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Fundamentally it is a political problem, not a technological problem. We need high carbon taxes, we need to end fossil fuel subsidies, and we probably need to change our economic system to something that addresses the tragedy of the commons.

But we’ve seen in recent years how technology can influence politics. I’d quote a tweet from Tristan Harris from the other day [1]:

> In an hypothetical world, if Facebook were re-designed entirely into a global coordination tool for billions of people to take the most meaningful and significant steps to fight climate change -- what would it look like?

1: https://twitter.com/tristanharris/status/1049177712227573760

9 comments

Yes, it's a political problem. And one solution is to build nuclear power plants. We need a few thousands of these worldwide to get around 70 % of energy production from fission, then solar, wind and hydro can cover the rest. I really don't understand why we're not doing this.

25 % of emissions are from electricity [1], and 21 % from industry. Industy would quickly start using more electricity once it became cheap. Transportation (14 %) will take time to electrify, and the 24 % of emissions from agriculture and forestry is harder to remove (increase meat prices, thus lowering demand and production).

China, India, UAE and South Korea are building lots of reactors now.[2] I really hope Europe, the Americas and Africa follow.

We have a solution! Yes, it costs money, let's do it!

[1] https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/global-greenhouse-gas-emiss... [2] http://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/current-and...

I'm also in favor of nuclear power, but you have to admit that there are valid concerns. Nuclear waste is unsolved as long as we don't build breeder reactors. Uranium supplies aren't limitless either. Without breeders we'd run out quickly. Thorium is unproven tech. Safety is a concern, both engineering (do you really trust for-profit companies not to skimp on safety?) and proliferation of nuclear materials (how many people does it take to break into a nuclear power plant and steal enough material for a dirty bomb? Which nation states do you trust enough to use nuclear power without building bombs?). Nuclear power is also quite expensive because of all the regulations you need to make it safe.

Yep, unfortunately nuclear power is about 2x more expensive than e.g. gas, and more expensive than even renewables. The solution here would be to make CO2 expensive enough.

"Fundamentally it is a political problem" -- Agreed.

What if the whole problem is that of "growth"?

Here's one possible chain of thought. I don't fully subscribe to this, so please feel free to poke holes in it:

1. The biggest polluters tend to be commercial enterprises

2. They are aware of the environmental impact of their actions, but are reluctant to stop

3. They are staffed by (mostly) normal human beings, but they continue because they are heavily incentivized to show continued growth

4. Businesses can no longer reach a "steady state" -- they must continue growth or be considered failures

5. Growth appears to be demanded by stockholders

6. Stockholders need growth for return on their investments

7. Investments are necessary because of... inflation ?

Ergo, stop inflation, slow down growth?

Yes. 100x Yes. See Herman Daly on Steady State Economics. Also see https://newleftreview.org/II/111/troy-vettese-to-freeze-the-... for a critique of Daly's proposals as being not radical enough.

As a stockholders my incentive is to increase my net worth. I do this by investing in companies that produce profits and grow. Now if inflation was to be lowered to 1% or 0% why would I stop being interested in growing companies and getting richer?

And while increasing regulations on climate change would be costly, it's a drop in the bucket compared to the cost of stopping GDP growth and would harms tons of individuals who would find it harder to find a job and provide for their family.

Richer only for the sake of being rich? After certain threshold, more money doesn't change your lifestyle much, does it? Yes, you can get better, faster cars, but that is just greed in particular, ignorance in general. Hint, you don't NEED that.

I think you misread my comment. It was not about need but about incentives. Specifically that changing inflation doesn't change incentives. And removing growth from an economy is far more expensive way to prevent climate change than something like a carbon tax.

If you are arguing the easiest fix to climate change is to convince everyone to stop being interested in increasing their material wealth. That seems like a hell of an uphill battle. Orders of magnitude harder than passing a really high carbon tax.

P.S. getting rich is usually not the terminal goal, but a means to financial security for the middle class, and status for the upper class.

No, it doesn't work out that way.

First, in order to determine what people will do, the relevant word is not "need" but "want".

