What fossil fuels are doing to our oceans • Hacker News Board

Re: What fossil fuels are doing to our oceans

#161

Post by foozed » Thu, Mar 02, 2017, 4:01 PM UTC

mavhc wrote: post #70

andrewwhartion wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quick 'back of the envelope' (literally) calculations: Toyota Camry [0] Dual VVT-i engine gets 7.9L/100km and 183gm/km emissions. That roughly works out as 2.3kg CO2 per 1L petrol. Therefore, a tonne of CO2 is produced for every ~430L petrol. Petrol is around AUD $1.40/L, so about AUD $600 of petrol. Carbon credits [1] are worth about $14 euros per tonne of CO2, which is say AUD $19. Therefore 'carbon neutral' petrol…

This is what confuses me, if it only costs 10% more to fix the problem, why the hell is it still a problem?

Correct me if i'm wrong, but i don't think that's how carbon credits work? Paying 10% more for gas doesn't magically reduce the CO2 emitted. I would expect that at some point, someone has to actually not emit CO2 for this to work.

Re: What fossil fuels are doing to our oceans

#162

Post by TeMPOraL » Thu, Mar 02, 2017, 4:43 PM UTC

nkoren wrote: post #160

TeMPOraL wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great to hear positive news about Podaris! I wish you success, and if you have an interesting testimonial or story, don't forget to post it here :). RE list, thanks for the link, I didn't know about this work. I'll try to dig through it after work today. Thanks for pointing out the issues with subdividing systems innovations and knock-on effects. I guess I've assumed that building a comprehensive list would be easier…

Yeah, the messaging around both companies needs to get a lot better. Futurescaper is a tool for collaboratively creating and analysing crowd-sourced systems maps. The purpose of doing this is to better understand the dynamics of a complex problem domain, where many different perspectives are required to get a complete picture. It's not really about annotating documents; more about getting people to tell stories in wa…

So I understand the following document is a kind of use case description of the solution your company provides?

http://www.la.one.un.org/images/publications/Analysis_UN_sur...

It looks very interesting indeed. Is it potentially suitable for NGOs, and if so, are there any plans of making some of it available for such nonprofits? I ask partly because I'd love to get my hands on this (and do run an NGO I could use as an excuse ;)).

Re: What fossil fuels are doing to our oceans

#163

Post by cname » Thu, Mar 02, 2017, 4:51 PM UTC

TeMPOraL wrote: post #77

anotherturn wrote: post #10

It's not really enough to read and upvote, but I'm at a loss as to what I can personally can do about this. So in the spirit of the askhn "how would you turn around Twitter" - let's apply the same thinking to this: "how would you fix the oceans "? There must be some practical steps that one or many of the hn audience can execute?

I see people mentioning things like "become a vegetarian" or "bike to work", but those are easy and neglible-impact things. Sure, they'd have a huge effect if half of the population suddenly adopted them, but that's not going to happen - so just going vegetarian yourself and calling it a day is not really helping anything. What I'd love to see is a list of high-impact work one could use their skills to help with. May…

Making a decision to change is important not just because of the direct impact it may have but also because it's empowering. Being empowered is enabling and has an amplifying effect on both personal and social change.

Re: What fossil fuels are doing to our oceans

#164

Post by anotherturn » Thu, Mar 02, 2017, 5:41 PM UTC

ge96 wrote: post #149

parhurs wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would say those are hard and seemingly-neglible-impact things, and that's why the general populace don't do those sorts of things. I see a parallel with being afraid of flying but not driving; people are not very rational or good at assessing impact. There's no reason not to change our habits, further, there's a positive feedback loop for vegetarianism: more consumer, more products, more consumers. If you want to a…

This probably doesn't belong here... I thought I read/heard that we became smart because our brains grew a lot due to eating meat. I realize this sort of change probably took hundreds/thousands of years not over the course of someone's life. Also can't argue the salt/red meat stuff either. I'm just curious if it made our brains grow/possibly lead us to today. Moderation I suppose. I don't want to stroke out at 55.

I don't know for certain but I suspect it may be more due to the calorific density of meat. Grazing on vegetation is a full time activity leaving zero time for other activities. Whereas if you only have to have a single meaty meal in a day you can spending the rest of the day planning your next hunt.

