So what can we - the average HN crowd - actually do?
Bret Victor's essay on what a technologist can do about climate is a well-reasoned perspective targeted at people in the tech industry, and it's at least a start. What else?
Reject consumerism, and use your extra resources for personal fulfillment, health, and fixing the world.
It doesn't require everyone to cooperate, just us and those like us. Especially if we can capture the imagination of other similar people around us.
Local examples of living well and doing good have more impact than we think. This requires a change in popular culture right? How does that happen? It's not with polarizing media campaigns. People are influenced by people around them that they admire. Live well, save the world, and be noisy about it. People will notice.
Very seriously look at what we are doing, who we are working for, which companies get our attention.
How many new tech companies are doing things which feed into a consumerist culture which doesn't care about long-term impact because it's always BUY BUY BUY? It's all about making fuck you money, which really is fuck everyone else money. That's ugly and seeing as how it's one of the driving forces of the tech industry...well, some of us are guilty.
We are all deeply embedded in a culture with massive issues and to fix that we have to reexamine our own actions which are contributing to it.
Well said. It's hard to find ethical jobs. But that's not an excuse for working for evil companies instead. The world needs more ethical companies. Seek them out, join them, help them prosper. Please make the world a better place to live in, not worse, there's already too many people on that side of things, don't become one of them.
Here is what I try: Host stuff in data centers that are operated by 100% Renewables, use hardware efficiently (virtualisation, ARM boards for simple tasks),
fly not more than every 2-5 years, eat meat only once a week, use public transport as much as possible (easier said in Europe I assume), take cold showers whenever I have the courage, make sure my bank does not invest my money in fossil fuel or military projects, ...
Politicians and also scientists still avoid to say this aloud but without sufficiency there will be not enough change. The window of efficiency has passed.
Even though I admire Bret victor's work very very much, I think we as technologists do not have much an influence over the issue by inventing. Instead, as I myself, and nearly everybody I know is barely aware of the issue at all, we need to make the general public aware of what is taking place through means of media. This has become a political problem, not a technology problem.
Everyone knows, noone gives a shit, because most people can't afford to care. It's only a small sliver of humanity - the college-educated upper-middle class of the west - that cares, and even most of them are just socially posturing and not actually caring.
What works is the economic argument, the best environmental choice has to become the cheapest one, and that's something technology can do.
When solar power is cheaper than coal, coal power plants will shut down very quickly and be replaced by solar power plants.
When electric cars are cheaper than ICE cars, noone is going to buy the latter, and vehicle pollution will quickly disappear as well.
And you can drive those electric cars for perhaps 10 years after that switch, until the global food supply finally kicks the bucket. On the current course, we are looking at global nuclear war level disruption; the only question is "when." Estimates are between 2035 and 2070.
The problem is: once we stop, were have decades more build up that catches up.
Really, actually reading the science, I'm starting to think the Fermi paradox is solved.
When you say "cheaper," anything we do today is cheaper than massive human death.
Tools for making complex systems understandable to people unfamiliar/unpracticed in scientific thinking could be a powerful part of influencing this political problem (which I agree it is).
For starters have fewer or no kids, and stop traveling frivolously by air.
Aircraft emissions, because they are made at high altitude, have a climate impact that is leveraged by a factor commonly estimated to be 2.7 higher than the same emissions if made at ground-level.[1]
Which means that if you're planning to drive already, flying may be a better option. Though ground-based electrified rail would be better still -- even if it has higher net energy consumption, solar-fed electrified rail beats fuel-fed aircraft.
The key is the frivolous word in the GP comment. Aircraft actually are fairly efficient, it's just that the mileage of a single flight is a substantial fraction of most people's total annual driving. That old Jevons paradox again.
As for electric aircraft: think "powered glider" rather than "emissions-free 747". Roughly half an airliner's takeoff weight is fuel, and that's burnt up over the course of the flight. Battery storage densities are on the order of 1/100th to 1/50th of petrol or kerosene (latter is essentially jet fuel). The trend's been slight on improvement, and though there've been some battery-powered aircraft, they're comparable to a very-small-engined aircraft with a tiny fuel tank -- think 20-40hp and less than a gallon of fuel (about 15-30 kW and 2-3 litres, for rational people).
