6 ms·

Will technology save us from climate change?

40 points by HourglassFR 6y ago

m4r35n357 6y ago
No
KozmoNau7 6y ago
I think we're staring ourselves blind, straining to see any possible high-tech solution that will solve climate change neatly, easily and without any significant sacrifices. The problem is not technological. It is political and societal, and those cannot be solved by technology. At this point, even trying to mitigate the consequences of climate change will take large-scale mobilization, on a scale we have never seen before, much larger than the wartime mobilizations of WW2. Considering our current stumbling response to a global pandemic, with possible consequences much lesser than what climate change will bring, I'm sorry to say that the outlook is quite grim. We have act as humanity collectively, not as individual bickering nations.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- ben_w 6y ago
  I’m rather more optimistic; WW2 was an extremely large mobilisation, and I think this could have been done at the scale of the moon landings a decade ago, but now the tech is cheap enough for people to make a profit while saving the environment.
endisneigh 6y ago
I have no doubt that if humanity wanted to, it could sequester all the carbon necessary to reverse climate change, and more. The question isn't really whether humanity is capable of doing it (we are), but rather whether we will do it. In particular, for those who have the majority of "ability" to make change, would it be easier for them to take more and more clean resources in a zero-sum battle or have a short to medium term hit in allying themselves with the rest of the world to fix climate change in the long term? If COVID has shown us anything, the answer to the last question is unequivocally no. COVID has been a very obvious salient problem and most nations failed the test. If we can't beat COVID, we will not beat climate change. No technology can change human nature.
- ekianjo 6y ago
  > If we can't beat COVID, we will not beat climate change. No technology can change human nature. Erm, looks like we are doing pretty well to beat COVID with vaccines developed in record timing.
  - wffurr 6y ago
    500,000 dead in the US, largely due to failure to wear masks and observe distancing protocols, is a strange way to "beat" COVID.
    - ben_w 6y ago
      There are massive gaps between losing to COVID (which would’ve been 1-10% deaths depending on if they happened suddenly enough to overwhelm the healthcare system or not), versus what actually happened in any given nation (0.2% in Belgium to 0.00003% in Burundi, 0.155% in the USA), versus the best possible combination of decisions and actions in response to this virus (it being stopped in China before it ever spread outside Wuhan). Same with climate change. Worst case is Venus, we’re heading for a few degrees Celsius change that persists for centuries, we could’ve prevented almost all of the problems we’re looking at now if we’d made the best choices even as late as the 60s and 70s.
    - ekianjo 6y ago
      and your point is? The fact that vaccines are here makes the COVID problem irrelevant a few years from now. That's called beating COVID.
    - rayiner 6y ago
      There is very little evidence that the death rate in the US is "largely due to failure to wear masks." Mask wearing in different countries is all over the map. The US is actually on the higher end in terms of mask wearing: https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2020/07/08/face-off-over-face-masks-europes-latest-north-south-split https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2020/07/08/face-off.... Meanwhile, countries like Denmark and Norway with very low rates of mask wearing have seen very low COVID death rates. EDIT: More recent data from YouGov showing same pattern: https://yougov.co.uk/topics/international/articles-reports/2020/03/17/personal-measures-taken-avoid-covid-19 https://yougov.co.uk/topics/international/articles-reports/2.... Mask-wearing rates in Denmark and Norway picked up in 2H 2020, but were still on the low side.
Kydlaw 6y ago
He and his team (mostly composed of scientists, not economists) provide very interesting insights on global warming/energy transition. Unlike others, they provide the big picture of the situation and are not trying to hide their sources. I'm surprised to see one of his presentation on HN, where the opposite opinion reign I think. As an example, they are really "bearish" on the Green New Deal, as it will simply not be enough to address the challenge ahead of us. Curious to see people' reaction.
- wffurr 6y ago
  Is there a written summary of version of this talk that you'd recommend? I am curious but not curious enough to watch the whole thing.
  - HourglassFR 6y ago
    Not that I'm aware of. This talk is in itself a summary of a 10+ hours course he gives to his studends. Is the first time I have come across a presentation of this guy in english and this is why I wanted to share it here. But basically it is a re-hash of the limits to growth arguments, with more modern data.
  - Kydlaw 6y ago
