15 ms·

Engineers can disrupt climate change

139 points by headalgorithm 5y ago

slingnow 5y ago
Engineers aren't going to be able to stop anything on their own. Someone needs to FUND engineers to solve the problem. We don't magically conjure and implement global-scale solutions.
- airstrike 5y ago
  Easy. You just need to add a social engineer to the team who can make a couple of high-profile trillionaire engineers believe this is about which of them will solve the problem first.
- mbgerring 5y ago
  VCs, governments, nonprofits, large financial institutions, etc are all pouring buckets of money into climate tech right now.
malchow 5y ago
I have posted this before, but I am hiring at Enphase. [1] [2] I am building an architecture to move electrons at the same efficiency with which we move bits. This enables microgrids. Microgrids enable decentralization and networking. Decentalization and networking enables diverse prime movers competing on price. Price competition enables sustainable energy. If that's interesting, get in touch. [1] https://enphase.com/ https://enphase.com/ [2] https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/ENPH?p=ENPH&.tsrc=fin-srch https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/ENPH?p=ENPH&.tsrc=fin-srch
- api 5y ago
  That's a good place to work since it seems to get less attention. It's clear that getting as many things as we can on the grid is part of the solution since the grid is easier to transition to non-carbon energy than a bunch of mobile engines, but the grid is a lot less efficient than it could be.
- Syonyk 5y ago
  > I am building an architecture to move electrons at the same efficiency with which we move bits. I'm not sure how to interpret that... I don't think the internet is particularly power efficient at moving things around. It uses an awful lot of energy to deliver unwanted crap for the most part... and I'd rather not have my electricity use data collected for big data analytics in the bargain. I'm not a particularly huge fan of Enphase, though. You've been promising IQ8 for years now (3?), delaying plenty of installs by people who are waiting for the islanding capability promised, but never actually delivered. And the NEC 2017 changes to rapid shutdown requirements seem very, very suspiciously lined up with exactly what Enphase offers (per panel electronics), while offering no practical benefits to firefighting safety (a damaged array cannot be assumed to be anything sane regardless of how it's wired). I've heard a number of people who do solar for a living claim that Enphase had their fingers in that particularly annoying requirement, which makes many otherwise simple rooftop installs far more expensive. And, despite that, microinverters are no cheaper than doing optimizers and string inverters - I've done some system design with Enphase parts vs Sunny Boy inverters and Tigo optimizers (which gets me the same thing, except that with the Sunny Boys and Tigo you do actually get grid down power), and the costs are nearly identical. Just, the Enphase system is less capable (with "Wait for IQ8, it'll be awesome!" being nearly as believable at this point as Tesla's totally legit self driving cross country trip in... was it 2018 they were supposed to do that?).
  - specialist 5y ago
    Was there a nice way to make your point? "Hey u/malchow! So much need for better microinverters. Is your IQ8 on track for 2021Q3 release? How will it stack up against Acme Power's μInverter XT?"
    - Syonyk 5y ago
      Except I don't think microinverters are a good solution to almost any problem except that one that Enphase was involved in creating, the module level rapid shutdown requirements in NEC 2017 - which rather radically increase the number of connections in array, and those increased connections counts do cause problems. Enphase has been promoting the IQ8s since 2017, and it's a constant refrain in various solar places of "Yeah, I'm going to hold off putting solar up until the IQ8s are out," which is consistently "Oh, about 6 months away." Same as it's been for the past three years. When a company is consistently deceptive like this, at the literal expense of preventing cheaper solar systems (it's about $0.25/W difference in materials plus whatever the additional labor is), I will ask direct questions of their representatives. I'm interested in boosting solar. Not Enphase's corporate profits.
- johnjj257 5y ago
  What architecture are YOU building aren't you a lawyer? Consider using the royal we especially around the real architects
systematical 5y ago
I've been hopeful about this for a long time, mostly because I think its our only hope. There was a decent Nova episode on this last year: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/video/can-we-cool-the-planet/ https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/video/can-we-cool-the-planet/ It gave me some doubt, but I'm still hopeful.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
BitwiseFool 5y ago
Climate Change is first and foremost a political problem. I'm not saying that innovation and engineering can't address the issue. But we actually have plenty of good tools to reduce our carbon footprint that our politics just will not allow us to implement. Can you imagine forcing construction of Nuclear Power Plants, restricting meat consumption, and policies that heavily disincentivize population growth? Absolutely not. But people are hoping Engineers find magic bullets so that our leaders don't have to take drastic action.
- toomuchtodo 5y ago
  Engineers need to run for office.
  - pope_meat 5y ago
    This ruins the human.
    - toomuchtodo 5y ago
      It is an opportunity to grow. Embrace the struggle.
      - ryder9 5y ago
        no, whining and giving up is easier
      - pope_meat 5y ago
        That's like saying jumping in to a wood chipper is an opportunity to learn how to navigate the inside of a wood chipper...sure, I guess, but what comes out ain't your good intentions, just mulch.
        toomuchtodo 5y ago
        I concede not everyone has the necessary emotional fortitude for the difficulty level of some challenges. It’s an acquired state.
louis___ 5y ago
This is scary if the same engineers, who promised us our data would be safe, not sold for showing us ads, that AI would not be racist, start playing with the earth's climate... > We described what we had learned as Google engineers who worked on a well-intentioned but ultimately failed effort to cut the cost of renewable energy. A "well-intentioned but ultimately failed" attempt at reversing climate change may be more complicated to correct than a bug in production.
- ganzuul 5y ago
  Those things are caused by management dynamics imposed on publicly traded companies stemming from regulatory incentives; Not engineers. - It's Conway's Law all the way down.
- tcmart14 5y ago
  For data, blame the stock holders and investors. Engineers are beholden to them for their jobs. Venture capitalists and shareholders want to leverage data analytics to turn a profit. You could almost make an argument for AI. The same people push engineers to turn out code and products in short time spans. This is why Uncle Bob says it is okay for engineers to lie to improve the final product. A story he tells is of telling the General he is doing one thing when really he was refactoring. However, how much of this is done in industry, I don't know. But companies are known for pushing engineers to meet deadlines which means tests get skipped and bugs don't get fleshed out.
gdubs 5y ago
Hello, from NW Oregon — currently one of the hottest places on the planet. Feels like a convection oven. My puppy found a bunch of dead baby birds last evening — almost certainly related to the heat. Hard not to read the symbolism into it.
- adreamingsoul 5y ago
  Hi, I hope the heat wave resolves soon. I love the PNW and this type of event scares me.
  - gdubs 5y ago
    Thanks - it’s definitely been a disturbing event, and hard to convey just how unusual it is. Portland was a couple of degrees from the Las Vegas record yesterday, and the infrastructure just wasn’t built for it. We’re just south in the Willamette Valley, and have a heat-pump system that’s been doing a decent job, but apparently you’re not meant to run AC more than a 20 degree delta from outside temps. So, we were at 80-90 inside yesterday by end of day. Today is supposed to be the worst of it, and then we’re supposed to drop to normal summer highs.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
- hkai 5y ago
  By your anecdotal logic, if you encounter an unusually cold winter day, that will be proof that global warming doesn't exist.
  - aaaxyz 5y ago
    That's why it's called "climate change"and not " global warming "
makeworld 5y ago
> While humanity is currently on a trajectory to severe climate change, this disaster can be averted if researchers aim for goals that seem nearly impossible. We’re hopeful, because sometimes engineers and scientists do achieve the impossible. How bleak. In any case, I'm not so sure this "miracle" approach is really viable, or something that can be relied on. Related: https://www.independent.co.uk/climate-change/news/climate-change-global-warming-end-human-civilisation-research-a8943531.html https://www.independent.co.uk/climate-change/news/climate-ch...
cjohnson318 5y ago
We could cut speed limits from 70-75 to 50 (assuming most people do "five over") like we did in the seventies. This reduces fuel consumption by about 40%, assuming fuel consumption is proportional to the cross-sectional area of a vehicle and the square of its velocity. This isn't a silver bullet, but 40% is nothing to sneeze at.
- airstrike 5y ago
  This would never work for political / social reasons.
  - cjohnson318 5y ago
    It worked in the seventies during the oil embargo.
    - airstrike 5y ago
      Electric cars didn't exist then.
      - cjohnson318 5y ago
        You're right, electric cars were not available in the 1970's. However, unless you're generating and storing enough solar power to power your car year round, at anywhere from 2-17kWh a day, then your electric vehicle will still be using fossil fuels. Even power grids that utilize solar farms still need natural gas plants online that can handle shortages on short notice.
