[HN Gopher] Engineers can disrupt climate change
___________________________________________________________________
Engineers can disrupt climate change
Author : headalgorithm
Score : 115 points
Date : 2021-06-28 15:46 UTC (7 hours ago)
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(TXT) w3m dump (spectrum.ieee.org)
| [deleted]
| worik wrote:
| 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.
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| 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.
| Proven wrote:
| > Climate Change is first and foremost a political problem.
|
| It's not a problem at all.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Engineers need to run for office.
| pope_meat wrote:
| This ruins the human.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| It is an opportunity to grow. Embrace the struggle.
| pope_meat wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| I concede not everyone has the necessary emotional
| fortitude for the difficulty level of some challenges.
| It's an acquired state.
| pope_meat wrote:
| 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.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Good people exist who can and do serve governance tours
| of duty, without the need to be or turning into
| sociopaths.
|
| We fundamentally disagree it seems, although I appreciate
| the dialog. I hope we can agree we should do the best we
| can with what we have where we are.
| ryder9 wrote:
| no, whining and giving up is easier
| lisper wrote:
| And then people need to vote for them. Here is an
| organization trying to make that happen:
|
| https://314action.org/
| skipants wrote:
| Does your average person want to vote for an engineer?
| ryder9 wrote:
| also being an engineer doesn't make one good at policy
| decisions, diplomacy, and politicking
|
| shit, a lot of software engineers i know have barely
| passable people skills
| ant6n wrote:
| > Engineers need to run for office.
|
| 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.
| shadilay wrote:
| Interestingly Communist China is a political system dominated
| by engineers. It seems that engineers in government have a
| negative effect on climate change if anything. https://www.bl
| oomberg.com/news/articles/2019-09-23/bankers-g...
| splistud wrote:
| 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.
| dimitrios1 wrote:
| 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.
| tcmart14 wrote:
| Or politicians who seek advise and counsel from engineers.
| And then balance out the cost-benefit analysis.
| [deleted]
| mysticlabs wrote:
| You still think carbon has anything to do with climate change?
|
| Hint: You're made of carbon. Everything around you is made of
| carbon. The correlation between carbon and the weather is
| political propaganda, not sound or justified science.
|
| Do you want to know what actually controls the weather? Look
| up. The sun and it's various cycles control most weather on
| earth.
|
| Pollution and the climate are not the same thing. Climate is
| controlled by the sun.
|
| Do we need to reduce pollution? Yes.
|
| Does carbon have anything to do with the weather? Not really.
| That's politics and propaganda. The whole carbon foot print
| concept is about taxation, control, and politics, not science.
| ngrilly wrote:
| Please go troll somewhere else:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_consensus_on_climat.
| ..
| thescriptkiddie wrote:
| 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.
|
| [0] http://www.cat-bus.com/2017/12/gadgetbahn/
| kanzure wrote:
| You could just as easily say the opposite though?
|
| _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.
| tcmart14 wrote:
| 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.
| thescriptkiddie wrote:
| 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.
| jjk166 wrote:
| 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.
| meowkit wrote:
| 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.
| tabtab wrote:
| 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.
| nawitus wrote:
| 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.
| Pyramus wrote:
| > 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.
| thescriptkiddie wrote:
| 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.
| fogihujy wrote:
| 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.
| xrisk wrote:
| 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.
| bluescrn wrote:
| 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?
| meristohm wrote:
| 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.
| imtringued wrote:
| >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.
| lucideer wrote:
| > _population growth is a dog whistle, that particular factor
| is directly correlated to human development which is what we
| need to tackle_
|
| Pretty sure that's what the gp was referring to. It's not a
| dog whistle if that's your understanding of it.
| Robotbeat wrote:
| 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.
| spaced-out wrote:
| >What we need is the technology to make climate action
| politically feasible, ie without making people materially
| poorer.
|
| What if this isn't physically possible?
| Robotbeat wrote:
| 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 100 more than we'd need. And humanity
| already gathers and economically utilizes some solar energy
| beyond the Earth.
| nightski wrote:
| 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.
| yongjik wrote:
| 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.
| twobitshifter wrote:
| 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.