Re: What fossil fuels are doing to our oceans

#165

Post by LeifCarrotson » Thu, Mar 02, 2017, 5:57 PM UTC

6d6b73 wrote: post #159

TeMPOraL wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see people mentioning things like "become a vegetarian" or "bike to work", but those are easy and neglible-impact things. Sure, they'd have a huge effect if half of the population suddenly adopted them, but that's not going to happen - so just going vegetarian yourself and calling it a day is not really helping anything. What I'd love to see is a list of high-impact work one could use their skills to help with. May…

What we need is to begin working really hard on creating a new society. A society where every human life is priceless, where there is no space for "race" or "sex" on the application because it's not needed.Where the environment is cared for and not exploited. Where science is respected and not just used to push someone's agenda. Where people are supported and helped whenever they need that help, but they also underst…

I think you missed the thrust of TeMPOraL's request for high-impact projects. There's a spectrum of difficulties (or, alternatively, price) and of effectiveness:

            Very Easy/Cheap
                 ^
                 |
                 |
    Not          |       Highly
    
    Effective    |       Effective
                 |
                 |
                 v
             Very Hard/Expensive

Your suggestion is in the bottom right corner, requiring a complete rework of society. It makes sense to prioritize efforts in the top right corner - perhaps as adrianN suggested, contributing a change that will reduce power consumption of millions of servers. That is a lot more important than changing that light bulb in your closet to LED and saving a couple kW while the home stands, versus a small fraction of an industry that consumes gigawatts of power. Similarly, while we can hope for an immortality solution or cancer cure in the distant future, right now your dollars are a lot more effective at the Against Malaria Foundation.

Re: What fossil fuels are doing to our oceans

#166

Post by nkoren » Thu, Mar 02, 2017, 6:08 PM UTC

TeMPOraL wrote: post #162

nkoren wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, the messaging around both companies needs to get a lot better. Futurescaper is a tool for collaboratively creating and analysing crowd-sourced systems maps. The purpose of doing this is to better understand the dynamics of a complex problem domain, where many different perspectives are required to get a complete picture. It's not really about annotating documents; more about getting people to tell stories in wa…

So I understand the following document is a kind of use case description of the solution your company provides? http://www.la.one.un.org/images/publications/Analysis_UN_sur... It looks very interesting indeed. Is it potentially suitable for NGOs, and if so, are there any plans of making some of it available for such nonprofits? I ask partly because I'd love to get my hands on this (and do run an NGO I could use as an…

Yep, that's exactly what it does, and indeed, we've worked with quite a few NGOs and nonprofits! If you're interested, send a note on the website's contact form. Mention that you found out about it from Nathan on Hacker News, and I'll make sure you get priority treatment. :-)

Re: What fossil fuels are doing to our oceans

#167

Post by 6d6b73 » Thu, Mar 02, 2017, 6:21 PM UTC

LeifCarrotson wrote: post #165

6d6b73 wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What we need is to begin working really hard on creating a new society. A society where every human life is priceless, where there is no space for "race" or "sex" on the application because it's not needed.Where the environment is cared for and not exploited. Where science is respected and not just used to push someone's agenda. Where people are supported and helped whenever they need that help, but they also underst…

I think you missed the thrust of TeMPOraL's request for high-impact projects. There's a spectrum of difficulties (or, alternatively, price) and of effectiveness: Very Easy/Cheap ^ | | Not | Highly Effective | Effective | | v Very Hard/Expensive Your suggestion is in the bottom right corner, requiring a complete rework of society. It makes sense to prioritize efforts in the top right corner - perhaps as adrianN sugges…

I'm not sure it would require a complete rework of society, but of course large part of it would need to be redesigned. It would be not easy but it would definitely have a large impact, that's why I think it's worth it. And of course sooner we start replacing rotten foundations of our society with something better, the better.

> [...] changing that light bulb in your closet to LED and saving a couple kW while the home stands, versus a small fraction of an industry that consumes gigawatts of power.

Yes and now. By changing light bulb bazillion times, we were able to save gigawatts of power. It did require just a little bit of work and investment from everyone, but it was more attainable than building new ecologically sound power plants. If just 1mln bulbs were replaced, and each saved 50W /day - we were able to save 50GW of power each and every day. How much more work/money/politics would be required to save as much by building cleaner power plants?

> right now your dollars are a lot more effective at the Against Malaria Foundation.

That might be right, but we have enough resources, to tackle all of the important projects, however due to the way our society is structured we waste these resource on stupid, pointless stuff.

