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> That's not nothing, but it's not that impressive either. Almost all initiatives fighting carbon emissions are on the low % percentages. That's just the natur

> That's not nothing, but it's not that impressive either. Almost all initiatives fighting carbon emissions are on the low % percentages. That's just the nature of the problem. If humanity wants to stand a chance, we need to catch ALL the low hanging fruits

qeternity 4y ago
The problem with decarbonization is that there isn’t any low hanging fruit. At its core, hydrocarbons are the best source of energy at this moment, ignoring emissions. And the emissions problem is a massive tragedy of the commons. So you have a need to drive behavior towards something suboptimal with incentives that benefit those who don’t change behavior.
- VintageCool 4y ago
  The low hanging fruit is to decarbonize the grid with solar, wind, and a batteries (and nuclear). Meanwhile, switch automobiles from ICE to EVs. And replace natural gas heating for homes with electric heat pumps. There are other challenges, but that is a big chunk of the job that is doable / already being done with current technology.
  - midoridensha 4y ago
    >Meanwhile, switch automobiles from ICE to EVs. Better yet, redesign cities so they're walkable and bikable and have good public transit (running on electricity of course), so people don't need cars. Cars are bad in many many ways: emissions are only a small part of the problem with cars. Crashes kill tens of thousands of people in America alone every year, they cause people to be obese because they don't walk anywhere, I could go on and on. >And replace natural gas heating for homes with electric heat pumps. Electric heat pumps actually don't work in very cold weather.
    - mmaurizi 4y ago
      How cold is "very cold" to you? There are air-source heat pumps that work all the way down to -15F now.
    - Xylakant 4y ago
      Depends on what you define as “very cold”. Comparatively few people live in climates where you consistently have extended periods where the average temperature drops below zero. And there are ways to work with that. For example what’s in German called “Eisspeicherheizung” (ice storage heating). It cleverly uses the crystalization energy of water [1]. You basically bury a few tons of water and use it as a buffer. You drive a heat pump that extracts energy from the water and on the other side, you run a collector circuit that collects solar energy and heat from the air. Effectively, every time the temperature raises above 0 degrees, you fill up your buffer. The size of the buffer is designed so that at the end of the heating period, most water has been turned to ice. And now you also have free cooling for the summer. This system can cover periods where the outside temperature drops below zero without loss of efficiency. [1] freezing a liter of water at 0 degrees requires an equivalent energy to heating a liter by 80 degrees Celsius.
    - stinos 4y ago
      Electric heat pumps actually don't work in very cold weather. Sure they do, their efficiency just drops to below the point where it remains feasible (i.e. cheaper than furnace/boiler). Technology has come a long way and most of the world's population doen't seem to live in that 'very cold' weather, so I'd wager heat pumps are still the way to go. Especially ground source heat pumps thrive well enough in cold climates, just not always doable to install on existing sites. https://carbonswitch.com/do-heat-pumps-work-in-cold-weather/ https://carbonswitch.com/do-heat-pumps-work-in-cold-weather/ touches the subject; not the best source perhaps but searching for 'cold climate heat pump' gives plenty of info.
    - criddell 4y ago
      > redesign cities so they're walkable and bikable and have good public transit (running on electricity of course), so people don't need cars I think you underestimate how much people like their cars and aren't considering how unwilling people are to walk or bike when it's cold or hot out. Public transit should be fixed though. Keep buses and their fixed route and schedule during rush hours and for the rest of the day have publicly funded ride-share type of service.
  - qeternity 4y ago
    With all due respect, I'm going to guess you don't have any experience in the commodities sector. None of this is low hanging.
