8 ms·

Paris agreement on climate change has come into force

76 points by tbarbugli 10y ago

zzalpha 10y ago
And two, five, ten years from now we'll all be talking about how the Paris agreement failed and how the <insert name of major city> agreement is a major breakthrough and we'll limit warming to 3-4C this time, we swear! But good news, while the Great Barrier Reef is now 90% bleached, the Seychelles are forming a new underwater ecosystem!
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- xiphias 10y ago
  The only reason why Paris agreement wont fail is that it now makes financial sense to use renewable energy even without caring about the environment.
  - witty_username 10y ago
    Source? IIRC these require government subsidies.
    - stale2002 10y ago
      The source is looking at solar power costs over time for the last 20 years. Costs are still dropping by 30 percent a year.
  - tzs 10y ago
    In the United State making financial sense is not sufficient. It used to be, but that is changing. In 2008, for example, the Republican party platform acknowledged that human activity was increasing atmospheric CO2, and said that it was common sense that the US take measured and reasonable steps to address this. They called for technology-driven, market-based solutions that will decrease emissions and mitigate the impact of climate change. They said that in the long run we needed to move to zero emission sources, with fossil fuels being a bridge to that emissions free future. It said they would aggressively support technological advances to reduce our dependence on petroleum. It supported raising gas mileage standards for cars and trucks, and was pro electric vehicle. Eight years later, their platform no longer calls for reducing emissions, calls for forbidding the EPA from regulating CO2, and calls for increasing the use of coal and oil. Most of the candidates who ran for the GOP nomination were firmly in the "climate change is not happening camp", and the few who were not were in the "it may be happening, and we may even be contributing a little, but it is not anything we need to do anything about" camp. Unless those Republicans who are not anti-science can somehow move the GOP back toward their 2008 position, where they acknowledge the problem and the need to address it and the need to move to clean energy in the future, where the major difference with Democrats was in how to accomplish these goals rather than on their necessity, I don't see how the US is going to do much about climate change.
    - thaumasiotes 10y ago
      > In the United State[s] making financial sense is not sufficient You follow this with three paragraphs, and yet none of them contains one word in support of this claim. What's standing in the way of people who want to do whatever is cheapest?
      - ZeroGravitas 10y ago
        If a government subsidises the wrong thing, the right thing will no longer make financial sense. If the government bans the right thing, it no longer matters whether it makes financial sense. However, I am slightly optimistic about these things as many city and state governments as well as private corporations are taking steps to do the right thing, even as parts of the government and society take the opposite side.
  - barney54 10y ago
    That is not accurate. It does not make financial sense to use renewables versus natural gas for electricity generation. Here's the data: https://www.eia.gov/forecasts/aeo/pdf/electricity_generation.pdf https://www.eia.gov/forecasts/aeo/pdf/electricity_generation... Note the report has an important caveat. "The LCOE values for dispatchable and nondispatchable technologies are listed separately in the tables, because caution should be used when comparing them to one another." The reason is that wind and solar are dependent on the weather and the position of the sun. It does not matter how cheap something is if it can't keep the lights on. Wind and solar might seem close in price to nat gas electricity generation, but in reality they need to be much cheaper because there is not such thing as an electricity grid run on wind and solar alone. There is only wind and solar + natural gas for when the wind isn't blowing and the sun isn't shining.
    - diafygi 10y ago
      It's half accurate. The investment firm Lazard has a nice report[1] on comparing U.S. energy costs by source. Here's the costs in the U.S. (without counting subsidies): * Wind: $ 32/MWh * Solar: $ 43/MWh * Natural Gas: $ 52/MWh * Coal: $ 65/MWh * Geothermal: $ 82/MWh * Biomass: $ 82/MWh * Nuclear: $ 97/MWh * Solar+Storage: $ 119/MWh * Diesel: $ 212/MWh Also, and you can get to about 50% penetration of non-dispatchable sources before you have to start adding storage[2]. So renewables are currently cheaper than natural gas for half the electricity, then more expensive for the other half. As storage gets cheaper and the likelyhood of a carbon tax increases, the expectation is that renewables + storage will likely get cheaper than natural gas in the next 5 years or sooner[3]. So, the claim is half accurate in theory, but actually fully accurate in practice since by the time we reach 50% renewable penetration, storage will be by far cheap enough to take up the other half. [1]: https://www.lazard.com/media/2390/lazards-levelized-cost-of-energy-analysis-90.pdf https://www.lazard.com/media/2390/lazards-levelized-cost-of-... [2]: https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~vsmith/docs/renewables_sgc_2013.pdf https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~vsmith/docs/renewables_sgc... [3]: http://powerledger.io/energy-disruption-solar-plus-storage-cheaper-grid-2017-2/ http://powerledger.io/energy-disruption-solar-plus-storage-c...
