Arctic sea ice sets a record low maximum in 2025 | Hacker News Reader

Arctic sea ice sets a record low maximum in 2025

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135 pointsmartinpw143 comments

It is good to see this here on HN. We, the hackers and painters, would have the power to build world wide communities for addressing the climate collapse (the climate that provided good conditions for humanity to thrive). We have the wealth to work on solutions, we are the ones also contributing to burn the world, maybe because we have given up or because it is just too comfortable. We sit in our offices, home offices, letting everything collapse as long as the pizza and the next gadget reaches our desk. We control how information is distributed, we are responsible. We would be advised to take action; will we?

I think you know the answer to this.

It's chilling to think that collective action is just something we do after we have been punched in the face. Unfortunately, we are also so rational, so this will not count as a punch in the face. It should, but it won't.

According to Andrew Forrest we don't. His view is that there are 999 people in the world, plus himself, who are responsible for climate change and could fix it if they chose to.

https://www.smh.com.au/environment/climate-change/inside-and...

This is not a homogenous group that believes some core cannon and lives the same lives. Most devs don't have "wealth" even. I think you watched too many movies.

It's interesting also that usually nobody says a "why" that makes sense. You clearly don't think our current lives are that valuable if all we're doing is eating pizza in our offices waiting for a gadget to arrive. So what's the point, to make it so in 3 or 4 generations those guys can eat the pizza and feel like we "solved climate" for them so they can relax?

Living such lives divorces people from what most of humanity are experiencing. i.e. people with power and money and the ability to live virtually are isolated from what's happening. We all have money - just to have a job in software is to be in the top X% of the world's population. I suggest that X is probably smaller than most of us think.

If I earn say $15k / yr (just as an example, I have friends making less producing software), in a regular Western country, half goes to a landlord, a quarter to general expenses, and the other quarter for emergency savings. Illustrate how those €3750 per year of disposable income can be used to help climate change and not live "divorced from what most of humanity is experiencing"?

For what it's worth some calculators say those €15k/yr would put one above 92% of people in the world. There's so much extreme poverty in Sub-Saharan Africa that it's very easy to be in top single digit % and still be getting fucked by the system every day.

And then after you make the case of "what" you still need a "why". Almost nobody cares about those starving people we have at the moment in said Sub-Saharan Africa, so why would they care about future people?

You're mixing euros and dollars which is a bit confusing. That is a very low salary IMO - I'm in the UK and after big efforts to hire people I cannot imagine being able to hire anyone who could write a for-loop for that little!

Nevertheless, lets assume that's a typical salary: you get to choose your energy provider here and you get to choose what food you eat and how you get your transport. You can put insulation in your loft and use less gas by reducing the heat in your by 1 degree. You can use your surplus to choose slightly more expensive green options. That's before you decide to do anything direct such as investing in companies that are doing innovative green things.

I don’t care about climate change. I’d rather the world have air conditioning and electricity than live in huts to prevent carbon emissions

Because those are the only two options.

Every Western country that has actually felt the pain of increased prices to reduce their emissions has had their voters rebel. It’s a loser issue

That's again an oversimplification. It's not black or white, it's more complex. And that shouldn't be passed onto the general population, but to the companies that have been exploiting the resources as if they were infinite. They have become megamagnates and megacompanies, and now that we ask for solutions, it should not be "ha, ok, pay more".

Someone will have to pay more. No one wants to - no one.

I empathize with this and your earlier obviously inflammatory remarks, but we either pay for adaptation/mitigation now or pay billions if not trillions later for infrastructure repairs, more human lives lost, further extinctions of animal biodiversity, and reduced economic productivity from the loss of arable land.

Taxing large emitters does still past the cost down to the consumer. Someone certainly has to pay eventually. Perhaps youre too cynical to believe humans now are willing to do so. I don’t think youre right, but it’s certainly an opinion those less optimistic share :) and there is plenty of current evidence to bring hopes down.

Alas I’d like to die knowing I tried and cared instead of contributing to the apathy of the situation.

Every(?) western nation is going through a cost of living crisis.

And some people believe increasing the cost of energy is a solution to anything.

There's one obvious solution to everyone's cost of living crisis: tax the wealthy fairly.

We'll send modern civilization off a cliff before we do it, but it isn't like we don't know the solution.

I hear this often, but I'm struggling to understand how taxing the wealthy will build houses, or lower the price of energy?

Taxing the wealthy does one thing very well: transfer money from the hands of the wealthy, who are notoriously good at managing their wealth, in to the hands of politicians and bureaucrats who are notoriously bad at managing other peoples money.

The way the wealthy "manage their wealth" is by buying up assets (including housing, etc) driving up the price for everyone else causing exactly this sort of cost of living crisis you referenced.

Not really that difficult to understand. You should read up on the history of US taxation and how much stronger the middle class was when the wealthy got taxed fairly.

You could not have agreed with my point more clearly. You don’t want to pay more, you want to force everyone richer than you to pay more. That’s the problem.

