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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

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.
        pope_meat 5y ago
        I'm arguing that anyone who is fit for politics is by definition already a bad person, and any good person that goes in to politics either gets out accomplishing nothing after a short time, or turning in to a ghoul by staying inside. You can't make deals with the devil and keep your soul.
        toomuchtodo 5y ago
        Good people exist who can and do serve governance tours of duty, without the need to be or turning into sociopaths. We fundamentally disagree it seems, although I appreciate the dialog. I hope we can agree we should do the best we can with what we have where we are.
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
- lisper 5y ago
  And then people need to vote for them. Here is an organization trying to make that happen: https://314action.org/ https://314action.org/
- skipants 5y ago
  Does your average person want to vote for an engineer?
  - ryder9 5y ago
    also being an engineer doesn't make one good at policy decisions, diplomacy, and politicking shit, a lot of software engineers i know have barely passable people skills
- ant6n 5y ago
  > Engineers need to run for office. Like a certain Angela Merkel, who has a doctorate in quantum chemistry, but has been mostly sitting on the climate change problem as Germany's chancellor for the last 16 years.
- shadilay 5y ago
  Interestingly Communist China is a political system dominated by engineers. It seems that engineers in government have a negative effect on climate change if anything. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-09-23/bankers-gain-over-engineers-as-china-s-xi-promotes-future-leader https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-09-23/bankers-g...
- dimitrios1 5y ago
  I don't mean this in a derogatory fashion, I've enjoyed working with most all my coworkers, and I am speaking in generalities here relative to the overall population, engineers tend to be more anti-social and more out of touch of what the needs are for the general population, and even more so for underserved and minority populations, which would make them terrible choices for political positions. They are excellent choices, however, for implementation teams. The real answer is we need more higher level engineers in gov IT.
  - tcmart14 5y ago
    Or politicians who seek advise and counsel from engineers. And then balance out the cost-benefit analysis.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- splistud 5y ago
  Because engineers are fantastic at figuring out how to devise a procedural plan that will work and get the critical amount of buyin. And they rock at figuring out how to pay for it. Look, engineers are tools (and don't get mad SEs, you aren't really engineers in the first place so this hardly applies to you). They are not leaders as a class, and shouldn't be running for office.
xrisk 5y ago
population growth is a dog whistle, that particular factor is directly correlated to human development which is what we need to tackle. besides, we have enough resources for reasonable usage even with growing populations.
- lucideer 5y ago
  > population growth is a dog whistle, that particular factor is directly correlated to human development which is what we need to tackle Pretty sure that's what the gp was referring to. It's not a dog whistle if that's your understanding of it.
- bluescrn 5y ago
  Nah, we need to break the population taboo to escape from the pyramid scheme of 'the economy demands endless growth on a finite planet' No idea how we do that. Tearing down capitalism without a clear plan could kill almost as many as climate change itself (We're starting to wake up to just how fragile our modern 'life support system' of global supply chains is - we really don't want to find out how it handles massive revolutions or widespread war!) But it's pretty clear that for every child not born (especially in the most wealthy and wasteful parts of the world), that's a whole lot of energy not used, miles not travelled, and meat not eaten. And if if you expect the next century to be really grim as we feel the full force of uncontrolled climate change, then do you really want to bring kids into the world?
  - meristohm 5y ago
    Suffering is a part of life. I helped bring one child into the world, and one is enough. We’ll help them towards autonomy and emotional maturity (a far better indicator of adulthood than advertisers of luxuries would have us believe). I’d like to make more space for other life on earth for a more robust, resilient ecosystem. I’m not hung up on my genetics carrying on forever, but I do like the idea of human life carrying on awhile, passing down stories over the next several millennia. What might it feel like to communicate with and learn from dolphins, whales, elephants, ravens, … fungi, trees? We may not need any technology for that; a culture shift might be enough.
nightski 5y ago
Politically I don't think any significant action will be taken fast enough or even at all. Even if one country does take significant action, there is no way the entire world is going to get on board unless there is strong financial incentive. Instead our only hope is an engineered solution - which might not even be reversing it at this point but more how to survive and thrive in a different world.
- karpierz 5y ago
  Your efficiency gains will just get eaten up by Jevon's Paradox[1] unless accompanied by a political solution. 1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
  - jeff303 5y ago
    Perhaps parent commenter is referring to carbon capture or something similar?
  - Robotbeat 5y ago
    Jevons paradox isn’t a physical law. It’s an observation. If your technical solution involves making coal or oil more valuable by increasing the amount of work it can do (or reducing the cost to extract it), that is Jevons Paradox. If it’s wholesale replacing it with something else, then Jevons Paradox need not apply.
  - epistasis 5y ago
    It's really clear that Jevon's paradox does not currently apply to decarbonizatiom and increased energy availability. As our GDP is rising, energy usage is going down. Our efficiency is increasing, with better gas mileage, more efficient lighting, etc, and total energy use is going down. There are some areas where Jevons paradox applies, but it's where the majority of use of something is gated by cost. Most of our energy consumption is not limited by that these days, in that most people aren't keeping the house colder at winter than they'd like it to save money, or driving less than they'd like because of gas costs. Where Jevons paradox causes lots of problems is with road building. Because by changing the fundamental geography, you're changing the demand side of the equation a ton.
Spinnaker_ 5y ago
I can't imagine that there will ever be a political solution. Let's say that 100 years from now we have solved climate change. What will history show? I doubt that the western powers plus China, India, Nigeria, Congo, Pakistan, etc all came together to successfully agree upon and implement a plan. That's what a political solution would require and I don't understand why anyone thinks it would ever happen. Instead, I bet we will look back and see a few revolutionary tech breakthroughs which, with some government backing, provided most of the solution.
beiller 5y ago
How is population growth a direct cause of climate change? Sure it may be very loosely correlated. But why even mention it? Further more the population is in decline in almost all developed countries is it not? If it really is political it's crap like this that will be first on the "things to do" list purely for votes and accomplishing nothing (except destroying people's lives).
- sitkack 5y ago
  > How is population growth a direct cause of climate change The carbon emitted is from human activity. More humans, more activity, more carbon.
  - Pyramus 5y ago
    Exactly, and the scary thing is not only do we emit more carbon every year, the rate of emission is also increasing, i.e. we are still on an exponential growth curve.
- nojokes 5y ago
