We are ‘greening’ ourselves to extinction
aljazeera.com
aljazeera.com
> A recent investigation into the world’s largest carbon standard found that 94 percent of its rainforest offset credits did not actually contribute to carbon reduction.
When I looked at the offset market in the past, I realized that it was one of the few markets where both the buyer and seller are perfectly happy with fraud.
- The buyer is motivated to seek the lowest cost offsets they can find. They're not paying for the cleanup - all they need is the offset document itself, often for legal purposes.
- The seller is more than happy to take the buyer's money and spend it on looking like they're doing something. The rest is free margin.
Neither side remotely cares about the underlying activity behind the offset, and neither side is really penalized if the underlying activity is fraudulent. In fact, both sides are actually better off if the whole thing is fraudulent! I can't think of many other markets where this dynamic exists.
My colleagues pass these in foreign languages for the lulz
> I can't think of many other markets where this dynamic exists.
Recycling market is the same - UK government pays you to recycle plastic, £60 per tonne. You find someone in a 3rd world country that will take it off your hands for £30 per tonne, and pocket the difference. They give you a document saying the plastic was 'recycled' and dump it in the ocean.
The sums may be wrong, but you get the gist
Generally we try to minimise our plastic use but it’s hard
I think landfilling is fine, we just need to make sure it does not end up in the environment floating about and causing contamination. And that we are not getting defrauded.
The government might as well be part of such fraud too? What do they care, if the plastics is not actually recycled.
But if they cay say to the voters, "Now we're recycling all plastics", then, some more votes, they'll get, in the next elections? (Maybe just a few more votes, if most voters also don't care)
Many people fully believe that they are making the world a better place, they are not "happy with being deceived" but they are just ignorant. This is like saying that the tobacco industry lies make both happy. That is only true as far as the buyer, the smoker, does not find the true, sometimes in a very hard way.
And your argument also applies to economic scams. If I invest all my money in a fund and think that I am getting a 20% return, I may be happy because I do not know that the bank has lost all my money. So, I am happy until I know the true.
Here, all the fault is in corporations that lie and scam people. The consumers are just trying to be good people. Your assumption that people does not want to know the true seems very profitable for scammers.
The tragedy of the commons is near universal on all transactions and our propensity for neglecting fraud regarding the commons is universal. It just so happens that for these transactions the focus is on the commons.
Woof.
Hahahahahahahahahaha!
The Castro Brothers, Hugo Chavez, and many others were some of the richest people in the world. These are not exceptions; they are generally the rule!
Some of what the author says is false. Consumer choices do make a difference. I work in climate tech and the product my company produces monitors electricity usage in the home. The average user reduces their home electricity usage by 7% in the first month, solely due to becoming aware of what they are using. Residential electricity usage is something like 45% of electricity usage here in the states, I believe. That’s huge progress due to consumer choice.
Electric vehicles are progress. There are companies developing new ways to extract lithium that do not destroy the environment as much as brining does. As where ICEs inherently must pollute (good luck having combustion without emitting CO2), electric power has the ability to become renewable and green. Oil companies are a hundred years ahead and have governments in their pockets, subsidies, and well-established infrastructure in place already. If renewable energy were in that position, there would be no contest in what was more eco-friendly.
Calling for “reparative justice” is another fear-mongering, divide-and-conquer strategy. The proper path forward IMO is capturing externalities so they can be incorporated into the existing economic framework. That’s what drives behavior of companies. I’m talking about putting a price on carbon. I’m talking about taxing land use at different rates for agricultural operations based on the type of agriculture being done. Imagine how quickly companies would change their behaviors if they had to pay the full price of what their fossil fuel usage or monoculture farming costs us collectively.
I totally agree! No way China should be able to have price advantages due to lack of manufacturing pollution control. And Mexico makes engine blocks for the north because of the difficulty of getting environmental approval for foundries in the north.
Pollution parity import tariffs will level the playing field and allow low-polluting factories to compete with the high polluting areas that are harming everyone.
> change their behaviors if they had to pay the full price
The imported igadgets and solar panels and baby rockers will be more expensive. If we manufacture at home we can even reduce usage of energy for transporting things from China.
C.f. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/29/opinion/ezra-klein-podcas...
in which there is an extended discussion of the way that meat production has become dramatically more efficient over the last 30 years but the low price that supposedly reflects this can more accurately be said to be due to new externalities that the industry created (and does not charge the consumer for at the transaction point).
Klein does a good opening monologue about the importance of prices in a capitalist economy, and that while low prices are typically a good thing, they must reflect the true cost of the thing being paid for.
How do you contradict yourself so quickly and not see it?
