Big oil helped shape Stanford’s latest climate-research focus • Hacker News Board

Re: Big oil helped shape Stanford’s latest climate-research focus

#51

Post by geodel » Fri, May 05, 2023, 6:00 PM UTC

runarberg wrote: post #42

htag wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you might be misunderstanding the amount of distrust placed in the root comment. He's claiming the more prestigious a University is, the more likely they are to take unethical funding because increased funding leads to more prestige. It's an attack on the integrity of modern science as practiced by academia, not on a subset of studies.

I kind of think the status of US schools is not very well known, or at least not consistently known: To summarize the situation. US education institutes are laying off hundreds of teachers, cancelling courses, cutting services, etc. across the board. If a teacher is hired, it is most likely for part-time, on lower wages, with fewer benefits. If a teacher is guaranteed tenure after x many years, chances are they will…

> US education institutes are laying off hundreds of teachers, cancelling courses, cutting services, etc

This also does not make much sense when one sees this humongous growth in new courses, departments, degrees and academic positions in first place over last few decades. So many universities did not become 5 star resorts by just keeping strictly educational services.

Re: Big oil helped shape Stanford’s latest climate-research focus

#52

Post by contemporary343 » Fri, May 05, 2023, 6:05 PM UTC

There is a potentially valid criticism here since this is ultimately about what the school (with its tremendous resources) is choosing to focus its efforts on. Stanford's previous global climate and energy project was famously funded by oil companies (though I suspect this was mostly a PR thing for them in previous decades), so this is not surprising. But should their priorities be those of the school?

Also some interesting things happening behind the scenes where they are clearly keeping faculty from certain 'troublesome' departments out of the process.. but that's not really unusual in the university context.

On the flip side, I think folks are also over-estimating the importance of corporate sources of funding here. The real reason for this focus is on government funding and resources on this topic that the school will want to tap into.

Re: Big oil helped shape Stanford’s latest climate-research focus

#53

Post by peteradio » Fri, May 05, 2023, 6:08 PM UTC

hutzlibu wrote: post #41

peteradio wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What regions of the world are we talking about? Northern Africa? South America?

All of them? Except the iciest colds in the north and most arid deserts, forests used to be the norm. edit: of course not every land was covered by forests, prairie also existed natural, but forests were a lot more common, than they are today.

I guess I was unaware, I'd thought forests in North America were more or less at par with the last few millennia.

Re: Big oil helped shape Stanford’s latest climate-research focus

#54

Post by rayiner » Fri, May 05, 2023, 6:11 PM UTC

phonescreen_man wrote: post #48

rayiner wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We don’t need to strong arm the world to access oil, we are a net exporter of oil. There’s lots of bad things to say about our foreign policy, but the idea that it’s about oil should have died with the Iraq War (where we spent trillions of dollars but didn’t get any oil).

You think the US bush and Bush senior administration would of given a thought about Iraq if it wasn’t an oil producing resource?

I didn’t back in 2003 when I was in the anti-war minority. But seeing how many of those same people just became democrats in the last 20 years, and are now talking about how we need to stay in Afghanistan or intervene in Ukraine, I was wrong. We never got any oil from Iraq because it was never about the oil. It was about remaking the world in America’s image. We were in Iraq for the same reason ISIS was in Syria. We are trying to establish our version of the Caliphate, except with liberal democracy and capitalism instead of Islam.

Re: Big oil helped shape Stanford’s latest climate-research focus

#55

Post by OrvalWintermute » Fri, May 05, 2023, 6:13 PM UTC

philipkglass wrote: post #45

inpdx wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Carbon capture is cleaning up dog shit in the kitchen with a toothpick instead of training it to go outside.

The dog has been dirtying the kitchen floor for long enough already that we're also going to need that toothpick. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change AR6 fact sheet on carbon dioxide removal: "Carbon dioxide removal (CDR) refers to technologies, practices, and approaches that remove and durably store carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere. CDR is required to achieve global and national targets of net zero CO2…

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Re: Big oil helped shape Stanford’s latest climate-research focus

#56

Post by OrvalWintermute » Fri, May 05, 2023, 6:19 PM UTC

I think Big Oil is less Big Oil than it really is Big Energy.

Big Energy has the massive capital to deploy for green energy solutions that are viable and will provide a renewable path forward off of more polluting or non-renewable sources. Big Energy's product of choice is mainly petroleum derived currently. Due to sourcing and limitations though, this is a mostly finite resource that they would love to replace for more profit.

Profit will drive them to new sources. When you see Big Energy actually moving to these new sources at the mega-industrial scale and not PoCs, prototypes, but deploying tens of billions of dollars, is when the true revolution will happen.

If they are funding Stanford and other parts of Academia, then that is a good thing.

Re: Big oil helped shape Stanford’s latest climate-research focus

#57

Post by godelski » Fri, May 05, 2023, 6:30 PM UTC

Can we stop the anti-sequestration movement? Let's just think about it for a second. How do we get to net zero if we account for lifetime emissions of energy sources? Even solar has lifetime emissions. You have to remove it from the atmosphere. (We'll ignore processes that can't be decarbonized, but that just adds to the problem)

So what do we know? We know that forests are hard to plant and that their early lifecycle is a carbon source. Still, we should plant trees. Ignoring this, US citizens alone would need to plant 500 trees per year to offset their current footprints[0]. That's 165 billion trees a year, and a densely packed forest has 4-6 sqft per tree. The US has just over a trillion square feet. You do the math. (even dramatic reductions in footprints don't solve this problem)

Okay, so trees aren't enough. Luckily we know land management is one of the best carbon sink techniques available. But we run into a similar problem, just with more efficiency than above. So what is the result? We have to use a variety of techniques, both natural and artificial, to scrub carbon from the air. Not to reach net negative (which should really be our goal), but just to even reach net zero! Yes, big oil is going to fund this. Why? Because when carbon taxes come in, they can keep their plants up by scrubbing a percentage of their carbon to match that tax. (They also want PR and this is cheap PR) If they somehow could scrub all the carbon (they won't), then what do we care? The goal is about carbon emissions, not source of energy. I just don't see them surviving, but of course they're going to try to hold on as long as they can instead of adapting and surviving. Their loss.

[0] https://8billiontrees.com/carbon-offsets-credits/reduce-co2-...

Re: Big oil helped shape Stanford’s latest climate-research focus

#58

Post by chinchilla2020 » Fri, May 05, 2023, 6:31 PM UTC

zamfi wrote: post #28

myrmidon wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm highly sceptical regarding ALL CO2 removal schemes that don't operate directly at a CO2 source, because I see absolutely NO WAY how they could ever be made cost effective: CO2 concentration in air is less than 1g/m^3, meaning that you would have to pump like 10000 m^3 of air through your apparatus just to remove the CO2 from a single car travelling ~100km. And this assumes 100% extraction efficiency which is not…

Look, I think direct air capture (DAC) is as much “not the solution” as the next guy, but this kind of black-and-white thinking has no place in climate change mitigation. Right now, DAC costs about $250-500/ton. The average passenger vehicle in the US emits 4.6 tons of CO2/year. You say it’s not cost-effective but you could literally charge every passenger vehicle user in the US $1-2000/year and use it for capture an…

> this kind of black-and-white thinking has no place in climate change mitigation.

This is not black-and-white thinking. He is pointing out that infeasible miracle cures are not the solution.

We need to focus on realistic possibilities, not Elon-Musk jesustech.

Re: Big oil helped shape Stanford’s latest climate-research focus

#59

Post by runarberg » Fri, May 05, 2023, 6:33 PM UTC

geodel wrote: post #51

runarberg wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I kind of think the status of US schools is not very well known, or at least not consistently known: To summarize the situation. US education institutes are laying off hundreds of teachers, cancelling courses, cutting services, etc. across the board. If a teacher is hired, it is most likely for part-time, on lower wages, with fewer benefits. If a teacher is guaranteed tenure after x many years, chances are they will…

> US education institutes are laying off hundreds of teachers, cancelling courses, cutting services, etc This also does not make much sense when one sees this humongous growth in new courses, departments, degrees and academic positions in first place over last few decades. So many universities did not become 5 star resorts by just keeping strictly educational services.

I’m sure there is data to be found, and I’m actually curious about it my self. I don’t know where to begin looking for it though. But I’m open to be proven wrong.

To be clear, I’m talking about the education system as a whole, not just prestige universities, but also community collages as well high schools and primary schools. Prestige universities like Stanford will always find funding to do what they want (e.g. from fossil fuel companies) this includes ballooning administrators playing the CV game, as well as keeping existing courses open while even opening new courses. Community collages and poorer school districts cannot afford to do all, and—it is my experience—they are way more likely to pick funding their administrators at the cost of education.

Re: Big oil helped shape Stanford’s latest climate-research focus

#60

Post by [deleted] » Fri, May 05, 2023, 6:35 PM UTC

rayiner wrote: post #27

Opposing nuclear was the first catastrophic mistake environmentalists made, causing them to be a net negative overall in terms of climate change. Opposing carbon capture will be the next (and possibly last) one. If you think climate change is a serious problem, then you need to put aside your moral beliefs and think like an engineer about solutions. There is no math that allows you to conserve/renewables your way to…

[deleted]