  - meristohm 5y ago
    What will it take to shift culture so that these solutions are adopted?
    - JohnWhigham 5y ago
      Better alternatives to driving yourself on the highway. Penalizing consumer behavior on a micro level rarely works out well (it's the same discussion with something like a meat tax; it just pisses people off).
IgorPartola 5y ago
Please remember that in our industry “disrupt” means “fuck up”. As in “Uber fucked up (disrupted) the transportation service industry.” Just something to keep in mind before getting all disruptive.
- sokoloff 5y ago
  If we could take whatever the equivalent of taxis is in power generation and food production and turn them into the equivalent of Ubers, I think that would be overall good. Uber’s not perfect, but as a consumer, they’re way better than what was there before.
  - pope_meat 5y ago
    We can make poor people deliver fuel cells to wealthy people on demand via an app, as independent contractors to avoid dealing with the worn out old ones that are no longer able to deliver fuel cells to the wealthy at an optimal rate.
- ttt0 5y ago
  I think it's just a hip new buzzword, like "disrupt the nuclear family", "disrupt white supremacy" etc
npwr 5y ago
There is an idea that is keeping me up at night. What if we could launch large sails to the L1 Lagrange Point to reduce the amount of radiation that reach the earth by only 2% ?
- claytoneast 5y ago
  I think about this often too. There are a ton of articles out there about it. It seems like it would require a pretty colossal amount of mass to get lifted into orbit, and then maintenance of a giant fleet of objects flying close together. Flock dynamics writ large. I've wondered if it would be easier to find an asteroid you can turn into sails (handwaving here about the difficulty of finding one, developing the technology to mine it & also spin up a space manufactory...) than it would be to make them all on earth. Who knows. EDIT: I've sort of come to the conclusion that this is the only solution that a single-party could take on that would meaningfully decrease the amount of heat in the atmosphere. Everything else is dependent on a ton of other people doing what they need to do, too.
  - npwr 5y ago
    Thank you for the problems I am looking for them! I keep thinking we could manufacture and send the sails from the moon. This would require a semi-automated production line and I have no idea if this is even remotely possible with current technology. I also think it is the only possible controllable way to control global warming. I am very happy to learn I am not the only one that thought of this.
  - kanzure 5y ago
    You don't need to launch that much mass: "Self-deployed extremely large low mass space structures" https://diyhpl.us/~bryan/papers2/space/Self-deployed%20extremely%20large%20low%20mass%20space%20structures%20-%202007.pdf https://diyhpl.us/~bryan/papers2/space/Self-deployed%20extre...
- LatteLazy 5y ago
  The L1 between earth and the sun is only 1% of the way to the sun. So the sail would need to be 99% of the cross sectional area of the earth. If it was opaque (reflective) and you only wanted to block 2%, you'd need a 2.23 million square km sail (0.020.99Pi*6000^2) Aluminium foil is about 2g/cm2. That's 3e-3 g/cm2. 3e-2 kg/m2. 30,000kg/km2. You'd need 66 million tonnes of aluminium. Maybe you can make it 100 times lighter with better materials? So only 600,000 tonnes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagrange_point https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagrange_point Maybe if we'd gotten into asteroid mining 100 years earlier...
LatteLazy 5y ago
We as a species have decided not to prevent climate change. You as an individual now need to consider how you individually will adapt, survive and profit. That's where we are. Anyone hoping for a last minute save is badly misinformed about the situation.
Syonyk 5y ago
How about they start by figuring out the concept of power efficiency in the web code that everyone runs? We could do a huge amount if we'd give every mainline tech company engineer a Raspberry Pi 4, and shut down their big workstations for a week a month, making them live on a mere quad core 1.5GHz chip with 8GB of RAM. I'm sick and tired of how every shiny new "update" of web applications uses more and more CPU, runs slower and slower, and, gosh, you'd better buy a new computer to run it. I've ranted before on my blog about the horrible things Google did to the Blogger interface - a text editing interface. For reasons I don't care enough to dig into, the "new" interface forced on everyone last year has some dependency on number of photos such that if you have too many photos, or too slow a system, you get massive, massive lag in entering text. It's literally unusable on plenty of systems that used to run the older interfaces, and you can choke out a fairly high end system by putting enough photos (100-200?) in a post. Even a dozen or so will choke out older systems that used to run the old interface fine. But, hey, it's no problem for the Googlers who wrote it and tested it on their high end 2 year old Xeon workstations! Worked great for their toy cases, and having not actually talked to anyone who uses Blogger, ship it and get your promotion, having ruined the interface for anyone with older or lower power hardware. The new Google Chat interface I've been migrated to is similarly painful on a Pi4. It only takes 20 seconds to load and then maybe a similar amount of time to load an actual conversation. Snappy on a M1 Mini, though, so who cares, right? Once it's actually loaded, it's tolerable (the usual slight lag in text entry that any Google app on a Pi4 has), but getting it loaded is quite painful, and Hangouts used to work just fine.
- whatisthiseven 5y ago
  > How about they start by figuring out the concept of power efficiency in the web code that everyone runs? Sure, a nice goal, but the Internet consumes maybe 10% of the world's electricity, and I highly doubt that is because of slow webpages. It is also "fairly easy" to green datacenter electrical usage because only the generation source need be changed, as opposed to replacing billions of cars, or even entire industrial practices like cement that give off CO2 as waste byproduct. All of which are in excess of 50% of total electrical usage. That, and we have to convert our powerplants anyway. Lastly, my understanding of slow webpages is largely IO and latency, not compute, which further reduces the link between slow pages and electrical usage.
rcMgD2BwE72F 5y ago
But do engineers actually care? The most evil companies don't have much troubles hiring great engineers for cash and equity. When renewable energy companies will offer better pays, and when the ones that destroy our climate won't compete, you'll see engineers switching jobs in flock, to bet on the the next get-rich-quick scheme. I bet this next wave will be about biodiversity, whose collapse might well be worse that climate change (in both impact and timing). For instance, companies that will provide the tools to expand the footprint over ecosystems as fast as possible, right before society reacts to put limit on the fragmentation of habitats. The ones that will help secure the most space (fragmenting the most) will rip the maximum benefits and pay the most. Startups building AI tools to support real-estate developer in this space are swarming already. https://www.newyorker.com/cartoon/a16995 https://www.newyorker.com/cartoon/a16995 will remains d'actualité for quite some time.
- adreamingsoul 5y ago
  Yes, I care, and not for the money.
temp00345 5y ago
Well, engineers created the.. engines, which burn the fossil fuels and that led to climate change, no ?
agentultra 5y ago
I'm under the impression that the climate feedback loops have developed too much inertia for us to counter with a technical solution that could reduce or even reverse climate change at this point. Even if the world stopped emitting carbon tomorrow we're still going to coast past the IPCC's recommended limits and straight into the worst-case scenarios before the end of the century. While I still think it's a worthy cause to reduce and sequester carbon I think we shouldn't be thinking about how to reverse this. We're going to have to live in a world with reduced fresh-water supplies, a dwindling supply of usable soil, and migrant populations. That's going to require a radical shift in global politics and economics. I think a big part of our role as engineers will be helping society to adapt to these new conditions. How do we continue to deliver power to cooling systems during record-breaking heat-waves, build nuclear reactors that are safe against the new kinds of natural disasters we're encountering, manage housing and construction to reduce emissions and local heat, etc.
- jeffdn 5y ago
  I believe that's why the article discussed a need for net _negative_ carbon emissions -- specifically, that we must sequester many gigatons per year in order to prevent what you mention.
seaorg 5y ago
I remember that google hired a team of crack scientists to get the the bottom of global warming. Their conclusion was that even if all carbon production was stopped immediately it would not stop the runaway. That was in 2015. We will probably end up needing to reduce solar flux. It’s the only thing that can save us. That’s why bill gates was planning on putting reflective aerosols in the atmosphere. That effort is to my knowledge the single most important effort relating to global warming. And people reject it. If we die we will certainly deserve it. Remember, we can spread reflective dust at L1, too. Reflective in the IR, so plant life won’t be hit. You don’t hear about solutions very much in this atmosphere of doom worship.
- mjmahone17 5y ago
  Don’t we run into problems of low level carbon dioxide poisoning, if we hit the levels of “the only way to keep the planet habitably temperate is to reflect sunlight”? At around 1,000 ppm we’d hit the point where everywhere outside you’d be noticeably affected. Which is around where we’re projected to be by 2100.
- kmtrowbr 5y ago