Re: What fossil fuels are doing to our oceans

#168

Post by TeMPOraL » Thu, Mar 02, 2017, 6:34 PM UTC

6d6b73 wrote: post #167

LeifCarrotson wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you missed the thrust of TeMPOraL's request for high-impact projects. There's a spectrum of difficulties (or, alternatively, price) and of effectiveness: Very Easy/Cheap ^ | | Not | Highly Effective | Effective | | v Very Hard/Expensive Your suggestion is in the bottom right corner, requiring a complete rework of society. It makes sense to prioritize efforts in the top right corner - perhaps as adrianN sugges…

I'm not sure it would require a complete rework of society, but of course large part of it would need to be redesigned. It would be not easy but it would definitely have a large impact, that's why I think it's worth it. And of course sooner we start replacing rotten foundations of our society with something better, the better. > [...] changing that light bulb in your closet to LED and saving a couple kW while the hom…

> It did require just a little bit of work and investment from everyone

The problem is, this work adds up superlinearly. The thing about humans is that coordination is hard.

In order to change enough lightbulbs to have an impact on global energy use, you'd have to convince many millions of people to act against their personal, short-term, economic best interest (if it was already in their perceived interest, they'd change the bulbs by themselves). This is a kind of problem you can't really take on directly. An indirect approach would be to e.g. significantly reduce the cost and increase distribution of the better bulbs, leveraging technology and market economy to your advantage. This way the bulbs will start making economic sense, and people will switch by themselves. It's a difficult approach, but much less difficult than persuading people directly.

But then again, you may discover that optimizing power usage in data centres can save as much power, but requires less work and less convincing than the lightbulbs scenario. It would be better to start from that.

This is the kind of solutions we need to prioritize - low effort, high impact.

Re: What fossil fuels are doing to our oceans

#169

Post by _andromeda_ » Thu, Mar 02, 2017, 6:38 PM UTC

snowwrestler wrote: post #56

danvdragos wrote: post #42

Reading this struck me: What is the difference between primordial volcanoes and human pollution? During the dinosaur age it was a lot hotter [0] and there were really extraordinary organisms. Further reading seems to go down a rabbit hole [1],etc. [0] http://blogs.ei.columbia.edu/2014/07/11/what-geology-has-to-... [1] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/blog/2010/apr/21/ice...

The difference is that during primordial times, we did not have all our infrastructure built out across the globe. Although global warming is often talked about in "bad for the Earth" terms, really, the Earth will be just fine. It's been through worse. Global warming is scary because it's bad for human societies. We built our cities and farms and national boundaries in certain places based on the climate we have had.…

>Global warming is scary because it's bad for human societies. We built our cities and farms and national boundaries in certain places based on the climate we have had. Significant shifts in sea level, precipitation, temps, etc. will cause massive costs and unrest.

Such a fresh perspective on this issue. Warrants thinking about but still I maintain, most humans don't have the discipline to worry about things that far in the future if the cost means they spend more on energy. Cheaper is the only way.

Re: What fossil fuels are doing to our oceans

#170

Post by 6d6b73 » Thu, Mar 02, 2017, 6:54 PM UTC

TeMPOraL wrote: post #168

6d6b73 wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure it would require a complete rework of society, but of course large part of it would need to be redesigned. It would be not easy but it would definitely have a large impact, that's why I think it's worth it. And of course sooner we start replacing rotten foundations of our society with something better, the better. > [...] changing that light bulb in your closet to LED and saving a couple kW while the hom…

> It did require just a little bit of work and investment from everyone The problem is, this work adds up superlinearly. The thing about humans is that coordination is hard . In order to change enough lightbulbs to have an impact on global energy use, you'd have to convince many millions of people to act against their personal, short-term, economic best interest (if it was already in their perceived interest, they'd…

> This is the kind of solutions we need to prioritize - low effort, high impact.

And I fully agree, but we have a lot of "technical debt" in our society. We have to keep supporting our existing "software", and fix all critical bugs, but we should also dedicate some time to refactor the society, even if it requires building version 2.0 from scratch, adding only these libraries that make sense.

As far as optimizing power usage in data centers - armies of engineers are already working on it, and there is really not much more we can gain there, but changes in software, to be more efficient, simpler and less bloated is something that would have a large impact. This however, as in the case with the light bulb, requires coordination of many different people/companies/technologies. This will simply be impossible not because it's hard, but because our society spends too much effort on making stuff look great, and making sure that we can be tracked by advertisers so they can sell us stuff we don't know we need or want.