A 3°C world has no safe place • Hacker News Board

Re: A 3°C world has no safe place

#261

Post by kragen » Sat, Jul 24, 2021, 6:48 AM UTC

Swizec wrote: post #134

scoofy wrote: post #49

American here. I took a bunch of earth science classes in college in 1999. I realized then, I would just plan ahead and aim for an urbanist lifestyle, because our country would have to change. I focused on transit alternatives as my primary advocacy, because it was the most obvious low-hanging fruit and paired with the public health. I never imagined this would happen, but as the years went on, I grew less astonished…

A recent Freakonomics episode about America absolutely blew my mind and cemented this idea I've been trolling friends with that suburbia should be banned. Americans use 2 trillion gallons of water per year ... for lawns. Nice green lawns. In the desert, in the south, in the north, between highways, friggen' lawns everywhere. No consideration for grasses that naturally enjoy the local environment. Only a perfect Briti…

Lake Superior receives about 1 meter of rain per year and covers 82000 sq km. So Lake Superior is using 82 billion cubic meters of water per year, or, in medieval units, 21 trillion gallons. You could catch 10% of the rainfall on Lake Superior in barges and supply the entire friggen lawn consumption you want to ban.

The Mississippi River discharges 16800 cubic meters per second of water, which is 530 billion cubic meters per year. In medieval units, that's 140 trillion gallons of water per year.

You're too easily impressed and have no sense of proportion, making it easy for dishonest people to manipulate your emotions. Humans are doing massive environmental damage, but human water use for lawns is insignificant.

Now get the hell off my friggen lawn.

Re: A 3°C world has no safe place

#262

Post by bookofsand » Sat, Jul 24, 2021, 7:03 AM UTC

kragen wrote: post #261

Swizec wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A recent Freakonomics episode about America absolutely blew my mind and cemented this idea I've been trolling friends with that suburbia should be banned. Americans use 2 trillion gallons of water per year ... for lawns. Nice green lawns. In the desert, in the south, in the north, between highways, friggen' lawns everywhere. No consideration for grasses that naturally enjoy the local environment. Only a perfect Briti…

Lake Superior receives about 1 meter of rain per year and covers 82000 sq km. So Lake Superior is using 82 billion cubic meters of water per year, or, in medieval units, 21 trillion gallons. You could catch 10% of the rainfall on Lake Superior in barges and supply the entire friggen lawn consumption you want to ban. The Mississippi River discharges 16800 cubic meters per second of water, which is 530 billion cubic me…

We should ban the Mississipi River, too.

Re: A 3°C world has no safe place

#263

Post by dgregd » Sat, Jul 24, 2021, 9:11 AM UTC

visiblink wrote: post #199

goatlover wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nuclear could have already replaced coal by now. Renewables need a lot of battery storage and transmission to scale up to not relying on coal any longer, since a majority of it is relying on the sun and wind.

Nuclear is such a horrible replacement. Let's let future generations deal with the waste from the power that sustained our lifestyle. I hate it. I'd rather live with less.

Every time I mention this here on HN I am down-voted. But I really think that in a next few decades sending (dangerous) cargo to (deep) space will become cheap and reliable. Space tourism just started this month and that will fund thousands of engineers working on that goal.

Re: A 3°C world has no safe place

#264

Post by noxer » Sat, Jul 24, 2021, 9:32 AM UTC

Daily reminder that all the emission reduced by the complete "western" world (the rest doesn't care about the green move) in the last years was all reversed by the additional emission of a single Asian country (China) and this does not even include the grows in emissions in other fast growing places like India.

The whole green move is a lie. There is no evidence that any of that has any relevant positive effect. And no, "we tried" or "a little bit is better than nothing", is not a valid argument all the efforts combined effects are within the margin of error for our predictions so we dont even know if or how much it makes a different.

The only way forward that makes sense is the one humans always did - technological progress. fusion reactors for example. Imagine what we could have by now if all that effort (financial) would have been used to actually find better ways to do the things that cause the pollution rather than making people feel bad for doing what they have to do survive.

But instead our politics puts money into nonsensical "progress" like for example replacing a certain % or fuel with biofuel which is know to be energy-negative. It needs more energy to produce than it gives back (not true if made form waste biomass but true if its made from crops planted for this.)