  - at-fates-hands 4y ago
    >> switch automobiles from ICE to EVs How soon before we have electrical grids capable of handling all the people charging their cars at the same time? This was five days ago - are we putting the horse before the cart right now? The announcement by the California Independent System Operator (Cal ISO) on Wednesday asking California residents not to charge their electric vehicles during peak hours to help conserve electricity continued to face backlash on Thursday, due to the state approving a ban on the sale of new gas powered vehicles by 2035 only a week earlier. At the same time, the power supply in California has been in a state of constant flux due to the same 2045 policy removing oil, gas, and coal plants at a rate faster than wind, solar, hydro, and other renewable sources of energy can replace them. On Thursday, a huge 9% loss of energy in 2025 was averted by the legislature passing a bill saving Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Station for several more years as a bridge to help meet power needs in the state. https://californiaglobe.com/articles/california-backlash-over-telling-californians-not-to-charge-electric-vehicles-during-heatwave/ https://californiaglobe.com/articles/california-backlash-ove...
- blooalien 4y ago
  > "The problem with decarbonization is that there isn’t any low hanging fruit." Sadly, the problem with decarbonization is that it doesn't matter if there is or isn't "low hanging fruit", because even if it was all "low hanging fruit", too much of humanity will fight to the bloody end to avoid taking action on any of it for fear that they'll have to A) admit that we've really fucked up, and B) they'll have to alter their life in some small inconvenient way that they'll blow way outta proportion to make it seem like some massive world-ending inconvenience.
  - qeternity 4y ago
    > Sadly, the problem with decarbonization is that it doesn't matter if there is or isn't "low hanging fruit" Ok, that's a different argument, one that I agree with. But you can't just handwave the reality away: there is no low hanging fruit.
    - ben_w 4y ago
      The other commenter may not have demonstrated any low hanging fruit, but I would say that there is still plenty of that: • PV is approximately the cheapest electricity available, and not yet saturated in summer daytime • BEVs have lower lifetime costs and emissions than ICE vehicles • Not all homes are as insulated as they can be • Given how cheap food is (and that the government subsidises and regulates it anyway), relatively modest updates can reduce methane emissions even without population dietary changes And all that's assuming zero new tech. Vat grown meat is aiming for lower emissions, not just ethical benefits; there are efforts to produce low (and zero) emission steel and concrete. The trouble is, the necessary reductions are around 99.9%, so we need more than just the combination of all the existing and near-term low-hanging fruit, we need all bar one of the apples in all the trees in the garden.
- MontyCarloHall 4y ago
  For exactly the reasons you describe, the low hanging fruit is (unfortunately) geoengineering. It is far easier to figure out the scientific engineering to increase the reflectivity of the earth’s atmosphere as safely as possible than to figure out the political engineering to make everyone willingly change their lifestyles dramatically and quickly enough to decarbonize at the rate the planet needs. No matter how you slice it, rapid decarbonization requires some reduction in our perceived quality of life, and that’s a politically intractable problem to surmount. The only other semi-feasible hanging fruit are technological — e.g. someone figures out a magic bullet for carbon capture, or the price of renewables and battery technology suddenly gets so cheap that the price of fossil fuel energy becomes extremely expensive by comparison.
lozenge 4y ago
...and many of the high hanging ones too!
philjohn 4y ago
And we've seen examples from other domains where 1% here, 0.5% there adds up to meaningful gains (I'm talking of the marginal gains philosophy of UK cycling, and then Team Sky). If we write off every "This will only help 1%" then you ignore that in combination the effect is magnified.
- simonebrunozzi 4y ago
  Don't know either examples - can you tell us more about UK cycling, and Team Sky?
