Comment by lazide 14 hours ago
Not that you’re wrong, but I find it darkly amusing that rather than than cut back on all the crazy things we’re doing, it would make sense to instead bio engineer a bunch of plant life to deal instead.
> for whatever reason the green movement has opposed the solution for decades. Even shutting down nuclear to use more coal.
This is an amusing and antique take on things. Anti-nuclear protests were frequently in the news in the 70s and 80s. As a result, some people with views set in stone in their youth believe that environmentalists are still predominately anti-nuclear.
In a strange twist of fate, this mindset is actually helping things today. The US President, likely motivated by a desire to own the libs and punch environmentalists in the face, plans to pour $4T into nuclear, making him an unintended climate change warrior, some say the greatest ever.
Exactly. Runaway capitalism is the fuel of our climate emergency. Boats and planes delivering container loads of plastic shit around the world. People flying to Europe for the weekend.
The best fix at this time, since we humans have shown ourselves to be collectively incapable of doing the right things, would be to push a stick into the spokes and bring the whole system crashing down.
Guess who seems to be doing just that (though for all the wrong reasons). If the rabid US leadership manages to crash the global economy, that could be the single biggest reduction in emissions in history.
> The US President, likely motivated by a desire to own the libs and punch environmentalists in the face, plans to pour $4T into nuclear, making him an unintended climate change warrior, some say the greatest ever.
All that cash and he’s only asking for 5 GW of improvements to existing reactors and ten “new large reactors.” So what, 20 GW total? By 2030.
That doesn’t come close to satisfying an AI power consumption estimate of 68 GW by 2027 and 327 GW by 2030. [1]
[1] https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RRA3572-1.html
> but for whatever reason the green movement has opposed the solution for decades
Which green movement are you referring to? I understand there are some anti-nuke green parties in some European countries but as far as I can tell they don’t hold all that much political power.
> Renewables are great but nothing currently is replacing baseload co2 producing fuels, which are still growing globally.
It is not a green movement that is currently interfering with the production of renewable energy sources in the States, that much is evident.
What is the proposed mechanism for implementing a cut back? A global population with 8 billion people and 1950s carbon emissions implies an average living standard somewhere in the realm of the 1900s. Are you volunteering to move back to the horse and buggy?
Bear in mind that the industrialized world of 1950 was only inhabited by a small portion of the global population at most a billion people.
The only path forward is technological innovation to reduce or remove carbon emissions.
CO2 emissions are not the driving force behind economic development. Energy is. And energy generation has been decoupled from CO2 emissions in almost every major economy, including China. Heck, in many countries economic growth has been decoupled even from energy use, with economies growing while energy use shrinks.
And while technological innovation is always nice, we always possess all the technology we need to get rid of the vast majority of emissions today. It’s just a question of implementation (ie the political will to spend some money and maybe reduce the share price of a few fossil fuel companies).
While earnest, I’ve heard this claim for 30 years - that it’s simple political will. The reality is that until very recently there were only two economically viable carbon neutral energy sources. We now have four, however there are real unsolved problems with scaling three of those solutions. The only technology which can reliably solve the crises brings along its own set of externalities.
It does few favors to anyone to underestimate the scale of the problem facing the world. There is no set of political body in the world with the capability to freeze consumption and lock billions of people into poverty.
“Horse and buggy”. How dramatic.
If at least the US got in line with the rest of the world, we would be half-way there.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita
The problem is not the 8 billion people, is the handful that have an disproportionate impact.
Disingenuous. Here is the correct chart to link if you want to assert emissions by country: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-co2-emissions-per-...
How does that make sense? The US reduced their emissions by shifting production to China, and China gladly lapped it up (in massive amounts).
It would be good to have a graph showing where the ultimate products of these emissions ended up.
> The only path forward is technological innovation to reduce or remove carbon emissions.
I’d be completely happy with technological innovations that allowed us to restore heat balance (solar radiation management, marine cloud brightening, etc). That can buy time for transitioning from fossil fuels.
I mean, if I had Elon Musk money, I'd build some kind of giant carbon capture mechanism. Perhaps I'd buy the largest basalt quarry I could find and start sequestering carbon at a planetary scale. It would cost a ton of money, but I'd do it in secret. If it worked, eventually it would show up on the scales, and I'd emerge from the shadows. This particular method of carbon capture could potentially work at a planetary scale and could potentially be done in secret, at huge cost, but the only blocking factor today is money.
https://eos.org/articles/basalts-turn-carbon-into-stone-for-...
