
What can a technologist do about climate change? (2015) - saadalem
http://worrydream.com/#!/ClimateChange
======
pjc50
> "The rest of this is more like retooling for World War II, except with
> everyone playing on the same team."

No, it isn't. They key problem is that it is absolutely not the case that
everyone is on the same team. Beyond the usual international division and
bickering, there are people profiting from high-CO2 industries who oppose
change and promote denialism, people who aren't interested in solving the
problem because they believe the consequences will land on other people, as
well as a huge hinterland of conspiracists, denialists, and fake news vendors
who just muddy the waters for whatever reason.

Covid-19 has highlighted all of these very sharply. There are countries which
have decided to do what's necessary to fight the virus on one hand, and
protestors making it very clear that they will not accept someone else's risk
of death for a restriction on their liberties.

~~~
adrianN
Yeah we can't even get people to wear a mask in public when it literally saves
lives today. Good luck convincing everyone of the massive changes needed for
climate change where the worst consequences won't appear for decades to come.

~~~
Trasmatta
Are people actually not wearing masks? When I go to the grocery store 90% of
people are wearing masks, and I live in a conservative state where it's not a
requirement.

~~~
adrianN
It depends strongly on which supermarket I go to. In the expensive supermarket
almost everybody wears one, in the cheap supermarket it's only about 50% who
wear one.

------
mtbch
Technology? Take a step back for the big picture.

GDP growth cannot be decoupled from greenhouse gas emission growth. Even tech
services require building and running an infrastructure to back them up. The
contribution of the sector to greenhouse gas emissions is non-trivial and
increasing.

Continuing on a growth path inevitably leads us to total failure.

Unless we can manage degrowth for an extended period of time, we're done.

This is of course heresy and cannot even be discussed.

I know what you're thinking and no, there is simply not enough time left to
implement a technical solution and/or decouple growth&energy, sorry.

Meanwhile - pr babble and CV19 pause aside - we as a species are ramping up
fossil fuel extraction and getting ready to exploit the thawing arctic. I
don't have to single out a nation or an energy company, because it's all of
them. See investor letters and fossil market outlook communications.

We all must do everything we can to buy more time - but at this point in time
technology can only be a plaster on gangrene.

Force policy change and force economists to come up with a new economic model.
And force yourself to accept a cut in your standard of living.

Do you see it ever happening?

~~~
at_a_remove
I'll take a step even further back.

Before economic growth we have population growth, and what you might call
"standard of living growth." Even as the population growth eventually slows,
Hollywood and such has been very busy exporting the vision of the American
dream to people who now want cars and iPhones. If we waved our magic wand and
froze the population at some number, that still won't stop people wanting to
-- even demanding to -- live like people in first world countries.

I think we're well beyond our carrying capacity already, and it's even worse
if you factor in trying to extend a first world lifestyle to everyone alive.

~~~
jjoonathan
People have been predicting that the world was near carrying capacity since
literal antiquity, and probably before. These predictions have an extremely
poor track record.

------
ericvanular
Join the community at [https://collective.energy](https://collective.energy)
or find a job at [https://enviro.work](https://enviro.work) working to help
the environment! (disclaimer: I'm the founder)

------
econcon
I am recycling plastic into 3d printing filament with my home brewed machine:

[https://medium.com/endless-filament/make-your-filament-at-
ho...](https://medium.com/endless-filament/make-your-filament-at-home-for-
cheap-6c908bb09922)

Anyone who needs help building one for their community can reach out to me.

Plastic usually degrades when recycled, it loses its properties like strength.
But 3d printing is a good area where recycled plastic can be used as lots of
people use it for printing a show piece with artistic value, not for high
stenght tasks.

~~~
_Microft
Thanks for sharing, very nice!

Average power is 3kW for the setup producing 5kg per hour from what I
understand. How much power is used for the electrical heating elements? Beside
insulation, could waste-heat from cooling the filament be re-used to reduce
power consumption, e.g. by using it to pre-heat the pellets in the funnel that
feeds the machine (I'm aware that the phase transition will (most likely)
require a lot more energy than heating the material to its melting point).