  Thank you for this. It is much easier for me to imagine that a relatively small expert team, well funded for the task (which is still virtually zero money in comparison to the cost of changing the world economy) could accomplish some feat of geoengineering which, would buy us time. I find this easiest to imagine. In fact, I see this as somewhat likely. "The feasibility of using an L1 positioned dust cloud as a method of space-based geoengineering" https://pure.strath.ac.uk/ws/portalfiles/portal/12714106/Bewick_R_et_al_Pure_The_feasibility_of_using_an_L1_positioned_dust_cloud_as_a_method_of_space_based_geoengineering_May_2012.pdf https://pure.strath.ac.uk/ws/portalfiles/portal/12714106/Bew... > In this paper a method of geoengineering is proposed involving clouds of dust placed in the vicinity of the L1 point as an alternative to the use of thin film reflectors ... it is envisaged that the required mass of dust can be extracted from captured near Earth asteroids, whilst stabilized in the required position using the impulse provided by solar collectors or mass drivers used to eject material from the asteroid surface.
- mbgerring 5y ago
Tycho 5y ago
How much does unwanted JavaScript contribute to climate change? Recently reviewed my MacBook power consumption because battery life seemed poor (I usually have it plugged in). Using Chrome's Task Manager I identified a webpage that was using most of the energy: it was an ancestry knowledge base page that I'd had open for months, except it wasn't text-only like I'd thought - at the foot of the page, after dozens of paragraphs, it had a syndicated ad strip.
LeifCarrotson 5y ago
> Climate policy is essential to the engineering work of decarbonization, as it can make the costs of new energy technologies plummet and shift markets to low-carbon alternatives. People often underestimate how much human ingenuity can be unleashed when it’s propelled by market forces. Propelled by market forces and by policy forces. Policy can provide a temporary push to get technology over a hump of development costs and scale up, but it's a really hard social problem to maintain in the long term. The real challenge for engineers is to build an eco-friendly technology that's cheaper and more desirable than the alternative; in that state it can basically free-fall forever under the push of market forces. Why would you drive a gas guzzling, high-maintenance old car when a Tesla has lower lifetime costs? Why would you run a noisy, smelly generator outside your camper van when you could put silent solar panels on the roof? Why would an energy company burn coal when a wind farm puts out more energy for less money? When new tech is both more desirable for the end user and for the planet, that's when it really takes off. I think the fundamental question we need to ask is what technology could be developed that would lead to market forces pushing carbon sequestration. Even if forward-thinking governments work together to develop sequestration-pushing policies, amoral actors will be perpetually incentivized to defect. You can't win that fight forever. > Making 1 tonne of cement lime releases about 1 tonne of CO2. If all the CO2 emissions from cement manufacturing were captured and pumped underground at a cost of $80 per tonne, we estimate that a 50-pound bag (about 23 kg) of concrete mix, one component of which is cement, will cost about 42 cents more. Such a price change would not stop people from using concrete nor significantly add to building costs. But it will perpetually cost more than a bag from an unscrupulous manufacturer; the economic incentive is to reduce that amount. Also, a 50 lbs concrete bag only costs about $2.50, so $0.42 is still a significant fraction...and at non-homeowner usage rates of an 8-yard/32,000 lbs truck with a cost of about $1,200, that's a nontrivial price jump of $270. People will still use it, sure, but they're not going to be happy about it. Instead (or in addition), we need some kind of industrial-scale technology that makes people want to pull CO2 from the air and put it in the ground.
pksebben 5y ago
I am troubled by the inclusion of McKinsey consulting in the earlier work. IMO it throws a real wrench in the trustworthiness of the study, considering their track record. I feel like it's unsurprising that actual renewable price reductions outpaced predictions from a study that McKinsey participated in; their fiduciary incentives absolutely do not align with greater adoption of renewable tech.
- rch 5y ago
  While your skepticism is certainly warranted, some individuals at McKinsey are deeply committed to sustainability, and arguably their involvement with the firm provides opportunities to have real-world impact.
  - pksebben 5y ago
    My familiarity with McKinsey is based on what I know about them via the Purdue Pharma "thing" and their involvement in Enron - I admit I am looking at this through a cardboard tube. I would like to know what you do about their commitment to sustainability. Do you have sources? Are you a source?
    - my_usernam3 5y ago
      McKinsey is HUGE. Like any of the major consulting firms, one department can be completely evil, while the other is saving the world; just depends on the client's needs. In a positive light there's tons of hype about ESG investing. With that in mind, many companies will hire McKinsey to construct reports that follow the trend. Example: https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/strategy-and-corporate-finance/our-insights/five-ways-that-esg-creates-value# https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/strategy-and-cor...
      - pksebben 5y ago
        This is a pretty good writeup. It's from a firm that's focused on messaging and image control, so perhaps to be taken with a grain of salt, but I like that they're pushing C-suite types to connect the dots between "good for all" and "good for investors". That said, I'm still a little leery, and here's why: Our system of incentives (that is, capitalism at large) is misaligned with properly resolving climate change. McKinsey's whole value proposition is that they will help your company achieve it's goals, whatever those goals may be. Even if working on climate change coincides with the direction of a company at some point in time, it's not the goal of the game. The goal of the game is "get more money", and that will be the thing that McKinsey should be focused on, as that is the product that they are selling: make your business more profitable. With this in mind, it feels .... odd, that they were the first choice for a climate study. There are plenty of NGOs, non-profits, and associated orgs whose primary mission is fixing climate change. Even if McKinsey is totally on the level here (which I'm personally undecided on), it feels a little like calling the plumber to fix a blown transformer. I suppose if I had to identify a singular, big reason that I'm leery, here, it's this: Renewables and other green tech is directly competitive with some of McKinsey's clients' goals. I make this assertion on the strength that they offer services to the oil & gas industries - as McKinsey does not publish their clients (another thing that garners my side-eye.)
thewarrior 5y ago
Lets go over the numbers shall we ? "Just build nuclear" - As per the post itself, we need to build 3 nuclear plants every day until 2050 to replace the entire grid with nuclear. Yeah not realistic. Carbon capture [0] 1. We take 5 billion cubic meters of Oil out of the ground 2. We emit 30 billion tons of CO2 3. We can only capture from big sources like power plants and industrial sources - Maybe about 40 % of Co2 can be captured 4. Half of the capturable CO2 is about 6 billion tons of gas 5. We will have to liquefy it so it has to go into the ground. 6. We have to shove 12 billion cubic meters of Co2 into the ground every year to sequester only half of the capturable CO2 however the scale of this is greater than the entire Oil industry that was created over 100 years and cost trillions in capital. 7. After this you're still only capturing a fraction of the carbon. You'll have to pay heavy taxes on everything you buy. 8. Who is going to live next to these billions of tons of C02 in the ground ? This will leak and kill people. Electric cars [1] 1. The global vehicle fleet is estimated at 1.4 billion vehicles travelling 28 trillion kilometers 2. Powering this is estimated to require an *additional* 17k Terawatt hours of carbon free power generation. The current global generation of electricity is 26k Terawatt hours. Phasing out fossil fuels from power generation entirely 3. The author estimates that we need to build 165k new power plants that are a mix of solar, wind, hydro and nuclear. This while most of the worlds existing infrastructure is crumbling. 4. We need 200k storage stations that can store 100 MWh to act as backup for solar / wind. This will need 90 million tonnes of batteries. 5. If you want to replace the Gas used for heating as well and go completely zero fossil fuel the estimate becomes - 6 million storage stations and 2 billion tonnes of batteries. 6. The entire known reserves of Nickel, Lithium, Cobalt are not enough to make these many batteries. We need another 7 Australian Lithium deposits. India and China continue to rapidly increase their emissions. Poorer nations cannot stop they are too poor to even begin. [0] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8SIjlZQf28I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8SIjlZQf28I - Vaclav Smil [1] - https://youtu.be/n_gvvj56rzw?t=2025 https://youtu.be/n_gvvj56rzw?t=2025
- stnmtn 5y ago
  This is incredible sobering. What can we do in the face of this?
  - 5y ago
mbgerring 5y ago
There are a large and growing number of job openings working directly on climate change, and the time to get in is now. Trillions of dollars are going to change hands, and millions of person-hours of work are going to be performed, to transition the entire world off of burning fossil fuels. You can get a piece of it! My company, Genability, is hiring full-stack engineers[1] to work on digitizing energy pricing. Many other companies are also hiring to work on different areas of this problem space.[2] I quit working in digital media to work on climate change full time last year, and I can't recommend it enough. Join me! [1] - https://www.genability.com/careers/ https://www.genability.com/careers/ [2] - https://jobs.climatebase.org/jobs https://jobs.climatebase.org/jobs
