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> It’s just so hard to know what actions have what impact on CO2 production Not really. For some reason the actually quite simple problem is needlessly complic

> It’s just so hard to know what actions have what impact on CO2 production Not really. For some reason the actually quite simple problem is needlessly complicated in the discussions. Stop digging up ANY carbon from below ground where it was safely buried. Any carbon above ground is part of the cycle that includes atmospheric CO2. You need huge effort to change how much of it is in CO2 form at any time while still having no certainty that it won't change very quickly (into CO2 atmospheric form), e.g. through fires (like the many burning forests just now). The earth's solution to removing the CO2 from the atmosphere was to bury it deep underground. Getting it back out from there is the BIG problem. The details of the above-ground carbon cycle are a small problem with very little impact compared to the big issue of getting more and more of the ancient carbon back up into the cycle. Of course, it's no use discussing the stop of all coal, gas, and oil digging, because there is zero chance of it happening. Coal at most and not even that looks likely, globally. It's like not caring about the huge hole in the hull of the ship while arguing about how to "safely" store all the water coming in.

rich_sasha 5y ago
You're describing the objective function, but ignoring the constraints. Stop digging up coal - fine. Cut off power to people who have no other power sources? Erm... What about emergency diesel generators for hospitals, diesel use for shipping goods (lowest-carbon-emitting means of transport). It's just not that simple.
- johnchristopher 5y ago
  I am pretty sure emergency diesel generators use a tiniest fraction of energy used by tankers moving goods around.
  - rich_sasha 5y ago
    Indeed. But simply closing down everything that pumps fossil fuel out of the ground breaks things we like and need. It's not that simple. Or is the medicine still better than the disease? I don't know anymore.
    - netizen-936824 5y ago
      Thing we need? Let's list them and figure out solutions Things we like? Sorry? I like living. I like this planet. Things we like very seriously need to take a back seat to needs right now. I've heard the same thing from a family member when I ask why they eat certain items while they are morbidly obese. Because they like them. Come on now, we're literally killing the planet with likes.
      - ahtihn 5y ago
        I like living too. I'm 100% confident that if we change absolutely nothing related to climate change, I'll keep living just fine. On the other hand, I'm also 100% confident that if fossil fuels are banned tomorrow, my life will be much worse. The choice seems pretty easy.
        kataklasm 5y ago
        and that's why we have this mess: because of people like you in the governments of this world only thinking about theur personal, short-term gain... it's fucking ridiculous. don't you care about future generations and the way they'll inhert your planet?
        paulcole 5y ago
        At least he’s honest about it. 99% of the developed world has this mindset but pretends like they want to change.
        amanaplanacanal 5y ago
        Sure. You are rich, living in a rich country. The poor living in poor countries will pay the price.
      - Throwaway197401 5y ago
        Here is a list 99% of all the products you take for granted are using fossile fuels. Medicin, contact lenses, paint, textiles, electronics, windmills, solar cells, concrete, asphalt, heavy machinery, most industrial manufactoring, all types of lubricants, plastic, mining, food production and I could go on. If you like living you are going to need most of the above. In fact if it wasn't for fossil fuel usage the likely hoood of you being alive let alone as rich as you are today would be very small. Energy is the industry that powers all other industries. You make that more expensive you make everything more expensive which means more people go hungry, less people can afford medicine, food production becomes more expensive and more people will die. It's really that simple. If you really believe we can do without all these things I would urge you to live without anything that has been made possible by fossil fuel industry for a month. Then you will realize just how live giving fossile fuel actually is.
- magicalhippo 5y ago
  > What about emergency diesel generators for hospital Use carbon capture to generate fuel from the air. Yes it's expensive compared to regular diesel, but for use-cases with low consumption like emergency generators that really shouldn't be a huge issue.
  - Throwaway197401 5y ago
    Making energy more expensive is going to kill people today.
    - Denvercoder9 5y ago
      Continuing carbon emissions is going to kill more people in the future.
      - Throwaway197401 5y ago
        No it's not and you have not a single scientifically demonstrated foundation for that kind of claims. Using fossil fuels is saving more lives, in fact it's making it possible for billions of people to live today. That wouldn't be possible without fossil fuels. In fact most of us wouldn't be here.
        Denvercoder9 5y ago
        > No it's not and you have not a single scientifically demonstrated foundation for that kind of claims. There's pretty clear scientific consensus that climate change will result in more hurricanes, wildfires, heat waves, cold spells, floods, droughts and especially that there will be shortages of clean water and land suitable for agriculture. All of those things kill humans.
        Throwaway197401 5y ago
        Victims of climate related issues of plummeted the last 150 years. Drought death have plummeted by 98% alone. The always changing climate is less of a challenge today than it was 200 years ago when we were under 2billion people. That's the rational lense to look at this through not whether humans have some impact or whether the climate is changing which we do and which it always is.
