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Personally I think that the idea that these trends can ever be revered by some sort of world wide agreement to lower consumption is a pipe dream. People want to

by harryh 10y ago

Personally I think that the idea that these trends can ever be revered by some sort of world wide agreement to lower consumption is a pipe dream. People want to eat meat and drive cars and fly on airplanes. As long as they're rich enough to do so you'll never stop them. The only solution to this problem is technology. Some combination of green energy sources plus probably very large scale terraforming.

JustUhThought 10y ago
I staunchly agree with your first point. I staunchly disagree on the second point. Technological solutions generally "solve" one problem at a time. Desalination solves the fress water problem. Carbon sequestration solve one part of the greenhouse gass problem. Electric cars solve another part. Green energy production and batteries mitigate another part. Next we need to solve pollution from ocean freightliners. Then the methane problem. Next the landfill problem. Followed by the issues created by how much we've changed global ecosysyems and weather patters due to strip mining, covering massive tracts of land with asphalt and concrete and monoculture, and deforestation. Then we need to discuss how we plan to stop poisoning the oceans because of our reliance on petroleum based fertilizers and chemical pesticides. And turtles all the way down. Untill we learn to live in balance with nature, rather than separate from it, in an extractive relationship, treating side effects as problems to be isolated and solved, it will always be more of the same.
- clarkevans 10y ago
  Why is this voted down? In the end, balance is a global political issue that we must address in addition to the specific concerns.
dasboth 10y ago
> some sort of world wide agreement to lower consumption is a pipe dream This has been my conclusion recently too. Sure, we can all do our own bit individually, but I can't realistically see a global shift in conscientiousness taking place.
- eludwig 10y ago
  It's good to remember that "globally" we are a huge collection of individuals. Perfect individual == perfect globe (ideally, of course).
  - pyrale 10y ago
    I remind myself that empty collection != null collection. Even if all humans die, mankind will survive for eternity as a collection :)
redwood 10y ago
I tend to agree: you can't go "back to nature" when you have 8 billion people running around, a larger and larger portion of which want to live like those of us in developing countries do (especially in the basic sense of having AC to escape this increasing heat). AC is a great little allegory for the whole thing... would you rather have AC and deal with hotter and hotter days, or forego AC and wait a century, have no children or grandchildren, and hope things return to where they were? We need to reduce the solar incident radiation...
- oliv__ 10y ago
  Before AC, did people not live without it?
  - throwanem 10y ago
    Before AC, people didn't know what they were missing. Good luck unringing that bell.
  - runeb 10y ago
    In my part of the world (northern Europe) basically nobody has AC, but that is probably because of the cooler temperatures here. I'm curious, at what temperatures do people who live with AC start using it? Or is it going all year round?
    - scrollaway 10y ago
      In greece, summers are atrocious without AC. But it gets even worse in the middle of polluted cities like athens. Some corners of Athens are disgustingly unbearable. Tall buildings, narrow streets filled with parked cars. The entire thing is a dust, smoke and heat trap. Temperatures feel 10 degrees warmer in those corners. Not to mention it smells horrible.
    - RobertoG 10y ago
      It's not all year round. The rule is pretty easy: when you can't think clearly any more you start your AC. That's the reason some houses have not AC in the south of Europe but all the offices have.
Roritharr 10y ago
I see this actually as a nice plot someone could turn into a book. 1. Build a machine that pulls significant amounts of CO² out of the atmosphere. 2. Go to the UN an straight up tell them "we can make this problem go away, give us 1tn$ and 20 square kilometers of land in these countries, over this schedule with these milestones". 3. Profit.
- pjc50 10y ago
  I think the technology for that is already there, or nearly so; the financial will really isn't. There's no way you can get $1trn for anything other than a war.
- viach 10y ago
  And what if this machinery starts taking out CO2 too fast? Who will stop it, taking into a count the beaurocraty level in UN and lobby behind such a money making machine? Indeed, worth a book.
- bennettfeely 10y ago
  > Build a machine that pulls significant amounts of CO² out of the atmosphere Or you could plant a tree.
- dredmorbius 10y ago
  Costs of carbon sequestration range from about $20 to $70 per tonne, as part of exhaust capture (CCS). For direct capture from the atmosphere, values are closer to $150/tonne. The world is dumping 38 billion tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere every year. (I'll ignore the additional gigatonnes we've already committed.) That's $2.6 trillion per year for sequestration, just to stay even. (The value's actually lower than I'd expected.) For comparison, global GDP is about $70 trillion, so this is 3% of global GDP. http://www.cbsnews.com/news/carbon-dioxide-emissions-rise-to-24-million-pounds-per-second/ http://www.cbsnews.com/news/carbon-dioxide-emissions-rise-to... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_sequestration https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_sequestration
  - gambiting 10y ago
collyw 10y ago
Having kids especially in the west is probably the least environmental friendly thing you could do.
- Stubb 10y ago
  I'll refer you to the opening scene from season 2, episode 6 of "Utopia": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rcx-nf3kH_M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rcx-nf3kH_M
- gus_massa 10y ago
  To save humanity we will need some kids anyway. Who will choose who will have them?
- blowski 10y ago
  If we stop having kids, then why would we bother to protect the environment?
  - collyw 10y ago
    Its a question I ask myself as I don't plan on having any. There is some instinct in me to avoid suffering of future generations. It seems to be the right thing to do. Not sure where that comes from.
- chr1 10y ago
  This is what i was thinking ~15 years ago, but now it is painful for me to remember that i could seriously support such an idea. Environmental friendly matters only because it is human friendly. Removing all the humans is not environmental friendly since climate change and extinctions happen a lot without humans too. Reducing number of people to half the current population is not environmental friendly since we were cutting down huge forests and driving species to extinction even before the industrial age. The most environmental friendly thing you can do is have more than 2 children, and make sure they are well educated. There are still lots of deserts on earth that they can make into forests, we just need the science and manpower for that. Warmer arctic region is not a problem, it gives more livable space. Higher sea level is not a problem, it gives more water to create lakes and fill aquifers in places like Sahara, Iran, and central Asia. 50 bln people on earth is not a problem, it gives more creativity and more workforce to go to Mars.
amelius 10y ago
> The only solution to this problem is technology. There already exists a "carbon offset market" [1] So the solution is economical, which in turn will lead to technological solutions (carbon-reducing technology directly driven by profits in this market). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_offset https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_offset
- hawski 10y ago
  From what I quickly found it seems that Greenhouse Gas Tax on meat is still missing. https://www.google.com/#q=greenhouse+gases+livestock+tax https://www.google.com/#q=greenhouse+gases+livestock+tax
  - adrenalinelol 10y ago
    It's missing from far more than just meat; the problem is raising taxes is politically painful in the short-term, and said policy will not reap any tangible benefits... The chances of a political solution (economics) to global warming won't be tenable until it's too late.
snarfy 10y ago
There is another solution: less people.
- throwanem 10y ago
  Oh, by all means, don't stop there! Elucidate the enormities you're willing to encompass.
  - RankingMember 10y ago
    C'mon man don't throw a thesaurus at us like that.
    - throwanem 10y ago
