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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_emission_standards#/media/File:Euronorms_Diesel.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_emission_standards#/m... As a

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_emission_standards#/media/File:Euronorms_Diesel.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_emission_standards#/m... As a layman these sorts of reductions always seemed pretty strict to me. It seemed like a backdoor way of banning ICE's. We know that we need to hit zero CO2. I think that regulations on emissions are the complete wrong way to go about it, though. Health issues in cities are irrelevant if global warming means the cities are underwater. Tax the fuel, give incentives to renewable energies and batteries, and let the market sort it out. Or, have the government seriously attack on the research front. It feels a bit like we're sitting here with this 'money' abstraction and pretending that energy research is too expensive, when realistically, governments across the world have the might to make clean energy the next Apollo project. Why aren't they? That would be a fantastic legacy for any president/prime minister/whatever. The UK could take bits of land it owns, chuck homes there, give some fresh university grads in shit economic situations some research to crunch on. Like Manhattan 2.0. You can't just say to people 'oh, your car is impossible, let's go and sniff each other's armpits on the subway, and you'll have to walk to the countryside'. It just doesn't work.

JumpCrisscross 10y ago
> It feels a bit like we're sitting here with this 'money' abstraction and pretending that energy research is too expensive, when realistically, governments across the world have the might to make clean energy the next Apollo project. Why aren't they? I think we're scared we won't find a cheaper source of energy than fossil fuels. At least for a few generations. Confronting the reality that society will have a smaller energy budget going in the future compared with the past is a scary prospect for democracy, because it challenges a leg of the "growing pie" assumption.
- stegosaurus 10y ago
  The idea of 'cheap' makes increasingly less sense going forward as the abstraction of money falls apart due to automation. What matters is EROEI with externalities included (e.g. energy cost of carbon capture or sea barriers or whatever). But even if we play that game, in the UK we already pay something like a 75% combined tax rate (probably higher now) on car fuels. So we've already priced in 4x. And household electricity bills are generally trivial compared to stuff like land cost. We can, and will, afford it in monetary terms.
- m_mueller 10y ago
  How cheap is fossil fuel once you factor in all external effects?
  - nickff 10y ago
    It is worth noting that fossil fuels have positive externalities in addition to the obvious negative ones.[1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Moral_Case_for_Fossil_Fuels https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Moral_Case_for_Fossil_Fuel...
    - m_mueller 10y ago
      I don't see how this is an externality though. Whatever benefits fossil fuels provide in the form of cheap energy and synthetic building blocks should surely be already factored into its market demand?
    - rayiner 10y ago
      An externality is a cost or benefit not borne by the parties to a transaction. Cheap electricity is not a "positive externality" because the benefit inures to, and is fully captured by, the buyer of the electricity.
    - Qwertious 10y ago
      'The book received mixed reviews, with Jay Lehr of The Heartland Institute saying, "Written in a conversational style that is easy to read and understand, this book can serve as a layman's guide, refuting the absurd claims that man controls the climate, while explaining why the current abundance of oil and gas due to hydraulic fracturing will leave all efforts to impose wind and solar energy in our rear-view mirrors."' So obviously a book containing some ignorant claims doesn't rule out it containing insightful claims, but rejecting global warming outright is pretty damning - what positive externalities, exactly, does he refer to?
  - ArkyBeagle 10y ago
    I don't know you'd compare it. What's the true cost of dependence on, ultimately, human muscle power? With, uh, slavery and such. GDP per capita took a vertical path after 1790 , when it'd been flat since the Babylonians began brewing beer.
- davedx 10y ago
  Solar is cheaper than coal in many parts of the world. From earlier this week on HN: http://www.climatechangenews.com/2016/04/18/solar-is-now-cheaper-than-coal-says-india-energy-minister/ http://www.climatechangenews.com/2016/04/18/solar-is-now-che... There are many stories out there documenting the rapidly falling prices of renewables across the world. The problem isn't economic, it's political.
wrong_variable 10y ago
As a fresh graduate. Its really frustrating, its impossible to get work as a researcher - even for shit pay ! Money has really dried up ( or maybe there are too many graduates ). In the UK their is a push from universities for students to self fund their Phd in aeronautical engineering ! Its the most regressive thing you could do, but whatever - democracy.
