Comment by midoridensha | Hacker News Reader

Comment by midoridensha | Hacker News Reader

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>we have all the tools we need to 'avoid it' (and have had them for some time), but it will take at least one, if not two, orders of magnitude more effort than any previous project with a completely global scope.

Right, which is why it's simply not going to happen. It would take far too much effort, and also far too much cooperation between different nations that all intensely hate each other. On top of that, large parts of the the global population 1) don't believe the problem exists in the first place, 2) doesn't think it's technically possible to do anything about (i.e. they think it's mostly natural, even if it's real), or 3) think they shouldn't have to change their actions at all because they're mad that the rich countries got to burn lots of oil and then stick all humanity with the problems from it.

The problem is beyond fixing. Even if, for instance, Germany manages to become 100% carbon-neutral, that isn't going to help much when the USA and China and Russia and India are spewing out so much carbon and refuse to stop. The thing to do at this point is to understand and predict well what's coming, so that we can take measures to mitigate the effects at local scales.

The cheapest energy systems are the carbon free ones.

Maintaining a fossil fuel based energy system will be more expensive and costly than switching to a carbon free economy.

Every single delay in the transition is wasted money, a transfer to fossil fuel interests at the expense of all the rest of humanity. And once you add in the environmental externalities on top of just the pure cost, it becomes even more egregious.

Saying that it's impossible is as ridiculous as saying it's impossible for us to have built the huge energy system we have today. Rebuilding it all will take just a few percentage of global GDP, less than would be spent on fossil fuels, and create the infrastructure for cheaper more abundant energy, laying the groundwork for more technological advancement.

Instead of repeating tired narratives of the past, it's time to start thinking critically and apply even the tiniest amount of skepticism to the received wisdom of entrenched interests. We only hurt ourselves when we wear the rose-colored glasses that let us live with the out-dated "truths" of the 20th century.

It's time for us to advance technologically.

> The cheapest energy systems are the carbon free ones

I would really like to believe this claim to be true.

Unfortunately my recent real-world data points gathered as a consumer while doing such mundane stuff as heating and powering my home and fueling my ageing vehicles leave me wondering what I'm missing.

I'd love to drive an EV. I'd love to have PV at home. A geothermal heat pump would be nice, too.

I just haven't got enough spare money to make any of these choices until they get considerably cheaper.

I think when they say "systems" they are referring to large grid scale energy generation systems, not what you can install at home, which is necessarily more expensive per unit energy than at grid scale.

Ok fair, but that has very little to do with utility sized energy production which I assume the OP is talking about.

Well the OP claimed "Maintaining a fossil fuel based energy system will be more expensive and costly than switching to a carbon free economy. Every single delay in the transition is wasted money."

The key question would be: expensive for whom?

Take a look at "Why is cheap renewable electricity so expensive?"[0] (published last week) which details the changes in electricity generation in the UK:

'The proportion of electricity generated [..] by renewables has increased from 3% in 2000 to 42% in 2022, whereas the proportion generated by fossil fuels has decreased from 73% in 2000 to 41% in 2022'

...but thanks to marginal cost pricing consumers don't see this because...

"The wholesale price of all electricity is set by the most expensive method of producing electricity, which is usually from burning gas"

[0] https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/why-is-cheap-renewable-...

Wait, so you have this whole document you can produce about how renewable energy is cheaper, but you started with complaints about how it's not cheaper?

Very odd. Almost as if you are not trying to argue based on data, but just being contrarian.

> renewable energy is cheaper

Again: cheaper for whom? Are we talking producers or consumers?

> Very odd

Renewables being cheaper unfortunately doesn't mean the electricity consumers purchase will necessarily be cheaper, at least not if we use the current market approaches and rely on gas to top up what can't be provided elsewhere.

PV+storage with subsidies (which I count as the regulator pricing in positive externalities) should be economical in large parts of the world. Where do you live?

Although household power prices have risen steadily over the last 20 years (and increased not so steadily in the last two!), PV feed-in tarifs have been falling relentlessly (see slide 41 from https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/content/dam/ise/de/documents/p... for specific data) so as far as I can tell, the ROI period for household PV still seems to be measured in decades.

You probably don't need a geothermal (i.e. ground source) heat pump.

They rarely make financial sense against modern air source heat pumps. Spend the saved money from digging on insulation and PV instead.

> I just haven't got enough spare money to make any of these choices

No, you haven’t got credit. Solar panels pay for themselves like 3 or 4 times 9n their lifespan. We had a period of zero-interest rates, we could have bought everyone solar panels.

But our bankers are too busy playing with fictitious derivatives instead of providing favourable credit to honest homeowners for renewables investment.

> But our bankers are too busy playing with [..]