- unionpivo 5y ago
  Diesel generators run on any kind of oil including kitchen oil. For emergency generators, that would be enough. For everything else we use oil for, not so much.
- nosianu 5y ago
  I did not tell anyone what they should or should not do! Also see my reply here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28127454 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28127454
ugjka 5y ago
It is too late for everything, there are cascading effects that are completely out of control like the permafrost melting and releasing methane. What are you going to do about that?
- whimsicalism 5y ago
  There is no evidence we have reached runaway warming yet, and while there are positive feedbacks, there are also negative ones as well. We have not accounted for all of them, which means we should keep trying. The evidence is not there to suggest fatalism yet, and even if it were, the impacts occur on a spectrum.
  - dragonwriter 5y ago
    > There is no evidence we have reached runaway warming yet There is evidence, which the various papers on the issue point to. It is not irrefutable evidence, but the nature of the question is such that there cannot be irrefutable evidence. For some reason, confusing “not irrefutable evidence” with “no evidence” is common on HN in both scientific and legal discussions. > We have not accounted for all of them Which ones, specifically, are not accounted for?
danybittel 5y ago
I really like your post! It's not rocket science. Too many interest groups are convoluting the issue. But, I think to clearest, easiest way is to just ban "coal, gas, oil". Then let the lack of it "tickle" through the economy. Not by tomorrow, mind you, have it gradually reduce. Where there are problems, help with tax money. We've done it before, with asbestos, lead in gas, ..
- Gigachad 5y ago
  CFC gasses where a big one. They were hugely useful for many things but were found to be breaking down ozone and were very rapidly banned effectively.
  - stephen999 5y ago
    These are good but also poor examples. The solutions to those were much much easier. If carbon reduction were that easy we would have done it already.
    - ZeroGravitas 5y ago
      Can you support your reasoning here? Do you mean easy as in "technically possible" or easy as in "the people with the current political power and wealth will benefit from this change and will suffer the consequences if they dont?" Climate change is the second type of hard. As was, for example, "freeing the slaves", "giving people the vote" and other such problems that often needed bloody wars and revolutions to be settled.
      - stephen999 5y ago
        Technically possible. There were alternatives developed quickly to the CFC problem that worked about as well and were only slightly more expensive. This lead to support for them politically because it was a no-brainer to switch over. On the other hand, alternatives to oil and gas are much more expensive and require significant sacrifices compared to just using oil. Electric cars are more expensive than ICE. They have less range and there is a lack of equivalent charging infrastructure. Those are being solved but it’s taken 30 years or more of working on battery technology and efficiency to match ICE cars for convenience. Solar panels and wind has been similar. Years of development and billions of dollars to optimize it and still has downsides compared to oil and gas. Things like airplane fuel and plastics there are no easy solutions to still. Even the things that have solutions like electric cars, solar panels, etc require tons of new infrastructure to switch which is expensive both in dollars and carbon cost. Just look at the total dollar amount of replacing all oil-using cars/trains/planes/power plants/factories/etc and compare to all CFC-generating devices it’s a lot more.
londons_explore 5y ago
> Stop digging up ANY carbon from below ground where it was safely buried. If a country does this today, they will be at a severe economic disadvantage compared to a neighbouring country which continues using coal. All their manufactured goods will end up more expensive, nobody will buy their exports, and their population and economy will suffer. Only a few countries have done this to any extent, and they are countries who either don't have many fossil fuels, or whose main exports don't involve energy. The only real solution is for all countries to agree to limit/stop digging up coal/oil/gas at the same time, and to apply punitive sanctions to countries who do not adhere to the agreement. There isn't really any other way. OPEC could do it if it had a few more members. The US could do it if they were prepared to threaten sanctions or millitary force. Nobody else can really do it.
- api 5y ago
  > The US could do it if they were prepared to threaten sanctions or millitary force. … in the 1990s, not today. Doing that today would just hand the world to China. The Iraq disaster and electing a humiliating clown and con man as president have taken quite a toll on US power. Meanwhile the rest of the world has grown. The US is just no longer what it was, and doesn’t have nearly the “soft” power it once did. The huge military is of little help on this issue.
- engineer_22 5y ago
  The US Military runs on fossil fuels.
- epistasis 5y ago
  That may have been true a decade ago, but today renewables provide the cheapest electricity. We have a clear tech path that leads to cheaper and more abundant energy, we just need to choose it and stop listening to the fossil fuel interests that don't want the transition to happen. Technology development accelerates the more we produce it. Accelerate the purchase of storage and renewable tech, and the quicker we will get to a future of abundant clean energy.
