6 ms·

The complication is EXACTLY why we need to be even more in panic and hair-on-fire about environmental issues. A colleague did some analyses for the life cycle e

The complication is EXACTLY why we need to be even more in panic and hair-on-fire about environmental issues. A colleague did some analyses for the life cycle emissions of refrigerants. The complexity in the process was absurd, and basically intractable without simplifications. How much indirect CO2 emissions are caused by an inefficient compressor? How much does it depend on how you generate electricity? Which country were the gaskets manufactured in? What was the process used to extract the rare earths? Everything depends on everything else and consequences are pretty unknown.

afarrell 6y ago
> even more in panic and hair-on-fire about environmental issues Panic is rarely useful. It might lead you to move at high and low velocity.
- afarrell 6y ago
  that should be: high speed and low velocity.
fastball 6y ago
Hence why the real solution has always been: 1. Electrify everything possible 2. Shift all electricity production to renewables, massively increase power output with nuclear nuclear nuclear. 3. Carbon capture.
- arcticbull 6y ago
  Ooh and stop mining Bitcoin
  - loceng 6y ago
    But how else will people make money than in a global, decentralized pyramid/MLM scheme?
    - WesolyKubeczek 6y ago
      s/make/lose/ But I see your point. We should make a pyramid/MLM scheme where you're promised rewards for planting trees, segregating waste, cleaning up in any potential wildlife habitats, and reducing/reusing stuff in general.
  - fastball 6y ago
    Actually, as part of "Electrify everything", it would probably be good to replace a significant chunk of the banking system with a cryptocurrency layer (maybe bitcoin, maybe not). With green energy, digital gold is a lot more green than physical gold. Bitcoin is like electric cars – not super green right in this moment when the grid is still dirty, but all it takes to make it greener is to green up the grid. Meanwhile the classical banking system: uses all forms of transport which green up slower (armored cars, planes, etc), requires crazy amounts of construction (I don't even want to guess how much cement has been used in the construction of physical banks all over the world), all those buildings use energy for AC/lighting/etc, require huge amounts of manpower to manage trust in the system (people definitely aren't green), and also need their own datacenters anyway. And I'm sure I'm forgetting some things, where as with BTC pretty much all consumption is baked into mining, which again just gets greener automatically as the grid gets greener. Nobody is running a Bitcoin mining operation off of diesel generators. If you did the math (impractical given the breadth of the existing banking system), I think you'd find Bitcoin is already far greener than the existing banking system, by a huge margin. And cryptos like Ethereum have the potential to 10x/100x/1000x that with things like PoS vs. PoW as well as the fact that Ethereum smart contracts can not only replace banking but probably other industries as well, such as title companies and various other middlemen.
    - arcticbull 6y ago
      > And cryptos like Ethereum have the potential to 10x/100x/1000x that with things like PoS vs. PoW as well as the fact that Ethereum smart contracts can not only replace banking but probably other industries as well, such as title companies and various other middlemen. It's been 13 years now and nobody's done it, because that's a terrible idea. The reason lawyers exist is that all contracts have ambiguity and require a human to review and consider. All contracts have circumstances that aren't captured. Just ask the DAO folks. Middlemen exist for a reason. Efficiency, conflict and ambiguity resolution, and so on. Blockchains are only useful for things that are entirely captured within the blockchain. As soon as you interface the blockchain with the outside world you have to trust something to enter and capture that data accurately - garbage in, garbage out. Once you're trusting someone, you don't need a blockchain, just fire up and RDS instance and save everyone the headache.
- adrianN 6y ago
  Destroying old growth forests is still a bad idea even if you have enough energy to capture all the carbon.
- AndyMcConachie 6y ago
  Everytime I hear the word 'carbon capture' I just think of trees. This is literally what trees do, they capture carbon.
  - TheSpiceIsLife 6y ago
