucky.

> making the grid green

In my understanding, greening grids undergo multiple transitions simultaneously

* from centralized to decentralized

* from stable base load to hard-to-predict intermittent generation

* from unidirectional to bi-directional (prosumers)

Instead of having big nuclear (1.5GW+) or coal plants that produce 90% of the time, we'll have countless small renewable generation sites - a solar park with 200MW capacity already takes up a massive amount of space - but on average only produces 25% of the time, some biogas, a 300 MW windfarm, lots of batteries. Consumers and some businesses will produce electricity themselves using solar and might want to sell excess power back to the grid. Building out the physical infrastructure, software and financial system that make such a system run smoothly is an absolutely astounding challenge. We are simultaneously ripping out base load (in the coastal US and in western Europe nuclear is under threat, coal is being fought everywhere) while also demanding much more from the grid by switching all street mobility to electricity.

In the end, the goal is to have a cleaner and more reliable system that provides power at competitive prices - this is an absolutely massive and extremely complex undertaking with technical challenges, political backlash ("don't build wind farms in my backyard!") and geopolitical problems (where do all the solar panels come from? How do ye compete with countries that use cheaper power?) along the way.

I'm not buying that renewable electricity is necessarily cheaper (just looking at solar panels during sunny summer days does not count, we care about edge cases) and I think what you are proposing is very hard.

Here's an excellent talk about grid-scale storage and a comparison between conventional batteries and Hydrogen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Ykv_0N-bRc

I recommend Daemon (by Daniel Suarez). An AI starts making this kinds of decisions. Including: designing builds/communities around expected weather to minimize heating cooling, capping the size of businesses to ensure decentralization, providing incentives for souring 95% of what you need within 100 miles, state of the art water treatment, incentives for local power and food, etc.

There's certain things in life, that it makes sense to 'consume' or 'own' outright... cellphones, tv, computers.

Then there's things that dumbfound me why we 'own' them... Power drills, tools, and a plethora of other things that take up space in our homes.

Imagine if every street in America had a warehouse w/ an employeed caretaker in charge of basically renting out power tools, ATVs, Jetski's, camping supplies, and they were networked w/ other warehouses to find items that are needed when they're out of stock locally.

Houses could be built smaller because you don't need to store so much wasteful shit.

i'd like to build this myself on a homestead-like intentional community/eco-village near Zion National Park someday when have the $$ for the land. (if anyone wants to donate - emails' in profile).

We definitely can tackle some consumerism, a lot we can't. People are greedy, not everyone is gonna sacrifice - making it easier TO sacrifice though can definitely help. Easier to share, recycle, etc...

Think of all the things in storage facilities across America that are things that people use infrequently that could be rented out, or loaned out, and actually utilized so somebody else doesn't need to buy it and require additional manufacturing of a product thus wasting resources...

There is no other choice beyond tech of some form or another.

People won't wear a mask in stores and restaurants to prevent the spread of disease. This pandemic tested the level of shared sacrifice acceptable in a mere short term crisis. It was not high at all.

Basically, sacrifice, except if it is of other people, cannot be part of the equation.

Current price inflation caused by loads of extra money for spending and supply chain disruption is already politically devastating.

Tech either stops environmental harm, gives us a way out of environmental harm, or lets us fight to have what remains.

The solution will be one of:

- Solar panels/electrification -- mitigate

- Carbon capture/body cooling suits/fake trees -- adapt

- Bombs and guns -- win

Based on what I've seen, and considering past history, Option 3 appears most likely.

Hopefully the biosphere isn't too terribly damaged by the time we reach it.

The more interesting solutions oriented stuff is in the second part of the article.

> A sensible society, he argues, would have taxed the hell out of big cars, big homes and frequent travellers decades ago, but there is a shortage of common sense and yes, it has something to do with supply chains.

The dull solution is that inefficient, heavily CO2 emitting stuff should be carbon taxed, and carbon tariffed. (read: big inefficient homes and cars)

The solutions have been with us this whole time. If we went back to 19th century urban planning and transportation solutions, compact cities, apartments, bicycles and trains, we'd massively cut our CO2 emissions while having no real negative impact on our standard of living.

> If we went back to 19th century urban planning and transportation solutions, compact cities, apartments, bicycles and trains, we'd massively cut our CO2 emissions while having no real negative impact on our standard of living.

That’s a bold assertion that may, in fact, be true for you, but it would clearly, substantially, and obviously negatively impact the standard of living for millions of others who would find being crammed into sardine can utopia anything but utopia.

You could shrink roads and non-space bits of green or concrete filler, expand living areas into some of that reclaimed space while shrinking the city from the rest of that space, have more personal space of higher quality with lower air and noise pollution and closer services in a smaller city and better public transport to/from suburban living areas, and have less sardine can life than currently.

I’m not sure how you shrink my tree-covered acreage to fit into this model, and how attempting to doing so wouldn’t be negatively impacting my quality of life.

I'm not sure how you get from "reducing road and concrete no-place filler in cities" to taking tree covered land away from your country estate, or what that has to do with options to improve both quality of life and carbon emissions/resource use in typical sprawling cities.

I consider a detached home with a private, wooded yard (which is still near enough to urban amenities and utilities to not be a "country estate") to be my ideal home, and don't see how this kind of home and lifestyle can fit into neo-urbanist planning schemes without a lot of friction.