  - philjohn 4y ago
    Dail Brailsford is the man who initiated it with Team GB - https://jamesclear.com/marginal-gains https://jamesclear.com/marginal-gains
credit_guy 4y ago
Replacing coal with natural gas has huge impact. It was probably the main driver of the reductions in emissions in the US for the last 15 years. Natural gas will continue to displace coal, so additional emissions reductions will be had. Solar and wind electricity generation also have a huge impact; they account for 10% of the electricity generation in the US now, but 20 years ago they accounted for roughly 0. The increase of solar generation was above 20% per year each year of the last decade (except one); wind grew at maybe about 10% per year. It's not likely that they continue at the same rate, but even if they grow at only 15% and 5% per year for the next 2 decades, the impact will be huge. We can get to a point where we only have solar, wind, hydro, nuclear and natural gas. The natural gas will be the most economic way to deal with the intermittency of solar and wind. Then we'll switch to hydrogen. Then we'll decarbonize steel and concrete. We'll actually start doing that in parallel. Once concrete is decarbonized, there's no point in wooden buildings.
- AstralStorm 4y ago
  Big impact for gas, yes, but limited. That will rid us of about 15% of emissions. Going renewable with nuclear could go to 50%. Gas also has a problem of leaking, and methane is a potent GHG, so it's not just emissions due to burning it. The remaining pieces are manufacturing and transportation. Former can be hard to make clean. Latter is the question of how quickly we can develop power grids for EV or hydrogen infrastructure and rebuild rail where it is insufficient. Also clean up mass shipping. New small block nuclear power plants are likely better than gas at filling in intermittent wind load (which is usually month spread) and can be toggled as needed.
  - Retric 4y ago
    A green grid supplying EV’s and home heating is enough to dramatically extend the window of time to deal with the other sources. I am not saying it’s the only issue, just that everything else is largely meaningless in comparison. Methane gas leaks are front loaded they don’t have long term impact as long as we quickly stop using it. In the short term it’s a problem but long term methane is effectively identical to CO2 because 1 atom of CH4 produces water and 1 atom of CO2.
badpun 4y ago
> If humanity wants to stand a chance, Why is it so commonplace now to conflate climate change with basically armageddon? I thought that most models predict some hard times (mass migrations and everything bad that comes with it), but species extinction (or even, civilization collapse) is still a fringe belief among the scientists.
- ben_w 4y ago
  While it is true that our species going extinct from climate change is extremely unlikely (even in the event of climate change leading to global thermonuclear war), and while I am also frustrated by binary thinking where everything is either "fine" or "disaster"[0], we are uncomfortably close to the lower estimate for the collapse of the Greenland ice sheet, which would cause a 7.2 meter sea level rise, which is a massive disaster. [0] or indeed where everything is either "cold" or "hot", as someone recently posted here suggesting that global warming would solve the problem of EV batteries being too cold sometimes
  - renjimen 4y ago
    Just to add some more detail, we estimate a maximum 2 m sea level rise by 2100 due to contributions from all glacier sources, including the Greenland Ice Sheet and the Antarctic Ice Sheet, but more likely closer to 0.8 m [1]. That is still a large amount given ~400 million people live below 2 m [2], and most of those in developing parts of the world. [1] https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1159099 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1159099 [2] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/jun/29/risk-from-sea-level-rises-unless-emissions-reduced https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/jun/29/risk-fro...
- harimau777 4y ago
  Maybe it depends on what segment of society you are surrounded by? Most of my friends are barely hanging on (unhealthy/multiple jobs, multiple roommates, no kids, can't afford healthcare, etc.). So any decrease in quality of life would be a catastrophe.
- radicalbyte 4y ago