  The population has grown 4 times everywhere but in Europe and US since 1950 and it keeps growing. The problems with the land and resource use would be much smaller if the population had stayed more or less constant everywhere. I am also certain that people would have been better of everywhere when the resources of the families would not have been put into bettering the well being of the households instead of maintaining the army of children. This problem is political and is governed by religious powers and cultural inertia.
mysticlabs 5y ago
You still think carbon has anything to do with climate change? Hint: You’re made of carbon. Everything around you is made of carbon. The correlation between carbon and the weather is political propaganda, not sound or justified science. Do you want to know what actually controls the weather? Look up. The sun and it’s various cycles control most weather on earth. Pollution and the climate are not the same thing. Climate is controlled by the sun. Do we need to reduce pollution? Yes. Does carbon have anything to do with the weather? Not really. That’s politics and propaganda. The whole carbon foot print concept is about taxation, control, and politics, not science.
- ngrilly 5y ago
  Please go troll somewhere else: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_consensus_on_climate_change https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_consensus_on_climat...
  - mysticlabs 5y ago
    You do realize anyone can edit Wikipedia, and its basically controlled by a bunch of Google executives? They’re not an accurate source of information for anything, let alone anything even remotely political. The sun dictates the weather, and always has. $cientists don’t understand how plasma physics work, and don’t include climate forcing in their predictive models. The underlying theories for how climate change works are not based in reality, they’re cherry picking data and using models that purposely exclude factors like the sun. This is basically like trying to explain to someone the earth is round 5,000 years ago when the “scientific consensus” at the time was the earth was flat. People who believe carbon controls the weather are basically equivalent to flat earthers parroting political propaganda. It’s like malware that was installed in their brain in childhood that gets activated any time anyone suggests looking into the actual science. Go research climate forcing. It’s how the weather actually works.
thescriptkiddie 5y ago
This is a pattern I've been noticing a lot lately. It is very tempting for an engineer who sees a problem to assume it is a technical problem, because then it has an engineering solution. Unfortunately most of the biggest problems are not technical problems, they are political problems for which there are only political solutions. It is extremely frustrating for an engineer - someone who solves problems for a living - to be confronted with a problem they are powerless to address, especially if the solution is "obvious". The classic example of this how people are constantly trying to come up with revolutionary new public transportation systems [0], which inevitably turn out to be suspiciously similar to a train, only worse. They see the failures of public transportation in the US and assume it must be because there is some problem with the technology. But technology is never the problem, politics is. [0] http://www.cat-bus.com/2017/12/gadgetbahn/ http://www.cat-bus.com/2017/12/gadgetbahn/
- kanzure 5y ago
  You could just as easily say the opposite though? It's a pattern I've been noticing a lot lately. It is very tempting for a person who sees a problem to assume it is a political problem, because then it has a political solution. Unfortunately most of the biggest problems are not political problems, they are engineering problems for which there are only engineering solutions. Geoengineering is not off the table. Reducing or blocking total sunlight by 1% can have dramatic changes to any global warming. Other techniques also exist. I think people seriously underestimate what engineering can accomplish. They also over-estimate what politics can accomplish.... The climate change deals we were talking about were hundreds of billions of dollars, which can buy quite a lot of R&D. Besides, if we have any chance of surviving as a multi-planetary species for billions of years, we need to know how to do terraforming.
  - tcmart14 5y ago
    I agree. Ill extend this. Climate change is an engineering problem, especially when time constraints are not considered. However, if we want to work at a fast rate to reduce climate change, it is certainly a political problem. That is just because the wheels of invention and innovation take time. It is an engineering problem, but because of quick demand for reducing carbon emissions, it is a political problem.
fogihujy 5y ago
Let's just state it plainly: unless there's a major change of priorities amongst the populace of Western countries, a political solution in the West is either going to be very slow, or it will have to include undemocratic methods. The developing world won't have resources to do much and most of the totalitarian regimes won't care until it's too late. Magic bullets are more likely than political solutions.
Robotbeat 5y ago
It only becomes politically viable if the engineering (and therefore monetarily, etc) viable. “Vasectomies for everyone, and you have to wear a hair shirt and abandon your house to live with 20 other people in an area dense enough for you to walk to your job, which is harvesting potatoes from an urban organic farm fertilized with human feces” is one possible solution to stopping climate change, but it isn’t politically viable. “Your truck is electric now, and your electricity comes from wind, nuclear, and solar power, including on the roof of your existing home. You travel via High Speed Rail or electric airplane. Steel is made using hydrogen. You use cutting edge low-latency satellite Internet to telecommute. We figured out how to reduce emissions of cattle using seaweed supplements.” …is politically viable. So engineering is necessary for the amount of feasible political capital we have to be spent on climate action. Engineering is essential to enabling political action.
- hpkuarg 5y ago
  Exactly. Without engineering better technology, the only real solution to climate change is that everyone goes back to pre-Industrial Revolution living standards.
  - splistud 5y ago
    Well, not everyone. Only those who live through the implementation phase. Probably only a small minority will have to go back to pre-Industrial Revolution living standards.
- oconnore 5y ago
  I think a major issue is that the viability of solutions is compared on a short term cost basis that ignores externalities. As an example: on a very short term basis, it is easier and cheaper to pile your trash in your basement, or to not brush your teeth. The value of those things only becomes very apparent after a day or more. On a short term basis, fossil fuel based solutions are really great, flexible, stable, and cheap. We have to do something different despite that, because that short term basis doesn't tell the full story.
- tinco 5y ago
epistasis 5y ago
These are neither the engineering nor political problems at the core of climate change, however. The biggest, at least in the US, is land use and allowing housing to be built close to jobs, in multi-use zoning, that allows people to go about their day without a car. That's the political third rail that even environmentalists fear to touch. Suburbia is unsustainable and we must allow more urbanization, and that will make all the rest of the challenges far easier than even stopping population growth. Because urbanized populations consume far less resources, need far less carbon even with current technologies. And it will make the transition to renewables much easier. Meat is an order of magnitude less impact than our bad land use, at least in the US. And nuclear is a lost cause. Even if we double our construction rate every year, it's not going to catch the tail of storage, solar, and wind in the time span we need to shift off carbon. And our current nuclear fleet is aged and ready to be decommissioned, even replacing our current nuclear fleet would require huge growth in an industry that doesn't know how to complete projects, much less scale and get cheaper. This is not a political problem, it's an industry problem. Population growth, similarly, isn't much related to our immediate climate action. We need static change in the next two decades, and telling everybody that there are no more kids entering the workforce in order to actually execute this transition would be disastrous. Say no more children are born for the next 20 years, and population drops, I don't know, 20%. I don't see that she distribution being set up to tackle the future challenges of the world. Population growth is already peaking, and the best thing to accelerate that is to industrialize the high population growth countries with green industries, and urbanize their populations.
