Reading this article makes me feel very angry, especially as I look at the authors' background.
There are so many things we can do, and these people are telling us that "the winner" is driving brand new fuel efficient cars, hot off the assembly line? What about biking? Walking? What about changing our habits so as not to rely as much on cars in the first place. How about not driving? There are people who don't drive at all, you could become one of them. What would it take?
How about some gardening? Plant a raspberry bush or a tree. If everyone planted a tree, do you know how many trees that would be? Billions of new trees. It wouldn't be very difficult. It would be much more affordable than buying a brand new electric vehicle.
Starting to bike doesn't solve climate change problems.
Not sure how you would plant a raspberry tree in a New York apartment.
There is very little the normal person can do about climate change without radically changing the way they live their lives and thats just not an option for most people.
Forgive me for the forthcoming rant, this is not a slight at you, but I really dislike the kind of attitude that you are projecting here. Al Gore famously said in his documentary that a lot of people go from Denial to Despair without pausing at the middle step of Doing Something about it.
Biking definitely can solve climate change. Seems to me that people simply do not get it through their heads that climate change starts with what they expect out of life. As long as everyone wants to drive an SUV or a fucking pickup truck because it is "safe", live 25 miles from work, own a new smartphone every two years, have a perfectly manicured front and back yard etc., we are all fucked. For too many people, climate change is a "their" problem:
* Wind turbines? Sure, just not in my backyard because it spoils my fucking view.
* Nuclear reactors? Hmm, maybe, but definitely not in my state, and preferably not in my country.
* Not travelling to exotic locations every holiday, and instead going on local hikes a bit more? No way!
* Give up owning a new smartphone every two years? Dead on Arrival.
* Wearing a sweater indoors in the winter instead of constant 25 deg C temperature indoors and 20 minute hot showers? Go fuck yourself. No, but look! I installed a Nest thermostat, so the do-gooder halo around my head is glowing bright!
* Biking to work? I can't! Live too far from home this and sweaty at work that.
Nothing but excuses. And wait! Is this uber-consumeristic lifestyle making me happier? No?! How is that possible?
Climate change is NOT a problem that more technology can solve. It is a sociological problem. A problem of what people expect out of life. As long as people keep thinking it's the politicians at fault and they don't owe anyone a damn thing, well, we'll keep on keeping on with business as usual. And you know what business as usual is? We haven't even started decreasing the rate of CO2 increase, what to talk of a zero emission civilization.
Sorry this is incoherent and comes across as a jab at you. It's not. It's just me expressing my frustration as an engineer. I hate that the layperson is convinced that it is engineering that will solve climate change, and That Technology to cure us of all ails is just around the corner. It's not. We need to stop fucking raiding this planet.
I don't know anyone that wants to live 25 miles from work. But almost everyone I know cannot afford to live closer and wants to. I'd love to live in the city. Too bad it's completely unaffordable, even at 3x the median income. This particular solution you have provided is also a solution only the upper class can employ, just like the one in the article. Wind turbines and nuclear reactors: now we're finally getting somewhere. And to build those, you need politicians that are willing to propose and fund them. I'm all for wearing sweaters indoors and only buying phones when the planned obsolescence of modern software makes them unusable (3-5 yrs), but that's an insignificant drop in the bucket. You will never get enough people to adopt such actions without legislation.
I disagree that this is an avenue open only to the upper class [1]. Not everyone can do everything, sure (if you're working two jobs, for example, the climate can rightly go fuck itself) but a lot of people can do a lot more.
I also disagree that they are insignificant drops in the bucket. The point I'm trying to make is that "culture" is infuriatingly hand-wavy and difficult to quantify, but it matters. As an example, I live in Geneva. Here, all shops close at 7 PM. This means that there less commercial activity past those hours, fewer people mindlessly roaming around in malls etc. Now, surely there are regulations guiding this too, but any government official wanting to undo this because "muh freedom", will be laughed out of the room because there is a culture here that treats this as deeply important.
That over $1700 price is a negative externality of home-as-investment culture and racist downzoning. There is no natural law that says the 2 bed/2 bath apartment has to be so expensive.
What about Brooklyn or somewhere else commutable by PT or cycle?
Do you really need two bedrooms - and two bathrooms?
