Ask HN: Manhattan Project for Climate?

There is nobody in world leadership positions who seriously cares about this beyond lip service. The UN will discuss it once in a while but the Security Council members just don't want to make the sacrifices. And in domestic elections it's not even an issue compared to like guns and abortions and, always, the economy. Really it comes down to the US and China and neither one wants to change the status quo because it means they will sacrifice.

It's a lot easier to get funding for some immediate, foreign looking enemy. The Axis powers drove us to the Manhattan project. Hard to instill that same sense of urgency in the politicos when the threat is always like 50 years away and not simply somebody they can bomb.

But it isn't a tech problem. It is a social problem.

Our society is not sustainable as-is. We don't need new tech to make the status quo sustainable, we need actual societal change. Less travel, more localization. Less cars, more public transport. Grow, shop, and consume local resources. Share talents to make that work. Build community, not corporations, etc.

Tech doesn't stop us from doing all that. What stops us is that many people don't want those changes.

What you’re describing sounds like the least likely of all outcomes, that people travel less, consume fewer goods produced far away, and become more pro social. The most likely outcome, imho sadly, is environmental and economic collapse. A tech miracle that saves our butts is a long shot but possible. But everyone behaving better and the world deglobalizing seems far-fetched to me.

Why not both? A tech miracle is a roll of the dice, and if we fuck up (which is a serious possibility), then it's over. No rerolls, no mulligan, no Player 2 "Switch to Luigi" mode. It's over.

So foremost, we should seek to make the most of the time we have. Even if we're fully trusting science, maximizing the time researchers have is the most important thing we can do. If we don't prioritize better individual life practices, then we're actively fucking over science and technology. No matter how you frame it, the single most important focus has to be more sustainable lifestyles.

I'm not saying what we should do, or what I'd like to happen. I'm saying what I expect to happen.

I'm a born cynic, so it could just be me, but I am not at all optimistic at this moment that humanity will overcome climate change without suffering massively, if it survives at all.

Fair enough. I'm a born pragmatist, so I hear that sort of wishcasting and fear the worst in people. I'm still open to a technological miracle saving us all, but I wouldn't count on it happening in anyone's lifetime.

Absolutely criminal that this is downvoted at all. Probably because it's not what anyone wants to hear: consume less and localize - the via negativa. Harms the sensibilities of all the big players.

The techno-entreprenerd idealist wants to blow up and burn even more shit with techno-experimental abominations in an effort to somehow counteract all the shit that's been burned and blown up, all so he can continue to burn and consume and devour the way he always has. Even though he doesn't believe in miracles, he somehow thinks he's going to create one - fucking moron. In doing so, he'll introduce even more unknown unknowns that will cause even more problems, mostly for the poorest people on the planet.

The ones with their heads in the sand want to keep going deeper and keep burning ever more fuel beneath it. They won't be consuming less anytime soon either.

Nobody wants to change and there's nothing that can be done about that. Time and natural calamities will make the change for these people. Just do what you can to take care of and localize yourself and your family. That's all you can do.

Tech is probably the only practical way that could be fixed, as unlikely as it is. Trying to force people to make do with less is not a winning proposition for a political party, and many people are not going to change their lifestyles willingly.

So a possible tech breakthrough is going to be the only thing that can save us here.

> Trying to force people to make do with less is not a winning proposition for a political party

There are so many assumptions baked into that sentence it is hard to know where to start. But it exemplifies the problem - we're talking about the survival of the species, and people are shutting the conversation down because they are locked into thinking of things in terms of the status quo.

The changes we need are going to come from a much larger re-thinking of our world.

Not sure why it's such a weird assumption that humanity is generally self interested and treats those in their immediate group/area as more important than anything else.

For many people, the issue is that they'll only do anything to change their lifestyle once the problem directly starts affecting them and the people they know. Those in some distant country affected by heatwaves and extreme temperatures? Sadly for many people, their response is basically "not my problem" (even if in practicality it at least partly is).

Is that the status quo? Yes, but for many people, they kinda like the status quo, and don't want to change. They don't seem climate change as a huge emergency (and on some parts of the political spectrum outright consider it left wing propoganda or something from an illuminati style conspiracy) and the political systems of today are not well tailored to dealing with it.

It's easy to talk about re-thinking the world, but how do you think humanity would do that? Why would humanity change their attitudes on these things after centuries of self interest and tribalism?

