cmutel

I'm an American living in Switzerland for over 10 years, and this was definitely my impression as well. But that isn't really the case anymore here - you can no longer have anonymous (i.e. only numbered) accounts, and Switzerland is no longer a preferred locations for dirty money.

The ironic thing is that one of those new hot spots, in addition to the usual suspects like Cyprus, the Caribbean, etc., is the USA. See https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/interactive/2021/wyo... for some juicy details.

The Nordic countries are famous for pioneering low temperature district heating. This can be as low as 50 C. Sorry, no citation, this is what I heard at a project meeting on district heating networks in Switzerland.

District heating with such (relatively) low temperatures is no problem, the energy to pump is much less than the energy to heat. My house is heated from nuclear waste heat pumped more around 10 kilometers.

Aargau, normally considered higher tax, but we have four kids at home.

Since we're having the semi-annual "how do taxes work in other countries" thread, here is my experience as an American living in Switzerland. Though I have been here a while, I still find it interesting and a little weird.

At the beginning of the year, you get a bill for that year based on what they think you will owe. This bill is due on October 31, i.e. you need to pay your estimated income tax before you have earned all that income. This is especially strange because most people will get a 13th month salary at the end of October (your annual salary is split into 13 months, the extra comes in time for Christms presents?). You are expected to save adequately to be able by the end of October.

Banking secrecy is not dead in Switzerland. There are no longer anonymous accounts, and banks share information with foreign governments. However, there is banking secrecy between the banks and the government. On the other hand, we pay a wealth tax each year (it's small), so you need to declare each account and how much you had in it on December 31.

To create an equal playing field between house owners and renters, house owners pay an imputed rent cost for how much they would have paid in rent for their house. This is added to their income before taxes are calculated. In my case, this means my assessed income is around 25k higher than it otherwise would be.

There is no automatic form filling in my state, but there is free tax software (Java app which runs everywhere), and it is pretty easy to use. If you have questions, the local tax office will nicely respond via "secure email" in 1-2 days.

Taxes are very progressive and family friendly. With 4 kids and one income we pay 6.5% combined local/state/federal on income of around 120k (plus imputed rent).

There are no property taxes. For the wealth tax, most people who own houses never pay off their mortgages. They will typically have a mortgage for 50% of the house value (which can be quite high, a typical house where I live is between 800k and 1000k, and more in bigger cities). The interest can be deducted, and the mortgage amount from the wealth tax.

The official ISO shortname changed on Sept 28, 2016: https://www.iso.org/obp/ui/#iso:code:3166:CZ.

Wikipedia has a good discussion: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Name_of_the_Czech_Republic

Sorry for being late to the game, but we have an as-open-as-it-can-be tool to compare petrol, gas, battery, and fuel cell cars, both today and in the future, available here:

http://carculator.psi.ch/

The Python library which does the calculations is here:

https://pypi.org/project/carculator/

One nice thing about our tool is that it calculates life cycle emissions including projected changes in the electricity grid of the region you live in. Of course, these are uncertain, but most other academic analysis just use the current grid mix.

It's important to realize that, even with the advances in electric vehicles, while they are better than combustion cars, they are far from zero-emission. Lifetime emissions for an electric car could still be 200 g CO2/km, split almost evenly between the electricity supply and everything else. Depending on usage, which of course has wide spatial variation, just road construction and maintenance itself could be 20 g CO2/km (this number is valid for Switzerland, which has very high utilization rates).

I think most people who are have seriously investigated the current system and possible future developments in the next 10 to 20 years have come to the conclusion that a lot of the change has to be in consumer behaviour - clean tech is not clean enough, or can't be scaled up enough in the current economic and political climate, to reach any reasonable climate goal.

Here is a series of three open access reviews covering the current literature (1000s of papers):

1: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aabf9b

2: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aabf9f/...

3: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aabff4

Yes, but the linked product/subscription also include deep injection, not just the capture.

You are right that this is very expensive. Other firms in this space estimate that there should be a lower bound for direct air capture of $100-200 per ton of CO2 [0].