Our electric cars aren’t using “renewable energy” (what a shifty term). They’re using oil being converted to electric energy (at a cost of losing some of the efficiency)
Maybe someday these cars will use energy purely generated from the sun or wind, but given the volume of cars in the planet Im suspicious we’ll ever generate that much. This ignores a growing population where each year we collectively consume more and more
Fusion would be a way to do it, or even fission, but for some reason we can’t consider fission and we don’t put nearly enough money into researching fusion
Classic conservative talking point. The next bit after this is "let's do nothing, gas burning cars are the future!". Anyone who actually wants to think for real about what the energy usage of an electric vehicle in their area is can refer to the EPA's Power Profiler: https://www.epa.gov/egrid/power-profiler#/
If you're in California, about half is gas. The other half is primarily nuclear, solar, wind and hydro. Transmission losses from power plant to home, and home to charged battery, are 10-20%; but then, electric drivetrains lose much less to efficiency than gas drivetrains. At the end of the day, emissions from driving an electric are better pretty much anywhere in the world; and in most places, massively better.
I think saying that electric "has the potential to become renewable" is quite reasonable. It'll certainly take a lot of time and isn't a certainty, but the generation mix is probably, all in all, an easier problem than the emissions from manufacturing batteries.
As of 7 months ago 13% of annual world electricity generation over the preceding year was wind and solar (and this goes up several percent a year), a little under 10% is nuclear and 15% is hydro. Along with minor renewable resources like landfill gas (distinct from wood biomass which should not be included) fossil fuels are under 60%.
Anyone in Brazil or Norway or one of many othernplaces has about two orders of magnitude less marginal emissions.
The amount of sunlight that hits a car over an average december day in Ireland could move it further than 80% of people drive. It's not yet possible to gather most of it, but in 80% of the world >90% of grid powered charging by covering one of the places the car parks on the regular with PV and buffering a day's power in a battery 10% the size of the car's.
where is the contradiction? yes, switching to an electric car when its oil converted to electricity isn't much better but it still represents progress because it creates incentive for an electrical supply chain that can take inputs from things other than oil. The idea is that it creates an opening for renewables to take a foothold where ice presented a blockade.
What product is that? I'd like to learn more
"The supposed energy transition that has been undertaken has seen renewable energy production expanded, but there has been no indication that oil and gas are being substituted and ultimately phased out."
Does this ever actually happen? Like have you made 'enough' by the time you become CEO of ExxonMobil?
In that sense climate deniers and climate pessimists are on the same side: do nothing, business as usual.
Al Jazeera may not be unbiased, but it seems the author is not on Qatar's payroll.
It's not uncommon in academia.
Honestly, there’s been a lot of lies and fraud in the green movement. There’s never any suggestion that our actions will produce specific results in a measurable way. We’re just always being fed one fear mongering tactic after another.
carbon offsets being a lie. most recycling being dumped. corporations having unfettered plastic usage while you’re demanded to use a paper straw…
Face it, at this point big oil has a more honest reputation.
I would generally trust Al Jazeera about anything apart from news about Qatar, simply because unlike western networks Al-Jazeera doesn't have to care about pleasing advertisers, and its evident in their honest Palestinian coverage(their reporters paid their lives for it).
They are only second to the BBC in terms of how many stations they have.
This video has details about how Al Jazeera works, and how a rare combination of state goals end up in probably the regions best journalism, to the point other middle eastern countries boycotted Qatar to try to stop Al Jazeera.
Yes they might be state-funded, but are they claiming accurately?
Good on Al Jazeera publishing this article and Kolinjivadi for writing it. More Western publications need to follow suit!
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jan/18/revealed...
https://www.zeit.de/2023/04/co2-zertifikate-betrug-emissions...
I guess its true that more western publications should follow reposting this story originally published by western media. Eastern media too.
> the growing electric vehicle industry may help reduce carbon emissions but it will also cause a massive jump in the demand for lithium and other minerals. [...] Apart from making climate change worse,
Reducing and eliminating carbon emissions is key to climate change reduction. Other environmental impacts aren't consistently correlated with climate action.
I don't know if there's a single movement that has been sidelined more than the conservation movement. Maybe the US labor movement.
Where he loses me is this whole idea of 'reparative justice'. That will never happen. We can't even get everyone to agree to meet targets that will keep the world at 1.5c. The idea that we'll get powerful countries and corporations to fork over trillions to right past wrongs is laughable. It's a bad faith poison pill. If I didn't know any better, I'd bet this guy is funded by fossil fuel companies to ensure nothing gets done.
Hundreds of things that are looking sus now. CEO pay, among others. But who would make large effective enteprises in such climate? I don't like large corps, but ive lived in socialism, and it is way worse.
My biggest pet peeve is this idea that the human race or even some large swath (“investors”) are doing one thing instead of another. How does one “pour billions in to policies” anyways? How do investors investing in bigpharma in any way impact public health policy?
It’s as if the author wants to take the entire human race aside and say “hey buddy, you’re making some mistakes”. Who? What? When!
Planting trees isn’t great for carbon offset but it’s probably great for a dozen other reasons - and guess what - we can do lots of things simultaneously!
If the worst miscalculation you can point at the human race making is accidentally planting too many trees - well - I think the author is perhaps the myopic one! Of course they immediately confuse other complex topics (wildfires bad is an extremely naive understanding of California!) so pulling apart any of this is hopeless.
Saved whom?
As I understand what happened it was the biggest wealth transfer in the history of humanity. The disaster investments pouring into the pharmaceutical industry before the pandemic wasn't the reason that the vaccines existed at all; there was decades of research that went into mRNA based vaccines. The pharmaceutical industry was more than profitable already and able to meet demands without the influx of investment.
