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I don't share a strong sense of optimism that we'll 'beat climate change'. We need to fundamentally change how humans live on this planet and interact with our

by jly 10y ago

I don't share a strong sense of optimism that we'll 'beat climate change'. We need to fundamentally change how humans live on this planet and interact with our ecosystems to move past issues like this. Projects like these will certainly help a lot of people in the near-term, but I fear they distract us from addressing the real problems. Sadly, the real problems don't have much of a financial incentive to be solved.

thesagan 10y ago
I'm with you on that one. The current patterns of human consumption are too slow to change in the face of the type of climate change we are looking at. Even simple things like the obscene volume of packaging used for marketing and antitheft measures speak against real reform occurring soon.
- wbillingsley 10y ago
  I can't help but be reminded of the factoid that in 1898 international planning conferences were flummoxed on how on earth to deal with the ever-increasing problem of the amount of horse manure in cities... by 1912, not so much. Now solar is cheap, coal seems incredibly unwieldy. Not just the poles and wires, but the mine, the railway to take the coal from the mine to the plant... We are now a year or two past an inflection point -- building new coal plants at this time would seem like a much riskier investment. And that means the rate of construction is going to drop way below the rate of retirement pretty fast & pretty soon. And because solar has high variability, it's going to get overbuilt (nobody wants their battery to go flat much, so it'll spend most of it's time full). ie, there is going to be a bunch of "spare power" lurking around that is effectively free. And since a lot of problems can get turned into energy problems, that's a pretty happy place to be. Rash prediction: The Gold Coast currently has a mothballed desalination plant, and a water line from it to the South-East Queensland dams (built during the "Millenium drought"). I would not be surprised if within 30 years, it is running full-time, and pumping inland, even if the town-water dams are full -- because the marginal cost of running it instead of not-running it is zero, and with a bit more engineering the spill-over can be redirected to top up the Murray-Darling's flow. It'd require about 69kms of additional pipe, to connect Wivenhoe Dam to Cooby Dam. (Cooby Dam is in Toowoomba, which also has a bore into the Great Artesian Basin, so at that point you're inland enough to pump back into the basin. Draws from the basin have been blamed for the reduction in flows of springs that feed the Murray-Darling system...) The quantities of water down a pipe might be small, in river terms, but if the marginal cost of power during periods of excess is zero, and seawater is free, then it might start to seem odd not just to leave it turned on whenever there's spare load...
Gargoyle 10y ago
>>We need to fundamentally change how humans live on this planet If anyone wonders why some resist accepting climate change as a fact, the above statement gets to a big piece of the underlying puzzle. I strongly suspect that if climate change was merely a scientific topic, there would be little-to-no resistance to accepting it as fact. But it's not just a scientific question, it's (been made into) a question of how humans fundamentally live on the planet. And so of course a subset of society is going to resist societal change. It's not that people are particularly stupid, it's that they don't like the fundamental changes to how they live that they believe will follow. Of course, we all know all of this, but for some reason we like to pretend we don't. In my personal opinion, if you truly care about stopping climate change, you should be spending our effort developing solutions that do NOT require fundamental changes in how humans live on this planet. That path is much more likely to be successful in the political realm and thus more likely to actually save the planet.
- RangerScience 10y ago
  I think Tesla and Solar City are excellent examples of this. They're not "stop driving, turn off your house lights, etc", they're "keep doing what you do, only now greener" Of course, issues with the greenlieness of electric cars, etc etc - but remember when solar panels were a net negative? AFAIK, that sure as hell didn't last.
  - the8472 10y ago
    > "keep doing what you do, only now greener" that only works temporarily. business as usual still means consuming exponentially more resources over time, which is not sustainable.
    - RangerScience 10y ago
      Unless you begin to also produce exponentially greater resources over time. Also, temporarily is still a good thing, and will make new resources stretch longer. #eatthesolarsystem
Ericson2314 10y ago
Technically I am an optimist. 50 Billion for fission plants and we are done. Socially, I am a pessimist----this is the perfect problem to defeat our institutions. Problem with the startup crowd is they tend to get the former better than the latter.
- hackuser 10y ago
  > 50 Billion for fission plants and we are done. I think each one costs around $10 billion; I don't think 5 nuclear power plants will solve climate change.
  - jaggederest 10y ago
    Tokamak style fusion is efficient only at extreme scale. That's not five 10GW nuclear power plants, it's one terawatt scale plant. For reference, the entire Three Gorges Dam and its electrical plant cost ~$30bln and it has a nameplate capacity of 22.5GW. $50B seems low for a terawatt-scale fusion plant. You'd need 3 of those plants to replace all electrical generation on earth, assuming they're at a 95% capacity factor. So call it a trillion dollars, maybe. Then you've got to look at total energy usage, which is order of magnitude larger, at 120TWh, so you'd need 12 to supply every energy need of current civilization. Maybe ~$50 trillion all included. So one year of the entire world's productive output.
    - dpc59 10y ago
      You need to account for the fact that energy needs will go up exponentially.
      - h4nkoslo 10y ago
        This has not been historically true. Growth overall has been more or less linear, and in developed economies like the US is essentially flat. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_consumption#/media/File:Bp_world_energy_consumption_2016.gif https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_consumption#/medi... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_the_United_States#Current_consumption https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_the_United_States#Cu...
elihu 10y ago
> We need to fundamentally change how humans live on this planet and interact with our ecosystems to move past issues like this. I don't know about that. It seems like moving to mostly-electric transportation and replacing coal and natural gas power plants with wind and solar isn't a huge lifestyle change. That's not to say that such a change can be done quickly, nor it will be easy. We still have some unsolved problems like energy storage. But it's not like we all need to become hunter-gatherers and live in cob huts. I think that by implying that people are going to have to give up driving or not heat their houses in the winter in order to address climate change, we just make it that much harder to gain political support from those same people.
noonespecial 10y ago
>>We need to fundamentally change how humans live on this planet Don't worry. As the climate changes, it will fundamentally change how humans live on this planet. Oh you wanted to choose how we change. Well, then, I share your pessimism.
ThomPete 10y ago
You could also look at it a different way. If you assume that we can't beat it. Then what should we do to remedy the results of it? What solutions should be built It feels kind of fruitless to continue this discussion with two sides that just don't agree even on what the discussion is about. So my suggestion to those who believe there is no way back; start companies that build solutions to some of the consequences you fear.
trymas 10y ago
One of possible and very effective, though quite radical solutions to stop climate change were discussed on another post's comment thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13302635 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13302635
dx034 10y ago
I think we already changed significantly how we lived from a few decades back. Not because of climate change, but because of technology. Renewable energy becomes competitive in many places worldwide since ~1-2 years, which will fuel investments and change the way we generate energy. Not because of climate change, but because of economics. Batteries are vastly more efficient than a decade back. It doesn't need a huge invention for batteries to be competitive with ICEs in cars, a few more years at current development speeds will likely be enough. It was started with investments by people worried about climate change, but once it's economic it will be adapted by (nearly) everyone. I think that we can beat climate change without needing to convince people that they have to fight it. Sell a decent electric pick up with ample range in the US and the extra power you get from an EV, in combination with home charging (finding gas stations on the country side can be annoying) could easily make it the best selling vehicle in the US. And I'm pretty sure it won't take too long for Ford to bring exactly that to market.
benevol 10y ago
> Projects like these will certainly help a lot of people in the near-term The priority is of course that it helps a company called YC make money, which should work. Keep in mind that this is the reason why companies are created and exist in the first place. It's called capitalism (and the reason for over-consumption, which lead us here). If it helps other people as well, then that is welcome, but not a priority.

