Comment by civilized | Hacker News Reader

Comment by civilized | Hacker News Reader

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I understand people's concerns about this, but I think we need to get real here.

This is what the world's yearly CO2 emissions look like: https://www.statista.com/statistics/276629/global-co2-emissi...

For us to not fry the planet, this graph needs to start going down. Fast. And it needs to go into negative territory.

Now look at what's happening in the world today. Russia invades Ukraine. Gas and oil supplies get disrupted. Now inflation is running rampant, the people of the developed world are angry, and their leaders are desperately looking for fossil fuels to keep their economies moving. They're decommissioning nuclear plants and bringing coal plants back online. Biden wants to kill the gas tax to keep from getting swamped in November. Meanwhile, China and India are being flooded with cheap Russian oil.

Does this sound like a world that is moving in the right direction to imminently push that emissions curve way down?

Pie-in-the-sky moralizing about what humanity should do does not keep the planet from frying. Let's consider other options and accept some risk in exchange for the opportunity to avoid a looming, inevitable catastrophe.

There is no centralized way to drive that change on the needed scale. Most humans don’t even view what we’re doing in civilization as shared project, let alone agree that this is required to protect it. I think they fundamentally lack the abstract thinking required. They won’t change until they feel the pain themselves. A poor fit for an abstract, not quite “here yet” problem. In the United States we can’t even get them to agree it’s a problem at all. But I think once we are collectively feeling the pain, solutions will be swift and surprising.

Your "other option" means certain disaster, sooner.

We already know what to do: build out renewables. Tax and otherwise cut burning fossil fuels. Renewables are already radically cheaper than any energy source ever devised, so the faster they are built out, the cheaper it gets.

Anything else is a dangerous distraction. Any big enough distraction is disastrous.

> Your "other option" means certain disaster, sooner.

I see no evidence or reason to believe this at all, let alone with such extreme certitude. Shouldn't we try harder to have a realistic scientific assessment?

> We already know what to do

But it's not happening and it isn't going to happen. That means your plan doesn't work. That means that, however well-intentioned you are, your plan is do nothing and fry the planet.

It is happening, just not fast enough. Renewables are already cheaper than anything else. Building out more saves money. Only social inertia slows it. Distraction adds to inertia.

Doing things to increase inertia makes things worse. Distracting people with pies in skies makes things worse.

The planet fries, regardless, if CO2 is not brought down. Fooling around with anything that does not brings catastrophe nearer.

> Only social inertia slows it. Distraction adds to inertia.

I don't buy the armchair social psychology here. People think they are much, much better at predicting how the population will react to things than they actually are. This led to a lot of terrible decisions during the pandemic, like telling people masks don't work on the baseless folk theory that wearing masks would cause people to take more risks. That theory, by the way, was very similar to the one you're advancing with such certitude.

We are moving too slowly to avert potentially catastrophic climate change. The armchair theory that, somehow, not buying more time with geoengineering will somehow... I don't know, somehow cause people to be more focused and move faster?... is barely believable even as a folk theory, but on top of that, is very clearly not coming to pass. Look around at what's happening in the world.

We need to get real.

Getting real means displacing CO2 production.

Anything that fails to displace CO2 production is, at best, wankage. Anything that steals capital from displacing CO2 production is much worse.

You're just layering folk theory upon folk theory with baseless, utter confidence. This is not the sort of problem we can just bluff our way through with gut feelings. We need to consider the options in a comprehensive, systematic, thoughtful, scientific fashion.

A comprehensive, systematic, thoughtful, scientific fashion that displaces CO2-emitting processes.

Fail to displace CO2 emission, and it is all just so much hot air.

Repeated baseless assertion is an irresponsible way to deal with a complex global crisis.

The planet is not a morality play where we simply demand that people be virtuous and things work out. We have to actually think things through and come up with a realistic plan considering the realities on the ground and human nature.

> Repeated baseless assertion is an irresponsible way to deal with a complex global crisis.

Yes. Listen to yourself.

We need to stop pumping greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere.

That will take a huge effort.

Distracting from that effort makes things worse.

> Distracting from that effort makes things worse.

I see no evidence or reason to believe that an effort to reduce solar irradiance distracts from the control of greenhouse gases on a civilizational scale.

Civilizations are always doing tons of different things. Most of those things aren't competing with one another for people or resources. They're just happening simultaneously.

We can walk and chew gum at the same time.

And don't you want to know how difficult this will be before immediately shutting it down? Isn't that a critical consideration?

> I see no evidence or reason to believe that an effort to reduce solar irradiance distracts from the control of greenhouse gases on a civilizational scale.

Then you are not paying attention.

We need to shut these liars down and stop thinking that we can make huge changes to complex systems that we do not understand and have predictable results, let alone good results

How do you leap to "these liars"?

What gives you the epistemic right to dismiss a proposal not on its scientific merits, but on some assumption about the certain moral evil of the people who said it?

> How do you leap to "these liars"?

To assert that it is possible using engineering to have predictable control over a system that we only have the barest understanding of (Earth's geophysical systems) is a straight up lie.

That is where.

Greed. Hubris. Burn the world.

By that logic, there is no point in doing anything at all. Who knows whether we can avoid burning by stopping CO2 emissions? It's all too complex!

You can't separate the scientists whose models told you to reduce CO2 and the scientists who propose reducing solar irradiance with bubble shades. They're all using the same equations to predict what will happen.

Clever trolling is still trolling.

