The fact that the Isle of Man is largely self governing, and that the TT is a big tourist draw perhaps leads to things not being banned.
The Wikipedia list includes deaths for other events using the TT course, so there were no deaths during the TT itself this year, but there was one during the Manx Grand Prix, a different event.
Yikes!!! Who keeps critters like squirrels, dogs, etc. off the course? I've ridden a lot of fast long twisty visibility impaired descents on a bicycle, up to about 55mph (not 136mph), and have had plenty of opportunities to evade obstacles, moving or not. Been involuntarily airborne a few times. To be sure I enjoy it as one of the most enjoyable activities of my life, but... that video is orders of magnitude more terrifying.
Why would it not be allowed? All drivers are adults who, on a track, should be left to decide their own fate.
Spectators if they go there to watch should also be left to decide their own fate. It's not like they're not aware that accidents happens and a piece of a car can hit them right between the eyes and kill them instantly.
This "things should be banned on a track because they are unsafe" is getting tiring.
> The above Wikipedia quote is also contradicted later in the same article, which says that a driver named Louis O’Regan died in 2024.
The list of fatalities is for on the Isle of Man TT Mountain Course which is used by both the Isle of Man TT races and Manx Grand Prix races (the "amateur rider's alternative" to the Island of Man TT). Louis O’Regan died qualifying for the Manx Grand Prix, meaning the 2024 Isle of Man TT was deathless. The list is confusingly combining two races for some reason.
"Between 14 and 19 June 2024, at least 1,301 pilgrims had died due to extreme heat in Mecca during the Hajj of 2024, with temperatures exceeding 50 °C (122 °F).[41]"
Agreed - and in proportion to the number of competitors, I would guess that the fatality rate is less than, say, climbing K2.
Update: Summing the 'number of finishes' column in the Competitor Analysis' on the IOMTT site I get 17355 finishes (the data appears to cover competitors who have finished 6 or more races.) The above-mentioned Wikipedia list of TT fatalities page gives a total of 281 (including 16 non-rider fatalities), giving a BoE figure of 1.62%. In contrast, the Wikipedia 'List of deaths on eight-thousanders' page says that, as of August 2023, about 800 climbers have summited K2, and 96 have died trying.
Annapurna has the worst statistics among these mountains: "for decades, it has the highest climber to fatality ratio of around 32%".
For the TT, if you think the number of competitors rather than finishes is the correct figure to use, the TT list used above contains 1275 competitors, for a fatality rate of about 22% (though, as mentioned above, this seems to exclude competitors with fewer than 6 finishes.)
If you aren't familiar with the TT, it's crazier than you can imagine. It's a race on ordinary roads, large sections of which run through residential villages. Spectators are seriously injured on a fairly regular basis. Completely uninvolved bystanders are seriously injured on occasion. Local residents have come home to find the charred wreckage of a motorbike in their front room.
It's incredible that races like the IoM TT and the Northwest 200 still exist, but I can't imagine anyone ever sanctioning such races if they were new. There's just so much unmanageable risk.
Presumably the motorbike owner or team or event sponsors have insurance to pay for the charred front rooms and bystander injuries? I could see spectators being at their own risk, but if the event becomes uninsurable, it will stop being held.
Yeah I’m totally familiar with the TT. I was a fan of MotoGP growing up.
It is absolutely bonkers to me. But can you expand a bit on “completely unrelated bystanders” because spectators also know the risks of being a spectator. It’s crazy.
But is there a situation where someone that lives in IoM isn’t aware of what’s going on that week or that weekend?
Not that I’m against making things safer here and there, and in particular spectator zones. But someone standing on a sidewalk to get a view of a motorcycle going 200MPH merely feet from them, knows what they’re risking, don’t they?
And I agree that such a race would never get sanctioned today. Even one like Monaco in F1. It’s too tight.
I am sort of with Kant who believed that we have duties and responsibilities to others. There is an enormous cost imposed by deaths caused by reckless actions, which is not limited just to family and friends. The effects of these types of things fan out beyond the individual incident as well. These deaths normalize behaviors that are then mimicked by future people keeping us stuck in the cycle of wanton and unnecessary death.
Every man dies, not every man really lives. I'm glad there are still some people with the courage to push the limits and damn the consequences. Modern life has become a little too safe and comfortable. Cheers to the Isle of Man TT riders, and let's hope the moralizing scolds and killjoys never get their way.
These people would have died anyway. We haven't reached immortality. It is mostly a scheduling problem.
Also first responders at the TT and irish road races like the flying doctors [1] are also mostly big fans of the sport and I would say you would be silly to call Isle of Man your home if you can't stand the TT or Manx GP. And you are totally free to take your vacations during those events if finding a crashed bike and a corpse on your lawn is an issue to you.
Waste is kind of a stretch. Every outsider involved would be getting paid.
If I'm hosting a race, ensuring medical staff, etc are present it's not really a waste of their time if someone does get hurt/dies. It's literally why they are there. You could argue that their qualifications can be better used elsewhere but that applies to anything.
One factor is the format: it's a time-trial event, not a head-to-head race. So if a rider dies, it's hard to pin the blame on anyone but the rider, who clearly knew what they were signing up for.
I remember my father born in 44 occasionally talking of this accident in the 80's or 90's, well when I was young, including the depiction of a child who was cut in half as he was sitting on his father's shoulders.
The design of the stands "met the safety standards at the time."
Isn't that always the way? Technology advanced in a rush and no one adequately modeled the risk. Spectators, trusting the purveyors of the entertainment, were slaughtered.
Yeah, that is indeed often the case. Sometimes technology advances at an incredible rate in a short time, and safety standards are horrifically behind. I'm reminded of internet and smart phone technology.
This was roughly the point when engine power ceased to be the limitation on race cars, and vehicles became limited by stability and control.
The fastest quarter mile for a production car in the 1960s was the 1958 Aston Martin DB4 GT at 13.8 seconds. Today, that would be embarrassing for a sports car.
Today, power is limited for most racing classes and everybody is focused on downforce and traction.
> vehicles became limited by stability and control
...I have never heard anyone talk about "stability" or "control" when talking about racing technology.
> Today, power is limited for most racing classes and everybody is focused on downforce and traction.
Downforce/aero is traction and most of the jostling (and cheating) has been around aero for fifty years or so; for example, adjustable suspension for minimum ground clearance at any time and to prevent sudden loss of downforce when going over a bump.
There's a reason at one point FIA started (and still does) a limit on the time F1 teams can spend in the wind tunnel. That allotment of time based on team standing. Other racing series, typically ones with production car bodies where aero options and budgets are more limited, will use intake restrictor plates and/or weight penalties.
"Power" is not limited, engine specs are; intake, displacement, stroke, layout, induction or not, and so on. There is a distinction, because, for example, some teams started using intake scoops and doing things like changing the engine fuel mapping based off vehicle speed (as F1 engine are metered via speed-velocity, not via airflow sensors.)
> I have never heard anyone talk about "stability" or "control" when talking about racing technology.
See this article in Road and Track about modern racing stability control.[1]
It goes back further than that. Suspensions were terrible going into the 1950s. During the 1950s, the proper relationship between springs, shocks, and linkages started to be figured out.
Look at 1950s movie car chases. Cars are wallowing all over the road.
My dad, his parents and all his siblings were in the grandstands but escaped uninjured. He was 7 years old. Mltiple decades later he would become emotionnal and angry if we, as adolescents, would mention dead bodies in a very casual manner, for exemple while commenting on a video game.
I knew about this accident and them being close to be hit by some of those parts that day but it took me years to make the connection between this and how his reaction. This must have been a huge war scene.
Expert piece of writing: “The enormous impact had torn the engine mount and front axle from the SLR’s chassis and sent both of these large pieces scything through a shoulder-to-shoulder crowd.“
Nobody takes pleasure in it. Motorsport is something where people generally respect, acknowledge and understand the inherent dangers associated with it.
I don’t believe that Motorsport audiences do generally acknowledge that they could be killed by flying pieces of cars, though. They acknowledge that the drivers are at risk.
Motorsport audiences in almost every discipline I know can rattle off a litany of safety incidences that have happened over the past 100 years. My point is that we do not shy away from talking about it because the presence of danger in this sport in general is well known.
I see it as having a wide enough range of vocabulary to be able to pick the most succinctly descriptive word for the situation. Brilliantly done in this case.
Safety consciousness really started only in the 70s. I think Jackie Stewart was a big proponent. He often was accused of being a wimp because real men embrace risking their lives. Then it started picking up more steam in the 80s with carbon fiber chassis and then more in the 90s when Senna died. Rallye stopped the insanity when Henri Toivonen burnt to death.
I feel environmental regulation is going the same path. There is a lot of resistance against improving things just because. Only when something really bad happens, people wake up. But even often nothings happens.
For example, in the 1967 F1 Grand Prix (the subject of the legendary cult-favourite racing sim Grand Prix Legendshttps://www.pcgamer.com/why-i-loved-hardcore-racing-sim-gran... ) two drivers died, and apparently half of the drivers would eventually die in motor accidents over the course of their careers.
I have very fond memories of working at Papyrus (1995-1997, including the very start of GPL; some of my code probably lived on in the telemetry recording and replay system, though I left early enough to not be in the credits [correctly so, IMO].)
The iRacing crew has a large overlap of ex-Papyrus, unsurprisingly.
> Rallye stopped the insanity when Henri Toivonen burnt to death.
Alone it probably would not have done it, but the sanity of Group B (or lack thereof) had been in question for a while: earlier in the same season Joaquim Santos lost control of his car after avoiding a group of spectators (who'd routinely play chicken with cars) resulting in 3 deaths and 30 injuries.
And the previous season Bettega had died on the same course Toivonen and Cresto lost their lives on, and Vatanen was gravely injured in Argentina.
I've never seen this, but can only imagine the stupidity of these spectators. To solve that, I'd have been in favor of awarding bonus points to drivers not avoid these "chickens"
While that was a problem, the larger one was that the cars were too fast for the tires and safety equipment of the time.
In a 13 month period there were three fatal accidents that were down to drivers losing control and crashing on their own. The last two coming in successive months. The repeated accidents killed off Group B and the nascent Group S that was supposed to replace it.
Modern WRC cars much higher cornering speeds than the Group B cars because of advances in tire technology. They aren’t as fast in a straight line, but they are massively safer in the event of a crash.
Group B absolutely had a cars problem, 3 of the 4 accidents mentioned were not crowd related, there was literally no close witness (only a video from far away) to Toivonen and Cresta's accident.
The Lancias were some of the worst offenders to the cars issue, but not the only one: many drivers complained that the cars had gotten way too powerful to be safe in Corsica.
