171–180 of 183 posts
A carbon tax is just massive scam built around this fear of global warning.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21364841
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> If you think it’ll cost a lot but end up ineffective [...] then it’s completely rational to vote against it. That is true, and I easily agree with everything you said, but FWIW there have been studies on whether cost-benefit analysis actually works by examining the outcomes after the fact. For example this set of case studies demonstrating that cost-benefit decision making would have historically made the wrong cho…
On the flip sides, focusing on goals rather than costs leads to programs that cost stratospheric amounts without producing the desired results. At the end of the day, we must attempt to rationally analyze our world and make decisions accordingly. If we abandon that, we might as well resort to religion. ("Climate change is God punishing us for the sins of capitalism!" "No! God wouldn't let climate change happen to God…
> focusing on goals rather than costs lead to programs that cost stratospheric amounts without producing the desired results.
Just curious, I don’t doubt there are some, I just don’t know what they are. What would count as some examples of that having happened in the past, akin to the examples I linked of leaded gasoline, damming the Grand Canyon, or removing vinyl chloride from workplaces?
(disclaimer: I work in a Climate&Energy research group) I just want to remind everyone that there are solutions to climate change. We know how to produce clean energy and sequester CO2. The current free market does not make those solutions profitable for investors, though, and we will have to change that. Solving climate change can be as simple as getting a carbon price adopted. It needs to ramp up over time, allow a…
The science tells us we don't have much to turn things around, not nearly enough.
Based on our history of energy transitions, even rolling out commercially available tech for low/zero carbon generation left to market forces will take many decades, almost a century.
Then there are hard problems we simply have no low/zero carbon solution for at scale. Manufacturing pig iron for primary steel, ammonia, cement, industrial agriculture, plastics, shipping, aviation, etc.
Also, AFAIK there does not exist a demonstrated technology for CO2 sequestration that scales and has the required CO2 emission balance (needs energy to run). Storage is also unsolved. I'm curious if you have a link.
It took a century to build out the global oil infrastructure with its millions of miles of pipelines, pumps, oil tankers, etc.
We'll need to handle multiple times the material flow for CO2 sequestration. And overhaul/retrofit/upgrade the entire global energy system, industry, transportation, shipping, agriculture... Even allowing for existing sequestration tech - there's no time.
We need a quick head start that only cutting back consumption can give us. 10% of the population is responsible for 50% of global anthropogenic emissions.
If the top 1% of emitters or the ~75 million people at the top cut back their consumption to the level of the average European's, global emissions would decrease by 30%.
The current economics paradigm (~growth is a must) guarantees we can't solve climate change as growth cannot be decoupled from CO2 increase.
This is a physics problem. Physics doesn't care about ROI or discount rates or tactics.
We were given a diagnosis of terminal cancer quite some time ago and we refused to do chemo or undergo surgery because it would have meant a drastic change in our lifestyle. Now we are stage three. We still meet with our oncologist team from time to time, only to actively sabotage all of their attempts to save us.
In 1988 the UN established the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. In 31 years, after 51 IPCC sessions and 25 major conferences our yearly CO2 emissions increased by 60%. That's how much we care.
In 2019, Energy companies are still set on fully realizing their extractions rights and are actively seeking new oil and gas fields to exploit, including in the thawing arctic.
We're still buliding 1500+ new coal power plants and hundreds of airports.
We're busy entrenching our fossil fuel dependence. Anthropogenic CO2 emissions are still on the rise.
There's just no political will.
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On the flip sides, focusing on goals rather than costs leads to programs that cost stratospheric amounts without producing the desired results. At the end of the day, we must attempt to rationally analyze our world and make decisions accordingly. If we abandon that, we might as well resort to religion. ("Climate change is God punishing us for the sins of capitalism!" "No! God wouldn't let climate change happen to God…
Cost-benefit is not the only way to rationally analyze the world. There are more than two options here, it’s not either cost-benefit or religion. The suggestion is not to ignore all costs, the suggestion is to be more thoughtful about using speculative estimates when deciding whether to do something big that will have a positive outcome, and not to prematurely limit our willingness to do it because the estimated bene…
First, the article paints a strawman of cost-benefit analysis. Cost-benefit analysis can consider different scenarios, probabilistic measures, and even qualitative components.
