I am troubled by the inclusion of McKinsey consulting in the earlier work. IMO it throws a real wrench in the trustworthiness of the study, considering their track record.
I feel like it's unsurprising that actual renewable price reductions outpaced predictions from a study that McKinsey participated in; their fiduciary incentives absolutely do not align with greater adoption of renewable tech.
While your skepticism is certainly warranted, some individuals at McKinsey are deeply committed to sustainability, and arguably their involvement with the firm provides opportunities to have real-world impact.
My familiarity with McKinsey is based on what I know about them via the Purdue Pharma "thing" and their involvement in Enron - I admit I am looking at this through a cardboard tube.
I would like to know what you do about their commitment to sustainability. Do you have sources? Are you a source?
McKinsey is HUGE. Like any of the major consulting firms, one department can be completely evil, while the other is saving the world; just depends on the client's needs.
In a positive light there's tons of hype about ESG investing. With that in mind, many companies will hire McKinsey to construct reports that follow the trend.
This is a pretty good writeup. It's from a firm that's focused on messaging and image control, so perhaps to be taken with a grain of salt, but I like that they're pushing C-suite types to connect the dots between "good for all" and "good for investors".
That said, I'm still a little leery, and here's why: Our system of incentives (that is, capitalism at large) is misaligned with properly resolving climate change. McKinsey's whole value proposition is that they will help your company achieve it's goals, whatever those goals may be. Even if working on climate change coincides with the direction of a company at some point in time, it's not the goal of the game. The goal of the game is "get more money", and that will be the thing that McKinsey should be focused on, as that is the product that they are selling: make your business more profitable.
With this in mind, it feels .... odd, that they were the first choice for a climate study. There are plenty of NGOs, non-profits, and associated orgs whose primary mission is fixing climate change. Even if McKinsey is totally on the level here (which I'm personally undecided on), it feels a little like calling the plumber to fix a blown transformer.
I suppose if I had to identify a singular, big reason that I'm leery, here, it's this: Renewables and other green tech is directly competitive with some of McKinsey's clients' goals. I make this assertion on the strength that they offer services to the oil & gas industries - as McKinsey does not publish their clients (another thing that garners my side-eye.)
McKinsey’s fiduciary incentives are absolutely aligned with overcoming the major challenge of the 21st century — climate disaster is bad for business. Whether any specific individual consultant (out of 30,000 people) has the foresight to recognize and plan for that is another question.
Hello, from NW Oregon — currently one of the hottest places on the planet. Feels like a convection oven. My puppy found a bunch of dead baby birds last evening — almost certainly related to the heat. Hard not to read the symbolism into it.
Thanks - it’s definitely been a disturbing event, and hard to convey just how unusual it is. Portland was a couple of degrees from the Las Vegas record yesterday, and the infrastructure just wasn’t built for it. We’re just south in the Willamette Valley, and have a heat-pump system that’s been doing a decent job, but apparently you’re not meant to run AC more than a 20 degree delta from outside temps. So, we were at 80-90 inside yesterday by end of day.
Today is supposed to be the worst of it, and then we’re supposed to drop to normal summer highs.
Climate Change is first and foremost a political problem. I'm not saying that innovation and engineering can't address the issue. But we actually have plenty of good tools to reduce our carbon footprint that our politics just will not allow us to implement. Can you imagine forcing construction of Nuclear Power Plants, restricting meat consumption, and policies that heavily disincentivize population growth? Absolutely not. But people are hoping Engineers find magic bullets so that our leaders don't have to take drastic action.
It only becomes politically viable if the engineering (and therefore monetarily, etc) viable.
“Vasectomies for everyone, and you have to wear a hair shirt and abandon your house to live with 20 other people in an area dense enough for you to walk to your job, which is harvesting potatoes from an urban organic farm fertilized with human feces” is one possible solution to stopping climate change, but it isn’t politically viable.
“Your truck is electric now, and your electricity comes from wind, nuclear, and solar power, including on the roof of your existing home. You travel via High Speed Rail or electric airplane. Steel is made using hydrogen. You use cutting edge low-latency satellite Internet to telecommute. We figured out how to reduce emissions of cattle using seaweed supplements.”
…is politically viable. So engineering is necessary for the amount of feasible political capital we have to be spent on climate action.
Engineering is essential to enabling political action.
Exactly, but the engineering is already done. We already have nuclear power, we already have adequate meat substitutes, we have high efficiency wind mills, we have high efficiency solar panels. We have high capacity batteries and high efficiency motors for our cars.
There literally is no essential challenge left in engineering. Frankly, just nuclear power could have been enough to dodge this whole fiasco 50 years ago if it wasn't so much more expensive than oil.
To demand even more from engineering is madness. To implement all of these things at the scale needed is politics, nothing else.
Agreed 100%: it's a basic economic problem- climate change is a classic tragedy of the commons scenario, largely caused by fossil fuels being too cheap, with easy-to-dismiss externalities.
Only political intervention (carbon taxes, green subsidies) could cause a decline in use.
Except that carbon taxes that are only implemented in one country cause fossil fuel demand by that country to decline, which makes it even cheaper for countries without carbon taxes.
I wonder if instead of a carbon tax, there should be a tax that funds a fossil fuel 1:N storage requirement. You burn a gallon of gas, you need to store a gallon of gas in the strategic reserve. That way the tax is paid, we eventually figure out how many gallons were accessible (because we eventually run out), and the price goes up for all countries even those that are not taxing carbon.
Alternatively, rather than extracting and storing the gas, the tax could fund the purchase of estimated reserves that are left unexploited.
I assume the oil companies would also love this method.
Well, everyone's going to hate the answer, but we'll be having to both incentivize decarbonization, and pressure countries to stop pumping and selling oil and gas. And that's meant in the extreme way, at some point we will have to go to war with these countries.
Why not just levy a carbon tariff on imports? Ban fossil fuel production, export, and import domestically and then replace most tariffs with a carbon tariff. Also, make decarbonization look awesome by investing in cheap decarbonization tech. Convince these countries to decarbonize by making it easy, cheap, and sexy while making it basically a precondition of trade. And combine this with substantial decarbonization foreign aid. All much cheaper & better than war.
This is one big reason I think “Degrowth”/austerity approaches to decarbonization are actually counterproductive: they make decarbonization look super unattractive to countries that want to develop, particularly if they have substantial fossil fuel reserves.
People don't use energy because it's sexy, they use it because they need or want things that cost energy and they pay according to their need.
The concern is not importing carbon, the concern is countries using the energy themselves. For every Tesla there's a thousand little diesel trucks driving around on the african continent, and that number will only go up, especially if western demand for oil goes down.
I don't think the 'attractiveness' of decarbonization has any consequence at all. Just look at Texas, one of the most oil dependent, climate change denying anti-green states there is, yet they're also the largest producer of renewable wind energy, and are closing their coal plants. That's got nothing to do with attractiveness, it's just economics. Selling wind power is simply profitable.
Vice versa, no one cares more about the planet than the rich people of the world. You won't find more green movement startups, solar panels on roofs, high efficiency buildings, electric cars and even vegetarians in any other slice of the population. Yet those same nature lovers are also the ones who do the most international flights. With each round trip burning as much fuel as a regular person would in a year of commuting to work. It's got nothing to do with attractiveness, they want to, there's no other way, they can afford to, so they do it.
> For every Tesla there's a thousand little diesel trucks driving around on the african continent
Nah, this isn't accurate. Tesla has sold over 1.5 million vehicles (probably will get over 2 million by the end of this year)[0]. There's only approximately 30-40 million cars in the entire continent of Africa[1]. (And expand this to "little diesel trucks" isn't going to change the math much, and probably there's fewer of those.)
Tesla is also scaling up, producing almost a million vehicles per year right now... over 180,000 last quarter, and they have 1 new factory in China that is expanding and 2 totally new factories (in Texas and Germany). So Tesla will soon be producing about as many new vehicles as all the new car sales in Africa (which has ~1 million new car sales per year [1]). And Tesla is just one provider.
More cost-optimized electric vehicles, like are super popular in China (the Hong Guang Mini EV is $4500 [2]), are likely to be the big sellers in Africa.
Alright, so you're right there's a good chance Africa will have a largely electrified car fleet by the end of this decade. It doesn't ease my heart on the entire oil industry though, as personal transport / commute is just one piece of the pie. We still have transportation of goods and materials, which is something that's hardly electrified at all (I suppose rail is? though I'm pretty sure the big heavy ones are still diesel powered).
And they still need to generate that power, and if oil really does become cheap enough for them, wouldn't they still buy it to turn it into electricity?
For countries without actual oil reserves, fossil fuels are pretty expensive. So I think it will really depend on where in Africa you’re talking about.
> To implement all of these things at the scale needed is politics
In America, where actual implementation of technology is carried out by private companies, this is simply not true.
This is like saying that the engineering work on the internet was "done" in 1996, and the work of driving adoption of the internet at scale was "just politics".
You can quibble over the definition of "engineering" but the fact remains that there are millions of person-hours of work to be done by people with the job title "engineer" in order to transition off of fossil fuels.
No one's going to be paying anyone to "engineer" this transition if there's no incentives. You can be as american as you like, but that won't change the fact that oil is basically free. You can't compete with free in a free market.
Oil is nothing like "basically free," and many renewable energy technologies are successfully competing with coal and even natural gas, in an environment where fossil fuels are more heavily subsidized than renewable energy technologies.
