Climate change: IPCC report is 'code red for humanity' • Hacker News Board

Re: Climate change: IPCC report is 'code red for humanity'

#811

Post by hardtke » Mon, Aug 09, 2021, 6:31 PM UTC

the_lonely_road wrote: post #452

headmelted wrote: post #421

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. A 200% value-added tax on fossil fuels that rises by 10% every year would provide the capital. EDIT: To clarify, this is not a suggestion to raise capital from the tax as much as it's to raise capital from the use of fossil fuels. It's a suggestion for an increasingly punitive financial cost to force behavioural changes.

We have an infinite money printing machine. We don't need access to any capital. That's not what the carbon tax is about. We need to change behavior. We need everyone that uses carbon to pay for its use (including the externalities) so that they stop using it as much as they are. This is why poor people can't be exempt. This is why the rich can't just pay for it. We all need a massive increase in the cost of everythi…

A carbon tax is a non starter in democratic countries because we have seen over and over again that raising the price of motor fuel is political suicide. Canada had to back off on a program that offered a carbon tax back as a rebate. Similar outcome in France with Yellow vest protest movement. Many countries have tried to get rid of fuel subsidies only to spark middle class street protests. In the US the main election issue in 2022 will be "inflation" which for many voters is the price of gas. Carbon taxes simply do not work in the real world.

Re: Climate change: IPCC report is 'code red for humanity'

#812

Post by cwkoss » Mon, Aug 09, 2021, 6:32 PM UTC

notabee wrote: post #775

robomartin wrote: post #647

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm past hoping for people to do the right things en masse. Getting people behind goals with long timelines is pretty much impossible. As you said, the pandemic demonstrated (and continues to demonstrate) how we behave and think. > Governments need to tax CO2 emissions on the business side and pour the money into carbon capture technology No. Sorry. You are buying into propaganda. Put simply: We (humanity) cannot d…

1. Humans have managed to fundamentally alter the global climate on a timescale of about 150 years. 2. Humans are incapable of fundamentally altering the climate on any significant scale compared to natural processes. Pick one. Yes, feedbacks can outpace what we're already emitting. Yes, we're in a dire situation that is going to take radical innovation and a huge surplus of zero carbon energy to basically reverse th…

Superlatively, humans have the capacity to instantly stop global warming by causing a nuclear winter. We already have the capability of kicking up enough dust that surface temperatures drop a dangerous amount.

We shouldn't do this, but humans can certainly do things much faster than "leave the earth alone for 50k years"

Re: Climate change: IPCC report is 'code red for humanity'

#813

Post by beachy » Mon, Aug 09, 2021, 6:33 PM UTC

ihuk wrote: post #728

habosa wrote: post #621

Just. Tax. It. We have warmed the earth because we love comfort and money. We will never stop loving those things. So instead let's use the same systems to fix this (or at least slow things down). As an individual my largest carbon impact is air travel. I like to go places, it's one of the main things I work to afford. Every single plane ticket I take should have a tax which is used to offset or capture the carbon em…

Where would that money go though? Do you honestly believe that given enough money politicians can come up with a viable solution for climate change? Mind you those are the same people who want to end privacy on the Internet[1]. Same people who came up with European Union’s biofuel mandate which caused deforestation of Indonesia for palm-oil plantations. Across the pond, it's the same people that subsidized ethanol fu…

> Where would that money go though?