  - Scarblac 10y ago
    The problem is we'll probably use renewably energy in addition to all the fossil fuel we burn...
- ptaipale 10y ago
  The news about the Great Barrier Reef being dead is very much exaggerated, though.
  - phaemon 10y ago
    What is that opinion based on?
    - ptaipale 10y ago
      Plenty of reporting, if you look outside the Twitter bubble that declared it dead. For example, http://www.snopes.com/scientists-pronounce-great-barrier-reef-dead/ http://www.snopes.com/scientists-pronounce-great-barrier-ree... http://edition.cnn.com/2016/10/14/us/barrier-reef-obit-trnd/ http://edition.cnn.com/2016/10/14/us/barrier-reef-obit-trnd/ The reef is damaged but far from dead.
      - phaemon 10y ago
        I don't use Twitter, and I don't have much time for CNN. I was looking for a link to a scientific paper, but Snopes generally makes an effort so I suppose they'll do. The reef is very badly damaged, and if you'd said that to start with, that would have been fine. Simply stating "the Great Barrier Reef being dead is very much exaggerated" makes it sound as though you're saying everything is just fine with it. Which it clearly isn't.
  - inimino 10y ago
    Not dead, dying.
- arethuza 10y ago
  Nitpick - a lot of the Seychelles are actually fairly hilly which is why their scenery is so spectacular. The Maldives are probably a better example to use!
- the8472 10y ago
  But we already know that the currently set emission reductions targets are not sufficient to meet the stated 2°C and 1.5°C goals. This is even baked into the Paris agreement itself. They will do reviews every few years and ratchet up the commitments necessary to meet the stated goals. New agreements may still be needed since the paris accords lacks enforcement mechanisms. So if we wanted to implement e.g. multi-national CO2 taxes or make some quid-pro-quo deals to get more renewables into developing countries then new deals will need to be made.
- douche 10y ago
  Wait, I thought Kyoto was the latest standard for nonsensical, feel-good non-binding climate change agreements?
Shivetya 10y ago
What force? It is still fully voluntary and your pretty much on your own in deciding what to do. If anything it really only is payout scheme to appease some smaller nations. The emission goals are NON BINDING. Its worse than no agreement because countries can point to it and declare they did something whereas they really aren't obligating themselves to more than a small tax. China has what, said their emissions may slow by 2030?
vowelless 10y ago
Slightly off topic: Is it possible to create technology that can suck out the CO2 from the atmosphere? If so, what would the back of the envelope costs for this be like? If this is a viable option, why continuously try to have these large scale agreements instead of building and selling technology to counter the CO2 emissions?
- rzzzt 10y ago
  Trees do it all the time. The more technical solutions (along with risks) are outlined in this article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_capture_and_storage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_capture_and_storage
- DennisP 10y ago
  People are working on that. One option is biochar: burn biomass in a low-oxygen environment, grind up the charcoal and work it into soil. Generally improves fertility and stays in place over a thousand years. A Nature study found that we could absorb about a gigaton carbon (or CO2, I forget) per year before we start doing serious harm to biodiversity. Our annual emissions are 10 GT carbon, or 30 GT CO2. There are others involving mineral erosion, or machines that take CO2 out of the atmosphere. There's a scheme for fertilizing oceans with iron particles, creating algae blooms that absorb CO2 then die and sink; that one may or may not work. The problem is, generally this stuff either has large environmental side effects, doesn't scale enough to absorb all emissions, is much more expensive than just reducing emissions, and/or uses a lot of energy, which would have to be produced by carbon-free sources that could have just replaced emissions in the first place. None of it is really available yet, and we're rapidly running out of time. We're starting to see positive feedbacks where, with higher temperatures, the planet emits CO2 and methane by itself, taking the temperature even higher without further help from us. So our best strategy is to reduce emissions as quickly as possible now. Given how far along things are, we will probably also need to reduce atmospheric CO2 levels after we've finally stopped increasing them. Of course, to whatever extent the negative-emissions techniques become available, safe, and affordable in the short term, they could definitely help. Biochar might be the closest to implementation, with no real downside except at very large scale.
- 10y ago
spodek 10y ago
> "The Eiffel Tower in Paris is expected to be lit up in green light on Friday to mark the entry into force of the historic climate pact." It would be "greener" not to light it for an evening. And to remind people to reduce their consumption of things that pollute overall. Obviously not a total solution, but a start.
- threesixandnine 10y ago
  Maybe it's one of those things - you have to spend money to make money? All in all, I don't personally have any issues with lighting up the Eiffel Tower if that means a lot of exposure and information about sick planet reaching more people.
- sambe 10y ago
