Zany ideas to slow polar melting are gathering momentum
economist.com
economist.com
So, in addition to being hopeful for technological innovation, we must advocate for widespread systemic change, so that we would not even need technology to fix the problem for us. This includes destroying the inherently unsustainable supply chain and in its place constructing a supply cycle. We need to abolish landfills, and require all (at least industrially) produced goods to have a clear recycling strategy. Sustainability is a problem that needs to be solved socially as well as technologically.
I'm almost positive I wouldn't make the cut, the top .003% has gotta be a higher bar than me to clear, hah. But still fun to think about.
I guess that might hint at a fly in the ointment to drive the plot...
I'm being a little glib in that comment, but the sentiment is I think true and I wish they'd be honest about it. If they stated plainly that "we think in order to achieve what we believe are the required reductions in xyz, we have to decrease the human population by X% so less is consumed" I would actually respect them more. Instead the de-growth mentality is rhetorized up to look nice, but again it's just window dressing.
And there are natural fertilizer paths that aren't cattle.
You've constructed a strawman.
You don't even understand. The methane's mostly for the hydrogen, used to make ammonia or some other nitrogen compound. There are other ways of making this, Birkeland Eyde, for instance, but there like one third as efficient, at best. This means people starve. You might make the case that we could efficiently use livestock manure as a substitute (it's the green solution), but not if you're going to turn this into Planet Vegan. Given the necessity of animal manure, it's difficult to think that "get rid of all the livestock" stems from anything other than bizarre vegan tendencies.
If you absolutely have to get rid of the livestock, so be it, but then you really do need the fossil fuels. Pick, it's one or the other as far as I can tell.
> And there are natural fertilizer paths that aren't cattle.
Nope. You've got livestock (hogs, poultry, etc), or you've got fossil-fuel-based Haber-Bosch. I'm not even really aware of any science fiction concepts "other paths".
The Haber-Bosch process needs hydrogen, as you said in your first paragraph. Hydrogen can be made directly from water by electrolysis with renewable or nuclear electricity. This was already done on an industrial scale in the 20th century, with hydroelectric power used to produce hydrogen for ammonia:
"1921–2021: A Century of Renewable Ammonia Synthesis"
https://www.mdpi.com/2673-4079/3/2/11
That's how to use the Haber-Bosch process without fossil fuels or livestock.
Nice. You've just made one of the most energy-intensive necessary industrial processes even more energy intensive. Even while you're doing your best to demolish whatever baseload power we might still have.
> This was already done on an industrial scale in the 20th century, with hydroelectric power used to produce hydrogen for ammonia:
Got any spare hydroelectric? Any more rivers you want to dam up? Maybe you can decommission a few more nuke plants and replace them with brown coal.
Additionally, pulse crop rotation is increasingly being used to provide some free nitrogen to the soil.
Bioreactors with Azotobacter vinelandii are showing promise in providing nitrogen fixing in a reactor.
And like, industrial composting produces fertilizers with plenty of nitrogen. Soybeans, in particular, need no nitrogen inputs and produce plenty of both useful food and nitrogen containing plant matter.
Our wastewater also contains tons of nitrogen, both from biosolids and from agricultural runoff. These are difficult to get at safely, admittedly, but not impossible.
If you pause to think about it, all that manure needs to come from feedstock plus other inputs (water, etc). If you diverted that same feedstock into producing fertilizer (in the case of soybeans) or not producing at all (in the case of dent corn) you'd have plenty of material and a reduced demand. Manure doesn't just magically come from no inputs.
We can still "have it all" -- flight, meat, etc., if the right incentives exist; this too is more notion than solution but is the only possible path.
We can make "sustainable" fuel, and cattle can be fed seaweed and restricted to existing range lands (i.e., don't destroy more forests).
A key problem is that this issue and associated solutions have been artfully politicized by their incumbent stakeholders so a significant portion of the population will resist these efforts purely out of spite.
A dangerous idea, there are fewer cattle than humans on Earth, even if we add sheep, goats and pigs, there are still more humans.
There is already historical precedent for what happens when a species makes the planet uninhabitable for nearly everything: after the evolution of photosynthesis, the atmosphere filled up with extremely toxic waste product known as oxygen gas, driving most species to extinction. The ecology recovered, with new species, millions of years later.
Rich people won't survive in their bunkers, either.
Sorry to sound frustrated, but this is an argument for 60 years ago. It's irrelevant today. The die is cast. There is no situation when we will not even need technology to fix the problem for us, except the one where we just give up and say "fuck it". No models show an insignificant rise in global temperature, even if all emissions stopped today, and there is no foreseeable scenario in which all emissions stop even in the next 50 years. We need to get with the program. It sucks, we don't want it to be this way, but we are basically down to science and engineering solutions rather than regulatory or ground-level change.