What space can you really live in?
none of that have any effect on climate change what so ever. you need to effect the industry to have any impact and thats not going to happen enough to have any effect.
I downvoted this comment. Why? Not because I think you're a bad person or something. Contrary, I think it's fucking awesome that we are on here having this conversation, and I think it's very important. Props on that. That wasn't why I downvoted it. The downvote was a way for me to say "I don't have energy right now to go back and forth like this, maybe if I press this button this person will take a step back and think about their attitude as a whole."
Okay, now I've eaten dinner and had some coffee. So what was my gripe with your comment?
1) It makes a strong, absolute claim with no evidence. Have you studied nonlinear systems? Even informally? We're dealing with hugely non-linear systems. Little things can compound into tumultuous waves. Look at the way viral memes spread. Culture changes in tumultuous waves. One generation might be hopelessly lost, while the next one comes in with unbelievable clarity, saying "that's just obvious."
2) It's implicitly discouraging of other peoples' perspectives and wisdoms. Imagine some great singer had let their irritable aunt or uncle's mean comments get to them when they were little and couldn't quite keep a pitch. We are learning, and there are without a doubt many, many ways to approach and tackle this. If anything, tackling something so ominously looming is going to take some serious imagination, vision and hope. You might not be hateful, but one doesn't need to be hateful or malicious to be discouraging or to play the part of hater.
3) Culture has, can, does, and will affect industry. Maybe not overnight, but they are inevitably interdependent. We have the power to engage with norms and at the very least set examples. We have the power to abstain, to moderate, to make demands, to dream, to actualize, on short and long term scales. In another comment, you pointed out that people are not systems, they are human beings. To me, that's actually a strength. It makes this struggle messier, but to me it's also an asset. It means that we have the ability to undergo rebirth in imagination and culture, which in the long haul makes us resilient and adaptable.
So basically even though you cant back your own claims up with any substantial evidence you decided to downvote me because you dont like what i said. The irony.
thats ok i can take it but what you dont seem to get is that we are humans not systems and thus wont be making the changes any other way than through technology.
you are basically asking humans not to be human which i believe is a common engineering blind spot :)
Yeah, you're right of course. Any solution requiring humans to change at large scales through raw appeals to emotion is itself Dead on Arrival.
This is where I'm really happy that the cult of mustachianism[1] is spreading as virally as it is. More people than anyone could ever have imagined, up and down the economic spectrum and up and down the Cost Of Living spectrum, are banding together to save money, and by extension, reducing their carbon footprint.
It's getting big enough that I get the feeling that the new status signifier is (slowly/glacially) becoming being able to live without excess. This is great because it will slowly shift the goalposts of what people aspire to.
i think you are a victim of a little wishful thinking here. with around a billion people getting into the middle class you are going to see one thing only and that is an increase in resource usage. the normal populations usage is not the problem but the industry that support their consumption.
you arent seeing humans change, you are seeing technology allowing for other types of living but any actual effect on climate they wont have.
i dont think i am. humans have mostly changed because technology allowed them to. its those large progresses which gave us new opportunities to change.
Edit: why the down vote? care to qualify rather than going trough all my comments you dont like and downvote them whoever you are?
I did not downvote you, but I can point out that your focus on technology as the single most important factor in human behavior change may be oversimplistic.
I know that sometimes I downvote as a way of saying "dude, come on, will you please just look outside yourself for one second!" Or because I'm tired and frustrated about something that means a lot to me, but somebody is approaching it in a polemical or absolute style.
Then we will sooner or later loose. It is true that this time we might avoid disaster (it will be very rough whatever we do from now on) with the help of technology. But that is just luck that there is a technology available to help us. In a slightly different world, solar would never be cheap enough or good enough to provide energy in a sustainable way. And this is true for many other aspects, tragedy of the commons is hundreds of years old.
The fact is we need regulations and incentives to do the right thing.
i am unconvinced regulation will help. i still find it quite telling that the biggest drop in US co2 emission was because of fracking not anything the otherwise very progressive obama adminstartion.
just becuase its luck and we dont lime that doesn't mean regulation will work, thats simply the wrong way to think about this.
Well the person in New York has the luxury of decent public transportation.
And the person who needs to drive, presumably they live in a suburb or a place with a yard, and they could plant 10 raspberry bushes.