- stegosaurus 10y ago
  I find myself wondering what the budget for Bletchley Park was. We are in a war, just as we were then. It's just slower and less visible. If we don't fix the energy problem, we are done for.
- dublinclontarf 10y ago
  > In the UK their is a push from universities for students to self fund their Phd in aeronautical engineering ! This is simply the market saying we don't need as many researchers in with Phd's in Universities.
- asuffield 10y ago
  This is an incomplete description of what is happening here. The world of academic research is undersupplied in funding, but massively oversupplied in researchers. There is no need to add more researchers; we can't fund the ones we already have. Efforts like the one you describe are demotivating people from training in a function that we don't need more of, which is a reasonable thing to do.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
nickff 10y ago
>"It feels a bit like we're sitting here with this 'money' abstraction and pretending that energy research is too expensive, when realistically, governments across the world have the might to make clean energy the next Apollo project. Why aren't they? That would be a fantastic legacy for any president/prime minister/whatever." Apollo wasn't very successful. I say this as someone who is personally an aerospace nut, and owns every space or aviation documentary he can get his hands on. Apollo succeeded in getting a dozen men to the moon, but it did not succeed in promoting the exploration of space, or creating a great deal of technological innovation which benefited the populace at large (for the amount of money spent). Apollo was also very unpopular, except for a little while between Apollo 9 and 12. Most of the population would have been happier with a new refrigerator or air conditioner, and those appliances would probably have had a better lasting impact (for a number of reasons).
- drcross 10y ago
  Sorry to sound harsh but your point doesn't meaningfully contribute to the discussion at hand. We knew what he meant.
  - nickff 10y ago
    The proper way for you to indicate this sentiment is to downvote my post, and avoid commenting, as per the Hacker News guidelines. From the number of up and down votes this post is getting, it appears that many people agree with you, but even more disagree. My point was that governments are unlikely to support 'moonshots', because the 'moonshots' are unpopular, as well as being bad investments.
    - magicalist 10y ago
      > The proper way for you to indicate this sentiment is to downvote my post, and avoid commenting, as per the Hacker News guidelines. Eh, I'm hoping dang will come by and detach the comment. It was a pretty classic middlebrow dismissal. "No need to read the comment! Someone compared something to the apollo project!", and etc. > My point was that governments are unlikely to support 'moonshots', because the 'moonshots' are unpopular, as well as being bad investments. There are other categories of public sentiment than popular and unpopular. It's not at all true that we don't fund things to the tune of tens of billions of dollars per year in the face of public lack of attention and apathy (and, actually, sometimes approval).
sdenton4 10y ago
Didn't you hear? All that money for research and public goods got sent down to Panama.
- ThisIs_MyName 10y ago
  This is getting old :-/
  - roddux 10y ago
    While I agree that the comment was off-topic and not really adding to the discussion, the issue is not getting old. The leaks happened barely a month ago, with no obvious repercussions (save Iceland). The story has been swept under the rug as much as possible and I will support anybody keeping it in the limelight.
mikeash 10y ago
This stuff is different from and often at odds with CO2 emissions. Taxing fuel works great for CO2, since the amount of fuel you burn corresponds very strongly to the amount of CO2 you emit. But it doesn't work at all for other sorts of emissions like these, because they depend heavily on how you burn the fuel, not just how much you burn. Often, burning everything cleanly means burning more fuel overall.
- stegosaurus 10y ago
  Yep. I was sort of trying to get at this with: >> Health issues in cities are irrelevant if global warming means the cities are underwater. I used to live in Central London and you could smell the diesel fumes in the morning. I'm very familiar with particulate emissions. Kill ICE's and we solve both.
  - magicalist 10y ago
    > I was sort of trying to get at this with: > >> Health issues in cities are irrelevant if global warming means the cities are underwater. which isn't true. Moreover, you didn't really give an argument for why this shouldn't be tackled at both ends of the problem. The smell is the least of our worries with particulate emissions.
  - ArkyBeagle 10y ago
    200 years ago it was horse manure. Is that what would replace it?
    - toomuchtodo 10y ago
      Electric vehicles.