I want them to pay the same amount I do as a percentage of their earnings. But they don't, they pay far less as a percentage of their earnings. THAT's the problem.

If you seized every billionaire’s money the government would be financed for less than a year. If you want sustainable taxation to finance your climate agenda you need to convince everyone to pay more. But people won’t do it unless you pitch it as a free lunch.

We either pay now to have this civilization last longer or we pay later in terms of the unsustainable systems not being sustained any more.

It isn't companies that use the world's resources, it is consumers.

Consumers can only buy that which has been manufactured. There is customer demand but nobody is forcing anyone to start a company. If you build a factory and release tons of co2 that is the concrete act destroying the planet. Blaming your clients for making you do it seems wrong. Also kicking the can down the road diffuses the responsibility and obfuscates what harm actually was done. Consumers have hard time tracking this stuff down and are amateurs vs. the manufacturers who are the experts in the process and actually can make decisions for the better.

There is no air conditioning and electricity if we don't stop destroying the environment.

Unfortunately, your stance seems to be the most common because it relinquishes you from the guilt of destroying what isnt yours so you can enjoy cheap stuff.

The allure of lucre and status convinced us we were better off making more addictive dopamine machines than bettering the human condition.

Not all of us. I refuse to work for corporations fueled by advertisements and so should you.

There are companies doing genuinely good out there. Maybe the pay is less(though I’m well compensated), at least you’ll work towards a better future.

Absolutely, I was speaking in generalities.

I actually think the bigger problem is artificial scarcity. Say you and someone else are bidding on a house. Your job is a net good to society and pays x, and someone else has a job which is a net harm and pays 2x. Now you need to decide whether you want a home or want to do something good.

This is only possible because homes (which are not hard to build) have an artificially constrained supply.

Currently the mathematically most effective thing everybody could do is to prevent any billionaire or millionaire to get out of bed in the morning.

This could be done by overwhelming them with love so much that they do not want to go on with their destructive lifestyle.

After this is done you can start thinking about how to change our own life.

No, the most mathematically effective thing would killing most humans immediately.

Blaming the rich is a scapegoat excuse that encourages most people to continue consuming beyond sustainability.

We need massive behavioral change that starts with everyday people, not the rich. Only then will the rich be held accountable.

Unfortunately, most people don't want to think about reducing their meat intake or not bagging their produce in plastic because that's too much work. This enables the rich and corporations to continue destroying the planet because we constantly have excuses.

1 million rich people with private jets, yachts and 7 houses, along with automated factories supporting that lifestyle would do far more damage than a few billion subsistence farmers.

Population reduction is not a viable solution. It is both ineffective and morally incomprehensible.

go, get yourself informed about psychopathy, and then come back to the drawing board.

nothing will advise people like the effects that are inevitable in the polar ice(all ice) collapse picking up speed this summers low will be "last call" Russia will very likely take a chunk of trade from both the suez and panama canals, through what is there EEZ exclusive ecomonic zone, coridore in the artic carbon and methane release from formerly frozen deposits will continue to feed the green house effect sea level rise will start to cause regular disruptions, and collapse of coastal land values where insurance premium costs are already rendering high end luxury homes from assets to liabilitys in some coastal areas, now fisheries will,??, are moving north, but there is less fish certain farming is moving north human technology is on the rise, and solar plus desailination will allow for agriculture(and other things) in desert regions around the mid lattitudes...ie: shifts in resources and habitability for landlocked and or arid countrys the advantage goes to countrys that have no electrical grids, or distribution and transport systems, as they can leapfrog over the western model, that requires centraly controlled/powered, wired conections everywhere vs, development at the scales supporting local imfrastructure requirements, that due to the nature of renewable solar, battery technology, can be scaled up, bit by bit as needs and capital coinside, rather than the masssive investments needed for traditional industrial infrastructure it's a heady, complex mix, where entrenched societies with fixed positions could be overwhelmed quickly

We always think that technical approaches will eventually fix things that should be dealt by administrative means. You will be busy, but the core problem is still unaddressed.

> We always think that technical approaches will eventually fix things that should be dealt by administrative means.

Administrative means created the problem. Nuclear was on a path to lower cost until the administrative state came and helped. Now we haven't built a nuclear plant in decades.

> We have the wealth to work on solutions

yeah, right. /s

Unfortunately we needed large scale climate engineering a decade ago.

Oil is a key driver of economic activity, how would we ever convince governments, businesses, and finally individuals to cut their earnings before they “get theirs”. Sure we can get a significant portion of individuals to live a net-zero life, but there are far too many people who don’t care since everything seems normal if you are not paying attention.

I want carbon neutrality, but I have no hope to achieving this before we face large scale ecological collapse (look at the GBR).

Climate engineering won't help (there is a million of unsolved and unsolvable issues with it). We have to stop emitting CO2 (etc), there is no other way. Why? Because if the warming won't kill us, ocean acidification will, and that is directly connected to the C in CO2.

