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Comment by tejohnso | Hacker News Reader

> Rather than collapse into despair, getting real about 1.5°C should mean we are able to hold open a space of grounded, realistic optimism.

So what does that realistic optimism look like? "We're never gonna make 1.5, we've already blown past it, hundreds of millions of people are going to suffer and die because of the choices of the wealthy. But, on the bright side..."

I don't think many people, especially politicians, can honestly be realistic AND optimistic. You can't put optimism into this conversation until you've first had acceptance. And you can't have acceptance until you have at least understood the significance of the situation and probably gone through some kind of grieving process. We're way off from that. People are still booking international vacations and buying brand new full size SUVs to do groceries.

And there's no need to collapse into despair either.

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I think you're mischaracterizing the nature of the problem. Take a look at [1] for example - US total CO2 emissions and CO2 emissions per capita have been dropping for a while now. The same is true for the EU as a whole [2]. So where is the increase in CO2 emissions each year coming from then? The developing world that wants a western world standard of living. Take a look at India for example [3]. It's not sufficient to tell people in western countries that they shouldn't drive SUVs or take long flights, you have to tell people in poorer (populous) countries that they can't have a better standard of living because doing so means more GHG. Would you like to tell people that?

By all means, we should be doing better in the west, but it's a lie to tell ourselves that driving an electric car and putting solar panels on the roof is going to solve the problem.

[1] https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/carb...

[2] https://www.eea.europa.eu/data-and-maps/indicators/greenhous...

[3] https://ourworldindata.org/co2/country/india

> It's not sufficient to tell people in western countries that they shouldn't drive SUVs or take long flights, you have to tell people in poorer (populous) countries that they can't have a better standard of living because doing so means more GHG.

No, we should tell them to leap frog the energy systems of the West and go straight to more efficient, cheaper (in medium to long term) energy sources like nuclear and solar. The same way many developing countries skipped over land lines and went straight to cellular for communications technology.

We should tell them with tariffs and economic sanctions if necessary. Renewables are cheaper (even when firmed with battery storage), there is no reason not to use them versus fossil fuels. You have to internalize the carbon emission costs into the economic system to encourage the desired outcome, otherwise humans will do the human thing: pollute with wild abandon when there is no cost to do so.

South Africa just commissioned a new coal plant expected to operate until 2075, one that will never turn a profit (for various reasons). It should be extremely economically painful for them to make such a decision, so much so that they revisit the depreciation schedule of the asset and alternatives.

We tell them with loans.

Electric cars and renewable energy are cheaper in the long term than gasoline cars and fossil energy, but gasoline cars and fossil energy require less capital up front.

The problem is that the third world is short of capital. So lend them the capital at really good rates (0% for example). That'll make the adoption of green solutions a no brainer for them.

If the new renewable energy sources were really as good as advertised - not only cleaner than fossil fuels, but also so much cheaper as well - then this would indeed be both obvious and inevitable. China in particular has a lot of the world's capacity to produce renewable generation equipment, they shouldn't need to rerun the pollution of western countries to have prosperity and this would solve both their massive pollution problems and their need to find new infrastructure projects to fund in order to prop up the economy, both major political headaches domestically. Yet they keep on pointing to the West's emissions as justification for why they should increase CO2 output instead. They also don't have the NIMBY problems of some Western countries.

My general conclusion is that the reason for this is that switching to green energy is neither as easy nor as cheap as advertised. Sure, on paper the cost per GWh is great and you can even realise much of that for the first few projects, but the cost of dealing with a lack of dispatchability and of intermittency from sources like solar and wind ends up massively outweighing that in practice. So no-one actually wants to switch to an all-renewable grid.

Growing economies might install as much solar as they're able, but they can still be tempted to burn fossil fuels on top of that, to grow even faster. Limiting climate change is going to require moderation, which is a tough ask for capitalism...

The reason why the West emissions are (slowly) decreasing is not because it's getting more sober or efficient, but because it is exporting emitting activities to the rest if the world.

We are shuffling emissions around, which at a global scale is pointless.

You don't need to tell them that. Rich countries could subsidize clean energy projects in poor countries. That's only fair given that most carbon emissions per capita have come from rich countries. Like a retroactive carbon tax.

yeah, we'll just share our star trek free/clean/infinite energy tech

Talking beyond your snark to anyone else reading this -- obviously I mean solar, wind, nuclear or hydro installations either in the poor country, or in the rich country and piped into the poor country via HVDC at discount rates.