#6 is that stockholders want growth of return on their investments (because, hey, extra money is good for them). And they'll want that growth to be as big as possible, no matter what the inflation is; so stopping inflation won't remove the pressure for growth.

On the other hand, if you want to force people to be satisfied with what they have and not strive for more, well, that's against a lot of our psychology, it's not going to happen - compared to that, getting all the governments to do what needs to be done (while still striving for as much growth is feasible given the restrictions) is easy.

Nope stockholders need return on investment. Sorry. You can't skip that.

The problem if you kill this is that it breaks the asset allocation "algorithm" that is capitalism. If we don't have return on investment why wouldn't we spend all our money on, say, gold toilet seats ?

Or to put it a bit glib: Why do we need factories to "feed starving children" more than we need gold toilet seats ? Return on investment.

Fundamentally, it's a consumer problem. Consumers don't want to pay more for using green power, or eat less meat, or use public transit instead of a car, buy an electric vehicle, or other things that restrict their comfort or degrade quality of life. Such restriction/degradation would be perceptible and short-term, while the climate threat is not perceptible and is long-term. Nobody really cares if the average temperature of the World ocean increases by 0.5 degree in 10 years. Most people see climate activism as fearmongering.

It's a coordination problem. If the diffuse damage of pollution instead was totally concentrated on an individual, people would be very focused on reducing their carbon foot print.

Right now our best technology for dealing with coordination problems are government and treaties.

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

I think the only answer is for green tech to become cheaper, or at least better and more desirable, to an extent that it can overcome all those unpriced externalities.

Consider lighting. When efficient lighting started to take off, it sucked. CFLs were expensive and worked poorly. People avoided them unless they were forced into them or really wanted to be green.

Now, LEDs are awesome. They’re still more expensive up-front, but the breakeven period is really short. They look great. I use them everywhere, not for environmental reasons, but because they’re the best practical choice.

Electric cars are another example. Used to be they were a sacrifice, unless your driving needs fit into a really narrow niche. Now they’re really good. They’re still not cheap, but people who can’t afford them often wish they could, and the prices will come down. Similar to lighting, I don’t drive an electric car to be green (although it’s a nice bonus), I drive it because it’s practical and convenient.

It shouldn’t have to be this way, but I think it does. Maybe it’ll work out anyway. It’s looking possible.

But things can change quickly if aktivists start to be perceived as credible. Germany decided to get out of Nuclear within a year of Fukushima (not the best move in hindsight, given Germanys reliance on coal at the moment...). We need to make climate change more credible in all the ways we have available to us. The easiest step is to start talking about it... get yourself some knowledge about the basics [1] and talk about the topic with confidence. Climate change IS REAL, solutions need to be FORCED ON THE POLITICAL LEVEL and consumers can/should reassure politicans that THIS IS THE WILL OF THE PEOPLE. Steps to take now:

1. Search for a local group enganged in the topic or set up a FB or Meetup event and start doing local talks in Bars. It‘s literally a 30 min effort in preperation plus having a nice time at a bar. Just did that this week and probably doing it again soon.

2. Donate money to effective climate charities, for example, the Coalition for Rainforest Nations [2] or the Clean Air Taskforce [3].

[1]: https://founderspledge.com/research/Cause%20Report%20-%20Cli... [2]:https://www.rainforestcoalition.org (donation page seems to have a problem at the moment...) [3]:http://www.catf.us

Very well put. We have the tools to fix this problem, we just need the will.

I wrote a lot more on this recently, with ideas that people on here can use to help influence better outcomes: https://unop.uk/how-to-help-with-a-big-global-problem-as-a-t...

It's a shame that the big technology companies aren't using their influence and reach to help.

I don't think it's the big technology companies - I doubt there's any large corporation the shuttering of which would not benefit the environment. I'd like to see more measures such as making a factory take its intake water downstream of where it discharges its waste water - you can bet that waste water will be clean. Otherwise we are reliant on the supposed goodwill of CEOs, which has manifestly failed to deliver thus far.

> I doubt there's any large corporation the shuttering of which would not benefit the environment.

Tesla.

Tesla has done more tangible work towards removing carbon from the atmosphere than probably any other entity in history.