If I remember correctly, he said that the energy use per-person in a (full) commercial aircraft flying from A to B is half as much as the energy use per-car if you drove from A to B.
This means that if two people carpool from A to B, you're as efficient per-person as flying from A to B; if four people carpool, it's twice as efficient per-person as flying.
Please call me out if I'm wrong or if I misunderstood the passage from Without Hot Air.
That's about right, though there are a few additional considerations:
1. Aircraft have heaviest fuel use during takeoff and ascent. Short flights are the least efficient. I'm not aware of a good modeling for this, but you might consider that there's a fixed takeoff/landing/taxi cycle and a variable cruise component to most flights. Also, larger aircraft (at capacity) tend to be more efficient than smaller ones, though that's a fairly varyable dynamic.
2. Automobiles offer numerous other capaibilities (and limitations). Generally, more cargo, and more direct transit. With airport delays adding 1-3 hours to a flight, that's 150 miles / 240 km of ground travel possible at highway speeds.
3. More luggage capacity / fewer restrictions. You can carry items on a car you couldn't on an airplane.
4. Point-to-point service. Aircraft fly to airports. Cars drive to specific addresses. That's another consideration in on-ground time, possibly several hours, in a flight. Autos start looking viable for trips of 200-250 mi / 320 - 350 km.
5. There are larger autos availabe. Five adults in a small compact might not be reasonable, but might consider an SUV or van. And efficient choice here would make up for lower fuel economy with higher passenger capacity.
Aircraft still generally win on safety on a pro-rated distance basis.
It's pretty irrelevant to make the comparison against automobiles because you're assuming the travel will occur regardless of mode. Most air travel is arguably frivolous, and wouldn't occur if required to do so by automobile for a variety of reasons (time, inconvenience, et cetera).
But if you must make the comparison, automobiles are obviously more efficient than aircraft per passenger for shorter distances. You wouldn't burn anywhere near the amount of fuel a jet uses taxiing to drive a comparable distance, to illustrate the extreme end of the spectrum favoring automobiles.
Actually teasing out where exactly the inflexion point lies depends on the specific vehicles being compared, occupancy levels, and distance being traveled. These things have been studied and compared, Google it if you're actually interested in knowing when to drive instead of fly. It's far more prudent to simply cut down or eliminate air travel altogether, IMHO.
There are other difficult to measure impacts from flying. For example, most people I encounter in the SF Bay area like to travel frivolously by air and broadcast to the world that they're doing so in their in-person conversations and social media posts. This amounts to advertising and promoting more frivolous air travel throughout their audiences, and wouldn't really be feasible if they hadn't taken the flight in the first place. There's a greater collateral damage with air travel, because it's so accessible and convenient, all it takes is a photo of a wing or some beautiful destination you flew to and anyone who sees the photo in your friend circle can likely afford to repeat the activity - there are effectively no barriers. Social networking has exacerbated this effect _tremendously_, it's somewhat horrifying.
This is an incomplete and thus inaccurate assessement. The efficiency is massively dependent on the distance being traveled. Shorter domestic flights are nowhere near as economical as longer ones. Longer flights amortize the hugely inefficient taxiing, takeoff, and climb to cruising altitude.
This article is good at encapsulating the increasingly dire science and urgent need for immediate action.
What can you do? Educate yourself, educate all your friends and anyone else you talk to, vote for politicians who take this seriously and urge dramatic immediate action, use any resources or connections you have to get this understood by the people who hold and wield power. The situation is rapidly slipping from bad to almost unimaginably dystopian.
The entire internet industry and tools saves a lot of money and energy itself. Some of what people used to travel by car or airplane to do, now is done over far more energy and time efficient internet connections. Large amounts of paper has been replaced by far more environmentally friendly digital versions.
The dream hasn't gone %100 yet, but it has replaced a big chunk already. Year by year it replaces more and more paper and in person travelling.