You can be as cynical as you want, but that won't change the fact that the transition to renewable energy is already more than a decade in progress and accelerating.
In my perception the price of oil is only constrained by the oil industry carefully matching their output to the demand. Am I wrong in this? Surely the Saudi's are not driving their gold plated lamborghini's because they really wanted them and spent all their savings hard won from razor thin margins.
I'm not normally cynical, but we have to be realistic when talking about the climate. The truth is we haven't really started the transition to renewable energy, we're just investing in renewable energy where it's convenient. The only thing we're really making strides in is greening up the electric grid, but the electric grid is just a piece of the pie of our total energy expenditure.
At some point everything you use and touch and see as a consumer is going to be green, your light, your heating, your car, maybe even the food you eat. And then we look at the grand scheme of things, and you'll find that you merely went down to 50% maybe 60%. And what's worse, to achieve that prices of almost everything had to be doubled, and the producers of oil simply tuned down their prices to appeal to less privileged nations, and those are both flourishing and buying almost as much oil as they were the US and Europe.
It depends on what oil. Margins in Saudi fields like Ghawar are enormous and costs are as low as $5 a barrel. By contrast American shale oil extracted via fracking can cost up to $30 a barrel.
Thanks, so at $30 that would be about $0.017/kWh right? The most competitive high efficiency windmills right now are producing at $0.030/kWh. So the most expensive form of extracting oil is about twice as cheap as the cheapest form of renewable energy right now.
I'm not sure if I'm being downvoted because of my hyperbole, or my negativity or people really disagree with me. I'm really not trying to be negative, I just feel that it's important we're spending our effort where it's most needed, and that's political change.
If you put a 50% subsidy on wind energy, you might put the fracking industry out of business, or if you put a 100% carbon tax on oil, same effect. That's a simple thing we could do right now, just a couple words on paper and it would change the world for the better more than any engineering project right now (except maybe fusion).
Not really accurate. $30/barrel is $0.017/kWh in terms of THERMAL energy, but that’s high entropy whereas wind energy is low entropy (electricity). To get that oil’s thermal energy into low entropy energy, you need to burn it and run some sort of heat engine, which throws about half to two-thirds of the energy away, so in low-entropy equivalent (ie electrical or mechanical energy), that oil costs $0.034-0.051/kWh.
Alright, so under some conditions the worst price for oil is competitive with the best price for solar. I know it's important to correct me, and obviously I should've expanded on the fact that it's thermal energy to make it more fair, but nit picking on my argument doesn't change the story. Apparently Saudi Arabia can get oil at $5/barrel, so that's a factor 6 we're still off by.
I fully agree, if it can be done in Saudi Arabia, it can probably also be done in Death Valley or some other nice sunny area reasonably close to a large population, and it will help a lot. I just fear that regardless of what we or anyone wants to pay, Saudi Arabia is still going to be wanting to sell it as long as it's over $5/barrel.
The regime that makes $5/barrel costs feasible is not politically stable at $5/barrel. The real social minimum acceptable price for oil in Saudi Arabia is MUCH higher than $5/barrel.
Natural gas is a better point, at 5.4 cents per kwh of baseload it squishes any renewables (3 cents/kwh for solar in a desert doesn't provide round the clock energy anywhere in the world).
There are far more sources of co2 emissions than just electricity and meat production. There's a lot to engineer to become carbon neutral, especially if we want to do it at a reasonable cost.
I think a major issue is that the viability of solutions is compared on a short term cost basis that ignores externalities.
As an example: on a very short term basis, it is easier and cheaper to pile your trash in your basement, or to not brush your teeth. The value of those things only becomes very apparent after a day or more.
On a short term basis, fossil fuel based solutions are really great, flexible, stable, and cheap. We have to do something different despite that, because that short term basis doesn't tell the full story.
Do you think it is possible to maintain solar/wind for an extended period of time given the reliance on rare earth minerals that it would create? Also one argument that I haven't heard answered is how to handle the non-biodegradable old solar panels/windmills that need to be replaced.
These things definitely can be implemented but are they sustainable? Not a rhetorical question, I'd actually like to hear some opinions on this.
"reliance on rare earth minerals" There are plenty in the ground. Some in hard to get to (politically/socially) places. They can be recovered from devices if that is a design criterion.
Windmills are generally made from metals which are recyclable, silicon is the major ingredient of solar cells - most common mineral on the planet. But they can be recycled too.
There is a lot of toxic waste generated using current technology, these are developing technologies which gives us a opportunity.
Having a fetish for the free market will not help. All this requires planning, and markets do not make plans.
Exactly. Without engineering better technology, the only real solution to climate change is that everyone goes back to pre-Industrial Revolution living standards.
Well, not everyone. Only those who live through the implementation phase. Probably only a small minority will have to go back to pre-Industrial Revolution living standards.
If there will be hell if airline fuel or pickup trucks have even small taxation, then they are always more advantageous compared to the alternatives, because they get a "free pass" for using a harmful but cheap energy source, and it doesn't matter what the engineer does.
Lead free gasoline didn't happen without regulation.
Gas taxes are unpopular. But EPA fuel economy standards are popular! So use fuel economy standards to make all new cars at least PHEV. Increase gas tax only when almost all cars on the road can use electricity.
This might be conflating two issues. Gas taxes aren't really about reducing GHG, they're about funding infrastructure. So the CAFE standards actually hurt infrastructure investment.
I'm not saying taxes can't be dual purpose, but we need to be cognizant of the primary intent and also to understand the blowback of policies, like how EPA fuel economy standards can affect other systems.
In the U.S. there's a federal pilot program for a vehicle-miles-traveled tax, but the proposal I saw wasn't meant to start until 2026. Some states have also instituted a kWh fee at the utility line. There's some administrative hurdles that needs to be worked out though, like the mechanism to track mileage. It's tougher than the gas tax because it's levied on each driver rather than on a relatively small number of wholesalers.
And to whatever extent climate change is expected to result in horrible reductions in quality of life, that's the extent to which we should be willing to throw money at the problem. Although, exactly how that money is thrown and to who and on what basis, is usually where we run into problems...
This is a pattern I've been noticing a lot lately. It is very tempting for an engineer who sees a problem to assume it is a technical problem, because then it has an engineering solution. Unfortunately most of the biggest problems are not technical problems, they are political problems for which there are only political solutions. It is extremely frustrating for an engineer - someone who solves problems for a living - to be confronted with a problem they are powerless to address, especially if the solution is "obvious".
The classic example of this how people are constantly trying to come up with revolutionary new public transportation systems [0], which inevitably turn out to be suspiciously similar to a train, only worse. They see the failures of public transportation in the US and assume it must be because there is some problem with the technology. But technology is never the problem, politics is.
It's a pattern I've been noticing a lot lately. It is very tempting for a person who sees a problem to assume it is a political problem, because then it has a political solution. Unfortunately most of the biggest problems are not political problems, they are engineering problems for which there are only engineering solutions.
Geoengineering is not off the table. Reducing or blocking total sunlight by 1% can have dramatic changes to any global warming. Other techniques also exist.
I think people seriously underestimate what engineering can accomplish. They also over-estimate what politics can accomplish.... The climate change deals we were talking about were hundreds of billions of dollars, which can buy quite a lot of R&D.
Besides, if we have any chance of surviving as a multi-planetary species for billions of years, we need to know how to do terraforming.
I agree. Ill extend this. Climate change is an engineering problem, especially when time constraints are not considered. However, if we want to work at a fast rate to reduce climate change, it is certainly a political problem. That is just because the wheels of invention and innovation take time. It is an engineering problem, but because of quick demand for reducing carbon emissions, it is a political problem.
I think that the problem is not that people over-estimate what politics can accomplish, the problem is that people (correctly) believe that they have approximately zero influence on politics, and therefore try to look for alternative solutions.
> But technology is never the problem, politics is.
I agree with you argumentation but I do not see why 'some/many technological problems are political problems' means 'all technological problems are political problems'.
I've also noticed the opposite pattern on HN: Folks arguing that a problem cannot be a technological problem, because in their society/country, it is a political problem. First example that comes to mind is healthcare in the US - just because there's some political debt around healthcare in US, doesn't mean there are interesting technological problems to be had elsewhere.
That line was meant to refer narrowly to the Gadgetbahn example. In public transportation the problem is almost always political because the technology has been mature for more than a century. I won't claim that things are so clear cut in every situation, but I do think this is a common trap.
So the solution sounds like we need more engineers in political power, or to decentralize political power away from those who specialize in obtaining it?
To me, all problems are technical. You could probably fit most political problems in game theory.
Technology often is the problem, or more concretely we can use technology to make the solution cheaper, which makes it more plausible for politicians to implement. Politicians already use x amount of money trying to prevent climate change. If technology was advanced enough that x is enough to prevent climate change completely, we could then solve the problem with a technological solution (assuming politicians are willing).
I don't think the tech is nearly cheap enough yet.
Political problems are when people can't agree on what they want. For example some fraction of the population wants to be on standard time year round, another part wants to be on DST year round, and a third part wants to alternate. What one group would call a solution, the others would call a problem, and the only option is some negotiated consensus.
For real problems though, where the affects are real and calculable, there is no such thing as a political solution. If you find yourself saying "we have the means to do this, but we can't get people to do it" then you should ask why not? It's too expensive compared to alternatives? Use technology to reduce costs. It's not safe enough? Use technology to add safety systems. It requires too much effort? Use technology to make it easier. And so on and so forth.
