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For me the pessimism is really starting to set in. Those most extremely passionate about climate change are ignoring the most immediate solutions and instead wa

by rib3ye 5y ago

For me the pessimism is really starting to set in. Those most extremely passionate about climate change are ignoring the most immediate solutions and instead waiting future tech and economies of scale for expensive half-steps. If projections are correct, the chance of the global community figuring out the political solution seems nearly impossible.

MattGaiser 5y ago
I am at the point where it is something that comes out of Y Combinator or defense companies that solve the problems of climate change. Either tech solves the problem or we fight over what is left.
- kergonath 5y ago
  Any technological solution at this point is going to face an impossible political situation. We have plenty of technological solutions already, and look at the mess we have. Sure, none of them is perfect, but none ever will be, either.
  - MattGaiser 5y ago
    Tesla is making a lot of progress in electrification of transport. No impossible politics got in their way. Mostly standard fights over unions and subsidies.
- duped 5y ago
  Tech is the problem of climate change. Tech powers economic growth, which has a price in joules, that incurs a debt in carbon. And not only that, the solution to the problem is already known. Have fewer babies and reduce the population over time, travel less, produce goods closer to where they are needed, eat more produce and less meat, and increase prices for goods and services that require more energy and produce more carbon emissions. Those are not technical solutions, they're political and economic.
  - MattGaiser 5y ago
    You would have an easier time negotiating the laws of physics or lobbying the sun to be a little less hot. Those are not happening, so we need to take a look at what is next on the list of possibilities.
    - duped 5y ago
      It's easier to raise taxes than build nukes. There are no technological possibilities that are predicated on sustained increases in human economic activity and energy usage. At best they slow the pace of climate change and at worse are fools errands.
  - epistasis 5y ago
    That's ridiculous, having fewer babies does nothing to help us fight climate change, and proposing that shows a horribly muddled view of the problem. The maximum climate effect from reducing having babies would mean no children for, say, the next 20 years. What does that do to reduce emissions to negative by 2050? Nothing! The very best it could possibly do is reduce emissions a tiny bit. It does not solve the problem, and it handicaps the workforce right when we need more people producing the tech to pull CO2 out of the atmosphere, in all the multitude of ways we need reconfigure our economy to be carbon negative. Tech is the only only only way out, unless you advocating for the premature deaths of billions and a return to nomadic lifestyles. Suggesting having fewer babies as a solution is just completely unserious. The other major fallacy is that more goods and services requires more carbon emissions. That's just BS. In general, goods require a lot more carbon at the moment, but that's absolutely not a requirement, it's only because we are pulling geological carbon out of the ground and dumping it into the atmosphere to capture stored energy. We have newer, better tech to capture energy from the sun and wind and store it, that does not require any emissions. Meat, similarly, is a red herring for those of us in the US. It's nothing compared to out driving, nothing at all. But brining up meat sure does rile up people to think that they aren't willing to make any changes. We have the tech, and I agree that the problems are political for their deployment, but solar wind and storage will be far more economically efficient when deployed.
- ayngg 5y ago
  I don't think there ever was another solution. Climate change policy will always incur asymmetrical costs, and the people who it effects wouldn't willingly enact them, and others would rarely share that burden in a meaningful way. Outside of innovation, any other policy will most likely incur economic cost which politicians are hesitant to do, especially now with how stretched lower classes are. I think the only way out is to make non hydrocarbon based energy production cheaper and as dependable as hydrocarbons.
  - MattGaiser 5y ago
    100% agree. We innovate our way out of this or we go over a cliff, as if politicians tried to reduce standards of living instead, they would be thrown out in favour of authoritarians who simply would not care about environmental harm.
dale_glass 5y ago
Which is the immediate solution, nuclear? Unfortunately it isn't. Solar and wind are way more immediate. Nuclear takes bloody ages to build and is too expensive, both in building costs and in the power it delivers. It's not being built because effectively nobody wants it. * Energy companies don't want it because it's long and tricky to make it actually happen -- if you're in the business of producing power, most anything else is an easier option. * Financial entities don't want it because it's billions of dollars upfront that may not ever make a profit. * Governments don't want it because it takes ages to build, so you're signing up for investing lots of tax money into something that your successor might cancel, and that they won't see the benefits of. * Consumers don't want it because the power costs more, and if given the choice pretty much will choose to pay for something else. At this point a single nuclear plant can take a decade to build, and if you were to try to have a huge build-up, it would take much longer. Because we're talking about a small and very specialized industry. You can't just get a nuclear reactor made down the street, and there isn't factories out there with an enormous amount of unused capacity for that because that makes no business sense.
- throw0101a 5y ago
  > Which is the immediate solution, nuclear? Unfortunately it isn't. Solar and wind are way more immediate. How about: * stop shutting down current nuclear electrical generation capacity * build more solar and wind capacity * as more renewable capacity comes online use it retire fossil fuel generators Once all the carbon-emitting stuff is offline then perhaps look at shutting down current nuclear. You know: the opposite of what Germany is doing.
epistasis 5y ago
I'm more optimistic than ever. The past few decades have been an absolute revolution in the economics of solar, wind, and storage. They are both getting cheaper than fossil fuels and scaling their production levels to just barely replace our carbon-emitting energy system with a carbon-free energy system on the schedule we need it. The biggest hurdles will be traditional powerful economic forces resisting the disruption of cheaper, cleaner technology eating their lunch. This will be a biiig problem in places like the US. But once we have clean, cheap electricity and storage, a lot of the other problems become so much easier. A lot of chemical processes will need to be sorted out, like ammonia for fertilizer and concrete and aviation/shipping fuels, but all these will be far easier when we have the cheaper form of electricity. We are in such a better place than we were a decade ago. There is tremendous reason to have hope, all we have to do is stay the course and speed our pace.