  - londons_explore 5y ago
ZeroGravitas 5y ago
You're not really disagreeing with the previous poster. We need to do what you suggest as quickly as possible. That means some things that depend on that carbon downstream should be stopped, replaced with alternatives or at the very least heavily discouraged while a market for substitutes created. But how do we decide which ones to do first? Ideally the cheapest and biggest impact. Our best tool for doing so is probably a well regulated market with a carbon fee. Unfortunately, the same groups that caused the problem, then tried to cover up the problem, then attacked all the solutions continues to talk about how great a carbon tax will be, while also funding the politicians who will never let it happen. But, if you want to know what the most sensible answer is then just look at what vaguely sensible countries are doing. What they're doing today is probably what we should all have been doing 20 years ago. This usually involves putting some kind of financial incentive on electricity producers to move to low carbon alternatives (gas is fine as a short term substitute, but if we'd started 20 years ago we'd no longer need it today) and other CO2 emitters to use electricity rather than fossil fuels (e.g. cars). Other basic elements are carbon tariffs to stop other countries undercutting your efforts. It's not rocket science. The whole "this is impossible" stuff is just bullshit from the people who don't want to do it. EVs, Solar and Wind Turbines were all impossible according to the same people. Most of the moonshot stuff is trying to come up with a technical solution to the political issues, and that's hard.
- wombatmobile 5y ago
  Alternatively, stop making babies. The maths is compelling.
  - vidarh 5y ago
    Birth rates are falling across the board, but stopping it faster either requires severely authoritarian measures or increasing economic safety, which counters the benefits. And reducing birth rates too fast sets us up for disaster too.
    - bsenftner 5y ago
      All it requires is education. I'd say a quarter of the over educated I know do not have kids, myself included. After a certain level of education, our society strikes one as no place moral to bring more people.
fouc 5y ago
That's not super helpful to the individual. Take an individual that bikes everywhere. What other changes can he make in his life that would reduce the demand of "digging out carbon"? As it turns out, he's relying on rubber wheels for his bicycle, he's relying on synthetic clothing for comfort, and numerous in his life products are made with plastic. What are the highest impact changes he can make?
- pille 5y ago
  I realized this additional perverse thing about trying to improve the world by riding a bike, as an individual: In our market economy designed to get people to consume cars, your foregoing car ownership actually just makes it a little more comfortable for all the car owners out there sharing the road with you. You reduce traffic for them, reduce the wear on the infrastructure, you drive down the price of cars and gas, and you free up a parking space. Of course this is all on the infinitesimal scale of your own individual influence on the world, its ecosystem, and the economy you live in, but so is your actual reduction in fossil fuel consumption if you give up driving. Point is, there needs to be something a lot bigger than your individual choice as a consumer. We need an economy that prices in the environmental impact of cars, and I’m pretty sure we need the state for that.
  - sitkack 5y ago
    The other ironic thing about bikes is all the technology that enabled cars was invented for bikes. Chains, inner tubes, spokes the quality of the steel.
- bserge 5y ago
  He can convince someone who uses a 2+ ton car for hauling their ass around to stop doing that.
- epistasis 5y ago
  Sometimes I think the worst mistake we made with cars was making the refueling process so easy. If people still had to lift buckets of gasoline to fill their tanks, they'd have a much better idea about the massive quantities of fuel that are needed for small amounts of car use. Rubber, synthetic clothing, plastics, do not get used up and ejected directly into the atmosphere. There is some energy use in manufacture, probably some chemistry that may emit some CO2. But it is absolutely dwarfed by the massive amount of gasoline fuel ejected directly into the atmosphere by driving. The store in a bike frame is probably the most carbon intensive part of a bike. For every pound of steel, two pounds of CO2 is currently emitted in manufacture (but this will probably go to zero in the future). For a 20-60 pound bike frame, that's the equivalent of only three gallons of gasoline. Three gallons. Because as a gallon of gasoline combusts, it picks up extra oxygen atoms and ends up being 20 pounds of CO2. Think of a 20 pound plate for weight lifting, and that's a gallon of gasoline once it's burned. All the other stuff in life--rubber, clothing, plastics--are almost a rounding error compared to the daily commutes we make in cars in the US. Lesson: get on that bike as soon as possible, and if you can't, at least get an EV.
stinos 5y ago
You do not mention methane at all, isn't that oversimplifying things?
- maxekman 5y ago
  Definitely! Vegetarian food is a big part of the solution. Methane from the absurd amount of meat produced is really bad, and also contributes around 10x CO2e.
grumblenum 5y ago
Ah, so we just eliminate low-cost transportation, agriculture, textiles and consumer goods and consequently starve billions of people. A modest proposal for such an ill-specified problem with unfalsifiable causes. I like it.
- baq 5y ago
  low cost now, high cost for grandchildren. if money is the problem, just print more, it isn't as important as habitability of this moist rock.
  - jiri 5y ago