Politics can't make a real problem go away, it can only avoid or hide the issue. Forcing people to use a more expensive power source doesn't solve the cost problem, it just chooses to ignore it. Maybe with subsidies you can reduce the cost on the books, but that just hides the cost elsewhere in a more easily ignored form. Banning something may avoid the costs, but it also removes the benefits. If you distribute the problem out over enough people, or concentrate the problem on a sufficiently small and isolated minority, you can reach a point where most of society doesn't care about the problem, but it's still there and unsolved.
Thinking of things as political problems leads to innaction. It is easy to scapegoat the persistence of a problem on the other side refusing to cooperate, rather than addressing the shortcomings of your proposal. Further, there is a strong incentive never to actually fix the problem as once you do, the issue that unites your constituency behind you will no longer be present. Finally, political solutions promote false dichotomies - our solution is better than theirs so you should support our solution, and any criticism of our solution will just be cannon fodder for the other side to use to promote theirs.
Yes, many people will sometimes propose technical solutions that are dumb and in no way an improvement over the current situation, but that does not mean technical solutions do not exist. A monorail isn't a better public transit option than a train, but the fact is there are real, unsolved technical issues with public transit that make construction and operation in many cases expensive and inconvenient, and just waving a pen won't make it inexpensive and convenient. I don't know what a better solution will look like, but it is entirely rational to search for one.
But because in practice people will flake, the only alternative may be a technical solution. If you can't fix "stupid", Plan B may be to engineer around it.
Politically I don't think any significant action will be taken fast enough or even at all. Even if one country does take significant action, there is no way the entire world is going to get on board unless there is strong financial incentive.
Instead our only hope is an engineered solution - which might not even be reversing it at this point but more how to survive and thrive in a different world.
It's really clear that Jevon's paradox does not currently apply to decarbonizatiom and increased energy availability.
As our GDP is rising, energy usage is going down. Our efficiency is increasing, with better gas mileage, more efficient lighting, etc, and total energy use is going down.
There are some areas where Jevons paradox applies, but it's where the majority of use of something is gated by cost. Most of our energy consumption is not limited by that these days, in that most people aren't keeping the house colder at winter than they'd like it to save money, or driving less than they'd like because of gas costs.
Where Jevons paradox causes lots of problems is with road building. Because by changing the fundamental geography, you're changing the demand side of the equation a ton.
Jevons paradox isn’t a physical law. It’s an observation.
If your technical solution involves making coal or oil more valuable by increasing the amount of work it can do (or reducing the cost to extract it), that is Jevons Paradox. If it’s wholesale replacing it with something else, then Jevons Paradox need not apply.
We are the proverbial boiling frog. Coronavirus has shown us that the world can act swiftly and forcefully to alter behaviors when we know there is a threat out there even if it is invisible. Climate change being gradual, diffuse , occasional and unpredictable in its immediate effects means that it’s easy to push off to tomorrow. If every beach condo tower around the world started falling to the ground at a predictable pace and we had a condo destruction tracker at the top of the news every night - we might get somewhere. But the way it is now it seems like an explainable one off situation.
IMHO, if one country does take significant action, the country now has strong incentive to advocate the same change for neighbors (because otherwise it's just losing out on competition), and these neighboring countries' activists and politicians can now point to the first country as an example.
It's already happening in limited scale: for example, more and more countries plan to ban ICE vehicles altogether. The more countries join the idea, the more "normalized" the idea becomes, which will force vehicle makers to take notes (because what's the point of designing vehicles if you can't sell them to most consumers), at which point the "battle" is won.
So, "one country taking initiative", while not being enough in itself, is a perfectly viable way of starting political change.
The most frustrating part of this all is that we are still mostly only talking about climate change, when our ecological disaster is that we have simultaneously crossed or are soon crossing most planetary boundaries (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetary_boundaries) at the same time.
Looking at only CO2 levels makes the solution seem technical: just start using better tech. Or worse: placing hope on geoengineering which is only about alleviating one boundary at the expense of most of the others.
But if you look at the facts that we have been for many decades exploiting nature faster than nature can regenerate, and that all economic growth has come hand in hand with more environmental stress, the root problem and the only solution becomes pretty obvious: heavy global tax to all nature exploitation and after that inevitably halts most economic growth, a redistribution of wealth and social restructuring.
We have no hope to have a livable planet the next century unless us westerners learn to not want more stuff, but learn to live with much, much less.
Engineering can indeed be useful to increase re- and upcycling in the future.
But given that recycling rate is at the moment for most materials miniscule, and our economic system can only work with global exponential growth, it alone can't be the solution – it's only valuable combined with also stopping growth in rich countries.
Let's just state it plainly: unless there's a major change of priorities amongst the populace of Western countries, a political solution in the West is either going to be very slow, or it will have to include undemocratic methods.
The developing world won't have resources to do much and most of the totalitarian regimes won't care until it's too late.
Magic bullets are more likely than political solutions.
population growth is a dog whistle, that particular factor is directly correlated to human development which is what we need to tackle. besides, we have enough resources for reasonable usage even with growing populations.
Nah, we need to break the population taboo to escape from the pyramid scheme of 'the economy demands endless growth on a finite planet'
No idea how we do that. Tearing down capitalism without a clear plan could kill almost as many as climate change itself (We're starting to wake up to just how fragile our modern 'life support system' of global supply chains is - we really don't want to find out how it handles massive revolutions or widespread war!)
But it's pretty clear that for every child not born (especially in the most wealthy and wasteful parts of the world), that's a whole lot of energy not used, miles not travelled, and meat not eaten.
And if if you expect the next century to be really grim as we feel the full force of uncontrolled climate change, then do you really want to bring kids into the world?
Suffering is a part of life. I helped bring one child into the world, and one is enough. We’ll help them towards autonomy and emotional maturity (a far better indicator of adulthood than advertisers of luxuries would have us believe).
I’d like to make more space for other life on earth for a more robust, resilient ecosystem. I’m not hung up on my genetics carrying on forever, but I do like the idea of human life carrying on awhile, passing down stories over the next several millennia.
What might it feel like to communicate with and learn from dolphins, whales, elephants, ravens, … fungi, trees? We may not need any technology for that; a culture shift might be enough.
>Tearing down capitalism without a clear plan could kill almost as many as climate change itself
I am an entity that has an understanding of capitalism that is 3 planes above the average homo sapiens.
Ok, let's be serious. Capitalism requires endless nominal growth (not real growth) because of the way our currency and debt system works. When there is a shortage of money, people start hoarding it, therefore the money supply must keep growing to meet hoarding demand otherwise people stop using money as a medium of exchange. Fiat is issued via debt. To maintain money supply growth the amount of debt in the system must grow. Thus we get endless debt growth. The easiest solution to deal with this is to just let the population grow forever as young people take on debt voluntarily or they purchase products and the companies take debt instead. If you have a nominally shrinking economy either because of a lack of population growth or a recession then the process has been interrupted. Private money creation via debt cannot keep up with the necessary increase in the money supply. It follows that the government has to take the debt on instead. The government must borrow money and do fiscal stimulus until 2% inflation has been reached at which point the economy is growing nominally again. This does not require real growth. We can go one step further and allow public money creation tied to inflation. 0% debt forever with no monthly payments. At this point debt doesn't matter anymore and we can kick the can down forever without real growth. Technically it isn't even debt at this point, it is just an account with a negative balance that tracks how much public money has been issued.
No it's much simpler. To maximize profits you need real growth, as that maximizes profits. If you don't maximize profits then someone else will and you will lose. This effectively means that capitalism requires infinite growth.
> But people are hoping Engineers find magic bullets so that our leaders don't have to take drastic action.
And engineers are hoping that politicians will just adopt their ideas without further work on the part of the engineers. Who's being more unreasonable in this situation, do you think?
This whole thread is riven with the attitude, sometimes more explicit and sometimes less, that in effect the engineering work to stop climate change is pointless: we have the tools, but that implacable demon Political Viability has condemned, and will always condemn our good works to eternal obscurity - as though the responsibility of the engineer ends when the tool is designed!
Which, to be fair, might be the case: the role of the engineer is to express the forms of nature and human craft in ever-more-useful ways. But as humans in a human culture, faced with the grim realities of climate change, can we really say that our responsibility ends with tool-making? Or do we have the additional responsibility to work to see those tools actually used for the common good?
These are neither the engineering nor political problems at the core of climate change, however.
The biggest, at least in the US, is land use and allowing housing to be built close to jobs, in multi-use zoning, that allows people to go about their day without a car. That's the political third rail that even environmentalists fear to touch. Suburbia is unsustainable and we must allow more urbanization, and that will make all the rest of the challenges far easier than even stopping population growth. Because urbanized populations consume far less resources, need far less carbon even with current technologies. And it will make the transition to renewables much easier.
Meat is an order of magnitude less impact than our bad land use, at least in the US.
And nuclear is a lost cause. Even if we double our construction rate every year, it's not going to catch the tail of storage, solar, and wind in the time span we need to shift off carbon. And our current nuclear fleet is aged and ready to be decommissioned, even replacing our current nuclear fleet would require huge growth in an industry that doesn't know how to complete projects, much less scale and get cheaper. This is not a political problem, it's an industry problem.