And safety equipment was lacking and not consistently applied, for instance fuel tank skid plates were usually left off on asphalt tracks like corsica, which is likely how Toivonen's lancia instantly caught fire when it went off the road.
> He often was accused of being a wimp because real men embrace risking their lives.
By whom? I bet that's not true (although to be fair, sports commentators can routinely be pretty spectacularly stupid). As a three-time world champion who won his first one in 1969, I don't think there were any people who could call Jackie Stewart a "wimp" without appearing ridiculous.
I think there were one or two incidents nearer the end of his career when he refused to race for safety reasons and some others (Jacky Ickx?) went out. Those guys are friends and I think everyone concerned understood the importance of safety, so it's... complicated.
> I feel environmental regulation is going the same path. There is a lot of resistance against improving things just because.
Well no not just because. I really care about the environment but it is getting a bit exhausting. In Holland everyone has to move away from natural gas meaning everyone has to buy hugely expensive heat pumps and insulate their houses more to deal with the lower heat output.
ICEs are getting banned from city centers so you need to buy an EV which is messy to charge if you live in a flat, we have to drag all our empty plastic bottles back to the shop now and can't even crush them to save bag space. New environmentally friendly paints scratch much easier. Lead free solder causes solder joints to break earlier meaning more frequent purchases. Plastic bottles now have their caps attached in an awkward way. Prices are constantly rising due to environment levies making it more expensive for citizens but companies are still raking it in and producing stuff they know it's harmful like PFAS. Housing is super expensive because environmental impact reviews limit the amount of new construction and the government put even more on hold due to too much nitrogen compounds.
All these things are just expensive and more hassle and I can imagine people are getting a bit frustrated. It's like it's never enough. It's with good reason sure but I can understand people feel like they're getting the short end of the stick.
I personally don't even own or need a car and I live somewhere now where I don't really need heating and we can still just dump our bottles in the plastic bin in the street here. So I'm pretty ok with everything. But yeah I feel people's pain.
I am sure we can do better and revisit some misguided regulations. But in general environmental regulation is probably one of the biggest success stories of the last 60 years. I grew up when rivers were green or blue some days, the rivers were dead with an occasional dead fish floating by, going into the water was a serious health risk. The switch to EV is painful, but once people experience clean air in cities again, there is no way anybody will want to go back. I was in Mumbai a few years ago and after two days when I blew my days a pile of black stuff came down and I was short breathed. People complained about unleaded gas and catalytic filters when they introduced. Auto companies told us the world would go under. Seems ignoring them was correct and things worked out for the better
Western countries are already clean enough. Very far from what it was in the 70s and earlier. There is a point of diminishing returns for everything. After that is seems to be more about returns to the individuals that claim to be for the cause, than to society as a whole.
There are orders of magnitude more serious threats to the future of humanity than climate change, such a imminent war. In part due to resource shortages, like energy, which in part was caused by prioritising misguided policies inspired by those same ideas.
It's not just climate change. Roughly speaking there are three goals around environmental regulation:
1) preserving at least some nature and biodiversity. Not much elaboration needed, we are causing a mass-extinction, some would like to limit the impact of that. And we profit from some of those species too
2) Climate Change. This one gets all the media attention, and it is a valid cause. Most Western countries are in a relatively good position in regards to impact of climate change, but even for us any dollar spent today to fight climate change will save us multiple dollars over the coming decades. We can deal with extreme weather and build better costal fortifications, but those things aren't cheap. Also nobody wants to deal with the upcoming migration crisis as poorer countries become ever less livable due to climate change
3) Imminent Health Concerns. European cities suffer from high concentrations of airborne particulate matter, primarily from residential heating and car exhaust that lingers in the air in densely built cities. This is the primary reason city centers become inaccessible to certain vehicle types and governments push for heat pumps. Particulates are linked to a range of health issues. Heart disease, respiratory infections, chronic lung disease, cancers, preterm births [1]. Sure, China is much worse, but that doesn't mean we can't make people's lives better and save on health care costs by reducing the amount of particulates we emit in densely populated areas
Climate change has the potential to radically change weather patterns, possible causing severe disruptions to global food production. If that happens, I guarantee you the likelihood of a world war will be even higher than today.
Besides, there is no real energy shortage. Renewables and nuclear work very well for most of Europe. The only problem are the Germans who thought being dependent on gas supplied by an insane dictator is better than operating nuclear power plants.
Yeah, nice on paper, easy to shout all the time, and I agree. But - even if whole Europe went to caveman era, we won't make dent big enough to matter at all or change trajectory of future in any significant way. We are just little above 5% of the world, even if we pollute more than average its just a small drop in a bucket. But we are literally destroying prosperity in whole Europe, while most of the world gives significantly less fucks about this topic so we endeavor on some quixotic quest for glory where none is found.
That's the problem with well-meaning fanatics - you can't discuss consensus with them, middle ground is their ground only. Even extreme moves are never enough. So what we are seeing - people like trump who don't give a fuck about environment are winning, slowly but surely. There is no reversal in next decades, its hard to accept since I wish it to be true but it won't.
Inability of far eco left to have any sort of meaningful dialog and find middle ground is the reason why all these at glance well-meaning policies are going to backfire massively, and they already do as OP mentions. Why should we head to poverty while all developing world coast on us, steal our tech like germany's solar cells tech and we are just left behind.
I'll never vote for any green-related party despite being a massive nature and wilderness lover. Those people are literal personification of 'road to hell is paved with good intentions', IMHO a form of simpleton's eco-terrorism.
Me? I am insignificant. But I talk about opinions of large parts of Europe, just look at recent elections (and US is exactly the same). Extremism never leads to good future, just more extremes and inevitably conflict where few profit and most suffer.
Yes, people believe the same thing as you - that everyone who disagrees with them is unable to have a dialog - and votes for extremists who try to eliminate the people who disagree with them so they won't have to worry about it any more. Tale as old as time. Are you trying to blame that on the people you disagree with?
There’s no threat of imminent war for the West. And any non-nuclear war is a much less danger than climate change. At worst, the WWII-scale war may cost a few hundred percent of GDP. Climate change will destroy trillions worth of property and may affect human population for thousands of years.
Yes but preventing what we can of it at this stage (which isn't much) will cost as much as a world war and will have huge impact on people's lives. So will climate change but not as equally distributed. Many areas will be fine and some will even improve (eg Siberia and Northern Canada might become a lot more habitable. The Soviets even had a plan to screw up the gulf stream by damming up the Bering Strait for this purpose.
I just don't see it happen. Most countries are democracies and turkeys don't vote for Christmas. It's not fair and I don't agree with it but it's realistic.
Add to that the 20 year delay in CO2 emissions and effect and most of it is already locked in.
> Yes but preventing what we can of it at this stage (which isn't much) will cost as much as a world war and will have huge impact on people's lives.
You seem to have gathered the wrong impression here. Yes, a certain amount of global warming is pretty much locked in, and that levels is high enough that it's gonna cause some pretty big problems. That doesn't mean that continuing to emmit CO2 at current levels for the next several decades won't make things significantly worse.
> Many areas will be fine and some will even improve (eg Siberia and Northern Canada might become a lot more habitable.
This also isn't true. While there are areas that will grow more temperate for growing crops, that doesn't mean those areas will be fine (or have good soil to do so). Sure Alaska might be able to grow more giant vegetables, but could lose a significant part or all of their fisheries and will face more problems with wildfires that it does today. Permafrost melting will destroy infrastructure. These northern ecosystems tend to be pretty fragile and warmer temperatures could cause significant ecological collapse.
There are areas where the impacts will be greater and lesser. There aren't significant areas that will be better off due to climate change.
WTF you talk about Ivan, we have a dictator that repeatedly claimed he will wipe out most of Europe's capital cities with nuclear strikes. Desire to stop his war campaign at atlantic. The only reason its not already done is utterly shitty state of russian army, otherwise 0 reasons. Existence of NATO is another one.
For americans this is easy peasy squabble far from home about topics you don't care nor know enough, for Europe and its democracy this is existential threat.
Funnily enough russia will mostly benefit from global warming so they have 0 reasons to act in any good way. Their burning military warehouses blowing up so big time earthquakes are detected far away produced more pollution than whole Europe driving around.
If you measure world-war scale conflict damage just in amount of GDP cost then its hard to discuss reasonably topics with Ivans of this world.
It is unreasonable to expect any meaningful discussion not just with Ivans of this world but basically everyone else, when you make only baseless claims influenced by propaganda and generally do not fit in format of this forum.
Please fact-check your first paragraph for the start.
Los Angeles after it rains (scrubs the air clean) and during the pandemic (drastically less traffic) was stunning. So, no, at least here, we’re not “clean enough”.
Climate change doesn’t just pause because there are more imminent threats. Human-exacerbated or not, it is changing, and it won’t wait for us to notice.
Not related, but when Bell was broken up in the early-80s I had a grandmother who said the world was ending. Seems that break-up improved things, at least for a while.
Even just going to a classic car show and standing in a field where a few dozen pre-1980s vehicles are idling really drives home what a triumph emissions regulations over the past few decades have been.
Yes but those weren't really a problem as it only applied to new cars. Existing ones were never a problem, owners could keep using them as long as they could keep going. So there was no cost offloaded on them. Like there is with cities banning ICEs.
Do you think that people who were inclined to discard bottle caps were correctly binning their bottles?
No, they were also throwing down their bottles which were more easily carried away by the rain and wind. Now, both the cap and the bottle are being washed into rivers instead of the caps being left behind. Net improvement: zero.
It's a classic example of survivorship bias. It's like the headline that bottle caps were the third most common litter on beaches - because bottles, sandwiches wrappers and crisp packets had been washed out to sea.
I hope you do realize that without numbers your argument against caps is just a speculation too. Whether it’s some bias or not, we can figure out only via research: the impact is easily measurable.
This is likely due to similar "annoying" regulation in the past, eg making space for bike lanes, investing in public transit and giving it more space than cars, and so on. These all have been protested using the same kind of vibes as how you're now protesting EVs and attached bottle caps. "We can't even park by the C&A anymore! Ridiculous! Will this madness ever end?"
What I'm trying to say is, when you say "boo climate policy", I read "boo progress". Is progress sometimes annoying? Sure! Is some of it ill-advised? Yeah also. (Or incorrectly billed as progress even). Is it then a better idea to just not solve problems and keep everything that's bad now, bad forever? No! It isn't! It's a completely show stopper argument. Usually with things like these, the annoyances are now, and the payoff is in the future. This holds for environmental policy just as much as bike lanes.
People found it plenty annoying when NL was as car centric as the US is now.
In some potential future when everybody has an EV you might not be against banning ICEs from city centers either. The annoyance is now, the benefit comes later.