      - ArkyBeagle 10y ago
        Sure. $100,000 US Teslas for everybody.
ArkyBeagle 10y ago
CO2 reduction will happen one filthy, grotty transaction at a time. It'll take exactly as long as it will take and there's probably [sweet fanny adams] anyone can do about it, other than build a thing that helps it along. I have living relatives who saw the transition from mules to tractors. It wasn't just nicer, it meant killing yourself much less slowly. Yes, they are that old, and they all look like tintypes from the 19th century - that gaunt, hollow look that working that hard gives you.
- davedx 10y ago
  > there's probably [sweet fanny adams] anyone can do about it That's a pithy defeatist statement. Personally I got a job at a renewable energy company. There are many avenues you can take to help tackle climate change.
  - ArkyBeagle 10y ago
    Excellent! Just please realize probably two-ten percent of the people I know were in alt. energy the first time around, after the Gas Scare in the 1970s. It just takes a while ( and the "defeatism" was just related to how long it will take.) You proving me wrong would the best possible outcome.
    - davedx 10y ago
      Yeah, tell me about it! The urgency (or lack of it) is what drives me crazy. At least there is hope though, for example huge changes are happening now in China at a crazy pace. I hope it won't be too little too late, the magnitude of what we need to do is daunting.
eru 10y ago
> We know that we need to hit zero CO2. I think that regulations on emissions are the complete wrong way to go about it, though. In general, yes. But there are different ways to burn your fuel to generate different amounts of other bad stuff. You want to tax these more directly.
WalterBright 10y ago
I agree. It's ridiculous to say that 99 parts per million of pollutants "passes" and 100 ppm "fails". There's no incentive to do better. But a tax of $1 per ppm multiplied by the annual number of miles driven will create powerful demand by consumers for lower taxed cars, and the car makers will do what they can to meet the demand.
mtgx 10y ago
It's one thing to trick the tests by 2x, maybe even 3x, if the tests are too strict for the real world. But not by 40x like VW did...And I believe they said only to gain a 10% performance boost. That's just stupid on VW's part. Anyway, the emissions scandal + the rise of EVs, will finally make all manufacturers try and push as many EVs on the market by 2022, when the new Euro 7 standard is official. They will need to lower their "fleet's" emissions, and the only effective way to do that is to push as many EVS into the market as possible. So in the end these regulations served their purpose. I'm happy for it.
skywhopper 10y ago
Actually, strict bright-line artificial limits like this are a great way to encourage innovation by using regulatory power to harness market forces to achieve a well-defined goal. In this case, the goal of MPG standards is actually not CO2 emissions or health, but using less oil. The international market for oil is quite broken and easily manipulated, and the global resources of oil are limited. I absolutely support government-funded research into improving automobile technology. As you say, clean energy is critical. The obvious place to focus energy research these days is on storage technologies from small scale chemical batteries to large-scale potential-energy solutions. We have the technology to generate clean energy relatively cheaply today, but we're missing the storage solutions to even out cycles in wind and solar power, and the continent-scale electricity grids we need to efficiently distribute the power to where it's needed.
schiffern 10y ago
>The UK could take bits of land it owns, chuck homes there "Chucking homes there" would be a good place to start improvements, actually. Designing zero-energy homes and offices is not hard, but housing developers have been slow to adopt the practice. Looking around, it seems like most modern house plans/blueprints have no preferred orientation to the single greatest energy source: the sun (or if they do then housing developers ignore them). When there's literally no "sunward"[1] on the map, then the cheapest of all energy reduction strategies -- passive solar design -- is all but impossible. Why isn't the climate zone given on a house plan? Because the assumption is that you'll just consume energy (typically fossil fuels) to make up the difference. We're designing buildings totally backwards: starting at form and bolting on function. The ideal would be adjustable parameters based on local conditions. South facing windows based on heating-degree-days, overhangs based on latitude, floorplans that adjust to ground topology and microclimate, etc. So you punch in the site conditions (or sense them), hit "compile", and it spits out blueprints for a zero-energy passive building specifically suited to those exact local conditions. This is more similar to how plants develop -- by sensing and adapting to local conditions, they incrementally design themselves to suit their habitat. [1] that is, south in the northern hemisphere and north in the southern hemisphere