Population growth, similarly, isn't much related to our immediate climate action. We need static change in the next two decades, and telling everybody that there are no more kids entering the workforce in order to actually execute this transition would be disastrous. Say no more children are born for the next 20 years, and population drops, I don't know, 20%. I don't see that she distribution being set up to tackle the future challenges of the world. Population growth is already peaking, and the best thing to accelerate that is to industrialize the high population growth countries with green industries, and urbanize their populations.
I'm mainly focused on California, with a bit of a look at the US. Transportation is the biggest single sector source of emissions, and completely dwarfs agriculture:
Industry is a big emitter as wel, but it also dwarfs agriculture. And since California is such a major agricultural exporter, it's not like it's offloading their agriculture emissions.
When I see people talking about meat as a big contributor to emissions, I assume that they are trying to drive a political wedge to stop any climate action. Not eating meat has a small effect for the climate, but causes absolutely massive political and cultural backlash. And it's quite likely that we will become carbon negative by 205-2060 without decreasing meat consumption.
Not trying to poke holes in your theory because it's been enlightening to me, but wouldn't it make more sense to look at the global statistics? I think since it's a global problem, it might be a mistake to take an overly US-centric (or worse yet, CA-centric) perspective.
In that context of global use, industry (29.4%, if you add industrial and cement/chemical processes) does exceed road transport (11.9%) and total transport (16.2%). For that matter, agriculture (18.4%) is still higher than transport. I think the GP claim that transport "doesn't hold a candle" to ag/industrial emissions is a bit aggressive, but it's not as lopsided worldwide as the data you shared either. To be fair, the data is 5 years old so maybe the proportions have changed.
I think policy at a particular level of government should be devoted to the domain that it controls.
So at the local government level, I advocate for the most influential policy, based on the numbers of what's being emitted there. In my small coastal community, replacing natural gas with heat pumps has a huuuuge impact on emissions. In most of the SF Bay, land use and allowing housing near jobs is by far the most impactful change.
If we are setting policy globally, sure, focus on global numbers, but we don't really set policy globally. Individual governments make broad promises for reductions, but it would be a mistake for a government to base their actions on global numbers rather than their own numbers.
I don't think that decarbonization is solvable through personal actions, but when I'm looking to change my personal impact, I look at what my actions are doing, not what the average person's actions are doing.
This seems like a bit of contradictory logic to me regarding focusing on local policy and then stating that hyper-local decisions aren't enough to solve the problem. It's hard for me to ascertain from your response where the effective policy threshold is set. From your perspective is it at the personal, local, state, nation-state, or global level where it's sufficient to solve the problem?
Policy can be (and is) created globally. I think we can impart global climate policy, but only to the level the individual state actors are willing to hold others accountable. If your local community bans natural gas fired heating, but also doesn't hold people accountable for breaking that standard it's not going to be an effective policy. Global policy is very much the same.
In the US, local policy is the best we have for changing land use at the moment. I'd love nothing more than for states or the feds to wrest control away from municipalities and counties, since local levels do not have a good understanding of land use. However, acting on the local level does not preclude acting at higher levels. It's just that both changing policy and changing who controls the policy might be a bigger challenge than working within the current separation of powers.
And even though local communities only change small parts of a system it's still changing the system, and demonstrating to other cities what is possible. My planning commissioners think that apartments "destroy" neighborhoods. When they see nearby communities adopting apartments without neighborhoods getting destroyed, it makes change more likely.
One thing about setting policy at a higher level is that it would still have the same effect that lower levels should enact to optimize their decarbonization path. Even if global policy is the same, different regions have different decarbonization paths.
That’s because those statistics are ignoring CO2 from economic activity. A Californian buys a computer manufacturered in Asia and these statistic only count the CO2 created to move it from the harbor to their house. All the CO2 from manufacturing, mining, and transporting it across the ocean are ignored.
So I take it that you agree that transportation dwarfs agriculture?
As far as Foreign imports of consumer goods accounting for a huge chunk of our carbon, that claim has never held up when I investigated it. In particular, Our World in Data had some fantastic plots showing that, though I don't have time to locate them at the moment.
Could I turn the tables on you and ask for some substantiation of the claim that import of consumer goods is a major source of emissions attributable in the US? Because the amount of carbon that goes into making a computer seems pretty trivial compared to that of making a car, and from burning a gallon+ a day.
Also, for evidence of the inherent sustainability of urban areas over suburban areas, check out these maps:
I forget if they account for carbon from imported goods or not, but it's a consumption based inventory, rather than the typical production based inventory.
I found a bit of time to do some digging. My conclusion: US transportation is about 7x the emissions of the products we import from China.
The embodied carbon in Chinese exports peaked in 2008, and has been decreasing, the most recent estimate I found was 1.4Gt in 2015 [1]. This is already less than the US transportation emissions of 1.7Gt in 2015 (from the EPA PDF I linked above).
And the US share of that 1.4Gt is only about 18% (409/2273B$ [2]), for about 0.25Gt of CO2 equivalents.
Cold you say more about that? You seem to be saying that you don't believe that HK is the second largest export market, but that's not my analysis, that's the numbers available from pretty much any source you can find.
I can't imagine that there will ever be a political solution.
Let's say that 100 years from now we have solved climate change. What will history show? I doubt that the western powers plus China, India, Nigeria, Congo, Pakistan, etc all came together to successfully agree upon and implement a plan. That's what a political solution would require and I don't understand why anyone thinks it would ever happen.
Instead, I bet we will look back and see a few revolutionary tech breakthroughs which, with some government backing, provided most of the solution.
I don't mean this in a derogatory fashion, I've enjoyed working with most all my coworkers, and I am speaking in generalities here relative to the overall population, engineers tend to be more anti-social and more out of touch of what the needs are for the general population, and even more so for underserved and minority populations, which would make them terrible choices for political positions.
They are excellent choices, however, for implementation teams. The real answer is we need more higher level engineers in gov IT.
Because engineers are fantastic at figuring out how to devise a procedural plan that will work and get the critical amount of buyin. And they rock at figuring out how to pay for it.
Look, engineers are tools (and don't get mad SEs, you aren't really engineers in the first place so this hardly applies to you). They are not leaders as a class, and shouldn't be running for office.
That's like saying jumping in to a wood chipper is an opportunity to learn how to navigate the inside of a wood chipper...sure, I guess, but what comes out ain't your good intentions, just mulch.
I'm arguing that anyone who is fit for politics is by definition already a bad person, and any good person that goes in to politics either gets out accomplishing nothing after a short time, or turning in to a ghoul by staying inside.
You can't make deals with the devil and keep your soul.
Like a certain Angela Merkel, who has a doctorate in quantum chemistry, but has been mostly sitting on the climate change problem as Germany's chancellor for the last 16 years.
I disagree. Climate Change is first and foremost an economical problem. Our society developed our economy model around reducing costs in the production to maximize our profit. The Climate change doesn't play a role in that model. Creating rules and policies, just forces the Economy model to find a way to hack through them (sending production to different countries, planting trees somewhere else, etc)
How is population growth a direct cause of climate change? Sure it may be very loosely correlated. But why even mention it? Further more the population is in decline in almost all developed countries is it not? If it really is political it's crap like this that will be first on the "things to do" list purely for votes and accomplishing nothing (except destroying people's lives).
Exactly, and the scary thing is not only do we emit more carbon every year, the rate of emission is also increasing, i.e. we are still on an exponential growth curve.
The population has grown 4 times everywhere but in Europe and US since 1950 and it keeps growing.
The problems with the land and resource use would be much smaller if the population had stayed more or less constant everywhere.
I am also certain that people would have been better of everywhere when the resources of the families would not have been put into bettering the well being of the households instead of maintaining the army of children.
This problem is political and is governed by religious powers and cultural inertia.
I wonder if there are any lessons to be learned from how acid rain and holes in the ozone were ultimately treated. There was definitely more signal in the empirical evidence of a problem, but those have been largely mitigated through regulation (and spending my summers doing HVAC work in the 80's and 90's, through some painful steps).
Another issue to go with my previous comment on this thread: when people (I’m not saying you) claim climate change is primarily a “political problem,” they’re often assuming a different political /system/ would solve it, including that socialism would solve the problem and (say) nationalizing the oil industry would help. I just don’t see this being the case. We HAVE examples where the oil industry is nationalized by a socialist government. Think Venezuela or the Soviet Union. In Venezuela, for instance, gasoline was/is DEEPLY subsidized for the consumer as a sort of social support. Nationalized industries end up wanting to stick around and in some ways are more prevented from disappearing than they would be with cutthroat capitalism. If abolishing capitalism has any strong effect on climate action, empirically the only way it has helped historically is by impoverishing people. I don’t think this is what people are going for when they say we have to abolish capitalism in order to solve climate change!
Or from a more positive perspective: There are good reasons to hold back excesses of capitalism and establish more social support, but to the degree it allows more people to live richer lives, that might actually make climate change WORSE.
What we need is the technology to make climate action politically feasible, ie without making people materially poorer.
We need climate change to be solved the same way ozone depletion was: ultimately by just swapping out something harmful for something with much less harm, but with the same overall capabilities.
There is no law of physics which says it’s impossible. But if you have discovered one with solid and falsifiable evidence, it would be a breakthrough in physics!
But I wouldn’t book a trip to Sweden for a Nobel Prize just yet. Over 100 Petawatts of sunlight hits the Earth, which is a factor of 10,000 more than we’d need. And humanity already gathers and economically utilizes some solar energy beyond the Earth.