      Language can be a form of play! I picked up my vocabulary from books, back when books were what you had to use. You have the Internet. Go thou forth and roll around in it!
      - RankingMember 10y ago
        I also speak Spanish, but not in comments since my goal is to have the people understand me. ;) IMO it's important to keep the person who's going to read your words in mind if you want them to understand you rather than using your favorite high-dollar words to try to sound smart. Making word soup like that obfuscates your message, as evidenced by the off-message conversation we're having right now.
        throwanem 10y ago
        Not that you're wrong, but I've been having conversations like the one that is on message here for a very long time now. I'm accustomed to there being a few people who will say "well, the real problem is that there's just too many people", and I'm familiar with the typical unwillingness of such people to be drawn on questions like exactly whom they find surplus to requirements, exactly how they see that changing, and exactly why they imagine it reasonable to say such things in front of God and everybody, just as though it were nothing to be ashamed of. I've more or less given up trying to draw such people into useful conversation, because there isn't enough common ground for direct discourse between me and someone who finds it other than abhorrent to seriously contemplate mass human slaughter as a geoengineering technique. Happily for my state of mind if nothing else, that perspective seems rare enough overall to make largely unnecessary an engagement for the benefit of the audience - put simply, this isn't really a subject on which most people need a worked example. So, in such a case, I sometimes feel at some liberty to indulge myself, especially here on Hacker News, where the typical user's personal lexicon is considerably broader than you tend to find a lot of other places. Of course I understand that it's not a game to everyone the way it is to me. But I also understand that I'm not the only one who feels that way about it. And I don't really know that there's a lot of grounds to assume, for example, that I'm just "using high-dollar words to try to sound smart". I mean, I already know I'm not all that smart, and I hope I'm not terribly insecure about it; I make myself useful in other ways, and in general I'm just glad to be able to keep up on HN to the relatively limited extent I succeed in so doing. Some folks just like playing with words, that's all. I've always been one of them. Sometimes, when there's no real need to hammer home a point most people already grasp implicitly and the rest aren't at home to, I screw around a little. You're the first person who has evinced any upset at all about that since before I was in high school. Maybe you're right, and I shouldn't indulge myself this way at all, rather than just doing so very rarely. But I don't really know that I care to stop. I guess I'll just have to hope that people getting bent out of shape over it remains as rare as it has been throughout my life heretofore.
room271 10y ago
I agree that technology in terms of energy supply will be important, but is terraforming really a sensible option? Given how little we understand the climate, trying to manipulate it in this way feels like a very risky manoevre. And there are big problems here in terms of externalities: my 'improved' climate might be disaster for you.
- chr1 10y ago
  That depends on what you mean by terraforming. If it is use nuclear bombs to cause huge volcano eruption, it is obviously stupid, but if it is using mirror to heat up air behind the cyclone makes it dissolve or change route, it's a great idea we should try. And we'll learn a lot about the climate in the process. > my 'improved' climate might be disaster for you. People tend to like the same kind of climate, so it will be disaster mostly for white bears and desert lizards. Of course it's possible that someone tries to improve climate in his location, by making it worse in other places, but that is not a risk introduced by terraforming.
pjmorris 10y ago
How about Lunaforming? If there's enough water, there's certainly enough sunlight to split it for H and O, making habitation and manufacturing possible. Migrating heavy industry off-planet, the old L5 society [0] idea, might be an option. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L5_Society https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L5_Society
- ekianjo 10y ago
  How do you move stuff there though? See how hard it is just to have the ISS in orbit...
- pjc50 10y ago
  The trouble with heavy industry is that it's heavy. You can't ship e.g. bauxite to orbit and aluminium back down using conventional rockets and have the economics make any sense. The timeframe is unlikely to work either. We're a decade away at least from the first industrial building on the moon, but we need to change CO2 production now. Edit: the only sci-fi space solution that might make sense is the solar shade, if you can find a suitable reflective durable thin light material for it.
  - pjmorris 10y ago
    I was thinking, but didn't write, that mining on the moon is the place to start. It'd be silly to ship raw materials to space. It's not nearly as hard to ship finished products back.
tombert 10y ago
Government intervention could conceivably work. In the same way that we were able to get rid of the hole in the ozone layer by imposing restrictions on CFCs, couldn't governments give tax incentives and impose regulations that encourage a greener, more sustainable system?
- harryh 10y ago
  That's kind of my point. Governments are (for the most part at least) beholden to the people and the people will never tax incentivize themselves into a state of drastically lowered consumption.
SixSigma 10y ago
> People want to eat meat and drive cars and fly on airplanes Not only that but try telling the billions in India and China "ok, now you're out of poverty you can't have a refrigerator or cooker"
pjc50 10y ago
Yes and no. You can change the carbon efficiency of people's consumption quite a bit with appropriate nudging and consumption taxes. You can also have global agreements paying countries not to exploit their "unburnable" fossil fuel resources. Little things like the EU mandate for ending incandescent lightbulbs can definitely add up. You need technology and policy and economics. The market for power plants is never going to be "free", it's always full of political considerations for permitting. So countries need to have energy policies that move towards low-carbon energy. Terraforming I'm much more skeptical about. I can't see how you can make the economics work for anything other than a tiny bit.
- neom 10y ago
  The economics aren't that hard, just long term and not as good as other returns. think arability. Particularly useful in areas you might terraform. (have thought about this for like 2 years now, heh. I hope it's my next startup.)
  - blowski 10y ago
    For me, terraforming is the equivalent of developers saying "we need to rebuild from scratch".
    - neom 10y ago
      Kinda, yeah!
      - pjc50 10y ago
        Don't worry, when we get our next Earth we'll do it properly.
- nilved 10y ago
  > Yes and no. You can change the carbon efficiency of people's consumption quite a bit with appropriate nudging and consumption taxes. You can also have global agreements paying countries not to exploit their "unburnable" fossil fuel resources. No, you really can't, or we wouldn't have year-after-year record breaking temperatures. Regulation has never fixed anything. And especially when it comes to science, we need to remember that innovation and regulation are opposite ends of the same spectrum.
s_q_b 10y ago
Nuclear, nuclear, nuclear. I've said this before, and the same climate scientists who first discovered anthropogenic global warming agree, that nuclear fission plants are the only technology that can bridge the gap between fossil fuels and fusion.
- pjc50 10y ago
  Possibly, but it's too slow and expensive to build and insure. Even in the UK, how much solar and wind can we put up before Hinkley Point C produces its first watt?
  - fencepost 10y ago
    Yeah, but don't forget the massive cleanup efforts required after big wind and sunlight spills.
- _ph_ 10y ago
  Wind and Solar are now cost-competetive with nuclear, without its nasty side effects. And the cost of storage for nuclear waste has not really been calculated yet.
  - nl 10y ago
    Whoever downvoted this should take a look again. While being pro-nuclear was all counter-conventional wisdom cool 5 years ago, the math is changing very, very quickly. PV power is so much cheaper in terms of startup costs, and it scales both up and (more importantly) down.
    - sanxiyn 10y ago