Anything less is quite morally unfair if you think about it. Rich countries have imposed this massive externality on poor countries and they haven't compensated the poor countries for doing so. If you make money by dumping waste into my backyard, the least you can do is give me a small slice of the profits.

Subsidizing clean energy in poor countries is a way to satisfy this moral obligation while also solving the problem you raised.

You mean wind, solar, nuclear, batteries and electrolysers? Because we have them available right now. In fact, we had them for the last couple of decades.

we have them yes, and at this moment, the richest country in Europe is rationing hot water and restarting coal power plants due a temporary disruption of supply of another fossil fuel.

Europe + North America is 10% of the world population, and we can barely carry our own burden.

I don't see your argument. Everybody knows that we're not deploying carbon free technology sufficiently quickly. That's why we're reading these articles.

in your reality, we're a type 1 civilization with unlimited resources, so obscenely rich that providing the rest of the world with free clean energy is a matter of political will

in my reality, we're 95% dependent on fossil fuels, dams and nuclear power stations cost tens of billions and take decades to build, there are no viable energy storage technologies, and even the few somewhat viable renewable energy technologies we possess still rely on a limited supply of expensive things like lithium. also, in my reality, double digit percentage of our population lives in poverty, and about half lives paycheck to paycheck, and our richest country is 30T in debt

We spend literal trillions on waging war. Every rocket fired in Ukraine today would pay for solar panels for a house or two. It's not a matter of money. Look how well we managed to to switch literally all industry to building weapons during the last world war. If we wanted to we could do the same for renewable energy. It's a matter of priorities.

But in actuality, it's much easier to do than that, because renewable energy is not all that expensive or hard to build. In many scenarios it's profitable to build it today, but bureaucracy is in the way. The proper market incentives and a bit of legislation would probably be enough to have private industry take over.

> Every rocket fired in Ukraine today would pay for solar panels for a house or two.

But it's more important that we stop Putin from just taking whatever territory he wants and killing as many civilians as it takes to do that than it is to put solar panels on a few more houses.

Of course it is. Right now. But what about the last thirty years?

If you don't spend any money on your military except when you need it, it will take so long to get it back up to speed that you'll probably lose the war in the meantime.

And if you don't spend any money on renewable energy life for a large fraction of our species will become much harder.

And it's not like military spending is really necessary either. The US for example spent a lot of money in Afghanistan and Iraq even though the country wasn't under reasonable threat from those actors.

You interpret little action and a lack of political will as evidence for "too hard and too expensive", when it's mostly ideological possession and corruption by anti-renewable conservatives, and to a smaller extent anti-nuclear greens.

Solar and wind costs are roughly on par with fossil fuels now. Variability doesn't matter when you can pipe excess amounts into poorer countries. It's all excuses.

  "double digit percentage of our population lives in poverty"

So you're taking the moral high ground huh. Will you be happy to accept a hundred million immigrants from SEA when the pollution from your country has made their region too hot to be liveable? Or will there be a convenient excuse to not do that?

Nobody forces developing countries to go through the same process as developed countries for raising the standard of living. We have the technology to achieve a very good standard of living with very low carbon emissions. It's not that much more expensive than burning fossil fuels either.

Before asking people in developing countries not to have a proper house, we could try to forbid private planes and reduce military spending by half, for instance.

The military use of fuels is just ridiculous. If we are not able to stop "small" and superfluous things like that, then, simply there is not hope.

Russia has made the military very not unnecessary

When I say the military, I mean, all the military, that's the minimum we the citizens of the world should be requesting.

Anyway, if you are talking about the USA military budget, that's just nonsense. Just check the numbers.

> When I say the military, I mean, all the military, that's the minimum we the citizens of the world should be requesting.

You can ask, but you won't get it. Disarmament, and I don't just mean nuclear, requires a level of trust that simply does not exist, because a relatively small group defecting (in the game theory sense) would be able to conquer the world.

It has been done in the past and can be done in the future. If we can't even do something like that forget about other changes. And I'm not talking about nuclear.

In fact, if your goal is really only defend your territory, you could keep nuclear and downsize all those war airplanes and tanks burning oil, and you would not be worse for it.

> It has been done in the past

What are you referring to? Because this sounds too implausible for us to be talking about the same category of thing.

Our military budget is only so high because we're making up for the rest of the NATO countries' military budgets being too low.