    > low cost now, high cost for grandchildren. [sarcasm] so, why transfer this "high cost" to grandchildren, let THEM solve whole problem of "habitability of this moist rock" [/sarcasm]
- amanaplanacanal 5y ago
  It’s only low cost to you because you are making other people pay most of the costs. It’s a good trick.
- nosianu 5y ago
  I did not propose anything. I pointed out what the actual problem is. If you want to refute that, feel free. Just because the problem is practically unsolvable does not equal it cannot be said out loud. Carbon above ground is going to increase and at most we can lower the speed of extraction, and until we have (sun-based energy) methods at scale to bring carbon back underground we will have to live with ever increasing CO2 levels. A change in trend to more getting buried than brought up (full stop first is impractical, plus methods will have to be developed and tested step by step) is not even on the horizon of the most optimistic scenarios. There are lots of people equating making the statement with "you say we should just do nothing" (I did not tell anyone about what they should/can/cannot do?) or with comments like yours, which is strange but very human.
zabatuvajdka 5y ago
I think the broader problem is the human mental condition. One of the largest contributors to global emissions is large scale factory farming but how many people are going to stop eating at McDonalds? Point being: people’s habits need to change across the board, but yet they argue that policy makers have no right dictating what they can/can’t do… If you ask a big business owner to halt production in the name of climate change, will they? Hell no. The government can squeeze people financially though so it literally is up to them to force businesses to comply lest they will exhaust their finances for non compliance. I dunno it’s a pretty interesting dilemma though…
- TeMPOraL 5y ago
  > One of the largest contributors to global emissions is large scale factory farming but how many people are going to stop eating at McDonalds? McDonald's process is likely also one of the most energy-efficient ways of producing these foods - they have incentives set right for that. This is where things get a bit tricky: people like to paint a dichotomy between factory farming and small family operations, and God knows factory farms are indeed strip-mining the soil. But if we were to suddenly replace them with family operations, how much would we need to still feed everyone? I suspect the answer is, "way too much", and thus any working solution will have to be somewhere in the middle between the two extremes. There are extreme efficiencies coming from the methods and the scales at which industry operates - we can't, and shouldn't, throw that all away. This conversation begs for being zoomed into, details cry out for consideration. Is industrial farming energy-efficient? Yes. Emissions-efficient? No. Can the former be improved without sacrificing the latter? Probably. Can large-scale farming be done sustainably with respect to soil use, without destroying efficiency? It's possible. Definitely worth looking into. > Point being: people’s habits need to change across the board, but yet they argue that policy makers have no right dictating what they can/can’t do… Yeah, that's part of why we are in this mess. I don't see a democratic way out of this; people won't vote for the right things until we're already all falling off the cliff, and marketers can no longer confuse regular people with disinformation. Currently, I think our options boil down to one or more of: - Governments getting more authoritarian and forcing businesses and consumers alike to adopt a much less carbon-intensive lifestyle; - New technologies pop up that allow politicians and/or businesses to have their cake and eat it too - offer less carbon-intensive way of doing the things that are already being done. Renewables and electric vehicles are two examples of this - despite initial troubles and active resistance, they crossed the threshold after which the market wants them, and it's politically safe to mandate them. That's why I'm very much bullish on all technological projects in climate space, and very angry at the "you can't solve social problems with technology" bullshit - new technology is a tried and true method of solving problems which are economically or politically untenable. New inventions offer new options to politicians and shareholders - which is what we need to have when our combined incentives paint the social process into a stalemate.
godshatter 5y ago
OK, stop digging up any carbon from below ground, but let's do it slowly. Turn off all the oil extractors and coal mining equipment tomorrow and I'm guessing we'd have at best a month before chaos erupts in the streets. One ransomware attack caused panic buying and chaos on the east coast for a few days. I'd argue that we need some oil production, for plastic if nothing else. But on a much smaller scale than how we use it now. You'd have to get this done globally, though. It doesn't matter if one country stops if others double down. It would be best to be done in concert with the other oil extracting countries so that prices wouldn't destabilize. This is probably what climate agreements should target rather than reducing consumption. Oil isn't extracted from the ground because people like it's color or something, it's what runs our industrial civilization presently. And I don't want to start looking for a piece of land in the mountains tomorrow that I can defend and start ammo-ing up because we suddenly decided oil wasn't going to be extracted anymore :) I do like the idea of looking at the problem at it's source, quite literally. Turn that tap off in a way that doesn't cause massive instability and the carbon in the atmosphere will eventually take care of itself. It's a perspective I never thought to look at the problem from. Not sure why, it seems obvious in retrospect.

