Comment by mseebach | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mseebach | Hacker News Reader

Most effort on the climate change front seems to be going towards linear solutions to essentially exponential problems: A few percent solar/wind in the grid mix, smart meters that allows utilization of those to go up a few percent, more expensive gas to discourage driving, incentives to buy more efficient vehicles. Encouraging better insulation of buildings.

But it's obvious that you can't fight an exponential battle with linear weapons.

Making cars run on an available non-fossil source of energy seems to be where the biggest win is - but it's much bigger task than inventing a good battery, electricity is still expensive, fossil in many places and the grids have nowhere near to capacity to sustain a large population of chargeable electrics. Bio-fuel tech is here, but we don't have the bio-mass to make it from. Etc.

The only area in this field that is ready for one-point disruption as far as I can tell is liquid bio-fuels. There is a world-wide mature infrastructure, and the market is hungering for a lower-cost alternative. I read about a bio-start-up that's developing an algae-catalysed process that converts sunlight and atmospheric carbon dioxide into a sort of crude oil that can be directly refined just like crude oil.

"Most effort on the climate change front seems to be going towards linear solutions to essentially exponential problems:"

Quote of the freaking century.

This is exactly the problem that most fail to realise.

This is not just a matter of replacing the current energy sources with greener alternatives.

This is about finding radically new ways to mine the universe for power because we sure are going to need it in order to survive and progress.

I concur - brilliant quote. I was thinking about this earlier today, how to put into words the seeming inadequacy of 'green' / 'alternative' energy projects. Some of them might really be good alternatives by now but what we really need is an 'exponential' breakthrough.

I actually live off the grid using a system of solar panels inverters and batteries (lead AGM batteries), the batteries are the most expensive part of the system, in the summer there is a lot of sun - I can cook with electricity, in the winter I'm using a netbook instead of the notebook to save electricity.

"I'm using a netbook instead of the notebook to save electricity." Why? A notebook uses less power than a lightbulb these days.

We don't use lightbulbs for lighting we use leds, so our lighting consumes less electricity than a notebook. In the evening I check how much electricity is left in accumulators and after using notebook in a cloudy day there is less electricity than after a netbook.

I didn't mean you had to use lightbulbs, I just wondered whether the difference between using a notebook and a netbook was actually significant. Do you by any chance know how much of a difference it makes (in energy)? I would be interested in knowing. :)

For Asus EePC it's about 20Wt for Toshiba Notebook it's about 40Wt.

Care to describe this in more detail?

I have:

two solar panels of about 70-100Wt (self made from ebay elements)

a bundle of two 200Ah 12V AGM accumulators

a cheap ($30) Chinese charge controller

a cheap Chinese invertor it writes on it 1500Wt but it sometimes stops on some 800Wt hardware (may be starting currents are too big)

I'm using the invertor for notebooks, water pump, blender, even when it doesn't have load it consumes about 0.4A/hour so we're turning it off, especially during winter. We're trying to use as much car chargers as possible also our led light is 12V linked directly to accumulators.

Do you manually repoint the panels based on season (for elevation)?

How far north are you?

No, they're positioned for winter position, because in the summer there is much more sun and accumulators are usually full.

Aren't most those solutions suppose to be applied by everyone, and therefore, it's a very large degree polynomial which could beat an exponential over a finite time frame?

Furthermore, electric cars are cheap to run... I heard a quote of £1.25 per hundred miles? They are expensive to buy and the range is a little on the small side, but both are improving (probably exponentially :P)

Cars are responsible for some 15% of carbon emissions globally. Even if we could replace all cars globally (a very long shot already), we haven't accounted for the fact that most electricity generated is by burning fossils. China is by far the biggest builder of new nuclear power, but they can't even keep up with their growth, much less overtake it.

Let's say we can get all cars replaced (meaning we fix range, cost, the sophistication required to service, grid capacity etc.), you've maybe shaved 5% off emissions - and that's a one-off, not a continuous improvement, the growth in carbon emissions keeps soldiering on.

It's irrelevant. We have to find ways of generating electricity cleanly anyway. So, we can kill 2 birds with one stone by making cars use that electricity. Better than driving hydrogen bombs around.

IMHO running out of fossil fuels and their escalating price is a much more compelling reason to use electric cars than the emissions argument.

>But it's obvious that you can't fight an exponential battle with linear weapons.

Well sure, but actually fixing the way our society runs to stop exponentially expanding our energy requirements would require, frankly, some minimal dose of social democracy. Can't have that!

I'm not sure what you're getting at. Yes, we can slow down the rate at which the rate of growth grows. We may even feel awfully good about that. But if any meaningful projection of climate data is to be believed, we don't need slower growth, we need a total collapse in emissions: we need to get to net negative emissions. Soon.

I think going green etc. is nice, and often just common sense with a new label on it. But very often it's just distracting from realising just what kind of breakthrough that is necessary.

Yes, we can slow down the rate at which the rate of growth grows

Yes, in the UK it's called taxing the hell out of everything. Petrol is now £1.42 a litre. That's right, A LITRE. That's about $8.50 a gallon. That'll make people use their cars less and move to more efficient vehicles very quickly.

you'd think so, but it probably doesn't make much of a difference. The london driving tax was supposed to make a difference, and I don't think it did much - there's not enough good alternatives.

there was some sarcasm meant in my comment but you are right of course, but unfortunately the way things are going we'll be forced to find an alternative cos we'll be priced out. Until that point governments know we will continue to pay and use it as a stealth tax. Yet we are still broke. And so the vicious cycle continues!

i couldn't tell if you were being sarcastic or not. it worked either way. ;)

What am I getting at? We need to shrink our energy usage. Efficiency gains are linear, energy use grows exponentially.

So what do we do? Try old-fashioned solutions like a healthy dose of localism and urban/geographical planning so that we exponentially decrease our energy requirements.

Manhattan is the greenest city in America, in the sense of spending the least energy per citizen.

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