      Indeed, it is amazing how quickly things are changing. If we solve intermittency, there won't be any reason to be pro-nuclear.
      - orangecat 10y ago
Ma8ee 10y ago
> As long as they're rick enough to do so you'll never stop them. This is the key. We just have to start charging properly for externalities. Then two things can happen, either only the very rich eat meat regularly or someone finds the technical solution you are hoping for.
mseebach 10y ago
It's not just the practical problem of getting rich people in the west to lower their consumption, it's the deeply moral problem of denying the lifestyle we've enjoyed for the past ~century to the couple of billion people currently joining the middle class. So yes, technology is the only solution. Incremental improvements in efficiency should not be shunned, but they're not going to be 'solutions'. I'm not even sure we will need to go to very dramatic steps to get there. Solar competitive with coal at market-prices seems to be right around the corner, that'll be a massive water-shed moment. I have high hopes for algae fuel (perhaps naive), because this can plug directly in to the existing downstream oil infrastructure (and burning hydrocarbons is going to be part of life for the foreseeable future).
deleted 10y ago
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Retric 10y ago
Per capita CO2 production has dropped in the US and EU by over 20%. Remember, the only long term causes are fossil fuels which are both finite and replaceable.
CalRobert 10y ago
Live in a multi-unit building in a city where you can commute and do errands by walking or cycling (electric bikes are fine and get around that whole pedaling bit). Source your energy renewably and use little of it (80-300kwh per month isn't crazy depending on your climate). Don't buy much stuff. Eat very little meat. I mean, it doesn't take it to 0 but even if you DO want a comfortable life it doesn't mean living in a hovel. I'm as guilty as anyone though. I love to travel, and I live on an island, so I fly a lot. Offsets only do so much (though they'd be really helpful if we had a functional carbon market).
- CalRobert 10y ago
  There is a sad counterpoint, though, and one I think of often. There are discretionary purchasers of fossil fuels - people/companies who would buy units of fuel but aren't because it's not cheap enough. All of the actions I named above reduce the demand for fossil fuels (by an infinitesimal amount, but still). Reducing demand reduces the price such that some other user will consume those fuels anyway. In this case it might as well be me, as a self-interested economic actor. This is the idea behind putting a cap on emissions and selling the right to emit, but so far such schemes are a failure. And as much as I hate to admit it, they really do need to be global in scale - if cap and trade just results in more stuff being manufactured in nations that don't limit emissions, we haven't really fixed anything.
  - larkery 10y ago
    You are right about the problem that efficiency in one place will potentially cause consumption in another. In the literature, this is usually called a 'rebound effect' or Jevons' paradox. It may be that an emissions / extraction cap could be implemented non-globally so long as a large enough block were willing to participate, and so long as they imposed tariffs on any non-participants to price in the emissions happening on the other side of the border.
- joshyeager 10y ago
  All of that sounds reasonable, except "Live in a multi-unit building in a city". Being that close to that many people sounds like hell.
goodmachine 10y ago
Regarding terraforming, I suggest a quick win may be to trigger a volcanic super-eruption. The cooling effect is known to reduce global temperatures to refreshing and/or bracing levels: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volcanic_winter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volcanic_winter I was leaning towards using nuclear weapons to kick things off, but the potential side effects of such an event will probably be tricky enough, without the giant dust clouds soon to enshroud the Earth also being radioactive. There may of course be other unforeseen consequences, but given the alternatives (which we see all too clearly) I ask: who's in?
- CalRobert 10y ago
  Well, the nuclear weapons could remove most of the carbon emitters, but that's morally challenging.
- legulere 10y ago
  It would also trigger a famine and lead to extremely bad air quality.
- pyrale 10y ago
  Volcanic dusts are naturally more radioactive than sedimentary dust, though. So I'm not sure the long term effects of a volcanic super-explosion would be much better without the nukes... :)
- chr1 10y ago
  Alice: Looks like there is a wasp nest under the roof, we need to do something about it Bob: Let's blow it up with dynamite! When thinking about terraforming people tend to think of megaprojects that would "fix" everything at once, but that doesn't work. There are much more predictable and safer ways to do terraforming, e.g. desalinating water, building canals, planting forests, ferilizing ocean in the worst case.
bad_user 10y ago
The problem is that costs are subsidized by basically letting businesses destroy the environment. The solution should be simple: add lots of taxes, let the off-the-shelf cost of meat and gasoline reflect the real cost to our environment, make deforestation a crime, tax the shit out of all polluting industries and if a country is not participating add taxes on imports from said country, or ban those imports altogether. As long as the burning of fossil fuels keeps being dirt cheap, there's no incentive for innovation. You mentioned meat - if governments would tax the current CAFO practices in accordance to the destruction of the environment and of our health, the consumption of meat would go down because of the price, but that meat would end up being raised with sustainable farming practices, on organic grass, locally grown, as that would prove to be the cheaper way to raise meat and so it would have a higher quality.
- sounds 10y ago
  Great suggestions! We've basically imposed the "taxes on imports from said country, or ban those imports" on North Korea, with the result that they use the worst of environmental practices: • Inefficient small coal-burning fireplaces in outlying areas. (Pyongyang is better.) • Regulatory environment where factory and vehicle emissions are not even close to a priority. • Unsafe nuclear testing. Ok, so that was my straw man :) Hopefully it illustrates something more universal, namely: Many countries lack the internal political will to put meaningful environmental clean ups in place. Even something as simple as the tax you proposed to pay for environmental clean up of disaster areas is impossible due to politics. Until we have de-politicized the topic, that probably won't change. New clean tech is one great way of accomplishing this.
  - tomp 10y ago
    > Many countries lack the internal political will to put meaningful environmental clean ups in place. Even something as simple as the tax you proposed to pay for environmental clean up of disaster areas is impossible due to politics. The point isn't changing other countries. The point is giving competing green technologies a fighting chance. I don't care whether Saudi Arabia suffocates in cheap oil or builds a hi-tech green energy paradise. That's their choice. But I don't want the local green energy startups and organic farms be driven out of business by cheap Saudi-Arabic oil. Same with China - I think it's fundamentally unfair that local businesses have to abide to many regulations (e.g. environmental, safety, hiring) that Chinese companies don't need to, yet they are able to compete in the same market offering lower prices. I think that the current implementation of free trade is a fundamentally failed and morally wrong model.
wahsd 10y ago
I know, let's make the rest of the world just as aspiriational and let's also import people from places where they had little environmental impact right into societies where they can have far greater impact, and then let's let them keep making more of them with abandon, especially in the third world where they then emerge to overrun the civilized world from because they reproduce at far than sustainable, let alone carrying capacity rates. The problem is clear, the solution is clear, yet the vast majority of people don't have the will to even just face the only solution. You simply can't rationally claim to want to do something about climate change and global warming on the premise that it's negative and needs "fixing", without talking about population control of poorly educated, low qualification people. Anything and everything else but qualitatively weighted population control is simply delaying disaster (if that is the premise you are operating on). We need to stop "saving" every child and person in the third world just so they can reproduce with abandon. For example, Nigeria is projected to reach 1 BILLION people by 2050. They can barely sustain themselves at the current 140 Million, you cannot consider yourself a rational or intelligent person if you think they will be able to do so at 1 BILLION.
