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We are ‘greening’ ourselves to extinction

aljazeera.com

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Re: We are ‘greening’ ourselves to extinction

#31

Post by rootusrootus »

> the push to replace fuel-engine vehicles with electric ones

As opposed to what, replacing cars with public transit? It takes a serious amount of hubris to look at the world and think that we can just wave a magic wand and make public transit work in places that largely rely on cars (even in Europe, which is much denser and more friendly to public transit, there are a lot of personal cars). We will run out of oil way before we reach that sort of 'utopia', so electric cars are a far better option than just continuing to burn all the fossil fuels we can. It doesn't preclude us from also incentivizing more public transit options, either.

Edit: the amount of downvotes any post that is skeptical of public transit as a global solution gets is really descriptive of how narrow the bubble is most HNers live in.

Re: We are ‘greening’ ourselves to extinction

#32

Post by rootusrootus »

korroziya wrote: post #21

From the article: "The supposed energy transition that has been undertaken has seen renewable energy production expanded, but there has been no indication that oil and gas are being substituted and ultimately phased out." That's not going to happen for another 27 years at least. I've said it before: Most people (including those who post here) are staggeringly illiterate when it comes to energy. Hydrocarbons store an…

I haven't met that many people who think we can do it in a year. But it won't happen in 27 years if we don't make a consistent effort every year between now and then.

Re: We are ‘greening’ ourselves to extinction

#35

Post by SECProto »

This article has a couple non-sequiturs that undermine the whole argument, the biggest to me was the thrust of these two sequential paragraphs:

> the growing electric vehicle industry may help reduce carbon emissions but it will also cause a massive jump in the demand for lithium and other minerals. [...] Apart from making climate change worse,

Reducing and eliminating carbon emissions is key to climate change reduction. Other environmental impacts aren't consistently correlated with climate action.

Re: We are ‘greening’ ourselves to extinction

#36

Post by midasuni »

savingsPossible wrote: post #30
mrleinad wrote: post #17

"Fossil Future" is an interesting book on this topic that argues we need to use more fossil fuels instead of less. And it makes me kind of agree with the author, since I learnt that solar and wind only makes sense to use where it can offset the carbon footprint that it created when it was manufactured. I totally vote for nuclear, and I hope that it picks up, but we'll need fossil fuels for multiple industries anyway…

> We can go green, but we can't go green and have everyone maintain their living standards at the same time we also grow and perform R&D on multiple areas. I would hope (at least at a physics level, politics would be hard, of course) that cutting down on yatchs and maybe flights might be enough... (i.e.: only cutting for the 1% or maybe 5%)

Nowhere near enough. Cut out every flight and every yacht in existence and you’re talking about a 10% reduction

Re: We are ‘greening’ ourselves to extinction

#37

Post by adrianN »

korroziya wrote: post #21

From the article: "The supposed energy transition that has been undertaken has seen renewable energy production expanded, but there has been no indication that oil and gas are being substituted and ultimately phased out." That's not going to happen for another 27 years at least. I've said it before: Most people (including those who post here) are staggeringly illiterate when it comes to energy. Hydrocarbons store an…

"You can't replace it in XX years" is particularly true if you don't even try.

Everything we use oil and gas for that is not fuel is a tiny fraction of our consumption and can be replaced with synthesis pipelines that use carbon dioxide, water and electricity.

Re: We are ‘greening’ ourselves to extinction

#38

Post by erulabs »

> billions of dollars have been poured into big pharma, instead of public health and policies

My biggest pet peeve is this idea that the human race or even some large swath (“investors”) are doing one thing instead of another. How does one “pour billions in to policies” anyways? How do investors investing in bigpharma in any way impact public health policy?

It’s as if the author wants to take the entire human race aside and say “hey buddy, you’re making some mistakes”. Who? What? When!

Planting trees isn’t great for carbon offset but it’s probably great for a dozen other reasons - and guess what - we can do lots of things simultaneously!

If the worst miscalculation you can point at the human race making is accidentally planting too many trees - well - I think the author is perhaps the myopic one! Of course they immediately confuse other complex topics (wildfires bad is an extremely naive understanding of California!) so pulling apart any of this is hopeless.

Re: We are ‘greening’ ourselves to extinction

#39

Post by rootusrootus »

ramesh31 wrote: post #8
t43562 wrote: post #5

Climate change has only one priority: stop releasing carbon into the atmosphere. We're all dead if we don't and we cannot afford to add one tiny extra burden onto that monumental task. Sorry. The alternative is death for us all and no chance of any justice ever.

This is like saying "weight loss has only one priority; eat less food and exercise more". Of course, but people simply won't. So what do we do?

> This is like saying "weight loss has only one priority; eat less food and exercise more".

I think this is far more reasonable. Want to weigh less? Eat a bit less, move a bit more. OP said eliminate all carbon emissions. That's like starving to lose weight. A good compromise is "emit a little less, plant a few more trees" or something along those lines, which is basically what we're doing.

We already know it won't be enough to avoid consequences, as those are already manifesting, but it's the most realistic path forward by far.

Re: We are ‘greening’ ourselves to extinction

#40

Post by bambax »

rootusrootus wrote: post #31

> the push to replace fuel-engine vehicles with electric ones As opposed to what, replacing cars with public transit? It takes a serious amount of hubris to look at the world and think that we can just wave a magic wand and make public transit work in places that largely rely on cars (even in Europe, which is much denser and more friendly to public transit, there are a lot of personal cars). We will run out of oil wa…

We could make it harder and harder to use/own a car: more expensive, difficult to park, slower to use, etc. Then people would seek out other solutions by themselves, be it using a bike, public transport, or moving less (asking for more remote work options, for instance).

We don't seem to even be trying to do this and it's depressing.

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