You do realize anyone can edit Wikipedia, and its basically controlled by a bunch of Google executives?
They’re not an accurate source of information for anything, let alone anything even remotely political.
The sun dictates the weather, and always has.
$cientists don’t understand how plasma physics work, and don’t include climate forcing in their predictive models. The underlying theories for how climate change works are not based in reality, they’re cherry picking data and using models that purposely exclude factors like the sun.
This is basically like trying to explain to someone the earth is round 5,000 years ago when the “scientific consensus” at the time was the earth was flat.
People who believe carbon controls the weather are basically equivalent to flat earthers parroting political propaganda. It’s like malware that was installed in their brain in childhood that gets activated any time anyone suggests looking into the actual science.
Go research climate forcing. It’s how the weather actually works.
Please remember that in our industry “disrupt” means “fuck up”. As in “Uber fucked up (disrupted) the transportation service industry.” Just something to keep in mind before getting all disruptive.
If we could take whatever the equivalent of taxis is in power generation and food production and turn them into the equivalent of Ubers, I think that would be overall good.
Uber’s not perfect, but as a consumer, they’re way better than what was there before.
We can make poor people deliver fuel cells to wealthy people on demand via an app, as independent contractors to avoid dealing with the worn out old ones that are no longer able to deliver fuel cells to the wealthy at an optimal rate.
I'm under the impression that the climate feedback loops have developed too much inertia for us to counter with a technical solution that could reduce or even reverse climate change at this point. Even if the world stopped emitting carbon tomorrow we're still going to coast past the IPCC's recommended limits and straight into the worst-case scenarios before the end of the century.
While I still think it's a worthy cause to reduce and sequester carbon I think we shouldn't be thinking about how to reverse this.
We're going to have to live in a world with reduced fresh-water supplies, a dwindling supply of usable soil, and migrant populations. That's going to require a radical shift in global politics and economics.
I think a big part of our role as engineers will be helping society to adapt to these new conditions. How do we continue to deliver power to cooling systems during record-breaking heat-waves, build nuclear reactors that are safe against the new kinds of natural disasters we're encountering, manage housing and construction to reduce emissions and local heat, etc.
I believe that's why the article discussed a need for net _negative_ carbon emissions -- specifically, that we must sequester many gigatons per year in order to prevent what you mention.
> While humanity is currently on a trajectory to severe climate change, this disaster can be averted if researchers aim for goals that seem nearly impossible. We’re hopeful, because sometimes engineers and scientists do achieve the impossible.
How bleak. In any case, I'm not so sure this "miracle" approach is really viable, or something that can be relied on.
The most evil companies don't have much troubles hiring great engineers for cash and equity.
When renewable energy companies will offer better pays, and when the ones that destroy our climate won't compete, you'll see engineers switching jobs in flock, to bet on the the next get-rich-quick scheme. I bet this next wave will be about biodiversity, whose collapse might well be worse that climate change (in both impact and timing).
For instance, companies that will provide the tools to expand the footprint over ecosystems as fast as possible, right before society reacts to put limit on the fragmentation of habitats. The ones that will help secure the most space (fragmenting the most) will rip the maximum benefits and pay the most.
Startups building AI tools to support real-estate developer in this space are swarming already.
There are a large and growing number of job openings working directly on climate change, and the time to get in is now.
Trillions of dollars are going to change hands, and millions of person-hours of work are going to be performed, to transition the entire world off of burning fossil fuels. You can get a piece of it!
My company, Genability, is hiring full-stack engineers[1] to work on digitizing energy pricing. Many other companies are also hiring to work on different areas of this problem space.[2]
I quit working in digital media to work on climate change full time last year, and I can't recommend it enough. Join me!
I have posted this before, but I am hiring at Enphase. [1] [2]
I am building an architecture to move electrons at the same efficiency with which we move bits. This enables microgrids. Microgrids enable decentralization and networking. Decentalization and networking enables diverse prime movers competing on price. Price competition enables sustainable energy. If that's interesting, get in touch.
> I am building an architecture to move electrons at the same efficiency with which we move bits.
I'm not sure how to interpret that... I don't think the internet is particularly power efficient at moving things around. It uses an awful lot of energy to deliver unwanted crap for the most part... and I'd rather not have my electricity use data collected for big data analytics in the bargain.
I'm not a particularly huge fan of Enphase, though. You've been promising IQ8 for years now (3?), delaying plenty of installs by people who are waiting for the islanding capability promised, but never actually delivered.
And the NEC 2017 changes to rapid shutdown requirements seem very, very suspiciously lined up with exactly what Enphase offers (per panel electronics), while offering no practical benefits to firefighting safety (a damaged array cannot be assumed to be anything sane regardless of how it's wired). I've heard a number of people who do solar for a living claim that Enphase had their fingers in that particularly annoying requirement, which makes many otherwise simple rooftop installs far more expensive.
And, despite that, microinverters are no cheaper than doing optimizers and string inverters - I've done some system design with Enphase parts vs Sunny Boy inverters and Tigo optimizers (which gets me the same thing, except that with the Sunny Boys and Tigo you do actually get grid down power), and the costs are nearly identical. Just, the Enphase system is less capable (with "Wait for IQ8, it'll be awesome!" being nearly as believable at this point as Tesla's totally legit self driving cross country trip in... was it 2018 they were supposed to do that?).
"Hey u/malchow! So much need for better microinverters. Is your IQ8 on track for 2021Q3 release? How will it stack up against Acme Power's μInverter XT?"
Except I don't think microinverters are a good solution to almost any problem except that one that Enphase was involved in creating, the module level rapid shutdown requirements in NEC 2017 - which rather radically increase the number of connections in array, and those increased connections counts do cause problems.
Enphase has been promoting the IQ8s since 2017, and it's a constant refrain in various solar places of "Yeah, I'm going to hold off putting solar up until the IQ8s are out," which is consistently "Oh, about 6 months away." Same as it's been for the past three years.
When a company is consistently deceptive like this, at the literal expense of preventing cheaper solar systems (it's about $0.25/W difference in materials plus whatever the additional labor is), I will ask direct questions of their representatives.
I'm interested in boosting solar. Not Enphase's corporate profits.
I won't argue with you too much on tone, and will try to keep it a bit more technically grounded next time. The NEC 2017 rapid shutdown changes from NEC 2014 (basically, per panel to less than 80V, as opposed to array boundary shutdown) significantly increase cost and complexity in an array, and add a lot more failure points on the roof. You can now no longer do a roof mount system on a totally unshaded roof without the per-panel equipment, and that's a very real cost increase for systems.
For a while, if you had a rooftop system and NEC 2017, there was no way to use the Sunny Boy backup outlets - because they require solar power, and after a rapid shutdown event (which is indistinguishable from a grid failure, from the point of view of the inverter), there was no power left to bring anything online.
You can provide voltage to the controllers in the inverter externally, though, and have it "open up" the Tigo modules (which handle shutdown among other things) so it can run standalone with the grid down and power the backup outlet.
For a rooftop solution, I think this is probably the sweet spot at the moment, and having done the math on it a while ago, the cost to do Sunny Boy and Tigo optimizers is within a rounding error of the cost of doing the same thing with Enphase microinverters. So, despite having a good bit more hardware, the cost is magically the same. Whatever claims Enphase is making about their cost effectiveness doesn't seem to match the reality, where I can adjust panel capacity vs inverter capacity to fit the system requirements (vs microinverters, which only come in one or two capacities, and if you want something else, well, lol, nobody else left in business so deal with it).
I'm actually a far bigger fan of ground mount solar (which is what I've built for my home - 15.9kW of panel, currently producing about 90kWh/day and producing from sunrise to sunset because most of the panels are east-west facing), and am working with some other people locally to figure out some ways to stamp out "homeowner installed" ground mount arrays that are a basic set of plans and equipment lists. Doing that, we can do solar for $1.25/W or less, which is a huge, huge savings over standard residential solar, which is $2.50/W or more (Tesla claims to come in lower, but won't touch anything the slightest bit complex and it's unclear if they're actually profitable doing that or just trying to drive other companies out of business with venture capital).
None of this makes me particularly popular with the local solar installers, because I'm far, far more interested in getting cheap solar built out than ensuring the installers have their tidy profits and commissions. I got a couple quotes a few years ago around $4/W for a basic roof mount system, and that's just disgusting.
That's a good place to work since it seems to get less attention. It's clear that getting as many things as we can on the grid is part of the solution since the grid is easier to transition to non-carbon energy than a bunch of mobile engines, but the grid is a lot less efficient than it could be.
We could cut speed limits from 70-75 to 50 (assuming most people do "five over") like we did in the seventies. This reduces fuel consumption by about 40%, assuming fuel consumption is proportional to the cross-sectional area of a vehicle and the square of its velocity. This isn't a silver bullet, but 40% is nothing to sneeze at.
One thing to keep in mind is that this decreases the carrying capacity of highways (cars spending more time in a lane of traffic) and could result in more construction.
Fine. Maybe we don’t get to drive so much.
What’s a reasonable per-person carbon and water quota? (with need-based exceptions, since giving up compassion and care for the differently-abled people is way low on my priority list)
Imposing regulations that limits energy and transportation feels appropriate. Prioritize survival (and housing, education, and healthcare, and helping people come to terms with mortality), and help retrain people to do more with less.