rich_sasha 5y ago

You're describing the objective function, but ignoring the constraints. Stop digging up coal - fine. Cut off power to people who have no other power sources? Erm... What about emergency diesel generators for hospitals, diesel use for shipping goods (lowest-carbon-emitting means of transport). It's just not that simple.

johnchristopher 5y ago
I am pretty sure emergency diesel generators use a tiniest fraction of energy used by tankers moving goods around.
- rich_sasha 5y ago
  Indeed. But simply closing down everything that pumps fossil fuel out of the ground breaks things we like and need. It's not that simple. Or is the medicine still better than the disease? I don't know anymore.
  - netizen-936824 5y ago
    Thing we need? Let's list them and figure out solutions Things we like? Sorry? I like living. I like this planet. Things we like very seriously need to take a back seat to needs right now. I've heard the same thing from a family member when I ask why they eat certain items while they are morbidly obese. Because they like them. Come on now, we're literally killing the planet with likes.
    - ahtihn 5y ago
      I like living too. I'm 100% confident that if we change absolutely nothing related to climate change, I'll keep living just fine. On the other hand, I'm also 100% confident that if fossil fuels are banned tomorrow, my life will be much worse. The choice seems pretty easy.
      - kataklasm 5y ago
        and that's why we have this mess: because of people like you in the governments of this world only thinking about theur personal, short-term gain... it's fucking ridiculous. don't you care about future generations and the way they'll inhert your planet?
        paulcole 5y ago
        At least he’s honest about it. 99% of the developed world has this mindset but pretends like they want to change.
      - amanaplanacanal 5y ago
        Sure. You are rich, living in a rich country. The poor living in poor countries will pay the price.
    - Throwaway197401 5y ago
      Here is a list 99% of all the products you take for granted are using fossile fuels. Medicin, contact lenses, paint, textiles, electronics, windmills, solar cells, concrete, asphalt, heavy machinery, most industrial manufactoring, all types of lubricants, plastic, mining, food production and I could go on. If you like living you are going to need most of the above. In fact if it wasn't for fossil fuel usage the likely hoood of you being alive let alone as rich as you are today would be very small. Energy is the industry that powers all other industries. You make that more expensive you make everything more expensive which means more people go hungry, less people can afford medicine, food production becomes more expensive and more people will die. It's really that simple. If you really believe we can do without all these things I would urge you to live without anything that has been made possible by fossil fuel industry for a month. Then you will realize just how live giving fossile fuel actually is.
magicalhippo 5y ago
> What about emergency diesel generators for hospital Use carbon capture to generate fuel from the air. Yes it's expensive compared to regular diesel, but for use-cases with low consumption like emergency generators that really shouldn't be a huge issue.
- Throwaway197401 5y ago
  Making energy more expensive is going to kill people today.
  - Denvercoder9 5y ago
    Continuing carbon emissions is going to kill more people in the future.
    - Throwaway197401 5y ago
      No it's not and you have not a single scientifically demonstrated foundation for that kind of claims. Using fossil fuels is saving more lives, in fact it's making it possible for billions of people to live today. That wouldn't be possible without fossil fuels. In fact most of us wouldn't be here.
      - Denvercoder9 5y ago
        > No it's not and you have not a single scientifically demonstrated foundation for that kind of claims. There's pretty clear scientific consensus that climate change will result in more hurricanes, wildfires, heat waves, cold spells, floods, droughts and especially that there will be shortages of clean water and land suitable for agriculture. All of those things kill humans.
        Throwaway197401 5y ago
        Victims of climate related issues of plummeted the last 150 years. Drought death have plummeted by 98% alone. The always changing climate is less of a challenge today than it was 200 years ago when we were under 2billion people. That's the rational lense to look at this through not whether humans have some impact or whether the climate is changing which we do and which it always is.
unionpivo 5y ago
Diesel generators run on any kind of oil including kitchen oil. For emergency generators, that would be enough. For everything else we use oil for, not so much.
nosianu 5y ago
I did not tell anyone what they should or should not do! Also see my reply here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28127454 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28127454

ugjka 5y ago

It is too late for everything, there are cascading effects that are completely out of control like the permafrost melting and releasing methane. What are you going to do about that?