qeternity 4y ago

The problem with decarbonization is that there isn’t any low hanging fruit. At its core, hydrocarbons are the best source of energy at this moment, ignoring emissions. And the emissions problem is a massive tragedy of the commons. So you have a need to drive behavior towards something suboptimal with incentives that benefit those who don’t change behavior.

VintageCool 4y ago
The low hanging fruit is to decarbonize the grid with solar, wind, and a batteries (and nuclear). Meanwhile, switch automobiles from ICE to EVs. And replace natural gas heating for homes with electric heat pumps. There are other challenges, but that is a big chunk of the job that is doable / already being done with current technology.
- midoridensha 4y ago
  >Meanwhile, switch automobiles from ICE to EVs. Better yet, redesign cities so they're walkable and bikable and have good public transit (running on electricity of course), so people don't need cars. Cars are bad in many many ways: emissions are only a small part of the problem with cars. Crashes kill tens of thousands of people in America alone every year, they cause people to be obese because they don't walk anywhere, I could go on and on. >And replace natural gas heating for homes with electric heat pumps. Electric heat pumps actually don't work in very cold weather.
  - mmaurizi 4y ago
    How cold is "very cold" to you? There are air-source heat pumps that work all the way down to -15F now.
  - Xylakant 4y ago
    Depends on what you define as “very cold”. Comparatively few people live in climates where you consistently have extended periods where the average temperature drops below zero. And there are ways to work with that. For example what’s in German called “Eisspeicherheizung” (ice storage heating). It cleverly uses the crystalization energy of water [1]. You basically bury a few tons of water and use it as a buffer. You drive a heat pump that extracts energy from the water and on the other side, you run a collector circuit that collects solar energy and heat from the air. Effectively, every time the temperature raises above 0 degrees, you fill up your buffer. The size of the buffer is designed so that at the end of the heating period, most water has been turned to ice. And now you also have free cooling for the summer. This system can cover periods where the outside temperature drops below zero without loss of efficiency. [1] freezing a liter of water at 0 degrees requires an equivalent energy to heating a liter by 80 degrees Celsius.
  - stinos 4y ago
    Electric heat pumps actually don't work in very cold weather. Sure they do, their efficiency just drops to below the point where it remains feasible (i.e. cheaper than furnace/boiler). Technology has come a long way and most of the world's population doen't seem to live in that 'very cold' weather, so I'd wager heat pumps are still the way to go. Especially ground source heat pumps thrive well enough in cold climates, just not always doable to install on existing sites. https://carbonswitch.com/do-heat-pumps-work-in-cold-weather/ https://carbonswitch.com/do-heat-pumps-work-in-cold-weather/ touches the subject; not the best source perhaps but searching for 'cold climate heat pump' gives plenty of info.
  - criddell 4y ago
    > redesign cities so they're walkable and bikable and have good public transit (running on electricity of course), so people don't need cars I think you underestimate how much people like their cars and aren't considering how unwilling people are to walk or bike when it's cold or hot out. Public transit should be fixed though. Keep buses and their fixed route and schedule during rush hours and for the rest of the day have publicly funded ride-share type of service.
- qeternity 4y ago
  With all due respect, I'm going to guess you don't have any experience in the commodities sector. None of this is low hanging.
- at-fates-hands 4y ago
  >> switch automobiles from ICE to EVs How soon before we have electrical grids capable of handling all the people charging their cars at the same time? This was five days ago - are we putting the horse before the cart right now? The announcement by the California Independent System Operator (Cal ISO) on Wednesday asking California residents not to charge their electric vehicles during peak hours to help conserve electricity continued to face backlash on Thursday, due to the state approving a ban on the sale of new gas powered vehicles by 2035 only a week earlier. At the same time, the power supply in California has been in a state of constant flux due to the same 2045 policy removing oil, gas, and coal plants at a rate faster than wind, solar, hydro, and other renewable sources of energy can replace them. On Thursday, a huge 9% loss of energy in 2025 was averted by the legislature passing a bill saving Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Station for several more years as a bridge to help meet power needs in the state. https://californiaglobe.com/articles/california-backlash-over-telling-californians-not-to-charge-electric-vehicles-during-heatwave/ https://californiaglobe.com/articles/california-backlash-ove...
blooalien 4y ago
> "The problem with decarbonization is that there isn’t any low hanging fruit." Sadly, the problem with decarbonization is that it doesn't matter if there is or isn't "low hanging fruit", because even if it was all "low hanging fruit", too much of humanity will fight to the bloody end to avoid taking action on any of it for fear that they'll have to A) admit that we've really fucked up, and B) they'll have to alter their life in some small inconvenient way that they'll blow way outta proportion to make it seem like some massive world-ending inconvenience.
- qeternity 4y ago
  > Sadly, the problem with decarbonization is that it doesn't matter if there is or isn't "low hanging fruit" Ok, that's a different argument, one that I agree with. But you can't just handwave the reality away: there is no low hanging fruit.
  - ben_w 4y ago
    The other commenter may not have demonstrated any low hanging fruit, but I would say that there is still plenty of that: • PV is approximately the cheapest electricity available, and not yet saturated in summer daytime • BEVs have lower lifetime costs and emissions than ICE vehicles • Not all homes are as insulated as they can be • Given how cheap food is (and that the government subsidises and regulates it anyway), relatively modest updates can reduce methane emissions even without population dietary changes And all that's assuming zero new tech. Vat grown meat is aiming for lower emissions, not just ethical benefits; there are efforts to produce low (and zero) emission steel and concrete. The trouble is, the necessary reductions are around 99.9%, so we need more than just the combination of all the existing and near-term low-hanging fruit, we need all bar one of the apples in all the trees in the garden.
MontyCarloHall 4y ago
For exactly the reasons you describe, the low hanging fruit is (unfortunately) geoengineering. It is far easier to figure out the scientific engineering to increase the reflectivity of the earth’s atmosphere as safely as possible than to figure out the political engineering to make everyone willingly change their lifestyles dramatically and quickly enough to decarbonize at the rate the planet needs. No matter how you slice it, rapid decarbonization requires some reduction in our perceived quality of life, and that’s a politically intractable problem to surmount. The only other semi-feasible hanging fruit are technological — e.g. someone figures out a magic bullet for carbon capture, or the price of renewables and battery technology suddenly gets so cheap that the price of fossil fuel energy becomes extremely expensive by comparison.

