5 ms·

> A lot more needs to happen to end oil's stranglehold. So what's your plan? Honest question. No sarcasm. How do we get from words to action?

corodra 7y ago
You want my honest answer? No fucking clue. I'm focused on cement. I've given up on tech, IT and programming and went into the cement industry to work towards a smaller CO2 footprint in cement production. It's the second largest CO2 producer on the planet behind fossil fuels. I found making apps and backend software to be a waste of time in my own desires. There's a shit ton of science in cement and infrastructure to keep me interested. Maybe I did give a partial answer? And I'll paraphrase Neil deGrasse Tyson on this one, "You can't save the world with an app." Get INTO the industry you want to fix and fucking fix it. Enough people do it, someone is bound to figure it out.
- fuzzfactor 7y ago
  >Get INTO the industry you want to fix and fucking fix it. Might as well walk the walk, I thought myself.
- Bartweiss 7y ago
  This at least points to an answer, one of maybe three answers I've seen with actual credibility. (The others are "pray that a geoengineering plan works without disaster" and "try to mitigate a whole bunch of warming while emissions gradually stabilize". Not exactly inspiring.) Visions of fixing global warming with high gasoline prices and renewable electricity subsidies are ludicrous. Focus on reducing personal emissions is almost always a distraction (perhaps excluding air travel and diet). As soon as you dive into numbers, it becomes obvious that even the most optimistic gains from those things can't come close to solving the problem. There's just too much CO2 output from production (concrete, plastics, farming, etc.), non-car engines (cargo ships, planes, heavy machinery, etc.), and hard-to-replace, high-emissions power (e.g. coal in outlying China). And power improvements are often less good than they appear; it's common to report fossil fuel reductions without accounting for any offsetting harms like sulfur hexafluoride leaks from wind turbines, or CO2 emissions from solar panel manufacture and disposal. That doesn't mean things are hopeless, or oil is blameless, or America should ignore the problem because China, or any of the other cop-outs. But I think you're exactly right: existing producers aren't going to roll over and quit, and meaningful state action will require promoting deep, pervasive changes, not just subsidizing rooftop solar. We need lobbying and outreach and communication and legislation; we also need a million practical things to be made better, or used better, or supplanted. All I can see to do is pick a problem that suits me and dive in.
- ridiculous_fish 7y ago
  That's awesome! Can you share more about how you got into the cement industry? Did you need to go back to school? What was the transition like? Where did you start looking? etc?
  - corodra 7y ago
    Really, nothing special in the whole thing or to write about. First off, to be clear, I'm no saint. I figured I'd align both making money and doing my part to lower CO2. I told my business partner to be on the look out for a cement/concrete manufacturing opportunity, year later we found one (who you know situation). I'm learning the industry first hand and researching how to lower emissions (really no good solutions out there for very good reasons). I never went to school to begin with. I don't feel like sucking up to academics for permission to do anything in my life. It's another business, so there's no real transition for me. Except I get to be outside more often and get dirty. I grew up poor and did a lot manual labor as a kid. So, it's nice not being glued to a computer or chair anymore. Way easier to stay in shape now.
nickik 7y ago
My solution would simply be to massively focus on nuclear. Replace all existing coal plants with nuclear plants and plug them into the network. Once you have mass production of nuclear power plants, you can start using nuclear power to create liquid alcohol fuels. Start a process of changing cars to electric or alcohol based fuels, the same goes for ships and eventually planes. The process of switching to alcohol based fuels can be started in parallel, with early on using fossil fuels. Start taxing fossil fuel usage to make people move over to liquid fuels. This vision was created out by one of the nuclear innovates. He invented the PWR (currently used nuclear) but rejected it as a terrible design for human energy production. His insistence that PWR were not 'perfectly save' got him essentially fired. He had come up with Molten Salt reactors to fix all the issues of PWRs. His vision was more to use nuclear heat to turn salt water into water you can use for irrigation. Not really produce Liquid fuels in a carbon neutral way but the vision makes sense. Now, unfortunately this should really have started in the 70s, but it would have been the most systematic approach to actually solving the problem. But of course that requires the population not to freak out about nuclear and to accept potentially higher oil prices.
- perfunctory 7y ago
  Let's suppose this is a good plan. But it's still just a plan. How do we actually realize it? We both know voting alone won't cut it.
  - nickik 7y ago
    No clue. Some leader or party making it their program. Very trick in democracies specially today with people having been so indoctrinated into so many of the old environmentalist ideas that are counter-productive. Meaning things like Anti-Nuclear, Anti-GMO and so on. Usually this wouldn't happen because of climate change. France pushed nuclear because they wanted to be independent of Saudi princes. But the French example clearly shows that a industrial country can go away from fossil fuel electricity in 15 years if its actually determined to do so and using nuclear energy. And they did it with 1960s technology, the same kind of effort with modern types of nuclear plants, could potentially be even faster. There is no question in my mind if there was political consensuses on a plan, any industrial nation could move away from 90% of fossil fuels usage within 20 years and it wouldn't actually cost as much as people tend to think.
mistermann 7y ago
In my opinion, the communication approach we are using is obviously (from observing the results) ineffective. Corodra above says: "Don't think for a second I'm "for oil". But I'm a realist. A lot more needs to happen to end oil's stranglehold. Not drum circles, UN circle jerks climate summits with teenagers crying nor bullshit "plant trees" PR stunts(past tree planting stunts have real piss poor success rates of the trees surviving after a year." I think there's a lot of truth in this. The current propaganda/meme-based approach (repetitive half true newspaper articles, Greta Thunberg, etc) to the issue is not only not moving the ball forward, it's actually causing unrest and resentment in our populations. It is causing people who likely don't really differ all that much in underlying beliefs to split into opposing psychological/ideological camps, and as the conversation continues in this same form, become further entrenched in their opposing stances. If you pay close attention when reading forum discussions, this seems quite apparent to me, even here among relatively more intelligent HN folks. I believe people need to start realizing this, and then we have to study the nature of the problem, and then we have to find a new approach to the global public discussion on this topic, and others like it.
lightedman 7y ago
"So what's your plan? Honest question. No sarcasm. How do we get from words to action? " Get a gun, shoot the fuckers. It's that simple. How are all these bright minds on HN incapable of coming up with such a simple solution? The majority of countries supplying the world with oil are despots and should be wiped off the face of the planet.
- NeedMoreTea 7y ago
  I'm thinking that might be challenging in the case of two of the world's top 4 oil exporters. So that leaves the despots. Err how many countries have been invaded or been gifted a regime change because of oil? You think the perpetrators will ignore someone starting a shooting campaign against Saudi oil?
- PeterisP 7y ago
  It's worth noting that currently the largest oil producer in the world is USA.
wefarrell 7y ago
The global economy needs to properly account for the cost of carbon emissions and reductions. For the oil and gas industry this would translate into a tax at the pump.