I'm afraid you are trapped in unfounded absolute certainty and are no longer in touch with the world. You've lost the distinction between reality and the contents of your own mind. https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/trapped-priors-as-a-ba...

Yes, gaslighting is clever too.

Which is exactly what you would say if your mind was stuck in a state of closed, ignorant absolute certainty.

Trolling is.

> But it's not happening ...

Perhaps not in the US, but other parts of the world is full speed on the renewables track

I refer you once again to the emissions chart. It's nice that renewables are coming online but that curve is not bending downward.

Oh, so let me try to follow your lead and lets imagine that it's not going to bend anytime soon... How about we start thinking in terms of big scale disaster preparation in stead of inventing pseudo solutions? In the past underground dwellings have been popular, I imagine these will be more resilient to heat... as for flooding, not so much... so how about we do some calculations on how to become less vulnerable to flooding, etc? Just saying...

IMHO, it's very easy to jump the tech fetish bandwaggon but all the ingenious inventions likely may turn out to matter less than little when nature applies force...

So, just assuming without any evidence that the proposal is a "pseudo solution"?

Not really. You are correct in that we need to switch to renewables NOW.

But we've already warned the world 1 degree or so. Renewables won't do anything about that. A sun shade can.

If we don't get nearly free electrical energy this isn't going to happen. Humans might as well accept it. We could save the planet with nuclear and renewables, but it won't happen, people are too stubborn.

Guess what happens if they decide to build that fleet of space bubbles: Hooray we can just continue what we were doing. Let‘s burn more oil! Let‘s build bigger cars! Party!

Global warming is the primary, if not the only, reason for an expensive transition to renewables. If global warming is stopped/reversed then there is no reason to not to burn more oil, is there? I don't like it, but I won't argue against fossil fuels with abstract moral reasons.

There are plenty of other reasons to get off fossil fuels. Burning them is bad for human health, they cause economic and geopolitical instability, supplies are finite, they cause ocean acidity that destroys ocean ecosystems, excess CO2 causes less nutritious plants, etc.

And renewables provide huge opportunities. Do you have any idea what it unlocks if you have unlimited clean energy? You could have massive, vibrant, beautiful cities and agriculture in the middle of the Sahara, and that's just the beginning.

Moving to electric cars also hurts the environment a lot, maybe not in the countries that buy the cars but in the countries where the materials are mined.

In reality we need structural policies that countries that spearhead pollution (like the USA) will never adopt. America is a car-centric country it is designed that way. Not only that but people expect their deliveries fast and also to be able to get what they want at all times... its a massive cultural shift.

It seems very difficult to stop climate change, i would say impossible, because socially, politically and economically we have built machine that cant be stopped anymore.

> Moving to electric cars also hurts the environment a lot, maybe not in the countries that buy the cars but in the countries where the materials are mined.

Well mines are not pretty. I have gold and coal mines not far from here, and they are ugly.

Go to Biafra and see what the oil industries look like to those places. AN oil spill in an estuary makes a mine look like a park.

> It seems very difficult to stop climate change, i would say impossible, because socially, politically and economically we have built machine that cant be stopped anymore.

Either we stop it, derail it, or burn it down completely. Or we all burn, and it will be worse.

The universe isn't a morality play where we are damned because of our bad behavior. We have options. We should use science and reason to decide what to do.

I‘m not sure what you are eluding to. Are you saying it is ok to exploit finite resources? That‘s also a morality play. Is it ok to live at the expense of future generations? I think we should finally start minimizing these external costs. We have the duty to do so.

Or we develop a way to regulate incoming sunlight while continuing the (slow) migration off fossil fuels and developing better carbon capture tech

I always find this viewpoint perplexing. Isn’t continuing to do the things we want to do a good thing?

These things are not bad in and of themselves, they are bad because of their externalities.

If we can find a way to offset the negative effects of burning coal, that’s great; it means poor countries can spend more GDP on healthcare and education, and less on upgrading to clean power.

I think sometimes we get used to doing things a certain way and its difficult to change bad habits.

Fossil fuels were never a good idea environmentally and even socially as it concentrated power massively... we just didnt know. You know how romans used to put lead in their drinks because they had become accustomed to the taste? I think our situation is similar.

I think this is due for a much longer discussion but it seems really silly to think we simply ought to repair externalities when theres just so many of them.

Poor countries should spend more in education for sure but, realistically, under our current economic and social systems: is it even desirable? I think the answer is no. Why would you want people who are mining cobalt, young men in many cases (an euphemism for kids) to be educated? Who would want do such an onerous task? If you give these people knowledge then how will that affect the price of these materials?

I mean, as I said in another comment, the inertia of this machine is too much. But, yeah, ideally we could just get rid of externalities and I think in many ways we try to hide them... but it seems to me (and i live in a mining country) the externalities really are much more difficult to deal with than it might seem at first glance.

> Poor countries should spend more in education for sure but, realistically, under our current economic and social systems: is it even desirable? I think the answer is no.

How is it possible to have a rational debate in the sphere of morals when attitudes like this are not carefully hidden away because those that hold them are so ashamed.

How can it be possible that this year a person here could advocate what is essentially enslaving whole communities to maintain the developed world's standard of living?

The developed world can change life style voluntarily with massive disruption or change with catastrophic disruption.

Trying to keep LDC's down will only make things worse in the future.

GP is describing the internal logic of the system, not their own preferences.

Yes. Even imagining it would work brings disaster closer.

Cynicism feels wise but sometimes it isn't.

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