What’s the exact, quantifiable payoff of tethered bottle caps?
And how many degrees will the earth cool down if everyone switched to EVs? The truth is that everything related to “carbon” has no quantifiable value. It’s like tithing at a church with the hope that God smiles upon you. How many tons reduction of CO2 results in a movement of the temperature? Let’s be precise because if we are making policy on this, the public has a right to know the exact benefit. And is the cost of that less expensive than the cost of not doing it? What exactly is the cost of not doing it? I’ve been hearing for 20+ years how we are just ten years away from disaster. 10 years is just long enough that it’s a few election cycles — so the politicians pushing this nonsense are rarely accountable for being continually wrong. Nothing in Al Gore’s movie came true. Ice caps were supposed to be done by now. They aren’t. So why are we still following that religion? It’s like a modernized version of a doomsday cult: “repent or rising seas will destroy the cities with the wrath of a vengeful Climate God.”
Are we allowed to question any of this? Shouldn’t someone be following the money to see who is getting rich off of this and who is enacting the policies that make those people rich?
Without those numbers, how can we determine if something is “progress?” We should be focused on real pollution: chemicals in the air and water, plastics in the ocean. CO2 isn’t a poison, nor a carcinogen, nor a toxin.
Why doesn’t the environmental movement unite behind banning high fructose corn syrup? Obesity in the U.S. is killing more people than climate change ever will.
I’ve been pondering whether it makes sense to respond in earnest. I assume good faith on your side, so let me try.
> It's like asking for data to prove gravity exists.
This is at least how physics majors start. From first principles. You know, scientists.
Getting emotional due to your own assumptions about someone else usually effects the exact opposite of what you’re trying to achieve. Which, I assume, is mutual understanding.
> Asking for data implies it's yet to be proven
No, why?
> Do you have data disproving the current academic consensus?
How often has consensus failed, even very recently? If the data is strong, what harm is there in reiterating the data and the conclusions out of it so that everyone understands?
I’m not saying this from a high horse. Over the years I’ve had many emotional moments when challenged about what is true or right. In hindsight most of these moments came from my own inability to exactly lay out the logical chain of an argument that I’d made, where I’d followed the consensus.
It's an unwritten rule in social interaction that when you discuss a topic, you question it by asking for data on it. Signalling scepticism.
You can replay this in an LLM and ask how common people would interpret such a reply as you made. I believe you'll find it's exactly as my reply stated.
The real issue is that you are questioning an academic consensus. It's not you, not me, not the baker down the street. It's a very large, global, group of academics with many years or research to substantiate their claims.
If you want to investigate the topic it's on you to find the data and study it. I'd question your sanity if you actually did that. Because I'll wager you're not equipped to interpret the data, so you'd first have to train for the maths and science, before moving on to interpreting the data and deciding whether or not you agree with it.
For most people it makes more sense to respect the academic consensus. Even knowing that it can change if new discoveries are made. Because that's what science is about.
Has the consensus ever failed?
The question belies the false belief that it shoudn't ever fail.
The entire idea of science is predicated on it failing and leading to new discoveries.
Hence it's on you to provide new data. That's science.
Sitting in an armchair questioning if science is accurate is exactly like questioning whether gravity exists. You know nothing either way, unless you measure it and provide data,
> I really care about the environment but it is getting a bit exhausting
I recognise it's a silly, tiny, small-minded thing to get hung up on, but it irritates me to no end that if I stop at McDonalds to grab a milkshake I've gotta drink it through a shitty cardboard straw that disintegrates half way through, while celebrities are flying around in private jets unimpeded.
If you wanted to discredit the environmental movement, I couldn’t think of a better way than forcing everyone to switch to paper straws. And as far as I’m aware, most places it wasn’t forced, it was voluntary.
It's the same thing like with GDPR - the market chooses to interpret the law in the most profitable way, which turns out to be one that's nominally compliant but defeats the purpose of the law and make things worse for the customers.
Why? Because a Big Law forced down by the Clueless Bureaucrats in the Great Soviet^WEuropean Union is something people are already primed to blame, making it a perfect scapegoat - the company can choose the absolute shittiest way to comply (onerous cookie banners and questionably legal consent forms, paper straws that disintegrate when you look at them), and rake in the profits, as customers won't question this choice (many won't even think there was a choice!) - they'll just assume it's the Eurocrats fucking up things for everyone because $reasons.
Now I wonder where else this is already happening, too.
I now realize that talking about malicious compliance with respect to GDPR was mishandling the Hanlon's Handgun. No, it's not stupidity, but it's also not malice (promoted by systemic incentives) in the sense of CEOs of the world hoping they can frustrate EU citizens into eventually voting the law away. It's simpler, more basic form of malice - it's companies knowing they can ignore what customers want or like and go straight for most profitable, no matter how frustrating or abusive, as the EU will take the blame by default, and it's so, so big, it'll take infinite amounts of it.
>I now realize that talking about malicious compliance with respect to GDPR was mishandling the Hanlon's Handgun. No, it's not stupidity, but it's also not malice
regardless of your heating source, this is a good thing. less wood/gas burned, less electricity used. I see no downside in that. Strange argument to try to make your case.
You might not see a downside if it's not your house to renovate. The problem is major home infra like heat pumps and retrofit work like extra insulation can be tremendously expensive. In the US alone, switching my gas furnace to heat pumps would easily cost $25k to match the BTU output, and that's without doing any additional insulation.
Sure, being efficient sounds great, but constraints of the real world are often unforgiving and need lots of material and labor to make change, both of which are increasing in price.
That would make sense at first glance, but I was talking to my HVAC contractor and they warned me not to make that assumption. It's not easy to compare gas furnace BTUs to heat pump BTUs for both physics and issues specific to my home (and probably most homes not made in the last decade or so).
It gets to -10F most winters here, but heat pumps struggle as it dips below freezing, while a gas furnace doesn't. What does that mean for heat in the colder parts of the year? Will I struggle to maintain 68F even if the BTUs are the same? This ties into my home design as well: Can I even substantially change my home's r-value the way it's built?
I couldn't afford a new home when I bought my house, so I live in older housing stock - 1949, made heavily of cinder blocks with plaster and stucco around them. It didn't have ducting when built, and that was partially retrofitted in using a central furnace with limited air ducts to push heat clumsily from the center of the house into a few primary rooms using a California plenum to pull air from the foundation, connected to certain rooms through floor registers. There's no good way to fix any of these compromises short of ripping half the home apart, or just building a new one, so the least bad compromise is usually an over-specced central forced air solution.
Do I get a central heat pump and air handler system with 100k peak BTUs? Do I get several mini-split units, each adding up to 100k BTUs? Do I overbuild on BTUs if I go mini-splits or multi-head? How will multiple smaller heat pumps work in winter as it freezes?
Will insulating change that? I can't insulate my foundation more than the earth already does. I guess I could rip out all my plaster walls and put in drywall and high r-value insulation behind them, but at that point, maybe a new house would be more worth the effort.
I think these kind of problems are endemic to the older housing stock and they're devilishly expensive to fix. Keep in mind - I have heat now. While my furnace will eventually depreciate to the point it needs replacement, to do all of this for no added functionality would be to take a new car's worth of value and gamble I might save a little on energy costs over the next 15 years. It's a dead-weight loss for me - I'm not going to recoup that on a house sale. It's not my 'forever' home, so I'm probably not going to stay more than 5 more years. (US national tenure seems to be 10-13 years.)
It's true that heat pumps have different performance characteristics from furnaces, but they weren't touching that issue, just insulation.
Will insulation reduce your needs? Yes. If you get into a situation where your foundation is responsible for most of your heat loss in -10F weather, you're in a great situation!
If improving the insulation on your walls is too hard, well that's disappointing, but that's a different topic from what happens when you do have good insulation.
Unfortunately, it's not just apt install insulation (wouldn't that be nice?), its a multifaceted problem involving energy sources (especially if you're shutting one down), heating infrastructure, housing stock retrofits, money, and more money.
The whole story about my house was just to try illustrating the difficulty of reducing a problem to "add insulation" and the downsides of ripping out otherwise-working infrastructure.
Adding insulation has complications, but not as many as you're making it out to have. You're making it sound like adding insulation requires replacing your heating system, and it definitely doesn't.
Making it just "add insulation" doesn't reduce the problem to trivial levels, but it does reduce the problem significantly.
If that's possible for you, installing the heat pump so that it exchanges heat underground should improve performance a lot when the air is very cold (or very hot).
This is the biggest problem. I rented an apartment for two years in the Dallas Texas area, and you just need one anecdote to know the place is massively energy inefficient -- all the windows on my apartment were single glass pane. It gets freezing cold for two or three weeks in winter. It gets triple digit (fahrenheit) in the summer. A well insulated home is a must to save money on electricity. Add to the fact that I'm sure the only heating I had was resistive electricity heat from the electric air conditioning...
What's sad is that the last time that people experienced significant restrictions and inconvenience - during Covid-19 lockdowns - it did move the environmental needle, but still not enough to make the 1.5C goal. So just imagine the vast gulf between the annoyances you listed and what it might take.
Most of the "cost" (at least in the West) can be attributed to people dragging their feet on adapting to remote set-ups and the efficiencies they bring. Businessmen didn't want to do business remotely, teachers didn't want to teach remotely, event planners didn't want to do virtual events; so, they sabotaged the shift. Too bad for the collateral damage of anyone who was underserved during this period, and the environment, and everyone who benefited from their newfound accessibility.
Saying you don't want more insulation and heat pumps is weird. You like higher utility bills? I get that the up front investment for it is unpleasant, but the remedy to that is government subsidies to encourage homeowners to upgrade.
You're assuming the person who complained has high gas bills.
Gas produces much more useful energy than a heat pump can. And the installation is much more simpler and space efficient.
If heat-pumps would be at least as good most likely they would be more successful on their own and there would be no need to be forced onto people by the government because "think of the environment".
Yes. I think a good example of this is the attempt to force everyone to use CFLs c20 years ago for light. Huge step backwards in quality of light, plus for many use cases they had a higher lifetime cost and shorter lifespan.
Then decent LED bulbs came along and noone needed to force anyone to do anything because the product works as a drop in replacement with lower lifetime costs in almost all relevant use cases.
> Well no not just because. I really care about the environment but it is getting a bit exhausting. In Holland everyone has to move away from natural gas meaning everyone has to buy hugely expensive heat pumps and insulate their houses more to deal with the lower heat output
This is just a more contrived version of “because I don’t want to”.
People were inconvenienced at the advent of seatbelts too.
Removing children from the labor pool was tiring for everyone else.
Arguably the only labor progressive change that didn’t inconvenience people was de-leading gasoline.
