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Ask HN: What can be done to prevent a climate catastrophe?

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Re: Ask HN: What can be done to prevent a climate catastrophe?

#381

Post by yread »

mynameishere wrote: post #154
cthulha wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What would win over republicans? I mean, if the survival of human civilisation isn't enough, what can you propose?

if the survival of human civilisation isn't enough, what can you propose Tell them the magic elves demand doing your bidding? Because both things are on the same level of rationality? Civilization, as such, is in no danger. ... To OP: The problem will solve itself if the population of the world goes down enough, whether naturally or through some actual catastrophe. Indeed most of the world's birth rate is low enough…

i hope population of the world goes down a lot in your region in particular

Re: Ask HN: What can be done to prevent a climate catastrophe?

#382

Post by soundwave106 »

thinkcontext wrote: post #274
xupybd wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe trying to win over republicans would be better? The culture wars don’t help this issue.

Fox News is the a major barrier to that happening. There are those on the right that believe in climate change and think that we need to take action but they are vastly underrepresented on Fox. With that being the case most Republican voters will believe that its a worldwide leftist conspiracy and few Republican politicians will dare defy this orthodoxy. That's why we have Republican congressional leaders saying thin…

The issue here is that this more or less blames the messenger and not what I see as the root cause.

For a long time (1980s-2000s for sure), major fossil fuel companies and other extraction industries -- famously ExxonMobil and Koch Industries (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ExxonMobil_climate_change_cont...), but quite a bit of others as well, have spent a lot of time funding and backing climate change denialism. The extraction industries tended to align to the Republican side, so these scientifically unsound opinions have tended to trickle up through conservative think tanks (eg Heartland Institute) and eventually down to the populist outlets (like Fox News and Rush Limbaugh and the like).

It does seem like that some of the oil companies are kind of weakly coming around to the fact that climate change is not something you can simply misinformation away. Maybe the lawsuits against extraction companies (https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/mar/20/can-clim...) are helping here. Regardless, it is not nearly enough to me at the moment. This is the pipeline that needs to be shut off in order for the message to be clearer on the right wing side in America.

Unfortunately, the concept of climate change denial has taken hold on the "conspiracy theory" side of American politic, so the concept is going to be floating around out there for a while (there are 18th century conspiracy theories still active after all). But what I'd hope to see if the extraction industry misinformation stops is that the more rational side of conservative American politics realize that this is a problem. Unlike most of Europe, it is difficult to think of many conservative politicians and personalities in the United States who are not denialists. (Arnold Schwarzenegger's one of the few I can think of immediately that is strongly convinced that climate change is a huge problem.)

Re: Ask HN: What can be done to prevent a climate catastrophe?

#383

Post by Retric »

korantu wrote: post #367
Retric wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nuclear still costs far to much vs Wind and Solar. If all greenhouse gases came from electricity generation then doing the France model might work, but it's much better to cheaply go 95+% renewable and use the savings to cut down on transportation and home heating etc. PS: Grid scale solar is rapidly hitting 2 cents per kWh in sunny places. Nothing else is anywhere near competing with that.

If you factor in cost of storage required to provide continuous power, then you get way more expensive and less reliable. Now this problem is solved by, surprise, fossil fuels. [0] Ofcourse solar is cheaper when it is sunny, provider might even need to pay consumer to get them to consume. [1] [0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2018/05/15... [1] https://www.businessinsider.com/renewable-power-german…

Continuous aka base-load power is considered a defect as it's not load following. You can load follow with nuclear but then it becomes ridiculously expensive. France gets around this largely by buying and selling to other countries, but that does not scale.

Really, going 100% nuclear takes either massive over supply or large scale energy storage just like solar. Wind however can supplement solar while still costing less than nuclear and allowing you to more closely match the demand curve.

A little peaking power allows you to avoid significant grid storage at very reasonable costs, and as I said fix transportation etc.