Re: A 3°C world has no safe place

#265

Post by noxer » Sat, Jul 24, 2021, 9:57 AM UTC

jaredklewis wrote: post #229

bko wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know who you're referring to as 'we' but in the US, carbon emissions have actually peaked in the early 2000s and decreased in an absolute sense since then, despite growing population and industrialization. We're currently at 1986 emission levels. US has 15% of global emissions, while China has 28% and is growing in both per person and absolute. I don't think you're wrong to be cynical about tackling this prob…

I feel your comment is too soft on America. The US's emissions per capita is more than 3 times the worldwide average. So we still need to cut our emissions by a factor of 3 just to be average. But considering we are the richest country in the world, I think it's reasonable we attempt to display some leadership by having below average emissions. And that's not even mentioning that the fact that of course current world…

>...so we really need to cut even more

This is the whole pitch of the green movement. Reduce emissions at whatever cost, they completely miss the point that we (the humans on this planet) dont know how to do this. Its not about what we should do its about figuring out how and until we know how there is not much point in making peoples life harder and make them feel bad for doing what they have to do. Or make placebo progress like biofuel and other nonsense.

The earth overshoot day in 2021 is on July 29. Its not hard to figure out that we are nowhere near sustainable and all the proposed cuts and implemented policies did so far is insignificantly reduce the GROWTH of global emissions.

We need real solutions, technological progress of the magnitude of the last 100 years or something like that to make any relevant difference. Not telling people how bad they are for the environment and how they can feel better by doing mostly useless stuff like carefully separating trash for the recycling-fraud industry.

Re: A 3°C world has no safe place

#266

Post by throw0101a » Sat, Jul 24, 2021, 12:13 PM UTC

bookofsand wrote: post #255

NumberWangMan wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is where border adjustments come into play. We can, for example, implement a carbon tax in the US and impose a tariff on goods from other countries depending on their own environmental policies. This serves as a way to put pressure on all countries to reduce greenhouse gas emissions together. In fact, the EU is in the process of doing this right now, and China is definitely reacting to it (not happy, but it seem…

How does the life of the average human looks like in a world with net zero emissions? How is that life different than subsistence farming? We need to articulate the future, not wax poetically toward some vague economic abstractions. Unless we can articulate some hopeful answer to this question, nothing consequential will change. People really do not want to live as subsistence farmers.

> How does the life of the average human looks like in a world with net zero emissions?

For one, net zero houses look pretty comfortable:

* https://www.chba.ca/CHBA/BuyingNew/Net-Zero-Homes.aspx

If you go further toward "passive house" you can have 5000 sq. ft. (500 sq. m.) of living area and only need 1500W (a hairdryer) to heat it:

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_vul4vMFdkA

Residential energy use accounts for roughly 20% of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in the United States:

* https://www.pnas.org/content/117/32/19122

IMHO there's still plenty of low-hanging fruit in just efficiencies that can be plucked before lifestyle sacrifices would need to be made.

Re: A 3°C world has no safe place

#267

Post by bjowen » Sat, Jul 24, 2021, 12:57 PM UTC

kragen wrote: post #261

Swizec wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A recent Freakonomics episode about America absolutely blew my mind and cemented this idea I've been trolling friends with that suburbia should be banned. Americans use 2 trillion gallons of water per year ... for lawns. Nice green lawns. In the desert, in the south, in the north, between highways, friggen' lawns everywhere. No consideration for grasses that naturally enjoy the local environment. Only a perfect Briti…

Lake Superior receives about 1 meter of rain per year and covers 82000 sq km. So Lake Superior is using 82 billion cubic meters of water per year, or, in medieval units, 21 trillion gallons. You could catch 10% of the rainfall on Lake Superior in barges and supply the entire friggen lawn consumption you want to ban. The Mississippi River discharges 16800 cubic meters per second of water, which is 530 billion cubic me…

It’s not really a critique of someone gawping at a big number to then go and gawp at a bigger one. These two numbers are only related in that they express volumes of water.

The context for the comment was that lawns consume water on a scale comparable to all domestic agricultural irrigation, or half of all the domestic reticulated water supply, and it’s not doing much beyond aesthetics. That is significant use of a precious resource by any measure, and a wasteful one by most people’s. If the amount of water in Lake Superior or the Mississippi were relevant to the relatively small water consumption for domestic use and agriculture, why would anyone be bothered about droughts? Just send in the barges!

Whether lawns are environmentally ruinous by dint of sucking up that much drinking water is a different argument. New builds clearing woodlands in order to have more acreage and monoculture lawns displacing native species / food webs are problems, but there’s certainly worse things you could do with an existing yard.