Private planes only? Aren't the elevators energy hungry? Aren't snack producing companies unnecessary?

Are you comparing the utility of elevators to the utility of private jets?

Elevators enable skyscrapers.

I don't know, are skyscrapers better or worse for the environment than lower-density buildings that don't need elevators?

This is so misleading it's not even funny anymore.

The USA and Europe have both delegated most high CO2 footprint industries to the developing nations through globalisation. It wouldn't be going down if we hadn't.

The issue isn't the evil developing nations which want to get the same quality of life. That contributes too, obviously... but making it sound as if the developed world has already gotten on the right track is incredibly misguided

It doesn't look like the links you provided show enough evidence to support the claim that CO2 emissions per capita are the result of poorer countries increasing their standard of living (it could be the result of industries that trade with wealthy countries to increase their std of living), but I would really like to see that idea explored and properly proven

I'm saying people haven't sufficiently engaged with the severity of the problem for optimism to be relevant.

You're trying to frame this as a rich vs poor situation, and talking about potential solutions and their likely effectiveness.

I think your post would've been better as a top level comment because it has nothing to do with what I was saying.

If you look at history, you don't economically catch up to the top dogs of the world by aping their technology. You catch up to them by leapfrogging them in technology--the newer technology allows you to undercut them, while throttling them of the cash necessary to retool to use newer technology. This is most historically most prominent in something like steelmaking.

Populations will not accept limitations on energy availability, no matter what goal is lauded. Look at Sri Lanka: the president fled and the people took over his opulent home. This will happen everywhere given enough pressure.

All artificial energy restriction scams are doomed to fail for this very reason. They will all usher in even lower-trust societies than exist now.

1. Breaking this down by country doesn’t make much sense. Per capita emissions makes more sense, from a humanitarian point of view.

2. India/China are ramping up solar and wind but it is a relatively poor country. Such investments should be funded by countries that have already “developed” and have the ability to fund such change.

> Per capita emissions makes more sense, from a humanitarian point of view.

How so? Aren't most emissions generated by industry rather than by individuals?

This reminds me a little bit of “jackpot” in William Gibson’s latest novels.

Interesting post. You are very much aware that it's the wealthy who do most of the damage, yet you somehow blame the so called developing world but don't want to be the to tell them to fuck off.

Am I misreading what you said?

I think they’re saying economic development in other places will create emissions that dwarf any mitigation achievable in today’s economically developed regions. Any plan that doesn’t address this likely scenario probably won’t work.

I gathered as much. What I really wanted to hear is what this person think should be done about it.

Any suggestions about what [people of] India can do?

The same that everybody else can do: elect politicians who build renewable power instead of electing politician who build coal plants.

> The same that everybody else can

First thing you need to understand about India — it's not the same as everybody else. The country is unique unlike any other country in the world. What works in other places might not work there.

> elect politicians who build renewable power instead of electing politician who build coal plants.

I think politicians across party lines want to switch to renewable.

Please understand that this switch to renewables can't be done overnight. And there's a huge population who can't be kept in the dark during the transition period.

Also, India is the 3rd largest producer of renewable energy (and 3rd largest consumer) in the world, behind USA and China [1]. They're making an effort.

[1] https://www.ey.com/en_sg/recai

Roughly 5 Billion people, or more, rely on the Haber process to turn hydrocarbons in nitrogen fertiliser so they can eat.

Carrying capacity of the earth before this mass manufacture of artificial fertiliser was maxxed out at around 1.5B, maybe with better plant strains that could be edged up, but not by 500% you would think.

We are still a fair way off from green steel, we are going to need metallurgical coal for some time, unless you like driving a wooden car pulled by a horse.

And alumina and lithium are both gas heavy in refining at the front end, needing calcination at 1000 DegC, plus or minus.

Then there is plastic, from lighter fractions of liquid hydrocarbons in many cases (condensate) - I can't believe you are still allowed to buy water in a plastic bottle or food in a plastic container that's a once use, that's crazy.

Hydrocarbons aren't going to become non-existent parts of the industrial landscape if any kind of life as we know it is to continue - we just need to start by stopping stupid waste in transient use cases like once use water bottles and food containers, decorative wrapping, short lived non repairable consumer appliances and goods, and synthetic fabrics that are made into clothes that could last for years or even decades, but get disposed of after 10 or 20 wears because of "fashion" or poor manufacture renders them useless in this time.

