Hacker News Reader

Comment by lumost | Hacker News Reader

I'd love to see some small scale experiments in geoengineering. Despite multiple climate agreements, over my life time - I have not seen any actual progress on climate change outside of technological advancement. Technology such as wind, solar, BEVs, and similar appear to be coming far too slowly to avoid catastrophe. Perhaps China's recent push on BEV and similar technologies will tip the scale, but I am skeptical.

Human's have been geoengineering for millenia via clear cutting of forests, bio engineering of crops, fertilization of fields, damming of rivers, and other activities. While there will certainly be consequences and side effects, even a partial sequestering of ~20B tonnes of CO2 per year would meet the Kyoto protocol.

Are the consequences of Geo Engineering so disastrous that we should accept the worst case scenarios of global warming.

View on HN

Doomberg has this theory that worldwide consumption of a source of energy never decreases, any fossil fuels extracted will be burned somewhere, and green regulations or subsidies just shift around who does the burning. Adding new sources of energy to the mix only reduces the rate of growth in fossil fuel consumption, but it still goes up.

Oil consumption didn't reduce coal consumption, it just added a new energy type. Same for natural gas.

So far they've been right. Decreased coal usage in developed countries has been offset by increased coal usage, of the now cheaper coal, in developing countries. German electric consumers are effectively subsidizing Chinese and Indian consumers.

Eventually that will turn around, if only because we start running out of fossil fuels, and the thesis will fall apart. But it will take far longer than we have, and we have far more fossil fuels than we can afford to extract and burn. That means the ONLY way to address climate change, which is a global problem, is through technological innovation. Regulation is a dead end, and just looking at the track record of regulation so far, it's hard to deny that.

That means making green alternatives that are better, and we're making some good progress on that. Electric cars are better in most ways for most uses except price. Solve that last one and they'll quickly displace combustion vehicles for most uses. Range is already good enough most of the time for most of the people.

It may also mean doing some geoengineering to soften the impact of global warming that will continue for multiple centuries if we don't intervene.

I think you're drawing the wrong conclusion from this set of facts and claims.

What I think you're saying is:

1. The only solution to this problem is technology that gives us alternatives to fossil fuels.

2. However, even if this technology becomes ubiquitous and cheap, it won't solve the problem by itself. Absent some forcing function, people will continue to use fossil fuels as long as they're convenient and available.

All of which may be true. But then you make the weird third claim:

3. Regulation is a dead end, and just looking at the track record of regulation so far, it's hard to deny that.

It seems to me that the only possible implication you can draw from facts (1) and (2) is that we are going to need massive amounts of regulation to discourage fossil fuel usage, since it won't drop organically even when sustainable alternatives are cheap and available.

PS As a totally unrelated note, here's a chart of global whaling activity. https://ourworldindata.org/whaling

That's a fair point, but the thing about regulation is it only works for one country at a time. For whaling we could make a law and apply it to the whole world, and most countries complied only because there were no whales left and no money to be made in it anymore. That's the real reason whaling ended.

With climate change, I don't think it's possible, and the current track record seems to back me up. When Europe enacts green legislation, the fossil fuels are just consumed elsewhere. It hasn't reduced consumption, just moved it. So, no, I don't see how we can regulate a way out of this problem. I think the only viable option is to innovate.

Maybe I'm too cynical, but that's the way I see the situation.

Honestly I kind of have to disagree with your entire premise.

We’re seeing pretty dramatic decreases in emissions across any advanced society that took major regulatory action to decrease emissions. EU emissions in 2023 were 37% lower than in 1990, despite population increases. A good chunk of the early drops were due to fuel substitution, but now increasingly they’re due to the deployment of renewables. In 2024, about 47% of the EU’s total electricity generation for the year came from renewable sources! These are incredible results, especially if you compare them to a decade or two earlier. If you’d told me that in a matter of 15-20 years, the EU’s pro-renewable industrial policy would have achieved these results (say back in the late 2000s) I would have been very surprised. Yet here we are, and the numbers keep jumping every year. So I would not say “regulatory approaches haven’t worked,” I would say “wow, this is one of the most effective regulatory interventions that human beings have ever devised.”