Laying under a tree yesterday in 37C (not as hot as Portland that day, or as humid as what I remember from the Midwest or South) I enjoyed the high-def, ultra-wide view above (birds, insects, leaves, sky) and below (ants, other insects, spiders, plants, soil). The olfactory emitter is top-notch, too, and the sound quality can’t be beat.
It 'may' decrease carrying capacity of highways. Also, induced demand is a real observed phenomenon with roadways. The more capacity there is, the more people will drive. Paradoxically, when capacity is removed, traffic will often just dry up. Highway agencies know this but still use traffic models to justify expansion that are self-fulfilling projections.
This seems like an awfully simplistic first order analysis that doesn't consider the end to end economics of driving.
Location is an economic constraint, and the ability to reduce or eliminate that constraint at will is very powerful. The fact that (some) traffic fills to capacity on a specific road just means there is economic demand surplus for travel between points connected by that particular route at that particular time. This demand tapers off when the roadway reaches capacity because another cost begins to grow exponentially. Travel in congested traffic quite literally causes people to murder each other. This cost, the stress of driving on congested roadways, doesn't seem to surface much because it's difficult to quantify. However, for me, it is the one thing that will cause me to change my plans.
(edit: It's easy to distill 'economic' motivation into profit. That's not my intent here. My view is that there is no intrinsic value of anything, the sun could have exploded 7 minutes ago and if anyone outside of its reach is there to witness it they might catalogue it as ES0481A (in 4+ years). I use 'economic' as an encapsulation of human desire to live and to thrive and its important to me and to this argument from that perspective.)
As you travel faster, you must increase the distance between cars for safety - decreasing the number of cars that can fit within a certain length of highway. But…
Have you seen some modeling of carrying capacity for highways at different speeds? You may be right, of course.
There are large regions of the US where the posted limit is 80, and the real limit is even higher. Reducing the speed to 50 would literally add an hour or more to daily commutes in some of these regions. It isn't the person in the city that is making a sacrifice by reducing speed limits.
An obvious flaw with this idea is that enforcement is local and discretionary. There are many jurisdictions that refuse to enforce posted speed limits today, never mind a limit of 50 which would be extremely unpopular.
Some states have 80mph stretches, but it's not the norm. Also, I think inner-city driving is a lot more time consuming than the long, high speed stretches between urban centers. If you only consider reducing speed on highways, then you have to cover very large differences before you encounter an additional hour off round-trip commute time.
At 50mph, you'd need to drive about 90 miles to add an hour to your total round trip, compared to driving 70mph. At 55mph, you'd need to drive about 130 miles, to add an hour to your total round trip, compared to driving 70mph.
Unfortunately, driving in cities is inelastic when it comes to fuel efficiency unless you hop on a bus. For highway driving, 55mph is annoying, but it's not unbearable, and you're making a real and measurable difference. For reference, 55mph is the standard in California for vehicles with more than two axles.
In the mountain west 80mph is the norm, and even then it is more of a suggestion, flow of traffic is closer to 90mph. Some states are posted 70mph on single-lane county roads. Many practical logistics of living in those regions become infeasible at 50mph because people have schedules and finite amounts of time for travel. You are being unrealistic about the implications.
When you live in the parts of the country that have 80mph limits, and I have, it is normal to spend 3-4 hours driving in a day. Things are very spread out and the distances are far, which is why the speed limits are so high. I've lived in towns where basic things like shopping were a 75 mile drive each way. Casually increasing those drive times by 75% is not a small thing and, frankly, no one would comply. You'll end up in exactly the situation you already have -- people in urban areas will drive slowly and people in more sparsely populated regions will drive as fast as is reasonably safe.
The fact that these higher limits are largely in remote areas also has the implication that not that many people are driving that fast anyway, so it is unlikely to have much impact anyway. It would rightly generate considerable resentment with no meaningful impact on carbon emissions.
All that aside, my car hits peak efficiency at around 70mph, as did my prior car. You can monitor this in many cars and I do. Drivetrains are optimized for typical highway speeds. It isn't the 1970s.
I guess what I've read about fuel economy is outdated. My main point is that: we shouldn't drive faster than our vehicle's limit of optimal fuel economy, since after that point fuel economy drops sharply.
All that said, I don't know what to say about driving 3-4 hours a day. After working 8-10 hours, and driving for 3-4 hours, there's not a lot day left before you have to start all over. Driving a total of 150 miles for groceries blows my mind; that's basically the width of the top half of Louisiana.
It’s a good idea. We could also incentivize companies to allow work from home to keep cars off the road. It’s discouraging how companies are ignoring the environmental footprint of going back to the office - but maybe if the government rewarded wfh they’ll change.
Cars in the seventies also tended to be smaller, meaning there was a smaller cross-sectional area on the vehicle. I think we have more efficient engines now, but I think the differences between larger more aerodynamic vehicles versus smaller less aerodynamic vehicles is negligible. If someone has numbers, then I'm happy to change my mind.
My car has a realtime mpg output. I can manage 35mpg at 75mph on cruise control. I do not get 40% better economy at 55mph.
You know what kills fuel economy? Not being on cruise control. After 3000+ highway miles this month, I can definitely say that drivers loitering in the passing lane (there's a reason why they have KEEP RIGHT EXCEPT TO PASS signs) cost enormous amounts of fuel due to the congestion and consequent and avoidable acceleration/deccelaration.
2. Electric cars can go MUCH further at slower speeds than at higher speeds. It is something like 25mph that maximizes range, at least with the Model S and Mach E.
3. Speed governors for cars, though probably highly unpopular amongst drivers, would probably save a lot of fuel.
That's very interesting. What kind of car do you drive? Do you know what your fuel efficiency is at 55mph? I would certainly expect there to be some difference between 75mph and 55mph.
I ran into a similar issue with a 2003 Honda Accord (v6 manual trans, one of my favorite cars ever).
I was spending almost 4 hours a day in the car for a three month job and went through all sorts of experiments to find peak efficiency. If I was on a level section of road, I could get better mileage by driving slower, e.g. 55 vs 75. But when I started to negotiate hills and have to accelerate to maintain speed, the mileage dropped way down because the engine wasn't efficient at generating power at those lower RPMs. And this is where you start to see these unexpected patterns in mileage with gas/diesel engines...they have a very lumpy efficiency curve, and it's regularly more important to stay in a specific RPM range than a specific speed if you want to maximize mileage. Once you start going up to 80-90-100mph physics takes over, of course, but there is a lot of variability in between.
At the time I was just thinking fuel prices and it got to the point where I was calculating how much I was saving by driving slower and it was cents per hour. I ultimately landed on 70mph as the sweet spot, and I would regularly get 32mpg.
For most vehicles, you see fuel efficiency start to take a hit around 55mph. The thing is that the velocity term in the air resistance equation is squared, so at some point your fuel efficiency starts dropping very, very quickly.
It's an interesting idea. Wouldn't the cost of raising funds, replacing all the signs, etc. be also damaging? What about having a clear "no speeding at all on speeds over 50mph" announcement, and start a campaign to enforce speeding even at 0.1mph over? That would quickly normalize driving at 10-15 miles under.
I don't think replacing signs would be large line item compared to our foreign wars budget, at any rate, all of that money would flow back into the economy pretty quickly as those workers spent their paychecks.
Even without signage, I imagine word of a new national speed limit would travel *pretty* quickly.
I think the optimal speed for fuel efficiency for most vehicles is around 55 mph, give or take a 2-3 miles per hour.
Edit: I was mistaken, this is from the Guardian:
> The Energy Saving Trust says that the most efficient speed you can travel in a car in terms of achieving the best fuel economy is 55-65mph. Any faster, though, and the fuel efficiency decreases rapidly. For example, driving at 85mph uses 40% more fuel than at 70mph (oh, and it's illegal too).
You're right, electric cars were not available in the 1970's. However, unless you're generating and storing enough solar power to power your car year round, at anywhere from 2-17kWh a day, then your electric vehicle will still be using fossil fuels. Even power grids that utilize solar farms still need natural gas plants online that can handle shortages on short notice.
Better alternatives to driving yourself on the highway. Penalizing consumer behavior on a micro level rarely works out well (it's the same discussion with something like a meat tax; it just pisses people off).
Unfortunately, driving is currently massively subsidized. If drivers simply had to pay for the road usage and the negative externalities of driving, such as noise and pollution, I think a lot less people would drive. Gas taxes and fees currently cover less than half of road spending alone, not even paying anything for pollution, noise, or other externalities.
That said, it will take a very charismatic politician to get anything done in that regard.
If transit advocates had to pay for the time people would spend waiting for the bus and for the rent premium associated with transit access under their proposed policies, I think a lot fewer people would repeat this line.
How much does unwanted JavaScript contribute to climate change? Recently reviewed my MacBook power consumption because battery life seemed poor (I usually have it plugged in). Using Chrome's Task Manager I identified a webpage that was using most of the energy: it was an ancestry knowledge base page that I'd had open for months, except it wasn't text-only like I'd thought - at the foot of the page, after dozens of paragraphs, it had a syndicated ad strip.
"Just build nuclear" - As per the post itself, we need to build 3 nuclear plants every day until 2050 to replace the entire grid with nuclear. Yeah not realistic.