  Do you imagine a future where not lighting up the Eiffel Tower has saved us from climate change? More generally, these "solutions" don't work. Billions of people don't suddenly all agree to reduce their quality of life voluntarily. For every energy efficient lightbulb there's some beef they aren't supposed to eat, or a standby device that uses 2W too much power they have to switch off and on 5 times a day. It's never happened before and it won't happen for this, even if the world goes to crap due to climate change. Maybe stop wasting resources on feeling good about optimising the uncommon case and work on systematic stuff like clean power.
  - Brakenshire 10y ago
    > It's never happened before and it won't happen for this It has happened that economic growth has untethered itself from fossil fuel growth almost everywhere in the Western world. I think consumer pressure can do something, apart from anything people just using it as an excuse to save money will do something. I agree that most of it has to be systemic, but there's a combination there. You need for instance cheaper storage and solar, more efficient a.c., better insulation, and so on, but you also need people to want to put in the effort to buy or install it.
    - maverick_iceman 10y ago
diafygi 10y ago
I work in cleantech, and it always seems weird how much fatalism I see in the comments sections of climate change threads on HN. Why are we so hopeless? Don't be! Be the entrepreneurs you say you are, because there's so much money to be made here! My favorite joke about climate change: "They say humans won't act until it's too late... Luckily, it's too late!" Here's my list of why we'll fix climate change: 1. Wall Street is now on our side. Clean energy technologies are now mature and cheaper without subsidy than fossil alternatives[1], so the clean energy sector is starting to be viewed by the financial sector more like construction rather than a tech R&D. 2. Insurance and Real Estate are now on our side. The effects of climate change are expected to have a $44 trillion economic downside[2], and that loss is starting to creep into the depreciation terms and insuring everything from crops to real estate. 3. Cleantech now has more jobs. Clean energy now employs more workers (including blue collar local workers) than the coal industry and the upstream oil industry[3]. Also, the advanced energy sector (cleantech + energy efficiency + smartgrid) is now at $1.4 trillion, which is bigger than many other industries like airlines and fashion, and will soon pass the entire media industry[4]. 4. Developing countries are now pivoting hard away from fossil fuels. China has pledged to peak emissions by 2030, but it may be as early as 2027[5]. Also, Africa is expected to leapfrog fossil-based generation and go straight to renewables (much like how skipped landlines and went straight to wireless)[6]. Given these allies, who do think is going to win in a policy fight? As powerful as Exxon and BP are, they don't hold a candle to Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Wells Fargo, Goldman Sacs, China, etc. So if you were wondering when the turning point for humanity to start taking action, now is that time. Rest assured, you won't have to do anything if you don't want. The people making the money will do it for you. It's really weird to see the HN community (and tech startups in general) totally not want in on any of that action. Now that the hardware tech is here, cleantech is now basically a scaling exercise, which means efficiency, which means software. There are literally trillions of dollars to be made in cleantech software, yet every time there's a post on climate change on HN it's all doom and gloom. Come on! We have to replace 87% of our global energy sources in less than 30 years[7]. That's faster growth than the Internet, and it's time for tech startups to cash in on it. [1]: https://www.lazard.com/media/2390/lazards-levelized-cost-of-energy-analysis-90.pdf https://www.lazard.com/media/2390/lazards-levelized-cost-of-... [2]: http://www.cnbc.com/2015/08/18/cost-of-not-acting-on-climate-change-44-trillion-citi.html http://www.cnbc.com/2015/08/18/cost-of-not-acting-on-climate... [3]: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-05-25/clean-energy-jobs-surpass-oil-drilling-for-first-time-in-u-s https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-05-25/clean-ene... [4]: http://www.solarpowerworldonline.com/2016/03/advanced-energy-hits-record-revenue-nearly-1-4-trillion-2015/ http://www.solarpowerworldonline.com/2016/03/advanced-energy... [5]: https://www.carbonbrief.org/climate-pledge-puts-china-on-course-to-peak-emissions-as-early-as-2027 https://www.carbonbrief.org/climate-pledge-puts-china-on-cou... [6]: http://news.trust.org/item/20161018065317-ct50s http://news.trust.org/item/20161018065317-ct50s [7]: http://www.pvsolarreport.com/the-next-internet/ http://www.pvsolarreport.com/the-next-internet/
douche 10y ago
So, assuming that average temperatures only go up 2-2.5 C, we'll effectively be out of the Little Ice Age again, and into the temperature ranges that most of the golden ages of human society experienced?
- alphapapa 10y ago
  You are a brave man. Don't you know that experts have formed a consensus on the scientific facts?
anon1253 10y ago
'It's about a society on its way down. And as it falls, it keeps telling itself: "So far so good... So far so good... So far so good." It's not how you fall that matters. It's how you land.' - La Haine
maverick_iceman 10y ago
We should seriously look into geoengineering. Pious utterances from world leaders notwithstanding, human behavior is not going to change.