This is why there is a race on for Greenland. (And Svalbard?)

Ice melting in the Arctic is not a linear process. There will most likely be ice free summers in the Arctic within most people here's lifetime.

I apologize if this is a joke and I missed it, but Greenland is an important strategic warfare location when considering the defense of the US against Russia. It’s absolutely not because there might be bearable summers 50 years from now.

Donald trump wants to build casino resorts for himself and exploit whatever resources are there. Plus, by annexing Greenland, he will have made the US bigger, which will look good for him in the future.

Do you really think Donald trump gives a shit about strategic interests? Do you really think he sees Russia as a threat?

I refuse to believe it is anything other than Greenland looking big on most maps. There's nothing strategic about this.

If it was a "strategic warfare" reason, there would be no talk of anything, since Greenland has been very involved in NATO efforts for decades and we literally have a military base there already, and have worked hard to build infrastructure there to deny Russia the ability to escape https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GIUK_gap

If the Trump admin was concerned about Russia, we would be cozying up to NATO, Canada, Europe, Denmark, Greenland etc, not fucking with them.

So why are we fucking with them if it's so important to work with them to defend against Russia?

The obvious answer is that Fascists ALWAYS do this bullshit. Because they are morons that can't conceive of power on the world stage in a way OTHER than outright ownership of territory.

Basically legacy. I re-built mother russia. I built mother north america - "trumpland".

It seems like so much has been said about climate change, with such comparatively miniscule action by the powerful.

Imagine being one of the optimates, the financial ultra-elite. You are at the pinnacle of power in our civilization. You have children, perhaps even grandchildren. You can subvert the rule of law to a huge extent and get away with it. The sheer power of your wealth can take on its own dynamic, allowing you to spend vast amounts on the most ludicrous ideas and still come out OK by sheer artificial demand. Thus, you can will a lot of things into existence.

What do you choose to do about climate change? Invest in many potential breakthroughs? Bring the smartest and most capable people in R&D together and partner with government to bring the best solutions to fruition at scale? Make your mark by moderating the impact of climate change and allow your children to live at least in a similar world to what we have today?

Nope. Instead, you choose to invest in pollution. The future be damned.

The above is actually happening, right now, at enormous scale. I'd urge people to remember this when our culture communicates that the worth of a person correlates with their net worth; it does not.

In the rotten competition for more and more, Seneca's words come to mind:

"The better man may win. But the winner is bound to be the worse man."

I mean despite constant economic growth, something which fundamentally depends on increased energy consumption, the US has decreased emissions per capita by 30% since 1970:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1049662/fossil-us-carbon...

This despite the fact that energy use has increased by about 60% during that time:

https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/us-energy-facts/

How do you look at these facts and what you see in them is "The billionaires are destroying our planet and don't care?"

How do you not see 30% less emissions on 60% more energy usage as a big win for the environment that should be celebrated?

If you look at the rest of the world it generally follows the same trend, with the massive, massive exception of China:

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita

All this is not to let anyone off the hook - I've long said if there's any one piece of the emission reductions pie that's missing, it's political action against China as a dirty exporter that we've all come to depend on and offshore our dirty industry to. Now we are at least getting some kind of action on that front, even if it's a President and a justification that you don't like.

But my real point here is, I'm so sick of these Doomer takes that are just rhetoric about why the world is awful and you need to blame someone convenient. When the reality is that there has been enormous action and enormous progress all over the planet. Developed countries have cleaned up their act in a big way, sure they may have more work to do, but the next big frontier is to solve the China emissions issue in a way other than just moving all the dirty industry to India, and sorry to say this is not something that a random billionaire can fix overnight.

The Texas legislature is currently attempting to pass legislation that disadvantages solar and batteries in preference of fossil gas. They don’t care about climate change or the future.

https://capitol.texas.gov/BillLookup/History.aspx?LegSess=89...

https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/energy-markets/texas-bi...

Additional citation:

https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/clean-energy/will-texas...

> When the reality is that there has been enormous action and enormous progress all over the planet.

The reality is that emissions are still increasing .. they need to stop increasing, they need to decrease considerably, and some of the emissions we've already put into the atmosphere need to be clawed back.

While we can acknowledge that the US is now (14.3 tonne per person) rolling less coal per person than it was in the 1970s (21 tonne per US citizen a year) it is still the case that the US is still emitting more per person than any other country on the planet.

Developed countries have "cleaned up their act" largely by outsourcing emissions intensive industry to developing countries ("the China emissions" issue has a sizable component that is really "a US consumption" issue).

I'm no doomer, I have a career in geophysics and have a pragmatic grounded view of the world. That said the take you have presented is papering over the very real issues.

>Developed countries have "cleaned up their act" largely by outsourcing emissions intensive industry to developing countries

That's only partially true and has flattened off in recent years. In the US the deficit of goods and services imports vs exports only represents 2.8% of total GDP.

Does that counter the claim though? Is the correlation between value of goods and emissions and waste related to goods so strong that GDP value balance is an easy standin for emissions and waste balance?

