6 ms·

Exactly, but the engineering is already done. We already have nuclear power, we already have adequate meat substitutes, we have high efficiency wind mills, we h

by tinco 5y ago

Exactly, but the engineering is already done. We already have nuclear power, we already have adequate meat substitutes, we have high efficiency wind mills, we have high efficiency solar panels. We have high capacity batteries and high efficiency motors for our cars. There literally is no essential challenge left in engineering. Frankly, just nuclear power could have been enough to dodge this whole fiasco 50 years ago if it wasn't so much more expensive than oil. To demand even more from engineering is madness. To implement all of these things at the scale needed is politics, nothing else.

JTbane 5y ago
Agreed 100%: it's a basic economic problem- climate change is a classic tragedy of the commons scenario, largely caused by fossil fuels being too cheap, with easy-to-dismiss externalities. Only political intervention (carbon taxes, green subsidies) could cause a decline in use.
- epicureanideal 5y ago
  Except that carbon taxes that are only implemented in one country cause fossil fuel demand by that country to decline, which makes it even cheaper for countries without carbon taxes. I wonder if instead of a carbon tax, there should be a tax that funds a fossil fuel 1:N storage requirement. You burn a gallon of gas, you need to store a gallon of gas in the strategic reserve. That way the tax is paid, we eventually figure out how many gallons were accessible (because we eventually run out), and the price goes up for all countries even those that are not taxing carbon. Alternatively, rather than extracting and storing the gas, the tax could fund the purchase of estimated reserves that are left unexploited. I assume the oil companies would also love this method.
  - tinco 5y ago
    Well, everyone's going to hate the answer, but we'll be having to both incentivize decarbonization, and pressure countries to stop pumping and selling oil and gas. And that's meant in the extreme way, at some point we will have to go to war with these countries.
    - Robotbeat 5y ago
      Why not just levy a carbon tariff on imports? Ban fossil fuel production, export, and import domestically and then replace most tariffs with a carbon tariff. Also, make decarbonization look awesome by investing in cheap decarbonization tech. Convince these countries to decarbonize by making it easy, cheap, and sexy while making it basically a precondition of trade. And combine this with substantial decarbonization foreign aid. All much cheaper & better than war. This is one big reason I think “Degrowth”/austerity approaches to decarbonization are actually counterproductive: they make decarbonization look super unattractive to countries that want to develop, particularly if they have substantial fossil fuel reserves.
      - tinco 5y ago
        People don't use energy because it's sexy, they use it because they need or want things that cost energy and they pay according to their need. The concern is not importing carbon, the concern is countries using the energy themselves. For every Tesla there's a thousand little diesel trucks driving around on the african continent, and that number will only go up, especially if western demand for oil goes down. I don't think the 'attractiveness' of decarbonization has any consequence at all. Just look at Texas, one of the most oil dependent, climate change denying anti-green states there is, yet they're also the largest producer of renewable wind energy, and are closing their coal plants. That's got nothing to do with attractiveness, it's just economics. Selling wind power is simply profitable. Vice versa, no one cares more about the planet than the rich people of the world. You won't find more green movement startups, solar panels on roofs, high efficiency buildings, electric cars and even vegetarians in any other slice of the population. Yet those same nature lovers are also the ones who do the most international flights. With each round trip burning as much fuel as a regular person would in a year of commuting to work. It's got nothing to do with attractiveness, they want to, there's no other way, they can afford to, so they do it.