It seems to me that while it was beneficial to have the vaccines we had rolled out it didn't "save" all of us. It protected a good number of people. It wasn't evenly or fairly distributed. And it made a very few number of extremely wealthy people even more wealthy while increasing the number of already financially precarious people in the world.
FDA is still issuing the EUAs.
https://www.fda.gov/emergency-preparedness-and-response/mcm-...
FTFY.
You mean the estimated USD 39.5bi taxpayer dollars that went into big pharma R&D just in the US?
Or the US 3.6Bi, Europe 1.9Bi of taxpayer money invested in the first 2 years in big pharma?
Big pharma doesn't exist in a vacuum. Someone needs to be interested in large scale research, purchasing and applying all those vaccines, or their effectiveness is hampered.
You're asking these questions as if they're rhetorical, relying on the simplicity of the "One doesn't! They don't!" answer to get that answer which you want. But that's not the true answer, the true answer is just more complicated.
People are investing billions into getting policies passed (lobbyists) and implementing them (compliance, government contracting, etc.). These are multi-billion-dollar economies.
Big pharma affects drug policy through lobbying, drug pricing, choosing what drugs to research and make publicly available, etc.
> If the worst miscalculation you can point at the human race making is accidentally planting too many trees - well - I think the author is perhaps the myopic one!
The miscalculation being pointed out by the author is that we're paying fraudsters for environmental interventions like removing carbon from the atmosphere, and they aren't doing it.
Even if planting trees is a good, it's not the good we're paying them for and it's not getting the results we intended. And if you read the article with the intention of understanding it rather than with the intention of picking it apart, you might have noticed that it points out that the trees aren't even getting planted in many cases.
> Of course they immediately confuse other complex topics (wildfires bad is an extremely naive understanding of California!) so pulling apart any of this is hopeless.
"Wildfires bad" is an extremely naive understanding of this article. Perhaps pulling apart the article is only hopeless for you because you're trying to pull it apart without bothering to understand it.
Ecology? Ah, ok, there is SOME at the end, meaning much less need of raw materials ONCE the transition would be made.
That's the point almost nobody want to state because in that case instead of getting a polarized cohort of fanatics on both side we would get a significant cohort of people stating "ok, let's do it BUT if we pay for product factories sustain the costs OR we participate to the costs and to the earning".
Biggest thing this article gets wrong: Not realizing that the dismissive approach to indigenous peoples and the poor does not make a policy (by defenitiion) ineffective. Turns out that environmentalism and humanism can be (and often are) at odds.
I don't think problem 1 will be solved until problem 2 is addressed, because pretending like there is no contention or sacrifice by the already downtrodden in order to prevent climate change is the only way the grift maintains popular support.
IMO this particular aspect of modern environmentalism is a religious root on a secular tree.
Many religions imply that man isn't natural, that there's the nature world and that we are above it/not part of it. That core belief carries over into secular society/people even though they no longer believe the system of thought that lead to that conclusion.
I assert that man is in fact natural not supernatural, and that the changes man makes to the world as as natural of a process a trees overgrowing a grassland to make a forest or an ocean eroding away an island.
There's other fallacious ideas around nature that may have nothing to do with religion that I think are just common breakdowns in logic. People commonly apply the idea of "balance" to areas where it doesn't apply, or at least doesn't apply in the way that they think it does. Earth is a complicated system of systems, but is it meant to be in balance? If that were so, Earth's climate would not oscillate (excluding changes in solar output) over geological eras. Was Earth out of balance during the ice age?
"Balance" may in part be a proxy for our desire to want systems with which we are accustomed to not change. I've witnessed countless individuals, concerned with preserving nature, who would consider a plant or animal to be "non-native" or "invasive" while failing to recognize that the plants they believe to be "native" were introduced by animals in recent ecological history. They overlook the possibility (really a high likelihood) that the environment that explorers set foot on was significantly different from how it was even a century prior. It'd difficult for concepts of nativeness and invasiveness to be comprehensible if they did. Not that these aren't useful concepts in some domain, but many people interested in ecology or environmentalism believe them to be absolutely accurate or meaningful.
No. At best that's a position held only by a tiny and extreme minority.
Consider "Permaculture", a school of applied ecology that's become popular all over the world since it was started by a government-employed ecologist and co. in the late 1970's. The explicit goal of this design school is to create and maintain agriculturally productive ecosystems that improve soil fertility and volume over time (the "permanent" part of "Permanent Agriculture".)
With applied ecology we could probably increase the carrying capacity of the Earth to the point of having, say, 20B people while also increasing biodiversity and climate and long-term stability and all that good stuff.
This is mostly a straw man argument. It's always a mistake to represent diverse groups like "environmentalists" as holding a homogeneous belief. There are certainly some environmentalists who believe what you just said, but as an environmentalist, I don't believe that, and I think the environmentalists who do believe that are the minority of environmentalists.