lozenge 4y ago

...and many of the high hanging ones too!

philjohn 4y ago

And we've seen examples from other domains where 1% here, 0.5% there adds up to meaningful gains (I'm talking of the marginal gains philosophy of UK cycling, and then Team Sky). If we write off every "This will only help 1%" then you ignore that in combination the effect is magnified.

simonebrunozzi 4y ago
Don't know either examples - can you tell us more about UK cycling, and Team Sky?
- philjohn 4y ago
  Dail Brailsford is the man who initiated it with Team GB - https://jamesclear.com/marginal-gains https://jamesclear.com/marginal-gains

credit_guy 4y ago

Replacing coal with natural gas has huge impact. It was probably the main driver of the reductions in emissions in the US for the last 15 years. Natural gas will continue to displace coal, so additional emissions reductions will be had. Solar and wind electricity generation also have a huge impact; they account for 10% of the electricity generation in the US now, but 20 years ago they accounted for roughly 0. The increase of solar generation was above 20% per year each year of the last decade (except one); wind grew at maybe about 10% per year. It's not likely that they continue at the same rate, but even if they grow at only 15% and 5% per year for the next 2 decades, the impact will be huge. We can get to a point where we only have solar, wind, hydro, nuclear and natural gas. The natural gas will be the most economic way to deal with the intermittency of solar and wind. Then we'll switch to hydrogen. Then we'll decarbonize steel and concrete. We'll actually start doing that in parallel. Once concrete is decarbonized, there's no point in wooden buildings.

AstralStorm 4y ago
Big impact for gas, yes, but limited. That will rid us of about 15% of emissions. Going renewable with nuclear could go to 50%. Gas also has a problem of leaking, and methane is a potent GHG, so it's not just emissions due to burning it. The remaining pieces are manufacturing and transportation. Former can be hard to make clean. Latter is the question of how quickly we can develop power grids for EV or hydrogen infrastructure and rebuild rail where it is insufficient. Also clean up mass shipping. New small block nuclear power plants are likely better than gas at filling in intermittent wind load (which is usually month spread) and can be toggled as needed.
- Retric 4y ago
  A green grid supplying EV’s and home heating is enough to dramatically extend the window of time to deal with the other sources. I am not saying it’s the only issue, just that everything else is largely meaningless in comparison. Methane gas leaks are front loaded they don’t have long term impact as long as we quickly stop using it. In the short term it’s a problem but long term methane is effectively identical to CO2 because 1 atom of CH4 produces water and 1 atom of CO2.

badpun 4y ago

> If humanity wants to stand a chance, Why is it so commonplace now to conflate climate change with basically armageddon? I thought that most models predict some hard times (mass migrations and everything bad that comes with it), but species extinction (or even, civilization collapse) is still a fringe belief among the scientists.

ben_w 4y ago
While it is true that our species going extinct from climate change is extremely unlikely (even in the event of climate change leading to global thermonuclear war), and while I am also frustrated by binary thinking where everything is either "fine" or "disaster"[0], we are uncomfortably close to the lower estimate for the collapse of the Greenland ice sheet, which would cause a 7.2 meter sea level rise, which is a massive disaster. [0] or indeed where everything is either "cold" or "hot", as someone recently posted here suggesting that global warming would solve the problem of EV batteries being too cold sometimes
- renjimen 4y ago
  Just to add some more detail, we estimate a maximum 2 m sea level rise by 2100 due to contributions from all glacier sources, including the Greenland Ice Sheet and the Antarctic Ice Sheet, but more likely closer to 0.8 m [1]. That is still a large amount given ~400 million people live below 2 m [2], and most of those in developing parts of the world. [1] https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1159099 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1159099 [2] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/jun/29/risk-from-sea-level-rises-unless-emissions-reduced https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/jun/29/risk-fro...
harimau777 4y ago
Maybe it depends on what segment of society you are surrounded by? Most of my friends are barely hanging on (unhealthy/multiple jobs, multiple roommates, no kids, can't afford healthcare, etc.). So any decrease in quality of life would be a catastrophe.
radicalbyte 4y ago