jasonkester 10y ago
Technology never ceases to amaze though. Just last week I replaced the 12 50 watt spotlights in my kitchen with 42 watts total worth of LEDs. For twenty dollars. You can't tell the difference except that maybe it's a bit brighter in there. That was something I wouldn't have predicted being able to do 10 years ago. If something changes in the next 30 years that make this whole climate change panic look like a bunch of silly overreaction, I won't be all that surprised.
- larkery 10y ago
  Unfortunately, the evidence so far: - A consistent exponential growth in emissions - A consistent improvement in GDP/energy and a mild improvement in energy/CO2 raises the question: can technical efficiency gains reduce emissions? If so, can they do so rapidly enough to prevent catastrophe. This question has been open since Jevons wrote about the use of coal in the Empire, but it is certainly not cut-and-dried. In the case of your spotlights, there are several places for a rebound effect: - You have more spare money; you spend that money on something else, which (perhaps) causes some emissions - You have avoided using some electricity, lowering the cost of electricity. This renders electricity useful for some other customer for whom it was previously marginal And so on. For efficiency gains alone to work, the new technology will have to be astounding enough to reduce the cost of energy below the marginal production cost for all the existing sources, and to allow us to chuck away all of the existing fossil fuel infrastructure without discomfort. Otherwise we will just use astounding new technology along with all our old technologies, and do more stuff. Efficiency gains (which will come, and are welcome and necessary) need to be coupled with a political limit on extraction of fuels to avoid this outcome, in my opinion.
- mikeash 10y ago
  Lighting is pretty small potatoes compared to transportation and agriculture and climate control. Your efficiency improvements, while great, are vastly outweighed by increases in global population and standards of living. If you were to wave a magic wand and put a complete stop to human CO2 emissions today, the consequences of climate change would still be felt for decades. Never mind some technological change in the next 30 years, we needed something in the last 30 years. It's too late to stop it now, the only question is how much it can be mitigated, and how to deal with the consequences.
golergka 10y ago
Honestly? At this point, I think that the only solution which will prevent Earth from becoming uninhabitable to all but simplest lifeforms is a war which will destroy at least most of humanity and reverse our technology level to one before of industrial revolution. New tech will never adopted fast enough by people acting out of their economic self-interest.
vijayr 10y ago
Didn't Yao Ming single handedly reduce the amount of ivory trade in China by spreading awareness about elephant situation? Obviously meat is much more dear to people than ivory, we might need a million Mings to spread awareness - it is still worth a shot though. Even if we manage to reduce meat consumption by say 5 to 10%, it would be a huge help.
at-fates-hands 10y ago
>> Some combination of green energy sources plus probably very large scale terraforming. The Achilles heel in all of this is how to make green energy affordable. If you want to really make impact, making these technologies affordable for lower income and the poor is the best way to reduce energy consumption. Unfortunately, a lot of these technologies are still way way way out of reach of these people to take part in. Last time I checked, getting a small solar array on my house would cost in the neighborhood of $20K just get it installed. With a ten year ROI, this isn't feasible for me to do right now, and our state just ended their solar tax deductions with no signs of it ever coming back - giving me even less incentive to do this. I'm all for less consumption and green technologies, but most are not affordable, and the long ROI isn't worth it right now.
- balabaster 10y ago
  Last I saw stats, something like 57% of the U.S. is officially living in poverty. Trying to afford anything more than the necessities of life isn't going to happen on an individual basis for them, so it'll need to be a state/federal level effort to provide them with that.
- maxsilver 10y ago
  > The Achilles heel in all of this is how to make green energy affordable. Last time I checked, getting a small solar array on my house would cost in the neighborhood of $20K just get it installed. Depending on where you live, green energy might already be affordable today. I had the same sticker shock at solar prices. While looking into that, I learned that my local for-profit electric provider offers a "green energy" option, where they promise to replace my billed electricity usage with mostly wind energy instead of the coal / natural gas mix normally used. The total cost of that is $0.01/kwh extra. Or, roughly $6/month extra on an average electricity bill, to switch from coal to wind. https://new.consumersenergy.com/residential/programs-and-services/green-generation https://new.consumersenergy.com/residential/programs-and-ser... A plan like this should be affordable for the vast majority of Americans.
hellofunk 10y ago
I disagree. There are advanced cultures in the world without this ambition you speak of (I'm looking at you, Holland), where convenient life in a local environment that is all accessible by bike, eating lots of fish, and caring less about immense wealth and impressions and more about quality of life.. it is attainable.
- chr1 10y ago
  And the coolest thing about Holland is that they are one of first to do terraforming on a large scale by creating a local environment under the sea level!
- alanwatts 10y ago
  I'd be interested to see a comparison on the amount of advertising done per capita in Holland vs. the United States. Once I stopped watching television, I was no longer exposed to such incessant advertising. As a result, I stopped caring so much about impractical consumption. I.e. buying the new car they show every 10 minutes in such persuasive and skillfully crafted multi-million dollar targeted advertisements.
  - RodericDay 10y ago
    Me too. I rail against advertising incessantly on here, but I really think it's far nearer to the core of the issue than a lot of people think. Even a lot of anti-ad folk are like "just make them less intrusive and it'll be fine". No, that's just an extra annoyance. Ads are, at their very essence, incredibly bad.
    - alanwatts 10y ago
      Just did some number crunching and it appears Holland spends roughly half as much on advertising per capita than the US. http://www.statista.com/statistics/272314/advertising-spending-in-the-us/ http://www.statista.com/statistics/272314/advertising-spendi...
subtenante 10y ago
> The only solution to this problem is technology. Or taxes.
thesimpsons1022 10y ago
pretty sure we can stop them but not by asking nicely. just takes armed officers and the threat of force from the state.
russell_sears 10y ago
We really need a global carbon credit system (with stiff tariffs for countries that do not participate). Cut net greenhouse emissions by a few percent a year until net emissions are negative and atmospheric CO2 and methane are back to pre-industrial levels. This will help renewables (and nuclear, for better or worse) in the short term. In the medium term, the invisible hand of the market will make carbon capture profitable, which means smart VCs will start dumping cash into it now. I think this sounds more plausible than terraforming, but is really the same thing.
enlightenedfool 10y ago
I would say political will. I still don't understand why aa advanced country like USA doesn't have a good public transportation system which could easily take the cars off the road. Many people would be happy to avoid sitting in cars for hours and polluting more.
deegles 10y ago
I think you hinted at the solution. "as long as people are rich enough to.." Well, put in place taxes high enough that people are rich enough to afford it! and use the money for sequestration tech or alternative energy.
daxorid 10y ago
The only solution to this problem is technology Naw. See the well-documented phenomenon of the Jevon's Paradox: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