Oh no, living in a fully nuclear/solar-powered Amsterdam-Tokyo, the horror.

This sounds great.

> This sounds great.

I’m sure it does — to you. It sounds like a one sentence horror story to me.

I enjoy living somewhere small enough that I have an active role to play in my community’s basic needs, including serving as a volunteer firefighter, while still being remote enough that I don’t need to intrude on my neighbors (or request their approval) to largely live the way I want to live — and vis versa.

Agreed. Simple life. This is the way. These megacities aren't sustainable and have consumed so many resources that could have sustained untold generations.

Don't city dwellers use fewer resources per capita than suburban, rural, and town dwellers? e.g. more efficient transport, shorter trip distances, more efficient heating and cooling, less resource-intensive construction per resident.

That's one narrative if you exclude a bunch of stuff and do some accounting trickery.

[1] I have commented on this in the past. I stand by my analysis but welcome harsh review and criticism. Read full thread for details.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28712733

So your argument is:

- people in cities are wealthier

- so, therefore, they consume more services from elsewhere, just like wealthy suburbanites or rural people do

- therefore, handwave, it doesn't matter that the actual daily bits of their life (transport, logistics, construction, etc) is more resource efficient.

This argument makes no sense to me. Controlling the variable, equally wealthy people emit more in suburbs, towns, and rural areas. Unless you're just hoping by moving people out of cities, enough wealth is obliterated to lower resource consumption?

Not exactly.

My argument is that the story of the per capita efficiency of city dewelpers is nothing more than a convenient story.

Where we go from there I leave to the reader but at least dispelling the myth allows us to see the world with open eyes and move forward.

> My argument is that the story of the per capita efficiency of city dewelpers is nothing more than a convenient story.

It seems pretty clear that being able to walk more, having practical public transportation, having in some cases centralized heating, etc --- are all wins that rural households can't have.

Yes, food has to get transported into the city, but most people even in rural environments don't eat food produced close to them (and doing so isn't really compatible with modern expectations, either, for various reasons).

But instead we just have an assertion from you that it all doesn't count, because maybe city dwellers do more energy intensive stuff elsewhere-- and gesturing to a long thread with you gesticulating that concrete is resource intensive? (town and rural users use more concrete and other building materials per capita... longer roads per house, less efficient foundations, big storm drainage systems, etc, per occupant, etc. e.g. rural Wyoming used 280,253 tonnes of portland cement in 2020; this is 0.28% of US use while Wyoming is 0.17% of the US population, vs dense New Jersey used 1,392,667 tonnes representing 1.4% of US use and had 2.7% of the population).

You have not dispelled any myths: you've just made unsupported statements.

Yeah it sounds like we have a large gulf of personal experience on this matter, so it makes sense that my description doesn't resonate with you.

IMO these sorts of conversations tend to fall down because we don't have the appropriate context to talk about our experiences. For example, I've lived in cities, car-dependent suburbia, and a bike-centric university town. Of those, the city and bike-centric university town were orders of magnitude better to live in.

However, I haven't lived in a rural environment, which seems like a very different experience, so I can't speak to the relative quality of the rural vs other-options lifestyle.

I like to think, though, that if we had an actual conversation (instead of an ephemeral textual exchange), I could probably explain why city living would likely facilitate many/all of the elements you are looking for in a community. Sadly, nearly all Americans simply haven't gotten to experience living in a city for themselves, and so don't have the context required to understand how cities facilitate community. America has precious few non-car-dependent cities (car-dependent cities don't count as cities IMO, since car-dependency is incompatible with the requisite transportation structure necessary for city communities to thrive).

Shrinking consumption would mean either that developing countries would need to stay in poverty forever, or to somehow find a way to greatly impoverish people in the developed nations that would not lead to widespread rioting.

Additionally, the bulk of world emissions currently comes from developing countries: https://www.cgdev.org/media/developing-countries-are-respons...

So shrinking consumption in developed countries would be far from enough. We'd need to find a way to make China, for instance, accept that they should accept a vast diminution in their living standards in order to satisfy mostly Western activists.

Solutions to climate change based on shrinking consumption or reducing growth in general are political and technical nonstarters. We need to focus on decoupling growth and consumption from resource usage and emissions. Only by developing the technology to do so do we have any hope to mitigate the effects of climate change.

> the bulk of world emissions currently comes from developing countries

And the bulk of emissions in developed countries comes from corporations. I don't know offhand, but I'd be shocked if the same bulk for developing countries isn't produced by corporations as well, and not shocked but wildly surprised if it's not the exact same corporations.

Thank you. Countries are just lines on a map. They may have their own politics, but they're still just a part of the whole. Global heating, Global Pollution, are things that bypass country borders.

When there's multi-national corporations contributing to these things, you cannot fault the countries, the people. You can only fault Capital, those keen on extracting every little bit from the Earth, until nothing remains.

Corporations build only things people want. Nothing less, nothing more. So if you want to fault somebody, sorry - it’s back to the people.

I do not believe it is the exact same corporations, as China is the single largest contributor to emissions right now and they are not very friendly to the idea of foreign corporations acquiring a significant foothold in their domestic market.