by rib3ye 5y ago

MattGaiser 5y ago

I am at the point where it is something that comes out of Y Combinator or defense companies that solve the problems of climate change. Either tech solves the problem or we fight over what is left.

kergonath 5y ago
Any technological solution at this point is going to face an impossible political situation. We have plenty of technological solutions already, and look at the mess we have. Sure, none of them is perfect, but none ever will be, either.
- MattGaiser 5y ago
  Tesla is making a lot of progress in electrification of transport. No impossible politics got in their way. Mostly standard fights over unions and subsidies.
duped 5y ago
Tech is the problem of climate change. Tech powers economic growth, which has a price in joules, that incurs a debt in carbon. And not only that, the solution to the problem is already known. Have fewer babies and reduce the population over time, travel less, produce goods closer to where they are needed, eat more produce and less meat, and increase prices for goods and services that require more energy and produce more carbon emissions. Those are not technical solutions, they're political and economic.
- MattGaiser 5y ago
  You would have an easier time negotiating the laws of physics or lobbying the sun to be a little less hot. Those are not happening, so we need to take a look at what is next on the list of possibilities.
  - duped 5y ago
    It's easier to raise taxes than build nukes. There are no technological possibilities that are predicated on sustained increases in human economic activity and energy usage. At best they slow the pace of climate change and at worse are fools errands.
- epistasis 5y ago
  That's ridiculous, having fewer babies does nothing to help us fight climate change, and proposing that shows a horribly muddled view of the problem. The maximum climate effect from reducing having babies would mean no children for, say, the next 20 years. What does that do to reduce emissions to negative by 2050? Nothing! The very best it could possibly do is reduce emissions a tiny bit. It does not solve the problem, and it handicaps the workforce right when we need more people producing the tech to pull CO2 out of the atmosphere, in all the multitude of ways we need reconfigure our economy to be carbon negative. Tech is the only only only way out, unless you advocating for the premature deaths of billions and a return to nomadic lifestyles. Suggesting having fewer babies as a solution is just completely unserious. The other major fallacy is that more goods and services requires more carbon emissions. That's just BS. In general, goods require a lot more carbon at the moment, but that's absolutely not a requirement, it's only because we are pulling geological carbon out of the ground and dumping it into the atmosphere to capture stored energy. We have newer, better tech to capture energy from the sun and wind and store it, that does not require any emissions. Meat, similarly, is a red herring for those of us in the US. It's nothing compared to out driving, nothing at all. But brining up meat sure does rile up people to think that they aren't willing to make any changes. We have the tech, and I agree that the problems are political for their deployment, but solar wind and storage will be far more economically efficient when deployed.
ayngg 5y ago
I don't think there ever was another solution. Climate change policy will always incur asymmetrical costs, and the people who it effects wouldn't willingly enact them, and others would rarely share that burden in a meaningful way. Outside of innovation, any other policy will most likely incur economic cost which politicians are hesitant to do, especially now with how stretched lower classes are. I think the only way out is to make non hydrocarbon based energy production cheaper and as dependable as hydrocarbons.
- MattGaiser 5y ago
  100% agree. We innovate our way out of this or we go over a cliff, as if politicians tried to reduce standards of living instead, they would be thrown out in favour of authoritarians who simply would not care about environmental harm.

dale_glass 5y ago

Which is the immediate solution, nuclear? Unfortunately it isn't. Solar and wind are way more immediate. Nuclear takes bloody ages to build and is too expensive, both in building costs and in the power it delivers. It's not being built because effectively nobody wants it. * Energy companies don't want it because it's long and tricky to make it actually happen -- if you're in the business of producing power, most anything else is an easier option. * Financial entities don't want it because it's billions of dollars upfront that may not ever make a profit. * Governments don't want it because it takes ages to build, so you're signing up for investing lots of tax money into something that your successor might cancel, and that they won't see the benefits of. * Consumers don't want it because the power costs more, and if given the choice pretty much will choose to pay for something else. At this point a single nuclear plant can take a decade to build, and if you were to try to have a huge build-up, it would take much longer. Because we're talking about a small and very specialized industry. You can't just get a nuclear reactor made down the street, and there isn't factories out there with an enormous amount of unused capacity for that because that makes no business sense.

throw0101a 5y ago
> Which is the immediate solution, nuclear? Unfortunately it isn't. Solar and wind are way more immediate. How about: * stop shutting down current nuclear electrical generation capacity * build more solar and wind capacity * as more renewable capacity comes online use it retire fossil fuel generators Once all the carbon-emitting stuff is offline then perhaps look at shutting down current nuclear. You know: the opposite of what Germany is doing.

epistasis 5y ago

I'm more optimistic than ever. The past few decades have been an absolute revolution in the economics of solar, wind, and storage. They are both getting cheaper than fossil fuels and scaling their production levels to just barely replace our carbon-emitting energy system with a carbon-free energy system on the schedule we need it. The biggest hurdles will be traditional powerful economic forces resisting the disruption of cheaper, cleaner technology eating their lunch. This will be a biiig problem in places like the US. But once we have clean, cheap electricity and storage, a lot of the other problems become so much easier. A lot of chemical processes will need to be sorted out, like ammonia for fertilizer and concrete and aviation/shipping fuels, but all these will be far easier when we have the cheaper form of electricity. We are in such a better place than we were a decade ago. There is tremendous reason to have hope, all we have to do is stay the course and speed our pace.