5 ms·

“These advancements aren’t incremental; they are quantum leap improvements.” I hope that physicist Dennis Whyte was being misquoted here. We need to rapidly ra

“These advancements aren’t incremental; they are quantum leap improvements.” I hope that physicist Dennis Whyte was being misquoted here. We need to rapidly ramp down the use of fossil fuels and replace them with technology that works today, such as photovoltaics and nuclear fission (in the interim). Aspirational projects that might possibly have a working proof-of-concept in a decade or five are not part of the solution to the climate crisis.

Jiro 5y ago
>I hope that physicist Dennis Whyte was being misquoted here. Why? Because quantum leaps are small? The metaphor is not comparing it to the size of the quantum leap; the metaphor is that quantum leaps are discontinuous.
- leephillips 5y ago
  I thought he also believed that the advances were of significant size, but maybe I’m wrong and he did, in fact, mean to admit that this recent, discontinuous progress was minute.
- robertlagrant 5y ago
  Presumably all progress, far above the quantum level, is discontinuous anyway. The main usage seems to just be "big".
kiba 5y ago
If we are serious about ramping down the use of fossil fuels, we should start with the eliminations of vehicles that we don't need, such as cars. In order to eliminate cars, however, it will require a drastic readjustment of our urban planning policies. Land use policies are what made cars viable and public transport unviable.
- hungryforcodes 5y ago
  This will NEVER happen. People rarely listen to urban planners, no one is going to tear up their cities and reorganize them around some untested ideological idea, and finally no one is going to give up their cars -- like it or not-- they are annoying. It's much easier to just make them all electric and decarbonize grid production.
  - soperj 5y ago
    >no one is going to tear up their cities and reorganize them around some untested ideological idea that's exactly what they did for cars in the first place.
    - mlindner 5y ago
      Cars replaced horse-drawn carriages which already filled cities. Poo covered the streets of New York City. Modern US cities were designed around the horse-drawn carriage, not the car.
    - hungryforcodes 5y ago
      Right, but those were the motor companies behind that. IE: Concrete, spendable money. Urban planners get very little cred unfortunately. If they were smart -- the urban planners -- they would get all computational and build highly accurate models of the cities they work for that people could just go online and check out. Then planners could create new versions of the real city, testing different ideas and sharing them interactively with the public. Most planners these days seem to just say "mass transit GOOD!" and "cars BAD!", without really any substance behind it. This often doesn't really convince the public of much.
    - lazide 5y ago
      Haha, that is a bit out of touch with reality unfortunately. Cars were immediately, obviously valuable to individuals - they gave people the freedom to go where they want to, with whom they wanted to, when they wanted to, and often allowed them to carry things that would otherwise be difficult to carry while doing so. Something which was otherwise very difficult to do previously. If you use public transit, it’s very difficult to go somewhere others do not want to go, or at a time when others do not want to go. You’re tied to what everyone else wants, pretty explicitly, since unpopular routes or schedules get less frequent (or no) coverage, and are expensive to run. You also can’t carry arbitrary heavy stuff since that tends to require infrastructure that is difficult to carry by hand or is not compatible with typical people on foot. Public transit is a system efficiency win, but a general loss for any outliers for individuals. And since everything is public, it adds a lot of friction if you want to go with someone who you otherwise would have issues being seen with in public, or are going somewhere/doing something you’d rather not publicize, or who struggles with crowds or similar problems (such as those with disabilities, children who are too young to self ambulate well, etc). Not unsolvable, but adds friction. Cars are (when roads aren’t completely mangled anyway), individual luxury items - because they enable a large degree of useful freedom for individuals. It’s no wonder that every economy that is able to pay for them goes crazy until it turns into a tragedy of the commons situation.
- leephillips 5y ago
  I totally agree. But another big contributor to the over-use of cars is the shared illusion that everyone has to “go to work”. I think the extended pandemic is contributing to shattering that illusion.
  - nopenopenopeno 5y ago
    >I think the extended pandemic is contributing to shattering that illusion. Or, the opposite? How could you be so out of touch as to think society did not depend on all the masses of people who continued going to work continuing to go to work? Realize these are the low wage workers who will be tasked to pay for your carbon tax, and they won’t blink an eye at re-electing Trump, who in such a case would be the left wing candidate regardless of his party affiliation.
  - rindalir 5y ago
    In 2017, only about 15% of vehicle trips in the US were taken for commuting [1], the rest are for shopping/errands (45%) and for socializing/recreation (the balance). So even if we eliminate half the commute trips, we still have a long way to go to reduce the miles traveled. [1] https://www.bts.gov/statistical-products/surveys/national-household-travel-survey-daily-travel-quick-facts https://www.bts.gov/statistical-products/surveys/national-ho...
    - leephillips 5y ago
      I thought it was more; thanks for the information. Although 15%, or say half that after subtracting the people who actually need to be physically at work, is still significant. Also, note that 15% of miles will be more, probably much more, than 15% of the pollution, because those miles are the slowest ones that people travel.
      - rindalir 5y ago
        I also thought it was more (I remember reading about 30% in the early 2000's), so I was kinda surprised. I think you are right that miles traveled will be higher, so from an emissions perspective the decrease in commuting is good news. From the perspective of cars being everywhere and making environments unpleasant, as long as people don't think twice about hoping in the car to go Starbucks twice a day, we've got a huge problem.