76 points by tbarbugli 10y ago

And two, five, ten years from now we'll all be talking about how the Paris agreement failed and how the <insert name of major city> agreement is a major breakthrough and we'll limit warming to 3-4C this time, we swear! But good news, while the Great Barrier Reef is now 90% bleached, the Seychelles are forming a new underwater ecosystem!

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
xiphias 10y ago
The only reason why Paris agreement wont fail is that it now makes financial sense to use renewable energy even without caring about the environment.
- witty_username 10y ago
  Source? IIRC these require government subsidies.
  - stale2002 10y ago
    The source is looking at solar power costs over time for the last 20 years. Costs are still dropping by 30 percent a year.
- tzs 10y ago
  In the United State making financial sense is not sufficient. It used to be, but that is changing. In 2008, for example, the Republican party platform acknowledged that human activity was increasing atmospheric CO2, and said that it was common sense that the US take measured and reasonable steps to address this. They called for technology-driven, market-based solutions that will decrease emissions and mitigate the impact of climate change. They said that in the long run we needed to move to zero emission sources, with fossil fuels being a bridge to that emissions free future. It said they would aggressively support technological advances to reduce our dependence on petroleum. It supported raising gas mileage standards for cars and trucks, and was pro electric vehicle. Eight years later, their platform no longer calls for reducing emissions, calls for forbidding the EPA from regulating CO2, and calls for increasing the use of coal and oil. Most of the candidates who ran for the GOP nomination were firmly in the "climate change is not happening camp", and the few who were not were in the "it may be happening, and we may even be contributing a little, but it is not anything we need to do anything about" camp. Unless those Republicans who are not anti-science can somehow move the GOP back toward their 2008 position, where they acknowledge the problem and the need to address it and the need to move to clean energy in the future, where the major difference with Democrats was in how to accomplish these goals rather than on their necessity, I don't see how the US is going to do much about climate change.
  - thaumasiotes 10y ago
    > In the United State[s] making financial sense is not sufficient You follow this with three paragraphs, and yet none of them contains one word in support of this claim. What's standing in the way of people who want to do whatever is cheapest?
    - ZeroGravitas 10y ago
      If a government subsidises the wrong thing, the right thing will no longer make financial sense. If the government bans the right thing, it no longer matters whether it makes financial sense. However, I am slightly optimistic about these things as many city and state governments as well as private corporations are taking steps to do the right thing, even as parts of the government and society take the opposite side.
- barney54 10y ago
  That is not accurate. It does not make financial sense to use renewables versus natural gas for electricity generation. Here's the data: https://www.eia.gov/forecasts/aeo/pdf/electricity_generation.pdf https://www.eia.gov/forecasts/aeo/pdf/electricity_generation... Note the report has an important caveat. "The LCOE values for dispatchable and nondispatchable technologies are listed separately in the tables, because caution should be used when comparing them to one another." The reason is that wind and solar are dependent on the weather and the position of the sun. It does not matter how cheap something is if it can't keep the lights on. Wind and solar might seem close in price to nat gas electricity generation, but in reality they need to be much cheaper because there is not such thing as an electricity grid run on wind and solar alone. There is only wind and solar + natural gas for when the wind isn't blowing and the sun isn't shining.