- doitLP 5y ago
  Looks like the LinkedIn job links have expired.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - mbgerring 5y ago
    Fixed, applications via LinkedIn are closed but we're happy to take applications by email.
mips_avatar 5y ago
I think one way the FTC could really help companies monetize climate change initiatives is to give guidance on how to market improvements in products that save carbon. We recently had a big improvement in Windows bandwidth for updates in Windows 11, but it was extremely difficult to use our carbon estimates for marketing. We estimated that we saved about ~3-5k households worth of electricity, but there were concerns that the FTC wouldn't accept our calculations.
worik 5y ago
If McKinsey is to be taken seriously then the only way forward is to abolish capitalism. It is not what they want but of you pay any sort of attention then it is a prerequisite as it is the compulsion for consumption, that capitalists have, that is going to burn us all. But they are very wrong. Ever increasing consumption is not a prerequisite for a economy that is good to live in. We do not need to abolish capitalism, but we do need to control and regulate it. If we are going to avoid global ecological catastrophe then we will need to do some planning. Things that are cheapest in short and medium term will have to be abandoned for things that avert the disaster. Markets can not do that. It needs to be done locally for local conditions with a eye for global requirements. This requires people in politics to use their brains and it requires the people to support the politicians in what is going to become a difficult struggle with folks like those from McKinsey - people desperate to maintain their privilege, desperate to monotonically increase their consumption. In lucky places this will be done by the ballot box. In less lucky places mass NVDA (non-violent direct action). In the very unlucky places it will require arson. I have faith in humans. My favourite species. The vast mass of us will shut down these greed heads from the height of capitalism and bring them back down to Earth.
ncmncm 5y ago
Including "solar-radiation management" among sensible activities, and omitting essential gating technologies such as energy storage, taints the whole article. The howlers suggest that it is a "feel-good" piece, or a marketing exercise aimed at making certain tech approaches seem to have the established merits of solar and wind build-out. Solar-radiation management, in particular, is another name for geo-engineering. It would be a clear disaster if we ever came to depend on it, as any hiccup in performance would subject Earth to a sudden rollback of any benefit, a far worse outcome even than what we are experiencing. (This is as distinguished from, e.g., spreading olivine to absorb atmospheric CO2, or scattering iron dust on the deep ocean surface, where suddenly not doing it anymore would not set us back at all.) Hydrogen-powered aviation is a clear technical win in the longer term, but any money diverted to that from, e.g., energy storage would be a setback, just as would diverting money from solar and wind build-out in favor of nukes. Removing CO2 from the atmosphere seems to attack the problem squarely, but fully 10% of the increased heating comes from the remarkably small amount of sulfur hexafluoride, SF6, already released into the atmosphere. (SF6 is 25k times as good at trapping heat as CO2.) There is an industrial replacement for SF6 available now, and apparatus to extract as much as possible from existing equipment for disposal, but what is already in the air is there for many centuries, and it is still being added to. Similarly, if the existing stock of HFCs were vented, that would produce as much forcing as all the CO2 now in the atmosphere. (HFCs are >2k as good at trapping heat as CO2.) People have instructions to carefully extract HFCs from refrigeration systems being dismantled, but in many places those instructions are ignored. So, some substantial fraction of the HFCs will leak. A replacement for HFCs is in the pipeline, but not in full production yet. So, just bringing CO2 back to pre-industrial levels would not suffice, even without considering the now-reduced reflectivity at the north pole and increased CH4 emission (25x) from melting permafrost. We need more. Mirrors in space are a dangerous fantasy, as noted above. We can't get the SF6 out of the air. We can't get the HFCs out of the air. We can't remove enough CO2 from the air to compensate for those without causing a different sort of eco-catastrophe. As it is, it is everything we can do just to build out solar and wind power extraction systems, and, soon, storage for them. We will get electric-fired ammonia production going to fuel ships, and LH2 for aircraft, and carbon-neutral cement, and electric steel production, and get control of CO2 emissions. But we will need to discover something more.
virtualdom 5y ago
This IEEE article makes some questionable extrapolations in my opinion. First, they start with 2017's global primary energy consumption of 600 PJ, and then round it up (by 66%!) to 1000 PJ ("for simplicity"). Then, 1000 PJ is used as the baseline that we would need to replace with zero carbon sources, leading to scary-sounding propositions like "covering roughly 1.6 percent of the world’s land area with (solar) panels". But that's misleading. Up to two thirds of the primary energy we "consume" each year is wasted: it is used to pump, refine, distribute, combust, or otherwise perform work and/or create heat that is not directly needed or wanted for the desired "energy service", e.g. moving a vehicle or lighting a home. Electricity generated from fossil fuel combustion has an immediate primary energy loss of 40-70% due to the inefficiency of heat engines. Wind and solar power plants do not. For example, if a solar plant produces 1GWh of electricity in a day, the full 1GWh is considered "primary energy production", while a natural gas plant that produced 1GWh of electricity in a day may have consumed 2-3GWh of natural gas "primary energy" in order to do so. Similarly, electric vehicles are much more efficient than combustion engine vehicles at converting "intermediate energy" into useful work (a charged battery or refined gasoline into motion). Heat pumps are often more efficient at heating spaces and water than burning gas. So, if we are able to generate most of our electricity from renewable sources, and electrify all ground transport, space/water heating, and many industrial processes, our primary energy use will be significantly lower in the future than it is today! That's not to say there aren't major technical and political challenges ahead to mitigating climate change, but oversimplifications that make the problem seem harder to overcome are of limited usefulness. Further reading: IEA underreports contribution solar and wind by a factor of three compared to fossil fuels http://energypost.eu/iea-underreports-contribution-solar-wind-factor-three-compared-fossil-fuels http://energypost.eu/iea-underreports-contribution-solar-win... Energy flow charts: https://flowcharts.llnl.gov/commodities/energy https://flowcharts.llnl.gov/commodities/energy
quasisphere 5y ago
I think one aspect of climate engineering that I don't see discussed very much is who is allowed to do that: Is a single country permitted to make decisions that affect the whole globe? Who decides how hot/cold the earth should be? Just as an example, some African countries could decide that in fact they would like to make the climate even colder than it used to be, which on the other hand would negatively impact agriculture away from equator. I think these questions form a big potential source of global power struggle and conflict.
Glench 5y ago
This is a terrible and misinformed article. We don't have to rely on nascent carbon storage or "deflecting some incoming sunlight to reduce heating of the atmosphere". We mainly have to electrify everything as fast as possible. With the right financing, this will actually save everyone money because of the inherit efficiency of electric machinery. It's explained here: https://www.rewiringamerica.org/ https://www.rewiringamerica.org/
- virtualdom 5y ago
  You're right. There are two major errors in just this one paragraph from the article: "Worldwide, humans use roughly one zettajoule per year. Satisfying that demand without further contributing to climate change means we’ll have to drastically speed up deployment of zero-carbon energy sources. Providing 1 ZJ per year with only solar PV, for example, would require covering roughly 1.6 percent of the world’s land area with panels." Actually, humans used 162,494 TWh of primary energy in 2017, which is 585 petajoules (PJ). The authors admit to rounding up from roughly 600 PJ to 1000 PJ "for simplicity" later in the article. Rounding up by 66% is hardly appropriate for a back-of-napkin calculation, much less in a published article on a very serious topic. Then, the authors imply that replacing all primary energy with solar power would require the same amount of primary energy. This is not true. If we were able to electrify all of humanities energy needs, we would only need 1/3 as much primary energy as we use today, since today's primary energy is mainly served by extremely inefficient fossil fuel combustion (coal and gas in power plants, petroleum for transport). 600 PJ is a reasonable estimate for primary energy use in 2021, so we would only need to build 200 PJ of solar power to replace fossil fuel combustion. The article called for 1000 PJ of solar, while reality is closer to 200 PJ. They were off by a factor of 5! Obviously, this paragraph was an over-simplification and was meant as a thought experiment. But the sloppy rounding error and the lack of acknowledgment of the primary energy differences between solar power and fossil fuel combustion call into question how deeply the authors really understand the problem of climate change, and the solutions we have available.