However, this is a very different product than BECCS - it direct air capture (DAC) of CO2 which would not occur without your purchase, in the only real permanent operating storage facility we currently have. It is very difficult to know what the marginal impact of changes in sugarcane production are, though we do know that there is potential for either indirect land use change, or mitigation of reduction due to shifts in demand/supply and knock-on effects.

[0] https://www.cell.com/joule/fulltext/S2542-4351(18)30225-3

Climeworks is a Swiss startup in business since 2003; they have built multiple pilot plants in Switzerland, and are well known here. See e.g. https://www.climeworks.com/about/

This is a reasonable place to start reading, they provide both summaries and detailed explanations of the science: https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar5/syr/

Lithium prices have gone down almost 60% in the last year.

Short-term storage isn't that bad, we have other battery chemistries or even completely different types (e.g. flow batteries). A bigger problem is seasonal storage, for which most batteries are far too expensive.

The process of making clinker uses heat to separate CaCO3 into CaO and CO2 [0]. This release of CO2 is normally about half the CO2 footprint of making concrete (the rest is mostly combustion of coal to generate heat).

CO2 can penetrate into the concrete and bond with CaO, over time reabsorbing all the CO2 released during the calcination process. In practice, CO2 doesn't penetrate deeply into concrete, so depending on the concrete type and environment something like 25% of the potential absorption of concrete is realized (this is based on a conversation I had with a colleague at work, the number is not exact).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calcium_carbonate

We looked into this with a completely open toolchain [0]. You could email either of the two first authors to get the code (not sure why it wasn't in the paper supporting information).

Building open carbon models isn't difficult, it's the input data that normally require licenses. I have built an open source life cycle assessment (LCA) software which has some traction [1], and there are alternatives for LCA [2] and integrated assessment models [3, 4]. However, data availability, especially on the level of completeness and detail you need to answer a specific question like carbon performance of a structure over a given period of time is a challenge. We are working on building a large open database to answer these kinds of questions[5], and Hacker News readers are welcome. Happy to chat via email if you want more info!

[0] https://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/acs.est.5b01735

[1] https://brightwaylca.org/

[2] http://www.openlca.org/

[3] https://github.com/JGCRI/gcam-core

[4] https://github.com/iiasa/message_ix

[5] https://bonsai.uno/

As far as I understand, current state-of-the-art is between $100-200 per ton CO2 (see https://www.cell.com/joule/fulltext/S2542-4351(18)30225-3). This is from the CO2 capture company Bill Gates has invested in, FWIW.

Here is a whole (open access) journal issue on negative emission technologies: https://iopscience.iop.org/journal/1748-9326/page/Negative%2...

Short summary: There is no free lunch. Almost everything is expensive, natural systems (afforestation and land use change) are cheaper but more variable. The cheapest negative emission technology is not to emit in the first place.

In our research, we see that the easy alternatives are being used almost to capacity already, making future improvement difficult. For example, there is basically no unused fly ash in Europe, and it is sometimes imported from as far away as India. Similarly, burning wastes for "free" heat is also limited by the availability of waste (residues from chemicals industry, tires, etc). This is particularly true in areas where waste incineration is the norm - plants built to service a certain volume of waste are struggling as wastes volumes decline due to diversion to recycling. Consumer waste has a rather high water content, so wastes with high energetic content help the incineration run better. This is why e.g. paper or plastic is sometimes burned instead of being recycled.

There is a way :) Don't forget that each atom of carbon combines with two oxygens from the air.

It is not unclear how their method, they explain it quite clearly and in detail [0]. In general, you are correct that road and (especially) rail require substantially more infrastructure than air travel. For combustion vehicles, however, such infrastructure is less than 10% of the total impact of such travel [1]. As energy source get cleaner, the relative impact of road construction and maintenance will increase. However, we run into difficult questions of allocation of burden, as essentially all damage to roads is done by heavy transport (damage goes by something like axle load to the fourth power), and by weather (irrespective of how much the road is used).