However, I believe this discussion is completely orthogonal to the point I was making. I was not talking about the bulk of emissions coming from developing countries as some kind of moral judgement about developing countries, simply to state that reducing emissions in developed countries would not be enough - which means that reduced consumption in developing countries would be required, which would in turn mean condemning a significant amount of the world's population to perpetual poverty.

You don't believe corporations are just doing emissions for the hell of it, do you? They have to sell to someone in the end.

Extracting fewer resources from the planet doesn't have to mean shrinking consumption. We can have both economic growth and less extractive consumption.

Or, as a currently-dead comment puts it, "Buy more videogames and digital movies". I might add books and music, but you get the point.

I keep wondering how much more do we need to extract, since we have tons of stuff in machines and devices, it's more a matter of recycling it.

I've had this idea for a while. A roving machine that slowly and autonomously eats through commingled landfills, like a giant industrial shredder on tires. Take in everything, refrigerators, catalytic converters, electronics, toys, couches, nylon clothing, diapers. Separate everything with some combination of magnets, eddy current metal detectors, centrifuges, machine vision and other means. The metals can surely be sorted in many ways, aluminium, steel, rare earths, the odd radioactive extracted, others melted down and separated. Glass and recyclable plastics cut to pellets. Everything not recyclable but with some chemical energy in it sent to a incinerator (with a high-efficiency electrostatic filter) for power generation. Things like cinder blocks would be left over. This would also reclaim land and eliminating huge eyesores.

That‘s pretty much what is done in countries with a recycling industry. It might be a bit more manual (you might have containers on the street for glass for example) but an entire industry is supposed to make it happen and burn the rest and turn it into electricity on the way. You can read up on their proceedings, e.g. at https://www.recycling-magazine.com/

The thing is: even after 40 years they‘re still not very good at it. Even the top countries just make the 50% mark. And that is done via a set of different political measures and education of the public https://www.nspackaging.com/analysis/best-recycling-countrie... .

Ever seen Wall-E?

In theory this would also influence/pressure material research to find solutions that are easier to recycle and not cheap/effective. Something that can last 1 year and be degraded easily in basic components to be reused (wink wink: nature).

I disagree with this premise.

Consumption by itself is not an issue, it's just a question of what we consume. For example, if all energy was generated from not-fossil-fuel, than (insofar as anthropogenic climate change is concerned) we have no climate-change problem at all.

Pollution of any kind can be addressed in this way. Don't like electronic waste? Build electronics in ways that facilitate perfect recyclability. Don't like tire graveyards? Design tires that biodegrade, or are otherwise reusable.

It's not that we need new technology to save ourselves. It's simply that we need to allocate resources towards moving our existing technologies in a more sustainable direction.

The link at the bottom of the page to Part Two (where he suggests solutions) is fairly easy to miss. Quoting some of it:

[H]ere is what our leaders should be saying:

We are eight billion people competing for finite resources and consuming energy at unprecedented levels. Economic growth is destroying the Earth and the atmosphere. It has degraded our humanity, and divorced us from the values of our ancestors.

Growth is a ponzi scheme. Increased prosperity depends on making more people because more people consume more goods.

If we don’t prioritize the health of the planet over our short-term economic interests the oceans will sicken with acid, the forests will die, and the fisheries will disappear. Nature will reduce our numbers if we do not scale down our appetites and ambitions.

The technospshere threatens our physical and spiritual existence. It must be scaled back and reoriented to serve people. Now it actively mines data from people while altering our brain functions to serve the growth of the technosphere.

We have exploited the richest of our fossil fuels, and renewables can’t offer the same energy density and quality. That is why energy conservation is the only way forward. Our energy use must consistently drop by three or four per cent a year over the next decade.

...

Ignore those alarmists that say contraction means you and I must live in cold caves. An economic retreat does not mean returning to the Dark Ages. As Hagens has observed, a 30-per-cent GDP drop in the United States would bring that nation back to a 1990s level of energy spending. A 50 per cent drop in GDP would bring the U.S. back to a 1973 level. Were those times so bad?

https://thetyee.ca/Analysis/2021/11/04/Returning-1970s-Econo...

For the benefit of the non-Canadians: The Tyee is a progressive fringe publication -- increasingly fringe in recent years as it raises its revenue from donations and it needs clickbait and outrage-porn to attract that funding.

Sometimes they make decent points, but they also spew a lot of utter nonsense.

Alternative hypothesis: without the need to appease corporate ad sponsors or billionaire owners, the publication is free to explore seemingly "fringe" ideas and topics.

Perhaps, but on the occasions they've covered a topic I'm intimately familiar with, their journalism has been laughably off the mark. In the spirit of preventing Gell-Mann amnesia, I'm not going to assume that they're any more accurate about anything else they write about.

Canadian and BC resident here. The Tyee is left-leaning but hardly "fringe". I would suggest they rely less on clickbait than many mainstream publications. https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/the-tyee/

They've gotten worse in the year since that page was last updated.

Shrinking will probably mean reviving 'culture'. Lower economic activity may imply more idle time, to be filled with group activities, art, rituals.

I for one would welcome this. Much preferable to everyone being too busy to hangout.