Switching to regenerative farming, which cuts the demand for fertilizers, and sinks massive amounts of carbon into the soil as it regenerates it from plain old dirt, can take about 1/5 of our carbon out of the air on its own, while continuing to feed all of us.

Massively scaling up fission power, beefing up the grid, and finding ways to adapt to the cycles of power availability from solar and wind, could go a long way towards cutting our emissions. Especially if we can electrify all of rail transport.

The reason we're wasting so much time is that the 0.01% who own most of the world profit from the status quo, and don't want change. They are quite willing to burn this world for more money.

Nuclear is not option. It's very expensive, slow to plan, build and operate, quite dangerous in operation and waste it creates and political risky, now that russia has a major control of nuclear fuel. Fusion is not even usable in the near future. And even the benefits are not good enough to justify all those problems. There is no single solution for our problem. We need a dozen of them to reshape the world, and at no phase has nuclear a place, because it will always take to long and too much money.

How are they dangerous? Modern western nuclear reactors literally can't explode.

Also looking at Uranium production by country, Russia isn't anywhere near the top producer.

https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-c...

It's not about the location of the mines, but who own the mines and facilities. And Russia is owning the majority of production worldwide at the moment.

There is also something about not any plant being able to use any random fuel rodes from everywhere, but having some dependencies. Which is why France still needs to buy from Russia, despite the sanctions. But this is probably only for old plant I guess.

> I am trying to understand why we are wasting so much time in getting there

I think many people here have touched on important reasons why we are wasting time (e.g., governments paying lip service to the problem).

But I think something that hasn't been mentioned yet is that the emerging climate crisis won't be described as a climate crisis.

Instead, it will be described by its indirect effects.

For example, we will have mass flooding problems. We will have mass migration problems. We will have crop failures and famine problems, etc.

And political entities won't say "this is a climate problem."

Instead, they will argue/wage-war/whatever by saying, "We've got to stop this migration at our border." Or "We've had horribly bad look with historic flooding."

If there were an asteroid heading for earth, we could (probably) all band together and try to deal with it because most people could understand the direct effects of an asteroid hit.

But climate change is more subtle and slowly evolving. So, it's easier to convince people that it's just a hoax.

Obviously, I'm speaking from a US-centric point of view. I'm not sure how the rest of the world thinks about this issue.

The issue is that we've relied on hydrocarbons for so long that switching off means significant change at basically every level of the stack. Let's take the transition to EV vehicles as an example. To do this you need to build charging infrastructure along common and uncommon routes. Do all houses need home chargers now? What about people who use street parking only? To make the switch worthwhile you need the utilities to switch the power base to renewables. Oh and with the switch, we're now more than 2xing the amount of electricity we need to generate. So now we need to upgrade our transmission lines to carry a lot more energy. And the grid in general needs to be smarter since renewables aren't consistent in energy output. EVs need less maintenance but it's more specialized so now we need to retrain all the mechanics. Oh and how do we do this with affordable prices?

We have to make a lot of changes across virtually the entire economy including equipment/factories etc that have lifespans in 30, 50,100 years. There are major questions about how fast we can accelerate the timelines as we basically reinvent ourselves

This is true but I also would caution against thinking we need to solve everything all at once. For example, EV charging is a real concern but a pretty small fraction of people need to drive more than 60 or so miles per day, so even a regular extension cord will work for them. That doesn’t mean we don’t need to address the others but if everyone who has access to a plausible EV charging situation, take transit, etc. now actually did the resulting plummet in emissions would buy many years in which to solve the harder problems. (As would not subsidizing SUVs, etc. – every bit counts)

This is going to be a huge transformation so we really need to make sure perfect isn’t the enemy of the good.

Turns out we should have left all the trolley wires and electrified rails in and swapped the power supply upstream. Although if we had done that a lot of our hydrocarbon dependency would have been prevented in the first place.

Well, world is complex, there exists more than five ways you mentioned, and even more than you mentioned, combined with comments on this post.

But overall, all them need huge investments, to make huge enough technologies shifts.

And unfortunately, there are not just money investments, but they also need some scarce resources, even human resources are not abundant.

On other side, as we all could see here on HN, humanity is really close to AGI, which could solve issue with human resources, and even more, read more :)

I think, modern market civilization, could continue grow without continue grow use terrestrial resources, by invest in space industries - mining asteroids, produce at least enriched metal concentrates in space.

What slows progress of space industries, mostly, asteroids too far from Earth for just radio remote control, because of speed of light limitation. Solution is obvious - create space enterprise, controlled by AGI.