        Robotbeat 5y ago
        > For every Tesla there's a thousand little diesel trucks driving around on the african continent Nah, this isn't accurate. Tesla has sold over 1.5 million vehicles (probably will get over 2 million by the end of this year)[0]. There's only approximately 30-40 million cars in the entire continent of Africa[1]. (And expand this to "little diesel trucks" isn't going to change the math much, and probably there's fewer of those.) Tesla is also scaling up, producing almost a million vehicles per year right now... over 180,000 last quarter, and they have 1 new factory in China that is expanding and 2 totally new factories (in Texas and Germany). So Tesla will soon be producing about as many new vehicles as all the new car sales in Africa (which has ~1 million new car sales per year [1]). And Tesla is just one provider. More cost-optimized electric vehicles, like are super popular in China (the Hong Guang Mini EV is $4500 [2]), are likely to be the big sellers in Africa. [0] https://insideevs.com/news/499678/tesla-model-3y-million-sales/ https://insideevs.com/news/499678/tesla-model-3y-million-sal... [1] https://lmc-auto.com/news-and-insights/african-auto-market-maturity/ https://lmc-auto.com/news-and-insights/african-auto-market-m... [2] https://www.bbc.com/news/business-56178802 https://www.bbc.com/news/business-56178802
mbgerring 5y ago
> To implement all of these things at the scale needed is politics In America, where actual implementation of technology is carried out by private companies, this is simply not true. This is like saying that the engineering work on the internet was "done" in 1996, and the work of driving adoption of the internet at scale was "just politics". You can quibble over the definition of "engineering" but the fact remains that there are millions of person-hours of work to be done by people with the job title "engineer" in order to transition off of fossil fuels.
- tinco 5y ago
  No one's going to be paying anyone to "engineer" this transition if there's no incentives. You can be as american as you like, but that won't change the fact that oil is basically free. You can't compete with free in a free market.
  - mbgerring 5y ago
    Oil is nothing like "basically free," and many renewable energy technologies are successfully competing with coal and even natural gas, in an environment where fossil fuels are more heavily subsidized than renewable energy technologies. You can be as cynical as you want, but that won't change the fact that the transition to renewable energy is already more than a decade in progress and accelerating.
    - tinco 5y ago
      In my perception the price of oil is only constrained by the oil industry carefully matching their output to the demand. Am I wrong in this? Surely the Saudi's are not driving their gold plated lamborghini's because they really wanted them and spent all their savings hard won from razor thin margins. I'm not normally cynical, but we have to be realistic when talking about the climate. The truth is we haven't really started the transition to renewable energy, we're just investing in renewable energy where it's convenient. The only thing we're really making strides in is greening up the electric grid, but the electric grid is just a piece of the pie of our total energy expenditure. At some point everything you use and touch and see as a consumer is going to be green, your light, your heating, your car, maybe even the food you eat. And then we look at the grand scheme of things, and you'll find that you merely went down to 50% maybe 60%. And what's worse, to achieve that prices of almost everything had to be doubled, and the producers of oil simply tuned down their prices to appeal to less privileged nations, and those are both flourishing and buying almost as much oil as they were the US and Europe.
nawitus 5y ago
There are far more sources of co2 emissions than just electricity and meat production. There's a lot to engineer to become carbon neutral, especially if we want to do it at a reasonable cost.