- chickenpotpie 5y ago
  Gonna need a citation on that one. Commuting doesn’t hold a candle in CO2 production compared to industrial manufacturing and agriculture
  - epistasis 5y ago
    I'm mainly focused on California, with a bit of a look at the US. Transportation is the biggest single sector source of emissions, and completely dwarfs agriculture: CA (41% of emissions): https://ww2.arb.ca.gov/ghg-inventory-data https://ww2.arb.ca.gov/ghg-inventory-data US (29% of emissions, PDF page 3): https://www.epa.gov/sites/production/files/2021-04/documents/us-ghg-inventory-1990-2019-data-highlights.pdf https://www.epa.gov/sites/production/files/2021-04/documents... Industry is a big emitter as wel, but it also dwarfs agriculture. And since California is such a major agricultural exporter, it's not like it's offloading their agriculture emissions. When I see people talking about meat as a big contributor to emissions, I assume that they are trying to drive a political wedge to stop any climate action. Not eating meat has a small effect for the climate, but causes absolutely massive political and cultural backlash. And it's quite likely that we will become carbon negative by 205-2060 without decreasing meat consumption.
programmarchy 5y ago
Here's another worldview: Politics is downstream from technology. Politicians are followers, not leaders.
Proven 5y ago
> Climate Change is first and foremost a political problem. It's not a problem at all.
Robotbeat 5y ago
Another issue to go with my previous comment on this thread: when people (I’m not saying you) claim climate change is primarily a “political problem,” they’re often assuming a different political /system/ would solve it, including that socialism would solve the problem and (say) nationalizing the oil industry would help. I just don’t see this being the case. We HAVE examples where the oil industry is nationalized by a socialist government. Think Venezuela or the Soviet Union. In Venezuela, for instance, gasoline was/is DEEPLY subsidized for the consumer as a sort of social support. Nationalized industries end up wanting to stick around and in some ways are more prevented from disappearing than they would be with cutthroat capitalism. If abolishing capitalism has any strong effect on climate action, empirically the only way it has helped historically is by impoverishing people. I don’t think this is what people are going for when they say we have to abolish capitalism in order to solve climate change! Or from a more positive perspective: There are good reasons to hold back excesses of capitalism and establish more social support, but to the degree it allows more people to live richer lives, that might actually make climate change WORSE. What we need is the technology to make climate action politically feasible, ie without making people materially poorer. We need climate change to be solved the same way ozone depletion was: ultimately by just swapping out something harmful for something with much less harm, but with the same overall capabilities.
- spaced-out 5y ago
  >What we need is the technology to make climate action politically feasible, ie without making people materially poorer. What if this isn't physically possible?
  - Robotbeat 5y ago
    There is no law of physics which says it’s impossible. But if you have discovered one with solid and falsifiable evidence, it would be a breakthrough in physics! But I wouldn’t book a trip to Sweden for a Nobel Prize just yet. Over 100 Petawatts of sunlight hits the Earth, which is a factor of 10,000 more than we’d need. And humanity already gathers and economically utilizes some solar energy beyond the Earth.
jcims 5y ago
I wonder if there are any lessons to be learned from how acid rain and holes in the ozone were ultimately treated. There was definitely more signal in the empirical evidence of a problem, but those have been largely mitigated through regulation (and spending my summers doing HVAC work in the 80's and 90's, through some painful steps).
amelius 5y ago
> Climate Change is first and foremost a political problem. Politics can't deal with long-term non-greedy policies. Therefore, it's not a political problem.
carbonguy 5y ago
> But people are hoping Engineers find magic bullets so that our leaders don't have to take drastic action. And engineers are hoping that politicians will just adopt their ideas without further work on the part of the engineers. Who's being more unreasonable in this situation, do you think? This whole thread is riven with the attitude, sometimes more explicit and sometimes less, that in effect the engineering work to stop climate change is pointless: we have the tools, but that implacable demon Political Viability has condemned, and will always condemn our good works to eternal obscurity - as though the responsibility of the engineer ends when the tool is designed! Which, to be fair, might be the case: the role of the engineer is to express the forms of nature and human craft in ever-more-useful ways. But as humans in a human culture, faced with the grim realities of climate change, can we really say that our responsibility ends with tool-making? Or do we have the additional responsibility to work to see those tools actually used for the common good?
ttiurani 5y ago
Indeed this is not an engineering problem. The most frustrating part of this all is that we are still mostly only talking about climate change, when our ecological disaster is that we have simultaneously crossed or are soon crossing most planetary boundaries (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetary_boundaries https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetary_boundaries) at the same time. Looking at only CO2 levels makes the solution seem technical: just start using better tech. Or worse: placing hope on geoengineering which is only about alleviating one boundary at the expense of most of the others. But if you look at the facts that we have been for many decades exploiting nature faster than nature can regenerate, and that all economic growth has come hand in hand with more environmental stress, the root problem and the only solution becomes pretty obvious: heavy global tax to all nature exploitation and after that inevitably halts most economic growth, a redistribution of wealth and social restructuring. We have no hope to have a livable planet the next century unless us westerners learn to not want more stuff, but learn to live with much, much less.
- agumonkey 5y ago
  One thing though, most material we need has been extracted already. New cars using old steel doesn't require more stress on the biosphere for metal.
  - ttiurani 5y ago
    Engineering can indeed be useful to increase re- and upcycling in the future. But given that recycling rate is at the moment for most materials miniscule, and our economic system can only work with global exponential growth, it alone can't be the solution – it's only valuable combined with also stopping growth in rich countries.
agumonkey 5y ago
Anybody managed to create or organize a group of people proactively changing their lives (energy use reduction, waste reduction, more reuse etc). If so how difficult would be to spread it a bit. I strongly believe that if you make just enough of these simple apolitical day to day groups, it will flip the rest due to follower effect
pelasaco 5y ago
I disagree. Climate Change is first and foremost an economical problem. Our society developed our economy model around reducing costs in the production to maximize our profit. The Climate change doesn't play a role in that model. Creating rules and policies, just forces the Economy model to find a way to hack through them (sending production to different countries, planting trees somewhere else, etc)