You may think it isn't the case, but I have a story of a friend doing a psychology internship. The small office she works for has her schlep paper testing kits, patient charts and so on back and forth in between offices. And since they are shared they have often have to deliver them back and forth more than multiple copies would let them prevent. The main reason why its still paper is because her boss is in her 60s. But my friend has started to convince her boss to start digitizing. Now with hippa compliant google drive and pdf files replacing testing manuals and patient charts, they will save a ton of gas energy and time alone. It will be huge for them.
Renewable and nuclear power are the only solutions of appropriate scale. Short of that, write computer programs that actually efficiently use CPU cycles.
Don't locate too close to sea level or in an area prone to flash floods. Avoid areas where temperatures hit 100F now; it's going to get worse. Design electronics to function well at 140F ambient. Don't invest in Florida or New Orleans, or in areas ever flooded by the Mississippi River. Don't invest in cities scheduled for unliveable temperatures, such as Doha, Abu Dhabi and Bandar Abbas.
That paradox has little relation to the quality of software.
Let's say that Pockemon is written in the way that it takes 50% less CPU. So devices need less power taken from the grid.
But it does not mean that number of its users will be doubled because of less consumption.
Engineering responsibility, that's how this entity was named in my university.
Or conversely, it's possibly, just as an outside and highly improbable guess, that reducing the costs and power consumption of individual computing devices might:
1. Allow them to proliferate such that rather than IBM's famous 1950 market for five computers, there's a market for five billion.
2. Which are collectively backed by football-pitch sized datacenters around the world, running said Pokemon games and Pr0nTube servers.
Population control and nuclear power seem to be two things that are both beneficial in and of themselves, and also helpful against CO2 emissions. What else? Are solar panels a net positive yet?
But really, population control is the big one, and it's hard to talk about because, what are you going to do? Western birthrates are already very low. But try to convince a Zambian to not have 9 children... The usual solution is education, but that #1 Takes a generation or two, #2 Is a gamble in the first place, and #3 Goes hand-in-hand with expanded industrial production.
Population is less of a concern than you might think. At least according to Has Rosling:
https://vimeo.com/79878808
(This is long, but worth watching.)
World population is starting to plateau, with the number of children no longer growing. What I take from the video is that the primary concerns are reducing extreme poverty and infant mortality in Africa on one hand, which will result in a reduced birth rate. And on the other hand, moving the most wealthy to technology and lifestyles with lower environmental impact (solar power, electric cars, and I'm not sure what else), so that as the developing world adopts a wealthier lifestyle there is not a proportionate increase in environmental damage.
"moving the most wealthy to technology and lifestyles with lower environmental impact" - that's a strategy that's new to me, and initially sounds smart, as I'd certainly rather that rich people had crazy cool low/zero-environmental-impact toys than gas-guzzling ones! However, isn't the net environmental impact of the 1% actually tiny compared to the activities of the 99%? So surely it's widely penetrating / mass adoption of low/zero-environmental-impact technologies by the 99% that will change the world?
And of course as George Monbiot said...
“(Population is) an important issue…most greens will not discuss. Is this sensitivity or is it cowardice? Perhaps a bit of both.”
“…if we accept the UN’s projection that global population will grow by roughly 50 per cent and then stop. This means it will become 50 per cent harder to stop runaway climate change, 50 per cent harder to feed the world, 50 per cent harder to prevent the overuse of resources.”
“Even if there were no environmental pressures caused by population growth, we should still support the measures required to tackle it: universal sex education, universal access to contraceptives, better schooling and opportunities for poor women. Stabilising or even reducing the human population would ameliorate almost all environmental impacts.”
"However, isn't the net environmental impact of the 1% actually tiny compared to the activities of the 99%"
According to the linked video, the richest billion are responsible for 50% of global carbon emissions. The idea is that we had better have much better technology in place as the next richest 3 billion people start to drive and fly more over the next 50 years.
There's no need to convince anyone of anything, it turns out that improving the quality of life for everyone, especially by providing education, makes birth rates drop dramatically.
It's pretty much only sub-saharan african countries that have a birth-rate above 3. Zambia is at 5.59, and was at 7.41 at the most in 1975.
I knew it was bad, but wow. Makes me rethink having kids. Oops...