    And then release a large majority of it when they die and are eaten by fungus and bacteria. https://www.sciencenewsforstudents.org/article/recycling-dead https://www.sciencenewsforstudents.org/article/recycling-dea...
    - enriquto 6y ago
      Thus, growing a tree and burning the wood (or disposing of it) is 100% carbon neutral. What's the problem, then?
      - TeMPOraL 6y ago
        The problem is that it's useless for sequestering carbon that's already in air, that we sourced from deep underground.
        enriquto 6y ago
        Yes, the obvious step would be to stop burning fossil carbon, it seems like a much more pressing issue than sequestering the one that is already in the atmosphere.
        kaybe 6y ago
        By now we need to do both, there is already too much carbon in the atmosphere. If you look at the IPCC projections, 1.5°C is only achievable with carbon capture of some sorts [0] (if at all). Research and development for this has to be pushed yesterday. Though word is in the air that the previous assessments might have been very optimistic.. although that will probably only be discussed in 2022 when the 6th assessment report is to be published. Which presses the issue only further. [0] https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/sites/2/2019/02/SPM3b-724x1024.png https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/sites/2/2019/02/SPM3...
CuriousSkeptic 6y ago
Sounds exactly like the kind of problem market economies handles very well. Main problem is figuring out how to incorporate emissions into price signals.
- pietrovismara 6y ago
  > Sounds exactly like the kind of problem It didn't really work out so far, otherwise we wouldn't be talking about an emergency.
- Marazan 6y ago
  Pricing negative externialities is EXACTLY the kind of thing market economies are terrible at.
  - CuriousSkeptic 6y ago
    Which was kind of my point. How can we internalize the externalities?
KorematsuFred 6y ago
Great example. Reminds me of Milton Friedman's "Nobody knows how to make a pencil" essay. A lot of human progress is result of human actions but not planning. Centralized planning around "climate change" would 100% be a recipe for disaster and a monumental failure about which future generations will write for 100s of years just the way we talk about slavery today. Your use of carbon makes my existence on the planet a bit risky and hence you should pay me some compensation. But how much ? That is an impossible task for anyone and not just for the centralized government systems but even for highly efficient private players looking at very small problems. This is something that even outright climate change deniers like me admit.
- loceng 6y ago
  It comes down to you do whatever bare minimum "we" determine is necessary to do your part in this struggle, or we'll eventually go to war to hold the line if your practices unsustainablility outweigh the cost of war; arguably in globalised society you can and should use economic levers first.
pjc50 6y ago
Indeed - which is the argument for point-of-extraction carbon pricing. Then you don't have to calculate anything, it gets sorted out along the supply chain by individual decisions as to whether the CO2 cost is worth it compared to the available alternatives at that step.
- adrianN 6y ago
  Until every country in the world has agreed upon doing that you still need to estimate CO2 when exporting and importing things from and to the common-carbon-price zone.
- contravariant 6y ago
  The problem there is that most ways to add carbon pricing are against the self interest of whomever enacts it. Point-of-extraction is especially bad because it places all of the initial burden on the few places that actually extract carbon, who are probably not going to like that idea.
  - jononor 6y ago
    On the other hand, those extractors are operating on licenses issued by governments. So in principle, one could add that do their license, and they would just have to deal with it. A challenge is that the market is global, while licenses are given out by nations. So requires alignment of many nations for it not to be a competitive burden on a few producers.
    - contravariant 6y ago
      Taxes are already on the government level, I'm not sure what other hand you're referring to here. Who would a corporation even pay the money to if it isn't enacted by a government?
  - conjectures 6y ago
    I guess it depends on the 'who' in those places. It's not hard to imagine a government rather fancying getting a tax receipt from extraction companies, particularly if it is seen as green. Who would presumably lobby rather hard against it. This suggests the absence of pricing at source is to some extent a result of successful lobbying.