"Well no not just because. I really care about the environment but it is getting a bit exhausting. In Holland everyone has to move away from natural gas meaning everyone has to buy hugely expensive heat pumps and insulate their houses more to deal with the lower heat output."
To be fair, they're heavily subsidized and many houses can do this for under 5k. And really, insulating the frankly awful housing stock isn't a bad thing. Disclaimer: I work for a heat pump company.
In city centres you don't need an EV, you need a bike. (I have two little kids and live in a car-focused Dutch town before anyone tells me that's impossible)
Also, as someone who has two little kids who will rub their hands all over glasses and then stick their fingers in their mouths, I'm delighted to see lead paint falling out of use.
>ICEs are getting banned from city centers so you need to buy an EV
Why on earth you need to buy a car on a country with one of the best rail infrastructures in the world and the best bike infrastructure in the world, is beyond me.
So, correction: they are banning cars from city centres, not just ICEs. As very well they should.
Do you live in the Netherlands? Because if you would, you find out that yes, there are many trains per day between the important cities. Not very efficient if you happen to live outside the main lines. The number or tracks are limited and accidents are frequent in the winter. So trains get delayed or cancelled. Not fun when you really can't miss getting to the destination on time - say from Den Haag to Schiphol.
Its all fun and games when things work out, but they don't all the time. And not to mention its really really hard to return from shopping at Ikea by train.
Biking, sure, fun, but not so autumn/winter/spring, especially in the areas close to the North Sea. The humidity and the wind makes the cold not very tolerable.
The comment I replied to is whinging about how EVs are not good enough for inner cities because flats don't have enough overnight charging spots. Now you're saying waa there's no trains in the middle of Bumfuck Nowhere, you need to catch a bus or bike to the station and it takes an extra half an hour. So which one is it?? Sorry for the crude language but it just seems like you have an opinion set from principle and then just apply any arguments you can to justify it.
The Netherlands is one of the most densely populated areas in the world, excellent public transport, excellent bike infrastructure. The majority of people don't need a car!! That's just a fact. And the people who do need it can still use it, precisely because the people who don't need have viable alternatives to driving.
> The Netherlands is one of the most densely populated areas in the world, excellent public transport, excellent bike infrastructure. The majority of people don't need a car!! That's just a fact.
Yet they have 500 cars per 1000 people [1] and 74% of households own a car [2].
People keep telling us this but we're a family of four with two little kids. We both commute to work, myself by bike and train and my wife by bike, and we haven't needed a car. We use a bakfiets for local trips, and occasionally a mywheels for longer trips afield.
Obviously some people will need cars (being a carpenter would be tough with just a bakfiets) but it is very feasible for many people to not have a car.
The fact that you make do with that doesn't mean everyone will make do or would like to bike versus driving. That is the whole point: let people use whatever is more comfortable for them.
"Driving" is not a neutral thing that falls from the sky. I know it seems like it, so much our society is structured around transportation by personal automobile.
But you need roads. It's a choice whether to make it e.g. 1 part car lane, 1 part bike lane, 1 part bus/tram lane, 1 part pedestrians, or flatten the whole thing to make space for cars.
Not to mention parking, pollution, the deaths and maimings, and the million other externalities.
Banning is ridiculous. If you want people to take public transport make it ridiculously good so that the car will seem worse everytime. You know, Japan does not ban cars in city centers and they don't need too.
I think they said city centers. Banning cars in city centers makes sense to me because it reduces traffic congestion.
Japan does not need to ban cars because it is incredibly expensive to own a car in Tokyo. So either you ban it or you make it so expensive that only the rich can afford a car. Either way works for me.
People aren't stupid. They'll see your "just make it so only the rich can afford it" scheme as a ban in all but name and they'll see your intent too. Optics matter. Sure with a powerful enough violence machine behind you you can kinda force people to do whatever but that's precarious and unsustainable. Doing the "right" thing needs to be so easy that people do it voluntarily.
That doesn't work because cars are so expensive to buy and maintain that you can't realistically tax the same amount for a public transport service, no matter how good it would be.
Japan makes car ownership ridiculously expensive and inconvenient. People spend an average of 100,000 yen on a car per month, that’s a third of the average monthly income.
Speed limits are low across the board, and there’s tons of traffic calming such that a trip by car is often slower than by train or bike.
Yes, Tokyo has the best public transport in the world, but people would still choose cars if they were faster and cheaper.
That’s a deliberate choice to slow down cars though. For example, Seoul has great public transport but high speed limits and traffic light patterns make it so that cars are twice as fast as trains. Of course, that pollutes the city and kills people, not to mention increase congestion.
I luckily don't live in Holland anymore. And the public transport there is pretty bad. Overfilled, under maintained. The legacy of 30 years of neoliberal policy.
Barcelona has amazing public transport though. As long as you live within the service area of Hospitalet through Badalona. Outside of that it sucks yeah. Agreed.
And yeah Montmeló is really hard to get to. I can imagine though as most people visiting the circuit are car enthusiasts.
I was talking about Holland but I don't live there anymore, luckily. Where I live there's not so many problems. But in Holland it's given rise to the extreme right parties.
I don't do bikes though. Only public transport and walking. Bikes aren't for me.
I know you didn't mean it this way, yet the irony is exactly that (out of context) bit: It will NEVER be enough.
What I mean by this is that this is madness. We cannot and will not EVER even make a dent, much less reverse, planetary scale with even the most extensive set of these ridiculous non-solutions.
The exercise necessary to understand just how insane this has gone is ridiculously simple. Have a look at this chart:
Now, imagine that on Monday we magically erase the United States from this planet. All of it. People. Buildings. Machinery. Power plants. 400 million ICE vehicles. Everything. It rolls back to prehistoric conditions.
Far more dramatic than switching to heat pumps or everyone driving EV's, right?
What will that accomplish? Erasing the US from the planet?
Nothing. Because this will only represent a 14% reduction in CO2 contribution at a planetary scale.
With 86% emissions still in place, nothing will reverse.
OK, let's magically ERASE (highlighted because this is far more severe than not using plastic straws, or whatever other madness we might choose to compare it to) half the world. So, 50% of our emissions go down to 0% on Monday and all of these countries --entire continents-- magically roll back to prehistoric non-human era.
What happens then?
Nothing improves. Nothing. Not even in 10K and maybe even 100K years.
The fact is that there's nothing humanity can do about this. We cannot affect change to planetary scale conditions. We can't even control reasonably local conditions and we are allowing lunatics to dictate policy while pretending that this will actually have an effect...despite it being mathematically impossible. It is a matter of physics, not feelings or opinion.
We know, without one shred of uncertainty, that if ALL OF HUMANITY evaporated from this planet tomorrow it would take 50K to 100K years for atmospheric CO2 to reduce by 100 ppm. We know this from 800K years of highly reliable atmospheric sampling data from ice core samples.
We are living in an "Emperor Has No Clothes" scenario, and those of us who are saying "He is naked!" are mostly being laughed at by the lunatics who want to pretend he is actually wearing something and those who, devoid of even an minimal attempt at critical thinking, blindly follow them.
There are legitimate and worthy reasons for which we should clean up our act. Climate change and saving the planet just happen not to be among them. Because it is impossible without violating the rules of physics.
Arguing that we cannot affect change to planetary scale conditions is an interesting argument, considering that the problem people are trying to address is a change to planetary scale conditions that was caused by humanity.
I can understand how that might sound nonsensical. Here's where a simple thought experiment might help understand the difference.
To clarify, we should note that I have never --ever-- in my many comments on this subject denied the genesis of the problem. It is clear as day that we contributed a massive amount of CO2 and other gasses to the atmosphere. Let's get that out of the way. This isn't about denial of that fact.
Thought experiment:
Take an warehouse the size of a Home Depot (approximately 10K square meters or 100K square feet).
Seal it. Nothing new comes in or goes out. Air, water, nothing.
Make a 1 cubic meter pile of wood in the center of it and light it on fire.
Let it burn out.
Your job, now, is to clean it.
The energy content of 1 cubic meter of wood is in the order of 3 MWh.
How much energy will it take to clean 100% of the gasses and particulate matter generated by the burn and deposited on every square millimeter of this warehouse?
Of course, this question is impossible to answer, other than to suggest it will take a lot more than the energy expended to create the problem in the first place. This is a basic principle in physics. Right? You cannot use less energy to reverse a process.
Another way to describe this principle is that it is far easier to cause destruction than it is to reverse it. It is much easier to implode a building in Las Vegas than to clean it up and build a new one. Etc.
Humanity burned fossil fuels with incredible energy content per cubic meter. Massive, unthinkable amounts.
This is how we caused change.
And it will take massively more energy to reverse these changes.
And to do so quickly, it will take POWER. Massive amounts of it. Energy is power over time. It is easy to talk about energy and lose sight of this. Cleaning that warehouse to reverse the effects of the burn will take orders of magnitude more time than what it took to burn a cubic meter of wood.
And so, my argument is not at all misaligned with reality. Yes, we did this in a very short period of time. And yet, no, we cannot and will not fix it in anything even remotely resembling a human lifetime no matter what we do. If humanity ceases to exist it will require 50K to 100K years per 100 ppm drop. If we still exist, even if we implement the most draconian of changes, nothing will change. Not one bit. In fact, it is far more likely that atmospheric CO2 levels will continue to rise.
It would be far more intelligent to understand this and work on how to live in this reality. The planet will take care of itself. And no, humanity isn't going to die off any time soon unless we start launching nukes across continents.
> If humanity ceases to exist it will require 50K to 100K years per 100 ppm drop.
If we don't cease to exist we could do that in a lot less time than 50k years. We could do it, and a lot more, in under 2k years.
Assumption: we can indefinitely keep producing solar panels at a rate at least as high as current production. I will call the amount of solar panels currently produced in one year an "arseload" of solar panels.
If we produced 1600 arseloads of solar panels (which would take 1600 years at the current rate of production) and used those to build solar farms in the 5 largest tropical deserts, and used the power from those to power direct air carbon capture operating at the efficiency of current direct air carbon capture (DAC) technology they would be removing enough carbon at a rate that would reduce the atmospheric CO2 levels from 450 ppm to 280 ppm (pre-industrial levels) in 6 years.
If the captured carbon was stored as graphite and spread out evenly under that 1600 arseloads of solar panels (which seems like a convenient place for it) it would be a layer roughly 1 cm deep.
Note that at around 180 arseloads of solar panels powering DAC we'd be removing CO2 fast enough to be removing about 10% more each year than we currently omit so even if we can't manage to reduce fossil fuels if we can at least finally stop their growth we can start having CO2 reduction in a couple hundred years.