- rindalir 5y ago
  I would also like to see a more walkable future, but I've given up hope that such a big transition will happen within a timeframe small enough to make a difference for things like GHG emissions. I guess I've made my reluctant peace with a rapid electrification of the world's vehicle fleet (which, yes, isn't exactly clean either).
- mdp2021 5y ago
  > we don't need It's not difficult to imagine a situation in which someone does not /strictly/ need a car (it also seems urban life is quite common these days). It should also be extremely easy to imagine having a car as extremely beneficial. (By the way: epidemics still being far from forgotten, it's really odd to paint collective, "public" transport as aproblematic.) Now, to attack the problem, one could also (and in some contexts primarily) hit house heating. There are voices recommending heating limited to 16°C/61°F. The issue is just about quality of life. Including enabling operations. Hacker should be attentive on their instruments, since they are instrument crafters. Since the control of resources has always been linked to their price (which is also equivalent to, or actually including, an externality tax) - so given a clear alternative -, I am not sure how the whole idea of "we will do without", restricting "freedom" (in abstract terms, as a primary value for constitutional decisors) and operation, came to be. (Up to not seeing "the car" as a life changing revolution... Reading just recently the first pages of a history text, the car was immediately mentioned as "expanding the possibilities for movement to unimaginable heights even for the richest of fifty years before". It has always been very clearly a most prominent gift of engineering, as if a third dotation of natural limbs: it's odd to now read about it as "negligible".)
  - kiba 5y ago
    It's not difficult to imagine a situation in which someone does not /strictly/ need a car (it also seems urban life is quite common these days). It should also be extremely easy to imagine having a car as extremely beneficial. Interurban rails and other form of mass transit gained prominence especially in the early 20th century. They were eventually outcompeted by cars on a wide variety of factors, including public support for funding of roads. It's not too difficult to imagine freight traveling on streetcar rails. (Up to not seeing "the car" as a life changing revolution... Reading just recently the first pages of a history text, the car was immediately mentioned as "expanding the possibilities for movement to unimaginable heights even for the richest of fifty years before". It has always been very clearly a most prominent gift of engineering, as if a third dotation of natural limbs: it's odd to now read about it as "negligible".) The car is simply not as viable without proper infrastructure and implicit subsidies.
- mlindner 5y ago
  > If we are serious about ramping down the use of fossil fuels, we should start with the eliminations of vehicles that we don't need, such as cars. Whenever people state things like this it shows that this person is out of touch with reality.
- pengaru 5y ago
  How about instead we get rid of the people we don't need, so everyone driving cars involves a much smaller multiplier and we can preserve a high quality of life without trashing the place.
- danaris 5y ago
  > In order to eliminate cars, however, it will require a drastic readjustment of our urban planning policies. (Emphasis added) The idea that we can eliminate the use of cars with urban planning policies is a clear indication of someone who has never spent any significant amount of time outside a city, or at least has never seriously thought about what it means. Most of the land in the world is not urban. Many millions of people live outside urban areas. That's not going to change. Probably ever. Though I'm a strong proponent of massively increased public transit systems, including both high-speed rail corridors and normal-speed rail branching off into smaller areas, cars will remain by far the most efficient means of point-to-point transport outside of well-planned urban centers (even in good rail corridors, outside of the very common cases they solve) for the foreseeable future.
andi999 5y ago
Or just depopulate regions in the world which require heating to survive.
- echelon 5y ago
  All of Canada and every state north of Kentucky?
- syspec 5y ago
  What about places that require massive amount of cooling in the summer
  - andi999 5y ago
    Hmmm.. Maybe migratory bird approach?
- elzbardico 5y ago
  Now this is something that our current fusion technology could help with
mlindner 5y ago
He is correct however. There's no possibility of replacing all power with renewables energy within 10 years, so having a 5 year time scale for a working prototype is completely reasonable. We're not even going to have all cars converted to electric vehicles within 20 years even in countries with the most strict rules, let alone all power generation and fossil fuel use for other applications. (Even if fossil fuel sales were forbidden tomorrow, it would still take 20 years for the existing vehicles to be taken out of the used market.)
- willis936 5y ago
  Climate predictions end in 2070, but the world does not. "We're fucked" isn't a reason to throw our hands up and not try. Fusion is "too late" the same way every other decarbonization tool is too late. It doesn't matter. Do it anyway. In 200 years the people who threw up their hands will be seen as short-sighted.
  - ncmncm 5y ago
    People who wasted fortunes on dead ends will be seen in a rather worse light. We already know what we need to stave off climate catastrophe: solar and wind, with storage and hydrogen synthesis, might be enough. Each cent pissed away on useless frivolity incrementally reduces our chance of success.
    - willis936 5y ago
      Nothing about fusion energy research indicates that it is a pointless frivolity. Things that fall in that category are adtech or fintech or middle management.
      - ncmncm 5y ago
        Good analogy. Fusion is like middle management: ultimately useless, but insistent on its own importance.
        5y ago