> I mean despite constant economic growth, something which fundamentally depends on increased energy consumption, the US has decreased emissions per capita by 30% since 1970

And the US population has grown from 203 million in 1970 to 331 million in 2020[0] - an increase of over 60%.

I can have fun with statistics too!

  How do you look at these facts and what you see in them is 
  "The billionaires are destroying our planet and don't care?"

Actions taken by same.

  How do you not see 30% less emissions on 60% more energy 
  usage as a big win for the environment that should be 
  celebrated?

How do you not see scientific evidence such as NASA provides?

  Air temperatures on Earth have been rising since the 
  Industrial Revolution. While natural variability plays some 
  part, the preponderance of evidence indicates that human 
  activities—particularly emissions of heat-trapping 
  greenhouse gases—are mostly responsible for making our 
  planet warmer.[1]

0 - https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/dec/popchange...

1 - https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/world-of-change/global-tem...

You basically just said we're still polluting enough to destroy the livable environment while championing a small efficiency gain.

Wild thing to be enthusiastic about. Very short sighted.

This kind of cynicism just encourages inaction. First, it frames the problem as only that of the powerful.

But largely, opinion polls are against the kind of action that would be useful. Nuclear, for example, is the only baseload tech we currently have at scale that doesn't burn carbon. It is widely opposed and public pressure has led to regulations blocking it or even expanding it.

Second, a lot of ultra wealthy ARE funding research. Bill Gates contributed substantially (though pulled back recently).

Stripe notably has made Stripe Climate, which lets businesses contribute shares of revenue to carbon sequestration tech, which is absolutely vital to removing CO2 from the air if we somehow got to net zero. They promoted it heavily and made great UI to allow businesses to list it as a marketing expense.

The real block is us. Public opinion is very powerful. Now, specific companies have worked mightily to convince the public not to act, particularly from the oil sector.

But the convenient message of gloom posting is not to do anything not to believe in doing anything and fob it off to the rich.

(I use Stripe Climate, it's great)

> Nuclear, for example, is the only baseload tech we currently have at scale that doesn't burn carbon.

Renewables + storage is also, when combined, a baseload tech.

If you are implying nuclear fills a niche on the grid that cannot be filled by renewables + storage, you're mistaken.

A lot of Europe lies in northern areas where solar is simply insufficient, especially in winter.

Solar / wind + huge batteries + huge transmission lines would compare: capture sunlight in places like Bulgaria or Greece, feed places like Norway or Britain. But this is way more disruptive, and likely expensive, than a nuclear power plant.

That's just not true. But more importantly investing in nuclear now. As long as we don't even have sufficient renewables to constantly power us during the day, good weather... it has a much higher CO2 reduction impact to invest in renewables than building nuclear power plants.

What's not true? That Sweden or UK receive less solar radiation than Greece, especially in December? That building a huge transmission line from there (or, better yet, from Sahara) would be a very hard and expensive undertaking? That having enough batteries to sustain, say, 2 days of baseload supply, when it's cloudy and not windy, is hugely expensive, and has never been tried because of that?

Well, nuclear is also expensive, but it's partly regulation, partly nuclear being bespoke in many cases, while solar panels currently enjoy enormous economy of scale.

I all for nuclear, for the record.

They receive less solar radiation, but still some. They both have great conditions for offshore wind.

Also all for nuclear, but decentralized renewables are great.

Nuclear is a total disaster recently. Enormous cost overruns, delayed operation. What reason in hell is there to pour money into that instead of wind? Wind works. Every turbine built adds power - no need to wait decades for the next screwed up nuclear install.

I'm a fan of the SMR idea although it turns out that it's less economic than people thought at the smaller sizes anyhow. I'm also very interested in the fusion startups............BUT we have to solve the climate problem now -- yesterday if it were possible.

We have no problem generating power with wind or solar. We have a problem of doing it in a dependable manner.

If there's something to pour money into, it's battery storage, both building much more of it, and developing cheaper variants of it. We need the cost of LiFePO4 batteries to fall as dramatically as the cost of solar panels did. Then renewables will make much bigger inroads into the grid in a lot of places.

https://highviewpower.com/news_announcement/highview-power-t...

...for example!

"LONDON – 15 October, 2024 – Highview Power, a leading provider of long-duration energy storage (LDES) technology, announced today that its plans to develop four new 2.5GWh power plants in the UK by 2030, have taken a crucial step forward following the launch of the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero’s (DESNZ’s) new investment support scheme. The scheme will use a “cap and floor” mechanism which will unlock the next stage of investment in the multi-billion-pound LDES programme, enabling the technologies vast potential to underpin UK decarbonisation.

Two of the 2.5GWh plants will deliver more storage than all of the UK’s existing battery storage, using 100% sustainable technology, with a 40-year lifespan. The addition of these four plants by 2030 means the government’s target to achieve a net zero grid by 2030 is achievable. Two of the 2.5GWh plants will be in Scotland and the other two in England. The first new plant will be located in Hunterston, Scotland."