I've not done the math to figure out when a program of adding an arseload of solar panel powered DAC to tropical deserts every year would actually get us back to pre-industrial levels. It's somewhere between 200 and 2000 years, but I'll leave it to others to figure out where in that range it would actually happen.
You're not factoring the energy and resources (eg excavation) needed to build all those arseloads of solar panels and DAC machinery and the infrastructure to connect, maintain and control them all, including things like cleaning all those panels. And the societal impact of paying for it all.
Fair enough, but how is your argument incompatible with transitioning away from fossil fuels and bringing in more environmentally aware regulations? It might not clean/reverse the damage already done but surely it helps to reduce the magnitude of future damage?
It isn't. Please note the last paragraph of my much-maligned post:
"There are legitimate and worthy reasons for which we should clean up our act. Climate change and saving the planet just happen not to be among them. Because it is impossible without violating the rules of physics."
As for reducing the magnitude of, as you put it, future damage, I very much doubt this is possible as well.
Loose quote from a research paper released by Google many years ago: Even if we were to deploy the most optimal forms of renewable and clean energy sources at a global scale, not only will this not reverse the problem, atmospheric CO2 will continue to rise.
Part of our reality is inescapable. For example, massive forest fires drive more CO2 into the atmosphere than lots of human activity. Around the world, there are fires in mines that have been burning for centuries (google it, you'll be surprised). Etc. We are kidding ourselves if we think that a bunch of measures that are but rounding errors at a planetary scale will have any impact at all in, as I like to put it, anything even remotely resembling a human time scale.
There are things we can do (and probably should do) that I think are likely to make for better and cleaner life all around without the fantasy of saving the planet or reversing climate.
One example of this is to seriously address the massive pollution created by container ships travelling our oceans every day. These ships burn bunker fuel, perhaps the worst thing one could burn. The stuff is horrible and the pollution it creates goes far beyond just CO2. I also learned that they contribute to something called "species pollution". They ingest all sorts of marine life into the ballast tanks at port A and pump it out at port B, transporting species clear across the planet, where they can and have done serious damage.
How to address container ships is a subject that requires serious discussion. It's a complex multivariate problem. Would all-electric ships be better? Massive hydrofoils (for more efficient transport)? Wind has been tried, it isn't as much help as one might think. Another optimization vector would be to eliminate them by distributing the production of material goods closer to their points of consumption. In other words, eliminate container ships (unlikely) or reduce the fleet by only transporting materials that cannot be sourced at the point of manufacture.
Again, these are complex problems. Their resolution, as a first step, requires leaving fantasy-land to then be able to discuss, evaluate and address reality. Only then will we we able to improve life, clean-up our act and live better. The value in these three desirable outcomes is self-evident to the point that they do not need to be justified by some fantastical imaginary doomsday scenario where all life on earth ceases to exist in, as some politicians have suggested, a dozen years.
I am all for being far better about how we behave on this planet. My problem is with creating a religion out of fantasies. Reality does not care about these things and keeps moving forward. It's almost like like stock market.
So we burned a pile of wood and now everyone in the warehouse is having a bad time. Some people in the warehouse say: please stop burning piles of wood, we need what's left from the air for breathing. But you say: nah, can't clean it up, so it's fine let's just keep burning more piles of wood.
Your comment is a case of taking a super-simplified thinking tool example and extrapolating it to make it fit a ridiculous reality. This, as well as ignoring the FACT that I did say that there are lots of reasons to clean up our act that have nothing whatsoever to do with the laughable idea of affecting change at a planetary scale.
So, yeah, thanks for a lazy and dishonest interaction. This is the reason we are still buried in fantasy-land.
Note that not a single person commenting against my claim has taken the time to explain how we can erase half the CO2 production from this planet by eliminating entire nations and actually make things better. Not a single person.
CO2 ligers in the atmosphere for 100+ years. It is impossible to claw it back in a meaningful way. It is also impossible to REDUCE atmospheric CO2 concentration at anything even remotely approaching a human lifetime scale, even several lifetimes. Believing anything else is to believe a fantasy of planetary proportions.
You claim that a 14% or even a 50% reduction of emissions would make no impact. Well, current climate research suggests differently:
- no reduction: > +4ºC by 2100
- 50% reduction: +2ºC by 2100
And those are two very different worlds we are talking about here.
So no, my comment is spot on: you say that, because current CO2 levels can't be undone, there is no difference between allowing this level to raise indiscriminately and trying to keep it at bay. It looks like you are caught in some kind of thought trap you can't get out of, and you feel like you stepped out of the matrix. Be careful, there is no matrix. It was only a movie.
This is a fantasy. That's the problem. It will not happen. Not even close.
> you are caught in some kind of thought trap
The ones caught in a thought trap are people who actually believe things such as actually being able to reduce world-wide emissions by 50% in a few dozen years. It's impossible. Truly impossible. It will not happen. No matter what the US and Europe might do to destroy their entire economies.
The truth is uncomfortable. I get it. It is far easier to get onboard a religion than to challenge it and understand reality.
All I can say is: Remember this conversation and, in ten and twenty years, check what you thought you knew against future reality.
I have been doing this now for about twenty years. So far, none of what the merchants of fear and marketers of (fake) solutions has aligned with reality. In fact, this profitable cult goes back farther than that, with guys like Al Gore (Inconvenient Truth) pushing various end-of-the-world predictions as far back the 1980's and, arguably, as far back as the 1970's. These people pushed bullshit like the planet facing "full ecosystem collapse" in 8 to 10 years; with different forms of this delusion promoted in the '80's, '90's, 2000's, etc.
The charts and data you cite are not an argument to do nothing.
They are a very strong argument to immediately commence CO2 removal (and ironically, one of the arguments against it is that it might let the CO2 polluters 'off the hook' for reducing their emissions).
There is no valid argument for CO2 removal. No matter how you slice it, emissions reductions are more cost effective than removal. If we wreck our economy in the process of trying to prevent global warning then the net effects will be even worse.
Of course, rapid emissions reductions would be best.
However, there are still two very solid arguments for capture, even if it has greater costs.
First, even if we somehow make emissions go to zero next Monday and forever after, the CO2 already baked into the atmosphere will still cause massive warming for centuries, and this will cause massive ecological disuption. Only removing the carbon (and/or implementing sun-blocking technologies) will allow a fast enough reset to pre-industrial levels and avoid such damage.
Second, it is extremely unlikely that we could make emissions go to zero in anything like the required timeframe. Even if somehow 100% of the people and politicians became convinced and decided to start next Monday, it would be decades before we approached zero emissions. Replacing all the fossil-fuel technology will not be instant. Thus, again, capture and sun-blocking tech has a definite role in rapidly repairing the damage.
"No matter how you slice it, emissions reductions are more cost effective than removal."
What about politically effective? You can start removing CO2 from the air without coordinating your effort with all the industrial powers of the world.
This is an invalid argument, in a world where China and the US are quickly becoming sworn enemies unlikely to agree on anything?
Currently there is no actual means for net reduction via CO2 removal.
Human activiy (the extraction and burning of fossil fuels) puts some 11 billion tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere every year.
There's a lot of industrial activity required to move 11 billion tonne (and that in itself creates additional emission issues to circimvent).
At this point in time the largest global project to sequester CO2 is adjacent to a SANTOS natural gas extraction project.
* It's not yet working as planned.
* Were it to work as planned the total CO2 sequestered would be a tiny portion of the amount required to be removed.
* It's a "cheat" obfuscated by mirrors in any case - the CO2 planned to be sequestered is a small proportion of the CO2 released by the natural gas extraction project its part of.
Right, although we do know how to scrub CO₂ from fossil-fuel power-plant flue gases, it eats up a substantial percentage of the energy produced by the power plant, as I explained in more detail in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42424292. This makes the power plant economically uncompetitive with other plants in the same area burning the same fuel and using the same design, so it is only profitable in the presence of fairly stiff cap-and-trade pricing.
But, as I explained in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42423291, the price of renewable energy (in particular solar photovoltaic) is in free fall, which is suddenly making vast amounts of very cheap energy available. The biggest cost of even existing direct-air-capture technologies is energy, so cheaper energy makes them viable in cases where they weren't viable before. Probably those prices will continue to fall further.
In short, we shouldn't be surprised that carbon capture hasn't taken off yet; we're still on the fossil side of the renewable energy transition.
I'm not suprised, I have a very good idea about the sheer scale of industrial plant building that would be required to make a significant dent in our current consumption and emissions.
The great unspoken catch to direct air capture technology as that develops is while it will (at sufficient scale) mitigate the extraction of "old" carbon from traditional fossil fuel deep earth operations it will likely serve to maintain the cycle of already extracted carbon in the air: (energy + air) -> fuel -> (carbon in air).
Don't get me wrong, these are good steps forward, they're just not solutions unto themselves - we still as a species need to reduce the absolute amount of insulating material in the atmosphere.
Currently we are not.
When we do start to wind back the amount added, we have to keep winding it back by a few hundred billion tonne.
There's only 7 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, total; winding it back a few hundred billion tonnes is not going to be physically possible unless you're talking about Venus. (Which is, admittedly, a pretty appealing prospect.) Here on Earth, the amount we need to remove is 0.02 hundred billion tonnes to get back to pre-industrial levels. That is, 2 billion tonnes. Of CO₂, not carbon.
There are a variety of different possibilities as to what to do with the extracted carbon. CO₂ is kind of an inconvenient form for making fuels from, so as long as they can cook oil and gas out of shale, people might just pump the carbon dioxide down wells and let it serpentinize some olivine, rather than reducing the carbon back out of it.
To one significant figure, the mass of CO2 in Earth's atmosphere is 3 trillion tonnes. Annual fossil fuel emissions of CO2 are about 37 billion tonnes:
Hmm, I'll have to figure out how I got that so wrong. That would explain some things that were bothering me about the Portland cement stats I posted yesterday. Thanks for the heads up!
No drama from my PoV - it's easy to get magnitudes etc. wrong and these are large numbers.
I haven't checked against the GeoPhys journals (I should, but ...), FWiW wikipedia has it that:
In October 2023 the average level of CO2 in Earth's atmosphere, adjusted for seasonal variation, was 422.17 parts per million by volume (ppm).
Each part per million of CO2 in the atmosphere represents approximately 2.13 gigatonnes of carbon, or 7.82 gigatonnes of CO2.
That's total, not just the excess portion added in by human activity and sourced from the bowels of the earth via mining for concentrated old sunlight energy.
Still, despite the fractional ppm composition that's a full atmospheric total of 3,301 billion tonne.
Here in W.Australia we move approx one billion tonne of iron ore from the Pilbara to (mostly) China per year. That takes some effort and energy.
It sure looks like I was somehow using the 7.82 gigatonne number as the total, rather than multiplying it by the necessary 422.