Come on! Enough with the excuses! It's getting me down!
I'm not saying that people should go and sabotage themselves. I'm saying that there are lots of different things that different people can do to upset this situation.
A big one for me is not buying new if at all possible. That goes for computers, cell phones, cars, clothes, etc.
There are many other reasons why people need to drive than them working in the suburbs and globally even more reasons why biking in a city is far from enough (Just look at some Chinese cities)
The thing is that if you really were to change your life for it to have an effect we wouldn't do it. Just the threat to reliable food supply is enough to make most people accept things as they are.
There are two things you can do which are the only rational things to do.
1) Invent non-polluting, technical solutions that either produce, at scale, enough energy to replace existing solutions and which are easy to implement
2) Prepare for the consequence of climate change and find solutions to help that.
Thats what you can do. Shouting on FB, Twitter or HN doesn't help anyone.
"There are two things you can do which are the only rational things to do."
I think those are the two things that you can rationally do! But not everyone is you. I think that your focus on technical and engineering solutions is actually a "one finger points three point back" kind of situation. I think that you are probably capable in those solutions, and I encourage you to take them as strengths, not as the only solutions possible.
Here's an example, one that comes to mind, of another skillset that's going to be valuable in times to come: mediation. I live in Minnesota, where it's very cold in the winter (gets down to -30 to -40 F) and very hot in the summer (gets up to 100 to 105 F of humid heat every year). I see the effects of heat. People get violent, impatient, antsy. Stuff comes out. Pots boil over. There are is quality research into these correlations (http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/01/opinion/sunday/weather-and...), so it's not just anecdotal. When times get hot around here, what we need is conversation, patience, spiritual introspection, therapies, caring people. We are going to need people with good leadership, with soft skills, who have the ability to motivate people, to guide people out of conflict, to model what's possible. Artists, parents, teachers, even just plain old solid friends who hold people together.
Okay, I'm not arguing that these are "the solutions to climate change". What I'm arguing is that they are necessary pieces of the puzzle!
"The thing is that if you really were to change your life for it to have an effect we wouldn't do it. Just the threat to reliable food supply is enough to make most people accept things as they are."
I've seen people change so drastically over the course of one lifetime, because they had to in order to survive. I've seen my religiously conservative people close to me go from being homophobic and anti-drug to being open minded and hearted. I've seen my somebody go from seriously flailing (with chronic substance issues, suicidal thoughts, body image struggles, etc) to being one of the most kick ass moms I know in 1 year flat. Don't underestimate! "When the spirit says move, move". And people will move.
P.S. I'm planning on building a web app to help people do interactively plan companion planting and permaculture gardens. If you're interested I'll let you know when I put up the source. I'll probably post it on here either way.
No i cant even do any of that and thats the point.
Instead of lulling people into the believe that human culture on its own can change things perhaps the time was better spent on the things that actually help. You havent provided anything but an emotional argument that culture can solve this, nor is there any evidence in history which points to this.
Technological progress brought us in this situation, technological progress can get us out of it.
The problem is not the individual consumer but the whole system that supports them and that wont be going anywhere as most people dont have the luxury of spending time planting or meditating.
Anecdotes on people changing is not anything but a great story. Of course people change but your argument need them to change in exactly the same way which is exactly the wrong way to understand humans. We aren't rational agents.
Couldn't agree more. I cycle 30 km every day to work and back. When I was a student, I cycled 40km every to Uni and back. You just have to get used to it.
While I own a car, I use it maybe only once per month. To get some wood or transport some things from the IKEA.
I have to admit, I live in Amsterdam, so the infrastructure for cycling is great.
Not driving is always an option. What if fuel cost $10,000 a gallon? Would you still drive? No, you'd figure something else out. You would convince your boss to let you telecommute, you'd take the train, bike or walk. Or you would find another job.
thats the thing though fuel would never be regulated to cost $10k a gallon the economy would get killed along with the political careers of those who voted it through.
Cars are not optional for most people. They dont just buy them for fun, especially not in china, india and large part of europe. So the answer is no its not worth the cost.
2) Go vegetarian. (Avoid beef if you can't and eat meat less).
3) Stop buying stuff.
4) Repair not replace.
5) Move to an urban environment.