PS: the video was reversed, right?

~~~
econcon
300w*3 power usage is below 3kW.

It's in this article:

“Building Filament Extruder” [https://medium.com/endless-filament/building-
filament-extrud...](https://medium.com/endless-filament/building-filament-
extruder-9cad8df7d357)

I didn't accurately measure it. My way of measurement is simply to run the
extruder use current rating from clamp meter and multiply that by line
voltage. So I guess the power usage goes down once heater reach target
temperature. It's by no means accurate, only guarantee there is that the power
usage will be below 3kilowatt.

Unfortunately I don't have good meter, the ones I order from AliExpress didn't
arrive yet due to Coronavirus lockdown issues.

>Beside insulation, could waste-heat from cooling the filament

I've no idea. I've a water bath which in which there is a motor which simply
moves the water from bucket into the bath then back the bucket.

>PS: the video was reversed, right?

No, the filament goes behind the spool so it appears as if the spool is
unwinding.

------
Glench
As a chaser to this article, the technologist Saul Griffith at Otherlab has
been consulting with presidential candidates and has a pretty strong case for
optimism, provided we take massive coordinated action right now:

"Decarbonizing with massive electrification will bring about a new American
abundance.": [https://medium.com/otherlab-news/decarbonization-and-
gnd-b8d...](https://medium.com/otherlab-news/decarbonization-and-
gnd-b8ddd569de16)

"How do we decarbonize? We don’t need a miracle. Everything we need to solve
climate change is already here.": [https://medium.com/otherlab-news/how-do-we-
decarbonize-7fc2f...](https://medium.com/otherlab-news/how-do-we-
decarbonize-7fc2fa84e887) Solar and wind have already won the market.

And his upcoming book, "In Climate Emergency Break Glass" has the first 3
chapters available for download free:
[https://www.breakglassbook.com/](https://www.breakglassbook.com/)

------
VBprogrammer
I was having a conversation with a friend before lock down and she was saying
that her and her partner have consciously decided to avoid flying. I pointed
out that, while certainly agree it's a good thing to do, by not flying at the
individual level you are only reducing the cost of flying at the margin. Where
as regulatory and technical changes could change the impact across the whole
industry.

------
goatinaboat
Easy. Focus on the electrical power needed to run your computation. CPU
seconds are a good proxy for this. Webdevs can make enormous contributions
here by cutting the megabytes of JavaScript they include in the simplest web
pages that are only a few K of useful content. The data centre industry emits
more CO2 than aviation so backend devs have a role to play too.

------
Rochus
Interesting page, but quite extensive and not particularly easy to read.

For developers who are interested in recommendations by scientists how they
can personally make an effective contribution, here are two interesting
publications:

[https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aa7541](https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aa7541)
(the most effective individual actions)

[https://www.researchgate.net/publication/320436353_Energy_ef...](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/320436353_Energy_efficiency_across_programming_languages_how_do_energy_time_and_memory_relate)
(energy efficiency across programming languages)

------
schmudde
> How do we get public perception and public discussion of energy and climate
> centered around evidence-grounded models, instead of tips, soundbites,
> factoids, and emotional rhetoric?

> Furthermore, the point of embedding a model is that the reader can explore
> scenarios within the context of the document. This requires tools for
> authoring “dynamic documents” — documents whose contents change as the
> reader explores the model.

I've long-appreciated Victor's perspective in this article. But the general
public understands very little about how models work and what they promise.
I've seen little evidence that making them explorable in the New York Times
has done much to move the public (and thus lawmakers) in the United States to
move on gun violence or climate change.

Technologists can build better tools for storytellers and whistle-blowers.
This mostly involves facilitating the disclosure, formatting (cleaning), and
analysis of data.

------
ehnto
Get involved in policy making.

~~~
epistasis
Yes, that or just plain politics, which is what will enable policy.

