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A 3°C world has no safe place

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Re: A 3°C world has no safe place

#271

Post by bookofsand »

scoofy wrote: post #256
bookofsand wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A. "serious bicycle or transit prioritization in our major (US) urban areas" will not make a dent in the world global emissions. B. The level of cuts required to bring the world to sustainable emissions level, combined with global population growth and global equity, would require that everybody to live with under 1.7t/year CO2 emissions by 2050. This is the level of Albania, Colombia or Morocco, complete political d…

Cool, low-hanging fruit is just, woe is me, too much trouble ! No problem, let's do nothing then. Should be a fun ride. Going to be Great Depression either way! I'm not saying we can fix it, I'm a nihilist at this point, I'm saying we could have fixed it 15 years ago .

The US should figure out ways to cut emissions in half. Unfortunately:

A. That will not fix the global problem, as US population is too small. Even if we were to completely shut down energy production in the US, the rest of the world would build enough power plants to cover for it and then some in less than 20 years. Industrialization of 10 billion people (3% in the US) is not pretty.

B. It is unclear what to concretely do in the US to significantly cut emissions. To simplify, the right doesn't want to hear about it, and the left is content with promoting minor inconsequential Potemkiniads.

We never had a chance to fix the problem, not with 10 billion people yearning an escape from poverty.

Re: A 3°C world has no safe place

#272

Post by bookofsand »

throw0101a wrote: post #266
bookofsand wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ro…

This is an excellent answer.

The number of Passivhauser in the US is apparently in the thousands. What would it take to scale this up to 100-1000 times? What would it take to change the status from luxury good to mass adoption?

https://www.pembina.org/blog/passive-house-revolution

Re: A 3°C world has no safe place

#273

Post by lotsofpulp »

bookofsand wrote: post #272
throw0101a wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 ro…

This is an excellent answer. The number of Passivhauser in the US is apparently in the thousands. What would it take to scale this up to 100-1000 times? What would it take to change the status from luxury good to mass adoption? https://www.pembina.org/blog/passive-house-revolution

There is always a reason why has not been widely adopted.

If it was all upside, the established players, in this case home builders, would have already incorporated it to gain a competitive advantage.

I am guessing there are downsides such as cost of materials, expertise, mold, or something that keeps this from being an economical solution.

Re: A 3°C world has no safe place

#274

Post by nine_k »

bookofsand wrote: post #244
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…

The numbers don't work out. Let's say in USA we cut meat consumption, car usage and air travel in half. That is quite a lot, congratulations to our eco-conscious citizens! Alas, let's not pat ourselves on the back just yet. USA accounts for 15% of global emissions. Agriculture and transportation make 14% and 24%, together 48%. Half of that is 24%. 24% of 15% is 3.6% of global emissions. On the flip side: * 96.4 of th…

The PerCapitaEmission thing is something we can curb without returning to to stone age, given today's technology.

We have two major technologies that allow for producing useful energy without producing much or any greenhouse gases: nuclear and solar. Wind and hydro are also on the table, but are more constrained by the environment.

We also have reasonably well developing technologies for meat-like protein production from plants (see e.g. the "impossible burger") and lab-grown meat. They are currently a bit expensive, but it's mostly the matter of investment.

Sadly, all that massive construction requires steel and concrete, which emit CO2 during production. Here comes carbon sequestration: we absolutely have technologies to quickly grow massive amounts of trees, cut them, and put them to use either as a long-term construction material, or just burn the hydrogen out of them to produce energy, and bury the carbon in the empty coal mines, playing back the carboniferous epoch process.

This all does not require colossal amounts of novel science or sci-fi technological breakthroughs. It does require though that petrol cars and trucks get steadily replaced with electric, coal mining all but stopped (we need carbon for steel production), oil pumping severely limited (we still need jet fuel until we can synthesize enough), coal-fired plants demolished or turned into nuclear plants. It requires massive construction of solar, wind, and nuclear (gasp!) electric generation, and massive construction of battery capacity to make solar practical for base load. It requires shutting off most of beef production, and replacing it with fish and shrimp farming, lab-grown meat, and plant-based pseudo-meat; red meat should become a luxury like salmon roe or caviar.

The obvious problem is that most people would totally not cooperate if they'd have to quickly and radically change their way of life, their idea of what prosperity looks like (bye grilling beef over coals!), and their jobs (coal industry? oil industry? bad luck!). Can this be overcome? Either most of the Earth's population, across national, political, and religious divisions would willingly make such a change, or an planet-scale dictatorship would emerge and consistently and efficiently pursue the goals of climate change reversal, while not severely affecting productivity. I see both scenarios utterly unrealistic :(

So, buy that realty next to a major northern river 1000ft above sea level. In a century it will have the best climate Earth can offer.

Re: A 3°C world has no safe place

#275

Post by mariusor »

scoofy wrote: post #112
dmead wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're asking people to suffering annoyances and spend lots of money when the average income has been going down for 40 years. I'm surprised you're surprised.

Living more efficiently obviously saves money . The absurdities of what's happening is literally the Sierra Club opposing density in San Francisco. The environmentalist are literally opposing density across California . Los Angeles, to San Francisco, to Marin County, under the banner of "preservation," we're going to destroy the climate. I just, i cannot believe this is happening. They same people who would hand wash…

> are literally creating suburban cities designed for burning carbon.