Growing up in New Zealand in the 70's, if someone had tried to warn that in the future you would be paying for drinking water (any water actually), by the half litre and more expensive than petrol in some cases, and you would get a free bottle that you immediately discarded when you finished drinking from it, you would have been ignored as a fringe lunatic at best, and may well have been taken in for some kind of assessment. And yet some decades later, here we are.

> The country is unique unlike any other country in the world. What works in other places might not work there.

That's been said about every nation. So, what exactly do you mean?

Indians have other ecological problems on our hands. Unchecked pollution (air, water, soil), poorly designed cities, burning stubble, etc. On per-capita CO2/CH4, India is doing great.

Your post contains three sources, but I respectfully have to say I consider it completely misleading.

There is no real evidence "decoupling", that is GDP growth combined with stagnation or decline in resource consumption and emissions.

All studies that are widely cited claiming that European and other western industrialized nations have achieved any measurable reduction in per-capita emissions and resource consumption have, to my knowledge, been debunked.

> US total CO2 emissions and CO2 emissions per capita have been dropping for a while now. The same is true for the EU as a whole

Economic growth depends on very material and observable effects on the physical world. I admit that I only looked closely at your first link, but arguing against this trope again and again is tiring.

So far I feel that all of these statistics have gaping logical holes, the worst and most obvious being considering "territorial emissions". Your first link seems to suffer from that too, at least at first glance.

It is outrageous to me that questioning "Green capitalism" is still considered a fringe position.

I can recommend e.g. this read (don't focus on the relatively tame headline):

https://eeb.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/Decoupling-Debunk...

> we should be doing better in the west, but it's a lie to tell ourselves that driving an electric car and putting solar panels on the roof is going to solve the problem.

I agree, at least in part.

But your conclusions are off to me.

Solar panels on the roof should mostly a net-positive thing (or net negative after a couple of years, in terms of emissions). The more widely deployed, the better.

What a pity that they are not widely deployed. Seems to be a systemic problem, fracking and coal are more lucrative.

Also they can ot offset an ever-increasing resource demand, eco-blind urban planning etc in their own.

That's a problem with most of the "eco products" out there.

We don't just need a new product, we need new politics.

As far as I know, western countries have not effectively reduced their per-capita emissions or resource consumption. At best, temporarily in times of recession, but the overall trend remains upwards. .

Even countries with stagnating population numbers keep on broadening the trail of destruction they impose on the world.

The way we delude ourselves into being "ahead in green progress" compared to developing nations sounds to me very neo-colonialistic and delusional.

Your comment hints at this fact, but only in a away that most people seem to paraphrase with "India matters, while us accelerating the global depletion of NNRs and raise of emission does not".

I feel like most coverage of climate change and environmental is purposefully framed in a way that implies there was no alternative to growth and capitalism. Also downplaying the scale of the problem and how we continue to perpetuate it.

The spurious statistics mostly reward countries that let others do the "dirt work" for them, sustaining absurd excesses of the rich and the population clashing over the "trickle-down" remains.

> People are still booking international vacations and buying brand new full size SUVs to do groceries.

And an awful lot of people are still acting as though "end users" can materially affect the situation with their personal choices, and implying that they are bad people for making them. I'm sure the American oligarchy and the leaders of China appreciate your efforts.

> implying that they are bad people

I don't know how you got the idea that I was implying people are "bad" for their lifestyle choices. I was talking about how far away we are from widespread acceptance and realistic acknowledgement of the problem.

When I see people acting like nothing is wrong, doing things that contribute to the problem, I do think that indicates a lack of acceptance and realization. Now I may be wrong. It could be possible that people are fully aware of the problem and are YOLO'ing their way through it. Or they share your opinion that nothing they do can materially affect the situation anyway, so they just go full throttle on carbon emission. But I suspect that for most people, that's not the case. I think that most people are unaware of the severity of the situation, and that if they were aware, they probably wouldn't be doing those things. Again, I could be completely wrong about what people know and how they would choose to behave. But at no point was I implying that there are good people and bad people and that personal carbon footprint is a decent way to measure that.

People are generally aware that their actions contribute to climate change, unless they choose to deny it for ideological reasons. They are just unwilling to make lifestyle sacrifices because of it. Most people value their personal comfort and the comfort of their family above the (statistical) lives of strangers.

You see exactly the same phenomenon every time a professional chooses to live in comfort instead of donating most of their income to charity. That's how people work, that's what they value, and that's why collective action is the only way of dealing with large-scale problems.

