Comment by lumost

Comment by lumost 14 hours ago

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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.

tfourb 11 hours ago

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).

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  • lumost 4 hours ago

    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.

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manoDev 13 hours ago

“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.

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  • cityofdelusion 12 hours ago

    Disingenuous. Here is the correct chart to link if you want to assert emissions by country: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-co2-emissions-per-...

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    • griffzhowl 11 hours ago

      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.

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      • tfourb 11 hours ago

        Ask and you shall receive: https://ourworldindata.org/consumption-based-co2

        You will notice that the picture does not change radically if you include emissions from trade (which is what you were asking).

        Turns out while China expects a lot of stuff to the us, it doesn’t have that big of an impact on net emissions.

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    • manoDev 5 hours ago

      This graph isn’t telling the history you think it does…

      China’s population is 4x times the US, and still, total emissions are a little over 2x — and that’s ignoring the outsized impact from exported goods.

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  • ekianjo 13 hours ago

    > If at least the US got in line with the rest of the world, we would be half-way there.

    China and India would like a word with you

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    • anonymars 10 hours ago

      Per-capita?

      But even so, in the future it'll be small consolation to think "nothing to be done, someone else was worse"

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dr_dshiv 14 hours ago

> 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.

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  • tcoff91 13 hours ago

    The moment anyone tries anything on that scale of geoengineering, they will immediately be blamed for whatever weather-based natural disasters that follow. I just don’t see how this can work without creating massive diplomatic tensions.

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    • oorza 12 hours ago

      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.

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      • marcosdumay 11 hours ago

        It's very much the wrong time to scale carbon capture. Doing some pilot plants for research is a good idea, but if your goal is to see the effects on the global plots, you should be working on something else.

        There's a sibling with the long-form reasoning. The problem is that we are pushing a lot of new carbon into the atmosphere, you just won't be able to scale anything enough and there's a really big opportunity cost to try to push the tide away.

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      • tcoff91 12 hours ago

        Carbon capture is probably the only geoengineering thing you could do that isn’t going to be massively controversial. Probably not practical though.

        The other options mentioned like messing with the atmosphere to make it reflect more heat into space will likely cause wars due to lack of global consensus

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      • lazide 12 hours ago

        I think you don’t understand the true scale of the problem. Just the additional fossil carbon being put in the atmosphere by the US alone is trillions of KG/yr.

        Not only is there no way to hide trying to do something about it at that scale, there is no single site (or even multiple sites) that could handle that amount of sequestration - we’re talking hundreds.

        And even Elon Musk could not afford it, even if he dumped everything he had into it.

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griffzhowl 12 hours ago

> 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!"

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  • griffzhowl 11 hours ago

    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.

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Arainach 13 hours ago

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.

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  • ethanpailes 12 hours ago

    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.

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    • keyringlight 12 hours ago

      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.

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  • keyringlight 12 hours ago

    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.

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  • exoverito 12 hours ago

    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.

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    • anon84873628 12 hours ago

      >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.

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      • oceanplexian 11 hours ago

        > 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.

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    • roelschroeven 12 hours ago

      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.

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lazide 12 hours ago

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?

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bix6 14 hours ago

I volunteer yeah. I can get everywhere I need on my bike so horse and buggy would give me enough range and prevent all the over touristing.

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  • dingnuts 13 hours ago

    there are many problems with this attitude but even bicycles require industrial processes and trade to maintain. Mainly the tires but if anything breaks the metallurgy for the spokes wouldn't be available

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    • bix6 12 hours ago

      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.

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      • lazide 11 hours ago

        Noble savage much?

        They had war, rapes, atrocities, tragedies, plagues, shittiness, famines, etc. too you know.

        At least from what we’ve been able to gather after they mostly got wiped out.

        It is no picnic living in a preindustrial society.

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    • JackMorgan 13 hours ago

      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.

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