China, India and Korea can build nuclear power plants without delays and cost overruns.

https://thebreakthrough.org/issues/energy/chinas-impressive-...

China is installing two orders of magnitude more renewables than nuclear.

Judging by what China is doing, renewables have soundly defeated nuclear. It's not clear why they're building any new nuclear plants now. Probably organizational inertia?

I think preserving nuclear industry is a decent justification on its own.

Especially the whole steam turbine/generator tech is a huge synergy for them (because all their coal plants need basically the same), and gutting suppliers by scaling back nuclear ambitions could have highly detrimental side-effects there.

Coal power is still the back-bone of their grid, and provides basically all the dispatchability (for now).

I think the big incoming challenge for renewables will be surpassing the 70%-ish percent mark (of produced electricity), because at that point intermittency is gonna become much more challenging (it's an easy problem as long as you can just down-regulate existing plants-- buffering with batteries is significantly more expensive, and they don't have a lot of gas either, which works pretty well for this).

I'm pretty confident that battery progress is gonna keep pace, and other countries are already way further in the switch to renewables anyway; China will be able to get free lessions there (e.g. Germany).

I want to note that the intermittency problems for a 100% renewable grid are not significantly different from a 90% renewable + 10% nuclear grid. Nuclear does very little to help because to make economic sense it has to be kept running most of the time, and so not much capacity can be kept in reserve to deal with renewables dropping out.

I'll also note that if renewables have reached 70%, the residual demand will be so uneven that new nuclear won't make any sense, as it won't be possible to keep it running most of the time. Too often renewables will be delivering 100% of demand and nuclear will have no market.

As renewables grow, prices become spikier. So what's wanted is some source with low capex that can jump in an exploit these spikes. Gas peakers are an example, but eventually the gas can be something other than natural gas (if NG is taxed for its CO2). Green hydrogen may be the best bet for the 100% renewable end game.

Op said renewables, not solar. Both Norway and Sweeden have significant (renewable) hydro, which pairs well with the cyclical nature of both wind and solar.

Batteries are not the only storage technology, nor is it the case that only one storage technology would be used, as different ones are best for different storage timespans. Diurnal would be batteries, but seasonal storage would likely be something different (like e-fuels).

Whether it is "disruptive" doesn't matter. What matters is cost. Renewables + storage look to be much cheaper than nuclear in the best places and at least competitive in the worst.

There was an insightful post a little while ago about people liking nuclear because of a bias toward simple solutions. It reminded me of the adage "for any problem, there's a solution that's simple, straightforward... and wrong." The economy is quite willing to optimize for more complex solutions if this ends up saving money. "Keep it simple, stupid (KISS)" doesn't apply at the level of the whole economy.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43426010

There is no such thing as storage. Current storage is tiny. Batteries are insanely expensive.

The water behind a dam is storage too, right?

There are lots of examples of pumping water up into reservoirs when electricity is plentiful so it can be released when electricity is scarce, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydroelectricit...

For less than 10% of the cost of land for my house I can run it for a week off battery.

Ah, the principle of "nothing can ever happen for the first time".

I have to love this sentiment, especially on HN. Because prices don't decline dramatically over time for any technology, right? Or if they do, then the safest thing to do is assume the future will see no continuing of trends of reductions, right? /s

You can order 1kW of panels with 1kWh of batteries as a plug-and-play system off of Amazon for about $1k.

Thats gonna generate >1MWh of electricity per year easily (probably closer to 2MW even), and with spot pricing for electricity at ~$100/MWh (Europe), this pays off within a decade easily.

Provide numbers if you disagree.

This is factually inaccurate. Solar and batteries are the cheapest form of generation currently.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43414219 (citations)

Lithium-Ion Battery Pack Prices See Largest Drop Since 2017, Falling to $115 per Kilowatt-Hour: BloombergNEF - https://about.bnef.com/blog/lithium-ion-battery-pack-prices-... - December 10, 2024

Lazard Levelized Cost of Energy+ - https://www.lazard.com/research-insights/levelized-cost-of-e...

> But largely, opinion polls are against the kind of action that would be useful. Nuclear, for example, is the only baseload tech we currently have at scale that doesn't burn carbon. It is widely opposed and public pressure has led to regulations blocking it or even expanding it.

The only country that seems to be having an honest conversation about how to adapt to climate change is France. They've been having society-wide conversations about it over the last few years and support for nuclear has gone up substantially.

It's the Germans who are showing leadership in Europe. The French and Swedish have most nuclear, but not because of green policies. Just historical. Germany have had the "Energiewende", which everybody in the world should marvel at - but not enough know about. It's shat on, and public opinion even in Europe has been shaped against it. But it really is an 'energy turnaround'. It is leadership by taking unilateral action in the face of our common enemy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energiewende

Don't know much about that policy but I frequently monitor electricity usage via https://app.electricitymaps.com and Germany has usually the highest carbon intensity electricity in western Europe. Getting rid of nuclear seems to have made things worse.

