7 ms·

To Save the Planet, Should We Be Moving Slower?

44 points by laurex 3y ago

okokwhatever 3y ago
Back to the 70s... my God...
xcskier56 3y ago
Tangent: in my undergrad, Bill McKibben was the “faculty advisor” for us on the xc ski team. I never really figured out what this role meant other than they were faculty, and liked the sport… but oh man did Bill love XC skiing. He was out skiing on the smallest amount of snow in November until the last patch melted in April. If you could have measured his enthusiasm for sliding around on snow compared to us who spent so much of our time focused on it, it would have been no contest.
mabbo 3y ago
It's a simple tragedy of the commons. Except the commons is the entire planet. I do not believe democratic governments would ever be willing to take the needed steps to slow growth sufficiently to save the planet- they'd be voted out of office and replaced by someone else. Autocratic governments will never care enough to do anything to help anyone but themselves. One begins to see why all the billionaires are trying to figure out how to escape the planet.
- kaba0 3y ago
  > One begins to see why all the billionaires are trying to figure out how to escape the planet After their greed being the reason why we are here.. but good news for them, there is nowhere else to go, they will rot with us here.
- defrost 3y ago
  > I do not believe democratic governments would ever be willing to take the needed steps Dysfunctional bicameral faux democratic governments such as the system that holds sway in the US at present will struggle - but they don't properly represent the will of the people at large. Every survey I've seen on health care or gun regulation for example shows the will of the public at odds with the actions of the government. THe founders were not fans of party politics .. and yet that became the emergenant behaviour, pandering to self interest and the highest bidders for attention and not to broad opinion.
  - candiddevmike 3y ago
    I think it's because capitalism perverts everything into repeating the mantra "don't fuck with the money". You need to fix the economic system along with the government.
    - blitz_skull 3y ago
      Why does capitalism have to be your scapegoat? Why not go to the root—the lust for power. In essence that’s what money is anyway, it’s just a means to an end. Would you also fix the endless human desire for more? If you can, then you’ve got a shot. Otherwise, you don’t.
      - HideousKojima 3y ago
        >Would you also fix the endless human desire for more? We could call it the New Soviet Man or something like that
    - gruez 3y ago
      >I think it's because capitalism ... That's why communist countries are known for their carbon neutral economies, and being excellent stewards of the environment, right?
      - ssabev 3y ago
        Yeah and human rights and happiness, etc, etc. Source: product of 2 former commie countries. The after effects probably take 50+ years to undo
      - ElectricalUnion 3y ago
        No communist country exists, and most likely one will never exist. Calling countries "communist" is supposed to be a capitalist joke on communism being a unreacheable utopia.
        gruez 3y ago
- irrational 3y ago
  I really don’t see the current Earth governments doing enough soon enough to make any difference. I’m afraid the best case scenario is worldwide mass revolts that literally kill all people in power and the worst case scenario is complete societal collapse due to mass migrations as the environment collapses.
  - vasco 3y ago
    Or some beach houses will be flooded and everyone just moves 100 meters inland.
    - kaba0 3y ago
      I’m sure the huge swathes of heavily populated regions on all continents that will be left without potable water and scorching hot temperatures will be content with it and not move to places that are actually habitable? Being climate change denialist is just utterly dumb at this point.
      - vasco 3y ago
        I don't deny climate change, I deny your prediction of hell on earth.
  - goatlover 3y ago
    Killing everyone in power just means new people will be put in power. Whether they will do a better job out of necessity just depends.
    - irrational 3y ago
      Well, if the cycle repeats and enough people die, the entire situation will sort itself out.
- antegamisou 3y ago
  > One begins to see why all the billionaires are trying to figure out how to escape the planet. For starters, they can stop investing on creative ideas that accelerate its environmental collapse.
- goatlover 3y ago
  To the extent they actually are trying to escape, they're idiots, since making any other planet (Mars) habitable is way harder and more costly than dealing with climate change. The Earth will retain a breathable atmosphere, shielded from radiation with surface liquid water and life that can adapt to a warmer climate. There's no realistic climate scenario in which Earth becomes Venus. That would require a far worse run-away greenhouse effect than has ever occurred on this planet. Most likely Venus had massive ongoing volcanic activity that surpassed any in Earth's history. The dinosaurs evolved in a world with four times the CO2 that we have today. Earth won't become uninhabitable, however serious climate change becomes. That's just not a thing.
  - kaba0 3y ago
    Not only more costly, it is impossible with current technology.
ponorin 3y ago
