Bret Victor: What can a technologist do about climate change? A personal view
worrydream.com
worrydream.com
18 Terawatts of demand, and rising, with just a few hours of stored capacity. It's like reaching an energy escape velocity. We're basically betting entirely on fusion and probably are not going to "make it".
So personally, I think about transitioning society to resilient non-dependence, and about designing for intermittent and highly variable energy and connectivity as vital goals.
A lot of what we do with computers - is really about what we don't do. Stop helping create obsolescence and waste. Curb the pointless chindogu, costly aesthetics above function, feeding vanity and insecurity to stoke demand etc. Tech seems to have a culture of gratuitous indulgence and luxury against a global backdrop of austere caution.
Maybe someone brighter than I am can explain why those things are not done post-haste.I am hardly among the brightest folks here, or anywhere. I am just curious about things. Curious, or fiend for that A-ha experience!:)
If we could magically rid the world of the toxic and addictive qualities of social media algorithms, (something technologists could do directly), and put more focus on fact finding and disseminating, it would have an impact.
Politics is just a proxy for people’s desires and motivations and willingness to make trade offs.
Polls show that most americans agree humans are causing climate change, but most won’t spend even $10 a month to combat climate change: https://apnorc.org/projects/is-the-public-willing-to-pay-to-... (open the top line results pdf).
Forget EVs. What’s it going to cost for people to replace their gas and oil heat with heat pumps? Way more than $10/month!
So things like subsidies could just help nudge markets to go. So strong subsidies for heat pumps would incentivize more people to make that move.
But to use your analogy, it’s also something mentioned in the article (or maybe I wanted to interpret it how I wanted to), we also don’t do a good job of communicating the risks.
My eyes glaze over when I read 2 degrees, “metric tons of CO2” cuz I can’t imagine how to weigh a gas, and other similar figures that are simply harder to relate to.
So we need to find better ways to communicate these things than very nerdy statistical model figures and such.
Who is going to pay for the subsidies? In the US, we caused massive inflation because we had to print trillions of dollars just to handle Covid.
The cost of not fixing climate change is going to be a much higher financial impact than the cost of governments programs to shift our energy. It’s already fiscally prudent for our economy to take care of late change even if every dollar of that is deficit funded (which there is actually not a need to structure the fix that extremely).
It’s only political lobbying of extremely wealthy fossil fuel corporations and billionaires that stands in the way.
It's inherently a cost problem. We have to replace a bunch of capital infrastructure with different capital infrastructure. That costs money. If you fund that with deficit spending, you will increase inflation, which is politically unpopular.
In aggregate polling, Donald Trump is now tied with Biden among people 18-34: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/16D9GSxqF5LFIRTcoVJlv.... That is completely nuts, and it's because eggs are somewhat more expensive than they were a few years ago. What do you think is the political feasibility of financing climate change mitigation efforts through deficit spending?
> There is little discussion of sticking to narrow market solutions when it comes to war, yet we blithely put out billions dollars for various form of defense and really don’t ask how are we going to pay
Defense spending as a share of the economy has been shrinking for decades as the Cold War threat recedes into memory: https://www.federalbudgetinpictures.com/non-defense-consumin.... If you can persuade Americans to open their pocket books for climate change the way they did for defense during the cold war, then that's great. But that's what it will take.
> It’s only political lobbying of extremely wealthy fossil fuel corporations and billionaires that stands in the way.
This sort of magical, ignorant thinking on the left is why we have no hope of doing anything to mitigate climate change.
Food price inflation is increased by increased heat waves, droughts, and shifting northward of pests that used to be controlled by colder winters.
Property insurance inflation drives up the cost of insuring against the effects of the same disasters - directly driving home ownership costs up, as well as rentals up.
Supply disruption as inflation driver increases from events like drought and heatwaves disrupting Panama canal operations.
Building supply inflation is increased as increased hurricane and tornado intensity causes more resources to be diverted to rebuilding instead of being able to do things like build new housing stock.
Defense spending is accepted deficit spending for the public good to avoid the disruption of military actions. It's a lot like other insurance spending.
Climate change is a form of insurance spending. If we don't fix Climate change, the inflation will come one way or another, and we should decide if we want to address it in a relatively controlled way of building up our economy with common deficit spending, or if we want uncontrolled events to land and generally inflate our economic costs in poorly controllable ways.