That's why it's called an 'energy turnaround' not an energy 180.

That's awesome thanks. Would be great if it also show'd what the average residential customer was paying as well as the average industrial users cost per kWh so we could get an idea of the cost of manufacturing as far as electricity input goes.

From that page:

> Germany phased out nuclear power in 2023 as part of the Energiewende,[4] and plans to retire existing coal power plants possibly by 2030

Why the fuck, when our biggest problem is co² emissions, would you close down nuclear first , increase coal and gas consumption and hand-wave to some future time when you hope to close coal plants.

I marvel at it alright! But obviously not for the same reasons you do. I think it's incredibly stupid, and likely driven by nutters in the Green party who are ideological (and fucking wrong) instead of pragmatic and science based.

>I marvel at it alright! But obviously not for the same reasons you do. I think it's incredibly stupid, and likely driven by nutters in the Green party who are ideological (and fucking wrong) instead of pragmatic and science based.

Anti-nuclear sentiment has always been transversal in Germany. At the time of the shutdowns, the conservatives didn't specially love the plants, but with Fukushima, it was electoral death to support them. Someone farting inside a nuclear plant would have been a political scandal, so they weren't going to wait. The future (correctly) was green energy, and Russian gas didn't seem like a bad bridge; after all, foresight is 20/20. You would have been seen as a cold war holdout nutter for raising fears of Russian dependence.

HN always finds public distrust of nuclear to be solely ignorance and oil propaganda, but that's reductive. My (pregnant!) mother woke up one day in the Soviet bloc and suddenly everything fresh in the stores was gone. No explanation, just hushed rumors and "don't eat anything not out of a can." The explanation came a day later. I imagine it wasn't very nice being on the other side and having minimal info during the first days. That's something traumatic that stays with people, not merely a Koch brothers psyop.

Sure, the Soviets were reckless, but the worst was avoided. A couple of decades later, the people who lived during Chernobyl are older, time has passed, and public opinion relaxes. Then Fukushima happens, minimal info again, and every bad memory comes back. We get the info? Just fuckup after fuckup: they knew the sea wall was too low, diesel backups were badly designed, staff wasn't trained correctly, HQ wanted to stop seawater cooling during a meltdown to save equipment.

This was not a technical failure but gross human error in famously detail-oriented Japan. Every reassurance since 1986 about nuclear energy rang hollow. The time for the fail-safe wunder-reactors was the 2000s with a wide rollout.

There are many technical arguments showing that further development and rollout of nuclear energy was the correct choice after Chernobyl, but the public's worries were never "nutty."

Generally, it's popular for people who want to dunk on green energy to choose people who dunk on nuclear as an easy target.

I think we need more nuclear, but it's not realistic given the pricetag and these cogent arguments as why voters are not enamoured either.

Whatever about "more nuclear energy", yeah it has long timelines and sky high price tags.. but decommissioning working nuclear plants decades early and leaning hard on the coal? Sorry, that's fucking asinine populist bullshit. The Russians didn't cause this.

Nuclear isn't "baseload" because it's not load, it's supply.

Baseload demand does not need consistent supply. Google in the late 90's proved that reliable results may be created from unreliable components.

There's been a lot of talk about more nuclear in France. But talk is cheap, and financial commitment to new nuclear starts has been notably lacking. The problem, as always, is very high cost and low dependability of the nuclear construction process. The EPR was a disaster, so France would have to go with a redesign. This adds to the risk and reduces confidence in yet another set of assurances that this time it will be cheaper.

I predict France will inevitably slide over toward a renewable dominated grid, just like everyone else.

Yes. Opinions are significantly influenced by the marketing powers of the rich.

Now you’re cooking with gas.

Perhaps those personality traits are incompatible with each other or at least very unlikely. It reflects badly on our species but hopefully we’re just going through a dip on a grand scale of things but toward a more peaceful and equitable world. A world where we don’t fetishize wealth accumulation.

The world in your last sentence may be possible. Consider: we have entire libraries full of psychological research about all sorts of behaviors and disorders. And quite often, how to deal with them.

Now: do we use any of this expensively acquired knowledge in our political processes, in any consequential way? Nope. :) Do we use it in the corporate world? Nope. Anywhere else, outside of the ivory tower? Also nope. For the most part, it just sits there unused.

But suppose we did use our psychological knowledge at great scale and fidelity. Then we should be able to treat many systemic issues. Because ultimately, it is merely human psychology that holds us back, rather than any physical resource limitations.

You're right but you're also missing the fact that the currently predominant mindset of selfish resource accumulation was actually manufactured. In the early 20th century, psychological and psychiatric research was weaponized by large corporations to solve overproduction crisis by creating consumerism.

There's a great documentary about it called "The Century of Self"

This isn't the inevitable product of human psyche. This is an engineered state devised to do precisely what's driving climate change: consume resources at an accelerating rate.