It doesn't really matter. Even if the tax revenue was piled up and set on fire, the planet would still be better off for it

Re: Climate change: IPCC report is 'code red for humanity'

#814

Post by biztos » Mon, Aug 09, 2021, 6:33 PM UTC

ptkd wrote: post #740

merpnderp wrote: post #720

If anyone actually believed it was "code red for humanity" they'd be pushing nuclear power. There is zero chance of moving off carbon energy sources without causing catastrophic mayhem, unless we use massive amounts of nuclear. For instance, the last 4 years my state has averaged 37% production of total possible installed wind generation capacity. This is a very windy state which is in the top 2 for installed wind ca…

I see this take a lot, and it’s kind of misinformed. The primary drawbacks of nuclear are: 1) incredible slow to build. A typical plant takes ~20 years from decision to productionized 2) extremely expensive, with a massively frontloaded cost. By contrast, solar and wind are fast to install and now cheaper. > wind power can be zero at some parts of the day There are a few solutions to this actually. First, having a mo…

> long-duration battery solutions

This isn't practical everywhere, but on the island of El Hierro (Canary Islands) there is a wind-and-battery solution in the form of a wind-pumped hydro-electric station. In effect there is a big pool of water acting as a battery and the wind turbine "charges" it.

When I ran across it on a trip to the island I was really impressed. Very original solution!

https://www.researchgate.net/figure/The-basic-configuration-...

Re: Climate change: IPCC report is 'code red for humanity'

#815

Post by masklinn » Mon, Aug 09, 2021, 6:36 PM UTC

mywittyname wrote: post #760

ptkd wrote: post #740

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see this take a lot, and it’s kind of misinformed. The primary drawbacks of nuclear are: 1) incredible slow to build. A typical plant takes ~20 years from decision to productionized 2) extremely expensive, with a massively frontloaded cost. By contrast, solar and wind are fast to install and now cheaper. > wind power can be zero at some parts of the day There are a few solutions to this actually. First, having a mo…

Nuclear power can be fast to build. It would need to be constructed in volume, with immutable designs. Right now, America builds so few nuclear plants that they are essentially all one-off designs. Mass production is key here. Vis-à-vis costs, the government can poof into existence trillions of dollars with no ill effects. Cost is an easily overcome obstacle. If a mandate came down to produce 1000 new nuclear reactor…

> Nuclear power can be fast to build. It would need to be constructed in volume, with immutable designs.

Exactly. You need look nowhere further than the french nuclear timeline for that to be clear: the country grew from 4.5GWe capacity to 49.5GWe between 1977 and 1987. 900MWe class reactors took 5~6 years to build, and the 1300MWe 7 to 8. And when you've worked out the kink, this can be parallelised massively (as long as you have sites to put them on), for about 20 years the country had a dozen reactors being built concurrently, the slowdown in construction times really started as the number of plants being built decreased: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/24/Chrono-p....

The design got more complex and there were teething issues with the N4, but Chooz took 16 years to enter service where the P3s took 8 years at most.

Re: Climate change: IPCC report is 'code red for humanity'

#816

Post by masklinn » Mon, Aug 09, 2021, 6:37 PM UTC

bradleyjg wrote: post #516

ihuk wrote: post #478

We bought an expensive washing machine 3 years ago thinking it will last us a long time. It already broke down twice. It's been broken for almost a month now waiting for parts and whatnot. There's a good chance we'll have to get another one. Does Electrolux/AEG care? No. They don't care about the environment, their only obligation is to their shareholders. But frankly neither do I anymore. Next time, I'll buy the che…

> ordinary people are tasked with saving the planet I can’t read minds, but my sense is that much of what individuals are asked to do is knowingly conservation theater. If you want to put a positive spin on that, you can say it makes them feel more committed to supporting the regulatory changes necessary by building a sense of shared sacrifice. The cynical version writes itself.

> I can’t read minds, but my sense is that much of what individuals are asked to do is knowingly conservation theater.

Oh it's not just conservation theatre, it's also cynical responsibilities shifting: by convincing everyone that the public at large is to blame, corporations get off scot-free

Re: Climate change: IPCC report is 'code red for humanity'

#817

Post by shreyshnaccount » Mon, Aug 09, 2021, 6:41 PM UTC

philipkglass wrote: post #785

shreyshnaccount wrote: post #736

why is the main focus on CO2 and not sulphides and nitrogenous gasses that cause a helluvalot more greenhouse effect than CO2 and are released by industries all around? am I missing something or is this fact ignored?( not saying that nothing should be done about CO2 tho)

It's because CO2 is by far the largest contributor, accounting for 80% of warming emissions from human activities in the US: https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/overview-greenhouse-gases Some gases containing sulfur and nitrogen are far more potent per molecule than CO2, but they are emitted in much smaller volumes. They collectively account for less than 10% of warming emissions.

makes sense, thanks!

