Hacker News Reader

> Focusing on "solutions" that address less than a percent of a percent of emissions is a distraction

A "percent of a percent" is of the order of scale of 0.01%. Airplanes account for 2.5% to 3.5% of all global emissions [1] and are emitted by only 11% of the population [2]. That's an error ratio of 300. If you're advocating for awareness in picking effective solutions, I think numbers should matter.

> Push any non-carbon energy source you like - nuclear, solar, wind, geothermal, it doesn't matter.

Yes,but all of these sources produce electricity, that's great for EVs, but planes don't run on electricity, they use carbon-energy (and this is not ready to change for commercial flying). Even if every country gets equipped with top quality nuclear plants, it will change anything for airplanes. Electrical and oxygen airplanes are very far from any real proposition.

I completely agree with you in being effective and very rational when picking solutions and advocating for them. I also think that we must be fair to future generations and to lower social classes. In this view, I think that we should (at least) stop encouraging flying and start encouraging trains, or just more local activities. Whether we must discourage it is another question, for which I have no answer.

[1]: https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions-from-aviation [2]: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S095937802...

> also think that we must be fair to future generations and to lower social classes

The people who fly most intensely are also in a prime position to fund meaningful carbon offsets, e.g. direct-air capture by Climeworks [1]. Railing against aviation in general is, in my opinion, pure virtue signaling. Arguing for taxing aviation to fund climate mitigation makes more sense.

[1] https://climeworks.com

Of course, I agree that taxing kerosene is what makes the more sense. There are so many great uses of airplanes ! I also really hope that one day, net-zero aviation will work, and for that to happen we must not discourage the research. I was just pointing out that it's false to say that aviation is not a problem.

God I absolutely despise direct air capture as any kind of argument for not doing something to reduce fossil fuel emissions.

It never, never makes sense in any realistic forseeable future scenario (ie not the pure fantasy that keeps getting thrown around) to capture and store CO2 at 500 or so ppm this way when it is far far far easier to not pull it out of the ground and emit it in the first place.

Atm it barely makes sense for easy industry CCS where it's done where the US gov subsidises it to reduce the price of co2 for enhanced oil recovery.

It's tantamount to arguing we should jump of the cliffs of dover because we can potentially climb back straight upwards fully disregarding the fact that if you survive no matter which way you turn it, whether you add stairs or elevators, it will always be more of a hassle getting back up than taking that one step of the ledge.

> when it is far far far easier to not pull it out of the ground

It is easier to not change how millions of people travel. If we aren’t doing direct air capture, we’ll still have the air travel. It’s a stupid place to try and optimise, and seems more a rhetorical tar pit than place where anyone seriously argues about carbon reduction.

Of the dozens of times I've flown, only once had it ever been urgent. From what I know of my colleagues and family, the vast majority of air travel is for pleasure. And we live in a country which does not afford us land travel to other countries of interest.

>It is easier to not change how millions of people travel.

Only if you assume we don't have to pull our co2 emissions down drastically in the first place.

>If we aren’t doing direct air capture, we’ll still have the air travel.

And if we'd account for the effort and cost of the direct air capture to offset it we'd have almost no air traffic and most of would remain would be less practical and fast. We'd have had so so much more runway on this issue if people were willing to go for even just the low hanging fruit. As it stands it appears we and you in particular don't even want to tacle the low hanging fruit wrt this part of the issue and so I presume in general.

My immediate thought was that they were describing non-commercial flights fyi. I imagine the numbers for that market are on the order of <0.1% but I'm curious if there are any hard numbers for it!

Your claim makes no sense. Any move towards reducing carbon will require many 1% improvements.

Personal aviation isn’t a problem because it’s the rich doing it, but because it’s extremely expensive, and in the vast majority of cases there is a much better alternative (flying commercial).

If there’s an easy way to knock out 0.1-0.5% of emissions you absolutely take it, even if in itself it doesn’t achieve everything we need, but it gets us closer.

And that’s before we consider the psychological/political impacts of telling a farmer to buy a new truck while not saying anything to a celebrity traveling in a private plane that will emit more carbon in a month than that farmer’s dirty truck would in its lifetime.

general aviation today is archaic specifically because of regulation making it impossible to innovate in the space. In the US leaded gas is still used. Relaxing the rules and allowing people to experiment with things such as hybrid electric propulsion gets us much closer to the ideal of carbon free aviation.

Regarding optimization, I always see this in software. People ruining the system chasing 1% improvements and locking in a local optimum by making it harder to perform the design level optimization that actually moves the needle. Imagine your CRUD system is full of selectN+1s and some well meaning engineer comes along and rewrites a bunch of code paths in raw SQL, making it harder to adopt automatic joining.

There is also no single catch-all solution to carbon emissions. There are 10,000 solutions that each only fix 0.01% of the problem. If we refuse to pursue any of the solutions because they only contribute a little to solving the problem in totality then we end up solving none of the problem.

not really, most of carbon emission is because either clean generation, storage or distribution of power is inadequate. Solar has been making strides in displacing daytime peak generation, batteries are ever improving, making zero carbon land vehicles viable. Distribution is top of mind for a lot of people these days. Carbon capture is getting closer to viable. Cutting single digit percentages of emissions here and there by banning things humanity actually needs is counterproductive at best

To drive this even further, you can solve the problem of inefficiencies by making energy consumption cheaper or energy cleaner.

Electric cars cause a ton of emissions through increased tire wear, road maintenance and by having much larger wheel-bases[1]. The US has 3x the per-capita emissions of comparable nations and cars are just part of the equation. [2]

A well designed city needs to be compact, use transit and promote walkability. If every Californian uses the $7500 carbon subsidy, then that's a $200 billion handout by the Govt. to promote electric vehicles. Even at American construction costs (which is its own nightmare), that should be enough to make the Bay Area and Los Angeles transit heaven. (with sufficient up zoning ofc).

My hot take is that electric cars & solar walls are the feel good moral-victories of those who refuse to make changes to the fundamentally unsustainable nature of their life-style. (I don't mean you. But a large enough cohort of Bay Area tech people fit this mold).

[1] https://dynomight.net/tires/

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_di... _____________

A few genuine questions

> pressuring the electric company to add storage to the grid

My understanding was that grid-scale energy storage was a pipe dream, and that the base-load issue meant that gas/nuclear were essential to a fully renewable grid. Has anything changed over the last few years ? In the immediate future, electric cars will make the base load problem a LOT LOT worse.

> My solar install

What is the life-span of your solar wall ? Batteries don't seem to have great lifespans, and the use-and-throw nature of it makes me want to prefer a hybrid. At least with petroleum cars, most of it was metal that could be melted and recovered. Is that true with batteries as well ?

This completely overlooks the psychological aspect, which is that the 1% is perfectly happy to fly to Davos every year in their hundreds of private jets, where they all sit together in a large room and tell us to stop flying, damnit, because it is killing the planet!

Sure, their one flight doesn't change anything. _Neither does mine_, when I fly a few times per year to get to another part of the world. Yet somehow my flight is considered "part of a large group and therefore dangerous", and theirs is not?

If the 1% wants to have moral authority, they should lead from the front: they should stop flying altogether, and limit themselves to low-carbon activities they can reach by train. Either we are all in this together, or it is nothing more than yet another pathetic power grab by people that already have too much of it anyway.