Jiro 5y ago

>I hope that physicist Dennis Whyte was being misquoted here. Why? Because quantum leaps are small? The metaphor is not comparing it to the size of the quantum leap; the metaphor is that quantum leaps are discontinuous.

leephillips 5y ago
I thought he also believed that the advances were of significant size, but maybe I’m wrong and he did, in fact, mean to admit that this recent, discontinuous progress was minute.
robertlagrant 5y ago
Presumably all progress, far above the quantum level, is discontinuous anyway. The main usage seems to just be "big".

kiba 5y ago

If we are serious about ramping down the use of fossil fuels, we should start with the eliminations of vehicles that we don't need, such as cars. In order to eliminate cars, however, it will require a drastic readjustment of our urban planning policies. Land use policies are what made cars viable and public transport unviable.

hungryforcodes 5y ago
This will NEVER happen. People rarely listen to urban planners, no one is going to tear up their cities and reorganize them around some untested ideological idea, and finally no one is going to give up their cars -- like it or not-- they are annoying. It's much easier to just make them all electric and decarbonize grid production.
- soperj 5y ago
  >no one is going to tear up their cities and reorganize them around some untested ideological idea that's exactly what they did for cars in the first place.
  - mlindner 5y ago
    Cars replaced horse-drawn carriages which already filled cities. Poo covered the streets of New York City. Modern US cities were designed around the horse-drawn carriage, not the car.
  - hungryforcodes 5y ago
    Right, but those were the motor companies behind that. IE: Concrete, spendable money. Urban planners get very little cred unfortunately. If they were smart -- the urban planners -- they would get all computational and build highly accurate models of the cities they work for that people could just go online and check out. Then planners could create new versions of the real city, testing different ideas and sharing them interactively with the public. Most planners these days seem to just say "mass transit GOOD!" and "cars BAD!", without really any substance behind it. This often doesn't really convince the public of much.
  - lazide 5y ago
    Haha, that is a bit out of touch with reality unfortunately. Cars were immediately, obviously valuable to individuals - they gave people the freedom to go where they want to, with whom they wanted to, when they wanted to, and often allowed them to carry things that would otherwise be difficult to carry while doing so. Something which was otherwise very difficult to do previously. If you use public transit, it’s very difficult to go somewhere others do not want to go, or at a time when others do not want to go. You’re tied to what everyone else wants, pretty explicitly, since unpopular routes or schedules get less frequent (or no) coverage, and are expensive to run. You also can’t carry arbitrary heavy stuff since that tends to require infrastructure that is difficult to carry by hand or is not compatible with typical people on foot. Public transit is a system efficiency win, but a general loss for any outliers for individuals. And since everything is public, it adds a lot of friction if you want to go with someone who you otherwise would have issues being seen with in public, or are going somewhere/doing something you’d rather not publicize, or who struggles with crowds or similar problems (such as those with disabilities, children who are too young to self ambulate well, etc). Not unsolvable, but adds friction. Cars are (when roads aren’t completely mangled anyway), individual luxury items - because they enable a large degree of useful freedom for individuals. It’s no wonder that every economy that is able to pay for them goes crazy until it turns into a tragedy of the commons situation.
leephillips 5y ago
I totally agree. But another big contributor to the over-use of cars is the shared illusion that everyone has to “go to work”. I think the extended pandemic is contributing to shattering that illusion.
- nopenopenopeno 5y ago
  >I think the extended pandemic is contributing to shattering that illusion. Or, the opposite? How could you be so out of touch as to think society did not depend on all the masses of people who continued going to work continuing to go to work? Realize these are the low wage workers who will be tasked to pay for your carbon tax, and they won’t blink an eye at re-electing Trump, who in such a case would be the left wing candidate regardless of his party affiliation.
- rindalir 5y ago
  In 2017, only about 15% of vehicle trips in the US were taken for commuting [1], the rest are for shopping/errands (45%) and for socializing/recreation (the balance). So even if we eliminate half the commute trips, we still have a long way to go to reduce the miles traveled. [1] https://www.bts.gov/statistical-products/surveys/national-household-travel-survey-daily-travel-quick-facts https://www.bts.gov/statistical-products/surveys/national-ho...