6) Consider going car free. (Walk, Bike, Public Transport, Car clubs).
7) Stop flying.
8) Avoid plastic packaging, or at least any product in packaging that cannot be locally recycled. (Here in the UK I have no idea why we allow food to be supplied in black plastic which most councils do not recycle).
9) If you have to have children, just have one. Choose schools they can walk/bike to.
10) Insulate (cheap) and solar (expensive) your home.
The thing many people here don't realize is that they can make real money fighting climate change. See my other comment in this thread for links to the major conferences with lists of cleantech companies that are hiring.
This list should be called "things upper-middle class people can do about climate change." It's all good advice, but so few people can do these things. Either the cost, time, or economic reality stand in the way of productive solutions. Because of this, climate change is an international political problem, one that will require so many unpopular solutions that I'm extremely pessimistic about the outcome.
I haven't seen many politicians campaigning for nuclear power, and you can't deal with CO2 emissions without that (base load problem, etc), so that's pretty hard to do.
First step is just agreeing there is a problem and put it on top of the agenda though. Politicians are supposed to set goals and find incentives; the "how" part (batteries vs. hydro vs. new tech for power storage vs. nuclear) can be more up to the market. A politician who is scared of climate change will at least be easier to convince to approve a new nuclear plant in (relative) silence even if they are not actively campaigning on it as a solution. And properly taxing emissions will make nuclear plants more competitive, again without a politician having to explicitly aim for it or campaign for it.
Are you serious? If I go and buy an acre of land (or many acres, more likely) and grow my own food, keep a few animals, and trade with my neighbours, how the hell does "move to an urban environment" make me suddenly more efficient? So I can rely on the supply chain to get all the goods that I could get by walking down the street to another farm?
IF you can buy an acre, please definitely do so. That will do more to help than almost anything else. On the other hand, the typical 2.5 kid family in Suburbia that drives even to the grocery store? They're better off moving to the city.
That's also an option, but most people living outside core urban areas don't do that, and adopting such a lifestyle probably is the harder choice for many.
Instead, they drive a lot, because everything (stores, work) is far away, and the infrastructure created for them is relatively inefficient. Very few people and regions are supplied locally, and not by large-scale, large-distance supply chains, rural or urban.
I would be quite surprised if growing your own food at small scale is more environmentally friendly than living in an urban area and consuming food that was produced and transported at massive scale.
Depends on what kind of growing your doing. There are a lot of agriculture styles that use very little resources and are economically affordable. If you're doing row-style monoculture, then you really can't compete with those economies of scale (and subsidies). But permaculture has huge yields for the amount of input it requires. Cultivating fruit trees and perennials in a plant "guild" can produce resilient, long term food sources with little upkeep. You could easily grow enough food for yourself on an acre.
Because there's not 7.5 billion acres of arable land that's also got good, stable water access.
Also, because someone living in a major city produces dramatically less carbon due to economies of scale, and your idea would result in an incredibly low density, offsetting any gains to food shipping cost.
Regarding 9), if you're reading this you should have as many children as possible. Your high-IQ genes will be passed on to them; only the intelligent of the next generation will have the foresight and technical ability to develop real (technological) solutions to environmental problems.
It's pretty well-demonstrated that the moralistic approach to climate change, where you harangue people into recycling or biking or whatever, doesn't work. It's just trimming around the edges, leaving the core 95% of the problem untouched. People won't give up their lifestyles, and in the case of poor third-worlders it's hard to ask them to do that anyway.
If climate change is stopped, it'll be by technological solutions.
There's <10% of the world population who will be endowed with the genetic gifts to participate in this process of technical solution-making. Your kids will be among them. Make some kids.
> A study (1999) by Capron and Duyme of French children adopted between the ages of four and six examined the influence of socioeconomic status (SES). The children's IQs initially averaged 77, putting them near retardation. Most were abused or neglected as infants, then shunted from one foster home or institution to the next. Nine years later after adoption, when they were on average 14 years old, they retook the IQ tests, and all of them did better. The amount they improved was directly related to the adopting family's socioeconomic status. "Children adopted by farmers and laborers had average IQ scores of 85.5; those placed with middle-class families had average scores of 92. The average IQ scores of youngsters placed in well-to-do homes climbed more than 20 points, to 98."
