
How Much Do You Know About Solving Global Warming? - smb06
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/06/09/climate/drawdown-climate-solutions-quiz.html?_r=0
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vkou
This is feel-good non-sense, in that it ignores the elephants in the room.
It's the equivalent of micro-optimization trivia on Stack Overflow, when most
programs are bounded by Amdahl's Law.

People driving >20 miles a day for work/groceries/school, exponential economic
growth, and exponential demand for consumer goods are what's driving climate
change. Exponential population growth is, as well, but at least there's some
end in sight for it.

Whether or not you compost, or throw away your food isn't going to change much
- not to mention that most food waste is outside of my control.

For instance, I don't throw away 50% of the food I buy - it gets thrown away
by farmers, transport companies, and the grocery store long before it gets to
my table.

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sintaxi
Well put.

Likely best thing anyone can do for the environment right now is to vote for
politicians that want to balance the budget. Deficits are artificially
increasing consumption at the expense of our children's environmental and
financial future.

Furthermore, no one wants admit it but mass immigration is undeniably horrible
for the environment. Not only does consumption of each immigrant increase by a
factor of 20x by moving to a developed nation. It also drains 3rd world
countries from the ambitious people it needs to develop into a stable and
prosperous nation.

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vkou
The best thing we could do for the environment is to mandate a 20-hour working
week. Or, alternatively, a crippling carbon tax, with the proceeds spent on
carbon sequestration.

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maxxxxx
You could double up fuel taxes. That would make commutes shorter.

~~~
vkou
It won't, though. You still need to get to work, and there's still going to be
a shortage of housing near workplaces.

The number of office workers that can, and will opt to work remotely, because
they will spend an extra ~$3/day on commuting will be a drop in the bucket.

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philipkglass
_Which would have the bigger impact: encouraging more car-pooling, or the
reduced car emissions from electric vehicles?

Although the book only looks at ride-sharing in the United States and Canada,
it presumes pretty modest gains, so the benefits of car-pooling don’t even
come close to the emissions savings from electric cars._

With the benefit of hindsight the question is more clearly phrased as:

"Which would have the bigger impact: simply _asking_ people to do more car-
pooling, or _actually making_ the switch to electric vehicles from ICE
vehicles?"

The question sneakily turns out to be about what's (assumed) easier to get
people to do, not which action, undertaken on equal scale, has greater
benefits. (But then why are wind farms preferred over solar on a later
question, considering how much more frequently NIMBY opposition arises toward
wind farms?)

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RodericDay
Maybe it's just me, but I think this test avoids some questions I expected
there, and does so in a very contrived manner.

"Switch to Electric" is favorably compared to "Hitch a Ride", and then "Hop on
the Bus" is unfavorably compared to "Ships ahoy".

The overall impression I take is something like: "just wait and see, some guys
are working on hard engineering problems wrt ships and planes, you save for
your Tesla while eating plants and you'll be doing your part".

~~~
sp332
Relatively speaking, I think far more attention has been given to reducing
emissions from passenger cars than from shipping, even though it's a much
smaller source of CO2. So it's an interesting comparison.

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tgb
I think you're mistaken that passenger cars are the smaller part. I'm
struggling to find a clear source but pg 45 of this [1] shows passenger cars
as 50% of total transportation energy (including road freight and shipping, I
think) and page 35 projects passenger cars as 43%, compared to 8% for
shipping, of CO2 emissions in 2050. You might be mixing up CO2 emissions with
Sulfur emissions [2]

[1]
[https://www.iea.org/publications/freepublications/publicatio...](https://www.iea.org/publications/freepublications/publication/transport2009.pdf)
[2] [https://www.quora.com/Is-it-true-that-the-15-biggest-
ships-i...](https://www.quora.com/Is-it-true-that-the-15-biggest-ships-in-the-
world-produce-more-pollution-than-all-the-cars)

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jpttsn
Great practice if you're making day-to-day decisions for hundreds of thousands
of households!

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sp332
I didn't realize onshore wind was going to be bigger than solar. I wish they
had some references.

~~~
sintaxi
Solar farms are an anti-pattern. Solar will be much larger than wind because
it makes the grid obsolete, doesn't require employees maintain, and has no
moving parts. Solar (both active and passive) is king IMHO.

~~~
lovemenot
Not sure what you mean by active / passive solar.

There are some economies of scale, even for photovoltaics, so calling PV solar
farms an anti-pattern is extreme. Then there's concentrated solar thermal,
which has extremely strong scale merit and therefore requires farm-scale to be
cost-effective.

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moxious
The sheer number of changes required, and their impact relative to the problem
suggests to me the inevitability of serious consequences. I think I may be
more interested in investing in technologies that help people cope with the
coming changes. Seems more practical than investing in technologies that
invite people to spend more of their money to avoid a tragedy of the commons.

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jbattle
A lot of these feel like trick questions. Which offers more bang for the buck:
improving airplane efficiency, or building a global network of high-speed
rail?

It matters a lot how much we are improving efficiency, and how complete the
"global network of high speed rail" is.

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SirLJ
A teleport will fix this...

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AnimalMuppet
Depends on the energy required to run it.

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Terr_
Long before you use it for people, teleportation would unlock other
capabilities and efficiencies. For example, consider what would happen for
nuclear power replacing fossil fuels if we could safely teleport nuclear waste
to a sealed cavern on the moon.

It's a relatively small payload (compared to transporting humans and goods)
and you don't really care if an imperfect teleporting process only allows you
to squeeze it through as a stream of molecular toothpaste.

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thisrod
This list ducks the most important question: "Is it possible to reduce
greenhouse gas emissions without everyone on Earth mastering every technical
detail of modern industry?"

The answer is, of course, yes.

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netcan
I'm guessing that these are contentious to some degree, or at least need
context. I think this format would work better if it made the case for the
right answer, or against your answer.

~~~
Jtsummers
It's an advertisement for a book, here's the list of scenarios they've
evaluated with some more information on each of them:

[http://www.drawdown.org/solutions](http://www.drawdown.org/solutions)

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bwindels
This list assumes, of course, that we don't want to change our lifestyle. I
don't see innovation and optimization alone keeping us below 2C.

