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Comment by perihelions | Hacker News Reader

They don't even have a nuclear engineering department! They might as well endow a theology seminary; it's the same category of problem-solving.

This is mainly prestige signalling, isn't it? He's a Silicon Valley oligarch, and this is the elite Silicon Valley school. If there's some additional, meritocratic factor specific to Stanford, for this type of billion-dollar gift... what is it?

edit: Perhaps it's synergies with their Natural Gas Initiative [0].

[0] https://ngi.stanford.edu/

edit 2: That's $1.98 million/year in oil & gas industry funding (adding up the tiers on this pricelist [1]).

[1] https://ngi.stanford.edu/content/corporate-affiliates-progra...

- "The NGI Industrial Affiliate Program offers three levels of membership:"

- "Sustaining Member ($250,000 per year), Corporate Member ($75,000 per year), and Basic Member ($35,000 per year, available to non Fortune 500 companies)"

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99% of climate change effort is social signaling, the other 1% is engineers and scientists working on more efficient, cleaner technologies.

What I see here is lots of money for talks, articles, conferences, and “awareness.”

Climate conferences are always held in nice places that you have to fly to. They’d do more for the environment by taking that money and paying people to pick up trash on the side of the highway. Of course, that’s why “climate” is the problem nowadays and not “the environment.” The former is a problem for other people to solve, the latter is a problem you can do something about yourself but requires getting off the couch.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/oliverwilliams1/2021/11/05/118-...

> 99% of climate change effort is social signaling, the other 1% is engineers and scientists working on more efficient, cleaner technologies.

China, India, Russia, Indonesia, Brazil, and Iran combined produce about four times the GHG emissions of the US (and nearly half of all world emissions). Move forward in time 30 years and add in countries with large populations like Pakistan, and it's clear that making alternatives to fossil fuels cheaper is a big deal for climate change. That's not to say the US political situation is of trivial importance, but it's not accurate to say we should ignore everything else.

Why could any of those countries not make the same argument, saying all other countries + the US pollute a lot more than them therefore thats not really their business ?

Not sure if you replied to the wrong person, but that's certainly not anything I said. I was responding to someone that wrote "99% of climate change effort is social signaling, the other 1% is engineers and scientists working on more efficient, cleaner technologies". If you make green technology cheaper, then those technologies will be adopted in the countries I listed. And the most effective way to reduce them in those countries is to make green alternatives cheaper. You're not going to accomplish much if you focus exclusively on reducing US GHG emissions.

If someone is willing to talk about nuclear as option. I know their serious and have done some basic research and maybe willing to negotiate viable solutions.

Most everyone else is either ignorantly repeating what they are told, or trying to make money off them.

> China, India, Russia, Indonesia, Brazil, and Iran combined produce about four times GHG emissions of the US

And? These countries combined have ten times the population of US and still only emit four times that of US. The per capita emissions of West are staggeringly high. Not to forget the west has already developed while these are all developing countries who will pollute more due to their growth phase. The responsibility of dealing with climate change primarily lies with the west only.

I'm not telling you not to hold these beliefs. I fully understand that some people do not believe GHG emissions or climate change are a problem. As a matter of "what the data says", most emissions do not come from the US, and with realistic projections for the next 30 years, a much smaller percentage will come from the US. You're absolutely free to hold the belief that China, India, and other countries should not have to do anything to curtail their emissions.

Thats simply not true. Engineering 'solutions' to climate change like more efficient or cleaner technologies, or things like direct air capture are also social signaling, although more veiled and perhaps self delusional. These solutions are the equivalent of building more lanes on a highway instead of going with public transportation solutions. If anything many of these technologies may end up making climate change demonstrably worse through increased consumption.

The only real solution to climate change is to decrease the rate of consumption and the overall size of the human population. 'Technical' solutions to climate change aren't. They'll simply increase our bandwidth for pollution.

The answers to climate change aren't technical, they're social. Society needs to become comfortable with the idea that doing less, being less productive and less consumptive, are fine. UBI, socialized healthcare, a guarantee of a basic social safety net so people can be very unproductive and still live safe, reasonably comfortable lives is what we need to solve climate change.

> The only real solution to climate change is to decrease the overall size of the human population.

I would say reducing the US population would be more effective then reducing human population in an undefined way

I see a lot of people saying “society needs to be more comfortable with less.” I never see anyone saying “I need to be comfortable with less.”

Colleges should offer a Bachelor of Science in Social Engineering. It would consist of spending four years writing “social engineering does not work” on a blackboard over and over.

Public health has a history of social engineering, sometimes successful.

I think there’s room for debate about what “social engineering” means. I’m talking specifically about hoping to solve a problem by convincing people to do something they don’t want to do, whether that’s exercise and lose weight or turn down the heat and put on a sweater to fight climate change.

You can educate people and provide them with low cost, high benefit options. But you can’t change human nature or brow beat people into having different priorities than they do.

> I’m talking specifically about hoping to solve a problem by convincing people to do something they don’t want to do

Ironically, the social engineering project most impactful to global warming exists to give people what they (think they) want, not to force them to do something they don't want to do. They're called suburbs. We made a whole range of living arrangements flat-out illegal, because (most) people express a preference for low-density living. A social engineering project of historical proportions. You're right; we should eliminate it.

People should be allowed to build whatever kind of housing they want to build on property they own and we should eliminate the social engineering scheme that restricts developers to single-family homes in most areas.

Donations are made because of relationships. The donor likely has a relationship with Stanford or leaders at Stanford and has had many conversations with them about what he might donate money for. This is what they came up with.

And, yes, donations are often vanity projects. He will likely get his name on a building, maybe an honorary degree. His name is now forever tied to Stanford.

> They don't even have a nuclear engineering department!

Why criticize that they're establishing something on the basis of not having something?

Are they establishing a nuclear engineering department? I don't see that in the article

The implication they are making is that nuclear power will solve the climate problem.

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