On the contrary, for me, environmentalism isn't about saving the planet, it's about saving humans. The planet doesn't need saving: if we turn the planet into a barren wasteland it will uncaringly continue hurtling through space without us, but we'll be dead. The environment is a necessary component to human survival and thriving. I don't believe that means we should have no impact on the environment--that's not possible--but that we need to be careful about when we change our impact on the environment, because we risk breaking the fragile ecosystems that have supported our existence.
Even that is a bit difficult. We're really talking about reducing the carrying capacity of the earth in most scenarios for both humans and other animals. Environmentalism is saying that many humans will die on the default path, and this is a path that can be diverted with sufficient action. The longer we wait, the worse the action is going to need to be and the more people that may die.
But nuances are difficult to communicate when the other side is working in wholesale disinformation.
So continual world war seems the only way to become sustainable.
"The supposed energy transition that has been undertaken has seen renewable energy production expanded, but there has been no indication that oil and gas are being substituted and ultimately phased out."
That's not going to happen for another 27 years at least. I've said it before: Most people (including those who post here) are staggeringly illiterate when it comes to energy. Hydrocarbons store an immense amount of energy in a small, portable, cheap form. You can't just replace it in a year.
And even if you COULD, oil and gas are used for more than fuel and power. Natgas is a major feedstock for nitrogen fertilizer. You cannot replace it with solar panels. Then there's the laundry list of byproducts like plastics and other materials made from oil and gas feedstocks which are essential for the modern world to function -also not able to be substituted by wind and sunlight.
Funny how they never mention this at Vox, Mother Jones, or other progressive-leaning publications.
https://flowcharts.llnl.gov/commodities/energy https://flowcharts.llnl.gov/commodities/carbon
(I'm pretty sure I've seen an even better one somewhere that breaks down e.g. personal vs. commercial transportation, but I can't find it right now.)
Parallel to that, we need to address the political issues that obstruct even minimal progress. And yes, sometimes that means holding our noses and voting for awful "moderates" or "centrists". Why? Because in a divided country (as most are) getting elected means getting the votes in the middle. Education helps some, in the long term, because it helps move the dividing line between the two sides of any issue (not just environment). Condescension and demonization don't help at all. In the short term, though, the biggest bang for the buck is to vote for people who will meet voters where they are ideologically and get them to support some kind of progress. Secondarily, electing people who will vote to dismantle the structures that favor obstruction and NIMBYism over doing something will also help - not this election cycle or next, but hopefully within a 27-year time frame.
So yes, consistent effort every year, but in ways that bear fruit and don't just satisfy someone's sense of superiority or self-righteous anger. There has been enough posturing. Every "that isn't good enough" or "they're both the same" delays actual progress. Like everything there's a strategy to this, and about 90% of what I see is a losing strategy.
Everything we use oil and gas for that is not fuel is a tiny fraction of our consumption and can be replaced with synthesis pipelines that use carbon dioxide, water and electricity.
None of those can be viably replaced right now. With very large transpo, there seems to be a lot of investment in hydrogen but skepticism surrounding it too, including for the environment.
And I count furnaces, cement making, and electricity production as fuel, since all you need for the process is heat.
It never was. It's a suggestion that near-term abatability e.g. 27 years is untenable. Policy and projection qua climate can't hinge on the promise of hypotheticals. It's possible to leverage nuclear more for an accelerated timeline, but the greens keep trying to block progress. Can't have your cake and eat it too is the way I see it.
Meaningful changes like this could happen in well under a year if the political will were there. From there, we could tackle the more difficult challenges you mention of the remaining quarter of oil used for industrial purposes. None of these problems are impossible to solve. Defeatism doesn't do anything to contribute to a solution.
[0] https://www.energy.gov/eere/vehicles/articles/fotw-1230-marc...
[1] https://www.epa.gov/greenvehicles/what-if-we-kept-our-cars-p...
Cost is not the only issue. Often not even the main one. Please go to a town meeting (or planning board meeting) some time. Pay attention to what arguments people actually put forth, and how. They'll cite not only cost but inconvenience, damage to local businesses, historical character, even environmental issues. And here's the thing: any new project has to win every one of those battles, while the NIMBYs only have to win one. That's what we call systemic bias. It can be fixed eventually, but not just hand-waved over. Until then, better sidewalks and bike lanes will take years in most towns if they're allowed to proceed at all, even when the money is readily available.
> Meaningful changes like this could happen in well under a year if the political will were there.
Not just political will but authoritarian political will. The US is a country where toxic individualism rules all, to the extent that even agreeing to pay our bills is a major political fight. Starting major new initiatives is even harder, which is why there haven't been many since NASA was formed. The structural support for obstructionism has to be weakened - local, state, federal - before meaningful change can occur.
> None of these problems are impossible to solve.
Not impossible, but not easy.
> Defeatism doesn't do anything to contribute to a solution.
Neither does hand-waving, which seems to be the favorite way to do nothing productive around here lately. Recognizing the difficulty or complexity of a problem isn't defeatism. Would you make that claim about building a new compiler or relational database? Indeed, that recognition is an essential part of doing the planning and resource marshaling to solve a problem where and how it needs to be solved. The Manhattan Project didn't go with the first day's design. Neither did NASA. Neither did the allies at Normandy. Nor, most relevantly, did cities and countries that did put in decent transit infrastructure. "Just whack away at it without a clue and look down your nose at anyone not joining you" is not generally the way to really get things done. And if you don't like that characterization, fix your own first.