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.
      - pope_meat 5y ago
        I'm arguing that anyone who is fit for politics is by definition already a bad person, and any good person that goes in to politics either gets out accomplishing nothing after a short time, or turning in to a ghoul by staying inside. You can't make deals with the devil and keep your soul.
        toomuchtodo 5y ago
        Good people exist who can and do serve governance tours of duty, without the need to be or turning into sociopaths. We fundamentally disagree it seems, although I appreciate the dialog. I hope we can agree we should do the best we can with what we have where we are.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
lisper 5y ago
And then people need to vote for them. Here is an organization trying to make that happen: https://314action.org/ https://314action.org/
skipants 5y ago
Does your average person want to vote for an engineer?
- ryder9 5y ago
  also being an engineer doesn't make one good at policy decisions, diplomacy, and politicking shit, a lot of software engineers i know have barely passable people skills
ant6n 5y ago
> Engineers need to run for office. Like a certain Angela Merkel, who has a doctorate in quantum chemistry, but has been mostly sitting on the climate change problem as Germany's chancellor for the last 16 years.
shadilay 5y ago
Interestingly Communist China is a political system dominated by engineers. It seems that engineers in government have a negative effect on climate change if anything. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-09-23/bankers-gain-over-engineers-as-china-s-xi-promotes-future-leader https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-09-23/bankers-g...
dimitrios1 5y ago
I don't mean this in a derogatory fashion, I've enjoyed working with most all my coworkers, and I am speaking in generalities here relative to the overall population, engineers tend to be more anti-social and more out of touch of what the needs are for the general population, and even more so for underserved and minority populations, which would make them terrible choices for political positions. They are excellent choices, however, for implementation teams. The real answer is we need more higher level engineers in gov IT.
- tcmart14 5y ago
  Or politicians who seek advise and counsel from engineers. And then balance out the cost-benefit analysis.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
splistud 5y ago
Because engineers are fantastic at figuring out how to devise a procedural plan that will work and get the critical amount of buyin. And they rock at figuring out how to pay for it. Look, engineers are tools (and don't get mad SEs, you aren't really engineers in the first place so this hardly applies to you). They are not leaders as a class, and shouldn't be running for office.