JumpCrisscross 10y ago

> It feels a bit like we're sitting here with this 'money' abstraction and pretending that energy research is too expensive, when realistically, governments across the world have the might to make clean energy the next Apollo project. Why aren't they? I think we're scared we won't find a cheaper source of energy than fossil fuels. At least for a few generations. Confronting the reality that society will have a smaller energy budget going in the future compared with the past is a scary prospect for democracy, because it challenges a leg of the "growing pie" assumption.

stegosaurus 10y ago
The idea of 'cheap' makes increasingly less sense going forward as the abstraction of money falls apart due to automation. What matters is EROEI with externalities included (e.g. energy cost of carbon capture or sea barriers or whatever). But even if we play that game, in the UK we already pay something like a 75% combined tax rate (probably higher now) on car fuels. So we've already priced in 4x. And household electricity bills are generally trivial compared to stuff like land cost. We can, and will, afford it in monetary terms.
m_mueller 10y ago
How cheap is fossil fuel once you factor in all external effects?
- nickff 10y ago
  It is worth noting that fossil fuels have positive externalities in addition to the obvious negative ones.[1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Moral_Case_for_Fossil_Fuels https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Moral_Case_for_Fossil_Fuel...
  - m_mueller 10y ago
    I don't see how this is an externality though. Whatever benefits fossil fuels provide in the form of cheap energy and synthetic building blocks should surely be already factored into its market demand?
  - rayiner 10y ago
    An externality is a cost or benefit not borne by the parties to a transaction. Cheap electricity is not a "positive externality" because the benefit inures to, and is fully captured by, the buyer of the electricity.
  - Qwertious 10y ago
    'The book received mixed reviews, with Jay Lehr of The Heartland Institute saying, "Written in a conversational style that is easy to read and understand, this book can serve as a layman's guide, refuting the absurd claims that man controls the climate, while explaining why the current abundance of oil and gas due to hydraulic fracturing will leave all efforts to impose wind and solar energy in our rear-view mirrors."' So obviously a book containing some ignorant claims doesn't rule out it containing insightful claims, but rejecting global warming outright is pretty damning - what positive externalities, exactly, does he refer to?
- ArkyBeagle 10y ago
  I don't know you'd compare it. What's the true cost of dependence on, ultimately, human muscle power? With, uh, slavery and such. GDP per capita took a vertical path after 1790 , when it'd been flat since the Babylonians began brewing beer.
davedx 10y ago
Solar is cheaper than coal in many parts of the world. From earlier this week on HN: http://www.climatechangenews.com/2016/04/18/solar-is-now-cheaper-than-coal-says-india-energy-minister/ http://www.climatechangenews.com/2016/04/18/solar-is-now-che... There are many stories out there documenting the rapidly falling prices of renewables across the world. The problem isn't economic, it's political.

wrong_variable 10y ago

As a fresh graduate. Its really frustrating, its impossible to get work as a researcher - even for shit pay ! Money has really dried up ( or maybe there are too many graduates ). In the UK their is a push from universities for students to self fund their Phd in aeronautical engineering ! Its the most regressive thing you could do, but whatever - democracy.

