341–350 of 365 posts
Not just the worst year to be alive, but also the beginning of the worst century to be alive: "The repeated blows, followed by plague, plunged Europe into economic stagnation that lasted until 640." Imagine the kind of horror and suffering that a century of global economic stagnation inflicts on generations of people.
You can take that even further as the sewage systems in Europe didn't recover until the 18th/19th century.
How susceptible are we to another catastrophic volcano eruption? After COVID-19 shut down supply chains, there were some problematic delays, but seems like we quickly recovered. If the entire planet's crops were wiped out, we're all just SOL if we don't get canned goods in time? If we had 12 months notice, could we as a planet get it together? 6 months? 3 months? Is there forecasting for volcanoes? (looks like yes: h…
I'm going to plug a charity here, Allfed, working to develop technologies to let us survive the loss of conventional agriculture for a period of years by working out efficient and economical ways to convert things like, e.g., dead trees into digestible calories and the plans to deploy them in the event of a large volcanic interruption or asteroid strike or nuclear exchange. https://allfed.info/
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> This was nowhere near Soviet bread line status. In the Soviet Union, perhaps you had to stand in line for bread, but, at least there was bread. Please stop. this is outright demonstrably false by every account. It's a nice reminder that someone with a lot of intelligence and dare I say talent in one area can be so wrong in another. But seriously dude, please educate yourself on the history of socialism and how it's…
Were you educated in the American school system by any chance?
In fact I’m getting this from the source. My own family lived there for most of their lives. Only left in the late 80s.
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I mentioned nuclear. It is secondary to the conversion from coal to gas though in terms of near-term realized benefit. Nuclear requires a lot of dereg and testing that will be decades out if we start today. This assumes the barriers of popular rejection can be overcome. China might pull it off, but I don't see the US radiating enthusiasm for it. But yeah, since few places on earth can take advantage of hydro, I don't…
It does not require dereg, it requires investment. Just lile renewables do.
The key parameters in a nuclear build are:
1) the construction time (impacted by regulatory regimes)
2) the cost of capital (interest rate of tying up money)
3) an uncertainty factor about getting shut down (impacted by regulatory regimes)
In China, 1&2 are 3-4 years and 2% respectively. In the US they are 8-9 years, 15% and maybe 50% chance you'll be shut down before you can finish. [0]
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Americans and citizens of high GDP countries are totally the scarfaces in this scenario
I mean sure, except for the ones who aren't. If the average citizen of the U.S is scarface what is a koch brother then? A monster made up of a thousand scarfaces all shouting say hello to my little friend in unison? If the average citizen of the U.S is scarface what about someone who works at Greenpeace, doesn't have a car and lives frugally? Probably scarface in comparison to the average untouchable in India but I d…
Warren Buffet has roughly 100,000X the wealth of the average american (~700k), but Warren buffet does not produce 10^5 as much co2 or consume 10^5 as much iron.
Seph-reed posted: >Not usually a fan of us vs them mentality, but your use of "we" here feels bad. Surely, it's all of us that use these resources, nobody on HN is self sufficient (please be the exception). But at the same time, most of us aren't getting much of the "cocaine" here, at least relatively.
This begs the question of what the threshold is for when it stops being a collective "us" problem, and becomes a "them" problem because of "their" disproportionate contribution to the problem. This [1] suggests that the richest 20% of americans account for 30% of US carbon emissions, or about 1.5x the average. If the bottom 80% are still emitting 70% of the emissions, than I would say it is still a collective "us" problem. If you somehow reduced the emissions from the top 20% richest americans to 0, the average american would still emit 300% more than the global average.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016041201...
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It's also a good reason to leave fossil fuels in the ground and not just extract them as quickly as possible wherever we find them. It seems conceivable that we could eventually find ourselves thermodynamically unable to recover after a catastrophy like a big solar flare. Unfortunately there is no way for anyone to make money by being responsible in this way. We are effectively draining our planetary rainy day fund a…
> We are effectively draining our planetary rainy day fund and spending it on cocaine Not usually a fan of us vs them mentality, but your use of "we" here feels bad. Surely, it's all of us that use these resources, nobody on HN is self sufficient (please be the exception). But at the same time, most of us aren't getting much of the "cocaine" here, at least relatively. It would almost be reasonable to say " They are e…
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> This implies regulatory disincentives to produce and consume fossil fuels. It's relevant to note that at no time in recorded human history have humans backed off the consumption of an energy source unless a better replacement (more dense) was found. We have plenty of examples of humans forgoing technologies that turned out to have downsides. And it's a near universal truth that dire warnings were given about these…
> plenty of examples of forgoing technologies I didn't say technologies, I said energy sources. > batteries do not have to become as energy dense as diesel We need a storage mechanism that allows the energy gained from renewable sources to power things without interruption. Two examples illustrate the problem today - for renewables to power a cargo ship the battery load-out required to move that loaded container ship…
There have only been a handful of energy sources, so this argument is lame. I'll also note that it's an example of "nothing can happen for the first time".