I'm not the happiest of dudes, that's for context, but I have this feeling that people are hiding something.. binging tv shows all the time, new video games all the time, waiting for the new console. It seems like a neverending chase of new shallow fun they don't even really like. Maybe simpler but deeper moments would improve things.

Shrinking consumption (ie economic deflation, a decrease in GDP) would absolutely destroy the USA. That's not a moral statement. I personally absolutely aim to reduce my consumption. But we live in a financialized debt based economy. It's about one nuance a way from an actual pyramid scheme except instead of recruiting people what it needs is GDP growth. The whole gig explodes when growth stops. Luckily the US could hypothetically keep growing for a VERY long time where as some other countries (China, Japan) are not going to fare as well (on the time frame of their own demographics curves).

Some people want the union to survive at the expense of so much more, and it shows.

Exactly, population growth is halting. I don't think we can sustain the same economic systems without population growth.

Us population is expected to grow through most of this century.

Yes but the rate of growth is much lower and the trend is down.

The same economic systems have lead, and continue to lead us towards the death our environment. Why keep those systems? We need to improve on those systems, if not reject them entirely.

Oh yeah I'm talking about improving. Minor tweaks not uprooting the entire thing. I'm also talking about doing so as a reaction to declining population not preemptively. We don't know exactly what the future will look like best to address the needs when they arise. But the change in population growth is going to have a major impact on our world economic system.

I'm a big fan of free markets and think our current iteration is one of the best ever, despite it's problems.

> Shrinking consumption (ie economic deflation, a decrease in GDP) would absolutely destroy the USA.

I can't really argue - the US financial industry, especially, is built on never-ending exponential growth, and some would argue the financial industry has "decoupled" from the rest of the economy. The whole 2008 tower of cards blowing over certainly would argue for that. How much value can you build on top of a loan that will never be repaid? Answer: Way, way more than you ought to.

But if you've built something that can't go on forever, it's reasonable to see that it won't. Exponential growth on a finite planet can't go on forever, and even if you start playing around in space, you just kick the can a bit.

The question then becomes, "Do you just let things go on and hope you can kick the can to the next guy's {political term, lifespan, etc}? Or do you try and fix the problem?"

The various degrowth/steady state movements are trying to fix the problem, not just kick the can.

But if you've built a house of cards that requires GDP growth to even continue existing - that house is going to come down one day.

> Shrinking consumption (ie economic deflation, a decrease in GDP) would absolutely destroy the USA. That's not a moral statement. I personally absolutely aim to reduce my consumption. But we live in a financialized debt based economy.

Yes and it appears we should consider rethinking that economy.

> The whole gig explodes when growth stops.

And it will. Isn't it better to act preemptively?

Neal Stephenson's new novel Termination Shock addresses this. Without spoiling too much: Its characters view political obstacles to mitigating climate change as important as technological ones. They see the urgent need to act, and try to do so with politics in mind. It's sci-fi that keeps the human element center-stage.

This is the uncomfortable truth that many don't want to talk about.

REDUCE. Then Reuse, then recycle.

Reducing consumption is the first step.

Recycling materials is often not less energy intensive than the original production.

That's why reduce and reuse are before it. Recycling is not about emissions and energy. It's about trying to reduce the amount of stuff going into landfills and our environment (like plastics and electronic waste) and trying to reduce how much new material we're stripping out of the earth.

Im saying recycle can probably be dropped altogether.

Aluminum, glass, and steel are highly recyclable.

The biosphere is incredibly good at recycling raw materials. It is not particularly good at recycling the materials that we produce.

> The biosphere is incredibly good at recycling raw materials.

That's not entirely true in a subtle but impactful way. Organic material such as food scraps, wood, paper, etc. do breakdown in landfills, but they emit methane as they do so. If these are instead composted, where the breakdown process releases much less methane, instead of being thrown away, then methane emissions can be drastically cutdown if everyone did it. Further, compost acts as a carbon sink. In fact, if composting saw 100% take up, it would reduce emissions by several whole percentage points.

https://www.compostingcouncil.org/page/ClimateChangeBenefits

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200224-how-cutting-your...

https://www.sanjoseca.gov/home/showpublisheddocument/198/636...

https://scraplab.princeton.edu/2020/03/the-composter-how-muc...

I meant at an atomic and molecular level. You're right that decomposing in the wrong way will produce different waste products, like methane, which is worse in the short term than CO2 (IIRC, better in the 80+ year time frame). If we look at the biosphere, the vast majority of elements that make up a given lifeform get recycled within months or years. If they weren't, the waste products would accumulate in the environment. We do see that in geological strata, e.g. limestone deposits, and fossil fuels. Those deposits generally took millions upon millions of years to accumulate because those leftover waste products were pretty minuscule compared to the biomass turning over.

We're producing waste faster than any other biological process in Earth's history, and it's new kinds of waste that no existing processes (other than defaults like erosion and UV irradiation) break down and recycle. And as a result those waste products are accumulating fast in the environment and unfortunately doing a ton of damage to the many intricate ecosystems that we indirectly depend on. Particularly plastic, forever chemicals, and an overwhelming amount of basically everything.