by harryh 10y ago

JustUhThought 10y ago

I staunchly agree with your first point. I staunchly disagree on the second point. Technological solutions generally "solve" one problem at a time. Desalination solves the fress water problem. Carbon sequestration solve one part of the greenhouse gass problem. Electric cars solve another part. Green energy production and batteries mitigate another part. Next we need to solve pollution from ocean freightliners. Then the methane problem. Next the landfill problem. Followed by the issues created by how much we've changed global ecosysyems and weather patters due to strip mining, covering massive tracts of land with asphalt and concrete and monoculture, and deforestation. Then we need to discuss how we plan to stop poisoning the oceans because of our reliance on petroleum based fertilizers and chemical pesticides. And turtles all the way down. Untill we learn to live in balance with nature, rather than separate from it, in an extractive relationship, treating side effects as problems to be isolated and solved, it will always be more of the same.

clarkevans 10y ago
Why is this voted down? In the end, balance is a global political issue that we must address in addition to the specific concerns.

dasboth 10y ago

> some sort of world wide agreement to lower consumption is a pipe dream This has been my conclusion recently too. Sure, we can all do our own bit individually, but I can't realistically see a global shift in conscientiousness taking place.

eludwig 10y ago
It's good to remember that "globally" we are a huge collection of individuals. Perfect individual == perfect globe (ideally, of course).
- pyrale 10y ago
  I remind myself that empty collection != null collection. Even if all humans die, mankind will survive for eternity as a collection :)

redwood 10y ago

I tend to agree: you can't go "back to nature" when you have 8 billion people running around, a larger and larger portion of which want to live like those of us in developing countries do (especially in the basic sense of having AC to escape this increasing heat). AC is a great little allegory for the whole thing... would you rather have AC and deal with hotter and hotter days, or forego AC and wait a century, have no children or grandchildren, and hope things return to where they were? We need to reduce the solar incident radiation...

oliv__ 10y ago
Before AC, did people not live without it?
- throwanem 10y ago
  Before AC, people didn't know what they were missing. Good luck unringing that bell.
- runeb 10y ago
  In my part of the world (northern Europe) basically nobody has AC, but that is probably because of the cooler temperatures here. I'm curious, at what temperatures do people who live with AC start using it? Or is it going all year round?
  - scrollaway 10y ago
    In greece, summers are atrocious without AC. But it gets even worse in the middle of polluted cities like athens. Some corners of Athens are disgustingly unbearable. Tall buildings, narrow streets filled with parked cars. The entire thing is a dust, smoke and heat trap. Temperatures feel 10 degrees warmer in those corners. Not to mention it smells horrible.
  - RobertoG 10y ago
    It's not all year round. The rule is pretty easy: when you can't think clearly any more you start your AC. That's the reason some houses have not AC in the south of Europe but all the offices have.

Roritharr 10y ago

I see this actually as a nice plot someone could turn into a book. 1. Build a machine that pulls significant amounts of CO² out of the atmosphere. 2. Go to the UN an straight up tell them "we can make this problem go away, give us 1tn$ and 20 square kilometers of land in these countries, over this schedule with these milestones". 3. Profit.

pjc50 10y ago
I think the technology for that is already there, or nearly so; the financial will really isn't. There's no way you can get $1trn for anything other than a war.
viach 10y ago
And what if this machinery starts taking out CO2 too fast? Who will stop it, taking into a count the beaurocraty level in UN and lobby behind such a money making machine? Indeed, worth a book.
bennettfeely 10y ago
> Build a machine that pulls significant amounts of CO² out of the atmosphere Or you could plant a tree.
dredmorbius 10y ago
Costs of carbon sequestration range from about $20 to $70 per tonne, as part of exhaust capture (CCS). For direct capture from the atmosphere, values are closer to $150/tonne. The world is dumping 38 billion tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere every year. (I'll ignore the additional gigatonnes we've already committed.) That's $2.6 trillion per year for sequestration, just to stay even. (The value's actually lower than I'd expected.) For comparison, global GDP is about $70 trillion, so this is 3% of global GDP. http://www.cbsnews.com/news/carbon-dioxide-emissions-rise-to-24-million-pounds-per-second/ http://www.cbsnews.com/news/carbon-dioxide-emissions-rise-to... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_sequestration https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_sequestration
- gambiting 10y ago

collyw 10y ago

Having kids especially in the west is probably the least environmental friendly thing you could do.

Stubb 10y ago
I'll refer you to the opening scene from season 2, episode 6 of "Utopia": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rcx-nf3kH_M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rcx-nf3kH_M
gus_massa 10y ago
To save humanity we will need some kids anyway. Who will choose who will have them?
blowski 10y ago
If we stop having kids, then why would we bother to protect the environment?
- collyw 10y ago
  Its a question I ask myself as I don't plan on having any. There is some instinct in me to avoid suffering of future generations. It seems to be the right thing to do. Not sure where that comes from.
chr1 10y ago
This is what i was thinking ~15 years ago, but now it is painful for me to remember that i could seriously support such an idea. Environmental friendly matters only because it is human friendly. Removing all the humans is not environmental friendly since climate change and extinctions happen a lot without humans too. Reducing number of people to half the current population is not environmental friendly since we were cutting down huge forests and driving species to extinction even before the industrial age. The most environmental friendly thing you can do is have more than 2 children, and make sure they are well educated. There are still lots of deserts on earth that they can make into forests, we just need the science and manpower for that. Warmer arctic region is not a problem, it gives more livable space. Higher sea level is not a problem, it gives more water to create lakes and fill aquifers in places like Sahara, Iran, and central Asia. 50 bln people on earth is not a problem, it gives more creativity and more workforce to go to Mars.

amelius 10y ago

> The only solution to this problem is technology. There already exists a "carbon offset market" [1] So the solution is economical, which in turn will lead to technological solutions (carbon-reducing technology directly driven by profits in this market). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_offset https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_offset

hawski 10y ago
From what I quickly found it seems that Greenhouse Gas Tax on meat is still missing. https://www.google.com/#q=greenhouse+gases+livestock+tax https://www.google.com/#q=greenhouse+gases+livestock+tax
- adrenalinelol 10y ago
  It's missing from far more than just meat; the problem is raising taxes is politically painful in the short-term, and said policy will not reap any tangible benefits... The chances of a political solution (economics) to global warming won't be tenable until it's too late.

snarfy 10y ago

There is another solution: less people.