Not saying we don't also need systemic change, just that is is not sufficient at this point.
But, the technology must be met with an ideological shift away from technological dependence. We need to create more environmental technology, and less representational technology - interfaces and screens.
The software revolution is yet to happen, that is what I aim for.
There's an ungodly amount of free space on earth. Drive outside a major city sometime.
Preventing people from dumping on unused land in order to reduce emissions seems ... ridiculous?
> Drive outside a major city sometime.
Growing up in the suburbs, I understand this quite well. But this land is not ours just because it is there and unused. We need to return a majority of the earth back to the ecology. Monkeys are falling out of trees in Mexico, 50% of bugs and birds are dead due to the ecocide, I could go on.
Just referencing 'unused land' as if it is ours to use by default is a gross misunderstanding and human-centric approach to ecology. There is more than us here.
Read "The Improving State of the World" by Indur Goklany.
Then we're wrong, and it doesn't matter. If we're wrong, what's the point in questioning it?
> We are sitting on our hands and praying for a deus ex machina to save us from ecological collapse
Well... no, we're not. Millions of people are working every day on the technology needed to solve these issues either directly (i.e., better pollution control on factories) or indirectly (i.e,. developing cleaner energy)
This isn't to say we all should just sit back and wait for the scientists to come up with an answer - we do very much need to fix many other issues as well, as you point out - but please let's not pretend that a) WE'RE DOOMED! or b) that we're just waiting for a "miracle" or some kind of "breakthrough" to save us
I've said this again and again—the only rational step is to directly subsidize poorer countries to not build coal plants and, in fact, replace them with more expensive but less destructive generation (inlcluding, say, battery farms, nuclear power, hydro, etc, that can properly address off-hour usage).
And of course the devil would be in the details, and it'd probably look messy and ugly. But I just cannot conceive of it being messier and uglier than the future we're staring down the barrel of.
I think the biggest barrier to this is not any rational problem that might be individually addressed but America's embarrassment at likely losing hegemony in the event we collectively manage to survive this catastrophe without mass death and the four horsemen. Really, refusing to stop global warming is a path towards retaining hegemony by taking advantage of future chaos as we have of past chaos. Everyone knows we have massive farmlands and water sources, enough to support our own people probably many many times over, and others do not have this luxury.
Excluding China global coal consumption would be down significantly, and they are quickly bringing alternatives online.
Exported coal meanwhile is fighting heavy transportation costs which only go up as demand starts to fall off. So, while they had very slow growth over the last decade that’s balanced on an economic knife edge. Most industry experts are just trying to decide how quickly things drop off not if they will.
And the thing with soot is that it’s the sort of thing where if you could fix it, the benefits would be nearly immediate. All you need is a couple clean layers of snow on top of the pack and most of the absorption stops.
Greenland gets it especially bad from all the Canadian fires that are nearly annual now: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/20...
I'm no expert, so I'd take my ideas with a grain of salt.
There's only one solution: stop the greenhouse effect at the origin.
It's pretty involved, and harder to pull off exactly as planned, but should work in a pinch, e.g. to stop a catastrophic runaway heating trend.
Any way we could maybe just solve the second problem to get it done faster? Those poor fossil fuels companies are really hurting-- honestly that should be our priority. We can't have oil execs going hungry.
/s
Clouds are keeping heat in though.
https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/44250/clouds-and-gl...
Long term we need to stop the greenhouse effect, but things are getting dire way faster than even the most delusional optimist could forecast reversing emissions.
From New York: https://psmsl.org/data/obtaining/stations/12.php
From Stockholm: https://psmsl.org/data/obtaining/stations/78.php
Simple: New York is sinking slowly. Stockhold is rising. Especially since the effects are pretty much linear 1880 to present.
Makes for lots of articles and airtime, that's all
Soon only multi-millionaires will be able to afford property insurance in large parts of Florida and California and eventually Nevada is going to have some amazing oceanview property.
That's how it works, we do nothing.
The rich can just get better air conditioning and air processing.
About the only blue black to any of the rich/ elite is war famine and general economic disruption from The four horsemen of the Apocalypse
We are doing a lot - all of California runs on solar for a few hours every day and no coal plants are being built.
Nihilism is pathetic.
It is sprayed around every airport in the United States and the world, there is always "reasons".
Lead molecular-mimics calcium in the body, there is no "undo" it is deadly and physically and mentally damaging.
Now go read about bunker fuel use in cruise ship and cargo ships around the world and how insanely toxic that is to wildlife.
Now go read about fracking burnoff for months just into the air, thousands of wells.
We have zero political will to changes things.
I am very old now and have seen climate change talk for nearly 50 years. Nothing is ever done.
Climate Change is past the turning point, billions will suffer the consequences, just not the wealthy.