139 points by headalgorithm 5y ago

Engineers aren't going to be able to stop anything on their own. Someone needs to FUND engineers to solve the problem. We don't magically conjure and implement global-scale solutions.

airstrike 5y ago
Easy. You just need to add a social engineer to the team who can make a couple of high-profile trillionaire engineers believe this is about which of them will solve the problem first.
mbgerring 5y ago
VCs, governments, nonprofits, large financial institutions, etc are all pouring buckets of money into climate tech right now.

malchow 5y ago

I have posted this before, but I am hiring at Enphase. [1] [2] I am building an architecture to move electrons at the same efficiency with which we move bits. This enables microgrids. Microgrids enable decentralization and networking. Decentalization and networking enables diverse prime movers competing on price. Price competition enables sustainable energy. If that's interesting, get in touch. [1] https://enphase.com/ https://enphase.com/ [2] https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/ENPH?p=ENPH&.tsrc=fin-srch https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/ENPH?p=ENPH&.tsrc=fin-srch

api 5y ago
That's a good place to work since it seems to get less attention. It's clear that getting as many things as we can on the grid is part of the solution since the grid is easier to transition to non-carbon energy than a bunch of mobile engines, but the grid is a lot less efficient than it could be.
Syonyk 5y ago
> I am building an architecture to move electrons at the same efficiency with which we move bits. I'm not sure how to interpret that... I don't think the internet is particularly power efficient at moving things around. It uses an awful lot of energy to deliver unwanted crap for the most part... and I'd rather not have my electricity use data collected for big data analytics in the bargain. I'm not a particularly huge fan of Enphase, though. You've been promising IQ8 for years now (3?), delaying plenty of installs by people who are waiting for the islanding capability promised, but never actually delivered. And the NEC 2017 changes to rapid shutdown requirements seem very, very suspiciously lined up with exactly what Enphase offers (per panel electronics), while offering no practical benefits to firefighting safety (a damaged array cannot be assumed to be anything sane regardless of how it's wired). I've heard a number of people who do solar for a living claim that Enphase had their fingers in that particularly annoying requirement, which makes many otherwise simple rooftop installs far more expensive. And, despite that, microinverters are no cheaper than doing optimizers and string inverters - I've done some system design with Enphase parts vs Sunny Boy inverters and Tigo optimizers (which gets me the same thing, except that with the Sunny Boys and Tigo you do actually get grid down power), and the costs are nearly identical. Just, the Enphase system is less capable (with "Wait for IQ8, it'll be awesome!" being nearly as believable at this point as Tesla's totally legit self driving cross country trip in... was it 2018 they were supposed to do that?).
- specialist 5y ago
  Was there a nice way to make your point? "Hey u/malchow! So much need for better microinverters. Is your IQ8 on track for 2021Q3 release? How will it stack up against Acme Power's μInverter XT?"
  - Syonyk 5y ago
    Except I don't think microinverters are a good solution to almost any problem except that one that Enphase was involved in creating, the module level rapid shutdown requirements in NEC 2017 - which rather radically increase the number of connections in array, and those increased connections counts do cause problems. Enphase has been promoting the IQ8s since 2017, and it's a constant refrain in various solar places of "Yeah, I'm going to hold off putting solar up until the IQ8s are out," which is consistently "Oh, about 6 months away." Same as it's been for the past three years. When a company is consistently deceptive like this, at the literal expense of preventing cheaper solar systems (it's about $0.25/W difference in materials plus whatever the additional labor is), I will ask direct questions of their representatives. I'm interested in boosting solar. Not Enphase's corporate profits.
johnjj257 5y ago
What architecture are YOU building aren't you a lawyer? Consider using the royal we especially around the real architects

systematical 5y ago

I've been hopeful about this for a long time, mostly because I think its our only hope. There was a decent Nova episode on this last year: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/video/can-we-cool-the-planet/ https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/video/can-we-cool-the-planet/ It gave me some doubt, but I'm still hopeful.

deleted 5y ago

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BitwiseFool 5y ago

Climate Change is first and foremost a political problem. I'm not saying that innovation and engineering can't address the issue. But we actually have plenty of good tools to reduce our carbon footprint that our politics just will not allow us to implement. Can you imagine forcing construction of Nuclear Power Plants, restricting meat consumption, and policies that heavily disincentivize population growth? Absolutely not. But people are hoping Engineers find magic bullets so that our leaders don't have to take drastic action.

toomuchtodo 5y ago
Engineers need to run for office.
- pope_meat 5y ago
  This ruins the human.
  - toomuchtodo 5y ago
    It is an opportunity to grow. Embrace the struggle.
    - ryder9 5y ago
      no, whining and giving up is easier
    - pope_meat 5y ago
      That's like saying jumping in to a wood chipper is an opportunity to learn how to navigate the inside of a wood chipper...sure, I guess, but what comes out ain't your good intentions, just mulch.
      - toomuchtodo 5y ago
        I concede not everyone has the necessary emotional fortitude for the difficulty level of some challenges. It’s an acquired state.

louis___ 5y ago

This is scary if the same engineers, who promised us our data would be safe, not sold for showing us ads, that AI would not be racist, start playing with the earth's climate... > We described what we had learned as Google engineers who worked on a well-intentioned but ultimately failed effort to cut the cost of renewable energy. A "well-intentioned but ultimately failed" attempt at reversing climate change may be more complicated to correct than a bug in production.

ganzuul 5y ago
Those things are caused by management dynamics imposed on publicly traded companies stemming from regulatory incentives; Not engineers. - It's Conway's Law all the way down.
tcmart14 5y ago
For data, blame the stock holders and investors. Engineers are beholden to them for their jobs. Venture capitalists and shareholders want to leverage data analytics to turn a profit. You could almost make an argument for AI. The same people push engineers to turn out code and products in short time spans. This is why Uncle Bob says it is okay for engineers to lie to improve the final product. A story he tells is of telling the General he is doing one thing when really he was refactoring. However, how much of this is done in industry, I don't know. But companies are known for pushing engineers to meet deadlines which means tests get skipped and bugs don't get fleshed out.

gdubs 5y ago

Hello, from NW Oregon — currently one of the hottest places on the planet. Feels like a convection oven. My puppy found a bunch of dead baby birds last evening — almost certainly related to the heat. Hard not to read the symbolism into it.

adreamingsoul 5y ago
Hi, I hope the heat wave resolves soon. I love the PNW and this type of event scares me.
- gdubs 5y ago
  Thanks - it’s definitely been a disturbing event, and hard to convey just how unusual it is. Portland was a couple of degrees from the Las Vegas record yesterday, and the infrastructure just wasn’t built for it. We’re just south in the Willamette Valley, and have a heat-pump system that’s been doing a decent job, but apparently you’re not meant to run AC more than a 20 degree delta from outside temps. So, we were at 80-90 inside yesterday by end of day. Today is supposed to be the worst of it, and then we’re supposed to drop to normal summer highs.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
hkai 5y ago
By your anecdotal logic, if you encounter an unusually cold winter day, that will be proof that global warming doesn't exist.
- aaaxyz 5y ago
  That's why it's called "climate change"and not " global warming "

makeworld 5y ago

> While humanity is currently on a trajectory to severe climate change, this disaster can be averted if researchers aim for goals that seem nearly impossible. We’re hopeful, because sometimes engineers and scientists do achieve the impossible. How bleak. In any case, I'm not so sure this "miracle" approach is really viable, or something that can be relied on. Related: https://www.independent.co.uk/climate-change/news/climate-change-global-warming-end-human-civilisation-research-a8943531.html https://www.independent.co.uk/climate-change/news/climate-ch...

cjohnson318 5y ago

We could cut speed limits from 70-75 to 50 (assuming most people do "five over") like we did in the seventies. This reduces fuel consumption by about 40%, assuming fuel consumption is proportional to the cross-sectional area of a vehicle and the square of its velocity. This isn't a silver bullet, but 40% is nothing to sneeze at.

airstrike 5y ago
This would never work for political / social reasons.
- cjohnson318 5y ago
  It worked in the seventies during the oil embargo.
  - airstrike 5y ago
    Electric cars didn't exist then.
    - cjohnson318 5y ago
      You're right, electric cars were not available in the 1970's. However, unless you're generating and storing enough solar power to power your car year round, at anywhere from 2-17kWh a day, then your electric vehicle will still be using fossil fuels. Even power grids that utilize solar farms still need natural gas plants online that can handle shortages on short notice.
- meristohm 5y ago
  What will it take to shift culture so that these solutions are adopted?
  - JohnWhigham 5y ago
    Better alternatives to driving yourself on the highway. Penalizing consumer behavior on a micro level rarely works out well (it's the same discussion with something like a meat tax; it just pisses people off).