    I look briefly, but could not find any... The issue is that they are mostly presenting at French engineering schools/colleges, and the presentations are... in french. There are no usually no transcripts nor even translations. At that point it's a cultural thing I guess to be bad at sharing knowledge world wide (Disclaimer: I'm French). I could not recommend enough to listen to it though. The viewpoint he is presenting is unusual enough to be worth it.
finiteseries 6y ago
For anyone else utterly fascinated with the debates between technological development advocates and lifestyle alteration advocates in response to climate change, I absolutely cannot recommend The Wizard and the Prophet enough. From the author of “1491” fame which is quite popular here on HN—it’s actually interesting I see that book on pre Colombian America recommended more often here on HN than the one on technology and climate change. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34959327-the-wizard-and-the-prophet https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34959327-the-wizard-and-...
trentnix 6y ago
It has to. Every prescription I've read almost exclusively focuses on changing behavior. That means telling huge numbers of people - billions really - that their pursuit of wealth and convenience and modernization must be handicapped. In some cases, we're told there are too many people altogether. That's a recipe for unrest and war on a global scale. A technological solution might avoid all that.
- hannob 6y ago
  > Every prescription I've read almost exclusively focuses on changing behavior. This sounds like a big strawman. I honestly have never met anyone who thinks we can fix climate change exclusively with changing behavior.
  - trentnix 6y ago
    If I'd said 'largely', would that have helped?
- pii 6y ago
  Policy can help, good stories can do a lot of work too
hannob 6y ago
Spoiler: No, but it can help. I'm really tired of this technology vs. policy vs. behavior changes discussions. It's a false dichtomy. We'll need all of that.
TheAdamAndChe 6y ago
I just finished reading the book released by Bill Gates titled "How to Avoid a Climate Disaster." In it, he described how tackling this problem will take an extremely difficult combination of technologic advancement, government policy, and market alignment. We need to do everything we can to be sure that choosing the green energy option isn't just the morally correct choice, but is also the rational choice for everyone to make. I recommend the book BTW. Though it tries its best to be optimistic, I finished it thinking "well shit, I don't know if this is possible." He is right in saying that it won't be easy.
- dgellow 6y ago
  And during the past decade a market emerged to reward individuals and companies for consuming as much energy as they can: bitcoin mining. The "rational" choice seems to be to just throw as much energy at it as we can. Of course that's completely absurd if the result is to destroy the environment, but that seems to be what is developing. I start to be really pessimistic about our ability to fix any real issue.
  - dools 6y ago
    The solution is very simple: bigger government. We have been tricked over the past 40 years into accepting that “small government” is a valid policy objective. Solving the big problems and creating big innovation in the 20th century came from a comparatively big government, the private sector was more about commercialisation than innovation and still is.
- swader999 6y ago
  I have a hard time taking anything that guy pushes given his associations and flights with Epstein.
  - TheAdamAndChe 6y ago
    I personally hold to the ethos of innocent until proven guilty, but suit yourself.
swader999 6y ago
It already does. Central heating and cooling.
- thewarrior 6y ago
  Global warming has nothing to do with turning on the air conditioner. It certainly didn’t help anyone save their homes from forest fires in California or Australia. Even if you had ACs you wouldn’t want to live in a place hotter than the Sahara desert (when humidity is taken into account). So you’ll move. And let’s say you do live in a good area. An exodus of a billion people all over the world trying to move into places like yours will get nasty. Drastic changes in climate patterns also risks the food supply.
jswizzy 6y ago
I'm still waiting on the crisis to materialize. Florida was suppose to be under water 10 years ago and 50 years ago we were suppose to be in a second Ice Age. Oh and the Ozone was suppose to be gone by now.
- thewarrior 6y ago
  Sea level rise happens over centuries. I don’t think Florida will have any serious problems before 2060. But Florida is almost completely going under water over 2100 - 2200. It’s understandable that some exaggeration in the urgency is needed else people will not care at all. And if that sounds hypothetical it means your kids or grand kids have no hope of living in or inheriting any property there. Once the reality hits around 2070 or so property values will drop drastically and there will be a mass refugee style exodus from such areas to others which could lead to stuff like “Build a wall to keep the Floridans out”