This demonstrates quite clearly that high socioeconomic status causes high IQ scores, not the other way around.
Your other source is the Pumpkin Person who's blog is titled "The psychology of horror" and writes about horror movies. Does not appear credible.
That results indicates that if you take children and go from "abused or neglected as infants, then shunted from one foster home or institution to the next" to a stable adopted family home, you can increase IQ scores.
Which is pretty obvious. There is always an amount of abuse that will destroy someone's IQ. Bringing them back to a decent middle-class upbringing will restore them to their baseline.
But once that baseline is achieved, evidence is that it can't generally be improved. One can learn skills and knowledge but IQ is stable. Above lower-middle class American abuse-free households, increases in SES don't affect IQ.
E.g. People have inherent talent at sprinting. Malnutrition or abuse can destroy this talent. But once people have decent upbringing, and try hard, and have support, what determines the champion is genetics. Which is why pretty much all champion sprinters have west African ancestry (since they have inherited traits that make them good sprinters).
EDIT: Here's a source for you on IQ heritability: American Psychological Association’s Task Force on Intelligence report.
“If one simply combines all available correlations in a single analysis, the heritability (h2) works out to about .50 and the between-family variance (c2) to about .25.” And “By late adolescence h2 is around .75 and c2 is quite low (zero in some studies).” (p. 85).
In the case of the foster children, they initially scored low on IQ test but once placed in a better environment their scores went up significantly. This demonstrates that environment can have a huge effect on IQ scores and casts doubt on tests which claim that a correlation between IQ and family members implies IQ is mostly a result of genetics. Since family members generally live in similar environments their similar IQ scores can be explained by environment. It is even plausible that IQ score is mostly a result of environment.
Now, I can not prove that to be the case but it is far from settled that better genes = better IQ = better socioeconomic status. That reasoning implies that people in third world countries are poor because they are stupid which I just don't believe, partly because I've actually been to some of those countries.
Anyway, I sometimes think it's quite funny how my own lifestyle is so much more green than the average "green" person. I don't have children, I don't own or drive a car, I only use public transporation, 99% of which runs on electricity. I'm vegan, I haven't been on an airplane for like maybe 4 or 5 years. I live in a modern, energy efficient and small apartment. I buy "100% renewable electricity" in a new, energy efficient "smart city neighbourhood". And of course I recycle.
Yet I haven't really tried to be more green, these circumstances have just happened naturally.
I tried to research this a while ago, and I think the numbers work out to say that going from a "standard" American omnivorous diet to a "standard" American vegetarian diet corresponds to a CO2 emissions reduction equivalent a one-way NY-SF flight or drive. Going from that to the a vegan diet is about equivalent to avoiding the return flight or drive.
So if you've already avoided having children, and already avoid flying and driving, then going vegan is probably one of the best things you can personally do to reduce your CO2 emissions. But if you haven't yet done those things, changing your diet, while a step in the right direction, may not be enough to effect a major reduction in your emissions.
(Sorry for lack of references --- I'll add them up if I can find them again. They were surprisingly hard to find the first time. Corrections appreciated if I've misremembered the figures.)
Actually, I'm pretty sure vegans need many energy-intensive or non-local complements or alternatives to simple, local animal products providing essential nutrients like eggs or butter (avocado, or almonds for instance, are almost everywhere terrible from an environmental point of view). Vegetarian is certainly better for the planet; vegan is probably hardly better if not worse.
For instance having a couple of hens in your backyard may be exploitative in your book, but it provides a rich, free source of food (several hundred eggs every year), while consuming all of your food remains, vegetables peels, rotten fruits etc. in the most efficient way imaginable. And the hens would be perfectly happy and not harmed in any way, as long as they have reasonable space with some grass and a bush to peck around.
Wait, are you saying that "having a couple of hens in your backyard" is similar to buying eggs from the grocery store? Because the typical vegetarian eating eggs doesn't get them from hens in their backyard.
The vegans I know call one bad and the other worse. However, the point that I was getting at is that you're recommending that people be vegetarians instead of vegans because of the environmental efficiency of feeding chickens scraps in the backyard, but almost everyone doesn't have a backyard, or chickens.