That's pretty harsh. But, if you think "things are that bad," let's also consider the moral culpability of people trying to stop the scientific study of geoengineering: https://www.solargeoeng.org/
Scientifically, stratospheric aerosol injection works: IPCC gives "high agreement that it could limit warming to below 1.5°C" with a material cost of less than $10B per year. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_geoengineering
But, as we all know, it is intellectually unacceptable to be an advocate for geoengineering. For some reason, "Thou shalt not believe in a technological solution to global warming." Instead, billions of people need to voluntarily (or not) dramatically reduce their lifestyle. I really don't get it. Any insights?
1. You have to keep doing it forever, and likely accelerate the rate at which you do. If rapid decarbonization doesn't happen in tandem, you'll need to be adding more and more aerosols over time. And the second you stop, you get a sudden whiplash climate change event that has a hundred years of warming in one. The risk of that catastrophe isn't worthwhile to many.
2. Most of the compounds that are cheap and effective are both ozone depleters and cause acid rain. The one studied most is Sulfur Dioxide, which would cause ocean acidification after many years of sustained use.
IMO, it's a fundamentally bad idea because it's using one form of pollution to fix the problem created by another. The second and third order effects could be unforeseen and catastrophic.
1. "You have to keep doing it forever"
2. "[Stopping] creates a sudden whiplash climate change event"
3. Geoengineering will deplete the ozone
4. Geoengineering causes acid raid
5. Geoengineering causes ocean acidification
6. Fundamentally bad: "one form of pollution to fix the problem created by another"
7. "second and third order effects could be unforeseen and catastrophic"
8. If we use geoengineering, then people won't decarbonize (I'm assuming this is also a concern).
1. We do lots of things forever, like collecting taxes or taking out the trash. So I don't understand that issue. 2. Why would we stop, if it is so important? 3. Open to ozone depletion as a bigger problem, but just by tonnage, it should be 1/3 of the effect described here: https://meteor.geol.iastate.edu/gcp/studentpapers/1996/atmos... 4. According to this article, acid rain from geoengineering would be a small fraction of the effect of current industrial pollution: https://doi.org/10.1029/2009JD011918 5. Ocean acidification is a real concern. But I suspect 2 degrees of warming will much more dangerous to ocean ecosystems. 6. I don't understand the fundamentally bad argument. Neither CO2 nor SO2 are bad chemicals. Our goal should be to moderate the climate; maybe we need one chemical to balance the other. 7. This is my personal opinion, but I think the second and third order effects need to be studied scientifically. The second and third order effects of degrowth are also real. 8. I think a move to geoengineering would be politically advantageous for decarbonization policy. No one wants geoengineering. But if we need it, we need it—and if we might need it, we should study it carefully, scientifically.
Transcription: https://spaswell.wordpress.com/2016/11/18/dr-gwynne-dyer-geo...
At one point he talks about the possibility of unilateral geoengineering, and he mentions the head of the Bangladesh Institute of Strategic Studies...
- - - -
FWIW I figure that a technological "magic bullet" might save our bacon, and it's prudent to explore the options. (Personally I thought the olivine weathering seemed promising but I don't know if anything came of it, at least so far.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enhanced_weathering
But I'm convinced by Václav Smil (among others) that the real solution will have to involve just not pulling up so much carbon from underground and putting it in the atmosphere.
Václav Smil at Driva Climate Investment Meeting 2019 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gkj_91IJVBk
He talks about how it would mean going back to a 1960's (USA) level of energy use per capita.
I feel like there's a narrow window here to choose our future, but that's likely an illusion or conceit.
For myself, I'm leaning toward becoming some sort of prepper, not politically nor ideologically, but as a kind of Pascal's Wager with the possibility of future chaos.
It's getting very boring listening to people confuse the two of those things.
Electric cars and heating are better. Electricity from renewables is better. Even if you totally ignore the GHG angle. Once you add that it's a no regret, no brainer decision, not a sacrifice.
http://https//www.transportenvironment.org/discover/how-clea...
Wait, what?!
The tragedy though is that companies pretend to be climate warriors on one hand but with the other hand they're being the worst sort of environmental pollutants. These days it's all okay if you're destroying the environment so long as you're offsetting your CO2
We're all dead if we don't and we cannot afford to add one tiny extra burden onto that monumental task. Sorry. The alternative is death for us all and no chance of any justice ever.
Of course, but people simply won't. So what do we do?
Easiest way to reduce GHG emissions right there.
I think this is far more reasonable. Want to weigh less? Eat a bit less, move a bit more. OP said eliminate all carbon emissions. That's like starving to lose weight. A good compromise is "emit a little less, plant a few more trees" or something along those lines, which is basically what we're doing.
We already know it won't be enough to avoid consequences, as those are already manifesting, but it's the most realistic path forward by far.