A simple calculation in units(1) shows that your figure is the right order of magnitude:
You have: 400ppm 4pi earthradius**2 atm / gravity
You want: trillion tonnes
* 2.1080571
/ 0.47437046
That's a bit low because the 422 ppm number is by volume, not weight, but that is relatively easy to correct with the molecular masses, assuming ideal gas behavior:
Correction to my sibling comment: we do have to keep winding it back by a few hundred billion tonnes. I had the wrong order of magnitude, and defrost had the right one. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42439752 for details.
I've done you the courtesy of extensively fact-checking your comments as well as my own, providing you with a boatload of new information you evidently lacked, and clearly demonstrating that some of your conclusions were based on incorrect information rather than reality. I'd appreciate it very much if you'd return the courtesy by correcting whatever information or reasoning I may have gotten wrong, especially if it's something major like the above. Simply sneering at me doesn't advance my understanding, yours (especially if what you're sneering at is that I know things you don't, as it seems to be), or anyone else's.
It would also do everyone a service if you withdrew your claims that turned out to be wrong, as I did in the comment above and in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42440198. That way they don't have to wade through the intricate details of the argument to figure out which of your claims still stand.
In the end the question is: are you here to figure out what is true? Or are you here to conceal what is true, like Ted Turner? I assumed the former, based on past experience, and asked dang to unflag your original comment as a result, even though it was a bit ranty. But this "hilarious" comment makes me wonder if I was wrong.
> They are a very strong argument to immediately commence CO2 removal
You do realize that removing CO2 will require massively more energy than what went into adding it to the atmosphere, right?
In other words, unless you know of a way to violate the laws of physics without consequence, the concept of viable CO2 removal is a bad joke of tragic proportions. Anyone proposing this should be instantly laughed off the stage.
This is a fantasy. Which is why every single proposal for CO2 removal has failed as the scams they actually are.
Not true at all (or only in limited circumstances that do not apply
First, it was not the original energy expenditure that is the problem. The problem is that the CO2 CHANGES the solar energy exchange equation, by allowing ~the same amount of solar energy to the earth's surface, but REDUCING the earth's ability radiate that energy back to space. That newly captured energy VASTLY EXCEEDS the original energy that went into adding the CO2 to the atmosphere. That original energy spent has almost zero impact on climate change.
Next, capture requires none of the things you say.
— Carbon capture can be done by 'farming' high-uptake organisms, which has extreme leverage for energy expended. Examples include iron-seeding of water to make algae blooms, planting high uptake trees, etc.
— Carbon capture can be done by accelerating natural chemical processes, e.g., exposing rocks that react with water and CO@, or crushing those rocks and spreading them on fields (iirc, Google just contracted with a company doing exactly that)
— Carbon capture can be done by enzyme-driven processes that make the desired reactions happen with minimal artificial energy input
— Even if you want to use a chemistry that requires direct energy input, there is zero requirement to recover the original highly complex and energy-dense molecules previously used for fuel, it only needs to make a compound that can be captured. Still requires less energy than original used.
— Even if you insist on producing new molecules as energy-dense as the originals, there is vastly more energy available via non-CO2-outputting sources, such as solar, wind, etc. which often produce surpluses. Again, the energy of the process has almost zero to do with promoting climate change.
So, NO, it neither a bad joke, a process that requires breaking laws of physics, at fantasy, or a scam.
> You've got a requirement to reduce entropy but none to pack it back into energy dense fuel.
C'mon, this is laughable. What are we going to do with it? Fill-up massive balloons? Also, I have never suggested that the objective should be to pack it back into energy dense fuel.
You are trying to talk your way around violating the laws of physics. Look, it's OK if you want to believe this. However, this does not change reality. This is why every single so-called solution has failed and ultimately is discredited.
As I suggested to someone else. If you don't see the point, do this:
Go to the store and buy a 10 Kg bag of finely ground flour.
Walk around your office or home and start throwing flour everywhere. Coat every single surface and crevice with it. Make sure it goes into your TV, computer, air conditioning system, setup a few fans to blow it around.
Now go back and retrieve every single particle.
The time, energy and resources required is astronomical when compared to the damage you can cause in 30 to 60 minutes. Anyone with minimal critical thinking capacity can understand that it will take weeks, if not months, of a very serious effort and lots more energy to remove every grain of flour.
Note that there is no requirement to put it back into the bag. You can eat it, cook with it. I don't care. Yet, you must repair the damage you caused down to the last particle.
Are you suggesting you can clean the room/office using less time, resources and energy than that required to create the disaster? I hope not.
That's the problem.
You need to understand that small-scale hypothetical first.
Now expand it to a planetary scale, where you have CO2 floating around the atmosphere at all levels, over every continent and ocean. The mere suggestion that we can actually claw this back should be ridiculous to anyone who stops to really apply some thinking to this problem. It's a fantasy.
We understand it well enough to know that it does not apply. Flour in crevices is not a gas in a mix of gasses
Your problem is you must pick the right small-scale hypothetical.
For gasses, any single removing device operating faster than the input devices will eventually remove ALL of the target gas. Yes, the rate gets asymptotic, and yes, more devices are better than one, but every molecule will all by itself come out of every crevice, and eventually bump into the removal device. That will NEVER happen with your flour example.
This principle is already used for pretty much every air cleaning device in use both on the planet and in space.
I am disappointed to see that you are relying on vague reasoning by analogy instead of thermodynamic calculations or empirical performance figures from currently existing carbon dioxide scrubber systems in this conversation. Generally you are more intellectually rigorous than this.
There are significant and relevant differences between carbon dioxide and flour for this purpose; for example, carbon dioxide is a gas and therefore diffuses continuously through the atmosphere, so a scrubber in a fixed location can eventually remove all of it, which is common practice in submarines and space stations. Also, the amount of energy obtained by burning carbon is orders of magnitude larger than, and actually the opposite sign from, the amount of energy obtained by scattering a similar mass of solid particles around, and this is relevant because you are specifically and explicitly comparing the energy consumed by the emission and capture processes.
> I am disappointed to see that you are relying on vague reasoning by analogy instead of thermodynamic calculations or empirical performance figures from currently existing carbon dioxide scrubber systems in this conversation. Generally you are more intellectually rigorous than this.
I have presented detailed calculations in the past only to be met with the same mindless brutalization via downvotes, comments and flagging. The HN masses are just as intellectually lazy as masses can be in any other context.
This is no different from recent events in the political spectrum, such as nearly the entire political and media machinery telling the world that Biden was just fine (and a bunch of other lies). Only those of us who managed to think outside the indoctrination seemed to have understood --years ago-- the sad reality that the poor man was being used and abused by the political machinery. Only when reality became inescapable did they start speaking the truth. In fact, it was worse than that, they actively attacked the man and popped him out of the system like a painful puss-filled pimple. The end result? They gave the leadership position to a candidate so flawed that billions of dollars and massive amounts of support from luminaries could not get her elected.
The point is: The truth always has a way to come out, sooner or later. Sometimes with undesirable consequences.
Climate change became a religion a long time ago. The domain is supported by the indoctrinated masses who love to regurgitate what they are told to think. Researchers fear going against the grain because their funding and careers depend on it. The powerful and those making money with this madness actively promote it and make sure they have support for insane projects. Frankly, it would be far easier to join them, regurgitate the nonsense and make millions of dollars per year by being a member of this dishonest club. Not my style. Sorry.
Regarding the flour analogy. You are reading too much into it. This was not a model of the planet and our atmospheric system. I only use these kinds of analogies to show how it takes far more effort, resources and energy to reverse damage that can be done in mere minutes. That's all.
Lot's of commenters on HN do not seem able to (or willing to) exercise critical thinking. Some might not have the requisite scientific background or real-world experience to understand what are otherwise simple arguments rooted in physics. One of the common comments goes something like: If we polluted it in X years we can clean it up in X years or less.
Of course, this is ridiculous. The example of flour spread all over the office is simple enough to illustrate just how silly this idea actually is. And, if someone cares enough to think it through a bit deeper, it also illustrates just how much more energy and resources is required than a sack of flour.
That's it. It isn't a model of a planet and its atmosphere. It's there to say: You cannot fix a problem with less energy, resources or time than what went into creating it in the first place. Nothing else.
> a scrubber in a fixed location can eventually remove all of it
That would be nice if it were possible. Sorry, this is another fantasy. Once again, things fail in a violent manner once considered at a global scale. You cannot filter air at a planetary scale, this is simply preposterous starting with the reality of building these kinds of systems every 10, 20, 50 or 100 miles throughout the planet, the scale, energy, resources and realities of air processing all work against you. These systems are far more likely to "filter" the same air over and over again than to actually "remove all of it".
In a prior life I was involved in large systems installations requiring the construction of clean rooms of varying scales, from small 20 x 20 foot labs to massive aerospace-level clean rooms (think Home Depot scale).
What works well in a smallish environment (a room, submarine, space station) quickly fails at larger scales. In the end, you cannot create a clean room by filtering the enclosed volume. That's not how it is done except for very specific applications (spacecraft, submarine, space station and that's it). The only way is to inject clean air and create positive pressure such that nothing is able to come in from the outside. Scrubber systems in the corner-case applications where this isn't an option are incredibly expensive and complex. They do not scale well at all.
Of course this isn't to suggest that we can bring in clean air into our atmosphere. My point is that the idea of filtering our entire atmosphere (or a substantial enough portion of it) only works on paper, research grant applications and proposals for funding by politicians eager to continue the narrative that drives unthinking masses to vote for them. Who wants to vote for someone who says "The emperor has no clothes"? Nobody. Far easier for the machinery to convince everyone that the naked man in front of them is wearing the finest garments every conceived. Sadly, that book [0] covers climate change with great accuracy.
Look, the scenario today is no different from what it has been for the last, 50 years or more. This articles [1] is an interesting compilation of predictions over time. All crazy nonsense. Yet, at the time, taken seriously and used to set policy and more.
Who would dare go against the likes of Nobel Prize winners, Ted Turner, Al Gore and other merchants of FUD? From a career standpoint, as academics, media or politicians, it would have been suicidal. Anyone can understand this. And yet, all of these and many others were selling pure unrefined bullshit. I mean, crap like this, quoting:
"A senior UN environmental official (Noel Brown) says entire nations could be wiped off the face of the Earth by rising sea levels if the global warming trend is not reversed by the year 2000."
(1970) "Air pollution may obliterate the sun and cause a new ice age in the first third of the next century if population continues to grow and earth’s resources are consumed at the present rate…"
"Harvard biologist and Nobel Prize winner George Wald, speaking at the University of Rhode Island in November 1970: “Civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.”"