Unfortunately this is a deep political problem I don't feel like treating in a HN comment box :)
I'd simply say that I think that we need to reorganize our world at a simpler scale, build smaller communities, sharing more local resources (like backyards and chickens and potato plots), step back on globalisation, reduce our consumption and environmental footprint, reduce division of labour, share work more, ...
Which is why I always prefer working on technology to working on culture. With right technological landscape, people can become "green" by just doing what they always do. Trying to change human behaviour directly is a bit like asking water to start flowing uphill on its own.
Since many people on HN live in California. The single greatest thing you can do if you live in be an advocate for building more housing in California, especially in locations with public transportation. California has low heating and cooling costs, and existing public transportation networks that can be extended.
I wonder how much the difference in residential heating/cooling really matters.
For example, I looked at natural gas consumption, in Texas industrial use is off the charts, residential is reasonably in line with California (on a per capita basis).
Of course that is only enough to say that it is necessary to take a closer look, by the time everything is added up it could well be that living in California is substantially better.
I have chosen to not have children. Environment concerns was not the only factor, but a significant one. I suspect that this choice is far better for the environment then anything listed in that article.
I'd say for most people, abstaining from having children would rank as a much bigger sacrifice than switching to a fuel efficient car though. I suspect you didn't particularly want to have kids in the first place.
It still makes a difference. Yes, the future is looking hectic, but now we have time to lay foundations. Even if half the population is wiped out (or more), we can lay cultural and physical foundations now that are seeds for the future.
In some ways, remember how lucky we are! We still have time and energy to prepare! We could be living in a world where the forces of intentional ignorance had done much more damage than they've managed. Yet we have excellent scientists.
I understand where you're coming from, however you must take into consideration that your individual actions are perceptible by your peers.
A difference in culture has much more potential effect than what may be perceptible.
You may not control Congress, but you can control your actions and influence your peers. Tiny influences can impact in an emergent change in the future.
Of course, this is highly subjective and probably more in the field of Ethics than anything else.
While not insignificant, I think it's worth asking what effect a 10% reduction in US passenger vehicle emissions would have in the long term. To put it in perspective, there's (what appears to be) an excellent new paper in Science that proposes a roadmap for reducing global emissions to a level that is estimated to have a 2/3 chance of keeping warming below 2C until 2100.
The paper is "A roadmap for rapid decarbonization" by Rockström1, Gaffney, Rogelj, Meinshausen, Nakicenovic, and Schellnhuber. While a valuable and probably required step, doubling US passenger vehicle efficiency is just one of many things that would need to be done, and done quickly. I think it's worth reading the paper closely to understand the steps that would be required according to our current understanding of the science: http://science.sciencemag.org/content/355/6331/1269
The full article is unfortunately behind a paywall, but since I think a reasonable argument can be made that breaking the logjam on the global warming debate is more urgent than following the nuances of US copyright law, I'll mention that plugging DOI:10.1126/science.aah3443 into sci-hub.bz will let you read the full paper.
I didn't think the answer would be to reduce your greenhouse gas emissions from driving by 10%.
If everybody does this, it results in a reduction of 5% for the US which isn't even in the ballpark of the 80% required from industrialized countries.
And I'm not sure this article is taking into account what the environmental impact of a few hundred million Americans all buying new cars and throwing out their old ones ...
The cost decline curve of solar and wind has been stupid: Wind is below 2 cents/kwh unsubsidized, solar still around 6-8 cents/kwh unsubsidized; natural gas is destroying the demand for coal, and renewables are destroying demand for nuclear. As renewable deployments accelerate, they will push out natural gas generation (along with cheaper battery storage).
Electric vehicles are here! Go get one. If not a Tesla, a Bolt, a Leaf, or perhaps a Volt if you still can't commit entirely to a battery electric vehicle alone. There's a federal tax credit in it for you.
Need your roof replaced? Order some Tesla solar tiles; orders are being taken as of next month, with delivery near the end of the year. A 30% federal tax credit to have your roof replaced is a pretty swank deal, along with the roof producing power (most likely) for the remaining life of the home. (I disregard state incentives for the purposes of this comment, but do check if your state has them, many do)
Regardless of technologic advancement, people still need to make the right choices in aggregate; get your LEDs in them fixtures, insulate your home, buy energy efficiency appliances (your utility probably pays a rebate for doing so).
