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Ask HN: What can be done to prevent a climate catastrophe?

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Re: Ask HN: What can be done to prevent a climate catastrophe?

#391

Post by patagonia »

I honestly believe there are 1000 paths to safety, that there only a few to dangerous climate change, but that we will take a path to dangerous climate change. Because it is easier. It requires not making hard choices. It requires not working together. It requires less sacrifice. It will be the path of human nature and behavioral inertia.

“So what can we do so our children don't live in some ghastly hothouse world?”

We are going to have to explain to later generations why we thought the 6th great extinction was an appropriate price to pay for having elaborate, throw-away Halloween lawn decorations which were made by and the most costly to the most vulnerable citizens of the planet.

I don’t say any of that lightly.

Re: Ask HN: What can be done to prevent a climate catastrophe?

#392

Post by anonuser123456 »

Retric wrote: post #380
anonuser123456 wrote: post #377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In northern climates in the winter, people use hundreds of thousands of BTU per day burning fossil fuels to heat their homes. Translated to electricity, that's 30+kwh per day with a huge portion of that during non peak solar and wind. In order to solve the energy problem, you also have to solve the heating one... and wind / solar currently can't do that.

Solar hot water heaters are cheap and work very well for home heating outside the arctic circle. In the US we mostly use them for pool heating, as anything else costs to much, but somehow they are ignored for other uses.

Solar water heaters are not cheap. 1 square meter of evacuated solar tubing with a storage tank is > 4k, before installation. That 1 m^2 will give you at most 500w of solar gain for 2-3 hours... in total maybe 5k BTU. That's a factor of 20 off relative to existing systems.

Re: Ask HN: What can be done to prevent a climate catastrophe?

#393

Post by decasteve »

pauldjohnston wrote: post #221

Well, having done some research into this recently, the tech world has something it can do right now. Switch to sustainably powered Cloud and move to renewably powered/offset Data Centres. e.g. Google (100% carbon neutral), Azure (100% offset), AWS (Oregon, Montreal, Ireland, Frankfurt regions are 100% carbon neutral) Cloud/Data Centres emit around 2% of Greenhouse Gas Emissions (bet you didn't know that). There is a…

A couple of others:

Hetzner: https://www.hetzner.com/unternehmen/umweltschutz/?country=en

OVH also has an energy efficient data centre in Quebec powered by a hydroelectric dam.

Re: Ask HN: What can be done to prevent a climate catastrophe?

#394

Post by bjowen »

nkurz wrote: post #327
adrianN wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is that related to their carbon policies?

It's probably not relevant to their carbon policy, but it's a valid qualifier to the first sentence which proposes Bhutan an otherwise unqualified "great example".

It is probably relevant to the success in implementing the policy. States that brutalise segments of their populations tend to have an easier time convincing the others to fall in line.

Re: Ask HN: What can be done to prevent a climate catastrophe?

#395

Post by ShriekBob »

dgudkov wrote: post #357
tobr wrote: post #19

Fundamentally it is a political problem, not a technological problem. We need high carbon taxes, we need to end fossil fuel subsidies, and we probably need to change our economic system to something that addresses the tragedy of the commons. But we’ve seen in recent years how technology can influence politics. I’d quote a tweet from Tristan Harris from the other day [1]: > In an hypothetical world, if Facebook were r…

Fundamentally, it's a consumer problem. Consumers don't want to pay more for using green power, or eat less meat, or use public transit instead of a car, buy an electric vehicle, or other things that restrict their comfort or degrade quality of life. Such restriction/degradation would be perceptible and short-term, while the climate threat is not perceptible and is long-term. Nobody really cares if the average temper…

I would argue that the only reason those none green things are cheaper is because of unpriced externalities. Externalities that industry isn't going to price in themselves, which means it becomes, again, a political problem

Re: Ask HN: What can be done to prevent a climate catastrophe?

#396

Post by Juliate »

questionasked wrote: post #233
Juliate wrote: post #139

Indirect action idea (I wonder about it). Gather with other persons to invest a few shares in the major groups responsible for CO2 emissions. Not to have weight per se, but to be invited in shareholders assembly. And to be regularly loud about the topic of the group's responsibility. It's enough for 4, 5 distinct individuals to bring up related questions in the same assembly so that it bothers other investors. Bother…

lmao how is paying the companies responsible for this possibly a good idea?