xrisk 5y ago

population growth is a dog whistle, that particular factor is directly correlated to human development which is what we need to tackle. besides, we have enough resources for reasonable usage even with growing populations.

lucideer 5y ago
> population growth is a dog whistle, that particular factor is directly correlated to human development which is what we need to tackle Pretty sure that's what the gp was referring to. It's not a dog whistle if that's your understanding of it.
bluescrn 5y ago
Nah, we need to break the population taboo to escape from the pyramid scheme of 'the economy demands endless growth on a finite planet' No idea how we do that. Tearing down capitalism without a clear plan could kill almost as many as climate change itself (We're starting to wake up to just how fragile our modern 'life support system' of global supply chains is - we really don't want to find out how it handles massive revolutions or widespread war!) But it's pretty clear that for every child not born (especially in the most wealthy and wasteful parts of the world), that's a whole lot of energy not used, miles not travelled, and meat not eaten. And if if you expect the next century to be really grim as we feel the full force of uncontrolled climate change, then do you really want to bring kids into the world?
- meristohm 5y ago
  Suffering is a part of life. I helped bring one child into the world, and one is enough. We’ll help them towards autonomy and emotional maturity (a far better indicator of adulthood than advertisers of luxuries would have us believe). I’d like to make more space for other life on earth for a more robust, resilient ecosystem. I’m not hung up on my genetics carrying on forever, but I do like the idea of human life carrying on awhile, passing down stories over the next several millennia. What might it feel like to communicate with and learn from dolphins, whales, elephants, ravens, … fungi, trees? We may not need any technology for that; a culture shift might be enough.

nightski 5y ago

Politically I don't think any significant action will be taken fast enough or even at all. Even if one country does take significant action, there is no way the entire world is going to get on board unless there is strong financial incentive. Instead our only hope is an engineered solution - which might not even be reversing it at this point but more how to survive and thrive in a different world.

karpierz 5y ago
Your efficiency gains will just get eaten up by Jevon's Paradox[1] unless accompanied by a political solution. 1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
- jeff303 5y ago
  Perhaps parent commenter is referring to carbon capture or something similar?
- Robotbeat 5y ago
  Jevons paradox isn’t a physical law. It’s an observation. If your technical solution involves making coal or oil more valuable by increasing the amount of work it can do (or reducing the cost to extract it), that is Jevons Paradox. If it’s wholesale replacing it with something else, then Jevons Paradox need not apply.
- epistasis 5y ago
  It's really clear that Jevon's paradox does not currently apply to decarbonizatiom and increased energy availability. As our GDP is rising, energy usage is going down. Our efficiency is increasing, with better gas mileage, more efficient lighting, etc, and total energy use is going down. There are some areas where Jevons paradox applies, but it's where the majority of use of something is gated by cost. Most of our energy consumption is not limited by that these days, in that most people aren't keeping the house colder at winter than they'd like it to save money, or driving less than they'd like because of gas costs. Where Jevons paradox causes lots of problems is with road building. Because by changing the fundamental geography, you're changing the demand side of the equation a ton.