We'll still need to work on bovine methane emissions [1], marine [2], and air fossil fuel consumption, but there's still a lot of low hanging fruit for us to capture.
storage haven't been solved and a large part of the entire economy is based on debt in the fossile fuel industry. renewables are not destroying the deman for nuclear as the worlds energy demand will continue to rise quite substantially as 1 billion people enter the middle class over the next decades.
But wind and solat cant deliver enough and its not storable yet, solve that and you have my support until then i am going to stick to supporting any effort to build nuclear over wind. Solar is different.
Considering that most of the pollution that causes climate change is caused by industry no single person can control, and that the solution proposed in this article will only work for a small percentage of upper class people at best, the only almost-universal (in the US) thing one can do to fight climate change is vote or participate in the political process. Sure, it's not very effective, but neither is this ploy to blame citizens for pollution when most pollution is caused by commercial and government entities. What's the point of getting a Prius if the government is going to allow industry to do whatever it wants as regards to pollution? Until this society and the government that allegedly represents it gets its shit together and starts regulating commercial industries and caring about climate change, why should I even care? It simply won't make a difference.
"What can I do to reduce my emissions" is the wrong question to ask, because most people don't care that much about reducing their impact. Even if everyone who cares could somehow cut out 100% of their emissions, it would only make a small dent in the problem. Trying to get everyone to make sacrifices and take personal responsibility is just not going to cut it.
But this doesn't mean the situation is hopeless! Renewables are quickly becoming cheaper than fossil fuels. Battery prices are falling rapidly, enabling cheaper electric cars, as well as cost-effective stationary storage facilities. There are startups that are trying to make plant-based meat substitutes that taste better than real meat and cost less. These are all scalable solutions; even someone who cares nothing for the planet would rather have lower energy costs, or a sexier car, or a cheaper, tastier burger. if we want long-term sustainability, we have to build and promote these kinds of alternatives.
If you want to make a difference, don't worry about what your immediate, personal impact to the environment is: one person's impact is negligible. Worry about what sorts of technological development you're funding.
Or worry about what sort of politicians you're supporting. If all the people who bought a Prius in the last ten years had bought a cheaper non-hybrid, and instead spent that extra money lobbying for better emissions standards, I bet you that would have made a way bigger difference in the end.
I very rarely see anyone talking about iron fertilization [1]. The oceanographer John Martin said "give me a half tanker of iron, and I will give you an ice age" [2].
Why are scientists not looking into this? Wikipedia states that the last experiments were done in 2012. It's been five years, and besides the precautionary principle (which in the case of the global warming should work in reverse), I don't really see any reasons to not perform further experiments.
Since ships are much bigger polluters than cars, a better thing to do would be to buy local exclusively. Governments could impose huge tariffs on imported goods (something Trump would certainly not mind). While we're at it we should probably ban mass production, too, tear down our cities and replace them with farming communes wherein everything people consume or use is produced sustainably from the local environment.
We're past the point where we can fool ourselves that virtue signalling will make a difference. If you want to make an impact on the climate, Western society has to fundamentally change into something quite different. It's a political problem with necessarily political solutions.
While I agree society needs to change, this vision of how it should change -- fewer globalized goods, no mass production, and so on -- well if that's my only option I'll take the climate change thanks. It's going to be dangerous for people, but so is what you suggest, seeing as how modern people owe a lot of their health and life enjoyment to the things you'd ban.
It is easy to play russian roulette when the gun is pointed at somebody else's head isn't it?
You say you would rather risk climate change than let go of your current comforts. How awfully convenient for you that the main effects will not be felt by yourself.
Rich people (most HN posters included) both benefit most from globalized goods AND are able to shelter themselves from the effects of climate change anyway. You probably won't have your home and rice fields permanently flooded or crops more and more years of drought, you probably won't need to find a new home. A lot of poor people will. And judging by politics today, when that happens, the rich countries who have benefited the most from burning fossil fuels will shut the refugees out rather than welcome them in.
Climate change is a terrible thing, but the effects will be felt very unevenly.