I see pair of space industry + AGI, as gamechanger, which could alone, without significant shifts in other technologies, solve Earth crisis.

And unfortunately, all these bright future things will not appear instant, even optimistic forecast, will spend decades to start this flywheel spin, and all this time will continue warming, but once, may be in 30-40 years from now, will achieve climate plateau, and than will see pivot and slowly cooling.

Theoretically, all industries you and comments mentioned, are big industries, so you could just build your own big enterprise, using some super-cool new technologies and change yourself things to better. But in practice, you anyway need somewhere got bright people to work with, and as I said, bright people are not abundant. So, looks like, we are now fortunate got good tickets, and we will build these new industries with AI tech.

As example of resources scarcity, just now, even without significant shift to EV, appear very serious deficit of EV support engineers, and also, exist huge deficit of support of EV chargers, even somebody calculated and seen, need significant changes into power grid, existing could not feed enough power to EV chargers if they will grow to proposed numbers.

Plus, seen not considered problems, firefighters complain they have not enough special tools for EV fires.

With AI also seen not considered problems, AI servers with modern GPUs consume too much energy and exhaust too much heat for existing DCs, so need to create new power generating and make bigger DCs.

> I am trying to understand why we are wasting so much time in getting there

You’re trying too hard and missing the obvious answer.

As a global society, we just don’t care at all. Too many people are struggling today to care about what life will be like in 30, 50, 100, or 200 years. Too many people are getting rich because of (not in spite of) the damage we’re doing to the planet. Too many people are too satisfied with their current life to even consider changing it.

There’s nothing to speed up. What you’re imagining isn’t coming in 50 years or 500 years.

As stated in Bill Gate's book [summary: 1], there are basically 5 issues to deal with: automobile transportation, energy (industrial/housing), airplanes, cement, and cows.

All of these will require multifaceted, long term solutions to get to net-zero carbon emissions. An opinion (no necessarily in the book) is that we need short term solutions to bridge the gap. This is not talked about enough. For example, sequestration to start removing the carbon from the atmosphere and climate engineering to reflect solar insolation back out of the atmosphere before it has a chance to get into the heat trap.

Off the top of my head, short term solutions could include putting sulphur back into shipping fuel [notes: 2](probably a bad idea), but other similar things could be investigated. The math needs to be done on whether it would be a net win for humanity. Perhaps there are additives to put into aircraft fuel that could mimic the effect of a volcanic eruption? Probably not even all of the 100,000 flights per day would need to carry it.

This recent post [3] on creating a stable carbon brick that claims $100 per ton will hopefully play out and scale up. Something like $200 billion per year for 20-30 years would solve it. That's a lot of money but on a global scale it's really not. I'm not a fan of nuclear (my first job was at a nuclear power plant), but I would be ok with its use to power sequestration at a massive scale.

All of these should be done - if they aren't already - while working on the decarbonization of the five things.

[1]https://medium.com/feedium/book-summary-how-to-avoid-climate...

[2] https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-how-low-sulphur-shippin...

[3] https://www.geekwire.com/2023/bill-gates-backed-startup-can-...

Coal consumption is still increasing, even as wealthier countries have moved to cleaner options: https://www.iea.org/news/global-coal-demand-set-to-remain-at...

It's seems likely the wealthiest nations will genuinely reduce their emissions, but they're likely to be offset by the emissions elsewhere.

I'd bet my mortal soul that you cannot "Manhattan project" humanity back into perfect harmony with nature in 100 years. The first Manhattan project made sure of that. Every time, greed and fear will outpace benevolent innovative contributions. Resource competition, hoarding and paperclip maximizing is our only mode of civilized existence.

I hate to be the one to say it, but us starry-eyed Silicon Valley nerds aren't going to put the genie back into the bottle.

Or to quote Einstein, "A new type of thinking is essential if mankind is to survive and move toward higher levels."

>I hate to be the one to say it, but us starry-eyed Silicon Valley nerds aren't going to put the genie back into the bottle.

Webshit was just the beginning. Why not mastery of superintelligent agents capable of planetary-scale solutions—on the first try? We can do this.

It will only work once you plug it into the Blockchain.