stegosaurus 10y ago
I find myself wondering what the budget for Bletchley Park was. We are in a war, just as we were then. It's just slower and less visible. If we don't fix the energy problem, we are done for.
dublinclontarf 10y ago
> In the UK their is a push from universities for students to self fund their Phd in aeronautical engineering ! This is simply the market saying we don't need as many researchers in with Phd's in Universities.
asuffield 10y ago
This is an incomplete description of what is happening here. The world of academic research is undersupplied in funding, but massively oversupplied in researchers. There is no need to add more researchers; we can't fund the ones we already have. Efforts like the one you describe are demotivating people from training in a function that we don't need more of, which is a reasonable thing to do.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

nickff 10y ago

>"It feels a bit like we're sitting here with this 'money' abstraction and pretending that energy research is too expensive, when realistically, governments across the world have the might to make clean energy the next Apollo project. Why aren't they? That would be a fantastic legacy for any president/prime minister/whatever." Apollo wasn't very successful. I say this as someone who is personally an aerospace nut, and owns every space or aviation documentary he can get his hands on. Apollo succeeded in getting a dozen men to the moon, but it did not succeed in promoting the exploration of space, or creating a great deal of technological innovation which benefited the populace at large (for the amount of money spent). Apollo was also very unpopular, except for a little while between Apollo 9 and 12. Most of the population would have been happier with a new refrigerator or air conditioner, and those appliances would probably have had a better lasting impact (for a number of reasons).

drcross 10y ago
Sorry to sound harsh but your point doesn't meaningfully contribute to the discussion at hand. We knew what he meant.
- nickff 10y ago
  The proper way for you to indicate this sentiment is to downvote my post, and avoid commenting, as per the Hacker News guidelines. From the number of up and down votes this post is getting, it appears that many people agree with you, but even more disagree. My point was that governments are unlikely to support 'moonshots', because the 'moonshots' are unpopular, as well as being bad investments.
  - magicalist 10y ago
    > The proper way for you to indicate this sentiment is to downvote my post, and avoid commenting, as per the Hacker News guidelines. Eh, I'm hoping dang will come by and detach the comment. It was a pretty classic middlebrow dismissal. "No need to read the comment! Someone compared something to the apollo project!", and etc. > My point was that governments are unlikely to support 'moonshots', because the 'moonshots' are unpopular, as well as being bad investments. There are other categories of public sentiment than popular and unpopular. It's not at all true that we don't fund things to the tune of tens of billions of dollars per year in the face of public lack of attention and apathy (and, actually, sometimes approval).

sdenton4 10y ago

Didn't you hear? All that money for research and public goods got sent down to Panama.

ThisIs_MyName 10y ago
This is getting old :-/
- roddux 10y ago
  While I agree that the comment was off-topic and not really adding to the discussion, the issue is not getting old. The leaks happened barely a month ago, with no obvious repercussions (save Iceland). The story has been swept under the rug as much as possible and I will support anybody keeping it in the limelight.

mikeash 10y ago

This stuff is different from and often at odds with CO2 emissions. Taxing fuel works great for CO2, since the amount of fuel you burn corresponds very strongly to the amount of CO2 you emit. But it doesn't work at all for other sorts of emissions like these, because they depend heavily on how you burn the fuel, not just how much you burn. Often, burning everything cleanly means burning more fuel overall.

stegosaurus 10y ago
Yep. I was sort of trying to get at this with: >> Health issues in cities are irrelevant if global warming means the cities are underwater. I used to live in Central London and you could smell the diesel fumes in the morning. I'm very familiar with particulate emissions. Kill ICE's and we solve both.
- magicalist 10y ago
  > I was sort of trying to get at this with: > >> Health issues in cities are irrelevant if global warming means the cities are underwater. which isn't true. Moreover, you didn't really give an argument for why this shouldn't be tackled at both ends of the problem. The smell is the least of our worries with particulate emissions.
- ArkyBeagle 10y ago
  200 years ago it was horse manure. Is that what would replace it?
  - toomuchtodo 10y ago
    Electric vehicles.
    - ArkyBeagle 10y ago
      Sure. $100,000 US Teslas for everybody.