I'm reading Gabor Mate's "Myth of Normal" and it helped me understand a lot more the nature of some of our misery and how much of it can be traced back to consumerism.

$2.1 trillion dollars was spent on the global energy transition in 2024. That's not miniscule.

https://about.bnef.com/blog/global-investment-in-the-energy-...

It is not just surface, but thickness too, what makes the whole picture. But what will matter in the end is exposing more (dark, albedo-wise) water to sunlight rising a notch global warming and melting even more Arctic sea ice. Positive feedback loops should be scary.

Direct link to their fantastic tool:

https://nsidc.org/sea-ice-today/sea-ice-tools/charctic-inter...

And this is why trump keeps ranting about greenland. It's not just a distraction. He wants to invade greenland and canada, and he wants global warming to accelerate so it becomes more accessible.

I'm amazed that these people have no advisors briefing them about Jet Stream collapse or the release of methane as permafrost melts etc. No one's gonna be mining anything up there and if they are there won't be much of a market anywhere to sell it in.

To expand, permafrost melting emits CO2 equivalent that is 100s of years of modern human activity. It’ll obviously happen in less than 100 years.

And that's just what we know about. There are still sources that we're discovering. Our sources don't match what we measure yet, which means it's likely worse than we know.

Spot on. The trouble with accelerationists is that they assume they know what will happen.

The French revolution was pretty much unleashed with that mindset. Upper class figures wanted to get rid of the nobility/royalty monopoly on power. They thought they could profit from a new arrangement. Then the terror began.

I'm afraid this is what we're in for here. The oligarchs think they can steer this. They want to speed up climate change, treat the world to some shock therapy and come up on top. If they're right, we're screwed. If they're wrong, we're even more screwed.

So they say. But I won't believe it until I see it on an official US government site.

To avoid ideological bias, of course.

You can still see the original bias on the official US sites if you squint hard and look under the sharpie corrections.

Have you ever seen a glacier before? In real life?

Yes, many.

In case it wasn't clear, my post was sarcasm. I realize that sarcasm plays badly in text forums and on HN in particular, but it's the best way to express how angry I am that the US government is so utterly deranged when it comes to science.

Poe's Law :-)

I think it's a sign of the times that it is not as obviously recognisable as sarcasm anymore :/

It was very obviously sarcasm. It only takes one clueless person to generate a thread of comments like this.

HN has always had people crazy/shitty enough to genuinely espouse beliefs similar to the one presented here. They rarely even get flagged or downvoted, so apparently it's not that offensive to the HN audience, which means you can only assume it to be within the community's overton window.

So no, you cannot assume these things are sarcasm unless you are perfectly willing to just mis-categorize all crazies as "just sarcastic".

Sorry, I'm seriously afraid I'll live long enough to see a generation of polar ice cap and glacier contrarians come up, like the flat earthers.

Yes. Quite a few. But I'm old enough that I've seen them go from quite large to almost gone.

I’ll wait for it to be reported on Fox News and then an announcement from the White House.

Front page of nasa.gov

Huh, there it is.

Good for them. I hope they find a new job soon.

I wonder how the results would be if they measure the average for the year instead of only the coldest months. I say that because I suppose that ice, just like snow doesn't exactly match with temperature.

https://wmo.int/news/media-centre/wmo-confirms-2024-warmest-...

The article is about the artic sea and so was my comment. That link is about global temperature.

You can see it on the interactive tool here: https://nsidc.org/sea-ice-today/sea-ice-tools/charctic-inter...

You can click on individual years, but the decade average plots are the most revealing. You can see the average has dropped significantly each decade, and the drop is actually larger in the warmer months (~35%) than in the colder months (~10%) for the year range 1980 to 2020.

Just checked the link. While average is decreasing for the artic sea, average is slightly increasing in the Antarctic. Which makes me think, since most of the ice is on actual land and not on the ocean. Is there another tool that tracks ice on land?

At this rate, oil fields and shipping lanes will open up we can race to toast the planet even more. But at least the billionaires will be happy and not have to worry about just being only multi-millionaires.

Billionaires are an insignificant rounding error in the total production of CO2 on the planet. 50 top billionaires make 1200x CO2 of the average person [1]. Considering there's less than 2,200 of them (< 0.000025% of the population), that makes sense. They can could produce over twenty thousand times more than the average person while staying under a percent. They're disproportionate, but shooting them into the sun leaves us precisely where we are, to many significant digits.

[1] https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/billionaires-emit-mo...

The power of invested Capital protecting itself is what delays climate change action. Billionaires have a oversized influence on the decisions of Capital, for obvious reasons. Looking at their personal co2 consumption multiplied by their number isn't the measure you should be assessing.

Having done a few deep dives, more than 50% of the lobbying in the UK against green buildouts such as rail freight expansion, onshore wind and ev chargers between 2015 and 2019 was funded by oil and gas companies looking to keep their market share and disproportionately the big consolidations like Baker Hughes. I have no idea whether the ratios break down similarly elsewhere in even the anglosphere given the higher share of primary sector industry in US and Canadian gdp.