Spinnaker_ 5y ago

I can't imagine that there will ever be a political solution. Let's say that 100 years from now we have solved climate change. What will history show? I doubt that the western powers plus China, India, Nigeria, Congo, Pakistan, etc all came together to successfully agree upon and implement a plan. That's what a political solution would require and I don't understand why anyone thinks it would ever happen. Instead, I bet we will look back and see a few revolutionary tech breakthroughs which, with some government backing, provided most of the solution.

beiller 5y ago

How is population growth a direct cause of climate change? Sure it may be very loosely correlated. But why even mention it? Further more the population is in decline in almost all developed countries is it not? If it really is political it's crap like this that will be first on the "things to do" list purely for votes and accomplishing nothing (except destroying people's lives).

sitkack 5y ago
> How is population growth a direct cause of climate change The carbon emitted is from human activity. More humans, more activity, more carbon.
- Pyramus 5y ago
  Exactly, and the scary thing is not only do we emit more carbon every year, the rate of emission is also increasing, i.e. we are still on an exponential growth curve.
nojokes 5y ago
The population has grown 4 times everywhere but in Europe and US since 1950 and it keeps growing. The problems with the land and resource use would be much smaller if the population had stayed more or less constant everywhere. I am also certain that people would have been better of everywhere when the resources of the families would not have been put into bettering the well being of the households instead of maintaining the army of children. This problem is political and is governed by religious powers and cultural inertia.

mysticlabs 5y ago

You still think carbon has anything to do with climate change? Hint: You’re made of carbon. Everything around you is made of carbon. The correlation between carbon and the weather is political propaganda, not sound or justified science. Do you want to know what actually controls the weather? Look up. The sun and it’s various cycles control most weather on earth. Pollution and the climate are not the same thing. Climate is controlled by the sun. Do we need to reduce pollution? Yes. Does carbon have anything to do with the weather? Not really. That’s politics and propaganda. The whole carbon foot print concept is about taxation, control, and politics, not science.

ngrilly 5y ago
Please go troll somewhere else: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_consensus_on_climate_change https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_consensus_on_climat...
- mysticlabs 5y ago
  You do realize anyone can edit Wikipedia, and its basically controlled by a bunch of Google executives? They’re not an accurate source of information for anything, let alone anything even remotely political. The sun dictates the weather, and always has. $cientists don’t understand how plasma physics work, and don’t include climate forcing in their predictive models. The underlying theories for how climate change works are not based in reality, they’re cherry picking data and using models that purposely exclude factors like the sun. This is basically like trying to explain to someone the earth is round 5,000 years ago when the “scientific consensus” at the time was the earth was flat. People who believe carbon controls the weather are basically equivalent to flat earthers parroting political propaganda. It’s like malware that was installed in their brain in childhood that gets activated any time anyone suggests looking into the actual science. Go research climate forcing. It’s how the weather actually works.

thescriptkiddie 5y ago

This is a pattern I've been noticing a lot lately. It is very tempting for an engineer who sees a problem to assume it is a technical problem, because then it has an engineering solution. Unfortunately most of the biggest problems are not technical problems, they are political problems for which there are only political solutions. It is extremely frustrating for an engineer - someone who solves problems for a living - to be confronted with a problem they are powerless to address, especially if the solution is "obvious". The classic example of this how people are constantly trying to come up with revolutionary new public transportation systems [0], which inevitably turn out to be suspiciously similar to a train, only worse. They see the failures of public transportation in the US and assume it must be because there is some problem with the technology. But technology is never the problem, politics is. [0] http://www.cat-bus.com/2017/12/gadgetbahn/ http://www.cat-bus.com/2017/12/gadgetbahn/

kanzure 5y ago
You could just as easily say the opposite though? It's a pattern I've been noticing a lot lately. It is very tempting for a person who sees a problem to assume it is a political problem, because then it has a political solution. Unfortunately most of the biggest problems are not political problems, they are engineering problems for which there are only engineering solutions. Geoengineering is not off the table. Reducing or blocking total sunlight by 1% can have dramatic changes to any global warming. Other techniques also exist. I think people seriously underestimate what engineering can accomplish. They also over-estimate what politics can accomplish.... The climate change deals we were talking about were hundreds of billions of dollars, which can buy quite a lot of R&D. Besides, if we have any chance of surviving as a multi-planetary species for billions of years, we need to know how to do terraforming.
- tcmart14 5y ago
  I agree. Ill extend this. Climate change is an engineering problem, especially when time constraints are not considered. However, if we want to work at a fast rate to reduce climate change, it is certainly a political problem. That is just because the wheels of invention and innovation take time. It is an engineering problem, but because of quick demand for reducing carbon emissions, it is a political problem.

fogihujy 5y ago

Let's just state it plainly: unless there's a major change of priorities amongst the populace of Western countries, a political solution in the West is either going to be very slow, or it will have to include undemocratic methods. The developing world won't have resources to do much and most of the totalitarian regimes won't care until it's too late. Magic bullets are more likely than political solutions.