"In April 2008, media mogul Ted Turner provided far more detail than either Gore or Pachauri, emphasizing the consequences of climate inaction. “Not doing it will be catastrophic. We’ll be eight degrees hotter in ten, not 10 but 30 or 40 years and basically none of the crops will grow. Most of the people will have died and the rest of us will be cannibals. Civilization will have broken down. The few people left will be living in a failed state like Somalia or Sudan, and living conditions will be intolerable. The droughts will be so bad there’ll be no more corn growing.”
(2019, AOC) "The world is gonna end in 12 years if we don’t address climate change"
When I say that this domain has become a sad joke, a religion, an incredible farce supported by those seeking political and financial gain, rather than real science, well, there's ample evidence to support this statement going back over 50 years. In other words, it is far more likely that this is all a big smelly pile of bullshit than otherwise.
> Lot's of commenters on HN do not seem able to (or willing to) exercise critical thinking. Some might not have the requisite scientific background or real-world experience to understand what are otherwise simple arguments rooted in physics.
Sure, that's true, but are those the people whose opinion you care about? If you tailor your argument for them and leave out all the reasoning, you'll look like one of them, and people who are able and willing to exercise critical thinking on the topic will write you off. Don't tempt people to confuse you with dumbfucks like Ted Turner and Noel J. Brown.
> You cannot filter air at a planetary scale, ... These systems are far more likely to "filter" the same air over and over again than to actually "remove all of it".
You might be right that you need more than a single giant inverse volcano sucking carbon dioxide out of all of the air.
The diffusivity of CO₂ in air is 16mm²/s, or 1.6 × 10⁻⁵ m/s in SI units. Suppose, conservatively, that there are no jet streams or any other wind, so you have to rely entirely on diffusion, and that you've reduced the CO₂ around your scrubber to the pre-industrial 280ppm (0.012mol/m³), while the opposite side of the planet, 20000km away, is still at 400ppm (0.017mol/m³). If the concentration gradient were constant, it would be 0.25 nmol/m³/m over that distance. Using the given value of the diffusivity, this results in 4 × 10⁻¹⁵ moles per second per square meter flowing over that gradient. The atmosphere is in effect about 8 km tall, so at the halfway point of this flow, the great circle halfway along the path, you have 320000 km² of cross-sectional area, through which your flow is about 0.000128 mol/s. If you're trying to clean up the air over, say, 20 years, that works out to about 800 kilomoles, only about 36 tonnes of CO₂.
But we had to remove 2.3 gigatonnes of the atmosphere's 7.8 gigatonnes of CO₂, not 36 tonnes. We need a system that's 64 million times more powerful, which means that instead of being 20000 km away from the farthest points on the planet, it needs to be about 20000/8000 = 2.5 km. (Also, the above is assuming that the gradient remains constant, which of course it can't; you'll have a much stronger cross-sectional gradient around anything like a point sink or source of carbon, because the same mass flow is spread over a much smaller area. I don't know the exact solution for diffusion on the surface of a globe, but I'm confident the above is in the ballpark.)
But we do have wind; to take the most extreme example, the jet streams travel about 50m/s, so any parcel of air in them circles the globe about once a week. So if you set up your antivolcano near a jet stream and create a locally very low CO₂ concentration, CO₂ will diffuse rapidly out of the jet stream as it travels through your area and diffuse rapidly back into the jet stream on the other side of the planet three days later.
So if you have winds that bring all of the atmosphere within 2.5km of your antivolcano at some point within those 20 years, you can scrub it all. All of it.
> Notable eruptions in recent years appear to have affected climate. One example is the 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines, which injected nearly 20 million tons of SO2 into the stratosphere that became dispersed around the globe in about 3 weeks. The recorded effect was a 0.5 degrees C (0.9 degrees F) drop in temperature for the following two years.
So in practice the timescale on which an antivolcano's CO₂-scrubbing effect would reach the air on the other side of the planet is only a few weeks, not the hundreds of millions of years that the naïve diffusion calculation suggests.
You say:
> In the end, you cannot create a clean room by filtering the enclosed volume.
I haven't tried, but I'd venture to guess that that's because dust, like flour, doesn't diffuse through air (at human temperatures on human timescales). It's a thousand times denser than air, so it can settle on surfaces and get trapped in certain kinds of airflow patterns. Carbon dioxide doesn't behave like that. It behaves like water vapor.
> Scrubber systems in the corner-case applications where this isn't an option are incredibly expensive and complex. They do not scale well at all.
Unlike cleanroom filters, scrubbers, which are gas-exchange devices used for removing unwanted gases from air, are actually very cheap and simple, and they scale extremely well; they are already being operated at many-megawatt industrial scale, which is how we ended the acid rain problem caused by coal power plants. A CO₂ scrubber can be as simple and low-tech as a wall painted with whitewash, though soda-lime scrubbers (a few percent of lye added to the whitewash, which is balled up in little beads to let the air pass through) are much more common because they are so much more compact. They are in wide use for general anesthesia, scuba diving, and decompression chambers. On the order of a million recreational scuba divers own their own scrubbers. You can buy a bottle of 5 liters of soda lime for €32 at https://www.diveavenue.com/en/high-pressure/1860-chaux-spher... if you stick a porous breathing tube into the bottle, it becomes a scrubber, although you'd probably die if you tried diving with it.
Other kinds of gas scrubbers are available as disposable cartridges from 3M for their respirator masks, so it's absolutely not true that they're "incredibly expensive and complex", but let's stay focused on CO₂ scrubbers here, since that's what's relevant to climate change.
The disadvantage of lime CO₂ scrubbers is that, although they are very simple, regenerating the lime requires heating it up to 900°. People have been doing this for 12000 years (it's probably literally the oldest human chemical process) but it takes a lot of energy compared to other sorbents like triethanolamine, which is why amine scrubbing is currently the mainstay of both submarine CO₂ scrubbers and point-source CO₂ capture pilot projects. There's a nice process flow diagram of a submarine CO₂ scrubber at https://sites.psu.edu/mooneypassionblog2/2022/03/22/how-subm....
As for scaling, lime burning, in the slightly altered form of portland cement making, is one of the world's largest-scale industrial processes, producing 4 billion tonnes of cement per year and emitting 1 billion tonnes of CO₂, which you'll notice is about 2½ years for the mass of the carbon dioxide we have to remove. (Portland cement, unlike Neolithic-style lime cement, only reabsorbs a fraction of that CO₂ when it sets.) So we already know we can scale lime kilns up to the requisite levels; we just have to capture their carbon dioxide output. There are also a bunch of startups trying to scale up amine scrubbing and other processes to direct air capture, but I'm skeptical that their supply chains will be able to compete for scale with the world limestone-and-other-calcareous-stone industry.
> My point is that the idea of filtering our entire atmosphere (or a substantial enough portion of it) only works on paper, research grant applications and proposals for funding by politicians eager to continue the narrative that drives unthinking masses to vote for them.
Every engineering idea only works on paper until you build it. That's how engineering works: you make things work on paper, you validate your assumptions with prototypes, you learn from your mistakes, and finally you create something that never existed before. Your criticism here is a fully general criticism of every technical innovation in history; it doesn't distinguish between perpetual motion machines (which work on paper if you screw up your calculations badly enough) and any routine civil engineering project such as a bridge embankment.
As shown in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42439752 my numbers above for the total atmospheric carbon dioxide load and the amount to remove are wrong by orders of magnitude. The total is 3.3 teratonnes, of which we will need to remove 1.1 teratonnes to get back to preindustrial levels, not just 2.3 gigatonnes. I believe this reduces the 2.5km number above (for the range over which diffusion alone would transport the necessary CO2 flux) to some 400m. Assuming I got the rest of the calculation right, which I'm uncertain of.
This also means that the world cement industry is not currently large enough to carry out the necessary direct air capture over a timespan of decades. You need a carbon dioxide capture industry 10 or 20 times larger; at current energy and material prices, this would cost on the order of 6 trillion dollars per year, about 6% of the world GDP of US$105 trillion per year, nominal, World Bank estimate: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomi.... World GDP has been growing about 3.9% per year, so rather than setting us back to the Stone Age, or even to the 18th century, this staggering expense would set us back to about the time Silicon Valley Bank collapsed, Hamas invaded Israel, OpenAI released GPT-4, and Microsoft bought Activision Blizzard.
This clearly demonstrates that it is technically feasible already, just not economically/politically. Rapidly falling energy prices thanks to the transition to super-cheap renewable energy will ease the economic difficulties, though the project may still require international diplomacy.
Also, https://earthscience.stackexchange.com/questions/994/how-lon... says, "The time scale of interhemispheric tropospheric transport is in the order of one year," not a few weeks. I assume that the difference from the Mount Pinatubo number is because the troposphere mixes more slowly than the stratosphere because in general the winds in the troposphere are slower. (However, the jet stream in particular is at the tropopause, where the two meet.)
I can't understand why you put so much effort into trying to justify your position with irrelevant analogies. You've tried to dismiss my point with a single line. There are several techniques for sequestering co2 pretty permanently that don't involve turning it back into fuel. Go and research them and stop being so dogmatic.
I used to think that too, but then I found out it wasn't true. It turns out that by instantly laughing at people who disagree with you, you lose the opportunity to learn the things they know that you don't.
Specifically, in this case, the standard enthalpy of formation of carbon dioxide is -393.5 kilojoules per mole (that's the energy you get when you burn coal). If you burn coal in a sealed 1-bar chamber to drive a heat engine (such as a steam turbine), and pump the exhaust gases through a passively-air-cooled 1-bar heat exchanger to cool them back down to room temperature, you have obtained those 394kJ/mol thermal, about 138kJ/mol electric, for only the cost of blowing the gas around, without releasing any carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Blowing the gas around with blowers takes typically about three orders of magnitude less energy than the heat energy the gas carries, though this depends on things like gas temperature and duct length, diameter, and smoothness. So physics is no bar (heh!) to getting from the coal-and-atmospheric-oxygen state into the electricity-and-captured-carbon-dioxide state.
There is some necessary energy cost involved in atmospheric carbon dioxide capture, because the air is only 400 ppm carbon dioxide and 99.96% other things, so there is an entropic cost to unmixing it. That entropic cost is not where you get the energy from burning it; the mixing happens above your smokestack where you can't extract any energy released and, as demonstrated above, can be avoided entirely. I don't understand thermodynamics well enough to calculate the thermodynamically necessary energy to reverse that entropy, but my understanding is that even at 400ppm it is orders of magnitude lower than the fuel's heating value.