I would imagine they are creating suburban cities designed for alternative means of transportation.

Re: A 3°C world has no safe place

#276

Post by CodeGlitch »

noasaservice wrote: post #70
titzer wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I look at what I'm actually doing, and I'm at my limit. Smaller house, solar panels, don't drive, don't eat meat, and don't have kids. And don't vote for politicians who are busy spreading nonsense. > I've given up hope that this will be solved. Oh, me too. Now it is about managing your personal guilt, which you realize at some level, judging from your comments. For me, I am likely past my lifetime CO2 budget, due…

> Smaller house, solar panels, don't drive, don't eat meat, and don't have kids. And don't vote for politicians who are busy spreading nonsense. I already live in a trailer. Solar wouldn't make sense since we have 2 big trees over our trailer providing us shade. Cuts down on AC in the hotter months (now veering on March). Not driving has been easy with WfH since last early March. I'm happy with that. I don't like dri…

Also don't own a dog [0]

I find the whole "don't have kids" thing sad and short-sighted. Having kids was the single greatest thing that's ever happened to me, and yes there's a CO2 footprint as a result but ultimately humans need kids to have a future. Please have children, and teach them the importance of the planet.

[0] https://phys.org/news/2009-11-dogs-larger-carbon-footprint-s...

Re: A 3°C world has no safe place

#277

Post by kragen »

bjowen wrote: post #267
kragen wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 p…

> These two numbers are only related in that they express volumes of water.

No, these three numbers are related in that they express volumes of fresh water consumed per year for particular uses in the United States. The Mississippi River is dumping 16.8 megaliters per second of freshwater into the ocean. In that context, it's totally inconsequential if people in the US spray 0.2 megaliters per second of freshwater onto their lawns.

> That is significant use of a precious resource by any measure

No, it is not.

> aesthetics. ... a wasteful [use] by most people’s [measure].

Beautifying our surroundings is not a wasteful use of resources by most people's measure; if it were, the mandatory lawn ordinances people are (rightly) decrying in this thread wouldn't have been voted in. We have seen what the results look like when people consider aesthetics "wasteful": Pruitt-Igoe, prisons, concentration camps, Soviet housing blocks, American high schools, battleships, the Pentagon, the bulldozing of forests and mountains to build parking lots. Humans do not flourish in these environments.

Instead, let us aspire to consider things wasteful that cannot be aesthetically justified!

The broader cultural context is, I think, that this lamentation of other people watering their lawns stems from the same misguided Judeo-Christian asceticism that led medieval hermits to never bathe and wear hairshirts, equating happiness, enjoyment, and comfort with sin, self-indulgence, and dissolution. Sometimes you see people from Judeo-Christian traditions attempting to justify such concepts by appropriating Buddhism, apparently unaware of the profound attention to aesthetics easily observable in any Buddhist temple or monastery.

This ascetisism has been twisted into a simplistic zero-sum pseudo-environmentalism—sometimes coupled with a feigned charity toward the poor—that equates material wealth with environmental destruction and impoverishment of others, and so seeks to ameliorate California's periodic droughts with showerhead flow restrictors and more restrictive central lawn planning.

> 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?

Probably because you're not building enough canals and pipelines to transport freshwater from the Mississippi (and other rivers) to US agricultural lands. Get on it! A lot of those rivers are already full of fertilizer! Also, it's a problem when half of California catches on fire, even if nobody's almonds burn.

Re: A 3°C world has no safe place

#278

Post by throw0101a »

bookofsand wrote: post #272
throw0101a wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 ro…

This is an excellent answer. The number of Passivhauser in the US is apparently in the thousands. What would it take to scale this up to 100-1000 times? What would it take to change the status from luxury good to mass adoption? https://www.pembina.org/blog/passive-house-revolution

Passive house is a very high standard, and I do not think it is very practical to do it at large scale.

Aiming for something that can be net zero is probably more practical: building stringently up to a certain point, and then throw some PV panels to offset whatever expected energy use is remaining.

Re: A 3°C world has no safe place

#279

Post by jaredklewis »

noxer wrote: post #265
jaredklewis wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The great majority of the world's population lives in countries with per capita emissions less than a third of the US's. Humans "know how."

It doesn't take ground breaking technology for Americans to stop driving Hummers on their office commute. Nor would it take a tech breakthrough for the US government to stop giving fossil fuel companies $20b/year in tax credits and subsidies. Nor any new tech for sunny regions to cover building roofs with solar panels. If we can spend $2 trillion plus in middle eastern wars of dubious value, surely we buy a some solar panels and batteries.

No new tech is needed. A modicum of will is all that is required.

Re: A 3°C world has no safe place

#280

Post by visiblink »

ddingus wrote: post #243
goatlover wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You would, but realistically, a majority of people are not willing to live with significantly less (which would entail a contraction in the economy and loss of jobs). And that includes all the people in countries still catching up. Nuclear was the alternative decades ago, and we could have witched to it until renewable tech was up to scale. So we decided a significantly warmer climate was better than dealing with rad…

It does not have to mean a loss of jobs. It would mean different jobs, and it means valuing work differently right along with things.

I was just about to add the same reply.
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