You're not paying the company, you're buying a share of its capital. That's not the same thing at all: in exchange, you get a right to get shareholders information and to participate in general assemblies, a right you may sell back later.

Plus, 1 share is enough to be invited to the shareholders meeting to get to ask questions. That's not out of touch.

(edit for clarification)

Re: Ask HN: What can be done to prevent a climate catastrophe?

#397

Post by m_mueller »

mahasvin wrote: post #366
dplavery92 wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's simply incorrect. https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/volcano-carbon-emissions/ https://www.climate.gov/news-features/climate-qa/which-emits... https://www.skepticalscience.com/volcanoes-and-global-warmin... https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2017/06/06/how-... https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/earthtalks-volcan...

Ah, Forbes always was an authoritative source on climate change. I am not in the mood for battling over the authors who are unable to consider 250 000 underwater volcanoes. You know, 250 000 underwater volcanoes cannot be wrong.

So you‘re biased against one source and ignore all the others given here?

Re: Ask HN: What can be done to prevent a climate catastrophe?

#398

Post by imtringued »

cletus wrote: post #63
sshine wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Too expensive to get to space? Eventually the cost of this will go down to dollars per kilogram. You speak of this as if space migration is going to be scalable.

The likely end result of orbital systems looks something like this: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=LMbI6sk-62E The thing about the that is that it's not high tech. It's an engineering problem not a science problem. A massive engineering solution I'll grant you. I'll also concede that there are going to be a lot of steps on between.

That is your answer? Some crazy science fiction colossal international space structure that will require all countries of humanity working together to build?

The future is going to be very mundane. Conventional reusable rockets are going to be enough. The fuel cost of a launch is orders of magnitude lower than the cost of whatever satellites you're bringing into orbit.

Re: Ask HN: What can be done to prevent a climate catastrophe?

#399

Post by plopilop »

mahasvin wrote: post #366
dplavery92 wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's simply incorrect. https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/volcano-carbon-emissions/ https://www.climate.gov/news-features/climate-qa/which-emits... https://www.skepticalscience.com/volcanoes-and-global-warmin... https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2017/06/06/how-... https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/earthtalks-volcan...

Ah, Forbes always was an authoritative source on climate change. I am not in the mood for battling over the authors who are unable to consider 250 000 underwater volcanoes. You know, 250 000 underwater volcanoes cannot be wrong.

That's a nice cherry-picking over the sources you're doing here. From Scientific American, quoting USGS:

> According to the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), the world’s volcanoes, both on land and undersea, generate about 200 million tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) annually, while our automotive and industrial activities cause some 24 billion tons of CO2 emissions every year worldwide

But I guess you're more knowledgeable on the subject than the US geological survey?

> On average, human activities put out in just three to five days, the equivalent amount of carbon dioxide that volcanoes produce globally each year

https://www.usgs.gov/news/human-activities-produce-more-carb...

Re: Ask HN: What can be done to prevent a climate catastrophe?

#400

Post by korantu »

natch wrote: post #379
korantu wrote: post #341

The only solution to rapid reduction in co2 emissions that can be deployed right now at sufficient scale is nuclear. There are passively safe designs built right now. It can provide electricity, heat and desalination if lack of water is an issue. There is enough nuclear fuel in sea water to consider it an infinite source as far as humans are concerned [1]. Further, USA alone can be powered by its existing nuclear _wa…

There is also plenty of hydrogen in sea water. As with the nuclear fuel you claim is infinite, there are costs and complications with extracting it, though. So it’s a silly claim. Nuclear has its own problems starting with the fact that it’s a highly centralized solution, with attendant problems following from that.

Well, there is plenty of hydrogen in the water indeed. If there was any worry that we are going to run out of hydrogen, and willing to pay hundreds of dollars per kg (uranium fuel cost), we would totally get it from sea water.

In which case hydrogen supply would be technically infinite.

As for your second concern, could you elaborate, why centralisation such a critical barrier to achieving co2-free energy production? Never heard this argument before.

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