ArkyBeagle 10y ago

CO2 reduction will happen one filthy, grotty transaction at a time. It'll take exactly as long as it will take and there's probably [sweet fanny adams] anyone can do about it, other than build a thing that helps it along. I have living relatives who saw the transition from mules to tractors. It wasn't just nicer, it meant killing yourself much less slowly. Yes, they are that old, and they all look like tintypes from the 19th century - that gaunt, hollow look that working that hard gives you.

davedx 10y ago
> there's probably [sweet fanny adams] anyone can do about it That's a pithy defeatist statement. Personally I got a job at a renewable energy company. There are many avenues you can take to help tackle climate change.
- ArkyBeagle 10y ago
  Excellent! Just please realize probably two-ten percent of the people I know were in alt. energy the first time around, after the Gas Scare in the 1970s. It just takes a while ( and the "defeatism" was just related to how long it will take.) You proving me wrong would the best possible outcome.
  - davedx 10y ago
    Yeah, tell me about it! The urgency (or lack of it) is what drives me crazy. At least there is hope though, for example huge changes are happening now in China at a crazy pace. I hope it won't be too little too late, the magnitude of what we need to do is daunting.

eru 10y ago

> We know that we need to hit zero CO2. I think that regulations on emissions are the complete wrong way to go about it, though. In general, yes. But there are different ways to burn your fuel to generate different amounts of other bad stuff. You want to tax these more directly.

WalterBright 10y ago

I agree. It's ridiculous to say that 99 parts per million of pollutants "passes" and 100 ppm "fails". There's no incentive to do better. But a tax of $1 per ppm multiplied by the annual number of miles driven will create powerful demand by consumers for lower taxed cars, and the car makers will do what they can to meet the demand.

mtgx 10y ago

It's one thing to trick the tests by 2x, maybe even 3x, if the tests are too strict for the real world. But not by 40x like VW did...And I believe they said only to gain a 10% performance boost. That's just stupid on VW's part. Anyway, the emissions scandal + the rise of EVs, will finally make all manufacturers try and push as many EVs on the market by 2022, when the new Euro 7 standard is official. They will need to lower their "fleet's" emissions, and the only effective way to do that is to push as many EVS into the market as possible. So in the end these regulations served their purpose. I'm happy for it.

skywhopper 10y ago

Actually, strict bright-line artificial limits like this are a great way to encourage innovation by using regulatory power to harness market forces to achieve a well-defined goal. In this case, the goal of MPG standards is actually not CO2 emissions or health, but using less oil. The international market for oil is quite broken and easily manipulated, and the global resources of oil are limited. I absolutely support government-funded research into improving automobile technology. As you say, clean energy is critical. The obvious place to focus energy research these days is on storage technologies from small scale chemical batteries to large-scale potential-energy solutions. We have the technology to generate clean energy relatively cheaply today, but we're missing the storage solutions to even out cycles in wind and solar power, and the continent-scale electricity grids we need to efficiently distribute the power to where it's needed.

schiffern 10y ago

>The UK could take bits of land it owns, chuck homes there "Chucking homes there" would be a good place to start improvements, actually. Designing zero-energy homes and offices is not hard, but housing developers have been slow to adopt the practice. Looking around, it seems like most modern house plans/blueprints have no preferred orientation to the single greatest energy source: the sun (or if they do then housing developers ignore them). When there's literally no "sunward"[1] on the map, then the cheapest of all energy reduction strategies -- passive solar design -- is all but impossible. Why isn't the climate zone given on a house plan? Because the assumption is that you'll just consume energy (typically fossil fuels) to make up the difference. We're designing buildings totally backwards: starting at form and bolting on function. The ideal would be adjustable parameters based on local conditions. South facing windows based on heating-degree-days, overhangs based on latitude, floorplans that adjust to ground topology and microclimate, etc. So you punch in the site conditions (or sense them), hit "compile", and it spits out blueprints for a zero-energy passive building specifically suited to those exact local conditions. This is more similar to how plants develop -- by sensing and adapting to local conditions, they incrementally design themselves to suit their habitat. [1] that is, south in the northern hemisphere and north in the southern hemisphere