  - leephillips 5y ago
    I thought it was more; thanks for the information. Although 15%, or say half that after subtracting the people who actually need to be physically at work, is still significant. Also, note that 15% of miles will be more, probably much more, than 15% of the pollution, because those miles are the slowest ones that people travel.
    - rindalir 5y ago
      I also thought it was more (I remember reading about 30% in the early 2000's), so I was kinda surprised. I think you are right that miles traveled will be higher, so from an emissions perspective the decrease in commuting is good news. From the perspective of cars being everywhere and making environments unpleasant, as long as people don't think twice about hoping in the car to go Starbucks twice a day, we've got a huge problem.
rindalir 5y ago
I would also like to see a more walkable future, but I've given up hope that such a big transition will happen within a timeframe small enough to make a difference for things like GHG emissions. I guess I've made my reluctant peace with a rapid electrification of the world's vehicle fleet (which, yes, isn't exactly clean either).
mdp2021 5y ago
> we don't need It's not difficult to imagine a situation in which someone does not /strictly/ need a car (it also seems urban life is quite common these days). It should also be extremely easy to imagine having a car as extremely beneficial. (By the way: epidemics still being far from forgotten, it's really odd to paint collective, "public" transport as aproblematic.) Now, to attack the problem, one could also (and in some contexts primarily) hit house heating. There are voices recommending heating limited to 16°C/61°F. The issue is just about quality of life. Including enabling operations. Hacker should be attentive on their instruments, since they are instrument crafters. Since the control of resources has always been linked to their price (which is also equivalent to, or actually including, an externality tax) - so given a clear alternative -, I am not sure how the whole idea of "we will do without", restricting "freedom" (in abstract terms, as a primary value for constitutional decisors) and operation, came to be. (Up to not seeing "the car" as a life changing revolution... Reading just recently the first pages of a history text, the car was immediately mentioned as "expanding the possibilities for movement to unimaginable heights even for the richest of fifty years before". It has always been very clearly a most prominent gift of engineering, as if a third dotation of natural limbs: it's odd to now read about it as "negligible".)
- kiba 5y ago
  It's not difficult to imagine a situation in which someone does not /strictly/ need a car (it also seems urban life is quite common these days). It should also be extremely easy to imagine having a car as extremely beneficial. Interurban rails and other form of mass transit gained prominence especially in the early 20th century. They were eventually outcompeted by cars on a wide variety of factors, including public support for funding of roads. It's not too difficult to imagine freight traveling on streetcar rails. (Up to not seeing "the car" as a life changing revolution... Reading just recently the first pages of a history text, the car was immediately mentioned as "expanding the possibilities for movement to unimaginable heights even for the richest of fifty years before". It has always been very clearly a most prominent gift of engineering, as if a third dotation of natural limbs: it's odd to now read about it as "negligible".) The car is simply not as viable without proper infrastructure and implicit subsidies.
mlindner 5y ago
> If we are serious about ramping down the use of fossil fuels, we should start with the eliminations of vehicles that we don't need, such as cars. Whenever people state things like this it shows that this person is out of touch with reality.
pengaru 5y ago
How about instead we get rid of the people we don't need, so everyone driving cars involves a much smaller multiplier and we can preserve a high quality of life without trashing the place.
danaris 5y ago
> In order to eliminate cars, however, it will require a drastic readjustment of our urban planning policies. (Emphasis added) The idea that we can eliminate the use of cars with urban planning policies is a clear indication of someone who has never spent any significant amount of time outside a city, or at least has never seriously thought about what it means. Most of the land in the world is not urban. Many millions of people live outside urban areas. That's not going to change. Probably ever. Though I'm a strong proponent of massively increased public transit systems, including both high-speed rail corridors and normal-speed rail branching off into smaller areas, cars will remain by far the most efficient means of point-to-point transport outside of well-planned urban centers (even in good rail corridors, outside of the very common cases they solve) for the foreseeable future.