  - rhino369 6y ago
    >And if that sounds hypothetical it means your kids or grand kids have no hope of living in or inheriting any property there. 95% of people don't really inherit property and many people these days are forced to move for economic reasons. Florida being "under water" sounds apocalyptic, but as you say, the chance will "happen[] over centuries." Every storm will slowly destroy some part of the developed area and will be rebuilt somewhere else. To put it in economic terms, what the net present value of losing Florida in 2180? Probably not all that much.
    - thewarrior 6y ago
      That’s for large parts to be completely underwater. It’s not a sudden event in 2180. It will start by 2060-2070
      - rhino369 6y ago
        It started 50 years ago.
eldaisfish 6y ago
There is a major part of this debate that keeps getting brushed under the carpet due to decades of fear-mongering. Nuclear energy. It is a large scale solution that works today, not at some indeterminate point in the future. Yes there are problems, yes there are limitations, yes there are risks and yes it is expensive but many of these can be addressed by governments and through regulation. A major part of reducing carbon emissions is to transition Asia and Africa away from coal and towards nuclear energy and not by the free market but by government supports. This can be supplemented by the plethora of technologies available today viz solar, wind, demand response etc. What is of prime importance is that we limit carbon emissions today and keep doing so even as economies grow and energy consumption increases.
- misiti3780 6y ago
  safe* nuclear energy.
  - rayiner 6y ago
    It doesn't have to be safe. If we reduced safety regulations to the point where we were having a Fukushima-scale disaster every year, to enable a massive increase in nuclear power deployment, we would still come out massively ahead if it allowed us to keep to a 2C versus 3C outcome.
- bryanlarsen 6y ago
  The cost and time scale of nuclear make it completely infeasible. Wind and solar are cheaper than just the thermal side of a nuclear power plant. IOW, if the nuclear part cost $0, it would still be cost-ineffective. And nuclear plants take >20 years to build. That's too long. And the batteries that solar/wind need are cheaper than HVDC power lines. Of course tearing down existing nuclear is silly, but building new ones is a non-starter.
  - TheAdamAndChe 6y ago
    What you said is absolutely true under the current regulatory regimes. Its important to note though that significant progress has been made on compact nuclear. It's safer, easier to produce, and can be centrally manufactured and delivered onsite, relieving much of what causes cost overruns. The largest hurdles involve allowing such nuclear plants to be deployed, which requires regulatory change.
dfilppi 6y ago
Without 'thermo-industrial' development, a large percentage of 'us' wouldnt even exist. So while predicting the future of technology isnt possible, we do know that technology created us.
- thewarrior 6y ago
  And it can also destroy us.
RGamma 6y ago
The better question is who can save us from ourselves? As long as it seems preferrable to dream of some hypothetical set of technical solutions rather than mildly discomforting us by adjusting habits to be less wasteful, I see little hope for that endeavor. With every day that passes without self-moderation the damage increases. Sorry flora and fauna, your world ends before consumerism does.
lr1970 6y ago
A clean and sustainable source of energy exists in a form of controlled nuclear _fusion_. Unlike Nuclear _fission_ (current nuclear technology) fusion works with hydrogen (deuterium and tritium isotopes) and produces no lasting radioactivity or dangerous materials. The source material is just water. Commercial use is still a decade away [1] [1] https://www.iter.org/ https://www.iter.org/
- orwin 6y ago
  Iter is 5 years away at least, and is not at all designed for commercial use. The next iteration isn't either. Iter tech for fusion won't be commercialized until 2050 at the very best. Alternative to tomawak exist though, so maybe?
  - lr1970 6y ago
    > Alternative to tomawak exist though, so maybe? Your probably meant tokamak.
lcall 6y ago
While it is important to be good stewards and not pollute etc, I don't think we are competent to solve climate issues as a whole, when we can't trust each other to keep our word (so much of the time), and especially when we have rejected the specific advice of the planet's Creator. But things can be OK in the long run if we really try to learn what we should do, and do that. I would include praying, honesty, and kindness among those things. Really there is good reason for hope for the best; many of these things are expected.
happyjack 6y ago
No. People need to take a thermodynamics class. Unless you go nuclear, you're not moving away from fossil fuels anytime soon. Most all OECD nations have decided that nuclear "isn't worth the risk." We're going to be burning coal for a long, long time.

