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How Much Do You Know About Solving Global Warming?
- RodericDay 9y agoMaybe it's just me, but I think this test avoids some questions I expected there, and does so in a very contrived manner. "Switch to Electric" is favorably compared to "Hitch a Ride", and then "Hop on the Bus" is unfavorably compared to "Ships ahoy". The overall impression I take is something like: "just wait and see, some guys are working on hard engineering problems wrt ships and planes, you save for your Tesla while eating plants and you'll be doing your part".
- GhotiFish 9y agono doubt. if you politically object to anything on that list, you merely need to compare it to something higher up and force people into a binary choice. "Which would be better"?
- sp332 9y agoRelatively speaking, I think far more attention has been given to reducing emissions from passenger cars than from shipping, even though it's a much smaller source of CO2. So it's an interesting comparison.
- tgb 9y agoI think you're mistaken that passenger cars are the smaller part. I'm struggling to find a clear source but pg 45 of this [1] shows passenger cars as 50% of total transportation energy (including road freight and shipping, I think) and page 35 projects passenger cars as 43%, compared to 8% for shipping, of CO2 emissions in 2050. You might be mixing up CO2 emissions with Sulfur emissions [2] [1] https://www.iea.org/publications/freepublications/publication/transport2009.pdf https://www.iea.org/publications/freepublications/publicatio... [2] https://www.quora.com/Is-it-true-that-the-15-biggest-ships-in-the-world-produce-more-pollution-than-all-the-cars https://www.quora.com/Is-it-true-that-the-15-biggest-ships-i...
- mikeash 9y agoIs it much smaller? I'm having trouble finding good numbers, but what I can find seems to put cars and ships at a similar level.
- sp332 9y agoI didn't realize onshore wind was going to be bigger than solar. I wish they had some references.
- sintaxi 9y agoSolar farms are an anti-pattern. Solar will be much larger than wind because it makes the grid obsolete, doesn't require employees maintain, and has no moving parts. Solar (both active and passive) is king IMHO.
- lovemenot 9y agoNot sure what you mean by active / passive solar. There are some economies of scale, even for photovoltaics, so calling PV solar farms an anti-pattern is extreme. Then there's concentrated solar thermal, which has extremely strong scale merit and therefore requires farm-scale to be cost-effective.
- gozur88 9y agoAnd yet you only get peak power from solar when the sun is normal to the panel. We need power at other times too.
- ScottBurson 9y agoThis page, linked at the bottom of the article, has a table each line of which links to a page with references: http://www.drawdown.org/solutions-summary-by-rank http://www.drawdown.org/solutions-summary-by-rank
- jpttsn 9y agoGreat practice if you're making day-to-day decisions for hundreds of thousands of households!
- netcan 9y agoI'm guessing that these are contentious to some degree, or at least need context. I think this format would work better if it made the case for the right answer, or against your answer.
- Jtsummers 9y agoIt's an advertisement for a book, here's the list of scenarios they've evaluated with some more information on each of them: http://www.drawdown.org/solutions http://www.drawdown.org/solutions
- vkou 9y agoThis is feel-good non-sense, in that it ignores the elephants in the room. It's the equivalent of micro-optimization trivia on Stack Overflow, when most programs are bounded by Amdahl's Law. People driving >20 miles a day for work/groceries/school, exponential economic growth, and exponential demand for consumer goods are what's driving climate change. Exponential population growth is, as well, but at least there's some end in sight for it. Whether or not you compost, or throw away your food isn't going to change much - not to mention that most food waste is outside of my control. For instance, I don't throw away 50% of the food I buy - it gets thrown away by farmers, transport companies, and the grocery store long before it gets to my table.
- sintaxi 9y agoWell put. Likely best thing anyone can do for the environment right now is to vote for politicians that want to balance the budget. Deficits are artificially increasing consumption at the expense of our children's environmental and financial future. Furthermore, no one wants admit it but mass immigration is undeniably horrible for the environment. Not only does consumption of each immigrant increase by a factor of 20x by moving to a developed nation. It also drains 3rd world countries from the ambitious people it needs to develop into a stable and prosperous nation.
- vkou 9y agoThe best thing we could do for the environment is to mandate a 20-hour working week. Or, alternatively, a crippling carbon tax, with the proceeds spent on carbon sequestration.
- sintaxi 9y agoImpossible to enforce.
- vkou 9y agoTrivial. Mandate any time >20h/week to be overtime. Mandate overtime rates to be double. For salaried employees, the hourly rate is Annual/1000h. Construct a legal system wherein employees can easily sue employers for wage theft. Most employers will voluntarily cut their hours. Will this cause dramatic economic upheaval? Yes, absolutely. The uncomfortable truth is that we can't cut our carbon emissions without drastically changing our way of life. (And putting your wilted kale in the compost bin isn't it.)
- moxious 9y agoThe sheer number of changes required, and their impact relative to the problem suggests to me the inevitability of serious consequences. I think I may be more interested in investing in technologies that help people cope with the coming changes. Seems more practical than investing in technologies that invite people to spend more of their money to avoid a tragedy of the commons.
- jbattle 9y agoA lot of these feel like trick questions. Which offers more bang for the buck: improving airplane efficiency, or building a global network of high-speed rail? It matters a lot how much we are improving efficiency, and how complete the "global network of high speed rail" is.
- SirLJ 9y agoA teleport will fix this...
- AnimalMuppet 9y agoDepends on the energy required to run it.
- Terr_ 9y agoLong before you use it for people, teleportation would unlock other capabilities and efficiencies. For example, consider what would happen for nuclear power replacing fossil fuels if we could safely teleport nuclear waste to a sealed cavern on the moon. It's a relatively small payload (compared to transporting humans and goods) and you don't really care if an imperfect teleporting process only allows you to squeeze it through as a stream of molecular toothpaste.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- philipkglass 9y agoWhich would have the bigger impact: encouraging more car-pooling, or the reduced car emissions from electric vehicles? Although the book only looks at ride-sharing in the United States and Canada, it presumes pretty modest gains, so the benefits of car-pooling don’t even come close to the emissions savings from electric cars. With the benefit of hindsight the question is more clearly phrased as: "Which would have the bigger impact: simply asking people to do more car-pooling, or actually making the switch to electric vehicles from ICE vehicles?" The question sneakily turns out to be about what's (assumed) easier to get people to do, not which action, undertaken on equal scale, has greater benefits. (But then why are wind farms preferred over solar on a later question, considering how much more frequently NIMBY opposition arises toward wind farms?)
- thisrod 9y agoThis list ducks the most important question: "Is it possible to reduce greenhouse gas emissions without everyone on Earth mastering every technical detail of modern industry?" The answer is, of course, yes.
- bwindels 9y agoThis list assumes, of course, that we don't want to change our lifestyle. I don't see innovation and optimization alone keeping us below 2C.