Re: A 3°C world has no safe place

#268

Post by wizzwizz4 » Sat, Jul 24, 2021, 1:26 PM UTC

magnetic wrote: post #175

wizzwizz4 wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Population reduction” again? It might be the most politically expedient option, but the planet isn't overpopulated. We're just polluting way too much. If you model a back-of-the-envelope sustainable civilisation, you'll find we're nowhere near any sort of fundamental population limit. As a species, our median per-capita pollution is okay. It's the mean per-capita pollution that's the issue.

> If you model a back-of-the-envelope sustainable civilisation, you'll find we're nowhere near any sort of fundamental population limit. How did you model it? I'm curious about the assumptions you made and how you came up with your conclusion.

I lost the envelope (it was a while ago (and also not a literal envelope)), but I'm pretty sure I just drew a circle somewhere reasonably habitable in Europe, filled it with a decent population density to roughly non-capital city population, placed enough high-density farmland around it to produce double the necessary food (in crops), put in eight radial train tracks and some roads leading to those train tracks, surrounded the whole thing by enough 20%-efficiency solar panels to power the city (peak 300W per person, at 10% electricity losses) then multiplied up to nine billion people.

I assumed all in-city transport was manual or electric (and hence covered by the solar panels), all trains and food transport was diesel (even though electric trains are realistic), that the roofs of the city were covered in 20% efficiency solar panels (at 0% loss, due to proximity), that all long-distance transport was done with cargo ships (no aeroplanes) and there was a tenth the shipping of what we've actually got.

The vast majority of the planet was completely untouched by my hypothetical civilisation. I know I missed out a lot of stuff (e.g. how goods get from ports to people and back), but I don't think my conclusion was that far out – especially since “tile the world with solar panels” isn't an efficient renewables strategy.

Re: A 3°C world has no safe place

#269

Post by MildlySerious » Sat, Jul 24, 2021, 1:33 PM UTC

fallingknife wrote: post #123

scoofy wrote: post #49

American here. I took a bunch of earth science classes in college in 1999. I realized then, I would just plan ahead and aim for an urbanist lifestyle, because our country would have to change. I focused on transit alternatives as my primary advocacy, because it was the most obvious low-hanging fruit and paired with the public health. I never imagined this would happen, but as the years went on, I grew less astonished…

> We don't even have serious bicycle or transit prioritization in our major urban areas. We don't have any concern for reducing our meat consumption. We don't have any concern for alternatives to airlines. Sorry, but this stuff is a joke. Population control and non carbon based energy sources are the only things that can really make an impact.

I see the population control argument made a lot, and while I don't want to throw this conversation out the window entirely, I personally don't think it's very constructive right now.

What we need is a drastic reduction in emissions FAST. X0% less now buys a lot more time and has a much bigger effect than X0% in say 50 years when most of the damage is done.

Any means of population control that is not straight up genocide will take decades if not generations to make a real impact.

Long term planning should of course be a core part of our strategy, and whether population control is part of that or not is not my call to make. That being said, the next five to ten years are much, much more important, and my experience in these contexts has been that the population control argument tends to interfere with this more important conversation about actions to take right now.

What would help most in a shorter time frame is economic incentives to move away from fossil fuels. Carbon taxes, and most importantly changing where subsidies go in the first place would go a long way. More funding for research in relevant areas would, as well.

Before those and other things aren't well underway, there is really nothing to gain from bringing up population control every time the climate change comes up, in my opinion.

Re: A 3°C world has no safe place

#270

Post by 411111111111111 » Sat, Jul 24, 2021, 1:41 PM UTC

bko wrote: post #176

quickthrower2 wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those stats are not fair because China is the world's factory. If China decides to stop exporting manufactured products to reduce it's emissions, the US would need to manufacture itself, increasing it's emissions.

https://ourworldindata.org/co2/country/china Take a look at "China: Consumption-based accounting: how do emissions compare when we adjust for trade?" > Annual consumption-based emissions are domestic emissions adjusted for trade. If a country imports goods the CO₂ emissions needed to produce such goods are added to its domestic emissions; if it exports goods then this is subtracted. 2018 had 8.96 bn carbon tons in co…

I loath it when statistics with titles like that are published.

The biggest amount of greenhouse gasses that china emits is from coal power plants. Naturally, figuring out what amount of electricity was used in the production of the exported goods is basically impossible, which is why its considered consumption in their data.

I'm sure the spirit of it is still correct (that most of their co2 emissions are for internal products/usage), but its hard to take that conclusion at face value when they didn't even mention the caveat that they ignore the by far biggest contributor of their emissions and consider it consumption by default.