40 points by HourglassFR 6y ago

I think we're staring ourselves blind, straining to see any possible high-tech solution that will solve climate change neatly, easily and without any significant sacrifices. The problem is not technological. It is political and societal, and those cannot be solved by technology. At this point, even trying to mitigate the consequences of climate change will take large-scale mobilization, on a scale we have never seen before, much larger than the wartime mobilizations of WW2. Considering our current stumbling response to a global pandemic, with possible consequences much lesser than what climate change will bring, I'm sorry to say that the outlook is quite grim. We have act as humanity collectively, not as individual bickering nations.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
ben_w 6y ago
I’m rather more optimistic; WW2 was an extremely large mobilisation, and I think this could have been done at the scale of the moon landings a decade ago, but now the tech is cheap enough for people to make a profit while saving the environment.

endisneigh 6y ago

I have no doubt that if humanity wanted to, it could sequester all the carbon necessary to reverse climate change, and more. The question isn't really whether humanity is capable of doing it (we are), but rather whether we will do it. In particular, for those who have the majority of "ability" to make change, would it be easier for them to take more and more clean resources in a zero-sum battle or have a short to medium term hit in allying themselves with the rest of the world to fix climate change in the long term? If COVID has shown us anything, the answer to the last question is unequivocally no. COVID has been a very obvious salient problem and most nations failed the test. If we can't beat COVID, we will not beat climate change. No technology can change human nature.

ekianjo 6y ago
> If we can't beat COVID, we will not beat climate change. No technology can change human nature. Erm, looks like we are doing pretty well to beat COVID with vaccines developed in record timing.
- wffurr 6y ago
  500,000 dead in the US, largely due to failure to wear masks and observe distancing protocols, is a strange way to "beat" COVID.
  - ben_w 6y ago
    There are massive gaps between losing to COVID (which would’ve been 1-10% deaths depending on if they happened suddenly enough to overwhelm the healthcare system or not), versus what actually happened in any given nation (0.2% in Belgium to 0.00003% in Burundi, 0.155% in the USA), versus the best possible combination of decisions and actions in response to this virus (it being stopped in China before it ever spread outside Wuhan). Same with climate change. Worst case is Venus, we’re heading for a few degrees Celsius change that persists for centuries, we could’ve prevented almost all of the problems we’re looking at now if we’d made the best choices even as late as the 60s and 70s.
  - ekianjo 6y ago
    and your point is? The fact that vaccines are here makes the COVID problem irrelevant a few years from now. That's called beating COVID.
  - rayiner 6y ago
    There is very little evidence that the death rate in the US is "largely due to failure to wear masks." Mask wearing in different countries is all over the map. The US is actually on the higher end in terms of mask wearing: https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2020/07/08/face-off-over-face-masks-europes-latest-north-south-split https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2020/07/08/face-off.... Meanwhile, countries like Denmark and Norway with very low rates of mask wearing have seen very low COVID death rates. EDIT: More recent data from YouGov showing same pattern: https://yougov.co.uk/topics/international/articles-reports/2020/03/17/personal-measures-taken-avoid-covid-19 https://yougov.co.uk/topics/international/articles-reports/2.... Mask-wearing rates in Denmark and Norway picked up in 2H 2020, but were still on the low side.

Kydlaw 6y ago

He and his team (mostly composed of scientists, not economists) provide very interesting insights on global warming/energy transition. Unlike others, they provide the big picture of the situation and are not trying to hide their sources. I'm surprised to see one of his presentation on HN, where the opposite opinion reign I think. As an example, they are really "bearish" on the Green New Deal, as it will simply not be enough to address the challenge ahead of us. Curious to see people' reaction.

wffurr 6y ago
Is there a written summary of version of this talk that you'd recommend? I am curious but not curious enough to watch the whole thing.
- HourglassFR 6y ago
  Not that I'm aware of. This talk is in itself a summary of a 10+ hours course he gives to his studends. Is the first time I have come across a presentation of this guy in english and this is why I wanted to share it here. But basically it is a re-hash of the limits to growth arguments, with more modern data.
- Kydlaw 6y ago
  I look briefly, but could not find any... The issue is that they are mostly presenting at French engineering schools/colleges, and the presentations are... in french. There are no usually no transcripts nor even translations. At that point it's a cultural thing I guess to be bad at sharing knowledge world wide (Disclaimer: I'm French). I could not recommend enough to listen to it though. The viewpoint he is presenting is unusual enough to be worth it.