afarrell 6y ago

> even more in panic and hair-on-fire about environmental issues Panic is rarely useful. It might lead you to move at high and low velocity.

afarrell 6y ago
that should be: high speed and low velocity.

fastball 6y ago

Hence why the real solution has always been: 1. Electrify everything possible 2. Shift all electricity production to renewables, massively increase power output with nuclear nuclear nuclear. 3. Carbon capture.

arcticbull 6y ago
Ooh and stop mining Bitcoin
- loceng 6y ago
  But how else will people make money than in a global, decentralized pyramid/MLM scheme?
  - WesolyKubeczek 6y ago
    s/make/lose/ But I see your point. We should make a pyramid/MLM scheme where you're promised rewards for planting trees, segregating waste, cleaning up in any potential wildlife habitats, and reducing/reusing stuff in general.
- fastball 6y ago
  Actually, as part of "Electrify everything", it would probably be good to replace a significant chunk of the banking system with a cryptocurrency layer (maybe bitcoin, maybe not). With green energy, digital gold is a lot more green than physical gold. Bitcoin is like electric cars – not super green right in this moment when the grid is still dirty, but all it takes to make it greener is to green up the grid. Meanwhile the classical banking system: uses all forms of transport which green up slower (armored cars, planes, etc), requires crazy amounts of construction (I don't even want to guess how much cement has been used in the construction of physical banks all over the world), all those buildings use energy for AC/lighting/etc, require huge amounts of manpower to manage trust in the system (people definitely aren't green), and also need their own datacenters anyway. And I'm sure I'm forgetting some things, where as with BTC pretty much all consumption is baked into mining, which again just gets greener automatically as the grid gets greener. Nobody is running a Bitcoin mining operation off of diesel generators. If you did the math (impractical given the breadth of the existing banking system), I think you'd find Bitcoin is already far greener than the existing banking system, by a huge margin. And cryptos like Ethereum have the potential to 10x/100x/1000x that with things like PoS vs. PoW as well as the fact that Ethereum smart contracts can not only replace banking but probably other industries as well, such as title companies and various other middlemen.
  - arcticbull 6y ago
    > And cryptos like Ethereum have the potential to 10x/100x/1000x that with things like PoS vs. PoW as well as the fact that Ethereum smart contracts can not only replace banking but probably other industries as well, such as title companies and various other middlemen. It's been 13 years now and nobody's done it, because that's a terrible idea. The reason lawyers exist is that all contracts have ambiguity and require a human to review and consider. All contracts have circumstances that aren't captured. Just ask the DAO folks. Middlemen exist for a reason. Efficiency, conflict and ambiguity resolution, and so on. Blockchains are only useful for things that are entirely captured within the blockchain. As soon as you interface the blockchain with the outside world you have to trust something to enter and capture that data accurately - garbage in, garbage out. Once you're trusting someone, you don't need a blockchain, just fire up and RDS instance and save everyone the headache.
adrianN 6y ago
Destroying old growth forests is still a bad idea even if you have enough energy to capture all the carbon.
AndyMcConachie 6y ago
Everytime I hear the word 'carbon capture' I just think of trees. This is literally what trees do, they capture carbon.
- TheSpiceIsLife 6y ago
  And then release a large majority of it when they die and are eaten by fungus and bacteria. https://www.sciencenewsforstudents.org/article/recycling-dead https://www.sciencenewsforstudents.org/article/recycling-dea...
  - enriquto 6y ago
    Thus, growing a tree and burning the wood (or disposing of it) is 100% carbon neutral. What's the problem, then?
    - TeMPOraL 6y ago
      The problem is that it's useless for sequestering carbon that's already in air, that we sourced from deep underground.
      - enriquto 6y ago
        Yes, the obvious step would be to stop burning fossil carbon, it seems like a much more pressing issue than sequestering the one that is already in the atmosphere.
        kaybe 6y ago
        By now we need to do both, there is already too much carbon in the atmosphere. If you look at the IPCC projections, 1.5°C is only achievable with carbon capture of some sorts [0] (if at all). Research and development for this has to be pushed yesterday. Though word is in the air that the previous assessments might have been very optimistic.. although that will probably only be discussed in 2022 when the 6th assessment report is to be published. Which presses the issue only further. [0] https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/sites/2/2019/02/SPM3b-724x1024.png https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/sites/2/2019/02/SPM3...

CuriousSkeptic 6y ago

Sounds exactly like the kind of problem market economies handles very well. Main problem is figuring out how to incorporate emissions into price signals.

pietrovismara 6y ago
> Sounds exactly like the kind of problem It didn't really work out so far, otherwise we wouldn't be talking about an emergency.
Marazan 6y ago
Pricing negative externialities is EXACTLY the kind of thing market economies are terrible at.
- CuriousSkeptic 6y ago
  Which was kind of my point. How can we internalize the externalities?

KorematsuFred 6y ago

Great example. Reminds me of Milton Friedman's "Nobody knows how to make a pencil" essay. A lot of human progress is result of human actions but not planning. Centralized planning around "climate change" would 100% be a recipe for disaster and a monumental failure about which future generations will write for 100s of years just the way we talk about slavery today. Your use of carbon makes my existence on the planet a bit risky and hence you should pay me some compensation. But how much ? That is an impossible task for anyone and not just for the centralized government systems but even for highly efficient private players looking at very small problems. This is something that even outright climate change deniers like me admit.

loceng 6y ago
It comes down to you do whatever bare minimum "we" determine is necessary to do your part in this struggle, or we'll eventually go to war to hold the line if your practices unsustainablility outweigh the cost of war; arguably in globalised society you can and should use economic levers first.

pjc50 6y ago

Indeed - which is the argument for point-of-extraction carbon pricing. Then you don't have to calculate anything, it gets sorted out along the supply chain by individual decisions as to whether the CO2 cost is worth it compared to the available alternatives at that step.

adrianN 6y ago
Until every country in the world has agreed upon doing that you still need to estimate CO2 when exporting and importing things from and to the common-carbon-price zone.
contravariant 6y ago
The problem there is that most ways to add carbon pricing are against the self interest of whomever enacts it. Point-of-extraction is especially bad because it places all of the initial burden on the few places that actually extract carbon, who are probably not going to like that idea.
- jononor 6y ago
  On the other hand, those extractors are operating on licenses issued by governments. So in principle, one could add that do their license, and they would just have to deal with it. A challenge is that the market is global, while licenses are given out by nations. So requires alignment of many nations for it not to be a competitive burden on a few producers.
  - contravariant 6y ago
    Taxes are already on the government level, I'm not sure what other hand you're referring to here. Who would a corporation even pay the money to if it isn't enacted by a government?
- conjectures 6y ago
  I guess it depends on the 'who' in those places. It's not hard to imagine a government rather fancying getting a tax receipt from extraction companies, particularly if it is seen as green. Who would presumably lobby rather hard against it. This suggests the absence of pricing at source is to some extent a result of successful lobbying.