The whole discussion of climate change is a living, breathing example of a 7-billion-person prisoner's dilemma.

Yes, I'm one of those people and I'm not sorry. I think big corporations are evil, but I also think they exist because ordinary people buy their products, usually out of convenience.

There would be not much use for so much fossil burning if we didn't use huge cars to transport us for half a mile instead of walking, or building houses in the freakind desert, or watching TV, or illumiating whole towns and changing night time into daylight, or constantly buying new clothes when we could still wear the old ones, or stuffing ourselves with food until we explode, etc.

So yes, no one personal choice will "materially affect" the situation. But the effort has to start somewhere. Blaming others, "oligarchs" or Chinese leaders doesn't help. It's just a cheap excuse.

> It's just a cheap excuse.

Suggesting that I give up -- admit it -- a LOT of personal freedom and convenience, when Chinese companies spew emissions equal to HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS OF PEOPLE -- and have no real incentive to change -- is like trying to empty the ocean with an eyedropper, while someone else is emptying buckets into it. Your "cheap excuse" is precisely the kind of "bad person" inference that I was alluding to. People like you seem to value altruism at MANY orders of magnitude than the people you are disparaging. And, hey, that's great, and all, but we just think you're bad at math.

I hope you include yourself in “choices of the wealthy”. It’s pretty much developed countries that got us here.

I'm talking about the wealthy west. So I do include myself. I agree that developed countries got us here.

I'm not sure an alternative could have been be very likely. We found a cheap, easily consumed polluting energy source that massively increased output. The negative effects are felt in decades or centuries, while the positive effects are felt almost immediately. This is a tough position to be in. Even though some people in the 19th century were well aware that this was a recipe for disaster, it would have taken an enormous amount of control and discipline to avoid the situation we're in now, if it were avoidable at all. Even today we haven't begun to reduce [global co2 emissions] and we have more awareness than ever.

[global co2 emissions]: https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/co2-emissions...

Making this a moral issue is completely counter productive. People inventing the internal combustion engine and the amazing improvements to the quality of human life enabled by fossil fuels, did not set out to bake the planet.

Climate change is a technical problem in need of technical solutions, along with the economic insights and political will to make it happen.

We are all in this together now. Figuring out who to blame accomplishes nothing.

that would only be true if there weren't a group of people who firmly believe we are not in this together and are fighting those of us who do tooth and nail.

> because of the choices of the wealthy

Problem, though, is that there might not be wealthy anymore, as global unrest may wipe them out.

> So what does that realistic optimism look like?

I think it looks radical, literally: we have to expect, in a world that has well and truly tackled climate change, things like car travel becoming a thing of the past, replaced by bikes, cargo bikes, trains, and airships.

(As an aside, "climate change" is just the beginning, we have entered the so-called Anthropocene Age, and that comes with vast responsibilities. E.g. what to do about "non-native invasive" species? Shall we garden the whole Earth? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropocene )

Expanding on the no-more-cars thing: EVs are a stop-gap, it doesn't make sense to put batteries in cars. But even if the whole fleet of ICE vehicles were to be converted to battery-powered EVs we still have to deal with the tire pollution! We can't have all that vulcanized rubber grinding against all those millions of kilometers of asphalt. It's one of the single largest sources of particulate pollution. Go check. It's fucked up.

We're going to have to seriously re-imagine and reconfigure our economic systems over the whole globe. We might could have a resurgence in sail-powered cargo shipping: https://postcarbonlogistics.org/ https://www.sailcargo.inc/ (As opposed to the current very cheap but very polluting system.)

I believe we can live in harmony with nature (that is, increasing life rather than destroying it by applying ecological science), and that we can do it and maintain our populations (no genocide or mass starvation or any of that) and maintain a decent standard of living for the everybody. We just have to apply the technology and resources we already have efficiently. We will still be subject to the human condition, but at least we would have time to work out all our other problems, eh?

So we should stop international travel to properly grieve, and that is not despair?

We should stop fossil-fuel driven emissions out of necessity.

I’ll stop flying international when the rich give up their private jets. See: Davos.

Well said

My dear brother of Climate, I am so glad you have you accepted Climate into your heart and have been born-again through your commitment to dedicate your life to leaving a lighter footprint. Continue to seek forgiveness for your sins against Climate, dear believer. One day we shall rejoice in the carbon-free heavens of Climate.

Praise be to Climate, for it provides for all. Amen.

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