by jly 10y ago

thesagan 10y ago

I'm with you on that one. The current patterns of human consumption are too slow to change in the face of the type of climate change we are looking at. Even simple things like the obscene volume of packaging used for marketing and antitheft measures speak against real reform occurring soon.

wbillingsley 10y ago
I can't help but be reminded of the factoid that in 1898 international planning conferences were flummoxed on how on earth to deal with the ever-increasing problem of the amount of horse manure in cities... by 1912, not so much. Now solar is cheap, coal seems incredibly unwieldy. Not just the poles and wires, but the mine, the railway to take the coal from the mine to the plant... We are now a year or two past an inflection point -- building new coal plants at this time would seem like a much riskier investment. And that means the rate of construction is going to drop way below the rate of retirement pretty fast & pretty soon. And because solar has high variability, it's going to get overbuilt (nobody wants their battery to go flat much, so it'll spend most of it's time full). ie, there is going to be a bunch of "spare power" lurking around that is effectively free. And since a lot of problems can get turned into energy problems, that's a pretty happy place to be. Rash prediction: The Gold Coast currently has a mothballed desalination plant, and a water line from it to the South-East Queensland dams (built during the "Millenium drought"). I would not be surprised if within 30 years, it is running full-time, and pumping inland, even if the town-water dams are full -- because the marginal cost of running it instead of not-running it is zero, and with a bit more engineering the spill-over can be redirected to top up the Murray-Darling's flow. It'd require about 69kms of additional pipe, to connect Wivenhoe Dam to Cooby Dam. (Cooby Dam is in Toowoomba, which also has a bore into the Great Artesian Basin, so at that point you're inland enough to pump back into the basin. Draws from the basin have been blamed for the reduction in flows of springs that feed the Murray-Darling system...) The quantities of water down a pipe might be small, in river terms, but if the marginal cost of power during periods of excess is zero, and seawater is free, then it might start to seem odd not just to leave it turned on whenever there's spare load...