It's not just an opinion, it's a physical reality. We only have the Earth's worth of biomass that we can use. And unlike former Twitter CEO's pipe dream we aren't anywhere near being able to venture into an exoplanet, and attempting to do so is hurting the environment yet again. About the only reason we're not changing course is because most nations on this planet currently subscribe to an ideology devised in the colonial age by some european dudes.
- mattnewton 3y ago
  I don’t buy this argument, it sounds too much like the malthusians explaining there wasn’t enough arable land to support the population before nitrogen fertilizer was invented. I’m not saying we have a “fertilizer for energy” around the corner, but I also wouldn’t rule it out and start asking people to stop building.
  - falcolas 3y ago
    Ironically, we’re getting our fertilizer from the same place we get most of our fuel: exhaustible caches in the ground. They may never run out, but they will only go up in price, raising the price of food.
    - defrost 3y ago
      Ahhh, not exactly - we get our fertilizer from the air actually - it's the enormous energy draw required that causes us to use fossil fuels from the ground. That massive carbon footprint exists because although the Haber-Bosch process represents a huge technological advancement, it’s always been an energy-hungry one. The reaction, which runs at temperatures around 500 °C and at pressures up to about 20 MPa, sucks up about 1% of the world’s total energy production. https://cen.acs.org/environment/green-chemistry/Industrial-ammonia-production-emits-CO2/97/i24 https://cen.acs.org/environment/green-chemistry/Industrial-a... Here in my state we're looking hard at mass production (global scale numbers) of 'green' ammonia. https://fortescue.com/what-we-do/green-energy-research/green-ammonia https://fortescue.com/what-we-do/green-energy-research/green...
Barrin92 3y ago
You can debate about de-growth but you definitely need to grow substantially slower than you bring new capacity online, or else you run into Jevon's paradox, which points out that if you increase consumption as fast as you make efficiency gains you cancel the latter out. Examples being cars becoming larger and heavier even though engines get better, bloated software despite faster chips, better healthcare but sicker populations, and so on. Vaclav Smil is cited in the article and he noticed in one of his recent books that despite large deployment of renewables, global fossil fuel reliance has only fallen from about 92% to ~88% over the last few decades. It's because we keep adding more consumers almost as fast as we add renewables. In regards to ecological problems we're on a tight schedule to fend off the worst consequences and that won't be possible if we keep eating up all new gains. Especially because there's hard limits on how fast you can add new infrastructure globally, which itself is rarely green.
ssabev 3y ago
If only we actually invested in the safest, greenest and best energy we got.. we wouldn't need all these edgy Malthusian takes
roschdal 3y ago
Yes
hashxyz 3y ago
I am getting sick of seeing the same edgy fatalistic comments every time a climate article is posted. If you are really such a master of the universe that you can predict the future and know it’s gonna be so horrible, then you must also know that the only morally justifiable action for you to take is to end your life right away to become a net-zero hero. Otherwise why don’t you calm down and entertain the thought that maybe the future won’t suck, and might even be normal or good, just like the present is right now. Why are you working on technology if you don’t think the future will be great?
- vasco 3y ago
  Also why are they having kids, why are they buying things, etc. If someone is truly concerned: vote that way, go work on making floating houses and thermal isolation and carbon recapture and leave the rest of us that live normal lives with average carbon usage alone. Anytime someone that had kids mentions anything about reducing other people's carbon output they should just be ignored. You just created a potentially forever chain of carbon usage that will be exponential. Meanwhile here I am with my "constant" carbon usage to your O(2^n) in perpetuity.
  - hashxyz 3y ago
    What if you actually can’t predict the future and climate change is actually good? What if having kids is actually a great thing for them and for the world? These are reasonable ideas if you don’t just spend your time doomscrolling on twitter all day. People talk about the AI singularity but the whole world is a singularity all the time. To model the entire world and predict how everything is going to play out on a social and economic level is obviously impossible. To make impoverishing top-down prescriptions based on that seems criminal. To utilize this storyline as a political mechanism is cruel.
    - defrost 3y ago
      > To model the entire world and predict how everything is going to play out on a social and economic level is obviously impossible. Sure. But that's a trite non sequitur entirely orthoganal to the simplicity of the thermodynamics underpinning the cause of climate change. Ever increasing levels of trapped energy that will increase at an even faster rate once methane and water vapor get seriously involved in the mix unless action is taken to either block the sun or reduce the insulating effects of atmospheric gases.
mikewarot 3y ago
We need to push hard on regenerative agriculture. The amount of carbon that could be captured while rebuilding a few feet of soil would go a long way towards helping balance out the CO2.