I support composting and produce as little landfill waste as I can get away with. I "recycle" (as much as putting something in the recycle bin is actually recycling) plastics, glass, aluminum, paper, etc. I compost all my food waste, and the only thing I put in the regular trash is stuff that I can't reasonably clean and recycle (e.g. tainted food wrappers). My composting is pretty unsophisticated. I just toss it out into the woods, spreading it out on purpose, as opposed to concentrating it in a compost pile. The Sun's UV will disinfect and being open to the air will dessiccate it before it is broken down by microbiota and insects eventually. I am slightly worried about infecting/breeding/spreading dangerous bacteria, particularly from meat products (which I make an extra effort to never waste) so I am not yet composting to produce soil for my garden.

Also, hardly ever do you get the thing you started with. Clear glass bottles are not recycled into more clear glass bottles. IIRC the recycled class glass is not clear enough and you end up with lower quality glass. Car tire rubber get recycled into other things (unless they get retreaded). I think aluminum cans are one of the few things that get recycled into more aluminum cans (minus some % loss).

Why does that matter? Is there an alternative?

Cleaning the glass bottles out and re-using them.

Yes reduce and reuse. Recycling is the last the things to consider. Clean the bottles and re-use them. Don't crush them and spend energy making something else with that material.

That was already pointed out, so I was confused by the comment chain. Of course reduce and reuse should be the priority, but the comment chain seemed to imply that recycling isn’t perfect, so it shouldn’t be done, as the person you responded to explicitly suggested in their other comment.

I was attempting to expand on "why" recycling is the last thing to do.

Who cares if their drink is in clear glass as long as it's clean?

I gave a simple example. The point is that recycling often results in an inferior product than what you started with even after spending energy to reprocess the raw material even for something as simple as a bottle. It's the last thing to consider. Reduce and reuse are the first two.

Most greenhouse emissions are already from non-western countries. That will be much more true in the decades to come. Even if western countries were to stop all emissions today, the net impact in 2100 won't be more than about 0.5 degC.

Are we really going to ask the non-rich world to cut back on their consumption and shrink their economies?

In 2000 I lived in Los Angeles in an air conditioned house (power bill >$100/month), drove to work every day consuming at least three gallons of gas, the computers I worked on consumed ~100-200 watts, and all my lights were incandescent.

In 2019 I lived in Bangkok in a (very-lightly) air conditioned apartment (power bill $15/month), walked to work, the computer I worked on consumed maybe 60 watts, and all my lights were LED.

I've since moved to Seattle and the power bill has gone back up, but I'm working remotely on another ~60 watt computer, and the next will be ~20 watts. The trend is in the right direction.

Unfortunately, from 2000 to 2019 the world population went up over 25% so there are many more mouths to feed and more demand on electricity.

But the world population will peak, and then decline.

No one is going to reduce consumption. To even suggest such a thing as a solution to any issue at any meaningful scale betrays a complete misunderstanding of the world by the author..

What happened to the Zero Population Growth movement popular 20+ years ago, or maybe for much longer?

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

It turned out that it happens by itself in developed nations.

Countries began importing population to make up for the lack of organic growth... and those that don't face an imploding population (S Korea forecasts going to 1/4 its curr pop by 2120, or to about its 1960 pop by 2100).

Though, if all countries aimed for their 1960s pop, that may not be bad if its done gradually as appears to be happening in S Korea.

There’s a continuous tension between capacity and load. We’ve been fortunate that technology (and untapped resources) have largely placed capacity above load for much of our lifetimes. Spare capacity tends to be followed by an increase in load. Remains to be seen if technology advances can keep capacity above load. If not, load will decrease, either gradually or drastically, one way or another.

It’s really a restatement of supply and demand. Prices that are free to respond to an imbalance between the two keep the two in balance. Prices have been low for a long time because capacity has been high / load has been low. As load increases faster than capacity, expect prices to increase,

“Shrinking consumption” is just code for a transfer of wealth & income from consumers to asset holders. Meanwhile technology could potentially provide the opposite with the right approach. As others have mentioned, green energy as an example is more labor intensive and less capital intensive, and the end result is a lot more individuals and communities owning the means to generate and store the energy they need instead of having to pay a form of rent to energy corps forever.

The powers that be might see climate change as a threat but they do not want that kind of economic shift. They want a larger % of lifelong renters and a larger share of wealth for themselves.

Nuclear Energy.

Over the course of only 10 years, France made 80% of their electricity Nuclear.

Have we become so much less competent that we, every modern nation, couldn't do it again?

Even faster/cheaper/safely?

Of course we could, if we really wanted to.

One of the primary issues with getting nuclear going is ... the Greens.

The Greens are a giant obstacle to Nuclear, an energy source which could, if applied appropriately and assertively, wipe out the C02 crisis.

The math is already there, we're literally ignoring it in our discussions.

"The World Is On Fire" but nobody is really talking about it?

Is this a giant existential crisis then 'manufactured' in a kind of systematic way?

We can use technology to shrink our consumption. It seems like the author's actual evidence is the weakest areas of the green tech, they don't take on the strengths of wind and solar or the innovations on batteries and EVs and electric bikes and busses. Instead the author takes on pie on the sky futuristic tech which is still nascent and may not pan out in the long run. Obviously green tech looks bad if you're only looking at hydrogen, CCS, direct air capture, those aren't even 1% of the development of one of the above mentioned domains.

We’re spoiled. 3.5 billion years of stored energy from the sun is ripe for the picking just under the surface.