| karpierz wrote:
| Your efficiency gains will just get eaten up by Jevon's
| Paradox[1] unless accompanied by a political solution.
|
| 1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
| agumonkey wrote:
| Unless culture marks overconsumption as bad
| Zababa wrote:
| White certificates are a good example of a political
| solution that directly stops this paradox:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_certificates
| jeff303 wrote:
| Perhaps parent commenter is referring to carbon capture or
| something similar?
| Robotbeat wrote:
| 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.
| epistasis wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| Robotbeat wrote:
| 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.
| oconnore wrote:
| 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.
| tinco wrote:
| 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.
| mbgerring wrote:
| > 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.
| tinco wrote:
| 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.
| mbgerring wrote:
| 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.
| tinco wrote:
| 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.
| JTbane wrote:
| 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.
| epicureanideal wrote:
| 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.
| tinco wrote:
| 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.
| Robotbeat wrote:
| 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.
| nawitus wrote:
| 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.
| Gravityloss wrote:
| 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.
| Robotbeat wrote:
| 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.
| bumby wrote:
| 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.
| Gravityloss wrote:
| There will be a driven kilometers based tax for electric
| vehicles, to finance road maintenance.
| epicureanideal wrote:
| 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...
| hpkuarg wrote:
| Exactly. Without engineering better technology, the only real
| solution to climate change is that everyone goes back to pre-
| Industrial Revolution living standards.
| splistud wrote:
| 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.
| crazynick4 wrote:
| 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.
| worik wrote:
| "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.
| epistasis wrote:
| 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.
| chickenpotpie wrote:
| Gonna need a citation on that one. Commuting doesn't hold a
| candle in CO2 production compared to industrial manufacturing
| and agriculture
| epistasis wrote:
| 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:
|
| CA (41% of emissions): https://ww2.arb.ca.gov/ghg-
| inventory-data
|
| US (29% of emissions, PDF page 3): https://www.epa.gov/site
| s/production/files/2021-04/documents...
|
| 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.
| chickenpotpie wrote:
| 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.
| epistasis wrote:
| 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:
|
| https://coolclimate.berkeley.edu/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.
| epistasis wrote:
| 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.
|
| [1] Fig 1C https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/fu
| ll/10.1029/201...
|
| [2] https://wits.worldbank.org/CountryProfile/en/Country/
| CHN/Yea...
| bumby wrote:
| 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.
|
| https://ourworldindata.org/emissions-by-sector
| epistasis wrote:
| Good questions!
|
| 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.
| bumby wrote:
| 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.
| jcims wrote:
| 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).
| carbonguy wrote:
| > 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?
| ttiurani wrote:
| Indeed this is not an engineering problem.
|
| 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.
| agumonkey wrote:
| One thing though, most material we need has been extracted
| already. New cars using old steel doesn't require more stress
| on the biosphere for metal.
| ttiurani wrote:
| 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.
| amelius wrote:
| > Climate Change is first and foremost a political problem.
|
| Politics can't deal with long-term non-greedy policies.
|
| Therefore, it's not a political problem.
| Spinnaker_ wrote:
| 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.
| beiller wrote:
| 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).
| sitkack wrote:
| > How is population growth a direct cause of climate change
|
| The carbon emitted is from human activity. More humans, more
| activity, more carbon.
| Pyramus wrote:
| 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.
| nojokes wrote:
| 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.
| programmarchy wrote:
| Here's another worldview: Politics is downstream from
| technology. Politicians are followers, not leaders.
| agumonkey wrote:
| Anybody managed to create or organize a group of people
| proactively changing their lives (energy use reduction, waste
| reduction, more reuse etc).
|
| If so how difficult would be to spread it a bit.
|
| I strongly believe that if you make just enough of these simple
| apolitical day to day groups, it will flip the rest due to
| follower effect
| thewarrior wrote:
| Lets go over the numbers shall we ?
|
| "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.
|
| [0] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8SIjlZQf28I - Vaclav Smil
|
| [1] - https://youtu.be/n_gvvj56rzw?t=2025
| stnmtn wrote:
| This is incredible sobering. What can we do in the face of
| this?
| ArkanExplorer wrote:
| The solutions to climate change are not technical, they are
| political.