Robotbeat 5y ago

It only becomes politically viable if the engineering (and therefore monetarily, etc) viable. “Vasectomies for everyone, and you have to wear a hair shirt and abandon your house to live with 20 other people in an area dense enough for you to walk to your job, which is harvesting potatoes from an urban organic farm fertilized with human feces” is one possible solution to stopping climate change, but it isn’t politically viable. “Your truck is electric now, and your electricity comes from wind, nuclear, and solar power, including on the roof of your existing home. You travel via High Speed Rail or electric airplane. Steel is made using hydrogen. You use cutting edge low-latency satellite Internet to telecommute. We figured out how to reduce emissions of cattle using seaweed supplements.” …is politically viable. So engineering is necessary for the amount of feasible political capital we have to be spent on climate action. Engineering is essential to enabling political action.

hpkuarg 5y ago
Exactly. Without engineering better technology, the only real solution to climate change is that everyone goes back to pre-Industrial Revolution living standards.
- splistud 5y ago
  Well, not everyone. Only those who live through the implementation phase. Probably only a small minority will have to go back to pre-Industrial Revolution living standards.
oconnore 5y ago
I think a major issue is that the viability of solutions is compared on a short term cost basis that ignores externalities. As an example: on a very short term basis, it is easier and cheaper to pile your trash in your basement, or to not brush your teeth. The value of those things only becomes very apparent after a day or more. On a short term basis, fossil fuel based solutions are really great, flexible, stable, and cheap. We have to do something different despite that, because that short term basis doesn't tell the full story.
tinco 5y ago

epistasis 5y ago

These are neither the engineering nor political problems at the core of climate change, however. The biggest, at least in the US, is land use and allowing housing to be built close to jobs, in multi-use zoning, that allows people to go about their day without a car. That's the political third rail that even environmentalists fear to touch. Suburbia is unsustainable and we must allow more urbanization, and that will make all the rest of the challenges far easier than even stopping population growth. Because urbanized populations consume far less resources, need far less carbon even with current technologies. And it will make the transition to renewables much easier. Meat is an order of magnitude less impact than our bad land use, at least in the US. And nuclear is a lost cause. Even if we double our construction rate every year, it's not going to catch the tail of storage, solar, and wind in the time span we need to shift off carbon. And our current nuclear fleet is aged and ready to be decommissioned, even replacing our current nuclear fleet would require huge growth in an industry that doesn't know how to complete projects, much less scale and get cheaper. This is not a political problem, it's an industry problem. Population growth, similarly, isn't much related to our immediate climate action. We need static change in the next two decades, and telling everybody that there are no more kids entering the workforce in order to actually execute this transition would be disastrous. Say no more children are born for the next 20 years, and population drops, I don't know, 20%. I don't see that she distribution being set up to tackle the future challenges of the world. Population growth is already peaking, and the best thing to accelerate that is to industrialize the high population growth countries with green industries, and urbanize their populations.

chickenpotpie 5y ago
Gonna need a citation on that one. Commuting doesn’t hold a candle in CO2 production compared to industrial manufacturing and agriculture
- epistasis 5y ago
  I'm mainly focused on California, with a bit of a look at the US. Transportation is the biggest single sector source of emissions, and completely dwarfs agriculture: CA (41% of emissions): https://ww2.arb.ca.gov/ghg-inventory-data https://ww2.arb.ca.gov/ghg-inventory-data US (29% of emissions, PDF page 3): https://www.epa.gov/sites/production/files/2021-04/documents/us-ghg-inventory-1990-2019-data-highlights.pdf https://www.epa.gov/sites/production/files/2021-04/documents... Industry is a big emitter as wel, but it also dwarfs agriculture. And since California is such a major agricultural exporter, it's not like it's offloading their agriculture emissions. When I see people talking about meat as a big contributor to emissions, I assume that they are trying to drive a political wedge to stop any climate action. Not eating meat has a small effect for the climate, but causes absolutely massive political and cultural backlash. And it's quite likely that we will become carbon negative by 205-2060 without decreasing meat consumption.

programmarchy 5y ago

Here's another worldview: Politics is downstream from technology. Politicians are followers, not leaders.

Proven 5y ago

> Climate Change is first and foremost a political problem. It's not a problem at all.