Brett Victor’s perspective is as relevant as ever: http://worrydream.com/ClimateChange/

As commented here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38244827

I fundamentally reject the notion that we can't sustainably pull all this carbon out of the air. Part of why we have problems with forest fires today is vast over planting of forests in the past (as told to me by a firefighter involved in such management). Further, pull up the xkcd on energy densities by type - uranium is off the charts and many orders of magnitude greater than fossil fuels. Much of the perceived lack of solutions stems from a forced ignorance of the past and centuries of success with large scale projects ala the highway system, the Hoover Dam, Social Security, nuclear powered vessels, etc.

Further, trying to force people to live with less is a losing proposition. Water is life-societies with less water scarcity tend to have less war/violence. Similar is probably a truism for food and generally personal liberties.

Then there's the resources dissolved in the oceans water. Huge amounts of everything we could ever need (lithium, gold, uranium, etc). Pull an amount of carbon out of the ocean and the ocean will pull that amount of carbon out of the atmosphere. Plus, of course, nearly limitless fresh water once desalinated.

The Earth is an absolute gem of diverse life sustaining resources. Just don't be self destructive.

We don't need more research or missing some key technology. Its only a motivation problem at this point.

Even battery tech is _way_ more advanced than the current lithium that is cheaply available - only the demand isn't there because its already so cheap - thats again a motivation problem to get the demand up and costs down for alternatives.

We know how to build energy neutral houses (well insulated, produce their own energy/heat, ...) and can produce food much more locally (see how the dutch deliver produce to around the world with minimal resource/land usage, look at what solarfoods is doing, ...) and also energy neutral.

transport can be shifted to EV public transport to a quite large degree, the energy coming from renwewables. excess renewable energy can be used for hydrogen production which then can act as portable fuel, maybe even used for airplanes one way or the other.

... but all this stuff costs money. money that ordinary people right now are severely lacking, because a few people are hoarding all of it instead. take that money away, use it for fundamental infrastructural projects, done by local companies in parallel (not one megacorp), which creates tons of jobs, which stimulates the economy. Like a green new deal.

This all can be achieved here and now, and once going the prices for relevant materials/tech plummet, and not so rich countries can also start doing it.

Why are people preferring to work themselves into poverty for some billionaires' profits instead? the point of a government is that it oversees areas like the economy and course-corrects when something goes wrong. if everyone including elected politicians worship some capitalism god instead, there is a need to change personell, maybe have a look into alternatives to vote for instead of the past parties that don't act on the important issues?

I fail to understand how one may think nuclear as part of any realistic approach.

For one cranking up new reactors became too difficult a long time ago. France (Flamanville-3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flamanville_Nuclear_Power_Plan... , also in Finland https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olkiluoto_Nuclear_Power_Plant#... ) and the US (Vogtle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vogtle_Electric_Generating_Pla... ) projects are horrifically over-budget and late.

China, often presented as building reactors at a fast pace, only produces about 6% of electricity with 50GW nominal electric power, and long-term plans for future capacity are up to 200 GW by 2035 ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_China ): 7.7% of predicted total electricity generating capacity. Given that their previous long-term plan failed flat this meek result even remains to be seen. China already has 253GW solar and 281GW wind (plan for combined solar and wind: 1,200 gigawatts by 2030) ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_in_China , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power_in_China ). Even taking into account the load factor seeing there some 'nuclear renaissance' seems difficult.

Then there is peak uranium. "identified uranium reserves recoverable at US$130/kg ((...)) At the rate of consumption in 2017, these reserves are sufficient for slightly over 130 years of supply". It means that quadrupling the meek world nuclear fleet (which provides about 2.5% of final energy) would limit, under current conditions, the lifetime of all reactors to about 30 years. Betting on some new way to quickly obtain huge amounts of good uranium at low cost would be funny, as the uranium bubble of 2007 massively bumped up exploration with tiny results (+ ~15% up in reserves). Good luck to finance this. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium_mining#Peak_uranium

Strategy also chimes in. Nearly all uranium mining is, directly or indirectly, under the aisle of a politically-loaded power (either Russia, the US or China): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:World_Uranium_Mining_Prod... Therefore nations trying to reduce their influence on them will try hard to avoid becoming dependent on uranium, and nation accepting this will only bet if the power also bets on it, enforcing the uranium peak.

Waste management remains a major challenge. Not a single nation solved it. The more advanced ones (Finland and Korea) don't even enjoy a working solution for the lifetime of their current reactor fleet.

Then there is the NIMBY effect.

Add risk (accident triggered by bad luck/terrorism/act of war...). Various unpleasant events since the 70's showed that the then dreamed "very very low accident rate" nuclear was a mere wish.