It's not clear that our politicians are actually particularly serious about change, either. The only big change I've noticed this side of the pond in the last year is that our drink cartons now have tethered plastic caps.

OK, they're still made of bonded layers of cardboard, aluminium and polyethylene which make them hard work to recycle, and according to a 2021 German study indeed less than 1/3rd of them are actually recycled ...

...but at least now the hard-to-recycle plastic lids now stay attached to the empty and hard-to-recycle cartons!

<sigh>

> Every single delay in the transition is wasted money

About ten years ago I realized that solar, wind, and batteries were going to beat fossil fuels on pure balance sheet accounting. Bonus: better long term risk. Were now in a rentier capitalist stages of grief situation where they're having to deal with all their fossil fuel based assets being suddenly worthless. But there is nothing they can do to stop what's coming.

>Every single delay in the transition is wasted money, a transfer to fossil fuel interests at the expense of all the rest of humanity.

Ok, exactly how do you propose to: 1) Get China to stop building more coal-burning power plants, and 2) Get Americans (and others) to start building and moving to dense, walkable cities and stop driving SUVs?

The problem isn't "fossil fuel interests", it's a very large number of "normal" people who refuse to change their lifestyles, plus various authoritarian governments that refuse to change their trajectories.

The only way you can "rebuild it all" is to somehow take control of the whole world militarily and set up a single global authoritarian government to do all this. Trying to get the world's existing governments, some authoritarian (and not caring about the problem) and others democratic (with most of their populations refusing to change their lifestyles), is like herding cats. What you want to do is technically possible, but politically completely impossible. Getting everyone to work together just to deal with a virus turned out to be a disaster, in case you forgot that.

I would only disagree in one part of this:

>The problem isn't "fossil fuel interests",

I would say it's not "just" fossil fuel interests. But they are playing a huge part in this - particularly in sowing misinformation about clean technologies, and how being carbon neutral will mean the end of your life, or that some kid in a country you've never been to will be digging stuff out of the ground for your EV/solar panel. Most of which isn't actually true (or is a minority case), but they have successfully made everyone think that it is.

I actually read people on here (who I'm assuming are intelligent) last week saying they were not going to give up any part of their current lifestyle to reduce emissions, so you're right in that respect. It's like dealing with stroppy 8 year-olds in many cases.

But I do think that it's still worth countries who can do (democratic ones) going ahead anyway. The only way will be to do this, otherwise it'll be game over.

It's game over.

>I actually read people on here (who I'm assuming are intelligent) last week saying they were not going to give up any part of their current lifestyle to reduce emissions, so you're right in that respect. It's like dealing with stroppy 8 year-olds in many cases.

Exactly. And these aren't people in authoritarian countries; there are people in democratic nations. If politicians try to hard to push these people to give up their current lifestyles, they'll be voted out.

>But I do think that it's still worth countries who can do (democratic ones) going ahead anyway.

What we're going to get is some smaller, rich, democratic nations like Netherlands and Finland making real changes, and not making any significant change planet-wide because these places are small and have little population compared to India, China, and USA. Meanwhile, Americans will still be driving everywhere in 6000-pound SUVs (some of which might become EVs, but lots of EVs still means lots of electricity needed, which has to come from somewhere) and heating and cooling their huge 5000 square foot (464 square meters) homes, and China will still be running coal-fired power plants and probably building even more so their people can live more like Americans, etc. etc.

I simply see no way that you're going to get most of humanity to agree to the degree of changes in energy use and emissions output needed within the next 5 years to head off a climate catastrophe. Making significant and meaningful changes in 100 years isn't going to help because it's going to be much too late. Basically, we're like the Titanic, 30 seconds before it hits the iceberg: there's simply no practical way to change course at this point. The best thing to do is stop arguing how to avoid the iceberg, and start talking about who gets the lifeboats.

> The best thing to do is stop arguing how to avoid the iceberg, and start talking about who gets the lifeboats.

Obviously the people with the most money and/or the biggest guns.

I don't think the outcome is anywhere near as binary as you suggest, and there is a way to reduce emissions while increasing or maintaining living standards; you pay the price of development to make renewable options the best choice.

I will continue to shill https://makesunsets.com

Does the page take over scrolling? Not a good sign for somebody who wants to take control over our climate.

*edit: The downvotes are fair for the level of snark. Still, as I cannot judge the validity of the approach, shouldn't I be skeptical when there is an inclination to change more than necessary?

At least for me, the page keeps scrolling for a short moment, unlike other pages like HN. It's tasteful, but unnecessary.

Shouldn't I be skeptical when there is an inclination to change more than necessary?

No you should not. This is not a website where they present a new web framework that respects your browser.

What are the odds that we end up just making things worse.