> Tesla has done more tangible work towards removing carbon from the atmosphere than probably any other entity in history.

Think you might be over-egging it here - think about the shift from coal to less co2 intensive sources (e.g. gas) for power generation at national scale, which has happened in many countries. I suspect that's responsible for some fairly gargantuan savings in co2 compared to Tesla, which is still a small minority player.

This is true, and many more companies too. What I was getting at though was that tech companies have lots of influence but choose not to address this challenge and instead focus on advertising or other areas.

If we can get renewables cheaper than fossil fuels and get reasonable energy storage politics won’t be a problem.

I thought that all we had to do was develop non-combustion energy sources cheaper than fossil fuels, and everything else would fall into place. I think that's still mostly correct. But I underestimated how long people who are economically dependent on fossil fuel industries, and their political allies, could delay the transition. I think that those sorts of delay-and-obstruct tactics are going to ensure we far overshoot CO2 targets before (hopefully) beginning to correct them. That's even while the technologies of low-carbon energy continue to advance at a rapid clip.

Moving energy production to renewables is the easiest part. Much more difficult is the part where we need to do something about the few billion (and rising!) gas-guzzling personal automobiles. Electric cars are simply not going to be the solution in the timeframe that matters. In the EU traffic is the only major CO2 source that continues increasing. The third big problem is agriculture, specifically meat production. Two to three billion new people who have traditionally been mostly vegetarians are now hungry for meat, and the planet simply cannot afford such a thing.

This absolutely can be a problem, because infrastructure needs political approval. Worst case is a ban on renewable generation to protect fossil fuel profits, for example.

As soon as renewables become more profitable than fossil fuels any (personal) economic incentive politicians have to subsidise the fossil fuel industry will switch to the renewable industry. Even the most corrupt politicians you could imagine are not so hell bent on destroying the planet that they would refuse bribes from their friends in the solar industry.

The real political incentive behind fossil fuel subsidy comes down to technology and economics. The reality is that every nation is dependent on oil and gas and without them their economies would be destroyed. The real reason politicians fear a real push towards cleaner energy is that it will increase energy prices enough to trigger nationwide riots and protests.

You are correct but if we can get to the point that economics drive green energy the political opponents will have trouble stopping it.

There is a tipping point in there that we could be prevented from hitting, but I really don't think that will happen.

Agriculture, deforestation are major emitters not directly linked to fossil fuels.

Cement industry, heating are large consumers of fossil fuel that are seeing very little advances compared to electrification of the transportation sector.

So just because renewable electricity starts to dominate does not mean our carbon footprint goes to zero.

Bhutan is a great example how countries could look like. It is the only carbon-negative country in the world and they measure Gross National Happiness instead of Gross Domestic Product.

https://www.ecowatch.com/this-country-isnt-just-carbon-neutr...

Bhutan achieves this by importing most of what they use from countries that produce the carbon. Obviously this doesn't scale.

I'd really hope that a poor, primarily agricultural country is not actually a great example of what this could look like.

Are you aware of this country's recent past ethnic cleansing...?

How is that related to their carbon policies?

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

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

It seems strange to praise them for their Happiness quotient when they may well have arrived at that by shall we say, unsavory methods.

It's only a political problem if you make it one. Better politics requires less technological innovation, and better technology requires less political innovation.

The political barrier suddenly becomes much less intimidating if an extremely efficient way to such CO2 out of the atmosphere manually was found tomorrow.

Thermodynamics kind of forbids efficient ways to suck CO2 out of the atmosphere. Unburning coal takes more energy than you got from burning it.

Source? Carbon capture and storage (CCS) seems to be a thing for sure.

If global warming is a political problem not a technological one we’re screwed. China and India aren’t rich yet, never mind Africa and all those people want a nice middle class house or apartment and a two week international holiday per year.

Here’s hoping for a technological solution or failing that gradual and non-catastrophic climate change.

Change in CO2 Emissions per capita 1990-2016 https://twitter.com/naytadata/status/1049675803007602688?s=2...

It is a political problem, but technology can change it dramatically. A cheap and safe energy source like Thorium-based nuclear power and self driving electric cars would tilt the table.