Robotbeat 5y ago

Another issue to go with my previous comment on this thread: when people (I’m not saying you) claim climate change is primarily a “political problem,” they’re often assuming a different political /system/ would solve it, including that socialism would solve the problem and (say) nationalizing the oil industry would help. I just don’t see this being the case. We HAVE examples where the oil industry is nationalized by a socialist government. Think Venezuela or the Soviet Union. In Venezuela, for instance, gasoline was/is DEEPLY subsidized for the consumer as a sort of social support. Nationalized industries end up wanting to stick around and in some ways are more prevented from disappearing than they would be with cutthroat capitalism. If abolishing capitalism has any strong effect on climate action, empirically the only way it has helped historically is by impoverishing people. I don’t think this is what people are going for when they say we have to abolish capitalism in order to solve climate change! Or from a more positive perspective: There are good reasons to hold back excesses of capitalism and establish more social support, but to the degree it allows more people to live richer lives, that might actually make climate change WORSE. What we need is the technology to make climate action politically feasible, ie without making people materially poorer. We need climate change to be solved the same way ozone depletion was: ultimately by just swapping out something harmful for something with much less harm, but with the same overall capabilities.

spaced-out 5y ago
>What we need is the technology to make climate action politically feasible, ie without making people materially poorer. What if this isn't physically possible?
- Robotbeat 5y ago
  There is no law of physics which says it’s impossible. But if you have discovered one with solid and falsifiable evidence, it would be a breakthrough in physics! But I wouldn’t book a trip to Sweden for a Nobel Prize just yet. Over 100 Petawatts of sunlight hits the Earth, which is a factor of 10,000 more than we’d need. And humanity already gathers and economically utilizes some solar energy beyond the Earth.

jcims 5y ago

I wonder if there are any lessons to be learned from how acid rain and holes in the ozone were ultimately treated. There was definitely more signal in the empirical evidence of a problem, but those have been largely mitigated through regulation (and spending my summers doing HVAC work in the 80's and 90's, through some painful steps).

amelius 5y ago

> Climate Change is first and foremost a political problem. Politics can't deal with long-term non-greedy policies. Therefore, it's not a political problem.

carbonguy 5y ago

> But people are hoping Engineers find magic bullets so that our leaders don't have to take drastic action. And engineers are hoping that politicians will just adopt their ideas without further work on the part of the engineers. Who's being more unreasonable in this situation, do you think? This whole thread is riven with the attitude, sometimes more explicit and sometimes less, that in effect the engineering work to stop climate change is pointless: we have the tools, but that implacable demon Political Viability has condemned, and will always condemn our good works to eternal obscurity - as though the responsibility of the engineer ends when the tool is designed! Which, to be fair, might be the case: the role of the engineer is to express the forms of nature and human craft in ever-more-useful ways. But as humans in a human culture, faced with the grim realities of climate change, can we really say that our responsibility ends with tool-making? Or do we have the additional responsibility to work to see those tools actually used for the common good?

ttiurani 5y ago

Indeed this is not an engineering problem. The most frustrating part of this all is that we are still mostly only talking about climate change, when our ecological disaster is that we have simultaneously crossed or are soon crossing most planetary boundaries (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetary_boundaries https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetary_boundaries) at the same time. Looking at only CO2 levels makes the solution seem technical: just start using better tech. Or worse: placing hope on geoengineering which is only about alleviating one boundary at the expense of most of the others. But if you look at the facts that we have been for many decades exploiting nature faster than nature can regenerate, and that all economic growth has come hand in hand with more environmental stress, the root problem and the only solution becomes pretty obvious: heavy global tax to all nature exploitation and after that inevitably halts most economic growth, a redistribution of wealth and social restructuring. We have no hope to have a livable planet the next century unless us westerners learn to not want more stuff, but learn to live with much, much less.

agumonkey 5y ago
One thing though, most material we need has been extracted already. New cars using old steel doesn't require more stress on the biosphere for metal.
- ttiurani 5y ago
  Engineering can indeed be useful to increase re- and upcycling in the future. But given that recycling rate is at the moment for most materials miniscule, and our economic system can only work with global exponential growth, it alone can't be the solution – it's only valuable combined with also stopping growth in rich countries.

agumonkey 5y ago

Anybody managed to create or organize a group of people proactively changing their lives (energy use reduction, waste reduction, more reuse etc). If so how difficult would be to spread it a bit. I strongly believe that if you make just enough of these simple apolitical day to day groups, it will flip the rest due to follower effect

pelasaco 5y ago

I disagree. Climate Change is first and foremost an economical problem. Our society developed our economy model around reducing costs in the production to maximize our profit. The Climate change doesn't play a role in that model. Creating rules and policies, just forces the Economy model to find a way to hack through them (sending production to different countries, planting trees somewhere else, etc)