whimsicalism 5y ago
There is no evidence we have reached runaway warming yet, and while there are positive feedbacks, there are also negative ones as well. We have not accounted for all of them, which means we should keep trying. The evidence is not there to suggest fatalism yet, and even if it were, the impacts occur on a spectrum.
- dragonwriter 5y ago
  > There is no evidence we have reached runaway warming yet There is evidence, which the various papers on the issue point to. It is not irrefutable evidence, but the nature of the question is such that there cannot be irrefutable evidence. For some reason, confusing “not irrefutable evidence” with “no evidence” is common on HN in both scientific and legal discussions. > We have not accounted for all of them Which ones, specifically, are not accounted for?

danybittel 5y ago

I really like your post! It's not rocket science. Too many interest groups are convoluting the issue. But, I think to clearest, easiest way is to just ban "coal, gas, oil". Then let the lack of it "tickle" through the economy. Not by tomorrow, mind you, have it gradually reduce. Where there are problems, help with tax money. We've done it before, with asbestos, lead in gas, ..

Gigachad 5y ago
CFC gasses where a big one. They were hugely useful for many things but were found to be breaking down ozone and were very rapidly banned effectively.
- stephen999 5y ago
  These are good but also poor examples. The solutions to those were much much easier. If carbon reduction were that easy we would have done it already.
  - ZeroGravitas 5y ago
    Can you support your reasoning here? Do you mean easy as in "technically possible" or easy as in "the people with the current political power and wealth will benefit from this change and will suffer the consequences if they dont?" Climate change is the second type of hard. As was, for example, "freeing the slaves", "giving people the vote" and other such problems that often needed bloody wars and revolutions to be settled.
    - stephen999 5y ago
      Technically possible. There were alternatives developed quickly to the CFC problem that worked about as well and were only slightly more expensive. This lead to support for them politically because it was a no-brainer to switch over. On the other hand, alternatives to oil and gas are much more expensive and require significant sacrifices compared to just using oil. Electric cars are more expensive than ICE. They have less range and there is a lack of equivalent charging infrastructure. Those are being solved but it’s taken 30 years or more of working on battery technology and efficiency to match ICE cars for convenience. Solar panels and wind has been similar. Years of development and billions of dollars to optimize it and still has downsides compared to oil and gas. Things like airplane fuel and plastics there are no easy solutions to still. Even the things that have solutions like electric cars, solar panels, etc require tons of new infrastructure to switch which is expensive both in dollars and carbon cost. Just look at the total dollar amount of replacing all oil-using cars/trains/planes/power plants/factories/etc and compare to all CFC-generating devices it’s a lot more.

londons_explore 5y ago

> Stop digging up ANY carbon from below ground where it was safely buried. If a country does this today, they will be at a severe economic disadvantage compared to a neighbouring country which continues using coal. All their manufactured goods will end up more expensive, nobody will buy their exports, and their population and economy will suffer. Only a few countries have done this to any extent, and they are countries who either don't have many fossil fuels, or whose main exports don't involve energy. The only real solution is for all countries to agree to limit/stop digging up coal/oil/gas at the same time, and to apply punitive sanctions to countries who do not adhere to the agreement. There isn't really any other way. OPEC could do it if it had a few more members. The US could do it if they were prepared to threaten sanctions or millitary force. Nobody else can really do it.

api 5y ago
> The US could do it if they were prepared to threaten sanctions or millitary force. … in the 1990s, not today. Doing that today would just hand the world to China. The Iraq disaster and electing a humiliating clown and con man as president have taken quite a toll on US power. Meanwhile the rest of the world has grown. The US is just no longer what it was, and doesn’t have nearly the “soft” power it once did. The huge military is of little help on this issue.
engineer_22 5y ago
The US Military runs on fossil fuels.
epistasis 5y ago
That may have been true a decade ago, but today renewables provide the cheapest electricity. We have a clear tech path that leads to cheaper and more abundant energy, we just need to choose it and stop listening to the fossil fuel interests that don't want the transition to happen. Technology development accelerates the more we produce it. Accelerate the purchase of storage and renewable tech, and the quicker we will get to a future of abundant clean energy.
- londons_explore 5y ago