A lot of the money is going to have to be spent in the first world ... first to get the technology down in cost but there are existing technologies that developing countries can use now and it should be in their budgets instead of paying for their oversized army or paying ghost salaries to government workers who are all relatives of the minister. I mean these countries will need to act with a discipline and honesty that they are unaccustomed to. We need to get their populations worked up to demand it. (I am from Zimbabwe which is why this bugs me)
To pretend that some people are going to entirely take care of others is demotivating and wrong. Most of us are going to have to take strain.
We are also going to have to de-emphasise NIMBY and other concerns that aren't absolutely critical that might block our investments in clean energy.
https://nypost.com/2020/01/10/the-telling-tale-of-glacier-na...
The general trend is clear however and has been for decades.
Look into Bjorn Lomborg. I have no idea how accurate his stuff is, but he is the only one that actually seems to take a pragmatic approach to the problem and looks at the bigger picture
The trend is clear, the world is warming, we know the mechanism, we know the cause and we can calculate at least some of the results and we know they’re bad.
People saying “oh but things are always changing, there used to be an ice age” and things like that, completely ignore the pace of change.
You don’t need to panic but please don’t bury your head in the sand.
Disclaimer: I don't deny global warming. I'm just not sure what the objectively realistic options are that don't include massively reducing global population and at the same time sinking millions into poverty due to lack of energy. We can go green, but we can't go green and have everyone maintain their living standards at the same time we also grow and perform R&D on multiple areas.
I would hope (at least at a physics level, politics would be hard, of course) that cutting down on yatchs and maybe flights might be enough... (i.e.: only cutting for the 1% or maybe 5%)
I think that's all this movement has: hope, but without anything real to back it up.
Virtue signaling seems to be their solution. I'm all for grounding Bill Gates to use a train to go anywhere, but I think we should have a serious discussion on the subject, with facts and not just "let's hope this works".
IIRC, PV panels become (on average) carbon neutral after three years of operation. Given the lifespan, this suggests that there are very few locations you can put them where they won't more than pay back the carbon emitted in their production.
I'm a former nuclear fan. In anything like its current form it is a dead end, and it is past time we move on.
Could you further elaborate on this take? I'm not interested in challenging you or anything, but the anti-nuclear position is often out of fear of catastophe, so it's refreshing to hear an opinion that it's a dead end.
All current reactor designs, even the most recently approved ones, are bespoke. Incredibly expensive, slow to build, relying on a lot of one-off manufacturing and a dwindling number of experts in the technology. We could overbuild wind & solar on breathtaking scales and still spend a good bit less. I suspect we will find an energy storage solution for solar (EVs is a reasonably good bet IMO) before we'll figure out how to make economical nuclear a reality.
I don't worry much about catastrophe. The worst ones we have seen so far were practically non-events compared to the ongoing damage we do just with coal alone. Both of the big disastrous nuclear events have straightforward engineering solutions (and in the case of the first, we already have done that engineering). Aside from it being a bit of an eyesore, I'd happily live in close proximity to a current generation nuclear plant.
I think we'd need to see a fundamental shift in our approach to nuclear before we could make it viable. Maybe something like shifting to smaller floating reactors that we could churn out in quantity. I doubt we could make it directly cost competitive with wind & solar, but maybe we could find a way to make it valuable enough to keep as an alternative.
We'd also need a cultural shift, of course -- people already fear nuclear power plants and have forced them to close prematurely as a result. That's a non-trivial problem, and I don't have a solution for that. Humans aren't rational, even if we like to pretend otherwise.
Just implying that a threat involves not only the real damage it might cause, but also what's the likelihood it'll actually happen.
That depends on where you install them. Almost anywhere in Europe it doesn't make sense to use solar, and yet they're doing it.[1]
These critiques and the silly book's premise that since solar/wind might not break even from an embodied carbon standpoint, that somehow burning actual carbon molecules in their place is "better" are just politically correct denialism.
I don't mean to say I have the absolute truth, I want to see if they've even considered sun availability for different regions. It seems solar proponents really haven't analyzed it from that point of view, AFAIK.
What I mean is, I haven't seen those calculations. Have you, or are you just hoping they have done the math? I wouldn't put any faith on any politician doing any hard math on this whatsoever.
Exclude the tax exemptions and subsidies given to those companies and then check if they're profitable or not.
As opposed to what, replacing cars with public transit? It takes a serious amount of hubris to look at the world and think that we can just wave a magic wand and make public transit work in places that largely rely on cars (even in Europe, which is much denser and more friendly to public transit, there are a lot of personal cars). We will run out of oil way before we reach that sort of 'utopia', so electric cars are a far better option than just continuing to burn all the fossil fuels we can. It doesn't preclude us from also incentivizing more public transit options, either.
Edit: the amount of downvotes any post that is skeptical of public transit as a global solution gets is really descriptive of how narrow the bubble is most HNers live in.
We don't seem to even be trying to do this and it's depressing.
- Make it door to door, no connections, no hiking to or from a station/stop/port at either end
- Make it on demand, no timetables or shortages
- Make it actually show up, and not be susceptible to strikes or moderately bad weather
- Make a ticket cost the same as or less than the cost in petrol (or electricity) for the same journey
- Make it private, without the need to be crammed into a box with strangers
These aren't unreasonable requirements, or some utopia situation. They're all things that personal cars provide that trains, planes, taxis, subways, and busses frequently (perhaps generally?) do not. I don't even commute, I work entirely remotely, and your proposal would still be a massive decrease in my quality of life whether it achieved your objective or not.