Re: Climate change: IPCC report is 'code red for humanity'

#818

Post by inglor_cz » Mon, Aug 09, 2021, 6:41 PM UTC

dont__panic wrote: post #744

jimworm wrote: post #257

For all the carbon capture that the Devonian/Carboniferous period did over 100 million years, humanity undid a large part of it in 150 or so years. And now to preserve human civilisation in some form, the most direct way is probably to rebuild that carbon sink within a much shorter time. Much shorter than 150 years, not 100 million. Current carbon emissions are over 10 billion tonnes per year, so the capture speed wi…

There are 7 billion people on the planet. Couldn't we just... have everyone plant a few trees? Trees weigh something like a quarter of a ton+ when fully grown, and pull directly from the atmosphere. Even if we remove the 50% of people who live in cities without yards, if every rural human planted 5 trees a year we'd end up sequestering a lot of that carbon, right? I know it's not permanent but if you just keep planti…

Planting a tree won't do much on its own. It must survive and grow. The thing is, a lot of places where trees thrive are already covered with forest. With 7 billion people, you cannot sacrifice much of the arable land either.

Israelis have been reforesting their country for about 100 years and they have the best results on Earth (at least percentage-wise), but even they face bad odds in really dry places like the Negev desert.

https://aardvarkisrael.com/the-reforestation-of-israel/

Re: Climate change: IPCC report is 'code red for humanity'

#819

Post by causalmodels » Mon, Aug 09, 2021, 6:43 PM UTC

systemvoltage wrote: post #804

mtooth wrote: post #759

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed - if the situation is as dire as presented then nuclear fission is the only clear solution today for baseload power. All the rebuttals I usually read seem to present hypothetical alternatives that may very well come to fruition but we have nuclear as a well-tested and known solution to the problem ready for us to begin using today should we simply decide to act.

Meanwhile California is busy decommissioning Diablo plant: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diablo_Canyon_Power_Plant I don’t see a path forward without Nuclear. Europe and China has done better in this area than US. There is a bunch of fear mongering in liberal California circles about Nuclear. Well informed and technically minded people I know in Bay Area all support Nuclear power. Frankly the media has done an awfu…

New York just decommissioned the Indian point nuclear plant [1] due to some shady politics. The largest planned solar installation in the US was defeated by environmental groups because it would be an eyesore [2].

At some point we’re going to have to grapple with the fact many “concerned” groups don’t actually care about climate change. Instead they use it as a stalking horse for other political projects.

[1] https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=47776

[2] https://apnews.com/article/technology-government-and-politic...

Re: Climate change: IPCC report is 'code red for humanity'

#820

Post by renewiltord » Mon, Aug 09, 2021, 6:43 PM UTC

mberning wrote: post #700

habosa wrote: post #621

Just. Tax. It. We have warmed the earth because we love comfort and money. We will never stop loving those things. So instead let's use the same systems to fix this (or at least slow things down). As an individual my largest carbon impact is air travel. I like to go places, it's one of the main things I work to afford. Every single plane ticket I take should have a tax which is used to offset or capture the carbon em…

Carbon taxes disproportionately hurt low income people. Rich folks will still drive their cars, fly on jets, and use tons of energy in general. Carbon taxes also make your nation less competitive in a global economy. That’s not good when enemy states have zero compunction about using fossil fuels to overtake you economically and militarily. Carbon taxes also incentivize industry to move production to nations with lit…

Yeah well that’s because poor people (in America) are hella carbon inefficient for economic value creation. They’ll drive like 100 miles each way to work a $16/hr job as a McDonalds worker.

That shit is not sustainable.