finiteseries 6y ago

For anyone else utterly fascinated with the debates between technological development advocates and lifestyle alteration advocates in response to climate change, I absolutely cannot recommend The Wizard and the Prophet enough. From the author of “1491” fame which is quite popular here on HN—it’s actually interesting I see that book on pre Colombian America recommended more often here on HN than the one on technology and climate change. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34959327-the-wizard-and-the-prophet https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34959327-the-wizard-and-...

trentnix 6y ago

It has to. Every prescription I've read almost exclusively focuses on changing behavior. That means telling huge numbers of people - billions really - that their pursuit of wealth and convenience and modernization must be handicapped. In some cases, we're told there are too many people altogether. That's a recipe for unrest and war on a global scale. A technological solution might avoid all that.

hannob 6y ago
> Every prescription I've read almost exclusively focuses on changing behavior. This sounds like a big strawman. I honestly have never met anyone who thinks we can fix climate change exclusively with changing behavior.
- trentnix 6y ago
  If I'd said 'largely', would that have helped?
pii 6y ago
Policy can help, good stories can do a lot of work too

hannob 6y ago

Spoiler: No, but it can help. I'm really tired of this technology vs. policy vs. behavior changes discussions. It's a false dichtomy. We'll need all of that.

TheAdamAndChe 6y ago

I just finished reading the book released by Bill Gates titled "How to Avoid a Climate Disaster." In it, he described how tackling this problem will take an extremely difficult combination of technologic advancement, government policy, and market alignment. We need to do everything we can to be sure that choosing the green energy option isn't just the morally correct choice, but is also the rational choice for everyone to make. I recommend the book BTW. Though it tries its best to be optimistic, I finished it thinking "well shit, I don't know if this is possible." He is right in saying that it won't be easy.

dgellow 6y ago
And during the past decade a market emerged to reward individuals and companies for consuming as much energy as they can: bitcoin mining. The "rational" choice seems to be to just throw as much energy at it as we can. Of course that's completely absurd if the result is to destroy the environment, but that seems to be what is developing. I start to be really pessimistic about our ability to fix any real issue.
- dools 6y ago
  The solution is very simple: bigger government. We have been tricked over the past 40 years into accepting that “small government” is a valid policy objective. Solving the big problems and creating big innovation in the 20th century came from a comparatively big government, the private sector was more about commercialisation than innovation and still is.
swader999 6y ago
I have a hard time taking anything that guy pushes given his associations and flights with Epstein.
- TheAdamAndChe 6y ago
  I personally hold to the ethos of innocent until proven guilty, but suit yourself.

swader999 6y ago

It already does. Central heating and cooling.

thewarrior 6y ago
Global warming has nothing to do with turning on the air conditioner. It certainly didn’t help anyone save their homes from forest fires in California or Australia. Even if you had ACs you wouldn’t want to live in a place hotter than the Sahara desert (when humidity is taken into account). So you’ll move. And let’s say you do live in a good area. An exodus of a billion people all over the world trying to move into places like yours will get nasty. Drastic changes in climate patterns also risks the food supply.

jswizzy 6y ago

I'm still waiting on the crisis to materialize. Florida was suppose to be under water 10 years ago and 50 years ago we were suppose to be in a second Ice Age. Oh and the Ozone was suppose to be gone by now.

