Comment by throwaway_7274 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by throwaway_7274 | Hacker News Reader

Somehow, somehow, everyone’s heads are still in the sand. Desperately trying to bury them deeper. It’s like CICO denialism.

I expect this to be a deeply unpopular take here, but solutionism will fail. Magic technology will not come to save us. All of our industrial tekhne has been in the service of rolling down the stored-energy hill faster and faster. To put the genie back in the bottle, to take apart the CO2 and turn it back into hydrocarbons, we’d have to do more work than everything that was done in the last two centuries. And that’s an extremely conservative lower bound.

It’s so dire. I don’t think most people understand that everything around them is made out of petroleum. Not just your ability to travel, or your clothes. Your food is made of petroleum. Your institutions are made of petroleum. Your gender equality is made of petroleum. Your freedom is made of petroleum.

There is no putting this thing in reverse. If the AI doesn’t get us first, thermodynamics will topple all of this.

While it is true that reversing combustion would require more energy than was released burning it, I don't think anyone reasonable is proposing it. The proposal is to redirect future energy production away from fossil extraction and into cleaner sources (solar, wind, nuclear, geothermal) which is a completely different thermodynamic problem. The constraints are things like grid storage capacity, permitting timelines, and critical mineral supply chains - not physics.

If we overcome these very real contraints, we reduce the rate of new additions to atmospheric CO2. We will still need to do the thermodynamically hard work of removing CO2 at gigaton scale, but deferring that until removal tech is more mature is the right sequencing.

Of course, this assumes that we are actually working towards the CO2 output reductions right now and really committed to CO2 removal in the near future.

Sorry if this sounds like a dumb question, but I legitimately don't know: does the thermodynamic argument hold up? (Broadly, I agree that humanity needs a healthier relationship with industrialism before fixing this is possible).

A few ways I can imagine it doesn't:

- We can reduce warming by other means, like changing the Earth's albedo.

- A lot more energy falls to Earth every day from the sun than we use via petroleum; a good amount of solar/wind would let us climb back up the hill via sequestration.

- We don't need to sequester CO2/methane into high-energy-density hydrocarbons; could an efficient sequestration process yield eventually net positive energy per unit greenhouse gas from the burn -> sequester process?

Yeah, this is all true! All of these things are also insanely hard, like, orders of magnitude harder than what we usually mean by “insanely hard,” and might be near-impossible in a similar way that unburning all the carbon is near-impossible, only… somewhat less so. I only talk about unburning all the carbon to emphasize the sheer scale of the problem. There are things you can “fix” or “clean up” or “undo” like, surprisingly, the ozone hole. This is not something we can undo. We can at best halt it, and even slowing it would be (will be) historically traumatic.

Not a dumb question at all.

You are right, except: "solutionism will fail. Magic technology will not come to save us."

You just can't know this. It might be true. But it might not. That's the thing about the future, it is fundamentally alien.

I mean… I guess, sure. But on a scale of “heavier-than-air powered flight is impossible” to “superluminal signaling is impossible,” it’s like… realistically, about halfway in-between? Enough that I’d sooner start lifting weights and practicing my scary face than count on a third-act gizmotron.

All we have to do is plant trees. Millions of trees, and reduce beef farming.

Trees are carbon neutral. They turn carbon into wood while they're growing and then release that carbon when they rot or burn or are eaten. Only a very small number of trees escape one of those fates.

If you increase the amount of wood in existence, that is not carbon neutral, if you can maintain the increased level.

Then it'd be a one-time carbon removal, not a continuous carbon removal like is required.

With what water? Trees are dying because of heat or burning in flames.

The desertification of Europe has already started.

More trees leads to more water; look into micro climates. Even in deserts! See China's Green Wall.

China's green wall hasn't met objectives, is worsening water losses, and isn't solving desertification.

This led me down some research papers. Thanks!

It looks like you are more right. Without environmental moisture to capture, the trees are effectively straws depleting ground water and losing it to evaporation.

The Yucatan has enough moisture blowing in that trees aid in capturing moisture and increasing rainfall. Without an outside source of moisture, the false desert forests are likely making things worse water wise.

> Your gender equality is made of petroleum.

That is the weirdest and wokest comment I read this year on the internet. Could you please explain?

I agree that it’s a little weird, insofar as people don’t talk about it, but I’m not sure it’s very woke at all. It’s in a lot of tension with conventional woke ideas.

The usual way people talk about all this is more or less idealist (as opposed to materialist): people thought hard and got better morals (or worse morals, if you have a reactionary bent). The claim I’m making is that it’s not a coincidence that egalitarian norms happened to be correlated with the falling cost of energy. It’s basically the same idea as “God created men [and women]; Sam Colt made them equal.”

Sounds a little coloured by the blinkers of American Exceptionalism rooted in European Western culture.

Pre tech non petroleum communities like the Nagovisi in Papua New Guinea, the Khasi in India, the Mosuo people in southwestern China, the Minangkabau of West Sumatra, the Akan in Ghana, Bribri in Costa Rica, et al managed to avoid patriarchal society without possessing a Colt.

Yeah, it's contextual. Of course. There's context in everything.

I think the idea is that rights for women (along with other traditionally disadvantaged groups) are only sustainable in a prosperous society driven by cheap energy, and that as soon as resources become scarce, there will be a powerful revanchist backlash aimed at rolling things back to a more patriarchal and traditionalist way of life.

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