44 points by laurex 3y ago

Back to the 70s... my God...

Tangent: in my undergrad, Bill McKibben was the “faculty advisor” for us on the xc ski team. I never really figured out what this role meant other than they were faculty, and liked the sport… but oh man did Bill love XC skiing. He was out skiing on the smallest amount of snow in November until the last patch melted in April. If you could have measured his enthusiasm for sliding around on snow compared to us who spent so much of our time focused on it, it would have been no contest.

mabbo 3y ago

It's a simple tragedy of the commons. Except the commons is the entire planet. I do not believe democratic governments would ever be willing to take the needed steps to slow growth sufficiently to save the planet- they'd be voted out of office and replaced by someone else. Autocratic governments will never care enough to do anything to help anyone but themselves. One begins to see why all the billionaires are trying to figure out how to escape the planet.

kaba0 3y ago
> One begins to see why all the billionaires are trying to figure out how to escape the planet After their greed being the reason why we are here.. but good news for them, there is nowhere else to go, they will rot with us here.
defrost 3y ago
> I do not believe democratic governments would ever be willing to take the needed steps Dysfunctional bicameral faux democratic governments such as the system that holds sway in the US at present will struggle - but they don't properly represent the will of the people at large. Every survey I've seen on health care or gun regulation for example shows the will of the public at odds with the actions of the government. THe founders were not fans of party politics .. and yet that became the emergenant behaviour, pandering to self interest and the highest bidders for attention and not to broad opinion.
- candiddevmike 3y ago
  I think it's because capitalism perverts everything into repeating the mantra "don't fuck with the money". You need to fix the economic system along with the government.
  - blitz_skull 3y ago
    Why does capitalism have to be your scapegoat? Why not go to the root—the lust for power. In essence that’s what money is anyway, it’s just a means to an end. Would you also fix the endless human desire for more? If you can, then you’ve got a shot. Otherwise, you don’t.
    - HideousKojima 3y ago
      >Would you also fix the endless human desire for more? We could call it the New Soviet Man or something like that
  - gruez 3y ago
    >I think it's because capitalism ... That's why communist countries are known for their carbon neutral economies, and being excellent stewards of the environment, right?
    - ssabev 3y ago
      Yeah and human rights and happiness, etc, etc. Source: product of 2 former commie countries. The after effects probably take 50+ years to undo
    - ElectricalUnion 3y ago
      No communist country exists, and most likely one will never exist. Calling countries "communist" is supposed to be a capitalist joke on communism being a unreacheable utopia.
      - gruez 3y ago
irrational 3y ago
I really don’t see the current Earth governments doing enough soon enough to make any difference. I’m afraid the best case scenario is worldwide mass revolts that literally kill all people in power and the worst case scenario is complete societal collapse due to mass migrations as the environment collapses.
- vasco 3y ago
  Or some beach houses will be flooded and everyone just moves 100 meters inland.
  - kaba0 3y ago
    I’m sure the huge swathes of heavily populated regions on all continents that will be left without potable water and scorching hot temperatures will be content with it and not move to places that are actually habitable? Being climate change denialist is just utterly dumb at this point.
    - vasco 3y ago
      I don't deny climate change, I deny your prediction of hell on earth.
- goatlover 3y ago
  Killing everyone in power just means new people will be put in power. Whether they will do a better job out of necessity just depends.
  - irrational 3y ago
    Well, if the cycle repeats and enough people die, the entire situation will sort itself out.
antegamisou 3y ago
> One begins to see why all the billionaires are trying to figure out how to escape the planet. For starters, they can stop investing on creative ideas that accelerate its environmental collapse.
goatlover 3y ago
To the extent they actually are trying to escape, they're idiots, since making any other planet (Mars) habitable is way harder and more costly than dealing with climate change. The Earth will retain a breathable atmosphere, shielded from radiation with surface liquid water and life that can adapt to a warmer climate. There's no realistic climate scenario in which Earth becomes Venus. That would require a far worse run-away greenhouse effect than has ever occurred on this planet. Most likely Venus had massive ongoing volcanic activity that surpassed any in Earth's history. The dinosaurs evolved in a world with four times the CO2 that we have today. Earth won't become uninhabitable, however serious climate change becomes. That's just not a thing.
- kaba0 3y ago
  Not only more costly, it is impossible with current technology.