Carbon capture [0]
1. We take 5 billion cubic meters of Oil out of the ground
2. We emit 30 billion tons of CO2
3. We can only capture from big sources like power plants and industrial sources - Maybe about 40 % of Co2 can be captured
4. Half of the capturable CO2 is about 6 billion tons of gas
5. We will have to liquefy it so it has to go into the ground.
6. We have to shove 12 billion cubic meters of Co2 into the ground every year to sequester only half of the capturable CO2 however the scale of this is greater than the entire Oil industry that was created over 100 years and cost trillions in capital.
7. After this you're still only capturing a fraction of the carbon. You'll have to pay heavy taxes on everything you buy.
8. Who is going to live next to these billions of tons of C02 in the ground ? This will leak and kill people.
Electric cars [1]
1. The global vehicle fleet is estimated at 1.4 billion vehicles travelling 28 trillion kilometers
2. Powering this is estimated to require an *additional* 17k Terawatt hours of carbon free power generation. The current global generation of electricity is 26k Terawatt hours.
Phasing out fossil fuels from power generation entirely
3. The author estimates that we need to build 165k new power plants that are a mix of solar, wind, hydro and nuclear. This while most of the worlds existing infrastructure is crumbling.
4. We need 200k storage stations that can store 100 MWh to act as backup for solar / wind. This will need 90 million tonnes of batteries.
5. If you want to replace the Gas used for heating as well and go completely zero fossil fuel the estimate becomes - 6 million storage stations and 2 billion tonnes of batteries.
6. The entire known reserves of Nickel, Lithium, Cobalt are not enough to make these many batteries. We need another 7 Australian Lithium deposits.
India and China continue to rapidly increase their emissions. Poorer nations cannot stop they are too poor to even begin.
> "Just build nuclear" - As per the post itself, we need to build 3 nuclear plants every day until 2050 to replace the entire grid with nuclear. Yeah not realistic.
> Average world electricity consumption is about 3 TW or 3000 average sized 1 GW nuclear power plants.
That makes it sound like GP is several orders of magnitud wrong. Throws the rest of the post into question as well.
> "Just build nuclear" - As per the post itself, we need to build 3 nuclear plants every day until 2050 to replace the entire grid with nuclear. Yeah not realistic.
France averaged building one nuclear power plant every 100 days during the Messemer plan. Far from 3 per day, but France only makes up slightly less than 1% of the population. Similarly, in the US if we built nuclear plants at the same rate as we did during the 1970s we would have 100% nuclear and hydroelectric electricity generation on that timeframe. There is historical precedence for this pace of nuclear plant construction.
As far as the alternatives, it's the most viable approach, short of a miraculous breakthrough in storage technology, fusion, or similar.
Engineers aren't going to be able to stop anything on their own. Someone needs to FUND engineers to solve the problem. We don't magically conjure and implement global-scale solutions.
Easy. You just need to add a social engineer to the team who can make a couple of high-profile trillionaire engineers believe this is about which of them will solve the problem first.
I think one way the FTC could really help companies monetize climate change initiatives is to give guidance on how to market improvements in products that save carbon. We recently had a big improvement in Windows bandwidth for updates in Windows 11, but it was extremely difficult to use our carbon estimates for marketing. We estimated that we saved about ~3-5k households worth of electricity, but there were concerns that the FTC wouldn't accept our calculations.
This IEEE article makes some questionable extrapolations in my opinion. First, they start with 2017's global primary energy consumption of 600 PJ, and then round it up (by 66%!) to 1000 PJ ("for simplicity"). Then, 1000 PJ is used as the baseline that we would need to replace with zero carbon sources, leading to scary-sounding propositions like "covering roughly 1.6 percent of the world’s land area with (solar) panels".
But that's misleading. Up to two thirds of the primary energy we "consume" each year is wasted: it is used to pump, refine, distribute, combust, or otherwise perform work and/or create heat that is not directly needed or wanted for the desired "energy service", e.g. moving a vehicle or lighting a home. Electricity generated from fossil fuel combustion has an immediate primary energy loss of 40-70% due to the inefficiency of heat engines. Wind and solar power plants do not. For example, if a solar plant produces 1GWh of electricity in a day, the full 1GWh is considered "primary energy production", while a natural gas plant that produced 1GWh of electricity in a day may have consumed 2-3GWh of natural gas "primary energy" in order to do so.
Similarly, electric vehicles are much more efficient than combustion engine vehicles at converting "intermediate energy" into useful work (a charged battery or refined gasoline into motion). Heat pumps are often more efficient at heating spaces and water than burning gas.
So, if we are able to generate most of our electricity from renewable sources, and electrify all ground transport, space/water heating, and many industrial processes, our primary energy use will be significantly lower in the future than it is today! That's not to say there aren't major technical and political challenges ahead to mitigating climate change, but oversimplifications that make the problem seem harder to overcome are of limited usefulness.
This is scary if the same engineers, who promised us our data would be safe, not sold for showing us ads, that AI would not be racist, start playing with the earth's climate...
> We described what we had learned as Google engineers who worked on a well-intentioned but ultimately failed effort to cut the cost of renewable energy.
A "well-intentioned but ultimately failed" attempt at reversing climate change may be more complicated to correct than a bug in production.
Those things are caused by management dynamics imposed on publicly traded companies stemming from regulatory incentives; Not engineers. - It's Conway's Law all the way down.
For data, blame the stock holders and investors. Engineers are beholden to them for their jobs. Venture capitalists and shareholders want to leverage data analytics to turn a profit.
You could almost make an argument for AI. The same people push engineers to turn out code and products in short time spans. This is why Uncle Bob says it is okay for engineers to lie to improve the final product. A story he tells is of telling the General he is doing one thing when really he was refactoring. However, how much of this is done in industry, I don't know. But companies are known for pushing engineers to meet deadlines which means tests get skipped and bugs don't get fleshed out.
I think one aspect of climate engineering that I don't see discussed very much is who is allowed to do that: Is a single country permitted to make decisions that affect the whole globe? Who decides how hot/cold the earth should be?
Just as an example, some African countries could decide that in fact they would like to make the climate even colder than it used to be, which on the other hand would negatively impact agriculture away from equator. I think these questions form a big potential source of global power struggle and conflict.
This is a terrible and misinformed article. We don't have to rely on nascent carbon storage or "deflecting some incoming sunlight to reduce heating of the atmosphere". We mainly have to electrify everything as fast as possible. With the right financing, this will actually save everyone money because of the inherit efficiency of electric machinery. It's explained here: https://www.rewiringamerica.org/
You're right. There are two major errors in just this one paragraph from the article:
"Worldwide, humans use roughly one zettajoule per year. Satisfying that demand without further contributing to climate change means we’ll have to drastically speed up deployment of zero-carbon energy sources. Providing 1 ZJ per year with only solar PV, for example, would require covering roughly 1.6 percent of the world’s land area with panels."
Actually, humans used 162,494 TWh of primary energy in 2017, which is 585 petajoules (PJ). The authors admit to rounding up from roughly 600 PJ to 1000 PJ "for simplicity" later in the article. Rounding up by 66% is hardly appropriate for a back-of-napkin calculation, much less in a published article on a very serious topic.
Then, the authors imply that replacing all primary energy with solar power would require the same amount of primary energy. This is not true. If we were able to electrify all of humanities energy needs, we would only need 1/3 as much primary energy as we use today, since today's primary energy is mainly served by extremely inefficient fossil fuel combustion (coal and gas in power plants, petroleum for transport). 600 PJ is a reasonable estimate for primary energy use in 2021, so we would only need to build 200 PJ of solar power to replace fossil fuel combustion. The article called for 1000 PJ of solar, while reality is closer to 200 PJ. They were off by a factor of 5!
Obviously, this paragraph was an over-simplification and was meant as a thought experiment. But the sloppy rounding error and the lack of acknowledgment of the primary energy differences between solar power and fossil fuel combustion call into question how deeply the authors really understand the problem of climate change, and the solutions we have available.
There is an idea that is keeping me up at night. What if we could launch large sails to the L1 Lagrange Point to reduce the amount of radiation that reach the earth by only 2% ?
The L1 between earth and the sun is only 1% of the way to the sun. So the sail would need to be 99% of the cross sectional area of the earth. If it was opaque (reflective) and you only wanted to block 2%, you'd need a 2.23 million square km sail (0.020.99Pi*6000^2)
Aluminium foil is about 2g/cm2. That's 3e-3 g/cm2. 3e-2 kg/m2. 30,000kg/km2.
You'd need 66 million tonnes of aluminium.
Maybe you can make it 100 times lighter with better materials? So only 600,000 tonnes.
I think about this often too. There are a ton of articles out there about it. It seems like it would require a pretty colossal amount of mass to get lifted into orbit, and then maintenance of a giant fleet of objects flying close together. Flock dynamics writ large. I've wondered if it would be easier to find an asteroid you can turn into sails (handwaving here about the difficulty of finding one, developing the technology to mine it & also spin up a space manufactory...) than it would be to make them all on earth. Who knows.
EDIT: I've sort of come to the conclusion that this is the only solution that a single-party could take on that would meaningfully decrease the amount of heat in the atmosphere. Everything else is dependent on a ton of other people doing what they need to do, too.
Thank you for the problems I am looking for them! I keep thinking we could manufacture and send the sails from the moon. This would require a semi-automated production line and I have no idea if this is even remotely possible with current technology.
I also think it is the only possible controllable way to control global warming. I am very happy to learn I am not the only one that thought of this.
> Climate policy is essential to the engineering work of decarbonization, as it can make the costs of new energy technologies plummet and shift markets to low-carbon alternatives. People often underestimate how much human ingenuity can be unleashed when it’s propelled by market forces.