IgorPartola 5y ago

Please remember that in our industry “disrupt” means “fuck up”. As in “Uber fucked up (disrupted) the transportation service industry.” Just something to keep in mind before getting all disruptive.

sokoloff 5y ago
If we could take whatever the equivalent of taxis is in power generation and food production and turn them into the equivalent of Ubers, I think that would be overall good. Uber’s not perfect, but as a consumer, they’re way better than what was there before.
- pope_meat 5y ago
  We can make poor people deliver fuel cells to wealthy people on demand via an app, as independent contractors to avoid dealing with the worn out old ones that are no longer able to deliver fuel cells to the wealthy at an optimal rate.
ttt0 5y ago
I think it's just a hip new buzzword, like "disrupt the nuclear family", "disrupt white supremacy" etc

npwr 5y ago

There is an idea that is keeping me up at night. What if we could launch large sails to the L1 Lagrange Point to reduce the amount of radiation that reach the earth by only 2% ?

claytoneast 5y ago
I think about this often too. There are a ton of articles out there about it. It seems like it would require a pretty colossal amount of mass to get lifted into orbit, and then maintenance of a giant fleet of objects flying close together. Flock dynamics writ large. I've wondered if it would be easier to find an asteroid you can turn into sails (handwaving here about the difficulty of finding one, developing the technology to mine it & also spin up a space manufactory...) than it would be to make them all on earth. Who knows. EDIT: I've sort of come to the conclusion that this is the only solution that a single-party could take on that would meaningfully decrease the amount of heat in the atmosphere. Everything else is dependent on a ton of other people doing what they need to do, too.
- npwr 5y ago
  Thank you for the problems I am looking for them! I keep thinking we could manufacture and send the sails from the moon. This would require a semi-automated production line and I have no idea if this is even remotely possible with current technology. I also think it is the only possible controllable way to control global warming. I am very happy to learn I am not the only one that thought of this.
- kanzure 5y ago
  You don't need to launch that much mass: "Self-deployed extremely large low mass space structures" https://diyhpl.us/~bryan/papers2/space/Self-deployed%20extremely%20large%20low%20mass%20space%20structures%20-%202007.pdf https://diyhpl.us/~bryan/papers2/space/Self-deployed%20extre...
LatteLazy 5y ago
The L1 between earth and the sun is only 1% of the way to the sun. So the sail would need to be 99% of the cross sectional area of the earth. If it was opaque (reflective) and you only wanted to block 2%, you'd need a 2.23 million square km sail (0.020.99Pi*6000^2) Aluminium foil is about 2g/cm2. That's 3e-3 g/cm2. 3e-2 kg/m2. 30,000kg/km2. You'd need 66 million tonnes of aluminium. Maybe you can make it 100 times lighter with better materials? So only 600,000 tonnes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagrange_point https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagrange_point Maybe if we'd gotten into asteroid mining 100 years earlier...

LatteLazy 5y ago

We as a species have decided not to prevent climate change. You as an individual now need to consider how you individually will adapt, survive and profit. That's where we are. Anyone hoping for a last minute save is badly misinformed about the situation.

Syonyk 5y ago

How about they start by figuring out the concept of power efficiency in the web code that everyone runs? We could do a huge amount if we'd give every mainline tech company engineer a Raspberry Pi 4, and shut down their big workstations for a week a month, making them live on a mere quad core 1.5GHz chip with 8GB of RAM. I'm sick and tired of how every shiny new "update" of web applications uses more and more CPU, runs slower and slower, and, gosh, you'd better buy a new computer to run it. I've ranted before on my blog about the horrible things Google did to the Blogger interface - a text editing interface. For reasons I don't care enough to dig into, the "new" interface forced on everyone last year has some dependency on number of photos such that if you have too many photos, or too slow a system, you get massive, massive lag in entering text. It's literally unusable on plenty of systems that used to run the older interfaces, and you can choke out a fairly high end system by putting enough photos (100-200?) in a post. Even a dozen or so will choke out older systems that used to run the old interface fine. But, hey, it's no problem for the Googlers who wrote it and tested it on their high end 2 year old Xeon workstations! Worked great for their toy cases, and having not actually talked to anyone who uses Blogger, ship it and get your promotion, having ruined the interface for anyone with older or lower power hardware. The new Google Chat interface I've been migrated to is similarly painful on a Pi4. It only takes 20 seconds to load and then maybe a similar amount of time to load an actual conversation. Snappy on a M1 Mini, though, so who cares, right? Once it's actually loaded, it's tolerable (the usual slight lag in text entry that any Google app on a Pi4 has), but getting it loaded is quite painful, and Hangouts used to work just fine.

whatisthiseven 5y ago
> How about they start by figuring out the concept of power efficiency in the web code that everyone runs? Sure, a nice goal, but the Internet consumes maybe 10% of the world's electricity, and I highly doubt that is because of slow webpages. It is also "fairly easy" to green datacenter electrical usage because only the generation source need be changed, as opposed to replacing billions of cars, or even entire industrial practices like cement that give off CO2 as waste byproduct. All of which are in excess of 50% of total electrical usage. That, and we have to convert our powerplants anyway. Lastly, my understanding of slow webpages is largely IO and latency, not compute, which further reduces the link between slow pages and electrical usage.

rcMgD2BwE72F 5y ago

But do engineers actually care? The most evil companies don't have much troubles hiring great engineers for cash and equity. When renewable energy companies will offer better pays, and when the ones that destroy our climate won't compete, you'll see engineers switching jobs in flock, to bet on the the next get-rich-quick scheme. I bet this next wave will be about biodiversity, whose collapse might well be worse that climate change (in both impact and timing). For instance, companies that will provide the tools to expand the footprint over ecosystems as fast as possible, right before society reacts to put limit on the fragmentation of habitats. The ones that will help secure the most space (fragmenting the most) will rip the maximum benefits and pay the most. Startups building AI tools to support real-estate developer in this space are swarming already. https://www.newyorker.com/cartoon/a16995 https://www.newyorker.com/cartoon/a16995 will remains d'actualité for quite some time.

adreamingsoul 5y ago
Yes, I care, and not for the money.

temp00345 5y ago

Well, engineers created the.. engines, which burn the fossil fuels and that led to climate change, no ?

agentultra 5y ago

I'm under the impression that the climate feedback loops have developed too much inertia for us to counter with a technical solution that could reduce or even reverse climate change at this point. Even if the world stopped emitting carbon tomorrow we're still going to coast past the IPCC's recommended limits and straight into the worst-case scenarios before the end of the century. While I still think it's a worthy cause to reduce and sequester carbon I think we shouldn't be thinking about how to reverse this. We're going to have to live in a world with reduced fresh-water supplies, a dwindling supply of usable soil, and migrant populations. That's going to require a radical shift in global politics and economics. I think a big part of our role as engineers will be helping society to adapt to these new conditions. How do we continue to deliver power to cooling systems during record-breaking heat-waves, build nuclear reactors that are safe against the new kinds of natural disasters we're encountering, manage housing and construction to reduce emissions and local heat, etc.

jeffdn 5y ago
I believe that's why the article discussed a need for net _negative_ carbon emissions -- specifically, that we must sequester many gigatons per year in order to prevent what you mention.

seaorg 5y ago

I remember that google hired a team of crack scientists to get the the bottom of global warming. Their conclusion was that even if all carbon production was stopped immediately it would not stop the runaway. That was in 2015. We will probably end up needing to reduce solar flux. It’s the only thing that can save us. That’s why bill gates was planning on putting reflective aerosols in the atmosphere. That effort is to my knowledge the single most important effort relating to global warming. And people reject it. If we die we will certainly deserve it. Remember, we can spread reflective dust at L1, too. Reflective in the IR, so plant life won’t be hit. You don’t hear about solutions very much in this atmosphere of doom worship.