by tinco 5y ago

JTbane 5y ago

Agreed 100%: it's a basic economic problem- climate change is a classic tragedy of the commons scenario, largely caused by fossil fuels being too cheap, with easy-to-dismiss externalities. Only political intervention (carbon taxes, green subsidies) could cause a decline in use.

epicureanideal 5y ago
Except that carbon taxes that are only implemented in one country cause fossil fuel demand by that country to decline, which makes it even cheaper for countries without carbon taxes. I wonder if instead of a carbon tax, there should be a tax that funds a fossil fuel 1:N storage requirement. You burn a gallon of gas, you need to store a gallon of gas in the strategic reserve. That way the tax is paid, we eventually figure out how many gallons were accessible (because we eventually run out), and the price goes up for all countries even those that are not taxing carbon. Alternatively, rather than extracting and storing the gas, the tax could fund the purchase of estimated reserves that are left unexploited. I assume the oil companies would also love this method.
- tinco 5y ago
  Well, everyone's going to hate the answer, but we'll be having to both incentivize decarbonization, and pressure countries to stop pumping and selling oil and gas. And that's meant in the extreme way, at some point we will have to go to war with these countries.
  - Robotbeat 5y ago
    Why not just levy a carbon tariff on imports? Ban fossil fuel production, export, and import domestically and then replace most tariffs with a carbon tariff. Also, make decarbonization look awesome by investing in cheap decarbonization tech. Convince these countries to decarbonize by making it easy, cheap, and sexy while making it basically a precondition of trade. And combine this with substantial decarbonization foreign aid. All much cheaper & better than war. This is one big reason I think “Degrowth”/austerity approaches to decarbonization are actually counterproductive: they make decarbonization look super unattractive to countries that want to develop, particularly if they have substantial fossil fuel reserves.
    - tinco 5y ago
      People don't use energy because it's sexy, they use it because they need or want things that cost energy and they pay according to their need. The concern is not importing carbon, the concern is countries using the energy themselves. For every Tesla there's a thousand little diesel trucks driving around on the african continent, and that number will only go up, especially if western demand for oil goes down. I don't think the 'attractiveness' of decarbonization has any consequence at all. Just look at Texas, one of the most oil dependent, climate change denying anti-green states there is, yet they're also the largest producer of renewable wind energy, and are closing their coal plants. That's got nothing to do with attractiveness, it's just economics. Selling wind power is simply profitable. Vice versa, no one cares more about the planet than the rich people of the world. You won't find more green movement startups, solar panels on roofs, high efficiency buildings, electric cars and even vegetarians in any other slice of the population. Yet those same nature lovers are also the ones who do the most international flights. With each round trip burning as much fuel as a regular person would in a year of commuting to work. It's got nothing to do with attractiveness, they want to, there's no other way, they can afford to, so they do it.
      - Robotbeat 5y ago
        > For every Tesla there's a thousand little diesel trucks driving around on the african continent Nah, this isn't accurate. Tesla has sold over 1.5 million vehicles (probably will get over 2 million by the end of this year)[0]. There's only approximately 30-40 million cars in the entire continent of Africa[1]. (And expand this to "little diesel trucks" isn't going to change the math much, and probably there's fewer of those.) Tesla is also scaling up, producing almost a million vehicles per year right now... over 180,000 last quarter, and they have 1 new factory in China that is expanding and 2 totally new factories (in Texas and Germany). So Tesla will soon be producing about as many new vehicles as all the new car sales in Africa (which has ~1 million new car sales per year [1]). And Tesla is just one provider. More cost-optimized electric vehicles, like are super popular in China (the Hong Guang Mini EV is $4500 [2]), are likely to be the big sellers in Africa. [0] https://insideevs.com/news/499678/tesla-model-3y-million-sales/ https://insideevs.com/news/499678/tesla-model-3y-million-sal... [1] https://lmc-auto.com/news-and-insights/african-auto-market-maturity/ https://lmc-auto.com/news-and-insights/african-auto-market-m... [2] https://www.bbc.com/news/business-56178802 https://www.bbc.com/news/business-56178802

mbgerring 5y ago

> To implement all of these things at the scale needed is politics In America, where actual implementation of technology is carried out by private companies, this is simply not true. This is like saying that the engineering work on the internet was "done" in 1996, and the work of driving adoption of the internet at scale was "just politics". You can quibble over the definition of "engineering" but the fact remains that there are millions of person-hours of work to be done by people with the job title "engineer" in order to transition off of fossil fuels.

tinco 5y ago
No one's going to be paying anyone to "engineer" this transition if there's no incentives. You can be as american as you like, but that won't change the fact that oil is basically free. You can't compete with free in a free market.
- mbgerring 5y ago
  Oil is nothing like "basically free," and many renewable energy technologies are successfully competing with coal and even natural gas, in an environment where fossil fuels are more heavily subsidized than renewable energy technologies. You can be as cynical as you want, but that won't change the fact that the transition to renewable energy is already more than a decade in progress and accelerating.
  - tinco 5y ago
    In my perception the price of oil is only constrained by the oil industry carefully matching their output to the demand. Am I wrong in this? Surely the Saudi's are not driving their gold plated lamborghini's because they really wanted them and spent all their savings hard won from razor thin margins. I'm not normally cynical, but we have to be realistic when talking about the climate. The truth is we haven't really started the transition to renewable energy, we're just investing in renewable energy where it's convenient. The only thing we're really making strides in is greening up the electric grid, but the electric grid is just a piece of the pie of our total energy expenditure. At some point everything you use and touch and see as a consumer is going to be green, your light, your heating, your car, maybe even the food you eat. And then we look at the grand scheme of things, and you'll find that you merely went down to 50% maybe 60%. And what's worse, to achieve that prices of almost everything had to be doubled, and the producers of oil simply tuned down their prices to appeal to less privileged nations, and those are both flourishing and buying almost as much oil as they were the US and Europe.

nawitus 5y ago

There are far more sources of co2 emissions than just electricity and meat production. There's a lot to engineer to become carbon neutral, especially if we want to do it at a reasonable cost.