Will technology save us from climate change?(media.mit.edu) |
Will technology save us from climate change?(media.mit.edu) |
In particular, for those who have the majority of "ability" to make change, would it be easier for them to take more and more clean resources in a zero-sum battle or have a short to medium term hit in allying themselves with the rest of the world to fix climate change in the long term?
If COVID has shown us anything, the answer to the last question is unequivocally no. COVID has been a very obvious salient problem and most nations failed the test. If we can't beat COVID, we will not beat climate change. No technology can change human nature.
While this solution is appealing, it always leads to more questions than answers. Let's assume the How is solved. Where do you store it? Can it scale and if yes with which scenario? - Infinite growth? No way, it's physically impossible. - With a reduction? Maybe, but what will be the cost then? Will it be cost effective?
I think at that point we are back at the OP question.
Plants. The answer is, and always has been, to stop emitting additional carbon from fossil fuels, restoring ecosystems, and letting plants and algae and natural carbon sequestration mechanisms do their thing. It also feels pretty inarguable that making that change would be possible if literally everyone on Earth went "yeah, let's do that."
Now you might ask if that’s in pure carbon, CO2, or dead organisms but that is just an economic question. While multiple options exist picking one is far less difficult than funding it’s implementation.
Someone creates some magical building material that is high in carbon, non-reactive (or at least doesn't leach carbon into the air), economically viable and is mostly recyclable.
Imagine something along the lines of synthetic high carbon asphalt or masonry products.
I think COVID actually teaches a different lesson. Our experience with COVID teaches that it has to be technology that addresses climate change, not political or sociological solutions. Lockdowns ultimately failed in even the most socially disciplined countries like Germany. But we got a vaccine developed in record time.
Similarly for climate change, solutions that require "everyone to cooperate and do their part" won't work. It just won't. Even if the USA and Europe went to zero emissions tomorrow, growing CO2 emissions in industrializing China, India, and Africa are going to keep increasing global CO2 emissions. It's rational for them. Bangladesh is going to be one of the hardest-hit countries from climate change--an estimated 30-50% hit to GDP by 2100. But investing in rapid growth and industrialization, even at the cost of climate, still makes sense for Bangladesh. One, because of game theory--Bangladesh cannot by itself avoid climate change, due to emissions by other countries. Two, because of math--a 30-50% hit to what Bangladesh's economy could be in 80 years with strong growth would still leave it better of on net than risking doing anything to compromise the 5-7% annual GDP growth it has now and stagnating for that time.
To mitigate climate change, the developed world needs moonshot technologies. We need to not only be investing in renewable energy--although that's necessary, going to zero emissions will still not be enough. We need to be investing massive amounts of money into carbon sequestration technology.
In other words, suppression achieved through lockdowns is an unstable equilibrium. Only herd immunity, ideally achieved via vaccination, produces a stable equilibrium for suppression.
Similarly with global warming, while we may be able to temporarily reduce emissions, at significant economic cost, via political and sociological solutions without new technology, this reduction is an unstable equilibrium. The only permanent solution - the only stable equilibrium - is via technological means (cheap renewable energy and carbon sequestration).
Erm, looks like we are doing pretty well to beat COVID with vaccines developed in record timing.
Similarly, for global warming it would be a waste of time and effort to try to stop the natural process (limit human activity to revert the temperature increase) and instead focus our innovation and resources into mitigation (carbon capture, green energy, fortifying coast lines...)
For the record, I am not advocating completely ditching liberalism, but we should understand that it became (in the form of neoliberalism) too ideological in the Western world. That prevents us seeing alternative social solutions that can be very effective in beating the pandemic.
(And I am writing this from Prague, Czechia. Strangely enough, our government managed to beat the 1st wave by doing lots of early restrictions, but then we were massively hit by 2nd wave in the reluctance to do restrictions again. This cannot be explained away by human nature, it was purely a matter of cultural perspective.)
The wealthy and powerful will be fine even as millions die off in newly unlivable areas. That's the brutal reality.
That's dumb upper class. Smart upper class realizes their wealth and lifestyle are entirely dependent on keeping the rest of the world working, and satisfied enough they don't try to tear everything apart.
It is a large scale solution that works today, not at some indeterminate point in the future. Yes there are problems, yes there are limitations, yes there are risks and yes it is expensive but many of these can be addressed by governments and through regulation.
A major part of reducing carbon emissions is to transition Asia and Africa away from coal and towards nuclear energy and not by the free market but by government supports. This can be supplemented by the plethora of technologies available today viz solar, wind, demand response etc.
What is of prime importance is that we limit carbon emissions today and keep doing so even as economies grow and energy consumption increases.
And nuclear plants take >20 years to build. That's too long.
And the batteries that solar/wind need are cheaper than HVDC power lines.
Of course tearing down existing nuclear is silly, but building new ones is a non-starter.
Nuclear power needn't take that long to build. China is building them in five or six years. Standardisation helps immensely with timelines and safety.
Batteries are not an energy solution. The current largest batteries around the world can only provide minutes of power for typical western grids. Yes, minutes.
I'm surprised to see one of his presentation on HN, where the opposite opinion reign I think. As an example, they are really "bearish" on the Green New Deal, as it will simply not be enough to address the challenge ahead of us. Curious to see people' reaction.
Is the first time I have come across a presentation of this guy in english and this is why I wanted to share it here. But basically it is a re-hash of the limits to growth arguments, with more modern data.
I could not recommend enough to listen to it though. The viewpoint he is presenting is unusual enough to be worth it.
I'm really tired of this technology vs. policy vs. behavior changes discussions. It's a false dichtomy. We'll need all of that.