We’ll burn all 3.5 billion years of it in 200 or so years.

An episode of the BBC Show “Bang Goes the Theory” showed me how ridiculous our lifestyle is when they put a typical English family into a house powered solely by bicyclists. The family had no idea - they just went about their day while a few dozen bicyclists were practically killing themselves so they could run the shower and the kettle at the same time.

I agree with the author, lower consumption is the only real solution.

Historically, the role of the bicyclists was performed by slaves, serfs, peasants...

If you get rid of the machines, involuntary servitude will be back before you know it, because human nature hasn't changed, yo.

Personally, I'd rather that not happen.

You are leaving out the point that we have practically limitless energy in the form of solar, wind, and nuclear. It's inevitable, the oil companies can't block it forever.

My impression is that modern economics has no playbook for something like this, and with the undue influence economics has on high level geopolitics these days, it seems very unlikely to have legs.

This is the classic “Prophet vs Wizard” dichotomy as laid out in The Wizard and the Prophet by Charles Mann. I highly recommend the book for getting a thorough background on the thoughts of both camps. I really wish it wasn’t always presented as a binary choice. I’m not convinced that we can’t be both less wasteful and more productive. Like genetically engineering plants that require fewer pesticides and less tilling. But I guess that’s just the Wizard view.

Degrowth is not a solution in the same way that "just stop fighting" isn't a viable pathway to world peace.

Look for other solutions.

> Degrowth is not a solution

Why?

It's not politically viable. It's not even viable within countries that are doing well, much less across the world where people still live in extreme poverty.

You'd need a global authoritarian regime with strong control over the population & extreme taxes or a command economy to make it a reality

I believe at least some proponents of degrowth see it as a vehicle for exactly what you described. That is, if degrowth is really the only solution and the only way to do that is a global authoritarian regime, oh well what can we do, might as well create one and redistribute wealth in a way they see better while we're at it

There's too many people that have less than they want for shrinking consumption to actually happen.

Remember Thomas Malthus thought that the only way to avoid human overpopulation was sexual abstinence.

It worked horribly. Humans love sex. They also love consumption and material goods. You are not going to convince people in developed nations to cut back their consumption. And you are not going to convince people in developing nations that they will never have the lifestyle of the developed nations. In addition, in a democracy, attempting to try to do those things will be political suicide. People will happily tell pollsters that they want to combat climate change, but the minute it affects them (for example rising fuel prices), they will be out in the streets attempting to throw the politicians out of office (see the yellow vest protest in France).

For overpopulation, the solution literally turned out to be a pill. Once women had access to safe, cheap, reliable birth control, population growth leveled off.

Either tech will save us, or we are doomed.

To be fair, state pensions and stable financial systems might be just as much a solution for overpopulation as contraceptives. Kids are your bank and healthcare in advance age in developing countries. You don't need as many (or any at all) when you know your needs will be met by a combination of state support and your money that will still be yours.

This was explored in "Interstellar". Religion was the last attempt at anti-natalism and issuing blame and self-pity. It never worked and will never worked. If you are scared of technology, good luck being human.

Tech is a huge portion of the solution if the world population doesnt' shrink significantly. We're not going to willing go back to communal villages and hunting and gathering without a cataclysm

If personal austerity were to catch-on, Brawndo would automatically fire everyone. Consumption drives food on the table. It's the nuances of consumption, not ignorant, self-righteous virtue-signaling: "starvation, not bathing, not traveling, homelessness, childlessness, and suicide are how I keep my carbon footprint to an absolute minimum."

How the climate emergency will be fixed: bio CCS at-scale using oceanic organisms to do the hard work of carbon fixation for us. GMO and automated floating "farms" as necessary.

I really shouldn't even have to say this but apparently this is unclear to some people.

There are exactly zero sane countries which are going to adopt a policy of deliberately reducing the material standard of living of their citizens. Zero. Democratic, authoritarian, capitalist, communist, doesn't matter. No one is going to do that. No one is going to run on a platform of "I will make our country poorer and reduce its international influence". Anyone who thinks this that this is an even remotely plausible solution to the issue at hand is nothing short of delusional.

Even the Taliban will probably go back to selling drugs at some point.

What happens when inflation rises to the point people can’t purchase goods effectively? Reduced consumption.

What happens when you lockdown the economy and force people out of the workforce — less production (higher cost of goods).

I agree it’s delusional, but I’m pretty sure they’re doing it.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Reset

Of course, the stakeholders will become massively rich.

Inflation is usually demand driven and it certainly is in the current case. It is the result of INCREASED consumption. U.S. consumer spending (adjusted for inflation) is significantly above the pre-pandemic peak https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/consumer-spending

I believe that assumes correct inflation figures. I don’t know if those are accurate. I can tell you almost all goods and assets are up over 6% this year. Hell, Kraft-Heinz, General Mills, etc are all raising prices 20% in January 2022, etc

This is sort of the rub. What looks to be the most effective is also not possible due to current and real incentives. But let’s see. Family size is similar, your family is more influential in its community if it’s larger, but more education and affluence tend to cause smaller sizes. Wonder if an analogous shift would occur.

> is nothing short of delusional.

Agree. But what if it was not actually physically possible to sustain humanity's current level of consumption, no matter what the energy sources are? Then we're headed for catastrophic failure and collapse. Not considering this possibility is as delusional as anything.