throwanem 10y ago
Oh, by all means, don't stop there! Elucidate the enormities you're willing to encompass.
- RankingMember 10y ago
  C'mon man don't throw a thesaurus at us like that.
  - throwanem 10y ago
    Language can be a form of play! I picked up my vocabulary from books, back when books were what you had to use. You have the Internet. Go thou forth and roll around in it!
    - RankingMember 10y ago
      I also speak Spanish, but not in comments since my goal is to have the people understand me. ;) IMO it's important to keep the person who's going to read your words in mind if you want them to understand you rather than using your favorite high-dollar words to try to sound smart. Making word soup like that obfuscates your message, as evidenced by the off-message conversation we're having right now.
      - throwanem 10y ago
        Not that you're wrong, but I've been having conversations like the one that is on message here for a very long time now. I'm accustomed to there being a few people who will say "well, the real problem is that there's just too many people", and I'm familiar with the typical unwillingness of such people to be drawn on questions like exactly whom they find surplus to requirements, exactly how they see that changing, and exactly why they imagine it reasonable to say such things in front of God and everybody, just as though it were nothing to be ashamed of. I've more or less given up trying to draw such people into useful conversation, because there isn't enough common ground for direct discourse between me and someone who finds it other than abhorrent to seriously contemplate mass human slaughter as a geoengineering technique. Happily for my state of mind if nothing else, that perspective seems rare enough overall to make largely unnecessary an engagement for the benefit of the audience - put simply, this isn't really a subject on which most people need a worked example. So, in such a case, I sometimes feel at some liberty to indulge myself, especially here on Hacker News, where the typical user's personal lexicon is considerably broader than you tend to find a lot of other places. Of course I understand that it's not a game to everyone the way it is to me. But I also understand that I'm not the only one who feels that way about it. And I don't really know that there's a lot of grounds to assume, for example, that I'm just "using high-dollar words to try to sound smart". I mean, I already know I'm not all that smart, and I hope I'm not terribly insecure about it; I make myself useful in other ways, and in general I'm just glad to be able to keep up on HN to the relatively limited extent I succeed in so doing. Some folks just like playing with words, that's all. I've always been one of them. Sometimes, when there's no real need to hammer home a point most people already grasp implicitly and the rest aren't at home to, I screw around a little. You're the first person who has evinced any upset at all about that since before I was in high school. Maybe you're right, and I shouldn't indulge myself this way at all, rather than just doing so very rarely. But I don't really know that I care to stop. I guess I'll just have to hope that people getting bent out of shape over it remains as rare as it has been throughout my life heretofore.

room271 10y ago

I agree that technology in terms of energy supply will be important, but is terraforming really a sensible option? Given how little we understand the climate, trying to manipulate it in this way feels like a very risky manoevre. And there are big problems here in terms of externalities: my 'improved' climate might be disaster for you.

chr1 10y ago
That depends on what you mean by terraforming. If it is use nuclear bombs to cause huge volcano eruption, it is obviously stupid, but if it is using mirror to heat up air behind the cyclone makes it dissolve or change route, it's a great idea we should try. And we'll learn a lot about the climate in the process. > my 'improved' climate might be disaster for you. People tend to like the same kind of climate, so it will be disaster mostly for white bears and desert lizards. Of course it's possible that someone tries to improve climate in his location, by making it worse in other places, but that is not a risk introduced by terraforming.

pjmorris 10y ago

How about Lunaforming? If there's enough water, there's certainly enough sunlight to split it for H and O, making habitation and manufacturing possible. Migrating heavy industry off-planet, the old L5 society [0] idea, might be an option. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L5_Society https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L5_Society

ekianjo 10y ago
How do you move stuff there though? See how hard it is just to have the ISS in orbit...
pjc50 10y ago
The trouble with heavy industry is that it's heavy. You can't ship e.g. bauxite to orbit and aluminium back down using conventional rockets and have the economics make any sense. The timeframe is unlikely to work either. We're a decade away at least from the first industrial building on the moon, but we need to change CO2 production now. Edit: the only sci-fi space solution that might make sense is the solar shade, if you can find a suitable reflective durable thin light material for it.
- pjmorris 10y ago
  I was thinking, but didn't write, that mining on the moon is the place to start. It'd be silly to ship raw materials to space. It's not nearly as hard to ship finished products back.

tombert 10y ago

Government intervention could conceivably work. In the same way that we were able to get rid of the hole in the ozone layer by imposing restrictions on CFCs, couldn't governments give tax incentives and impose regulations that encourage a greener, more sustainable system?

harryh 10y ago
That's kind of my point. Governments are (for the most part at least) beholden to the people and the people will never tax incentivize themselves into a state of drastically lowered consumption.

SixSigma 10y ago

> People want to eat meat and drive cars and fly on airplanes Not only that but try telling the billions in India and China "ok, now you're out of poverty you can't have a refrigerator or cooker"

pjc50 10y ago

Yes and no. You can change the carbon efficiency of people's consumption quite a bit with appropriate nudging and consumption taxes. You can also have global agreements paying countries not to exploit their "unburnable" fossil fuel resources. Little things like the EU mandate for ending incandescent lightbulbs can definitely add up. You need technology and policy and economics. The market for power plants is never going to be "free", it's always full of political considerations for permitting. So countries need to have energy policies that move towards low-carbon energy. Terraforming I'm much more skeptical about. I can't see how you can make the economics work for anything other than a tiny bit.

neom 10y ago
The economics aren't that hard, just long term and not as good as other returns. think arability. Particularly useful in areas you might terraform. (have thought about this for like 2 years now, heh. I hope it's my next startup.)
- blowski 10y ago
  For me, terraforming is the equivalent of developers saying "we need to rebuild from scratch".
  - neom 10y ago
    Kinda, yeah!
    - pjc50 10y ago
      Don't worry, when we get our next Earth we'll do it properly.
nilved 10y ago
> Yes and no. You can change the carbon efficiency of people's consumption quite a bit with appropriate nudging and consumption taxes. You can also have global agreements paying countries not to exploit their "unburnable" fossil fuel resources. No, you really can't, or we wouldn't have year-after-year record breaking temperatures. Regulation has never fixed anything. And especially when it comes to science, we need to remember that innovation and regulation are opposite ends of the same spectrum.

s_q_b 10y ago

Nuclear, nuclear, nuclear. I've said this before, and the same climate scientists who first discovered anthropogenic global warming agree, that nuclear fission plants are the only technology that can bridge the gap between fossil fuels and fusion.

pjc50 10y ago
Possibly, but it's too slow and expensive to build and insure. Even in the UK, how much solar and wind can we put up before Hinkley Point C produces its first watt?
- fencepost 10y ago
  Yeah, but don't forget the massive cleanup efforts required after big wind and sunlight spills.
_ph_ 10y ago
Wind and Solar are now cost-competetive with nuclear, without its nasty side effects. And the cost of storage for nuclear waste has not really been calculated yet.
- nl 10y ago
  Whoever downvoted this should take a look again. While being pro-nuclear was all counter-conventional wisdom cool 5 years ago, the math is changing very, very quickly. PV power is so much cheaper in terms of startup costs, and it scales both up and (more importantly) down.
  - sanxiyn 10y ago
    Indeed, it is amazing how quickly things are changing. If we solve intermittency, there won't be any reason to be pro-nuclear.
    - orangecat 10y ago