|
| Call politicians, protest, raise funds, join a party, become
| a politician yourself.
|
| With just a $20 carbon tax we basically end coal, which is
| about 40% of our global emissions:
|
| https://www.resources.org/common-resources/calculating-
| vario...
|
| At $50 we end natural gas, at $100 we end oil.
| thewarrior wrote:
| There are some answers but you'd probably get downvoted in
| places like this for even suggesting them.
| elsonrodriguez wrote:
| It's not a story the Jedi would tell you.
| srajabi wrote:
| It's quite cost effective to do something like: https://en.wi
| kipedia.org/wiki/Stratospheric_aerosol_injectio...
|
| Or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marine_cloud_brightening
| FreeSpeech wrote:
| Realise our predictions are fallible:
| https://edition.cnn.com/2020/01/08/us/glaciers-national-
| park...
| Gravityloss wrote:
| Average world electricity consumption is about 3 TW or 3000
| average sized 1 GW nuclear power plants.
|
| One could build a hundred factories building 200 MW modular
| reactors, one per day each, meaning the problem is solved in...
| 150 days.
|
| It is indeed a large scale problem.
|
| One can still look at projects like the 20,000 B-24 Liberator
| bombers produced in USA during the second world war. That is a
| staggering achievement. https://www.airplanes-
| online.com/b24-liberator-production-as...
| glogla wrote:
| > "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.
| generativenoise wrote:
| The 3 per day per the article is for 1ZJ which is an
| estimate of total energy consumption, not just replacing
| the electrical grid.
| Manuel_D wrote:
| > "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.
| Tycho wrote:
| 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.
| louis___ wrote:
| 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.
| ganzuul wrote:
| 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.
| tcmart14 wrote:
| 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.
| gdubs wrote:
| 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.
| adreamingsoul wrote:
| Hi, I hope the heat wave resolves soon. I love the PNW and this
| type of event scares me.
| gdubs wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| makeworld wrote:
| > 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.
|
| Related: https://www.independent.co.uk/climate-
| change/news/climate-ch...
| rcMgD2BwE72F wrote:
| But do engineers actually care?
|
| 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.
|
| https://www.newyorker.com/cartoon/a16995 will remains d'actualite
| for quite some time.
| adreamingsoul wrote:
| Yes, I care, and not for the money.
| ncmncm wrote:
| 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 win technical win in the
| longer term, but any money diverted to that from energy storage
| would be a setback, just as would diverting money from solar and
| wind build-out in favor of nukes.
| temp00345 wrote:
| Well, engineers created the.. engines, which burn the fossil
| fuels and that led to climate change, no ?
| pksebben wrote:
| 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.
| rch wrote:
| 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.
| pksebben wrote:
| 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?
| my_usernam3 wrote:
| 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.
|
| Example: https://www.mckinsey.com/business-
| functions/strategy-and-cor...
| pksebben wrote:
| 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.)
| oconnore wrote:
| 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.
| cjohnson318 wrote:
| 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.
| jcims wrote:
| 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.
| OldHand2018 wrote:
| 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.
| meristohm wrote:
| 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.
| zip1234 wrote:
| 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.
| jcims wrote:
| 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.)
| lostapathy wrote:
| Would this still have the same impact it did in the 70's?
|
| Cars today are much more aerodynamic than they were 50 years
| ago. That almost certainly changes the "economics" of such a
| change drastically.
| cjohnson318 wrote:
| Yes, I think so.
|
| 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.
| imoverclocked wrote:
| I think cars are configured to be more efficient at higher than
| 50 mph these days.
| cjohnson318 wrote:
| 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).