mjmahone17 5y ago
Don’t we run into problems of low level carbon dioxide poisoning, if we hit the levels of “the only way to keep the planet habitably temperate is to reflect sunlight”? At around 1,000 ppm we’d hit the point where everywhere outside you’d be noticeably affected. Which is around where we’re projected to be by 2100.
kmtrowbr 5y ago
Thank you for this. It is much easier for me to imagine that a relatively small expert team, well funded for the task (which is still virtually zero money in comparison to the cost of changing the world economy) could accomplish some feat of geoengineering which, would buy us time. I find this easiest to imagine. In fact, I see this as somewhat likely. "The feasibility of using an L1 positioned dust cloud as a method of space-based geoengineering" https://pure.strath.ac.uk/ws/portalfiles/portal/12714106/Bewick_R_et_al_Pure_The_feasibility_of_using_an_L1_positioned_dust_cloud_as_a_method_of_space_based_geoengineering_May_2012.pdf https://pure.strath.ac.uk/ws/portalfiles/portal/12714106/Bew... > In this paper a method of geoengineering is proposed involving clouds of dust placed in the vicinity of the L1 point as an alternative to the use of thin film reflectors ... it is envisaged that the required mass of dust can be extracted from captured near Earth asteroids, whilst stabilized in the required position using the impulse provided by solar collectors or mass drivers used to eject material from the asteroid surface.
mbgerring 5y ago

Tycho 5y ago

How much does unwanted JavaScript contribute to climate change? Recently reviewed my MacBook power consumption because battery life seemed poor (I usually have it plugged in). Using Chrome's Task Manager I identified a webpage that was using most of the energy: it was an ancestry knowledge base page that I'd had open for months, except it wasn't text-only like I'd thought - at the foot of the page, after dozens of paragraphs, it had a syndicated ad strip.

LeifCarrotson 5y ago

> Climate policy is essential to the engineering work of decarbonization, as it can make the costs of new energy technologies plummet and shift markets to low-carbon alternatives. People often underestimate how much human ingenuity can be unleashed when it’s propelled by market forces. Propelled by market forces and by policy forces. Policy can provide a temporary push to get technology over a hump of development costs and scale up, but it's a really hard social problem to maintain in the long term. The real challenge for engineers is to build an eco-friendly technology that's cheaper and more desirable than the alternative; in that state it can basically free-fall forever under the push of market forces. Why would you drive a gas guzzling, high-maintenance old car when a Tesla has lower lifetime costs? Why would you run a noisy, smelly generator outside your camper van when you could put silent solar panels on the roof? Why would an energy company burn coal when a wind farm puts out more energy for less money? When new tech is both more desirable for the end user and for the planet, that's when it really takes off. I think the fundamental question we need to ask is what technology could be developed that would lead to market forces pushing carbon sequestration. Even if forward-thinking governments work together to develop sequestration-pushing policies, amoral actors will be perpetually incentivized to defect. You can't win that fight forever. > Making 1 tonne of cement lime releases about 1 tonne of CO2. If all the CO2 emissions from cement manufacturing were captured and pumped underground at a cost of $80 per tonne, we estimate that a 50-pound bag (about 23 kg) of concrete mix, one component of which is cement, will cost about 42 cents more. Such a price change would not stop people from using concrete nor significantly add to building costs. But it will perpetually cost more than a bag from an unscrupulous manufacturer; the economic incentive is to reduce that amount. Also, a 50 lbs concrete bag only costs about $2.50, so $0.42 is still a significant fraction...and at non-homeowner usage rates of an 8-yard/32,000 lbs truck with a cost of about $1,200, that's a nontrivial price jump of $270. People will still use it, sure, but they're not going to be happy about it. Instead (or in addition), we need some kind of industrial-scale technology that makes people want to pull CO2 from the air and put it in the ground.

pksebben 5y ago

I am troubled by the inclusion of McKinsey consulting in the earlier work. IMO it throws a real wrench in the trustworthiness of the study, considering their track record. I feel like it's unsurprising that actual renewable price reductions outpaced predictions from a study that McKinsey participated in; their fiduciary incentives absolutely do not align with greater adoption of renewable tech.

rch 5y ago
While your skepticism is certainly warranted, some individuals at McKinsey are deeply committed to sustainability, and arguably their involvement with the firm provides opportunities to have real-world impact.
- pksebben 5y ago
  My familiarity with McKinsey is based on what I know about them via the Purdue Pharma "thing" and their involvement in Enron - I admit I am looking at this through a cardboard tube. I would like to know what you do about their commitment to sustainability. Do you have sources? Are you a source?
  - my_usernam3 5y ago
    McKinsey is HUGE. Like any of the major consulting firms, one department can be completely evil, while the other is saving the world; just depends on the client's needs. In a positive light there's tons of hype about ESG investing. With that in mind, many companies will hire McKinsey to construct reports that follow the trend. Example: https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/strategy-and-corporate-finance/our-insights/five-ways-that-esg-creates-value# https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/strategy-and-cor...
    - pksebben 5y ago
      This is a pretty good writeup. It's from a firm that's focused on messaging and image control, so perhaps to be taken with a grain of salt, but I like that they're pushing C-suite types to connect the dots between "good for all" and "good for investors". That said, I'm still a little leery, and here's why: Our system of incentives (that is, capitalism at large) is misaligned with properly resolving climate change. McKinsey's whole value proposition is that they will help your company achieve it's goals, whatever those goals may be. Even if working on climate change coincides with the direction of a company at some point in time, it's not the goal of the game. The goal of the game is "get more money", and that will be the thing that McKinsey should be focused on, as that is the product that they are selling: make your business more profitable. With this in mind, it feels .... odd, that they were the first choice for a climate study. There are plenty of NGOs, non-profits, and associated orgs whose primary mission is fixing climate change. Even if McKinsey is totally on the level here (which I'm personally undecided on), it feels a little like calling the plumber to fix a blown transformer. I suppose if I had to identify a singular, big reason that I'm leery, here, it's this: Renewables and other green tech is directly competitive with some of McKinsey's clients' goals. I make this assertion on the strength that they offer services to the oil & gas industries - as McKinsey does not publish their clients (another thing that garners my side-eye.)

thewarrior 5y ago

Lets go over the numbers shall we ? "Just build nuclear" - As per the post itself, we need to build 3 nuclear plants every day until 2050 to replace the entire grid with nuclear. Yeah not realistic. Carbon capture [0] 1. We take 5 billion cubic meters of Oil out of the ground 2. We emit 30 billion tons of CO2 3. We can only capture from big sources like power plants and industrial sources - Maybe about 40 % of Co2 can be captured 4. Half of the capturable CO2 is about 6 billion tons of gas 5. We will have to liquefy it so it has to go into the ground. 6. We have to shove 12 billion cubic meters of Co2 into the ground every year to sequester only half of the capturable CO2 however the scale of this is greater than the entire Oil industry that was created over 100 years and cost trillions in capital. 7. After this you're still only capturing a fraction of the carbon. You'll have to pay heavy taxes on everything you buy. 8. Who is going to live next to these billions of tons of C02 in the ground ? This will leak and kill people. Electric cars [1] 1. The global vehicle fleet is estimated at 1.4 billion vehicles travelling 28 trillion kilometers 2. Powering this is estimated to require an *additional* 17k Terawatt hours of carbon free power generation. The current global generation of electricity is 26k Terawatt hours. Phasing out fossil fuels from power generation entirely 3. The author estimates that we need to build 165k new power plants that are a mix of solar, wind, hydro and nuclear. This while most of the worlds existing infrastructure is crumbling. 4. We need 200k storage stations that can store 100 MWh to act as backup for solar / wind. This will need 90 million tonnes of batteries. 5. If you want to replace the Gas used for heating as well and go completely zero fossil fuel the estimate becomes - 6 million storage stations and 2 billion tonnes of batteries. 6. The entire known reserves of Nickel, Lithium, Cobalt are not enough to make these many batteries. We need another 7 Australian Lithium deposits. India and China continue to rapidly increase their emissions. Poorer nations cannot stop they are too poor to even begin. [0] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8SIjlZQf28I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8SIjlZQf28I - Vaclav Smil [1] - https://youtu.be/n_gvvj56rzw?t=2025 https://youtu.be/n_gvvj56rzw?t=2025

stnmtn 5y ago
This is incredible sobering. What can we do in the face of this?
- 5y ago

mbgerring 5y ago

There are a large and growing number of job openings working directly on climate change, and the time to get in is now. Trillions of dollars are going to change hands, and millions of person-hours of work are going to be performed, to transition the entire world off of burning fossil fuels. You can get a piece of it! My company, Genability, is hiring full-stack engineers[1] to work on digitizing energy pricing. Many other companies are also hiring to work on different areas of this problem space.[2] I quit working in digital media to work on climate change full time last year, and I can't recommend it enough. Join me! [1] - https://www.genability.com/careers/ https://www.genability.com/careers/ [2] - https://jobs.climatebase.org/jobs https://jobs.climatebase.org/jobs

doitLP 5y ago
Looks like the LinkedIn job links have expired.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- mbgerring 5y ago
  Fixed, applications via LinkedIn are closed but we're happy to take applications by email.