ZeroGravitas 5y ago

You're not really disagreeing with the previous poster. We need to do what you suggest as quickly as possible. That means some things that depend on that carbon downstream should be stopped, replaced with alternatives or at the very least heavily discouraged while a market for substitutes created. But how do we decide which ones to do first? Ideally the cheapest and biggest impact. Our best tool for doing so is probably a well regulated market with a carbon fee. Unfortunately, the same groups that caused the problem, then tried to cover up the problem, then attacked all the solutions continues to talk about how great a carbon tax will be, while also funding the politicians who will never let it happen. But, if you want to know what the most sensible answer is then just look at what vaguely sensible countries are doing. What they're doing today is probably what we should all have been doing 20 years ago. This usually involves putting some kind of financial incentive on electricity producers to move to low carbon alternatives (gas is fine as a short term substitute, but if we'd started 20 years ago we'd no longer need it today) and other CO2 emitters to use electricity rather than fossil fuels (e.g. cars). Other basic elements are carbon tariffs to stop other countries undercutting your efforts. It's not rocket science. The whole "this is impossible" stuff is just bullshit from the people who don't want to do it. EVs, Solar and Wind Turbines were all impossible according to the same people. Most of the moonshot stuff is trying to come up with a technical solution to the political issues, and that's hard.

wombatmobile 5y ago
Alternatively, stop making babies. The maths is compelling.
- vidarh 5y ago
  Birth rates are falling across the board, but stopping it faster either requires severely authoritarian measures or increasing economic safety, which counters the benefits. And reducing birth rates too fast sets us up for disaster too.
  - bsenftner 5y ago
    All it requires is education. I'd say a quarter of the over educated I know do not have kids, myself included. After a certain level of education, our society strikes one as no place moral to bring more people.

fouc 5y ago

That's not super helpful to the individual. Take an individual that bikes everywhere. What other changes can he make in his life that would reduce the demand of "digging out carbon"? As it turns out, he's relying on rubber wheels for his bicycle, he's relying on synthetic clothing for comfort, and numerous in his life products are made with plastic. What are the highest impact changes he can make?

pille 5y ago
I realized this additional perverse thing about trying to improve the world by riding a bike, as an individual: In our market economy designed to get people to consume cars, your foregoing car ownership actually just makes it a little more comfortable for all the car owners out there sharing the road with you. You reduce traffic for them, reduce the wear on the infrastructure, you drive down the price of cars and gas, and you free up a parking space. Of course this is all on the infinitesimal scale of your own individual influence on the world, its ecosystem, and the economy you live in, but so is your actual reduction in fossil fuel consumption if you give up driving. Point is, there needs to be something a lot bigger than your individual choice as a consumer. We need an economy that prices in the environmental impact of cars, and I’m pretty sure we need the state for that.
- sitkack 5y ago
  The other ironic thing about bikes is all the technology that enabled cars was invented for bikes. Chains, inner tubes, spokes the quality of the steel.
bserge 5y ago
He can convince someone who uses a 2+ ton car for hauling their ass around to stop doing that.
epistasis 5y ago
Sometimes I think the worst mistake we made with cars was making the refueling process so easy. If people still had to lift buckets of gasoline to fill their tanks, they'd have a much better idea about the massive quantities of fuel that are needed for small amounts of car use. Rubber, synthetic clothing, plastics, do not get used up and ejected directly into the atmosphere. There is some energy use in manufacture, probably some chemistry that may emit some CO2. But it is absolutely dwarfed by the massive amount of gasoline fuel ejected directly into the atmosphere by driving. The store in a bike frame is probably the most carbon intensive part of a bike. For every pound of steel, two pounds of CO2 is currently emitted in manufacture (but this will probably go to zero in the future). For a 20-60 pound bike frame, that's the equivalent of only three gallons of gasoline. Three gallons. Because as a gallon of gasoline combusts, it picks up extra oxygen atoms and ends up being 20 pounds of CO2. Think of a 20 pound plate for weight lifting, and that's a gallon of gasoline once it's burned. All the other stuff in life--rubber, clothing, plastics--are almost a rounding error compared to the daily commutes we make in cars in the US. Lesson: get on that bike as soon as possible, and if you can't, at least get an EV.

stinos 5y ago

You do not mention methane at all, isn't that oversimplifying things?

maxekman 5y ago
Definitely! Vegetarian food is a big part of the solution. Methane from the absurd amount of meat produced is really bad, and also contributes around 10x CO2e.

grumblenum 5y ago

Ah, so we just eliminate low-cost transportation, agriculture, textiles and consumer goods and consequently starve billions of people. A modest proposal for such an ill-specified problem with unfalsifiable causes. I like it.