If you want alternatives to be more popular, make them better than the status quo for every individual rather than just waving at "the world in general" and saying it's better for that/them.
- They should not be stuck in traffic jams
- They should not kill children, pedestrians and cyclists
- They should be electric without heavy and polluting batteries
These aren't unreasonable requirements, or some utopia situation. They're all things that trains and subways provide that cars do not.
> - Make a ticket cost the same as or less than the cost in petrol (or electricity) for the same journey
In your utopia, do I get a free car and only spend money on petrol for travel? It it a country that provides free car repairs and service, need no insurance, MOT checks, and has no road tax?
In Britain the fixed costs of owning a car exceed £2000 a year before you've driven a single mile.
> They're all things that trains and subways provide that cars do not.
Figure out how to get trains to operate everywhere instead of only on fixed routes, and then this comparison will be valid. Until then you're talking about two (more, really) different use cases with a minimal amount of overlap.
So at the very least we will need buses, and a lot of them, to feed the areas where it't uneconomical or otherwise unfeasible to run rails. Do the environmental math on that -- how full does a bus need to be before the pollution per passenger is better than a compact car with one passenger? How about a compact car with four passengers? Public transit would need a fundamental change in approach.
And of course this is only talking about people. Always lost in this conversation is that moving humans from place to place is just one use case.
Sure, to some extent. The knowledge we already have about how to prevent e.g. cars killing children, pedestrians, and cyclists is that you slow them down (and separate them which also typically involves taking space from cars to make room). But as seen above in this thread, that kind of thing meets opposition from people who say you're "making good things in life shittier".
> the areas where it't uneconomical or otherwise unfeasible to run rails.
If you've never done this, I suggest taking a look at old maps of the US's passenger rail network. We had a lot more rail in the past than we do now.
Smaller roads with fewer lanes and lower speeds are very unpopular among car enthusiasts.
> Figure out how to get trains to operate everywhere instead of only on fixed routes
Cars can't operate everywhere so this is a unrealistic requirement in the first place.
> Do the environmental math on that -- how full does a bus need to be before the pollution per passenger is better than a compact car with one passenger? How about a compact car with four passengers?
Assuming a 1 person/car with a average 19mpg, and a average bus 6.2mpg, you need 3.06 people on a bus before it breaks even.
If you can have 4 people on a compact car with four passengers, you can have a bus with 3 people on it.
Also note that your other examples violate my overarching point which is that they're about externalities. They don't represent advantages to the users' near term needs/desires, and in the case of my personal feelings about cyclists are actively in opposition, so they're almost always going to be fighting an uphill battle for mass acceptance.
Variable? A single line of rail moves more people per hour that 6 lanes of highway - that's just physics.
Average speed of London traffic is 10 km/h while the new Elizabeth Line wooshes past at 90 km/h. It can cross London before your car gets 1/3 of the way.
A crowded train still moves at 90 km/h. Your car in a jam is personally comfortable (unless you need to take a piss), but doesnt move anywhere.
The idea that cars are comparable to public transport in situations of gridlock is preposterous.
I don't especially want alternatives to be more popular; I want less carbon and fewer cars. If that means making cars shittier (than they already are), then that's good in my book.
> Make it private, without the need to be crammed into a box with strangers
People who can't stand "strangers" should pay a special tax for being antisocial. Society is nothing if not sharing space with strangers.
Well, because the parties who try to do that (e.g. Greens in europe) immediately get out-voted out of office once the population starts to notice the permanent traffic jams.
But it's not for a lack of trying -- they put measures like reducing speed limits in cities, reducing car lanes, etc.
But I and many others who commute to Vienna don't want to go back to commuting by public transport. Been there, done that - in one direction, it's 1.5h by train + 2 metro lines, vs. 30-40 mins by car. It's an absolute no brainer, I will not waste 3h per day (!!) commuting.
To the helpful suggestions of "finding a home closer to work", I can only say: and what do I so in some years when I change jobs? Move again? No thanks!
Public transport is great if the factors align, but honestly, with the travel times that I have, I wouldn't use it even if they made it free of charge.
To put it another way, if you told people 100 years ago that we'd need to build 63,000 gas stations and 4 million miles[1] of highway in the US, they'd think you're crazy. It would seem logistically impossible. AND no one would want to pay for it. Yet tell those same people 100 years of "it's for the economy" and you end up where we are.[2]
[1] That is only a conservative estimate of all the infrastructure that was built to subsidize the auto/oil industry. It's a lot more.
[2] This is not me disagreeing with the article. Greening is absolutely a swindle to make money.
100 years ago we had one third the population we have today. Undoing that kind of development in another 100 years is plausible, but I suspect the oil problem will have resolved itself around that time anyway.
And installing the same size network of public transit is far more expensive than paving that many miles of roads. Vastly, incredibly, insurmountably more expensive. The real ask is for changing population patterns to become more dense, and this is a decades-long evolution.