Ma8ee 10y ago

> As long as they're rick enough to do so you'll never stop them. This is the key. We just have to start charging properly for externalities. Then two things can happen, either only the very rich eat meat regularly or someone finds the technical solution you are hoping for.

mseebach 10y ago

It's not just the practical problem of getting rich people in the west to lower their consumption, it's the deeply moral problem of denying the lifestyle we've enjoyed for the past ~century to the couple of billion people currently joining the middle class. So yes, technology is the only solution. Incremental improvements in efficiency should not be shunned, but they're not going to be 'solutions'. I'm not even sure we will need to go to very dramatic steps to get there. Solar competitive with coal at market-prices seems to be right around the corner, that'll be a massive water-shed moment. I have high hopes for algae fuel (perhaps naive), because this can plug directly in to the existing downstream oil infrastructure (and burning hydrocarbons is going to be part of life for the foreseeable future).

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

Retric 10y ago

Per capita CO2 production has dropped in the US and EU by over 20%. Remember, the only long term causes are fossil fuels which are both finite and replaceable.

CalRobert 10y ago

Live in a multi-unit building in a city where you can commute and do errands by walking or cycling (electric bikes are fine and get around that whole pedaling bit). Source your energy renewably and use little of it (80-300kwh per month isn't crazy depending on your climate). Don't buy much stuff. Eat very little meat. I mean, it doesn't take it to 0 but even if you DO want a comfortable life it doesn't mean living in a hovel. I'm as guilty as anyone though. I love to travel, and I live on an island, so I fly a lot. Offsets only do so much (though they'd be really helpful if we had a functional carbon market).

CalRobert 10y ago
There is a sad counterpoint, though, and one I think of often. There are discretionary purchasers of fossil fuels - people/companies who would buy units of fuel but aren't because it's not cheap enough. All of the actions I named above reduce the demand for fossil fuels (by an infinitesimal amount, but still). Reducing demand reduces the price such that some other user will consume those fuels anyway. In this case it might as well be me, as a self-interested economic actor. This is the idea behind putting a cap on emissions and selling the right to emit, but so far such schemes are a failure. And as much as I hate to admit it, they really do need to be global in scale - if cap and trade just results in more stuff being manufactured in nations that don't limit emissions, we haven't really fixed anything.
- larkery 10y ago
  You are right about the problem that efficiency in one place will potentially cause consumption in another. In the literature, this is usually called a 'rebound effect' or Jevons' paradox. It may be that an emissions / extraction cap could be implemented non-globally so long as a large enough block were willing to participate, and so long as they imposed tariffs on any non-participants to price in the emissions happening on the other side of the border.
joshyeager 10y ago
All of that sounds reasonable, except "Live in a multi-unit building in a city". Being that close to that many people sounds like hell.

goodmachine 10y ago

Regarding terraforming, I suggest a quick win may be to trigger a volcanic super-eruption. The cooling effect is known to reduce global temperatures to refreshing and/or bracing levels: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volcanic_winter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volcanic_winter I was leaning towards using nuclear weapons to kick things off, but the potential side effects of such an event will probably be tricky enough, without the giant dust clouds soon to enshroud the Earth also being radioactive. There may of course be other unforeseen consequences, but given the alternatives (which we see all too clearly) I ask: who's in?

CalRobert 10y ago
Well, the nuclear weapons could remove most of the carbon emitters, but that's morally challenging.
legulere 10y ago
It would also trigger a famine and lead to extremely bad air quality.
pyrale 10y ago
Volcanic dusts are naturally more radioactive than sedimentary dust, though. So I'm not sure the long term effects of a volcanic super-explosion would be much better without the nukes... :)
chr1 10y ago
Alice: Looks like there is a wasp nest under the roof, we need to do something about it Bob: Let's blow it up with dynamite! When thinking about terraforming people tend to think of megaprojects that would "fix" everything at once, but that doesn't work. There are much more predictable and safer ways to do terraforming, e.g. desalinating water, building canals, planting forests, ferilizing ocean in the worst case.

bad_user 10y ago

The problem is that costs are subsidized by basically letting businesses destroy the environment. The solution should be simple: add lots of taxes, let the off-the-shelf cost of meat and gasoline reflect the real cost to our environment, make deforestation a crime, tax the shit out of all polluting industries and if a country is not participating add taxes on imports from said country, or ban those imports altogether. As long as the burning of fossil fuels keeps being dirt cheap, there's no incentive for innovation. You mentioned meat - if governments would tax the current CAFO practices in accordance to the destruction of the environment and of our health, the consumption of meat would go down because of the price, but that meat would end up being raised with sustainable farming practices, on organic grass, locally grown, as that would prove to be the cheaper way to raise meat and so it would have a higher quality.

sounds 10y ago
Great suggestions! We've basically imposed the "taxes on imports from said country, or ban those imports" on North Korea, with the result that they use the worst of environmental practices: • Inefficient small coal-burning fireplaces in outlying areas. (Pyongyang is better.) • Regulatory environment where factory and vehicle emissions are not even close to a priority. • Unsafe nuclear testing. Ok, so that was my straw man :) Hopefully it illustrates something more universal, namely: Many countries lack the internal political will to put meaningful environmental clean ups in place. Even something as simple as the tax you proposed to pay for environmental clean up of disaster areas is impossible due to politics. Until we have de-politicized the topic, that probably won't change. New clean tech is one great way of accomplishing this.
- tomp 10y ago
  > Many countries lack the internal political will to put meaningful environmental clean ups in place. Even something as simple as the tax you proposed to pay for environmental clean up of disaster areas is impossible due to politics. The point isn't changing other countries. The point is giving competing green technologies a fighting chance. I don't care whether Saudi Arabia suffocates in cheap oil or builds a hi-tech green energy paradise. That's their choice. But I don't want the local green energy startups and organic farms be driven out of business by cheap Saudi-Arabic oil. Same with China - I think it's fundamentally unfair that local businesses have to abide to many regulations (e.g. environmental, safety, hiring) that Chinese companies don't need to, yet they are able to compete in the same market offering lower prices. I think that the current implementation of free trade is a fundamentally failed and morally wrong model.

wahsd 10y ago

I know, let's make the rest of the world just as aspiriational and let's also import people from places where they had little environmental impact right into societies where they can have far greater impact, and then let's let them keep making more of them with abandon, especially in the third world where they then emerge to overrun the civilized world from because they reproduce at far than sustainable, let alone carrying capacity rates. The problem is clear, the solution is clear, yet the vast majority of people don't have the will to even just face the only solution. You simply can't rationally claim to want to do something about climate change and global warming on the premise that it's negative and needs "fixing", without talking about population control of poorly educated, low qualification people. Anything and everything else but qualitatively weighted population control is simply delaying disaster (if that is the premise you are operating on). We need to stop "saving" every child and person in the third world just so they can reproduce with abandon. For example, Nigeria is projected to reach 1 BILLION people by 2050. They can barely sustain themselves at the current 140 Million, you cannot consider yourself a rational or intelligent person if you think they will be able to do so at 1 BILLION.