Propelled by market forces and by policy forces. Policy can provide a temporary push to get technology over a hump of development costs and scale up, but it's a really hard social problem to maintain in the long term. The real challenge for engineers is to build an eco-friendly technology that's cheaper and more desirable than the alternative; in that state it can basically free-fall forever under the push of market forces.
Why would you drive a gas guzzling, high-maintenance old car when a Tesla has lower lifetime costs? Why would you run a noisy, smelly generator outside your camper van when you could put silent solar panels on the roof? Why would an energy company burn coal when a wind farm puts out more energy for less money? When new tech is both more desirable for the end user and for the planet, that's when it really takes off.
I think the fundamental question we need to ask is what technology could be developed that would lead to market forces pushing carbon sequestration. Even if forward-thinking governments work together to develop sequestration-pushing policies, amoral actors will be perpetually incentivized to defect. You can't win that fight forever.
> Making 1 tonne of cement lime releases about 1 tonne of CO2. If all the CO2 emissions from cement manufacturing were captured and pumped underground at a cost of $80 per tonne, we estimate that a 50-pound bag (about 23 kg) of concrete mix, one component of which is cement, will cost about 42 cents more. Such a price change would not stop people from using concrete nor significantly add to building costs.
But it will perpetually cost more than a bag from an unscrupulous manufacturer; the economic incentive is to reduce that amount. Also, a 50 lbs concrete bag only costs about $2.50, so $0.42 is still a significant fraction...and at non-homeowner usage rates of an 8-yard/32,000 lbs truck with a cost of about $1,200, that's a nontrivial price jump of $270. People will still use it, sure, but they're not going to be happy about it. Instead (or in addition), we need some kind of industrial-scale technology that makes people want to pull CO2 from the air and put it in the ground.
We as a species have decided not to prevent climate change. You as an individual now need to consider how you individually will adapt, survive and profit. That's where we are. Anyone hoping for a last minute save is badly misinformed about the situation.
If McKinsey is to be taken seriously then the only way forward is to abolish capitalism. It is not what they want but of you pay any sort of attention then it is a prerequisite as it is the compulsion for consumption, that capitalists have, that is going to burn us all.
But they are very wrong. Ever increasing consumption is not a prerequisite for a economy that is good to live in. We do not need to abolish capitalism, but we do need to control and regulate it.
If we are going to avoid global ecological catastrophe then we will need to do some planning. Things that are cheapest in short and medium term will have to be abandoned for things that avert the disaster.
Markets can not do that.
It needs to be done locally for local conditions with a eye for global requirements. This requires people in politics to use their brains and it requires the people to support the politicians in what is going to become a difficult struggle with folks like those from McKinsey - people desperate to maintain their privilege, desperate to monotonically increase their consumption.
In lucky places this will be done by the ballot box.
In less lucky places mass NVDA (non-violent direct action).
In the very unlucky places it will require arson.
I have faith in humans. My favourite species. The vast mass of us will shut down these greed heads from the height of capitalism and bring them back down to Earth.
Including "solar-radiation management" among sensible activities, and omitting essential gating technologies such as energy storage, taints the whole article. The howlers suggest that it is a "feel-good" piece, or a marketing exercise aimed at making certain tech approaches seem to have the established merits of solar and wind build-out.
Solar-radiation management, in particular, is another name for geo-engineering. It would be a clear disaster if we ever came to depend on it, as any hiccup in performance would subject Earth to a sudden rollback of any benefit, a far worse outcome even than what we are experiencing. (This is as distinguished from, e.g., spreading olivine to absorb atmospheric CO2, or scattering iron dust on the deep ocean surface, where suddenly not doing it anymore would not set us back at all.)
Hydrogen-powered aviation is a clear technical win in the longer term, but any money diverted to that from, e.g., energy storage would be a setback, just as would diverting money from solar and wind build-out in favor of nukes.
Removing CO2 from the atmosphere seems to attack the problem squarely, but fully 10% of the increased heating comes from the remarkably small amount of sulfur hexafluoride, SF6, already released into the atmosphere. (SF6 is 25k times as good at trapping heat as CO2.) There is an industrial replacement for SF6 available now, and apparatus to extract as much as possible from existing equipment for disposal, but what is already in the air is there for many centuries, and it is still being added to.
Similarly, if the existing stock of HFCs were vented, that would produce as much forcing as all the CO2 now in the atmosphere. (HFCs are >2k as good at trapping heat as CO2.) People have instructions to carefully extract HFCs from refrigeration systems being dismantled, but in many places those instructions are ignored. So, some substantial fraction of the HFCs will leak. A replacement for HFCs is in the pipeline, but not in full production yet.
So, just bringing CO2 back to pre-industrial levels would not suffice, even without considering the now-reduced reflectivity at the north pole and increased CH4 emission (25x) from melting permafrost. We need more. Mirrors in space are a dangerous fantasy, as noted above. We can't get the SF6 out of the air. We can't get the HFCs out of the air. We can't remove enough CO2 from the air to compensate for those without causing a different sort of eco-catastrophe.
As it is, it is everything we can do just to build out solar and wind power extraction systems, and, soon, storage for them. We will get electric-fired ammonia production going to fuel ships, and LH2 for aircraft, and carbon-neutral cement, and electric steel production, and get control of CO2 emissions.
I remember that google hired a team of crack scientists to get the the bottom of global warming. Their conclusion was that even if all carbon production was stopped immediately it would not stop the runaway. That was in 2015.
We will probably end up needing to reduce solar flux. It’s the only thing that can save us. That’s why bill gates was planning on putting reflective aerosols in the atmosphere. That effort is to my knowledge the single most important effort relating to global warming. And people reject it. If we die we will certainly deserve it.
Remember, we can spread reflective dust at L1, too. Reflective in the IR, so plant life won’t be hit. You don’t hear about solutions very much in this atmosphere of doom worship.
Thank you for this. It is much easier for me to imagine that a relatively small expert team, well funded for the task (which is still virtually zero money in comparison to the cost of changing the world economy) could accomplish some feat of geoengineering which, would buy us time. I find this easiest to imagine. In fact, I see this as somewhat likely.
> In this paper a method of geoengineering is proposed involving clouds of dust placed in the vicinity of the L1 point as an alternative to the use of thin film reflectors ... it is envisaged that the required mass of
dust can be extracted from captured near Earth asteroids, whilst stabilized in the required position using the impulse provided by solar collectors or mass drivers used to eject material from the asteroid surface.
Don’t we run into problems of low level carbon dioxide poisoning, if we hit the levels of “the only way to keep the planet habitably temperate is to reflect sunlight”? At around 1,000 ppm we’d hit the point where everywhere outside you’d be noticeably affected. Which is around where we’re projected to be by 2100.
> We will probably end up needing to reduce solar flux
If you believe this, the time to start working on its actual practical application is probably right now. Do you believe in this enough to stop what you're doing for work, and work on this instead? The money is out there.
How about they start by figuring out the concept of power efficiency in the web code that everyone runs?
We could do a huge amount if we'd give every mainline tech company engineer a Raspberry Pi 4, and shut down their big workstations for a week a month, making them live on a mere quad core 1.5GHz chip with 8GB of RAM.
I'm sick and tired of how every shiny new "update" of web applications uses more and more CPU, runs slower and slower, and, gosh, you'd better buy a new computer to run it.
I've ranted before on my blog about the horrible things Google did to the Blogger interface - a text editing interface. For reasons I don't care enough to dig into, the "new" interface forced on everyone last year has some dependency on number of photos such that if you have too many photos, or too slow a system, you get massive, massive lag in entering text. It's literally unusable on plenty of systems that used to run the older interfaces, and you can choke out a fairly high end system by putting enough photos (100-200?) in a post. Even a dozen or so will choke out older systems that used to run the old interface fine.
But, hey, it's no problem for the Googlers who wrote it and tested it on their high end 2 year old Xeon workstations! Worked great for their toy cases, and having not actually talked to anyone who uses Blogger, ship it and get your promotion, having ruined the interface for anyone with older or lower power hardware.
The new Google Chat interface I've been migrated to is similarly painful on a Pi4. It only takes 20 seconds to load and then maybe a similar amount of time to load an actual conversation. Snappy on a M1 Mini, though, so who cares, right?
Once it's actually loaded, it's tolerable (the usual slight lag in text entry that any Google app on a Pi4 has), but getting it loaded is quite painful, and Hangouts used to work just fine.
> How about they start by figuring out the concept of power efficiency in the web code that everyone runs?
Sure, a nice goal, but the Internet consumes maybe 10% of the world's electricity, and I highly doubt that is because of slow webpages. It is also "fairly easy" to green datacenter electrical usage because only the generation source need be changed, as opposed to replacing billions of cars, or even entire industrial practices like cement that give off CO2 as waste byproduct. All of which are in excess of 50% of total electrical usage. That, and we have to convert our powerplants anyway.
Lastly, my understanding of slow webpages is largely IO and latency, not compute, which further reduces the link between slow pages and electrical usage.
I understand and share the frustration, but generic indignant rants like this don't improve HN threads, especially when they're off topic and get repeated a ton, as this one is and does.
I feel like it's unsurprising that actual renewable price reductions outpaced predictions from a study that McKinsey participated in; their fiduciary incentives absolutely do not align with greater adoption of renewable tech.