Second, what's the alternative? If you don't at least quantify the things that are quantifiable, all you're doing is going by gut feelings and emotion. And that's the province of savages.
> Just curious, I don’t doubt there are some, I just don’t know what they are. What would count as some examples of that having happened in the past, akin to the examples I linked of leaded gasoline, damming the Grand Canyon, or removing vinyl chloride from workplaces?
There are many areas where over-emphasis on desired outcomes and goals, while ignoring costs, led to poor results.
The war on poverty: https://www.heritage.org/poverty-and-inequality/report/the-w...
The war on drugs: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/31/opinion/failed-war-on-dru...
Doubling education spending per student since 1970 (in constant dollars): http://www.foundry.org/wp-content/uploads/ed-spend-fam-facts...
The Iraq War, most of our Middle East policy, and the TSA.
Socialism: https://www.fff.org/explore-freedom/article/socialism-markin.... (Huge disaster from an environmental standpoint.)
Many environmental disasters are the result of focusing on goals or outcomes without thinking about costs. Irrigating the southwest, damming the Colorado, hydroelectric power, opposition to nuclear power in the 1960s and 1970s, etc.
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So you what do you want do? Run around and poll everyone on their feelings and make decisions based on anecdote points? You fail to present a better alternative.
> Run around and poll everyone on their feelings and make decisions based on anecdote points? Democracy sounds pretty dope when you put it that way. > You fail to present a better alternative I just want people to treat human life with dignity. Chile 1973--we've seen what happens with your line of rationalization and commoditizing human lives.
I'm sure it will be "dope".
>I just want people to treat human life with dignity.
I want an airplane made of gold. Who cares what you want? You dislike the only practical method of achieving what you want and present no alternative so you'll get nothing.
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> Run around and poll everyone on their feelings and make decisions based on anecdote points? Democracy sounds pretty dope when you put it that way. > You fail to present a better alternative I just want people to treat human life with dignity. Chile 1973--we've seen what happens with your line of rationalization and commoditizing human lives.
Yeah, try enacting an infrastructure project at the implementation level via direct vote democracy. No evil quantifiable data needed. I'm sure it will be "dope". >I just want people to treat human life with dignity. I want an airplane made of gold. Who cares what you want? You dislike the only practical method of achieving what you want and present no alternative so you'll get nothing.
It's almost like there are multiple methods of organizing democratic systems of governance and not all of them rely on direct democracy. Maybe, if we had some roughly representative system, wherein people elected people to represent their interests, then those elected officials would hold town-halls to hear their constituents complaints, worries, and get a general feel for their "feelings." That sure seems capable of addressing infrastructural needs.
> Who cares what you want?
I am generally pretty interested in that. Maybe in the above fictional system of governance we recently conjured, my elected official might even have some interest in what I want.
> You dislike the only practical method of achieving what you want
What do I even dislike again? I critiqued you defending monstrous humans for prioritizing dollar values above human lives. Is the Pinochet model really the only viable model in your opinion?
> I want an airplane made of gold
At this point, it seems you'd sooner have a solid gold helicopter.
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I'm baffled. You "expect" something that you say you have no reason to expect, and you hope this expectation is wrong. Is this some new meaning of "expect" that I'm not familiar with? Or do you follow a psychological strategy of expecting bad things so that you'll always be pleasantly surprised?
