Comment by quacked | Hacker News Reader

Comment by quacked | Hacker News Reader

I am continually frustrated by climate doomerism by people who aren't willing to make the lifestyle changes that would be requiring to stop using so much oil.

We don't have enough raw materials in the world to replace the current oil grid with wind and solar, and nuclear requires a top-tier industrial society operating at peace for thousands of years to ensure there's no risk of catastrophic failure or radiation leakage.

Instead activists like to blame the usual suspects (Exxon, BP, etc.) without asking themselves what all of this oil is getting used for. International shipping, plastic, jet fuel, auto fuel, industrial lubricant, diesel for agriculture. I know people who will go to a climate protest on Thursday and get on a plane to visit Costa Rica for fun on Friday. Climate activism at the popular level is a virtue-signalling game. If we want to stop emissions we need to turn the global economy and its consumer activity into a smoking hole and keep it that way for centuries. And concurrently we need to transition to wind, solar, and nuclear.

I have the opposite view. No matter what individuals do, they won't turn the system around. Furthermore, a good % of consumption is B2B. There has to be a systemic ban on producing products that threaten the existence of life. Winning money is not an excuse to destroy the planet.

Yes, I know it's utopic, hard to regulate, implement and will never happen. But drastic decisions need to be made. People think we need cars so it's fine to destroy life to use cars. Well, humans lived a good bunch of years without cars, and humans won't be able to live when cars destroy the planet. So stop producing cars, stop producing fuel, and people will struggle but survive. Continue producing cars and fuel, and we'll all perish to greed and stupidity.

> I have the opposite view. No matter what individuals do, they won't turn the system around

I don't think we have opposite views; I don't think individuals will willingly stop consuming sources of emissions. "Systemic ban on producing products that threaten the existence of life" is what I mean by "turn the global economy into a smoking hole".

It would never fly politically, but we could effectively deal with nuclear waste in a future-proof way if we dissolved it into sea water. Uranium's natural concentration in sea water is 3 parts per billion and there are 1.3e21 kilograms of sea water. This comes out to 3.9e9 metric tons of uranium already in sea water; all these numbers utterly dwarf all the nuclear waste we could possibly ever create. Even when you consider that natural uranium is merely a toxic heavy metal and high grade radioactive waste is substantially more radioactive, that doesn't change much. The intensity of radioactive waste drops substantially if you store it even for just a few decades, which is probably unnecessary but certainly manageable.

I don't seriously propose this though, it would be pointless to propose because it would never be accepted. Even Japan dumping a tiny bit of tritium into the ocean has turned into a big controversy. Seriously suggest something like the above and most people will think you're an insane troll.

Far more politically expedient to shoot it into the sun.

Until a failure during boost results in radioactive debris scattered all over the place.

Rocket reliability has jumped over the last decade, and a trend that is likely to continue. But one could (and should) still encapsulate the material in an explosion-proof container.

That seems like an important idea. Has it been studied in depth? Ideas beyond the pale today, like geoengineering, can certainly fall inside the pale later.

I'd worry about how evenly the materials get distributed. Ocean currents are weird. The pacific garbage patch happened.

There's also another kind of doomerism, just as annoying: the one repeating "oh it goes in cycles, nature will recover" while blissfully ignoring that we probably are in position to influence and smooth out this cycle, instead of getting wiped out while nature will indeed recover in a way or another.

> We don't have enough raw materials in the world to replace the current oil grid with wind and solar

This is not true. None of the required materials are rare.

Here's the International Renewable Energy Agency arguing that scarcity needn't stop the green transition:

https://www.irena.org/News/expertinsights/2021/Nov/Materials...

Here’s an article presenting an opposing view. It’s not just a matter of planning ahead; it’s decades of work to scale up production given harder to reach deposits, more toxic by-products, and political hurdles, ironically from many environmentalists who are demanding the switch to green energy in the first place.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jimvinoski/2023/04/28/theres-no...

I personally don't care if you're frustrated by it. Things aren't looking good unless more is done.

"Things aren't looking good unless more is done" is literally the point of my comment.

geoengineering is the way out of this mess, not lifestyle change. see toplevel thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36616606

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