andi999 5y ago

Or just depopulate regions in the world which require heating to survive.

echelon 5y ago
All of Canada and every state north of Kentucky?
syspec 5y ago
What about places that require massive amount of cooling in the summer
- andi999 5y ago
  Hmmm.. Maybe migratory bird approach?
elzbardico 5y ago
Now this is something that our current fusion technology could help with

mlindner 5y ago

He is correct however. There's no possibility of replacing all power with renewables energy within 10 years, so having a 5 year time scale for a working prototype is completely reasonable. We're not even going to have all cars converted to electric vehicles within 20 years even in countries with the most strict rules, let alone all power generation and fossil fuel use for other applications. (Even if fossil fuel sales were forbidden tomorrow, it would still take 20 years for the existing vehicles to be taken out of the used market.)

willis936 5y ago
Climate predictions end in 2070, but the world does not. "We're fucked" isn't a reason to throw our hands up and not try. Fusion is "too late" the same way every other decarbonization tool is too late. It doesn't matter. Do it anyway. In 200 years the people who threw up their hands will be seen as short-sighted.
- ncmncm 5y ago
  People who wasted fortunes on dead ends will be seen in a rather worse light. We already know what we need to stave off climate catastrophe: solar and wind, with storage and hydrogen synthesis, might be enough. Each cent pissed away on useless frivolity incrementally reduces our chance of success.
  - willis936 5y ago
    Nothing about fusion energy research indicates that it is a pointless frivolity. Things that fall in that category are adtech or fintech or middle management.
    - ncmncm 5y ago
      Good analogy. Fusion is like middle management: ultimately useless, but insistent on its own importance.
      - 5y ago