I live in Australia and think of the cane toads being introduced to eat the cane beetle. In this can I worry we overdo it and cause an ice age.

My worry is that by applying quick fix bandaids we avoid tackling the real problem and are not forced to decarbonize. Then we're stuck with more and more fixes in the future and who knows what side effects it'll have.

I don’t think anyone is avoiding the problem, I think people are just unsure about what the best solution is. We could have replaced coal with nuclear in the 70s but that was ‘too risky’ for the average environmentalist, so we are putting out bets on developing renewables faster than climate changes occur.

We merely trade one risk for another, there is never a silver bullet. Most climate skeptics are happy to take the risk that the models aren’t accurate or the scientists doom predictions don’t occur. I think there’s a chance the models are wrong but I’d prefer to take the pain/risk of trying to reduce the potential for a problem before it’s too late.

> I don’t think anyone is avoiding the problem

Oil and gas companies would probably come to mind. If we apply quick fixes, you can be sure O&G will be lobbying hard not to do anything to restrict their operations.

I wouldn’t call that avoiding the problem. No one expects oil and gas companies to shut down until we have something to replace them. Renewables haven’t been very effective yet (just look at Germany) so we still need oil and gas companies to function (eg just stop oil all using iPhones and Macs).

I’m guessing you still use products made from fossil fuels: would you say that you are avoiding the problem? Or would you say you a just being pragmatic? It’s easy to point fingers but unless you are living in a hut in the woods you will still be contributing to GHG.

It's actually easy to point fingers when you're aware of the tactics used by O&G. Examples:

* They knew about climate change a long time ago, yet decided to use tobacco industry playbook rather than try to be part of the solution.

* They obfuscated plastic recycling on purpose (do you know the difference between PET-1 and PET-2, why does the plastic type symbol look exactly like the universal symbol for recycling?)

* Even more recently, they branded the term 'clean coal' and had different media outlets and politicians parrot it around.

* Established fake grassroots movements to make it look like people support whatever shit they do.

These and many other violations are discussed in the excellent YouTube channel Climate Town.

If we do quick fixes, O&G will absolutely use the opportunity to keep pushing their garbage and hinder other progress.

Thanks for the youtube suggestion, I'll check it out. The only one I'm aware of is the PR firm that worked with BP to develop the recycling concept. Maybe I'm being too easy on them.

Can I ask why?

I don't think there is much scientific evidence it is safe to do and the last people I would want engaging in geo engineering would be a VC funded startup.

> It would take far too much effort, and also far too much cooperation between different nations that all intensely hate each other.

I share your pessimistic assessment and I would frame it differently. The thing that strikes me, above all, is that this is the first project that really requires cooperation on this scale. Basically everything before was possible with smaller groups following their own incentives (basically bog standard capitalism). The cost of cooperation was not worth the returns.

This is different - we need to learn to cooperate on a previously unheard of scale - and (as you note) we need to learn to cooperate in a way where we don't totally trust others. I just saw Oppenheimer so, to draw a historic analogy, it's like you have to run the Manhatten project...but also actively share work with Russian and Nazi scientists to finish the project earlier than US science could alone. It's on an entirely different level of difficulty that we have never really needed to attempt previously.

For instance - are oil & gas companies being disruptive and acting in bad faith? Yes. Do we need them to stop? Absolutely. Probably the easiest way is to reward their bad faith action if they will really start cooperating. At this stage we need them to be winners. Justice is a luxury for people who are in less dire conditions.

> Even if, for instance, Germany manages to become 100% carbon-neutral, that isn't going to help much

I think you're totally wrong on this and I encourage you to look into the science on it. We can make the planet as hot as we want. Every bit of warming emission hurts. I'd also argue that, in the same way that California standards change things across the US (because they are so big) the developed world truly abandoning carbon would dramatically impact the rest of the world.

>I think you're totally wrong on this and I encourage you to look into the science on it. We can make the planet as hot as we want. Every bit of warming emission hurts.

It does, but it's not a linear relationship. Everything I've read talks about a "tipping point" and exponential curve: basically, once you get past a certain point, it starts snowballing. Critical ocean currents stop working the normal way, etc. Germany becoming carbon neutral just isn't enough to avoid this. Germany isn't that big an emitter when compared to everyone else.

>I'd also argue that, in the same way that California standards change things across the US (because they are so big) the developed world truly abandoning carbon would dramatically impact the rest of the world.

Germany is not "the developed world". It's not even much of a leader of it. The US is, and the US is NOT going to become carbon-neutral (or even close to it) in our lifetimes. And even if they did, somehow, there's still China.

China is currently the country that builds the most renewable energy. Their energy production through solar exceeds that of the rest of the world (!). Thanks to the Biden administration, the US is currently at least trying to catch up to that.

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