I don't know why you chose to exaggerate here, but rail lines are +/- the same cost per mile as interstate highway, and that's without the economies-of-scale benefit that comes from there being 100x the number of interstate miles. They're also vastly cheaper in terms of materials; the cost is mainly not materials. Concrete production is also extremely CO2 and energy intensive. Unsurprisingly, a boring 19th century technology deployed with vastly less energy and raw materials is more efficient. We're moving backwards in terms of overall system efficiency because of the economics of supporting a individualistic consumer society. And there's a phalanx of people spreading FUD to defend it from disruption.
But the vehicle I use on the rails has to stay on rails, and the cost of running rails becomes significantly more expensive as density increases. Politically and economically both. And can you replace every last paved road in America with rails? No, of course not, so you still have some kind of road network. Which brings us back full circle to why people like interstates to begin with.
Systemic energy efficiency is one very simplistic measure of a transportation network. And I would argue the least important.
Though I would love to hear a description of your utopian transportation system. Assuming it doesn't rely too heavily on a wholesale redesign of lifestyle preferences (e.g. "everyone lives in a skyscraper" is kind of a non-starter).
As you're putting up pantographs for the trams, there's no reason to not also have trolleybuses using them. When you have a network density built up to less than 5 minutes walk to the nearest tram/trolleybus stop, with a good timetable for daytime, there is little reason to have any private transport for within-town transport. Add provision of freight carrying by tram (use passing loops and specially designed trams for carrying pallets or delivery cages) and the number of vehicles with good reason to be in the town decreases further.
As you get into lower density areas, it makes more sense to go for links between towns and villages by rail, with ICE or electric buses feeding in. There should be no more than 15 minutes walk for normal users to reach a bus stop (Note: all bus stops should be very nice, with roofs and walls that keep the rain out). In all rural and urban cases, there should be the option of an app or call button which summons a battery minivan (or trolleybus in suitably served areas) to a person's door at anytime, with confirmation after the length of time for estimated collection is received. Automated scheduling systems with 24 hour service for dispatching electric minivans at reasonable cost to the end user to a location would remove the need for a lot of car journeys.
The thing is, none of this requires new technology, and could be marketed as a jobs program alone. Automating parts would be nice, but there's no reason this couldn't have been done anywhere in say, 1920.
It appears to take somewhere between 115 - 215 tons of steel per mile of highway track, but you're going to want double track if you're comparing to highways, so 200 - 400 tons of steel. Steel produces somewhere between 1 - 3 tons of CO2 per ton of steel depending on how it is produced. So say 300 tons of steel at 2 tons CO2 / 1 ton of steel. So 600 tons of CO2 per mile of railroad track. Track lasts from 2 - 40 years, so if we say 20 years on average, we get 30 tons / year.
Maybe highways don't last 60 years, or track lasts longer than 20. Also, if you are thinking of high speed passenger rail, it uses a lot of concrete so that it can be on an elevated track. But it looks like concrete highways and railroads are comparable as fair as CO2 from construction. Certainly rail isn't so "vastly" better that we need to be concerned about phalanxes of FUD.
Now, operating costs in terms of CO2 probably favor railroads pretty heavily, at least for freight. Since passenger rails is a lot less dense in terms of cargo, the story for passenger rail might be different.
(These figures are sourced from asking DDG "co2 per ton concrete", etc)
It takes a serious amount of hubris to look at the world and not See the fact that most people never had a car and never will. Do you realise that poor people all over the world rely on public transport to survive?
There are 190 countries in the world. United states has 6th highest car ownership per person. 139 countries that Less Than Half cars per person that US does.
US has 0.9 cars PP, Israel has 0.4, China 0.2 India 0.06
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_vehicles_...
Yes, it is true that most of Europe has > 0.5 cars PP. So in a way it's a measure of wealth.
More Accurate way of examining this issue, it distance driven per year per person, and I was not able to find such statistics.
I will go out on a limb here and suggest most of them actually rely on their feet. Bicycle if they can afford it. Then a motorcycle as income permits. And as soon as their lifestyle supports it, a car.
The problem with public transit as a solution is that we've had a long time to prove that out. The US had better public transit in many cities ~100 years ago than today. Why did the car dominate? I don't buy into conspiracy theories. People buy, on average, whatever best meets their needs. Make the best public transit in the world today universally available, and a huge number of people will still choose cars because they are more useful. Note that the only places in which public transit dominates are places so dense that the pain of public transit is less than the pain of making a car work. This does not describe more than perhaps three cities in the United States (and only in their downtown cores) and it never will unless we put an artificial cap on creating new cities.
The "artifical cap against public transit" exists, enacting a low density urban sprawl model on most cities, preventing a alternative from cars from working.
When people make comparisons of car ownership vs public transit, they always vastly inflate the cost of ownership, and more importantly, they do not account for the value of one's time. Just to give an example, if I were to replace the driven commute to my office with public transit, my commute time would grow from 30m to 90m each way.
Do not get me wrong. Public transit and especially protected bike infrastructure would be wonderful to have, but we're not going to be replacing cars any time soon. We need to be pushing EVs hard.