This site is particularly bad with techno hopium. When in reality, nothing is moving in the right direction, let alone fast enough. There are a lot of delusions and magical thinking, and it's hard to be a realist without suffering accusations of doomerism and legions of downvotes.

Nobody thinks this is a desirable solution. Yet, many (including me) still suggest we talk about it.

The reasoning is backwards. This is not the kind of situation where we have the luxury to paint a future we might like and then design a plan to get there, this is a situation where given a set of strong constraints we need to weigh our options and choose the less terrible one.

Shrinking consumption isn't going to happen. Most of this world hasn't even industrialized.

Tech is the solution.

I think it's worth pointing out that tech has benn the catalyst and part cause of this mess in the first place.

Yes, by raising the life expectancy and living conditions of human kind. But I thought those were good things?!

Shrinking consumption would create deflation, which would impact gains which could impact employment.

Any change that affects economy should be taken slowly or else there's no time to prevent negative side-effects.

If we approached financial efficiency like we did energy and material efficiency, something like UBI might work.

We’ve learned how to raise and tend animals and plants for longevity and productiveness while we harvest their useful byproducts (milk, wool, apples, almonds). Why don’t we do the same with economic entities?

UBI will become a basic necessity if automation and employer efficiency continue advancing.

Ideology Makes Smart People Fall for Stupid Ideas. What article is saying: - "go back to caves, don't buy anything, it is stupid but you should believe in that". This is not people want.

I used to live in a country tried to build communism. I do understand and support clean energy, ecology. But this kind of calls remind of ideology over natural order of things.

People will always want to live in a warm house during winter, surround themself with comfort etc.

Only science and technology can bring us to the end goal of 100% clean , renewable everything.

Some examples:

Why do we need all this rockets, going to space, mars, lets solve problems on earth first: - with this mind set no boom of Solar Energy, since it's been designed for space

- no closed-cycle tech also developed for space first

- even CO2 from air was developed for space and military goals first

Creating tremendously complex goals of going to the space, other planets triggered lots of tech with autonomy and limited resources in mind.

Another example, electric cars. Hey lets reduce consumption of cars 50%:

- People will keep using old, inefficient cars, that produce more pollution, - Investors will invest less money to EV, so slower transition, less charging infrastructure

- No cheap EV in a forceable future

- No cheap battery storages to keep solar, wind energy

Keeping demand naturally as it is pushed gasoline car to museums by 2030-35. That itself will cut humongous amount of co2. So that we can focus on producing more clean energy for more efficient EV's.

Another example, lets limit to heating to 60f (15c) and cut the emission from heating:

- Consumption is high, pricing for keeping the house warm jumped? Good, people will install geothermal, solar etc.

As you can see consumption triggers progress and provide with playground for better tech. All you need to provide restrictions in the areas like plastic etc. Economy will find it's way.

If you give everyone what they want, well, there’s not enough beachfront, pizza, makeup and recreational drugs for all. What people want in a consumption culture and what can be sustained are completely different.

I’d agree with the idea that targeted areas of restriction may be fruitful. But I think the real issue is expectations and ethics.

Couldn't you get the whole country high with a couple kilos of LSD or Fentanyl? Weed is called that for a reason as well. And pizza is about as cheap a food as can be. Seems like we're almost post scarcity on some things. Might need to go to VR for beachfront for all since that is scarce indeed.

I mostly agree with the article, but the devil is in the details. Just as there are good and bad technological applications, there are good and bad ways to decrease consumption.

shrinking won't save us neither, but the 10x change will.

imagine asking china & india to shrink their volumes of energy consumption :)

I honestly can't wrap my head around the views of people promoting "degrowth" as a solution. How do they reconcile their ideas with the basic reality that is evident from a single chart like that one [0] and, again, very basic facts about our world like population numbers?

The simple reality is that there are a lot of people and most of them are very poor by Western standards. There are almost 8 billion people on this planet, and only 1 billion of them live in the West. There will most likely be 10 billion people, with almost all of the extra 2 billion being born in the developing world. Those 8 billion people's living conditions are abysmal compared to developed world, so they want to improve them, which means increasing their energy consumption. 8 billion people is 8 times more than 1 billion people, therefore even if it's somehow possible to "degrow" Western economies to the level of consumption of 1970s and force the developing world to stop at that level, that's still a severalfold increase in overall carbon output.

If we unshackle ourselves from the reality of international politics, let's assume that instead of waiting for the developing world to catch up we somehow redistribute all wealth equally and freeze it at that level. Ignoring all beneficial effects of wealth concentration (you can't build five smaller semiconductor plants for the price of a one big one) and previous wealth expenditure (infrastructure already in place is worth a lot of carbon), the resulting average quality of life on this planet will be closer to favelas than to whatever even the most ascetic green activists would be happy to accept. And we actually need to reduce that level, not just abandon overseas holidays.

Of course, we can't ignore international politics, so any measure that fails the MAP test (can you convince Modi, Assad, and Putin to implement it?) is at most a minor respite, not a solution. Something tells me that it would be hard for green activists to convince those leaders to deliberately reduce their citizens' living conditions and, for two of them, abandon their biggest export revenue streams.