  - diafygi 10y ago
    It's half accurate. The investment firm Lazard has a nice report[1] on comparing U.S. energy costs by source. Here's the costs in the U.S. (without counting subsidies): * Wind: $ 32/MWh * Solar: $ 43/MWh * Natural Gas: $ 52/MWh * Coal: $ 65/MWh * Geothermal: $ 82/MWh * Biomass: $ 82/MWh * Nuclear: $ 97/MWh * Solar+Storage: $ 119/MWh * Diesel: $ 212/MWh Also, and you can get to about 50% penetration of non-dispatchable sources before you have to start adding storage[2]. So renewables are currently cheaper than natural gas for half the electricity, then more expensive for the other half. As storage gets cheaper and the likelyhood of a carbon tax increases, the expectation is that renewables + storage will likely get cheaper than natural gas in the next 5 years or sooner[3]. So, the claim is half accurate in theory, but actually fully accurate in practice since by the time we reach 50% renewable penetration, storage will be by far cheap enough to take up the other half. [1]: https://www.lazard.com/media/2390/lazards-levelized-cost-of-energy-analysis-90.pdf https://www.lazard.com/media/2390/lazards-levelized-cost-of-... [2]: https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~vsmith/docs/renewables_sgc_2013.pdf https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~vsmith/docs/renewables_sgc... [3]: http://powerledger.io/energy-disruption-solar-plus-storage-cheaper-grid-2017-2/ http://powerledger.io/energy-disruption-solar-plus-storage-c...
- Scarblac 10y ago
  The problem is we'll probably use renewably energy in addition to all the fossil fuel we burn...
ptaipale 10y ago
The news about the Great Barrier Reef being dead is very much exaggerated, though.
- phaemon 10y ago
  What is that opinion based on?
  - ptaipale 10y ago
    Plenty of reporting, if you look outside the Twitter bubble that declared it dead. For example, http://www.snopes.com/scientists-pronounce-great-barrier-reef-dead/ http://www.snopes.com/scientists-pronounce-great-barrier-ree... http://edition.cnn.com/2016/10/14/us/barrier-reef-obit-trnd/ http://edition.cnn.com/2016/10/14/us/barrier-reef-obit-trnd/ The reef is damaged but far from dead.
    - phaemon 10y ago
      I don't use Twitter, and I don't have much time for CNN. I was looking for a link to a scientific paper, but Snopes generally makes an effort so I suppose they'll do. The reef is very badly damaged, and if you'd said that to start with, that would have been fine. Simply stating "the Great Barrier Reef being dead is very much exaggerated" makes it sound as though you're saying everything is just fine with it. Which it clearly isn't.
- inimino 10y ago
  Not dead, dying.
arethuza 10y ago
Nitpick - a lot of the Seychelles are actually fairly hilly which is why their scenery is so spectacular. The Maldives are probably a better example to use!
the8472 10y ago
But we already know that the currently set emission reductions targets are not sufficient to meet the stated 2°C and 1.5°C goals. This is even baked into the Paris agreement itself. They will do reviews every few years and ratchet up the commitments necessary to meet the stated goals. New agreements may still be needed since the paris accords lacks enforcement mechanisms. So if we wanted to implement e.g. multi-national CO2 taxes or make some quid-pro-quo deals to get more renewables into developing countries then new deals will need to be made.
douche 10y ago
Wait, I thought Kyoto was the latest standard for nonsensical, feel-good non-binding climate change agreements?