jasonkester 10y ago

Technology never ceases to amaze though. Just last week I replaced the 12 50 watt spotlights in my kitchen with 42 watts total worth of LEDs. For twenty dollars. You can't tell the difference except that maybe it's a bit brighter in there. That was something I wouldn't have predicted being able to do 10 years ago. If something changes in the next 30 years that make this whole climate change panic look like a bunch of silly overreaction, I won't be all that surprised.

larkery 10y ago
Unfortunately, the evidence so far: - A consistent exponential growth in emissions - A consistent improvement in GDP/energy and a mild improvement in energy/CO2 raises the question: can technical efficiency gains reduce emissions? If so, can they do so rapidly enough to prevent catastrophe. This question has been open since Jevons wrote about the use of coal in the Empire, but it is certainly not cut-and-dried. In the case of your spotlights, there are several places for a rebound effect: - You have more spare money; you spend that money on something else, which (perhaps) causes some emissions - You have avoided using some electricity, lowering the cost of electricity. This renders electricity useful for some other customer for whom it was previously marginal And so on. For efficiency gains alone to work, the new technology will have to be astounding enough to reduce the cost of energy below the marginal production cost for all the existing sources, and to allow us to chuck away all of the existing fossil fuel infrastructure without discomfort. Otherwise we will just use astounding new technology along with all our old technologies, and do more stuff. Efficiency gains (which will come, and are welcome and necessary) need to be coupled with a political limit on extraction of fuels to avoid this outcome, in my opinion.
mikeash 10y ago
Lighting is pretty small potatoes compared to transportation and agriculture and climate control. Your efficiency improvements, while great, are vastly outweighed by increases in global population and standards of living. If you were to wave a magic wand and put a complete stop to human CO2 emissions today, the consequences of climate change would still be felt for decades. Never mind some technological change in the next 30 years, we needed something in the last 30 years. It's too late to stop it now, the only question is how much it can be mitigated, and how to deal with the consequences.

golergka 10y ago

Honestly? At this point, I think that the only solution which will prevent Earth from becoming uninhabitable to all but simplest lifeforms is a war which will destroy at least most of humanity and reverse our technology level to one before of industrial revolution. New tech will never adopted fast enough by people acting out of their economic self-interest.

vijayr 10y ago

Didn't Yao Ming single handedly reduce the amount of ivory trade in China by spreading awareness about elephant situation? Obviously meat is much more dear to people than ivory, we might need a million Mings to spread awareness - it is still worth a shot though. Even if we manage to reduce meat consumption by say 5 to 10%, it would be a huge help.

at-fates-hands 10y ago

>> Some combination of green energy sources plus probably very large scale terraforming. The Achilles heel in all of this is how to make green energy affordable. If you want to really make impact, making these technologies affordable for lower income and the poor is the best way to reduce energy consumption. Unfortunately, a lot of these technologies are still way way way out of reach of these people to take part in. Last time I checked, getting a small solar array on my house would cost in the neighborhood of $20K just get it installed. With a ten year ROI, this isn't feasible for me to do right now, and our state just ended their solar tax deductions with no signs of it ever coming back - giving me even less incentive to do this. I'm all for less consumption and green technologies, but most are not affordable, and the long ROI isn't worth it right now.

balabaster 10y ago
Last I saw stats, something like 57% of the U.S. is officially living in poverty. Trying to afford anything more than the necessities of life isn't going to happen on an individual basis for them, so it'll need to be a state/federal level effort to provide them with that.
maxsilver 10y ago
> The Achilles heel in all of this is how to make green energy affordable. Last time I checked, getting a small solar array on my house would cost in the neighborhood of $20K just get it installed. Depending on where you live, green energy might already be affordable today. I had the same sticker shock at solar prices. While looking into that, I learned that my local for-profit electric provider offers a "green energy" option, where they promise to replace my billed electricity usage with mostly wind energy instead of the coal / natural gas mix normally used. The total cost of that is $0.01/kwh extra. Or, roughly $6/month extra on an average electricity bill, to switch from coal to wind. https://new.consumersenergy.com/residential/programs-and-services/green-generation https://new.consumersenergy.com/residential/programs-and-ser... A plan like this should be affordable for the vast majority of Americans.

hellofunk 10y ago

I disagree. There are advanced cultures in the world without this ambition you speak of (I'm looking at you, Holland), where convenient life in a local environment that is all accessible by bike, eating lots of fish, and caring less about immense wealth and impressions and more about quality of life.. it is attainable.

chr1 10y ago
And the coolest thing about Holland is that they are one of first to do terraforming on a large scale by creating a local environment under the sea level!
alanwatts 10y ago
I'd be interested to see a comparison on the amount of advertising done per capita in Holland vs. the United States. Once I stopped watching television, I was no longer exposed to such incessant advertising. As a result, I stopped caring so much about impractical consumption. I.e. buying the new car they show every 10 minutes in such persuasive and skillfully crafted multi-million dollar targeted advertisements.
- RodericDay 10y ago
  Me too. I rail against advertising incessantly on here, but I really think it's far nearer to the core of the issue than a lot of people think. Even a lot of anti-ad folk are like "just make them less intrusive and it'll be fine". No, that's just an extra annoyance. Ads are, at their very essence, incredibly bad.
  - alanwatts 10y ago
    Just did some number crunching and it appears Holland spends roughly half as much on advertising per capita than the US. http://www.statista.com/statistics/272314/advertising-spending-in-the-us/ http://www.statista.com/statistics/272314/advertising-spendi...

subtenante 10y ago

> The only solution to this problem is technology. Or taxes.

thesimpsons1022 10y ago

pretty sure we can stop them but not by asking nicely. just takes armed officers and the threat of force from the state.

russell_sears 10y ago

We really need a global carbon credit system (with stiff tariffs for countries that do not participate). Cut net greenhouse emissions by a few percent a year until net emissions are negative and atmospheric CO2 and methane are back to pre-industrial levels. This will help renewables (and nuclear, for better or worse) in the short term. In the medium term, the invisible hand of the market will make carbon capture profitable, which means smart VCs will start dumping cash into it now. I think this sounds more plausible than terraforming, but is really the same thing.

enlightenedfool 10y ago

I would say political will. I still don't understand why aa advanced country like USA doesn't have a good public transportation system which could easily take the cars off the road. Many people would be happy to avoid sitting in cars for hours and polluting more.

deegles 10y ago

I think you hinted at the solution. "as long as people are rich enough to.." Well, put in place taxes high enough that people are rich enough to afford it! and use the money for sequestration tech or alternative energy.

daxorid 10y ago

The only solution to this problem is technology Naw. See the well-documented phenomenon of the Jevon's Paradox: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox