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Greenhouse Gas Emissions Rise Like a ‘Speeding Freight Train’ in 2018

nytimes.com

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Re: Greenhouse Gas Emissions Rise Like a ‘Speeding Freight Train’ in 2018

#131

Post by 7952 »

wowzap wrote: post #83
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #30

It seems to me we are truly and globally fucked: 1. There were just massive protests and riots in France (a relatively ecologically-aware country) due to an increase in the diesel tax of about 8 cents a liter meant to help wean the country off carbon. As a result of the riots, the tax was cancelled. 2. Current US administration is going 180 degrees in the other direction, i.e. doing everything it can to support coal.…

Reducing carbon emissions sounds good until you consider that you could actually just save up some money, move somewhere away from the shore, and live out the rest of your life. What incentives are the carbon-reducing crowds providing for the common man? Are they going to finally get it together and build affordable housing in our coastal cities? Are they going to let us park electric vehicles or do we have to ride t…

If you need to provide incentives for doing the right thing it suggests that you haven't won the argument yet about what the right thing is.

Re: Greenhouse Gas Emissions Rise Like a ‘Speeding Freight Train’ in 2018

#132

Post by village-idiot »

jhcl wrote: post #35

US comments are pretty staggering: "We're probably not the biggest problem so we won't do anything." Let's see how many decades it will take before we all find out that this isn't a country but a world problem.

“Fuck you, got mine”

Re: Greenhouse Gas Emissions Rise Like a ‘Speeding Freight Train’ in 2018

#133

Post by hwillis »

jf22 wrote: post #84
aaron_m04 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a very ignorant opinion, considering that proof-of-stake cryptocurrencies have insignificant emissions.

Sure, there are probably nuances to account for like how much energy generation is used.

Not sure if you're understanding what he's saying, but just in case:

Bitcoin and similar are Proof-of-Work currencies, which have you do arbitrary hashes to prove that you deserve a vote on the blockchain. The cost of that computing energy makes it infeasible to generate bad votes when the entire community is voting against you.

Ethereum and similar are Proof-of-Stake, which require you to own coins to vote on the blockchain. That doesn't require any computational effort since it's easy to verify that you actually own the currency. Given that it's distributed, it still requires more energy to reach consensus than a centralized system, but it's basically infinitesimal. For all practical purposes it can be ignored.

Re: Greenhouse Gas Emissions Rise Like a ‘Speeding Freight Train’ in 2018

#134

Post by yongjik »

rcMgD2BwE72F wrote: post #25
sologoub wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

EU seems to be doing way better than the US on a per capita basis - 10% for 512 million people versus 15% for 325 million in US.

Population density (people/km2) - EU: 116 - US: 33 Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependen...

Canada has density of 4 people/km2, and somehow manages to have less per capita CO2 than the US.

Re: Greenhouse Gas Emissions Rise Like a ‘Speeding Freight Train’ in 2018

#135

Post by hackeraccount »

vkou wrote: post #113
i_am_proteus wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If gas reserves are exploited along with coal reserves, your conjecture holds. If gas reserves are exploited in lieu of coal reserves, it does not. If the cost per Joule of carbon-free energy goes down over time, carbon-free energy will eventually dominate the energy economy. This is generally expected to happen "too late" because of how much carbon will be released before we get there. If burning oil and gas instead…

> If gas reserves are exploited along with coal reserves, your conjecture holds. If gas reserves are exploited in lieu of coal reserves, it does not. If we exploit all the fossil fuel resources, in currently operating mines and wells, we will blow through the 2 C 'safe' warming budget. Unless for every new fracking well, we shut down a coal mine, the conjecture absolutely holds.

That's exactly what the parent is saying. We're not shutting down coal mines - they're just being made noncompetitive but in the long run that amounts to the same thing.

Re: Greenhouse Gas Emissions Rise Like a ‘Speeding Freight Train’ in 2018

#136

Post by agumonkey »

baroffoos wrote: post #122
agumonkey wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For France it's better to delay judgement, it's a messy protest movement. I despised it at first because why "defend cars" but these people don't care about cars or fossil fuels. It's just that they have no other way to find and go to a job. ps: no other way as in other modes of transportation worsen badly, they did use train but it's too unreliable and a lot more expensive than a few years ago. This is the kind of t…

We will all have no way to find a job when the planet is destroyed.

Planet ain't going anywhere. Only us.

Re: Greenhouse Gas Emissions Rise Like a ‘Speeding Freight Train’ in 2018

#137

Post by hackeraccount »

kazen44 wrote: post #87
wowzap wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reducing carbon emissions sounds good until you consider that you could actually just save up some money, move somewhere away from the shore, and live out the rest of your life. What incentives are the carbon-reducing crowds providing for the common man? Are they going to finally get it together and build affordable housing in our coastal cities? Are they going to let us park electric vehicles or do we have to ride t…

you seem to vastly underestimate how impossible "moving somewhere away from the shore" would be for the majority of the world's population. For instance, my country would be over 50% flooded with a 2 meter searise. also, countries like bangladesh are truely screwed, and it has a population of 150 million people! not to mention that climate change would make our global economy collapse and high yield argriculture impo…

Bangladesh's problem isn't that it's so close to sea level it's that it's poor. California's problem isn't that droughts make forest fires it's that they're aren't quite so rich that they can live in the middle of a tinderbox.

Re: Greenhouse Gas Emissions Rise Like a ‘Speeding Freight Train’ in 2018

#138

Post by cbkeller »

black6 wrote: post #107
fromthestart wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My "allegation of bad faith" is a regular topic on HN, because it is plaguing most soft sciences in modern academia. Climate science is not immune - especially because of it's practical unfalsifiabity. If science is broken then it's conclusions must be treated with skepticism - even if researches are on average well meaning.

Without another Earth-like planet to act as a control, and geologic time-scales in which to perform the experimentation, the science is bunk. Climate science must rely on models -- models which are constantly being tweaked as they continue to fail to accurately predict reality. But the groupthink here just cannot objectively look at climate science, compare it to the scientific method, and realize there may be someth…

Let's try applying the same logic to another field.

"Without another solar system to act as a control, and astronomical timescales in which to perform the experimentation, the science is bunk. Our understanding of the solar system must rely on models which are constantly being tweaked to better fit the observations (first Newtonian gravity, now special and general relativity too!)"

Re: Greenhouse Gas Emissions Rise Like a ‘Speeding Freight Train’ in 2018

#139

Post by mirimir »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #30

It seems to me we are truly and globally fucked: 1. There were just massive protests and riots in France (a relatively ecologically-aware country) due to an increase in the diesel tax of about 8 cents a liter meant to help wean the country off carbon. As a result of the riots, the tax was cancelled. 2. Current US administration is going 180 degrees in the other direction, i.e. doing everything it can to support coal.…

> It seems to me we are truly and globally fucked

Yep. I'd say that's clear. My only consolation will be all those "told you so" opportunities. And I have moved north, uphill, and into a region of small farms. So hey.

Maybe it's aliens who are using humanity to "terraform" Earth into a climate that's more favorable to them. That makes about as much sense as anything else.

Re: Greenhouse Gas Emissions Rise Like a ‘Speeding Freight Train’ in 2018

#140

Post by AnthonyMouse »

flukus wrote: post #123
freeone3000 wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Usually this would be accomplished by farmers passing on higher food prices on to the supermarkets and the consumer.

Unfortunately this doesn't work in a globalized race to the bottom. People can go buy a cheaper item that was shipped around the world 3 times before landing on supermarket shelves.

That is a completely separate problem. If country X can produce food cheaper than yours, your farmers will be unprofitable and you'll end up importing food (or subsidizing local food somehow). If both countries impose a carbon tax in the same amount, nothing about that has changed.

Moreover, the best way to do a carbon tax is to just give the money back to people -- use it to fund a UBI. Then the amount can be as high as you want because the higher you make the tax, the more progressive it is, because it increases the amount of the UBI. Let corporations pay more for diesel with the money going to individuals. Paying $900/month in additional fuel tax to get $1000/month in UBI would be great for the poor. Not so much for the oil companies.

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