ponorin 3y ago

It's not just an opinion, it's a physical reality. We only have the Earth's worth of biomass that we can use. And unlike former Twitter CEO's pipe dream we aren't anywhere near being able to venture into an exoplanet, and attempting to do so is hurting the environment yet again. About the only reason we're not changing course is because most nations on this planet currently subscribe to an ideology devised in the colonial age by some european dudes.

mattnewton 3y ago
I don’t buy this argument, it sounds too much like the malthusians explaining there wasn’t enough arable land to support the population before nitrogen fertilizer was invented. I’m not saying we have a “fertilizer for energy” around the corner, but I also wouldn’t rule it out and start asking people to stop building.
- falcolas 3y ago
  Ironically, we’re getting our fertilizer from the same place we get most of our fuel: exhaustible caches in the ground. They may never run out, but they will only go up in price, raising the price of food.
  - defrost 3y ago
    Ahhh, not exactly - we get our fertilizer from the air actually - it's the enormous energy draw required that causes us to use fossil fuels from the ground. That massive carbon footprint exists because although the Haber-Bosch process represents a huge technological advancement, it’s always been an energy-hungry one. The reaction, which runs at temperatures around 500 °C and at pressures up to about 20 MPa, sucks up about 1% of the world’s total energy production. https://cen.acs.org/environment/green-chemistry/Industrial-ammonia-production-emits-CO2/97/i24 https://cen.acs.org/environment/green-chemistry/Industrial-a... Here in my state we're looking hard at mass production (global scale numbers) of 'green' ammonia. https://fortescue.com/what-we-do/green-energy-research/green-ammonia https://fortescue.com/what-we-do/green-energy-research/green...

Barrin92 3y ago

You can debate about de-growth but you definitely need to grow substantially slower than you bring new capacity online, or else you run into Jevon's paradox, which points out that if you increase consumption as fast as you make efficiency gains you cancel the latter out. Examples being cars becoming larger and heavier even though engines get better, bloated software despite faster chips, better healthcare but sicker populations, and so on. Vaclav Smil is cited in the article and he noticed in one of his recent books that despite large deployment of renewables, global fossil fuel reliance has only fallen from about 92% to ~88% over the last few decades. It's because we keep adding more consumers almost as fast as we add renewables. In regards to ecological problems we're on a tight schedule to fend off the worst consequences and that won't be possible if we keep eating up all new gains. Especially because there's hard limits on how fast you can add new infrastructure globally, which itself is rarely green.

ssabev 3y ago

If only we actually invested in the safest, greenest and best energy we got.. we wouldn't need all these edgy Malthusian takes

roschdal 3y ago

Yes

hashxyz 3y ago

I am getting sick of seeing the same edgy fatalistic comments every time a climate article is posted. If you are really such a master of the universe that you can predict the future and know it’s gonna be so horrible, then you must also know that the only morally justifiable action for you to take is to end your life right away to become a net-zero hero. Otherwise why don’t you calm down and entertain the thought that maybe the future won’t suck, and might even be normal or good, just like the present is right now. Why are you working on technology if you don’t think the future will be great?

vasco 3y ago
Also why are they having kids, why are they buying things, etc. If someone is truly concerned: vote that way, go work on making floating houses and thermal isolation and carbon recapture and leave the rest of us that live normal lives with average carbon usage alone. Anytime someone that had kids mentions anything about reducing other people's carbon output they should just be ignored. You just created a potentially forever chain of carbon usage that will be exponential. Meanwhile here I am with my "constant" carbon usage to your O(2^n) in perpetuity.
- hashxyz 3y ago
  What if you actually can’t predict the future and climate change is actually good? What if having kids is actually a great thing for them and for the world? These are reasonable ideas if you don’t just spend your time doomscrolling on twitter all day. People talk about the AI singularity but the whole world is a singularity all the time. To model the entire world and predict how everything is going to play out on a social and economic level is obviously impossible. To make impoverishing top-down prescriptions based on that seems criminal. To utilize this storyline as a political mechanism is cruel.
  - defrost 3y ago
    > To model the entire world and predict how everything is going to play out on a social and economic level is obviously impossible. Sure. But that's a trite non sequitur entirely orthoganal to the simplicity of the thermodynamics underpinning the cause of climate change. Ever increasing levels of trapped energy that will increase at an even faster rate once methane and water vapor get seriously involved in the mix unless action is taken to either block the sun or reduce the insulating effects of atmospheric gases.

mikewarot 3y ago

We need to push hard on regenerative agriculture. The amount of carbon that could be captured while rebuilding a few feet of soil would go a long way towards helping balance out the CO2.