It is rather difficult to determine the actual impact of any one person's decision to fly or not fly. The state of the art considers the aircraft, the average load factor of the operator (or even load factor over a specific route), and the demand for urgent freight on that route (i.e. an empty seat might be compensated by more freight). Moreover, the marginal impact of one person is not the same as the marginal impact of e.g. a new travel policy for a large institution. Do to low data availability, we often take the average impact instead of the marginal.

For those actually interested in helping making open source and open data tools to help others make informed decisions, please check out BONSAI [2,3] (I am affiliated with the BONSAI NGO).

[0] http://ecopassenger.hafas.de/bin/help.exe/en?L=vs_uic&tpl=me... [1] https://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/acs.est.8b00261 [2] https://github.com/BONSAMURAIS/bonsai [3] https://bonsai.uno/

The cited study is not peer reviewed, nor does it provide any supplementary data. Simply put, as it is not reproducible, it is not science.

The best studies will be completely open about their assumptions, data sources, approximations, and uncertainties. They generally report (and I find similar conclusions in my research) that in most places where people are buying EVs, given the uncertainties in our supply chain models, they are at par with hybrid gasoline or natural gas cars. And it is difficult to construct consistent scenarios where the electricity grid does not get cleaner over the lifetime of an EV built today and used for 15 years.

A good starting point when exploring these calculations is the GREET model: https://greet.es.anl.gov/.

I am part of a team building an RDF database to be used for environmental footprinting and industrial ecology (https://github.com/BONSAMURAIS), and am also slowly becoming part of the Swiss open data scene - I would appreciate a chance to chat with you about your experiences!

For us, RDF seems like the only technology that can easily adapt to the large number of data types that we envision collecting.

The following open access publications give a broad overview of NETs:

Part 1: Research landscape and synthesis: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aabf9b

Part 2: Costs, potentials and side effects: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aabf9f

Part 3: Innovation and upscaling: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aabff4

I think you are right that Drawdown is doing good work, and trying to compare things that are quite difficult to compare. At the same point, the HN community should be aware that the data and models are neither open nor clearly identified, which means that we essentially have to just trust their conclusions. I work in this space [1], and when I see results with five significant digits (!) for prospective assessment it makes me very curious to see how these results were generated.

For an alternative, see the Big Open Network of Sustainability Assessment Information (BONSAI [2]; disclosure: I am chair of the board) which is trying to do similar work with open data and open science.

[1] https://chris.mutel.org/ [2] https://bonsai.uno/

The method to calculate there fact sheets (or environmental footprints) is called life cycle assessment, and has been trying to come up with labels for a long time. There have been large projects by Walmart and Tesco, for example, to label all their products. The problem is data availability.

This is an area where the Hacker News community can help. There is an initiative to replace the closed-source databases used to calculate such labels called BONSAI: https://bonsai.uno/; https://github.com/BONSAMURAIS/bonsai (I am one of the volunteers). We are doing the best we can, but could really benefit from people with expertise in

* Semantic web/RDF (to design and populate the larger database)

* Text processing (to use the web as a source of data on production and consumption)

* Machine learning/remote sensing (to understand the spatial pattern of industry)

There is also an active community focused on energy data and modelling: https://openmod-initiative.org/

Indeed. Here is a reasonable introduction by people who have a deep background in environmental footprinting: https://lca-net.com/blog/what-will-distributed-ledger-techno...

We just published a study on the environmental performance of current and future battery and fuel cell motorcycles (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030626191... ; also available via scihub). The supporting information is open Jupyter notebooks, though some of the background data is closed.

The environmental performance of electric motorcycles is different than cars:

- Cars need ancillary services like heating, increasing battery size

- Motorcycles have no real chance at regenerative braking

- Motorcycles are driven fewer kilometers than cars, making the impact of the vehicle more important (as opposed to the fuel).

Currently, we estimate that battery motorcycles are preferable across a variety of environmental indicators, though results differ for small and large motorcycles, which have very different usage patterns.

Feel free to contact me directly if interested in discussing or collaborating on open source life cycle assessment code or data (https://brightwaylca.org/, https://chris.mutel.org/).

Perhaps, though the first Apple store in the Zurich area was in a mall which few would call glamorous: https://www.apple.com/chde/retail/glattzentrum/