By the way, this is the kind of talk that makes me want to learn a few little somethings from doomsday preppers, stock up on guns, ammunition, water, and food that doesn't go bad for a century or more, and buy a surplus military subterranean missile silo to turn into a geothermal-supported bunker - because now I have a family, and that shit changes your outlook. And I'm fine being laughed at when nothing happens, but awful happy to be prepared when it does.
We could pollute the exosphere with reflecting particles.
The sun's winds could send these particles away into outer space after some time (which would depend on the average particle mass). The particles could be small enough to be harmless to satellites, yet big enough to last some time. Just an idea.
One of the best analyses I read of the original Matrix movie (before the sequels came out) was that the whole thing (Matrix, Zion, machines, etc.) was a virtual reality game run by humans to keep us busy until Earth's biosphere recovered from the rodgering we're currently giving it.
Given how politicized this has become--anyone who challenges the alarmism is outcast from the field--I think there's good reason to be skeptical of the rapidly escalating predictions of the consequences. I'm not saying climate change isn't happening or that it's not driven by humans, but it's kind of remarkable that 1C over a century has become 3.5C in two decades. And of course, global control of all major industries is always the proposed solution.
How about nuclear? It can power the world, it's carbon neutral, and modern reactors are physically incapable of meltdown. It seems to be the obvious solution, but those sounding the alarm over climate change tend to be the same groups that oppose nuclear.
> And of course, global control of all major industries is always the proposed solution.
That's what has troubled me when I've discussed this with people who clearly know much more than I do about climate. The underlying assumption often seems to be, "Since the science is unquestionable, then surely you must agree that massive government intervention is the only way to solve the problem."
Now that's something I'm pretty skeptical of, after seeing how so many well-intended government programs have not only failed to accomplish their goals but have been actively harmful.
Maybe government action is what's needed here. I don't know. But I sure don't want to assume that it's the answer.
In the eyes of some, this just makes me a skeptic and a denier.
If your position is "Science is believable, but I believe massive government intervention cannot solve the problem, so we need an alternative solution," then at least you have a logically coherent position.
The problem is when people go like this: "Massive government intervention cannot solve anything. Scientists say there is a problem, and massive government intervention is proposed as a solution. Therefore the science must be wrong; ergo, there is no problem."
Please educate these people that they aren't making any sense, and then after that we can talk.
I personally feel like the only way out now is some sort of active geoengineering solution. You're not going to convince everyone across the world to cut their emissions of greenhouse gases, and I suspect that even if you manage to do that, we have released too many gases into the atmosphere already.
This for whatever reason is even more unpopular than population control and nuclear power.
I completely agree though. Emission cuts are just not going to happen fast enough under any even slightly politically plausible scenario. It's a fantasy.
It also tends to actually be more expensive then any other solution (other then doing nothing in the short term). The huge sources of SO4 or whatever you plan to use have to actually be produced from somewhere.
We could turn ourselves around, and then literally nuke those who chose not to. It is technically possible -- we have all the tech, power, and people to do it.
Meanwhile: The political focus is on building walls.
And resulted in asthma inhalers becoming super expensive because a corporation was given de facto control over the CFC replacements. And that's just one example.
So it only counts if the solution has no other effects? Any trade off means failure? Should we continue to let CFCs destroy the ozone layer so inhalers can be cheaper?
What do you consider to be massive government intervention?
A carbon tax, as long as it is in put into place before the problem gets out of hand, would probably solve the problem, but I would not consider that "massive" government intervention.
The kind of climate change caused by our greenhouse gas emissions is bad for the country as a whole. In an ideal free market, normal market forces would cause us to move away from causing this kind of climate change. Real markets are not ideal free markets. A carbon tax, by making greenhouse gas produces pay some of the costs that otherwise would be externalities shifted to others, brings the real market closer to an ideal free market.
If we wait too long then a carbon tax won't be enough and massive government intervention could become necessary. By "massive" I mean the government stepping in and making decisions like what fuels you must use, setting specific emission caps on specific emitters, and things like that.
It's fundamentally a problem of externalities. It's an absolutely textbook example of tragedy of the commons, and historically the only solutions that work have been government solutions.
Is there an alternative to national government intervention?