Magical thinking is somehow believing we avoid costs by sticking our head in the sand and wishing for conditions long past.
You’re literally doing the same thing as climate change denying conservatives. It’s inconvenient for their political ideology so they won’t believe the data that’s right in front of their face.
You’re doing the same thing. The data says that regular voters won’t spend even $10 per month to mitigate climate change, but you want to blame “corporations and billionaires.” Inflation just happened to occur right after we printed $6 trillion in response to COVID, but that must have been billionaires and corporations too!
How can you believe that when the graph of M1 money supply looks like this: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M1SL
You and I largely have nearly zero influence on these decisions because a handful of extremely large (aka too large to fail) corporations, billionaires and their lobbyists yield sufficient influence over most governments to almost always get their way. We've legalized bribery and then are surprised at the consequences.
It is not people as in "a democratic majority" which want to destroy the habitable state of the Earths atmosphere, ecosystems and our own food chain for very little short-term gain. People have children and younger relatives, and we do care about them.
It is a very small minority of very greedy individuals, and there are also massive amounts of disinformation going on so that the democratic majority confounds the interests of these with their own.
No, it’s my mom, my siblings, probably your mom, the guy who does my tile work, etc. You’re framing this in your head as a “good versus evil” problem, which forces you to then assign blame to a “small minority of very greedy individuals.” But instead it’s a problem of humans putting short term individual comfort ahead of long term collective interests.
My brother and my sister in law have STEM degrees from Yale and MIT. They’re well-meaning democrats. But they take several international trips every year, each of which emits about as much CO2 as driving an SUV around all year. Most people I know don’t do that—but only because they don’t have the money.
Heck, I have progressive activists friends who don’t really care about climate change because their particular focus is racial issues or abortion. They obviously don’t want to affirmatively destroy anything, they’re just the same people who wouldn’t pay more than $10/month to address it. They assume there will be some deus ex machina that resolves the problem. (Get to work CO2 capture nerds!)
Look—people eat like crap and don’t exercise, taking years off their own lives. They take drugs that could kill them. People still smoke. They know better but they do it anyway. You think those same people are going to make non-trivial sacrifices for environmental problems that might affect their kids or grandkids?
People will save money by transitioning to EVs and heat pumps.
Often the big barrier is an upfront cost that makes them just continually pay a higher monthly cost, or a long payoff time.
There's various ways to financially engineer that and unlock the savings and government often plays a vital role in that since the switch has various other benefits, like less death and disease.
The big money drowns out even an enormous amount of citizens, hackers or not. 8 container ships cannot be a very massive income for the industries throwing money at politicians and would go a long way. Thorium reactors would create new jobs, deal with the problem om storing radioactive fuel rods for millions of years by making them a commodity for a new industry that makes use of them and reduces the millions of years needed to store those down to thousands of years and when we run out of nuclear waste we can continue fueling them with thorium, which is _everywhere_. The air would get cleaner & ther is money to be made.
You would think not that much political will was needed for small, big impact things like that.
Of course, ther eis always the chance I am insane and will wake up from this nightmare in a haze from forcefully administered anti-psychotics via injection
It was written almost 9 years ago and we’re almost in the same place.
Peak fossil fuels are expected in the next few years.
https://www.npr.org/2023/10/24/1207976763/global-shift-to-cl...
Where a huge amount of works needs to be done is carbon-economic transport, housing and construction, and agriculture. And, yes, we will need to say farewell to a few things. That's OK, we are also not using steam engines any more.
And technologists are still learning how to incorporate the political dimensions into their solutions. Its non-optional to ignore them - https://jacobin.com/2023/12/evgeny-morozov-interview-technol...
That would cut the air pollution by something akin to the pollution by most of the cars on the planet, combined. Those things run on the worst sludge fossil fuel in existance.
So why are we not doing that?
I wonder because cows do not fart, they burp. And methane breaks down into water within 14 days of UV exposure in the atmosphere, and I like cows.
Another idea is Thorium reactors, they can run on spent fuel from traditional nuclear plants which is mostly _not used up_ and therefor must be stored millions of years. This would reduce storage time to thousands of years, make the spent rods a commodity and the physics preclude catastrophic meltdowns, make it really hard to enrich whatever those thingies they make thermonuclear atomic weapons with.
.. why are we not doing that either?
$0.02