It is a human phenomenon, that has religious and secular expressions. https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/psychology... ...some apocalyptic believers find the idea that the end is nigh to be validating. Individuals with a history of traumatic experiences, for example, may be fatalistic. For these people, finding a group of like-minded fatalists is reassuring. There may also be comfort in being able to a…
Models are educated guesses at realty; are the models guaranteed 100% accurate? No, and I'm (just) guessing that the inaccuracies are in the conservative realm.
I do not find it validating, I find it terrifying. I worry for my kids future.
Anybody who isn't worried about what's happening now is a fool.
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Most of your proposal are unrealistic. For example: > Instead of water line pipes, pull water out of the air. You need a lot of energy to transform water into vapor and you need to remove and dispose the same amount of energy to transform vapor into liquid water. Every three months there is a new Kickstarter scam that propose something like this. Sometimes it's an overoptimistic idealist, sometimes it's a plain scam,…
WATER: Traditional municipal water pipes aren't perfect either. They're expensive to install and maintain, and it takes energy to pump all that water around and maintain pressure. Think about Flint [1], think about the upcoming shortage of groundwater in India. The cost of traditional water infrastructure is higher than estimated. There is real need for air capture of water. Here's an interesting project to follow, p…
They don't extract water from air, they partially burn (gasify) biomass to produce water, carbon dioxide and charcoal. They extract the water from the fumes where it is more concentrated. (It's strange that they can dump all the heat, they need some good coolers.)
The cost is 1/2 of the cost of the desalinization, 2 times the cost of calling a water truck for the town, and 100 times the cost of tap water in a city. But the cost they quote is only the cost of the equipment, they don't include maintenance and they don't include the cost of the biomass.
The places were biomass is cheap and there is plenty of biomass are the places where there is enough water to grow crops or trees. It's not efficient to buy wood just to burn it to extract the water. Moreover, growing the tree will consume much more water than the water that you can extract with this device. Also, it's cheaper to call a water truck than enough truck with all the wood to produce the same amount of water.
> A single shipping container can hold many acres worth of short crops that can be grown on top of each other.
The plants need sunlight. It is possible to replace it with artificial light, but it is more expensive. At industrial scales it is worth only for plants that have a very high ratio of price per weights, not simple crops.
It's going to happen faster than we've been told. I expect in 10 years global panic will set in.
I think it will happen sooner than that. Once you have a 3 days heatwave, it's bad. If they occur during summer and the next summer, and if they last for 1 week or more, several times per summer, people will not talk about it, but feel it and understand that global warming is settling in and will not go away. The problem is that the temperature increase can be sudden and difficult to anticipate. A heatwave can also k…
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I’m familiar with the science and I’m afraid to say there are no easy solutions to climate change. Every meaningful systemic solution requires a dramatic curtailment of our current energy use, and would have tremendous negative socioeconomic impact. In short, all meaningful solutions rely on everyone’s life getting a bit worse, and in many cases, esp. in the western world, a lot worse. Furthermore, any systemic solut…
I've read assessments from climate scientists that don't paint nearly as dark a situation in terms of what we CAN do. The hard part is simply making it a political reality. But even ignoring that, it's important to define "worse". Worse than a year round fire season constantly threatening to burn down your home? Worse than 50 year floods every single year? As the impacts of climate change become more real to individu…
I'm not sure if this is referencing the current predicament in California (which Gavin Newsom is attempting to blame on climate change [0]), but if so the reality is closer to...
-failure to carry out proper controlled burns [1]
-corrupt California legislature being heavily backed by PG&E lobbying [2]
-those same California politicians not reigning in PG&E [3]
-and a couple other more minor things.. maybe including people living in risky areas [4]
The sea level change of 3 inches over the last 25 years, while ultimately an issue, is a cop-out for political failings in California right now.
[0] https://www.politico.com/states/california/story/2019/10/28/...
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/chuckdevore/2018/11/16/californ...
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/23/us/pge-california-politic...
[3] https://www.sfchronicle.com/business/article/PG-E-plans-near...
[4] https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2019-10-28/kincade-...