Local intervention can't work - heavy industry will just move to a local jurisdiction that doesn't have those interventions.
Even if you accept that nuclear is safe (which isn't as settled as many on HN seem to think!) there is still a pretty significant problem with nuclear proliferation.
The only alternative I can see is massive technological change to develop much, much more energy efficient industrial systems which are much, much cheaper than the existing systems. That would mean it was uneconomic to compete with them. But.. hoping for magic is a problematic solution.
While we are hoping for magic, maybe someone will develop a cheap, small, workable fusion reactor. That would be nice.
We already have the more efficient technologies; the main resistance is those benefiting from the status quo, who have the most money/power.
This is wrong on many levels.
Firstly, I said "much, much more efficient AND much, much cheaper". Both need to be true in order to combat the high costs of setting up an industrial production facility.
Secondly, I don't think either of these things are met. What are these more efficient and cheaper technologies for - say - producing cars, or plastic toys, or glass, or.. something.
Thirdly, these people benefiting from the status quo in industrial production.. which status quo is that exactly? The one where production moved to Mexico from the US 15 years ago? Or the one where it moved to factories in China? Or the current one where Chinese factory workers are losing jobs to increased automation?
Note that I'm not saying that the same people aren't keeping the money and power. I'm saying that they don't care about the place or means of production. They'll be just as happy to make money from cheap, efficient production as from expensive, polluting production.
Yes, I too am surprised when new data causes us to have to re-evaluate our predictions. We made a prediction, gosh darnit we should ignore all subsequent observations in refining it!
The point I'm trying to raise is the potential for publication bias. If publishing results that challenge the narrative is a risk to your career, you won't publish it. Meanwhile, the outliers in the other direction, which do fit the narrative, get published and picked up by others in the field. Here's an article echoing my concerns: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/science-news/1083714...
Given how politicized this has become -- anyone with dire predictions gets outcast from the mainstream news -- I think there's good reason to be even more concerned about the rapidly escalating predictions.
I actually suspect this is a shill political account. The recent comments are anti-Obama, claim to be a doctor who was harmed by obamacare, argue against evolution and science in general, and basically tow any hot-button political line. It seems suspect to me the only stories worthy of comment on hacker news are the ones where an ignorant right-wing position can be proclaimed. Make no mistake, this is a willfully ignorant comment meant to spread FUD.
I remember the times when we were in danger because the earth could get hit by a meteor. I am still working om my giant laser which will save the earth while you waste your time caring about the climate change. Are you worried about climate in 2100 and raising see level? There won't be any sees 2100! We all get vaporised if I can't finish my giant laser on time. I hear the pigbearman coming.
The deepest and oldest problem of human species is their over-confident rush to interfere and "fix" vastly complex self-regulating ecosystems they do not fully understand.
No, facts are facts. And the fact is that every prediction that has been made has underestimated the coming change. If I predict the DJIA will rise 50 pts every day next week, and it really goes up 100 pts, am I wrong? Sure, but not the way you think.
Don't care about karma, I care about my career. I've seen several careers short circuited because they didn't tow the complete liberal orthodox line. Welcome to SF.
So, first, it's "toe the line," and second, toeing the line means stretching outside the defined limit. You may want to edit your post to make a coherent statement.
Nah, it's just that people generally don't like to work with someone who claims "Scientists are wrong," and when asked how he/she knows it, answers "Well, they've been wrong before!"
Because who wants to argue with such a person in a design meeting?
No one is saying that but at least, unlike you, scientists have attempted to make a case (as have several other people on this thread). I'm inclined to go with the people who've studied this subject, made arguments, were peer reviewed at least by each other, even with the reality of their human failings and biases.
When my high-functioning aspergers friend was 'deeply concerned' about the ESAS methane some months back, the actual models not taking into account positive feedback loops, and how there was a very high likelihood of us as a species going extinct in a mere decade, and given how much I trust his criteria, I knew something wasn't going well. This article pretty much sums up what he was telling me.
Bret Victor's essay on what a technologist can do about climate is a well-reasoned perspective targeted at people in the tech industry, and it's at least a start. What else?
http://worrydream.com/#!/ClimateChange