This is the answer to carbon storage by the way, people just do not know about it. There's more than enough reactive mineral sites on the planet. The process is basically just dissolving CO2 into water, heating it, and soaking basalt in it to allow crystals to form. The water becomes heavier than ground water and can simply be poured into the Earth. The unsolved problems are optimization problems: direct air capture of CO2, using saltwater, that sort of thing.
If the world's billionaire class decided to buy carbon sequestering, we could have global CO2 levels returned to 1900 levels within a decade or two. The technology exists, the economic willpower does not.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-43789527
> Potentially, basalt could solve all the world's CO2 problems says Sandra: "The storage capacity is such that, in theory, basalts could permanently hold the entire bulk of CO2 emissions derived from burning all fossil fuel on Earth."
Having said all of that, this is likely the most dystopian option. It's the "tech bails us out, yet again" solution because we could deploy it thoroughly enough that we can solve climate change without addressing any of the existential issues that got us here. The right combination of corporate+government partnership commercializing this technology and making it mandatory is a very plausible way to arrive at "there's 4 corporations on Earth that run the show" a la Aliens.
> The only path forward is technological innovation to reduce or remove carbon emissions.
Jared Diamond said a funny thing in his book 'Collapse', when talking about the last person on Easter Island to have cut down a tree.
Easter Island had at one point been densely forested and supported a dense human population. When Europeans found it there were no trees and it was sparsely populated. It's thought that their famous Moai statues were rolled to the shore on logs, and trees were found plentifully according to the pollen record there.
Anyway, Diamond envisages the person cutting down the last tree as thinking "It's ok, technology will save us!"
btw, Jared Diamond's "Collapse" begins with a chapter on Montana gold mines. When I first got it I thought "oh no, this is gonna be boring af", but his depth and breadth of knowledge made even that captivating. I also learned later in the book about the Greenland Norse and their ups and downs, and that was also revelatory. Reading that book was one of the top edifying experinces of my life. I highly recommend it.
We could start by banning things that explicitly waste resources such as proof of work cryptocurrency and adjust tax incentives to punish huge energy consumers for things like AI. Make the energy cost factor in the long-term externalities and maybe companies will hesitate before burning the world for things that aren't necessary.
Things don't have to be perfect - you start with the biggest polluters/consumers and use trade incentives to convince other nations to join. We've seen this work under Democratic administrations (China's outputs are dropping) before Trump etc. threw it all away.
China turning the corner on emissions has far more to do with their desire to get out from under the possibility of an oil blockade locking up their economy than green pressure from the west. They also organically have an environmental movement, though not one that they are willing to kowtow to at the cost of growth.
Another factor for China was their cities choking on smog. One of the anecdotes I remember from Covid was that mask wearing in Asian cities was just another thing you did depending on that aspect of the weather, except in 2020 it had another reason behind it.
I think a cap on what consumption you're allowed until you can prove utility to society would be beneficial. That said, with crypto it was distributed so it'd be extremely hard to enforce, and using the example of how AI has played out there's companies willing and able to dump money speculating on it just so they don't lose out if it does bear fruit. I expect for anything in future that shows potential they can organize themselves around regulations faster than new rules and enforcement could adapt.
Disturbingly authoritarian impulses for a dubious prescription.
The climate goes through natural cycles, we are actually coming out of a global temperature low after the ice age. Cold eras are actually far more dangerous throughout human history, for example the Little Ice Age during the Dark Ages which caused widespread crop failures and famine in Europe. Warm eras are correlated with the golden ages of civilizations, such as the Roman Warm Period. Zooming out over geological time, the Earth is currently near an all time low in terms of surface temperatures.
Cryptocurrency functions as a decentralized means of exchange outside of the control of centralized powers. Governments have been feverishly debasing their fiat currencies, which has fueled inflation, pricing many young people out of owning a home. It would seem you would rather trap people in an inflationary monetary paradigm, justifying it with secular eschatology. Millenarian Marxists have similarly latched onto climate change as their justification for abolishing private property, policies of degrowth, and other anti-human initiatives.
Energy per capita is tightly correlated with living standards. We saw broad wealth increases up until about 1970, after which energy per capita flat lined, and income inequality started worsening. Europe has implemented many of the polices you want, and has achieved nothing besides deindustrialization and irrelevancy.
