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Comment by NhanH | Hacker News Reader

Let’s say if there is a magical wand that can will any policy the user wants to happen — so the magic can’t remove carbon, but it allows the bearer to pursue any mean within humanity technological abilities — what are the actual actions that could be taken to fight climate change? My impression is that even the big polluter like China (as an example) is already on full speed to build more nuclear plant or solar power, and they just can’t do it faster. Can someone realistically elaborate a high level plan on what could be done, or a pointer to such sources?

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80% of the global population lives in a developing nation, keen on quick and dirty energy sources and a growing appetite for hyper consumerism and meat consumption.

The West is living in lala land with some of the proposed policy measures.

A popular one is implenting a carbon tax at the border which forces buyer and seller to internalize societal cost.

But this would result in redefined trading blocs, particularly with united developing nations. The other bloc (paying the border carbon tax) will enter a post-growth period due to slow and expensive trade

Invest on renewable energy, until it is several times larger than our consumption; invest on energy storage and renewable chemical inputs; invest on carbon capture.

There's no hidden trick, all of that is completely obvious. Yet, government action could increase the rate of change several times.

Nobody is in full speed, everywhere things are mostly left to the market, and the market created a huge lot of completely artificial bottlenecks. It also is unable to do research and any kind of long-term investments, even when it's clear those are profitable; and it's always completely unwilling to do infrastructure investment.

this inevitably turns into an argument over the definition of "realistic" that then in turn becomes an argument over hope/positivity-vs-doomer that then inevitably turns into an argument over values.

with that caveat out of the way, here are some examples from other people you can mull around as you ponder the scope and scale.

#1 the IPCC themselves. As part of AR6 one of its reports is on mitigation options: https://www.ipcc.ch/report/sixth-assessment-report-working-g...

#2 - Bernie, if elected, wanted to start a 'green new deal' jobs program that would re-direct most of the military budget as well as greatly increase federal spending such that somewhere in the vicinity of 1.5T/year would be spent on the transition. The hope was that in de-escalating our global military presence he could also entice china into a grand bargain that involved them putting more of their military budget into it as well. Again regardless of your opinion on the realisticness of it, its worth recognizing as one of the only people and plans that got the scope and scale correct.

#3 - https://drawdown.org/ Drawdown isn't a policy so much as a menu of options that have been explored, studied, modeled, quantified and ranked.

Simply taxing CO2 emissions and maybe reinvesting some profits (into electrification and renewables) should do just fine.

The problem is people have to pay for these changes. This means potentially:

- General increase in prices/decrease in disposable income

- Danger for competitiveness of domestic industries

- Uncertain second-order effects/additional risk

Just consider electric vehicles-- pushing for no new combustion-car sales starting in 2025 would be political suicide in a lot of democractic nations, simply because people actually value future wellbeing on a planetary scale less than what's in their own pockets right now.

There is absolutely no need to go nuclear for electrical power at this point IMO-- it's not cost competitive, not sustainable and extremely unpopular, too.

Your assessment of nuclear power is completely wrong. Nuclear is the cheapest, most sustainable and widely supported source of clean electricity. Even in Germany more people support nuclear power than oppose it.

What is the source for your beliefs?

I'm assuming you are talking about nuclear fission because fusion is pretty much a pipe dream right now.

A 2020 report (https://www.lazard.com/media/451419/lazards-levelized-cost-o...) by Lazard (investment bank) points out significantly higher levelized cost of energy for nuclear energy compared to renewables.

In additions, most recently built reactors finished neither on time NOR on budget, and most of those were just expansions/additional blocks for existing plants, which is a big "free" decrease in risk/problems already compared to new plants (compare that with renewable costs which are trending down).

Nuclear is also absolutely not sustainable: Mining fuel is a dirty business and reserves are limited.

Nuclear proliferation is another undesirable side effect, and both nuclear waste and decomissioned plants are difficult and expensive to clean up.

Regarding popular support: What is your source for this? Maybe it is talking about delaying decomissioning of existing plants to keep electricity prices lower? I am extremely doubtful that this "support" could be leveraged into securing new places to build plants anyway.

Also consider that specifically the German electricity mix is basically 50% renewables already-- scaling that up seems more doable, faster, cheaper, and ultimately environment friendly than starting to build nuclear plants on a massive scale NOW.

Lazard doesn't account for energy storage and grid expansion so it shouldn't be used to compare intermittent and baseload energy sources. If there's political will NPPs can be and are constructed on time, like in ROK, PRC or 70's France. Your argument about sustainability even more so applies to renewables considering how much more resources have to be mined to build such low density and intermittent energy source. Also, renewables occupy a lot of space that can and should be rewilded. Using nuclear reactors to produce nuclear weapons is not easy (see Iran) and nuclear waste can be stored underground. Decomissioning of NPPs can be done after 80 or 100 years of operation which is a crazy long time given how short the lifespans of wind turbines and solar panels are. Germany electricity mix is 50% renewables yet right now it's emitting 8x more CO2 per kWh than France. I wonder why that's the case? Maybe energy policy should be more about decarbonisation rather than building renewable capacity?

There is no way except property seizure and capital reallocation at a large scale. This wont happen, so we're effectively doomed to suffer the slow violence of the inaction of our owners who themselves will never live to feel the harm they're aiding and abetting.

Can you go into a bit more details? What are the next step after property seizure, and where is the capital deployed?

Mass property seizure and capital reallocation, i.e. a revolution on a global scale, will inevitably lead to the deaths of millions and a setback on living standards for the rest, i.e. degrowth; which will accomplish the objective of fewer carbon emissions.

>will inevitably lead to the deaths of millions

You are being generous. Historically, tens to hundreds of millions would be more likely.

That is a very good point; nothing has done more to solve starvation or improve the global standard of living then capitalism. If we manage a hard switch to another system the mass deaths from starvation and the collapse of the standard of living should greatly reduce carbon emissions.

>There is no way except property seizure and capital reallocation at a large scale.

Just like collective farms made Russia and China agricultural power houses.

But removing carbon is within humanities technological abilities. I mean, just plant enough trees, and it's mostly done. This is not even a matter of technology. Removing sources of pollution, like certain animals we use for food and other things is another simple solution, which demands not technology at all.

This problem is not a matter of technology, it's yet another problem of society and people.

> I mean, just plant enough trees, and it's mostly done. This is not even a matter of technology.

Carbon capture is completely unplausible. Annual US CO2/capita is ~15tons, we simply can't realistically plant enough trees.

Currently there is no way to do anything that would have sufficient effect to compensate current pollution-- we HAVE to reduce it at the source.

But I completely agree that it is mostly just the will that is lacking.

One square meter of forest land, if any fallen trees are sequestered in a way so they never rot, will be enough to offset 1 watt of fossil fuel energy use. It's not enough to offset our current civilization by a long shot.

Well, completely deconstruct the globalized civilization we have today for a start. Everything that requires putting carbon into the atmosphere would need to be judged for whether or not it is truly necessary. And if you really want to exhibit wisdom rather than just intelligence, you'd want to start considering how things are going to work if renewables and nuclear simply just don't scale no matter what innovation you try.

The biggest and simplest is build massive nuclear power plants and run carbon capture with the energy. It solves the issue it's just not very $$ efficient.

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