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Comment by nocoiner | Hacker News Reader

He’s clearly wrong about one thing:

> Moving to Mars is a pipedream for 99.9999% of the population.

It’s actually a pipe dream for 100% of the population.

Slightly more seriously, I think he’s too pessimistic about the impact of renewable energy generation (contra his observations, Florida installed more solar capacity last year than any other state) and carbon sequestration. But I’m not highly confident in that assessment - maybe we are fucked. But I do think it’s more likely than not that human ingenuity and, believe it or not, capitalism (with a healthy dose of subsidies and industrial policy) will ultimately avert the truly dire scenarios.

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I've only heard that carbon sequestration is essentially a waste of time. Also thinking systemically we need to do more than address just carbon. Carbon is currently the primary focus, probably because it can be financialized, but we need to take basically every system we have and ensure it has useable outputs like natural systems do.

There are no practical carbon-capture storage technologies. I'm aware of at least one project by major engineering firms into actually implementing it - a serious attempt, by serious, experienced engineers, to make it work - that ended recently after years of effort with a final report that basically said "This doesn't work. Here's why..."

It's useful to the energy firms to keep the promise of CCS alive, but even if you have perfect capture at the point of generation, the problem of actually keeping it sequestered at any useful scale is unsolved.

The best CO2 sequestration technologies we have are soils, forests, plankton and seagrass. Unfortunately, all of them are being impacted by the effects of (mostly animal) agriculture and the fishing industry.

Act accordingly.

https://ourworldindata.org/drivers-of-deforestation

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jul/04/improvin...

Improving soil could keep world within 1.5C heating target, research suggests - better farming techniques across the world could lead to storage of 31 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide a year, data shows

https://academic.oup.com/icesjms/article/65/3/302/784343

Effects of climate and overfishing on zooplankton dynamics and ecosystem structure: regime shifts, trophic cascade, and feedback loops in a simple ecosystem

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/seagrass-ocean...

I flip-flop between optimism and pessimism on this and I’m in a pessimistic cycle at the moment.

I can also imagine the machinery of capitalism maybe working (I like the idea of declaring a ‘war on emissions’ popping a war revenue act for the highest earners and creating a new industry focused on reducing emissions).

But two things are fueling my pessimism: the first is that as a culture we’ve grown so used to a lifestyle (and economy) based on unsustainable use of our resources. I just can’t see a world where we take a step back from any of the modern conveniences we’ve gotten used to hanging.

I guess related to that: The free market is the most effective model, but that comes at cost of no protections for workers and resources, and that rewards exploitation.

I used to hope that I was wrong, now I mostly just hope that the worst results don’t happen in my own lifetime.

I'm in a similar place and have come to more or less the same conclusions regarding basically just trying to live it up while that's possible (Jim Morrison would say "I just want to get my kicks before the whole shithouse goes up in flames"). The several sigma temperature anomalies this year certainly didn't make me any more optimistic. And I get the impression that the scientists really don't have much clue about how this all ends anymore.

I used to feel jealous for children born after me because of all the things they'll get to see that I wont. These days I feel very much the opposite.

> now I mostly just hope that the worst results don’t happen in my own lifetime

I don't understand this point. It seems to me that the longer we wait for a collapse to happen, the worse it will be (as fewer resources will be left for rebuilding civilization).

What's the benefit of it happening in our children's lifetimes instead of our own, except for the fact that we get to continue unsustainable consumption a bit longer, rather than trying to change things?

Not all of us have children.

We are all but stewards for those who'll come after us.

Sooner or later there will be no one after - and it's sure looking like sooner to me. One reason of many for the no children.

Good ... you're further than the others. Now stop dwelling and get working so that doesn't happen.

Author here. I don't know where they installed those panels, because we drove 1800 miles through all sorts of areas and we hardly saw a single solar panel.

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