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/environment/green-living-
| blog/20...
| airstrike wrote:
| This would never work for political / social reasons.
| meristohm wrote:
| What will it take to shift culture so that these solutions
| are adopted?
| JohnWhigham wrote:
| 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).
| zip1234 wrote:
| 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.
| cjohnson318 wrote:
| It worked in the seventies during the oil embargo.
| titzer wrote:
| 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.
| zip1234 wrote:
| 1. Most cars actually get worse mileage at higher speeds:
| Source: https://afdc.energy.gov/data/10312
|
| 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.
| cjohnson318 wrote:
| 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.
| titzer wrote:
| There is a difference, but it is not 40%. I am usually not
| in the habit of setting cruise for 55mph on the highway,
| but I suppose I can try :)
|
| Volvo V60, 4 cyl gasoline engine, 2016 model.
| cjohnson318 wrote:
| 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.
| jcims wrote:
| 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.
| asciident wrote:
| 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.
| cjohnson318 wrote:
| 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.
| jandrewrogers wrote:
| 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.
| cjohnson318 wrote:
| 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.
| jandrewrogers wrote:
| 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.
| cjohnson318 wrote:
| 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.
| twobitshifter wrote:
| 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.
| IgorPartola wrote:
| 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.
| ttt0 wrote:
| I think it's just a hip new buzzword, like "disrupt the nuclear
| family", "disrupt white supremacy" etc
| sokoloff wrote:
| 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.
| agentultra wrote:
| 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.
| jeffdn wrote:
| 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.
| seaorg wrote:
| 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.
| mjmahone17 wrote:
| 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.
| kmtrowbr wrote:
| 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.
|
| "The feasibility of using an L1 positioned dust cloud as a
| method of space-based geoengineering"
| https://pure.strath.ac.uk/ws/portalfiles/portal/12714106/Bew...
|
| > 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.
| LeifCarrotson wrote:
| > _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.
| slingnow wrote:
| 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.
| airstrike wrote:
| 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.
| malchow wrote:
| 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.
|
| [1] https://enphase.com/ [2]
| https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/ENPH?p=ENPH&.tsrc=fin-srch
| Syonyk wrote:
| > _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?).
| specialist wrote:
| Was there a nice way to make your point?
|
| "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 mInverter XT?"
| Syonyk wrote:
| 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._
| specialist wrote:
| I guess I was triggered by the tone, which initially felt
| ad hominen.
|
| > _I 'm interested in boosting solar._
|
| Ok, thanks. I think I get it. Me too.
|
| I definitely want to hear solutions (those Sunny Boy
| inverters and Tigo optimizers you mentioned). And legit
| criticisms are very useful.
|
| Peace.
| Syonyk wrote:
| 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.
|
| However, there's a tech note floating around that
| explains how to do it:
| https://www.stellavolta.com/blog/technical-note-sunny-
| boy-us...
|
| 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.
| johnjj257 wrote:
| What architecture are YOU building aren't you a lawyer?
|
| Consider using the royal we especially around the real
| architects
| api wrote:
| 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.
| npwr wrote:
| 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% ?
| claytoneast wrote:
| 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.
| npwr wrote:
| 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.
| kanzure wrote:
| You don't need to launch that much mass: "Self-deployed
| extremely large low mass space structures"
| https://diyhpl.us/~bryan/papers2/space/Self-
| deployed%20extre...
| LatteLazy wrote:
| 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
| (0.02 _0.99_ Pi*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.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagrange_point
|
| Maybe if we'd gotten into asteroid mining 100 years earlier...
| LatteLazy wrote:
| 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.
| mbgerring wrote:
| 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!
|
| [1] - https://www.genability.com/careers/ [2] -
| https://jobs.climatebase.org/jobs
| doitLP wrote:
| Looks like the LinkedIn job links have expired.
| [deleted]
| mbgerring wrote:
| Fixed, applications via LinkedIn are closed but we're happy
| to take applications by email.
| Syonyk wrote:
| 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.
| dang wrote:
| " _Please don 't fulminate._"
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
|
| 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.
|
| https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
| whatisthiseven wrote:
| > 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.
| agumonkey wrote:
| Good point, what is the top 3 energy user in computing ?
| Communication ? Replicated storage ? I guess bitcoin can be
| listed.
| Syonyk wrote:
| Go try and use the modern internet on a Pi4, with a CPU
| monitor up.
|
| It's definitely compute bound.
| mips_avatar wrote:
| 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.
| systematical wrote:
| I've been hopeful about this for a long time, mostly because I
| think its our only hope. There was a decent Nova episode on this
| last year: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/video/can-we-cool-the-
| planet/
|
| It gave me some doubt, but I'm still hopeful.
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