Add adverse conditions created by powerful nations/institutions trying to avoid nuclear weapons proliferation.

Nuclear used to be the only way to obtain low-carbon electricity, and this may counterbalance some of those ordeals. But no, as the new kid in town, industrial renewables, is incredibly good and quickly progressing https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/nuclear-renewables-electr...

Innovative ways are far away. SMRs, for example, are touted up and NuScale was quite dynamic but then... their first project is now down. https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/nuscale-power-uamps-...

Closing the 'fuel' cycle (breeder reactors) would solve many (not all) those curses, however after decades and billions poured by many nations into research and prototypes it is not industrial ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor#Development_an... )

Nowadays nuclear is to energy what the mainframe is to IT.

We’re going to Mars. First crewed mission next year, millions of colonists within a decade.

Self-driving cars by Christmas! General AI by new Years!

I'd take the "no" bet on both of those claims.

Why? Even with the worst condition which will realistically happen to earth in the next 100+ years, it will be still a better environment than Mars. Anything we might do on Mars, can be better done on Earth. And when shit hits the fan on Mars, which will happen once or twice, you are grounded there, without any realistic help available. And in the best case, you are there with the guy who wasted Twitter for memes, probably as as your leader. How is that desirable?

Sarcasm. Can never make it obvious enough, apparently.

First, figure out how to create a self sustaining colony in the Atacama Yungay before even thinking about doing it on another planet. At least you'll be able to phone for help when you discover your colony isn't working.

While we're living in fantasy world, why not just skip the faffing around and solve world hunger and world peace next year?

Can't tell if I got downvoted for obvious sarcasm, or for offending the Musk fans.

The neoliberal economic model requires exponential growth in consumption and these economists are the ones who help politicians draft their policies and budgets. Degrowth (https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/13/economy/degrowth-climate-cop2...) seems like the only real solution to me but try explaining to people that they'll have to consume less and you'll realize why the most likely outcome is catastrophic collapse.

I've talked to people about plastic pollution and how most synthetic chemicals/pollutants are now part of the water cycle. The usual response is that it is depressing to think about and the conversation then changes to some inane news about the latest consumer gadget or toy. Most politicians are not interested in challenging their constituents and their consumption habits because that's not something that gets anyone elected into a political office. Presumably good leaders are supposed to think long term but most politicians are not good leaders and are happy to support policies that basically guarantee a catastrophic outcome.

It's tiring to see the blame pinned on the "neoliberal economic model" when, really, this has always been the case even among other species. This is life in the biological sense.

Now, regarding "degrowth", the key is population degrowth, which is challenging. People do not have to be worse off, they even can and should be better off than we are now at global scale, if there are fewer of us on the planet.

Population growth is necessary for exponential consumption, i.e. the more people there are the greater the GDP of the country because all economic metrics measured by neoliberal economists are linearly correlated with population size. In fact, neoliberal economics stops working if the global population is not increasing exponentially.

Most people don't know enough about what economists do to call them on a basic contradiction which is obvious to anyone who understands that the biomass of earth is finite. Exponential growth on a finite planet is both logically and physically impossible. They also do not account for pollution from consumption for which the technical term is "negative externality".

In any case, there are plenty of critiques and you can find the relevant articles on the web. I'm not the first to notice the inconsistencies in neoliberal economics and their ignorance of basic physical principles.

Claude.ai for posterity: I have a few thoughts on your perspective:

- Population growth is not always necessary or sufficient for economic growth. Technology, efficiency, productivity, institutions etc. also play key roles.

- GDP growth does correlate with population growth, but the relationship is not always linear. Economics is complex.

- Many economists do account for finite resources, negative externalities, sustainability issues, etc. Not all economists subscribe to simplistic neoliberal views.

- However, you're right that perpetual exponential growth is likely impossible on a finite planet. More nuanced economic models are needed.

- Reasonable people can disagree on how best to balance economic growth, environmental sustainability, and human development. There are no easy answers.

- Critiquing simplifications like "more people always means more GDP" is fair. But be careful not to overgeneralize on complex topics where experts disagree.

- Multi-disciplinary approaches incorporating economics, science, and ethics are important. Problems like climate change require nuance, not polarized narratives.

In summary, you raise valid concerns, but be cautious about blanket critiques. There is more depth and diversity of thought in economics than often portrayed. Engaging charitably across disciplines helps find solutions.