I don't know what's going on in people's heads when they talk about "degrowth". Most of the time I brought up [0] the discussion switched to per-capita measures and emotional arguments about guilt of past emissions, as if our atmosphere cares about Americans being especially polluting per capita when there are 20 times more people polluting somewhat less but increasing their pollutions every day. The easiest explanation I can think of is a combination of despair ("but nothing else would work"), desire for "simple" solutions ("just reduce consumption" sounds simpler and less tradeoff-y than, say, nuclear), blindness to the world outside of Western bubble ("we just need to do our part, how hard can it be not fly to vacations"), and a quasi-religious notion of carbon piety. It's disheartening and I strongly believe it's hugely disruptive to productive efforts to combat climate change.

[0]: https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/976/cpsprodpb/1711C/production...

Buy more videogames and digital movies

So the implication is effectively making everyone poorer — ie driving down consumption?

Nice, that’s what I want for my future and my kids future!

What the hell is this?

I teach my kids to buy less, reuse as much as possible (like keeping the glass jars to make pickles, etc).

Fix up old furniture instead of buying new ones.

Eventually you'll learn to build an emotional attachment to things and value reliable old stuff that you've improved over time. Its a good thing.

I do all that but still want my kids to build wealth. Like don’t you want them to retire? Have a better future than you do?

> Have a better future than you do?

I’m not sure if you’re serious or not but yeah- that’s the entire point of this discussion. “Wealth” is pointless if there is no habitable place for our children and their children to live.

Also worth adding that wealth doesn't need to mean owning more material possessions. Wealth can take the form of knowledge, opportunities, increased quality of life, etc. Think educational wealth, mental wealth, spiritual wealth, etc.

Less can also be more. How wealthy is an elderly person who requires multiple prescription drugs, nurse/home-care, etc.? Sure they might have acquired money during their life to pay for these things, but that also means they are dependent (read: not free) on a lot of things too. Dependency is a sort of anti-wealth.

This is awfully close to arguing for lower life expectancies.

Ah, so your convinced because there’s global warming you have to reduce the amount of material goods your child has.

Do you think any person in China would do the same (they already pollute at 2x the rate of the US)?

How about me? I’ll be teaching my child possessions mean wealth. Yes you should take care of them and yes you should ensure a sustainable environment. But you should maximize wealth, as well as maximizing knowledge, culture and spirituality.

In my case, wouldn’t that give my child an advantage to take your resources?

I’m not trying to be rude or mean, just how do you intend to compete with that? Because in that case, my lineage will take your resources.

> I’ll be teaching my child possessions mean wealth

That's what my mom taught me.

> just how do you intend to compete with that? Because in that case, my lineage will take your resources.

I didn't turn out the way my mom would have wanted. In my case, I realized that maximizing material wealth did not make me happy.

I am not trying to be mean either when I say this; but I pray my children aren’t horrible little goblins such as yourself. I also hope your children find some way to overcome the selfishness you want to instill in them. God bless your entire family.

> I am not trying to be mean either when I say this; but I pray my children aren’t horrible little goblins such as yourself.

I also pointed out you should maximize knowledge, culture, spirituality.

Since you mentioned God, perhaps you're aware of Proverbs 13:12

> A good man leaves an inheritance to his children's children, but the sinner's wealth is laid up for the righteous.

There are many such quotes. What is wealth creation, but a measure of ones value to society?

I never claimed you shouldn't be charitable, inspirational or helpful to others. If I make a wonderful widget, sell trillions of dollars and then help create a corporation to cure cancer making more trillions is that "selfish", perhaps! But wouldn't that be better to society?

At the end of the day, everyone is equally selfish, even those who claim to be altruists -- they do it to make themselves feel good. You're doing things for your reasons, but your doing it for yourself.

I hope you evaluate what truly is valuable. I don't think there's a correct answer here, but calling someone a goblin is beneath you.

The idea presented here is that consumption is not actually correlated to quality of living. Yes, to maintain a certain quality of life you must necessarily consume, but I think as a society we are past the point where we should feel morally justified to consume without limit and without regard to the sustainability of our consumption habits.

It's possible to maintain a certain quality of life without over-consuming.

You're externalizing your wealth—the world we inhabit—which is a really bad way to calculate your economic incentives.

We can still live well without increasing consumption. We'll have fewer cars, less packaging, and more expensive Amazon purchases, but in return we can focus on services like teaching, medicine, sport, and working less.

There will be less flying and less exotic food, but more art, sport, and intellectual culture. We'll also get to let nature heal and value the spaces that remain.

We need to see a healthy life as something other than pure natural resource extraction or we're fucked.

Shrinking consumption would, but its never going to be pursued as a policy unless the climate crisis becomes so immediate and obvious to every human bring alive, and by then, it will be too late. Therefore, we pursue the techs and policies that are possible to implement, where we hope that adversity breeds ingenuity.

We seem to have become hypnotized by the "blah blah blah" mentioned in the article, like frogs being slowly warmed, sous vide style.

The problem WILL be solved one way or another. Either we willingly make the changes necessary to render our existence sustainable at current population levels, or our environment will force those changes upon us in much more urgent terms, with the end result of reducing our population as necessary until our footprint is again sustainable. I have no hope that the former case will be the one pursued, human nature being what it is.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com