Shivetya 10y ago

What force? It is still fully voluntary and your pretty much on your own in deciding what to do. If anything it really only is payout scheme to appease some smaller nations. The emission goals are NON BINDING. Its worse than no agreement because countries can point to it and declare they did something whereas they really aren't obligating themselves to more than a small tax. China has what, said their emissions may slow by 2030?

vowelless 10y ago

Slightly off topic: Is it possible to create technology that can suck out the CO2 from the atmosphere? If so, what would the back of the envelope costs for this be like? If this is a viable option, why continuously try to have these large scale agreements instead of building and selling technology to counter the CO2 emissions?

rzzzt 10y ago
Trees do it all the time. The more technical solutions (along with risks) are outlined in this article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_capture_and_storage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_capture_and_storage
DennisP 10y ago
People are working on that. One option is biochar: burn biomass in a low-oxygen environment, grind up the charcoal and work it into soil. Generally improves fertility and stays in place over a thousand years. A Nature study found that we could absorb about a gigaton carbon (or CO2, I forget) per year before we start doing serious harm to biodiversity. Our annual emissions are 10 GT carbon, or 30 GT CO2. There are others involving mineral erosion, or machines that take CO2 out of the atmosphere. There's a scheme for fertilizing oceans with iron particles, creating algae blooms that absorb CO2 then die and sink; that one may or may not work. The problem is, generally this stuff either has large environmental side effects, doesn't scale enough to absorb all emissions, is much more expensive than just reducing emissions, and/or uses a lot of energy, which would have to be produced by carbon-free sources that could have just replaced emissions in the first place. None of it is really available yet, and we're rapidly running out of time. We're starting to see positive feedbacks where, with higher temperatures, the planet emits CO2 and methane by itself, taking the temperature even higher without further help from us. So our best strategy is to reduce emissions as quickly as possible now. Given how far along things are, we will probably also need to reduce atmospheric CO2 levels after we've finally stopped increasing them. Of course, to whatever extent the negative-emissions techniques become available, safe, and affordable in the short term, they could definitely help. Biochar might be the closest to implementation, with no real downside except at very large scale.
10y ago

spodek 10y ago

> "The Eiffel Tower in Paris is expected to be lit up in green light on Friday to mark the entry into force of the historic climate pact." It would be "greener" not to light it for an evening. And to remind people to reduce their consumption of things that pollute overall. Obviously not a total solution, but a start.

threesixandnine 10y ago
Maybe it's one of those things - you have to spend money to make money? All in all, I don't personally have any issues with lighting up the Eiffel Tower if that means a lot of exposure and information about sick planet reaching more people.
sambe 10y ago
Do you imagine a future where not lighting up the Eiffel Tower has saved us from climate change? More generally, these "solutions" don't work. Billions of people don't suddenly all agree to reduce their quality of life voluntarily. For every energy efficient lightbulb there's some beef they aren't supposed to eat, or a standby device that uses 2W too much power they have to switch off and on 5 times a day. It's never happened before and it won't happen for this, even if the world goes to crap due to climate change. Maybe stop wasting resources on feeling good about optimising the uncommon case and work on systematic stuff like clean power.
- Brakenshire 10y ago
  > It's never happened before and it won't happen for this It has happened that economic growth has untethered itself from fossil fuel growth almost everywhere in the Western world. I think consumer pressure can do something, apart from anything people just using it as an excuse to save money will do something. I agree that most of it has to be systemic, but there's a combination there. You need for instance cheaper storage and solar, more efficient a.c., better insulation, and so on, but you also need people to want to put in the effort to buy or install it.
  - maverick_iceman 10y ago