thewarrior 6y ago
Sea level rise happens over centuries. I don’t think Florida will have any serious problems before 2060. But Florida is almost completely going under water over 2100 - 2200. It’s understandable that some exaggeration in the urgency is needed else people will not care at all. And if that sounds hypothetical it means your kids or grand kids have no hope of living in or inheriting any property there. Once the reality hits around 2070 or so property values will drop drastically and there will be a mass refugee style exodus from such areas to others which could lead to stuff like “Build a wall to keep the Floridans out”
- rhino369 6y ago
  >And if that sounds hypothetical it means your kids or grand kids have no hope of living in or inheriting any property there. 95% of people don't really inherit property and many people these days are forced to move for economic reasons. Florida being "under water" sounds apocalyptic, but as you say, the chance will "happen[] over centuries." Every storm will slowly destroy some part of the developed area and will be rebuilt somewhere else. To put it in economic terms, what the net present value of losing Florida in 2180? Probably not all that much.
  - thewarrior 6y ago
    That’s for large parts to be completely underwater. It’s not a sudden event in 2180. It will start by 2060-2070
    - rhino369 6y ago
      It started 50 years ago.

eldaisfish 6y ago

There is a major part of this debate that keeps getting brushed under the carpet due to decades of fear-mongering. Nuclear energy. It is a large scale solution that works today, not at some indeterminate point in the future. Yes there are problems, yes there are limitations, yes there are risks and yes it is expensive but many of these can be addressed by governments and through regulation. A major part of reducing carbon emissions is to transition Asia and Africa away from coal and towards nuclear energy and not by the free market but by government supports. This can be supplemented by the plethora of technologies available today viz solar, wind, demand response etc. What is of prime importance is that we limit carbon emissions today and keep doing so even as economies grow and energy consumption increases.

misiti3780 6y ago
safe* nuclear energy.
- rayiner 6y ago
  It doesn't have to be safe. If we reduced safety regulations to the point where we were having a Fukushima-scale disaster every year, to enable a massive increase in nuclear power deployment, we would still come out massively ahead if it allowed us to keep to a 2C versus 3C outcome.
bryanlarsen 6y ago
The cost and time scale of nuclear make it completely infeasible. Wind and solar are cheaper than just the thermal side of a nuclear power plant. IOW, if the nuclear part cost $0, it would still be cost-ineffective. And nuclear plants take >20 years to build. That's too long. And the batteries that solar/wind need are cheaper than HVDC power lines. Of course tearing down existing nuclear is silly, but building new ones is a non-starter.
- TheAdamAndChe 6y ago
  What you said is absolutely true under the current regulatory regimes. Its important to note though that significant progress has been made on compact nuclear. It's safer, easier to produce, and can be centrally manufactured and delivered onsite, relieving much of what causes cost overruns. The largest hurdles involve allowing such nuclear plants to be deployed, which requires regulatory change.

dfilppi 6y ago

Without 'thermo-industrial' development, a large percentage of 'us' wouldnt even exist. So while predicting the future of technology isnt possible, we do know that technology created us.

thewarrior 6y ago
And it can also destroy us.

RGamma 6y ago

The better question is who can save us from ourselves? As long as it seems preferrable to dream of some hypothetical set of technical solutions rather than mildly discomforting us by adjusting habits to be less wasteful, I see little hope for that endeavor. With every day that passes without self-moderation the damage increases. Sorry flora and fauna, your world ends before consumerism does.

lr1970 6y ago

A clean and sustainable source of energy exists in a form of controlled nuclear _fusion_. Unlike Nuclear _fission_ (current nuclear technology) fusion works with hydrogen (deuterium and tritium isotopes) and produces no lasting radioactivity or dangerous materials. The source material is just water. Commercial use is still a decade away [1] [1] https://www.iter.org/ https://www.iter.org/

orwin 6y ago
Iter is 5 years away at least, and is not at all designed for commercial use. The next iteration isn't either. Iter tech for fusion won't be commercialized until 2050 at the very best. Alternative to tomawak exist though, so maybe?
- lr1970 6y ago
  > Alternative to tomawak exist though, so maybe? Your probably meant tokamak.

lcall 6y ago

While it is important to be good stewards and not pollute etc, I don't think we are competent to solve climate issues as a whole, when we can't trust each other to keep our word (so much of the time), and especially when we have rejected the specific advice of the planet's Creator. But things can be OK in the long run if we really try to learn what we should do, and do that. I would include praying, honesty, and kindness among those things. Really there is good reason for hope for the best; many of these things are expected.

happyjack 6y ago

No. People need to take a thermodynamics class. Unless you go nuclear, you're not moving away from fossil fuels anytime soon. Most all OECD nations have decided that nuclear "isn't worth the risk." We're going to be burning coal for a long, long time.