mips_avatar 5y ago

I think one way the FTC could really help companies monetize climate change initiatives is to give guidance on how to market improvements in products that save carbon. We recently had a big improvement in Windows bandwidth for updates in Windows 11, but it was extremely difficult to use our carbon estimates for marketing. We estimated that we saved about ~3-5k households worth of electricity, but there were concerns that the FTC wouldn't accept our calculations.

worik 5y ago

If McKinsey is to be taken seriously then the only way forward is to abolish capitalism. It is not what they want but of you pay any sort of attention then it is a prerequisite as it is the compulsion for consumption, that capitalists have, that is going to burn us all. But they are very wrong. Ever increasing consumption is not a prerequisite for a economy that is good to live in. We do not need to abolish capitalism, but we do need to control and regulate it. If we are going to avoid global ecological catastrophe then we will need to do some planning. Things that are cheapest in short and medium term will have to be abandoned for things that avert the disaster. Markets can not do that. It needs to be done locally for local conditions with a eye for global requirements. This requires people in politics to use their brains and it requires the people to support the politicians in what is going to become a difficult struggle with folks like those from McKinsey - people desperate to maintain their privilege, desperate to monotonically increase their consumption. In lucky places this will be done by the ballot box. In less lucky places mass NVDA (non-violent direct action). In the very unlucky places it will require arson. I have faith in humans. My favourite species. The vast mass of us will shut down these greed heads from the height of capitalism and bring them back down to Earth.

ncmncm 5y ago

Including "solar-radiation management" among sensible activities, and omitting essential gating technologies such as energy storage, taints the whole article. The howlers suggest that it is a "feel-good" piece, or a marketing exercise aimed at making certain tech approaches seem to have the established merits of solar and wind build-out. Solar-radiation management, in particular, is another name for geo-engineering. It would be a clear disaster if we ever came to depend on it, as any hiccup in performance would subject Earth to a sudden rollback of any benefit, a far worse outcome even than what we are experiencing. (This is as distinguished from, e.g., spreading olivine to absorb atmospheric CO2, or scattering iron dust on the deep ocean surface, where suddenly not doing it anymore would not set us back at all.) Hydrogen-powered aviation is a clear technical win in the longer term, but any money diverted to that from, e.g., energy storage would be a setback, just as would diverting money from solar and wind build-out in favor of nukes. Removing CO2 from the atmosphere seems to attack the problem squarely, but fully 10% of the increased heating comes from the remarkably small amount of sulfur hexafluoride, SF6, already released into the atmosphere. (SF6 is 25k times as good at trapping heat as CO2.) There is an industrial replacement for SF6 available now, and apparatus to extract as much as possible from existing equipment for disposal, but what is already in the air is there for many centuries, and it is still being added to. Similarly, if the existing stock of HFCs were vented, that would produce as much forcing as all the CO2 now in the atmosphere. (HFCs are >2k as good at trapping heat as CO2.) People have instructions to carefully extract HFCs from refrigeration systems being dismantled, but in many places those instructions are ignored. So, some substantial fraction of the HFCs will leak. A replacement for HFCs is in the pipeline, but not in full production yet. So, just bringing CO2 back to pre-industrial levels would not suffice, even without considering the now-reduced reflectivity at the north pole and increased CH4 emission (25x) from melting permafrost. We need more. Mirrors in space are a dangerous fantasy, as noted above. We can't get the SF6 out of the air. We can't get the HFCs out of the air. We can't remove enough CO2 from the air to compensate for those without causing a different sort of eco-catastrophe. As it is, it is everything we can do just to build out solar and wind power extraction systems, and, soon, storage for them. We will get electric-fired ammonia production going to fuel ships, and LH2 for aircraft, and carbon-neutral cement, and electric steel production, and get control of CO2 emissions. But we will need to discover something more.

virtualdom 5y ago

This IEEE article makes some questionable extrapolations in my opinion. First, they start with 2017's global primary energy consumption of 600 PJ, and then round it up (by 66%!) to 1000 PJ ("for simplicity"). Then, 1000 PJ is used as the baseline that we would need to replace with zero carbon sources, leading to scary-sounding propositions like "covering roughly 1.6 percent of the world’s land area with (solar) panels". But that's misleading. Up to two thirds of the primary energy we "consume" each year is wasted: it is used to pump, refine, distribute, combust, or otherwise perform work and/or create heat that is not directly needed or wanted for the desired "energy service", e.g. moving a vehicle or lighting a home. Electricity generated from fossil fuel combustion has an immediate primary energy loss of 40-70% due to the inefficiency of heat engines. Wind and solar power plants do not. For example, if a solar plant produces 1GWh of electricity in a day, the full 1GWh is considered "primary energy production", while a natural gas plant that produced 1GWh of electricity in a day may have consumed 2-3GWh of natural gas "primary energy" in order to do so. Similarly, electric vehicles are much more efficient than combustion engine vehicles at converting "intermediate energy" into useful work (a charged battery or refined gasoline into motion). Heat pumps are often more efficient at heating spaces and water than burning gas. So, if we are able to generate most of our electricity from renewable sources, and electrify all ground transport, space/water heating, and many industrial processes, our primary energy use will be significantly lower in the future than it is today! That's not to say there aren't major technical and political challenges ahead to mitigating climate change, but oversimplifications that make the problem seem harder to overcome are of limited usefulness. Further reading: IEA underreports contribution solar and wind by a factor of three compared to fossil fuels http://energypost.eu/iea-underreports-contribution-solar-wind-factor-three-compared-fossil-fuels http://energypost.eu/iea-underreports-contribution-solar-win... Energy flow charts: https://flowcharts.llnl.gov/commodities/energy https://flowcharts.llnl.gov/commodities/energy

quasisphere 5y ago

I think one aspect of climate engineering that I don't see discussed very much is who is allowed to do that: Is a single country permitted to make decisions that affect the whole globe? Who decides how hot/cold the earth should be? Just as an example, some African countries could decide that in fact they would like to make the climate even colder than it used to be, which on the other hand would negatively impact agriculture away from equator. I think these questions form a big potential source of global power struggle and conflict.

Glench 5y ago

This is a terrible and misinformed article. We don't have to rely on nascent carbon storage or "deflecting some incoming sunlight to reduce heating of the atmosphere". We mainly have to electrify everything as fast as possible. With the right financing, this will actually save everyone money because of the inherit efficiency of electric machinery. It's explained here: https://www.rewiringamerica.org/ https://www.rewiringamerica.org/

virtualdom 5y ago
You're right. There are two major errors in just this one paragraph from the article: "Worldwide, humans use roughly one zettajoule per year. Satisfying that demand without further contributing to climate change means we’ll have to drastically speed up deployment of zero-carbon energy sources. Providing 1 ZJ per year with only solar PV, for example, would require covering roughly 1.6 percent of the world’s land area with panels." Actually, humans used 162,494 TWh of primary energy in 2017, which is 585 petajoules (PJ). The authors admit to rounding up from roughly 600 PJ to 1000 PJ "for simplicity" later in the article. Rounding up by 66% is hardly appropriate for a back-of-napkin calculation, much less in a published article on a very serious topic. Then, the authors imply that replacing all primary energy with solar power would require the same amount of primary energy. This is not true. If we were able to electrify all of humanities energy needs, we would only need 1/3 as much primary energy as we use today, since today's primary energy is mainly served by extremely inefficient fossil fuel combustion (coal and gas in power plants, petroleum for transport). 600 PJ is a reasonable estimate for primary energy use in 2021, so we would only need to build 200 PJ of solar power to replace fossil fuel combustion. The article called for 1000 PJ of solar, while reality is closer to 200 PJ. They were off by a factor of 5! Obviously, this paragraph was an over-simplification and was meant as a thought experiment. But the sloppy rounding error and the lack of acknowledgment of the primary energy differences between solar power and fossil fuel combustion call into question how deeply the authors really understand the problem of climate change, and the solutions we have available.