> It won't be Li-Ion, it has to be something else, but that "something else" doesn't exist yet
Hydrogen. Ammonia. Synthetic hydrocarbons (which I explicitly listed). These are demonstrated technologies.
It's a common canard that anti-renewable polemics make to represent batteries as the only storage option. And you've continued to make this argument even after I listed alternatives earlier.
When you make an argument that no solution is possible, it puts the responsibility ON YOU to rule out not just batteries, but every conceivable solution and combination of solutions. You can't just adopt a lazy attitude of lousy engineering to make your case.
> As to carbon pricing - carbon pricing regimes require world-wide cooperation. IF you can get that, it effectively means limiting fossil fuel usage, right? Otherwise why are we doing it?
It will likely involve carbon tariffs. If some country refuses to control CO2 emission, trade with that country will be blocked. This will coerce the holdouts.
Your attitude there also smacks of fatal defeatism. What is your alternative, burning fossil fuels until we have a replay of the end-Triassic greenhouse mass extinction?
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New nuclear (Hinkley C) in the uk costs £92.50/MWh -- 3200MWe, operational from 2025 Proposed new offshore wind farms cost £40/MWh, operational from 2023/2024 Nuclear was the answer 15 years ago. It's not now.
Nuclear is still the answer to "what about baseline demand". Battery storage is possibly going to fit in there, but it doesn't do it yet. Tidal, ground source, gravity/momentum/compression/latent-heat storage solutions, some of these might do. I think we need at least one more cycle of Nuclear power plants. Perhaps then we'll have workable fission.
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How would green/grow houses help in such a situation?
The cold weather would kill crops in all but probably tropical latitudes. The lack of sunlight will slow plant growth. Placing plants in greenhouses / growhouses would keep them warm and you could supplement sunlight with LED lighting to feed the plants.
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> plenty of examples of forgoing technologies I didn't say technologies, I said energy sources. > batteries do not have to become as energy dense as diesel We need a storage mechanism that allows the energy gained from renewable sources to power things without interruption. Two examples illustrate the problem today - for renewables to power a cargo ship the battery load-out required to move that loaded container ship…
> I didn't say technologies, I said energy sources. There have only been a handful of energy sources, so this argument is lame. I'll also note that it's an example of "nothing can happen for the first time". > It won't be Li-Ion, it has to be something else, but that "something else" doesn't exist yet Hydrogen. Ammonia. Synthetic hydrocarbons (which I explicitly listed). These are demonstrated technologies. It's a co…
A matter of fact isn't an argument, it just is. It's usefulness here is that IF your solution depends on humans doing something for the first time ever in not just recorded history but also in the entire archeological record, it's a big assumption to be weaving into a proposal and weakens (but granted does not make impossible) the idea that you may be on the right track in assuming it will happen now. It's like the famous "How to draw an owl" meme: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/how-to-draw-an-owl
Are miracles possible? Sure. Should you bet on it in your planning? No.
> Hydrogen, ammonia
Both of these require fossil fuels to synthesize in quantities to meet today's needs, let alone new at-scale quantities. Hydrogen certainly may be better than burning coal or even natural gas, but it still would require fossil fuels. The amount of organically sourced ammonia we have on the planet _in total_ is only sufficient to support crops for ~4 bln people globally. There is no solution right now to synthesize enough ammonia at scale without hydrocarbons.
> [embargoes] will coerce the holdouts
We'll not get a chance to test this, but as a thought exercise let's consider how well embargoes work today. Then consider who the embargoes will be placed on from a justice perspective or from an effectiveness perspective. You are either advocating a form of colonialism in the developing world or telling your French neighbor to pay way more for heating, cooking, driving, etc. Both these things have taken place in isolation, and both had bad outcomes. Scaling it up doesn't make a good outcome any more likely.
> What's your alternative?
Rational thinking isn't defeatism - it's application _is_ the solution.
I would gently ask - very gently and politely as I would a friend - that you to re-read your initial response to my statement. You said it was "utter nonsense" and equated it to saying the earth was flat. I'm sure you can appreciate now with more data how the critique is actually the reverse. Your response to my points assumes a miraculous technological development at an indeterminant future date whose likelihood is not supported by existing efficiency improvement data. It disregards the voraciousness with which the planet is consuming fossil fuels today, the future burden forecasted by developing economies, and the insufficiency of current technologies to scale.
I empathize with your sense of hope and am similarly shocked at the risk we face as a species, but people typically do two things in the face of this shock that are equally irrational: deny global warming or believe the solution for energy transition is easy.
Bill Gates said in a talk at Stanford a few months ago that the "easy" people are a bigger barrier to decarb progress than the deniers. I don't know if I would agree in the ranking (or care), but agree that neither are helpful. The problem is enormously difficult (as befitting a planetary emergency). My view of solutions is informed the same way as my assessment of current energy use is. Seek knowledge, be rational, be very skeptical, watch out for the hucksters, support what's left over.