diafygi 10y ago

I work in cleantech, and it always seems weird how much fatalism I see in the comments sections of climate change threads on HN. Why are we so hopeless? Don't be! Be the entrepreneurs you say you are, because there's so much money to be made here! My favorite joke about climate change: "They say humans won't act until it's too late... Luckily, it's too late!" Here's my list of why we'll fix climate change: 1. Wall Street is now on our side. Clean energy technologies are now mature and cheaper without subsidy than fossil alternatives[1], so the clean energy sector is starting to be viewed by the financial sector more like construction rather than a tech R&D. 2. Insurance and Real Estate are now on our side. The effects of climate change are expected to have a $44 trillion economic downside[2], and that loss is starting to creep into the depreciation terms and insuring everything from crops to real estate. 3. Cleantech now has more jobs. Clean energy now employs more workers (including blue collar local workers) than the coal industry and the upstream oil industry[3]. Also, the advanced energy sector (cleantech + energy efficiency + smartgrid) is now at $1.4 trillion, which is bigger than many other industries like airlines and fashion, and will soon pass the entire media industry[4]. 4. Developing countries are now pivoting hard away from fossil fuels. China has pledged to peak emissions by 2030, but it may be as early as 2027[5]. Also, Africa is expected to leapfrog fossil-based generation and go straight to renewables (much like how skipped landlines and went straight to wireless)[6]. Given these allies, who do think is going to win in a policy fight? As powerful as Exxon and BP are, they don't hold a candle to Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Wells Fargo, Goldman Sacs, China, etc. So if you were wondering when the turning point for humanity to start taking action, now is that time. Rest assured, you won't have to do anything if you don't want. The people making the money will do it for you. It's really weird to see the HN community (and tech startups in general) totally not want in on any of that action. Now that the hardware tech is here, cleantech is now basically a scaling exercise, which means efficiency, which means software. There are literally trillions of dollars to be made in cleantech software, yet every time there's a post on climate change on HN it's all doom and gloom. Come on! We have to replace 87% of our global energy sources in less than 30 years[7]. That's faster growth than the Internet, and it's time for tech startups to cash in on it. [1]: https://www.lazard.com/media/2390/lazards-levelized-cost-of-energy-analysis-90.pdf https://www.lazard.com/media/2390/lazards-levelized-cost-of-... [2]: http://www.cnbc.com/2015/08/18/cost-of-not-acting-on-climate-change-44-trillion-citi.html http://www.cnbc.com/2015/08/18/cost-of-not-acting-on-climate... [3]: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-05-25/clean-energy-jobs-surpass-oil-drilling-for-first-time-in-u-s https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-05-25/clean-ene... [4]: http://www.solarpowerworldonline.com/2016/03/advanced-energy-hits-record-revenue-nearly-1-4-trillion-2015/ http://www.solarpowerworldonline.com/2016/03/advanced-energy... [5]: https://www.carbonbrief.org/climate-pledge-puts-china-on-course-to-peak-emissions-as-early-as-2027 https://www.carbonbrief.org/climate-pledge-puts-china-on-cou... [6]: http://news.trust.org/item/20161018065317-ct50s http://news.trust.org/item/20161018065317-ct50s [7]: http://www.pvsolarreport.com/the-next-internet/ http://www.pvsolarreport.com/the-next-internet/

douche 10y ago

So, assuming that average temperatures only go up 2-2.5 C, we'll effectively be out of the Little Ice Age again, and into the temperature ranges that most of the golden ages of human society experienced?

alphapapa 10y ago
You are a brave man. Don't you know that experts have formed a consensus on the scientific facts?

anon1253 10y ago

'It's about a society on its way down. And as it falls, it keeps telling itself: "So far so good... So far so good... So far so good." It's not how you fall that matters. It's how you land.' - La Haine

maverick_iceman 10y ago

We should seriously look into geoengineering. Pious utterances from world leaders notwithstanding, human behavior is not going to change.