corodra 7y ago

You want my honest answer? No fucking clue. I'm focused on cement. I've given up on tech, IT and programming and went into the cement industry to work towards a smaller CO2 footprint in cement production. It's the second largest CO2 producer on the planet behind fossil fuels. I found making apps and backend software to be a waste of time in my own desires. There's a shit ton of science in cement and infrastructure to keep me interested. Maybe I did give a partial answer? And I'll paraphrase Neil deGrasse Tyson on this one, "You can't save the world with an app." Get INTO the industry you want to fix and fucking fix it. Enough people do it, someone is bound to figure it out.

fuzzfactor 7y ago
>Get INTO the industry you want to fix and fucking fix it. Might as well walk the walk, I thought myself.
Bartweiss 7y ago
This at least points to an answer, one of maybe three answers I've seen with actual credibility. (The others are "pray that a geoengineering plan works without disaster" and "try to mitigate a whole bunch of warming while emissions gradually stabilize". Not exactly inspiring.) Visions of fixing global warming with high gasoline prices and renewable electricity subsidies are ludicrous. Focus on reducing personal emissions is almost always a distraction (perhaps excluding air travel and diet). As soon as you dive into numbers, it becomes obvious that even the most optimistic gains from those things can't come close to solving the problem. There's just too much CO2 output from production (concrete, plastics, farming, etc.), non-car engines (cargo ships, planes, heavy machinery, etc.), and hard-to-replace, high-emissions power (e.g. coal in outlying China). And power improvements are often less good than they appear; it's common to report fossil fuel reductions without accounting for any offsetting harms like sulfur hexafluoride leaks from wind turbines, or CO2 emissions from solar panel manufacture and disposal. That doesn't mean things are hopeless, or oil is blameless, or America should ignore the problem because China, or any of the other cop-outs. But I think you're exactly right: existing producers aren't going to roll over and quit, and meaningful state action will require promoting deep, pervasive changes, not just subsidizing rooftop solar. We need lobbying and outreach and communication and legislation; we also need a million practical things to be made better, or used better, or supplanted. All I can see to do is pick a problem that suits me and dive in.
ridiculous_fish 7y ago
That's awesome! Can you share more about how you got into the cement industry? Did you need to go back to school? What was the transition like? Where did you start looking? etc?
- corodra 7y ago
  Really, nothing special in the whole thing or to write about. First off, to be clear, I'm no saint. I figured I'd align both making money and doing my part to lower CO2. I told my business partner to be on the look out for a cement/concrete manufacturing opportunity, year later we found one (who you know situation). I'm learning the industry first hand and researching how to lower emissions (really no good solutions out there for very good reasons). I never went to school to begin with. I don't feel like sucking up to academics for permission to do anything in my life. It's another business, so there's no real transition for me. Except I get to be outside more often and get dirty. I grew up poor and did a lot manual labor as a kid. So, it's nice not being glued to a computer or chair anymore. Way easier to stay in shape now.