I recently watched this talk by Dan Kamman to the Northern Ca MIT club, and
though his background is all technical, he argues that we need far more
political action now:

[https://youtu.be/fmzfRTzN8Rk](https://youtu.be/fmzfRTzN8Rk)

------
VieEnCode
I can also suggest joining the community/Slack channels at:
[https://climateaction.tech/](https://climateaction.tech/)

------
jjoonathan
Build a gigantic floating barge in the middle of the pacific that uses
obscenely large nuclear reactors to power direct carbon capture / fuel
production and then sell the fuel to become the next petro power.

~~~
Valgrim
Well, if you produce fuel with the carbon you capture you still release it
into the atmosphere, so there's no benefit there. Plus you have to add the
carbon and the cost of developing/manufacturing/operating your insanely large
nuclear reactor (including mining the uranium), you still have to transport
your fuel around the world, and now you have to deal with nuclear waste,
proliferation issues, vulnerability to attacks and environmental catastrophes.

On the scale of bad solutions from 1 to 10, this probably reach 11.

~~~
jjoonathan
> Well, if you produce fuel with the carbon you capture you still release it
> into the atmosphere, so there's no benefit there.

It's just like EVs in that regard.

Unlike EVs, it ramps DCC tech to industrial scale, making it dirt cheap to go
carbon negative if we can ever work up the political will.

> Plus you have to add the carbon and the cost of
> developing/manufacturing/operating your insanely large nuclear reactor
> (including mining the uranium)

Whether you're building a nuclear plant or a wind mill, either way you build a
gigantic edifice of steel and concrete, but if it's a wind mill it will power
a neighborhood some of the time and if it's a nuclear plant it will power a
city, a large one, all of the time.

> On the scale of bad solutions from 1 to 10, this probably reach 11.

20% of our power already comes from nuclear. Solar only broke 1% in the last
year or two. If we hadn't stopped deploying nuclear in the 80s, our energy
would be roughly carbon neutral _today_. Not 50 years from now, _today_.

Instead, we pumped the atmosphere full of CO2 for 40 years (optimistically, 60
by the time solar is deployed), waiting for solar to become economical, all
while we had a perfectly workable solution in hand that self-styled
environmentalists effectively torpedoed.

On the scale of bad solutions from 1 to 10, _that_ probably reaches 11.

~~~
Valgrim
I fail to grasp how EV are "just like" releasing captured carbon in the
atmosphere. Sure, building them has a carbon footprint, but so does an ICE
vehicle, and over it's lifecycle an EV release a fraction of the carbon of a
traditional car.

In any case the best solution to transport-related carbon release is not to
simply replace ICE vehicles by EV, it's to reduce car and plane usage
massively, and promote walking, bicycling, public transport, remote working
and shared rides.

Wind mills and solar farms are built today much faster and at a cheaper price
and carbon emissions than nuclear stations. We are not 50 years ago, we are
now. Combined with existing hydroelectric dams, which act as giant batteries,
and other forms of utility scale power storage (actual batteries), existing
renewable energy grids have proven to be just as dependable as other sources
of energy.

I'm not fundamentally opposed to nuclear either. Give me a secure design that
can be built in less than 10 years, with reasonable costs, that private
insurers will accept to cover, with proper waste management and control of
nuclear proliferation, total operating transparency, that is actually possible
to dismantle at the end of it's lifecycle, and a strong risk mitigation plan
in case of external events (earthquake, floods, droughts, bombing), and I'll
say sure, bring it on.

In the meantime blaming environmentalism for climate change is a bit far-
fetched. Nuclear energy has been effectively torpedoed by itself, due to bad
management, the fossil fuel industry and spiraling costs, much more than
environmentalists (is there any place in the world where Greens have
significant political power?)

The bad solution I was referring to is about building a giant barge loaded
with nuclear stations in the middle of the Pacific ocean capturing atmospheric
CO2 in order to convert it into fuel that is going to be released in the
atmosphere again a few days later. Let's just say there's fundamental
inefficiencies in that plan.

------
Ericson2314
Dig subway tunnels under major cities without permission.

~~~
Ericson2314
Where the stations go can still be decided democratically after the fact.