Edit: Those pollution numbers don’t really add up to 1,200x on average. Source has Top 50 richest people produced same emissions as bottom 155 million people combined. Page 8: https://webassets.oxfamamerica.org/media/documents/bp-carbon...

For example individual billionaires Yachts alone represent 870x average emissions from someone globally. That’s just in operations and excludes construction.

That 90 minute number includes investments, which doesn't make any sense. Do we blame the CO2 emissions of SpaceX on Elon Musk, which would be included in that, or do we blame NASA/Americans and worldwide Starlink subscribers for paying for something that has CO2 as a byproduct?

It's the collective us that's the problem, not wanting to give up our standard of living. Shoot the developed countries into the sun and you save the world.

The pollution from customers shouldn’t be counted, but investments on startups involve real world resources being used.

Blue Origin for example has 11,000 employees yet still depends on Jeff Bezos to keep the lights on. For years it looked a lot like an hobby, let alone all the other even less successful rocket companies.

Also, Billionaires start up companies for their super yacht’s making them technically investments even if they’re only used by the billionaire themselves it makes sense from tax standpoint. When you have that kind of money the line between hobby, investment, and donation get blurry.

> Do we blame the CO2 emissions of SpaceX on Elon Musk

Of course. 100%. He started it, he could stop it. It’s not even a question. No one was asking for starlink. Humanity could have continued just fine without wireless internet in the middle of nowhere.

Except that’s not included in this calculation.

Who is responsible for an early stage statue startup without customers? The people investing money, thus investment is a category of emissions.

> Who is responsible for an early stage statue startup without customers?

Still the CEO who made the choice to accept outside funding.

Point is that if the 1% were forced to pay significantly more the 99% wouldn’t have to give up as much.

Hard to expect that the overwhelming majority of the population to collectively agree to willingly reduce their QoL when income inequality continues to grow.

If you work in tech, and you live in America, you are part of the 1% of the world.

My personal financial situation and the size of my tax bill is entirely irrelevant and tangential.

I'm not talking about income, I'm talking about CO2 generation [1].

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/data-insights/there-are-huge-ineq...

Good tax policy is good tax policy even if it hurts you specifically.

The difference is that your 'average' billionaire has effectively infinite resources to shield themselves from the repercussions of global climate change, sea level rise, strife, chaos, etc. At least as compared to your average Bangladeshi.

That seems somewhat tangential? Some people think that it would be right if the costs of slowing down climate change would be disproportionately borne by “the billionaires” (since they disproportionately benefited from economic growth and barely pay any taxes anyway).

Said billionaires obviously would disagree with that due to obvious reasons..

Normal people benefit far more from cheap energy than the ultra rich. Those people can just buy human labor if that's what is needed. For normal people it might be the difference between having a tractor to plow your field, and plowing it with animal power(possibly your own)

True. But at the rate we are going, there will not be many fields to plow :)

The ultra rich benefits from the human labour they need having cheaper energy. The ultra rich are often rich off the backs many many working people below them. If they can pay them less, as their energy costs are lower - that is great for them and makes them richer.

If they can keep them using energy resources they are invested in, all the better.

See also, trends in atmospheric co2 at Mauna Loa observatory:

https://gml.noaa.gov/ccgg/trends/

The animated history of Co2 levels is stunning :

https://gml.noaa.gov/ccgg/trends/history.html

For data going further back, we have deep antarctic ice sheet, ice core samples of atmospheric co2:

https://www.bas.ac.uk/data/our-data/publication/ice-cores-an...

https://climate.mit.edu/ask-mit/how-do-we-know-how-much-co2-...

At about 1:50 in the video linked above, when it zooms out, notice the citations to the ice cores.

russian people would love this

They're already training up rodeo riders and ranch hands for the anticipated Siberian cattle ranges.

https://miratorg.ru/en/events/rodeo/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rW_XWZjqG2Y

Stop blaming the rich and the corporations. They love when 8 billion people throw up their hands and give up, while continuing to buy cheap stuff.

Blaming the rich/corps is exactly what they want. They'll gladly be your bad guy as long as you keep buying their goods, which people do.

We are blasted by capitalist logic that we are shaped by. The second anyone says "maybe everyday people need to consume less?" people freak out like they're being assaulted. But nobody seems to call out corporations for their, "You deserve this environmental disaster of a hamburger" propaganda advertisement.

The world's few thousand illionaires don't consume like the other 8 billion people. Using the rich as an excuse just perpetuates the destruction and let's the rich continue.

The absolute worst part? Most people idolize the rich and pretend that one day they too will be rich. Capitalism has convinced us that we are entitled to excess. Calling out how insane this is is a social no-no because it makes people fee-fees hurt.

The Northwest Passage still isn't ice-free. There's more open water, but loose icebergs reportedly clog up the tight spots.[1]

[1] https://scitechdaily.com/arctic-ice-wont-let-go-the-surprisi...

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