PS: The need for grid electricity storage is overblown. Storing energy for more than 1 day means you very rarely use that stored energy making in non-viable. When you can have 2x as much solar and still only pay 4c/kwh that's pointless. Within the day it needs to compete with an over supply of energy most of the time.

Re: Ask HN: What can be done to prevent a climate catastrophe?

#384

Post by mikeash »

gardaani wrote: post #224
tobr wrote: post #19

Fundamentally it is a political problem, not a technological problem. We need high carbon taxes, we need to end fossil fuel subsidies, and we probably need to change our economic system to something that addresses the tragedy of the commons. But we’ve seen in recent years how technology can influence politics. I’d quote a tweet from Tristan Harris from the other day [1]: > In an hypothetical world, if Facebook were r…

Bhutan is a great example how countries could look like. It is the only carbon-negative country in the world and they measure Gross National Happiness instead of Gross Domestic Product. https://www.ecowatch.com/this-country-isnt-just-carbon-neutr...

I'd really hope that a poor, primarily agricultural country is not actually a great example of what this could look like.

Re: Ask HN: What can be done to prevent a climate catastrophe?

#385

Post by PeterisP »

hliyan wrote: post #285
tobr wrote: post #19

Fundamentally it is a political problem, not a technological problem. We need high carbon taxes, we need to end fossil fuel subsidies, and we probably need to change our economic system to something that addresses the tragedy of the commons. But we’ve seen in recent years how technology can influence politics. I’d quote a tweet from Tristan Harris from the other day [1]: > In an hypothetical world, if Facebook were r…

"Fundamentally it is a political problem" -- Agreed. What if the whole problem is that of "growth"? Here's one possible chain of thought. I don't fully subscribe to this, so please feel free to poke holes in it: 1. The biggest polluters tend to be commercial enterprises 2. They are aware of the environmental impact of their actions, but are reluctant to stop 3. They are staffed by (mostly) normal human beings, but th…

No, it doesn't work out that way.

First, in order to determine what people will do, the relevant word is not "need" but "want".

#6 is that stockholders want growth of return on their investments (because, hey, extra money is good for them). And they'll want that growth to be as big as possible, no matter what the inflation is; so stopping inflation won't remove the pressure for growth.

On the other hand, if you want to force people to be satisfied with what they have and not strive for more, well, that's against a lot of our psychology, it's not going to happen - compared to that, getting all the governments to do what needs to be done (while still striving for as much growth is feasible given the restrictions) is easy.

Re: Ask HN: What can be done to prevent a climate catastrophe?

#386

Post by startupfounder »

"...governments can be counted out of taking the leadership needed to solve this within 12 years."

This is the issue.[0]

Governments are the middlemen between citizens that we the people decide to put in power through voting to represent us and our issues like climate change.

But democracy has been hijacked by putting additional middlemen between we the people. The second middleman is the capital election, specifically ~132 Americans who donated 60% of the SuperPAC money.

So our representatives spend a significant portion of their time in office calling these people to get funding for the next election cycle and when they vote on issues they think of these donors. Follow the money.

Yes we can fix data centers or cargo ships or deploy nuclear power or utility regulation, but at some point regulation for these as well will be dependent on the people we vote to put into power to represent us.

At the end of the day, corporations have a fiduciary duty to their shareholders to maximize profits and shareholder value. If leaders lead, companies will follow.

I have an idea!

Why don't we, the very large community of Hacker News with 3-3.5M+ monthly uniques[1] petition one of the most innovative and powerful institutions to fund more projects that will fix broken governments around the world? "Government" is only mentioned one time in the YC RFP[2], maybe it should have it's own category.

Send them an email: hn@ycombinator.com or http://www.ycombinator.com/contact/ or contact your friends who are in the YC network.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mw2z9lV3W1g [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9219581 [2] http://www.ycombinator.com/rfs/

Re: Ask HN: What can be done to prevent a climate catastrophe?