nickik 7y ago

My solution would simply be to massively focus on nuclear. Replace all existing coal plants with nuclear plants and plug them into the network. Once you have mass production of nuclear power plants, you can start using nuclear power to create liquid alcohol fuels. Start a process of changing cars to electric or alcohol based fuels, the same goes for ships and eventually planes. The process of switching to alcohol based fuels can be started in parallel, with early on using fossil fuels. Start taxing fossil fuel usage to make people move over to liquid fuels. This vision was created out by one of the nuclear innovates. He invented the PWR (currently used nuclear) but rejected it as a terrible design for human energy production. His insistence that PWR were not 'perfectly save' got him essentially fired. He had come up with Molten Salt reactors to fix all the issues of PWRs. His vision was more to use nuclear heat to turn salt water into water you can use for irrigation. Not really produce Liquid fuels in a carbon neutral way but the vision makes sense. Now, unfortunately this should really have started in the 70s, but it would have been the most systematic approach to actually solving the problem. But of course that requires the population not to freak out about nuclear and to accept potentially higher oil prices.

perfunctory 7y ago
Let's suppose this is a good plan. But it's still just a plan. How do we actually realize it? We both know voting alone won't cut it.
- nickik 7y ago
  No clue. Some leader or party making it their program. Very trick in democracies specially today with people having been so indoctrinated into so many of the old environmentalist ideas that are counter-productive. Meaning things like Anti-Nuclear, Anti-GMO and so on. Usually this wouldn't happen because of climate change. France pushed nuclear because they wanted to be independent of Saudi princes. But the French example clearly shows that a industrial country can go away from fossil fuel electricity in 15 years if its actually determined to do so and using nuclear energy. And they did it with 1960s technology, the same kind of effort with modern types of nuclear plants, could potentially be even faster. There is no question in my mind if there was political consensuses on a plan, any industrial nation could move away from 90% of fossil fuels usage within 20 years and it wouldn't actually cost as much as people tend to think.

mistermann 7y ago

In my opinion, the communication approach we are using is obviously (from observing the results) ineffective. Corodra above says: "Don't think for a second I'm "for oil". But I'm a realist. A lot more needs to happen to end oil's stranglehold. Not drum circles, UN circle jerks climate summits with teenagers crying nor bullshit "plant trees" PR stunts(past tree planting stunts have real piss poor success rates of the trees surviving after a year." I think there's a lot of truth in this. The current propaganda/meme-based approach (repetitive half true newspaper articles, Greta Thunberg, etc) to the issue is not only not moving the ball forward, it's actually causing unrest and resentment in our populations. It is causing people who likely don't really differ all that much in underlying beliefs to split into opposing psychological/ideological camps, and as the conversation continues in this same form, become further entrenched in their opposing stances. If you pay close attention when reading forum discussions, this seems quite apparent to me, even here among relatively more intelligent HN folks. I believe people need to start realizing this, and then we have to study the nature of the problem, and then we have to find a new approach to the global public discussion on this topic, and others like it.

lightedman 7y ago

"So what's your plan? Honest question. No sarcasm. How do we get from words to action? " Get a gun, shoot the fuckers. It's that simple. How are all these bright minds on HN incapable of coming up with such a simple solution? The majority of countries supplying the world with oil are despots and should be wiped off the face of the planet.

NeedMoreTea 7y ago
I'm thinking that might be challenging in the case of two of the world's top 4 oil exporters. So that leaves the despots. Err how many countries have been invaded or been gifted a regime change because of oil? You think the perpetrators will ignore someone starting a shooting campaign against Saudi oil?
PeterisP 7y ago
It's worth noting that currently the largest oil producer in the world is USA.

wefarrell 7y ago

The global economy needs to properly account for the cost of carbon emissions and reductions. For the oil and gas industry this would translate into a tax at the pump.