baq 5y ago
low cost now, high cost for grandchildren. if money is the problem, just print more, it isn't as important as habitability of this moist rock.
- jiri 5y ago
  > low cost now, high cost for grandchildren. [sarcasm] so, why transfer this "high cost" to grandchildren, let THEM solve whole problem of "habitability of this moist rock" [/sarcasm]
amanaplanacanal 5y ago
It’s only low cost to you because you are making other people pay most of the costs. It’s a good trick.
nosianu 5y ago
I did not propose anything. I pointed out what the actual problem is. If you want to refute that, feel free. Just because the problem is practically unsolvable does not equal it cannot be said out loud. Carbon above ground is going to increase and at most we can lower the speed of extraction, and until we have (sun-based energy) methods at scale to bring carbon back underground we will have to live with ever increasing CO2 levels. A change in trend to more getting buried than brought up (full stop first is impractical, plus methods will have to be developed and tested step by step) is not even on the horizon of the most optimistic scenarios. There are lots of people equating making the statement with "you say we should just do nothing" (I did not tell anyone about what they should/can/cannot do?) or with comments like yours, which is strange but very human.

zabatuvajdka 5y ago

I think the broader problem is the human mental condition. One of the largest contributors to global emissions is large scale factory farming but how many people are going to stop eating at McDonalds? Point being: people’s habits need to change across the board, but yet they argue that policy makers have no right dictating what they can/can’t do… If you ask a big business owner to halt production in the name of climate change, will they? Hell no. The government can squeeze people financially though so it literally is up to them to force businesses to comply lest they will exhaust their finances for non compliance. I dunno it’s a pretty interesting dilemma though…

TeMPOraL 5y ago
> One of the largest contributors to global emissions is large scale factory farming but how many people are going to stop eating at McDonalds? McDonald's process is likely also one of the most energy-efficient ways of producing these foods - they have incentives set right for that. This is where things get a bit tricky: people like to paint a dichotomy between factory farming and small family operations, and God knows factory farms are indeed strip-mining the soil. But if we were to suddenly replace them with family operations, how much would we need to still feed everyone? I suspect the answer is, "way too much", and thus any working solution will have to be somewhere in the middle between the two extremes. There are extreme efficiencies coming from the methods and the scales at which industry operates - we can't, and shouldn't, throw that all away. This conversation begs for being zoomed into, details cry out for consideration. Is industrial farming energy-efficient? Yes. Emissions-efficient? No. Can the former be improved without sacrificing the latter? Probably. Can large-scale farming be done sustainably with respect to soil use, without destroying efficiency? It's possible. Definitely worth looking into. > Point being: people’s habits need to change across the board, but yet they argue that policy makers have no right dictating what they can/can’t do… Yeah, that's part of why we are in this mess. I don't see a democratic way out of this; people won't vote for the right things until we're already all falling off the cliff, and marketers can no longer confuse regular people with disinformation. Currently, I think our options boil down to one or more of: - Governments getting more authoritarian and forcing businesses and consumers alike to adopt a much less carbon-intensive lifestyle; - New technologies pop up that allow politicians and/or businesses to have their cake and eat it too - offer less carbon-intensive way of doing the things that are already being done. Renewables and electric vehicles are two examples of this - despite initial troubles and active resistance, they crossed the threshold after which the market wants them, and it's politically safe to mandate them. That's why I'm very much bullish on all technological projects in climate space, and very angry at the "you can't solve social problems with technology" bullshit - new technology is a tried and true method of solving problems which are economically or politically untenable. New inventions offer new options to politicians and shareholders - which is what we need to have when our combined incentives paint the social process into a stalemate.

godshatter 5y ago

OK, stop digging up any carbon from below ground, but let's do it slowly. Turn off all the oil extractors and coal mining equipment tomorrow and I'm guessing we'd have at best a month before chaos erupts in the streets. One ransomware attack caused panic buying and chaos on the east coast for a few days. I'd argue that we need some oil production, for plastic if nothing else. But on a much smaller scale than how we use it now. You'd have to get this done globally, though. It doesn't matter if one country stops if others double down. It would be best to be done in concert with the other oil extracting countries so that prices wouldn't destabilize. This is probably what climate agreements should target rather than reducing consumption. Oil isn't extracted from the ground because people like it's color or something, it's what runs our industrial civilization presently. And I don't want to start looking for a piece of land in the mountains tomorrow that I can defend and start ammo-ing up because we suddenly decided oil wasn't going to be extracted anymore :) I do like the idea of looking at the problem at it's source, quite literally. Turn that tap off in a way that doesn't cause massive instability and the carbon in the atmosphere will eventually take care of itself. It's a perspective I never thought to look at the problem from. Not sure why, it seems obvious in retrospect.