Granted it will be felt unevenly by why do you seem so gleeful to put all of this on the rich? Mass production and globalize trade makes medicines for poor people and makes all goods more affordable for low incomes. Also, what's with assuming everyone on HN is rich? Everyone loses without those things. You propose a guaranteed terrible thing for everyone. Are you trying to improve the situation or just try to talk rich people into self-flagellating?
Basically, correlate that with a map of GDP per capita.
But to be completely honest I just got fired up as I found (and still find) your comment in bad taste. If you are a rice farmer on the coast of Bangladesh or similar then I apologize. One can argue back and forth about economy, but altering the sea level without compensation to those who loose their land is not fair.
As for what I really believe I think a lot of mass production can be kept, and also noone is proposing to scrap ships or global trade overnight. Proposals for fixing global warming abound and is generally to gradually tax for emissions caused (ie put price tag on externality). This will then drive the economy towards less polluting alternatives where it is easiest.
That is not a "proposed terrible thing for everyone" in the same way that when OPEC doubles the oil price the economy does move on and adapt.
E.g. in my country of Norway some fish gets sent to China for packaging and then it gets shipped back where it came from. Eliminating that indirectly through increased shipping costs means some increased price in frozen fish to the consumer, but also more local jobs.
In the end "end of global trade and mass production" is extremely simplistic. It is all about how well the world economy will do with or without.
And there are studies on that, so that either of us don't have to rely on our gut. And they show the effects of climate change on the global
economy to be devastating when it finally hits. It is not the lesser evil at all.
"Industry ties" mean nothing with regards to locality. Ford has strong industry ties in Michigan but has done all of its recent state-of-the-art plant construction (for the North American market) in Mexico.
- Find a job closer to where you live or move closer to where you work.
- Get a smaller car.
- Get solar installed in your home.
- Decrease usage of disposable products. Use a shopping bag, a water bottle, your own mug, your own utensils, etc.
- Stop buying objects you don't strictly need. Prefer products that do not suffer from planned obsolescence. Prefer reusable/recyclable packaging.
- Decrease or stop consumption of meat.
- Wear more clothes instead of turning up the heater and get better thermal isolation (e.g: thicker windows).
Now, electric cars do not contaminate your immediate surroundings, but the process of manufacturing them can have a higher carbon footprint than the lifetime emissions of the vehicle.
Howdy! I work in cleantech, and I guess it's that time again for a what-are-we-going-to-do-about-it post :)
To start, here's my favorite climate change joke: "They say we won't act until it's too late... Luckily, it's too late!"
==So what can you do about it?==
The biggest thing this article doesn't say that is most relevant to the HN audience is that you can work at a new energy technology company! Our industries are out of the R&D stage and are currently focused on scale and growth[1], and we need as many smart people as we can get. There are lots of companies hiring software engineers.
==How do I find a job fighting climate change?==
I'd recommend browsing the exhibitor and speaker lists from the most recent conference in each sector (linked below). Check out the companies that interest you and see if they are hiring.
* Energy Storage[2][3]
* Solar[4][5]
* Wind[6]
* Nuclear[7]
* Electric Utilities[8][9]
* Electric vehicles[10]
Also, if you're in the SF bay area, I'd recommend subscribing to my Bay Area Energy Events Calendar[11]. Just start showing up to events and you'll probably find a job really quickly.
Wasn't there just an article here about how the 15 largest cargo ships pollute as much as all the cars in the world? So I don't think the answer to solve climate change is to buy two tons of product that has been transported on those ships.
I'd love to know what the real answer is, but it seems not much an individual can do about it.
"Pollution" is unfortunately an overloaded term. The article you are referring was about other kind of emissions than CO2; and so the 15 largest container ships do NOT contribute as much to global warming as all the cars.
Sea transport is about 3% of global CO2 emissions, while road transport is about 17%, so it is unlikely that "the 15 largest cargo ships pollute as much as all the cars in the world."
There are so many things we can do, and these people are telling us that "the winner" is driving brand new fuel efficient cars, hot off the assembly line? What about biking? Walking? What about changing our habits so as not to rely as much on cars in the first place. How about not driving? There are people who don't drive at all, you could become one of them. What would it take?
How about some gardening? Plant a raspberry bush or a tree. If everyone planted a tree, do you know how many trees that would be? Billions of new trees. It wouldn't be very difficult. It would be much more affordable than buying a brand new electric vehicle.