I recommend the book BTW. Though it tries its best to be optimistic, I finished it thinking "well shit, I don't know if this is possible." He is right in saying that it won't be easy.
I start to be really pessimistic about our ability to fix any real issue.
That's a recipe for unrest and war on a global scale. A technological solution might avoid all that.
This sounds like a big strawman. I honestly have never met anyone who thinks we can fix climate change exclusively with changing behavior.
From the author of “1491” fame which is quite popular here on HN—it’s actually interesting I see that book on pre Colombian America recommended more often here on HN than the one on technology and climate change.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34959327-the-wizard-and-...
But things can be OK in the long run if we really try to learn what we should do, and do that. I would include praying, honesty, and kindness among those things. Really there is good reason for hope for the best; many of these things are expected.
Your probably meant tokamak.
We're going to be burning coal for a long, long time.
The problem is not technological. It is political and societal, and those cannot be solved by technology.
At this point, even trying to mitigate the consequences of climate change will take large-scale mobilization, on a scale we have never seen before, much larger than the wartime mobilizations of WW2. Considering our current stumbling response to a global pandemic, with possible consequences much lesser than what climate change will bring, I'm sorry to say that the outlook is quite grim.
We have act as humanity collectively, not as individual bickering nations.
And if that sounds hypothetical it means your kids or grand kids have no hope of living in or inheriting any property there. Once the reality hits around 2070 or so property values will drop drastically and there will be a mass refugee style exodus from such areas to others which could lead to stuff like “Build a wall to keep the Floridans out”
95% of people don't really inherit property and many people these days are forced to move for economic reasons.
Florida being "under water" sounds apocalyptic, but as you say, the chance will "happen[] over centuries." Every storm will slowly destroy some part of the developed area and will be rebuilt somewhere else.
To put it in economic terms, what the net present value of losing Florida in 2180? Probably not all that much.
And let’s say you do live in a good area. An exodus of a billion people all over the world trying to move into places like yours will get nasty.
Drastic changes in climate patterns also risks the food supply.
As long as it seems preferrable to dream of some hypothetical set of technical solutions rather than mildly discomforting us by adjusting habits to be less wasteful, I see little hope for that endeavor.
With every day that passes without self-moderation the damage increases. Sorry flora and fauna, your world ends before consumerism does.
Its important to note though that significant progress has been made on compact nuclear. It's safer, easier to produce, and can be centrally manufactured and delivered onsite, relieving much of what causes cost overruns. The largest hurdles involve allowing such nuclear plants to be deployed, which requires regulatory change.
Meanwhile, countries like Denmark and Norway with very low rates of mask wearing have seen very low COVID death rates.
EDIT: More recent data from YouGov showing same pattern: https://yougov.co.uk/topics/international/articles-reports/2.... Mask-wearing rates in Denmark and Norway picked up in 2H 2020, but were still on the low side.
Same with climate change. Worst case is Venus, we’re heading for a few degrees Celsius change that persists for centuries, we could’ve prevented almost all of the problems we’re looking at now if we’d made the best choices even as late as the 60s and 70s.
Solar is an entire order of magnitude cheaper than nuclear. That's a lot of wiggle room for incidental costs.
> Nuclear power needn't take that long to build. China is building them in five or six years. Standardisation helps immensely with timelines and safety.
That's only counting the time from when shovels hit the ground. Even in China they spend 5 years before that in planning.
> Batteries are not an energy solution. The current largest batteries around the world can only provide minutes of power for typical western grids. Yes, minutes.
Neither is nuclear. Current nuclear designs cannot provide peaking power, and new designs that can are even more ridiculously expensive than current designs.
The buffer duration/cycle period matters significantly. I agree, turning every bit of carbon released into sticks n wildfire zones won't solve the problem, but in the current situation a) buffering will make a difference in the short term, and b) there are natural mechanisms that do sequester carbon on a functionally permanent basis and keeping those functioning or adding to their capacity through ecological restoration is extremely important and doesn't require new technology.
The kind of shit individualism has evolved into is ridiculous.
Oh we all know that data coming from China is super reliable, right? After all, they never lied about the Wuhan fatalities in the first place.
10 Trillion metric tons / 7.8 billion people ~= 1,300 tons per person which is well beyond the amount of building materials used.
With COVID letting it become so widespread with not enough protection before the vaccines, means that more people got the disease, the virus got more opportunities to mutate, and new strains are coming out, some of which could be more fatal or maybe resistent to vaccines. Getting late may makes it harder to solve, if possible at all.
With global warming is worse. Is not just stopping emissions, but what we already emitted is already driving the change. And positive feedback is already being triggered, with less albedo because less ice in the north pole, methane emissions in northern places like Siberia and Canada, and each time more frequent/bigger forest fires. So to slow it down you don't just have to capture the equivalent of what we emit (100k barrels/day makes a lot of greenhouse gases, think in 0.5-1 ton of greenhouse gases per barrel, and you have coal and others to take into account too), but also the amount we already emitted, and what comes from positive feedback (that eventually could become orders above of what we emit).
And I'm talking about greenhouse gases, not heat in particular, you are not dealign directly with warming addressing the gases, so that is something that should be taken into account regarding mitigation.
It's fairly easy to prevent stuff from entering the country when you are an island. Singapore also had no problem in doing it. Notice some kind of pattern?
> China stopped it and they have heaps of people
Do you trust any data coming from China? Because North Korea also claimed they had zero death from COVID.
Also, it's fairly clear by now that there is some genetic component with COVID: there are less death in asian ethnic groups compared to others, so having less deaths in China/Japan/Korea is consistent in that regard anyway.
> The US failed spectacularly
Comparing to death rates across Europe, not that much different actually. Media brainwashing much?