Gargoyle 10y ago

>>We need to fundamentally change how humans live on this planet If anyone wonders why some resist accepting climate change as a fact, the above statement gets to a big piece of the underlying puzzle. I strongly suspect that if climate change was merely a scientific topic, there would be little-to-no resistance to accepting it as fact. But it's not just a scientific question, it's (been made into) a question of how humans fundamentally live on the planet. And so of course a subset of society is going to resist societal change. It's not that people are particularly stupid, it's that they don't like the fundamental changes to how they live that they believe will follow. Of course, we all know all of this, but for some reason we like to pretend we don't. In my personal opinion, if you truly care about stopping climate change, you should be spending our effort developing solutions that do NOT require fundamental changes in how humans live on this planet. That path is much more likely to be successful in the political realm and thus more likely to actually save the planet.

RangerScience 10y ago
I think Tesla and Solar City are excellent examples of this. They're not "stop driving, turn off your house lights, etc", they're "keep doing what you do, only now greener" Of course, issues with the greenlieness of electric cars, etc etc - but remember when solar panels were a net negative? AFAIK, that sure as hell didn't last.
- the8472 10y ago
  > "keep doing what you do, only now greener" that only works temporarily. business as usual still means consuming exponentially more resources over time, which is not sustainable.
  - RangerScience 10y ago
    Unless you begin to also produce exponentially greater resources over time. Also, temporarily is still a good thing, and will make new resources stretch longer. #eatthesolarsystem

Ericson2314 10y ago

Technically I am an optimist. 50 Billion for fission plants and we are done. Socially, I am a pessimist----this is the perfect problem to defeat our institutions. Problem with the startup crowd is they tend to get the former better than the latter.

hackuser 10y ago
> 50 Billion for fission plants and we are done. I think each one costs around $10 billion; I don't think 5 nuclear power plants will solve climate change.
- jaggederest 10y ago
  Tokamak style fusion is efficient only at extreme scale. That's not five 10GW nuclear power plants, it's one terawatt scale plant. For reference, the entire Three Gorges Dam and its electrical plant cost ~$30bln and it has a nameplate capacity of 22.5GW. $50B seems low for a terawatt-scale fusion plant. You'd need 3 of those plants to replace all electrical generation on earth, assuming they're at a 95% capacity factor. So call it a trillion dollars, maybe. Then you've got to look at total energy usage, which is order of magnitude larger, at 120TWh, so you'd need 12 to supply every energy need of current civilization. Maybe ~$50 trillion all included. So one year of the entire world's productive output.
  - dpc59 10y ago
    You need to account for the fact that energy needs will go up exponentially.
    - h4nkoslo 10y ago
      This has not been historically true. Growth overall has been more or less linear, and in developed economies like the US is essentially flat. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_consumption#/media/File:Bp_world_energy_consumption_2016.gif https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_consumption#/medi... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_the_United_States#Current_consumption https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_the_United_States#Cu...

elihu 10y ago

> We need to fundamentally change how humans live on this planet and interact with our ecosystems to move past issues like this. I don't know about that. It seems like moving to mostly-electric transportation and replacing coal and natural gas power plants with wind and solar isn't a huge lifestyle change. That's not to say that such a change can be done quickly, nor it will be easy. We still have some unsolved problems like energy storage. But it's not like we all need to become hunter-gatherers and live in cob huts. I think that by implying that people are going to have to give up driving or not heat their houses in the winter in order to address climate change, we just make it that much harder to gain political support from those same people.

noonespecial 10y ago

>>We need to fundamentally change how humans live on this planet Don't worry. As the climate changes, it will fundamentally change how humans live on this planet. Oh you wanted to choose how we change. Well, then, I share your pessimism.

ThomPete 10y ago

You could also look at it a different way. If you assume that we can't beat it. Then what should we do to remedy the results of it? What solutions should be built It feels kind of fruitless to continue this discussion with two sides that just don't agree even on what the discussion is about. So my suggestion to those who believe there is no way back; start companies that build solutions to some of the consequences you fear.

trymas 10y ago

One of possible and very effective, though quite radical solutions to stop climate change were discussed on another post's comment thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13302635 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13302635

dx034 10y ago

I think we already changed significantly how we lived from a few decades back. Not because of climate change, but because of technology. Renewable energy becomes competitive in many places worldwide since ~1-2 years, which will fuel investments and change the way we generate energy. Not because of climate change, but because of economics. Batteries are vastly more efficient than a decade back. It doesn't need a huge invention for batteries to be competitive with ICEs in cars, a few more years at current development speeds will likely be enough. It was started with investments by people worried about climate change, but once it's economic it will be adapted by (nearly) everyone. I think that we can beat climate change without needing to convince people that they have to fight it. Sell a decent electric pick up with ample range in the US and the extra power you get from an EV, in combination with home charging (finding gas stations on the country side can be annoying) could easily make it the best selling vehicle in the US. And I'm pretty sure it won't take too long for Ford to bring exactly that to market.

benevol 10y ago

> Projects like these will certainly help a lot of people in the near-term The priority is of course that it helps a company called YC make money, which should work. Keep in mind that this is the reason why companies are created and exist in the first place. It's called capitalism (and the reason for over-consumption, which lead us here). If it helps other people as well, then that is welcome, but not a priority.