#387

Post by dane-pgp »

perfunctory wrote: post #229

Among other things, stop using cryptocurrencies.

Should we also stop using cars given that walking exists, or stop using computers when we could use a pencil and paper? Is there an amount of energy that the traditional banking system could use beyond which you would recommend people stop using banks?

You may not think that cryptocurrencies provide any benefit to the world (and I admit that I don't own any either), but their energy usage should be evaluated like any other technology or asset: Does the energy they require cost more than the amount of value they create in the market? If it did, then no one would mine cryptocurrencies.

The market value for cryptocurrencies may seem irrational to you, but there are probably lots of things that people value that seems irrational or unnecessary to outside observers. I personally think that a global, low-cost, uncensored means of transacting between strangers is revolutionary, and I look forward to future innovations that will make it more energy efficient (for the same level of usefulness and security).

Re: Ask HN: What can be done to prevent a climate catastrophe?

#388

Post by patagonia »

wtmt wrote: post #336

Don't wait for others to do things or take decisions. That's going to be an uphill battle if you really want changes quicker. Start with yourself, and then push others (including friends, family, colleagues, corporations, politicians, etc.). A lot can be done if people take up changes on their own instead of waiting for politicians or corporations or "those other polluting countries" to "just do something" about it.…

I used to bike everywhere. It cost me personally. I showed up late sometimes. Wet. Disheveled. Sometimes didn’t go because the distance or weather.

While I’m all behind the “be the change you want to see” method, I sincerely believe that it can actually take you out of the fight.

While I’m bicycling on the way to a meeting someone is there a few mins early / or gets two meeting in, and they are able to lobby more. Or do more. And have more of an impact.

Or said allegorically, we need more sheep in wolve’s clothing to take on the wolves in sheep’s clothing.

Re: Ask HN: What can be done to prevent a climate catastrophe?

#389

Post by jonstewart »

claydavisss wrote: post #280
jonstewart wrote: post #16

Give money to Democratic candidates challenging Republican incumbents, right now. If we believe in evidence-based science, then all evidence points to Republicans being anti-science. You don't have to be a committed lifelong Democrat to see that the current Republican party is fighting climate change efforts at every turn and needs to be displaced in order for political progress on the issue to happen.

California is majority-run by Democrats with a Democrat Governor who isn't seeking re-election (so he can do whatever he wants)... When asked if he would stop offshore drilling, Jerry Brown responded that he refused to put that many people out of work. This is in a state where Democrats have effectively no opposition The idea the Democrats are even one iota different on climate is ridiculous and dangerous. If Democra…

I like how you've qualified your demand, i.e., "show me ONE piece of real evidence or instance where a Democrat willingly sacrificed REAL economic gain to achieve a climate goal". My Magic 8 ball predicts you'll argue any cited examples don't show REAL sacrifice.

http://environment.law.harvard.edu/2018/06/california-cafe-s...

https://www.politico.com/story/2018/09/10/california-renewab...

I'll punt it back to you. Can you please show me ONE piece of real evidence or instance where the Republican Congress did _anything_ positive regarding climate change?

Also, I won't claim (and didn't) that electing a Democratic majority is sufficient to address climate change. It's just necessary, because only when Republicans realize that they'll continue to lose on climate change that we'll make real bipartisan progress.

Re: Ask HN: What can be done to prevent a climate catastrophe?

#390

Post by vbezhenar »

scalesolved wrote: post #296
vbezhenar wrote: post #284

There's no climate catastrophe. Nothing have to be done about preventing imaginable things.

Would you mind expanding on this?

I think that the whole human-changing-planet thing is huge fraud. There are legitimate concerns, like bad air in the cities because of cars, but global warming, if it exists at all (which I don't observe because winters are as cold as they always were), is because of planetary cycles, not because human affected anything significantly. Concentrating on green energy is stupid, humans should invest more money into nuclear stations and potentially thermonuclear technology.
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