China's CO2 emissions are increasing dramatically, and they continue to build more coal and natural gas plants. The USA and Europe reduced their emissions mostly by offshoring manufacturing to China.
It seems you're deeply confused about how the world works.
>Warm eras are correlated with the golden ages of civilizations
Yeah, and hot eras kill civilizations. There's a famous one called the 4.2 kiloyear event. Does modern mesopotamia seem like a great place for the birthplace of agriculture?
I don't necessarily agree with the parent's politics, but you seem to be completely ignoring the categorical difference of CO2 emissions and associated risks of climate tipping points to our civilization.
> Does modern mesopotamia seem like a great place for the birthplace of agriculture?
Actually yes, if not for the massive cultural and political dysfunction.
Modern Day Mesopotamia would be one of the most agriculturally productive regions in the world if managed. Like the California Central Valley and Central Arizona which share similar climate classifications and are the most productive regions (per Acre) on the planet.
If you think the rise in global temperature that's going on now is going to lead to the golden ages of civilization, you're deeply confused about how the world works.
Go to the Wikipedia page on the Little Ice Age, have a look at the graph Global Average Temperature Change, and explain to us how current climate change is at all comparable to the Little Ice Age, or the Medieval Warm Period for that matter.
Or have a look at https://xkcd.com/1732/ (scroll all the way down) to get an idea of the rate and scale of temperature changes throughout human history.
Notably, I’d count ‘technological innovation to reduce or remove carbon emissions’ as cutting back on the crazy.
I’m pretty sure that’s long forgotten now in the list of national priorities eh? Definitely in the USA. With war on their borders even the EU is reconsidering plans eh?
Sure there are also many problems with saying only tech can fix all our issues. Tech is the reason we have all these issues in the first place. People survived just fine in teepees. Some might even say they lived a better life before the tech (guns) and non-native disease enabled by tech (travel) wiped them out. Swap the bike for a horse then. All you need for that is wild food and people who care about animals.
This feels like whataboutism. "Sure, you're not doing international air travel and avoiding all the incredible waste of a modern car, but whatabout that small amount of resources needed for a bike?!"
It encourages helplessness and fatalism. Don't let perfect be the enemy of good.
> cut back on all the crazy things we’re doing
How would you get grant money for that?
I think cutting back on what we're doing already wouldn't draw a lot of grant support.
We can make a presentation showing "Look, if we just ate in-season locally-grown vegetables and wore clothes made from the fibres of our locally grown nettles and wool we could solve the climate crisis in maybe 100 years!"...
It doesn't seem to be economically compelling for people in the UK or US who are getting tomatoes in January, living in a house made from bricks mass-produced in the third world, and clothed in threads made in Bangladesh.
I hope things can change, but it will take people waking up to the fact that their comfort is bought at the expense of many people far away suffering through long ass work days, and even if they then recognize it why would they change their habits?
I want everyone to live in sloth gardens - just reach out, grab a leaf, and there's your food.
It's a dream but that's how we grow <3
> We can make a presentation showing "Look, if we just ate in-season locally-grown vegetables and wore clothes made from the fibres of our locally grown nettles and wool we could solve the climate crisis in maybe 100 years!"...
With respect, this doesn't seem to me a very fair assessment of the cause - the average person is not to blame, greedy, amoral corporations and spineless politicians are - nor the solutions. A more fair way of putting it might be, "If we seriously invest in alternative energy sources and reducing the major sources of carbon emissions, we'll be able to stop the climate crisis from irreparably fucking the planet, causing even more problems than we have now."
That's a good practice anyway. Focusing on the capability to flexibly adapt our agriculture ensures long-term survivability. Focusing on hyper-efficient extraction that assumes a steady state gives a high-output but incredibly fragile agricultural industry. One black swan event, like a few volcanic eruptions, and we're all toast - and of course, the climate is constantly shifting even in the absence of such events and human inputs, just more slowly.
The thing is actually stopping the warming involves:
1. Cutting emissions to zero. Not cutting back, zero
2. Extracting a chunk of co2 from the atmosphere and sequestering it
Cutting back just means things get worse less quickly. They still get worse.
To solve the issue we should be building nuclear among other things but for whatever reason the green movement has opposed the solution for decades. Even shutting down nuclear to use more coal. Renewables are great but nothing currently is replacing baseload co2 producing fuels, which are still growing globally. And which will still grow unless we make an economically feasible baseload alternative.