The reason global emissions haven’t dropped is because China’s emissions kept rising during this time. However: now we’re seeing a similar process unfold in China, just at a much larger scale. There the central government is massively subsidizing and encouraging the deployment of renewables. Current estimates are that China’s emissions may have already plateaued and are entering a structural decline. Again, yes, a lot of this is due to technology being available. But the rapid deployment of the tech is a function of strong government intervention.

We are going to reach a point very soon where 90%+ of any modern nation’s energy can be supplied using renewables, nuclear and storage. It’s actually coming very fast. (And that 90% is really only capped by intermittency issues, not because there are major limits on what we can generate.) At that point we’ll be into the very substantial “mop up” phase where we try to work through the remaining high-emissions industries. This will require massive amounts of regulatory intervention, since most of the barriers will be due to the need to replace existing infrastructure on an expedited schedule.

The developing world, including especially China and India are building out massive amounts of coal power still: You can see the data for yourself: https://globalenergymonitor.org/projects/global-coal-plant-t...

It's possible that will turn negative at some point, but I think that would only be through innovation when coal power isn't economically competitive anymore.

> We are going to reach a point very soon where 90%+ of any modern nation’s energy can be supplied using renewables, nuclear and storage. It’s actually coming very fast.

That's exactly my point. We have to get there. Until we do, regulations will just move the consumption around. If it's not Europe it's China, if it's not China it's India, if it's not India it's Africa, etc.

I still think the only we get out of this is make green energy much more economically competitive - the full cost of green energy including the cost of dealing with it's intermittent nature. We're not there yet, and it's a very hard problem to solve, because the more intermittent energy you add to the mix, the more expensive it gets to solve the intermittency.

I don't see regulation ever getting us there, except for those cases where it helps drive the innovation faster. Which comes back to my premise that the only way out is through innovation.

If you look closely at what China is doing, you’ll see that they’re building out a massive fossil-backed renewable grid. The new coal they’re constructing consists of modern dispatchable coal that can be spun up and down quickly to supplement the variability of renewables. They’ve also proposed a scheme of capacity payments [1] to pay coal plants for not generating. This is more or less the same as what Europe and the US have been doing, except we’ve been using natural gas instead of coal (and of course the scale of China’s renewable buildout utterly dwarfs what the West has done.)

The important thing here is that this makes economic sense. Coal is not cheaper than renewables and doesn’t really compete well with them when both are available (especially as the price curve for new renewables keeps dropping) but until storage is vastly more available, fossil backing is pretty much the only way to build out a renewable grid.

My big worry is not that “regulation won’t work” (I think we’ve already pushed ourselves over the economic tipping point where renewables and storage are pretty much inevitable.) My fear is that it will come too late, and that we’ve been much too optimistic about our carbon budgets.

[1] https://www.raponline.org/blog/changing-how-coal-power-plant...

That’s the official narrative out of China, and it’s a hopeful one. It doesn’t fit the data though, at least so far. China is constructing record amounts of coal power and consuming ever increasing quantities of coal. https://www.carbonbrief.org/chinas-construction-of-new-coal-...

But even if they manage to turn that around decades from now, the coal will go to India or Africa, it’s not going to stay in the ground until it’s really uneconomical (and even then more likely to be replaced by natural gas than renewables.) Again, some countries may achieve success with regulation in isolation, but what matters is what the whole world does. There I think regulation doesn’t work because we don’t have one government, but instead many competing nations. Tragedy of the commons rules more often than not. This is where we disagree. The data is currently on my side, fossil fuel consumption is at record levels and increasing still. I think your position is this will change at some point in the future, with the help of regulation.

Renewables are way cheaper than coal power in many places, but at the extreme they basically need backing by equal fossil fuel infrastructure as they come to dominate the grid. Because you have to have electricity when the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing. When you add that to the costs, then they don’t currently win. Fixing that is the innovation that can solve this, which I think we both agree on.

According to the same source (site), it looks like emissions in China have plateaued in Q3 2024 as compared to Q3 2023. So we’re already seeing some effects. https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-no-growth-for-chinas-em...

I agree with you that the coal capacity buildouts are worrying. The best we can hope is that China has just structurally misallocated a bunch of funds, and when it comes time to burn that coal, continued improvements in renewables and storage will make all those plants unprofitable. That’s what’s happening most other places.

I don’t share your optimism, but I admire it. For all our sakes, I hope you’re right.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com