Recompressing the carbon dioxide to liquid form requires about as much energy as you got in mechanical form out of the turbine; carbon dioxide liquefies at room temperature at 60 bar, liberating its enthalpy of vaporization of 16.7 kilojoules per mole, 4.2% of the enthalpy of formation. 59 bar is 5.9 kJ/l, and at room temperature and 1 bar an ideal gas occupies 24.4 l/mol, so you need to put about 140kJ/mol into compression. But as I understand it (and correct me if I'm wrong) almost all of that energy comes back out as heat. In practice, atmospheric carbon capture systems use absorbents or adsorbents such as calcium oxide, zeolites, or ethanolamine solutions to avoid this complicated and inefficient compression step. They use a substantial amount of energy to regenerate the sorbents, but, as I understand it, much less than burning the fuel generates.
For example, https://cobblab.eas.gatech.edu/energy/Readings/rochelle2009.... (DOI: 10.1126/science.1176731) says that a monoethanolamine scrubber used for flue-gas treatment at a 450-megawatt power plant in the year 02006 used 0.37 megawatt hours per ton of CO₂ removed. Assuming they mean metric tonnes, that's 1.332 gigajoules per 22700 moles of CO₂, which works out to 59kJ/mol, which is 43% of the energy obtained from burning the carbon. (Although amine scrubbers have been used for capturing CO₂ from flue gas at a number of power plants since the 01980s, I'm unclear on whether this 59kJ/mol number represents measurements from an actually deployed system or the projected performance of a proposed design.)
You could argue that it's easier to remove CO₂ from power-plant flue gas where it's fairly concentrated (12% rather than 0.04%), but in fact sorbents like monoethanolamine and triethanolamine are also quite effective at removing CO₂ from breathable air in environments such as submarines and space stations. At room temperature, their vapor pressure of CO₂ is quite low indeed, so it's mostly just a question of needing to expose the sorbent solution to air over a longer period of time. It doesn't result in requiring a proportional increase in the energy consumption of the process.
A recent open-access survey of the direct-air-capture problem is https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlepdf/2022/ee/d1ee03523... (doi 10.1039/d1ee03523a). (However, note that that's still from November 02021, at which point photovoltaic panels still cost three times as much as they do now, so its calculations of energy costs are inflated by at least a factor of three.)
So, no, the laws of physics don't require that removing CO₂ will require even as much energy as what went into adding it to the atmosphere, much less "massively more energy", as you claim.
Even if they did, though, that wouldn't make atmospheric carbon capture impractical or a scam. Burning methane (natural gas) yields 55.6 MJ/kg (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density#Chemical_reacti...) which works out to 892kJ/mol, but each mole of methane only produces one mole of carbon. The other 892 - 394 = 498kJ/mol (HHV) comes from burning the hydrogen (water's enthalpy of formation is -285.83kJ/mol, and methane's is -74.6kJ/mol, so we get 497.1 kJ/mol extra after the rounding errors). So even if we had to pay back all of that 286kJ/mol from the carbon to stuff it back into a bottle, we'd still have 56% of the energy we got from burning the natural gas left over.
And, of course, photovoltaics and wind provide abundant energy we can use for atmospheric carbon capture without releasing any more carbon dioxide, and nowadays they do it far more cheaply than fossil-fuel power plants ever did.
There are also schemes for atmospheric carbon dioxide capture with biological photosynthesis, which I think are probably not feasible at the required scale due to the required area, and with enhanced weathering by pulverizing olivines, which are probably feasible but strike me as risky. In the olivine case, the energy required to extract the gas from the atmosphere was provided billions of years ago by the heat of the earth driving carbon dioxide and other volatiles out of the mantle, so we don't have to care how big it is.
The reason "every single proposal for CO2 removal has failed" is (1) most of them are pretty energy-intensive, and until five years ago, energy was expensive (and cheap energy still hasn't reached most places); and (2) there's no clear way to make money at CO2 removal at current carbon credit prices, which are in part because the carbon credit market is pretty corrupt but also because at this point there's still a lot of low-hanging fruit in the emissions-reduction sector.
> You do realize that removing CO2 will require massively more energy than what went into adding it to the atmosphere, right?
The reaction of CO2 with silicate rocks that pulls CO2 out of the atmosphere naturally (and is why the Earth is not like Venus with 90 bar of CO2 in the atmosphere) is exothermic. So, the energy needed is not just not large, it could even be negative.
> The advocates for taking action are usually talking about limiting damage rather than restoring anything.
No, they are pushing nonsense for political and/or financial gain. Why? Who would push back against "saving the planet"? How many researchers are going to destroy their careers in a politically and financially-lucrative environment by speaking out against any of this?
Remember that we now know, without a shred of doubt, that the mass media has been pushing lies to their audience for quite some time. The climate madness is just another part of this problem.
Please read this research paper from Google. It has become increasingly difficult to find it. I have a dozen links that stopped working for whatever reason.
This was published on Spectrum, IEEE in December of 2014. A serious publication. The paper is from Google's research division. The title is: "Energy's Creative Destruction".
This study made the researchers realize the futility of what was being pushed by everyone at that time. This also happens to be the paper that launched me into a year-long effort to finally try to understand this topic. Frankly, once I found the correct scientific perspective, it really wasn't that hard to get a grip and understand that we are being sold a fantasy.
The research stopped without moving on to evaluate the viability of the various CO2 capture methods floated around that time (a 7 year effort that started in 2007). Everything since then has been debunked as, at best, ineffective and, at worst, impossible.
A year later the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany released this finding:
"Findings suggest that "even a probably unfeasible CO2 extraction rate" of 25 gigatonnes per year could not re-establish pre-industrial conditions or a low emission state with the period simulated (until 2700)."
"It's so much harder to capture carbon than it is to just not emit it to begin with,” says Harvey. “When your bathtub is overflowing, you don't reach for the gold-plated mop—you just turn off the faucet."
And there's more.
In other words, it's a fantasy. All of it.
Time to snap out of the Matrix and start to discuss reality.
Thank you very much for finding this Konigstein and Fork article! I am very glad to have read it. I encourage everyone else to do so, too; it's only 7 pages, and much of that is consumed by giant pie charts, so really only about 3 pages of content. Even if it doesn't meet the standards of a research paper, it's extremely informative!
Reality has changed significantly since 02014, though. Konigstein and Fork's article is framed by and based on Google's 02011 failure to make "RE<C", renewable energy cheaper than coal. But renewable energy is (and I'm aware that I'm arguably stating the obvious here) now much cheaper than coal and continues to decline in cost. (It has been much cheaper than coal for several years now in some places, though only in small parts of China, Northern Europe, and North America.) This violates the assumptions the article relies on; renewable energy is already vastly exceeding what the researchers considered "the most extraordinary success possible".
In 02014 PV panels cost 0.55 euros per peak watt (data from http://www.solarserver.com/service/pvx-spot-market-price-ind... visited 2016-02-18) and now the low-cost ones cost 0.060 euros per peak watt, and the mainstream ones (with warranties) cost 0.100 euros per peak watt. This implies the availability of intermittent energy for carbon-capture schemes at about an order of magnitude lower cost than was feasible when the paper came out; that changes the economics of carbon capture in favor of systems with lower capital equipment and materials costs and higher energy intensity
(The price in the US is still much higher due to a series of punitive tariffs against Chinese solar panels, presumably as a subsidy to the US's faltering fossil-fuel industries, but it's important to use unsubsidized prices for these calculations.)
Solar panel manufacturing can probably scale up to build many times current world marketed energy production, but only a small fraction of current world marketed energy production would be needed for atmospheric carbon capture, even with lower-energy-efficiency methods.
I previously did a ballpark number on atmospheric carbon capture via lime burning, but can't find it at the moment. But, essentially, the idea is that, if energy is free, you use it to heat limestone up to 900 degrees in a low-pressure sealed retort, driving the carbon dioxide out of it and making lime cement. You capture the nearly pure carbon dioxide thus produced, passively cool it, liquefy it, and inject it down gas wells into olivine rock formations, where it is permanently sequestered by serpentinization. Then you use the lime cement for building, at which point it reabsorbs an equivalent amount of CO2 from the air.
Due to the disruptive innovation in PV, no "disruptive technologies in carbon storage" are needed, just the Paleolithic technology of lime burning and the well-proven technologies of drilling gas wells.
The feedstocks and capital investment required for this approach are relatively small, a few times larger than the existing global cement industry, which is only 400 billion dollars a year, 0.4% of the global economy. What has made it uneconomical historically is the cost of energy, which is now in free fall thanks to solar panel manufacturers in the People's Republic of China achieving what Google failed at.
(This is not the only possible way to use superabundant solar energy to capture carbon cheaply; for example, the chloralkali process produces NaOH from salt water, and by reacting a slight excess of NaOH with magnesium chloride brine derived from seawater desalination, you get a magnesium analogue of the soda-lime used in scuba rebreathers, which rapidly absorbs carbon dioxide from air and sequesters it permanently as hydromagnesite.)
Consequently the majority of new power generation capacity in China is now solar and wind, even after correcting for their lower capacity factors, and China's carbon emissions seem to have peaked in February and are now in decline. China is especially important here not just because they consume the majority of the world's coal and a quarter of its marketed energy (5.5 terawatts out of 20) but because they produce 80% of the world's solar panels and because, unlike any other energy-intensive country, they are rapidly expanding their energy infrastructure.
The Google paper from 02014 says, "With exponential growth in deployment, businesses could be replacing 30 gigawatts of installed capacity annually by 2040." China's PV generation capacity stands at about 800 gigawatts (ac, peak) and is growing about 3% per month, which is to say, 25 gigawatts per month. What the paper's authors dared to hope might be happening yearly 26 years from now is happening monthly, already. (Except that it's mostly not replacing fossil-fuel generation yet, but augmenting it, because China's energy consumption is growing rapidly.)
The other articles you cite are similarly premised on the now-obsolete assumption that energy will remain expensive and therefore require energy-efficient carbon capture processes. Harvey is quoted as saying, "You'd have to build way more renewables than we need to stop burning fossil fuels altogether," apparently unaware that this is in fact already happening.
The Potsdam paper (https://www.nature.com/articles/nclimate2729) isn't about global warming at all except incidentally; it's about what happens with ocean acidification under the assumption that atmospheric carbon dioxide levels continue rising for 200 years to five times their current level. It doesn't investigate the feasibility of carbon capture, but rather what happens if atmospheric carbon dioxide rises to deadly levels far in excess of current levels and stays there for centuries before carbon capture is attempted.
There's still the question of what system of incentives would motivate spending on the order of a trillion dollars a year on carbon capture and sequestration, since nobody is buying the serpentine at the bottom of the gas injection wells, and the market price of synthetic hydromagnesite is likely to be minimal. Since it's only about 1% of world GDP, it's plausible that international diplomacy could find a solution, as with nuclear weapons reduction and the ozone hole.
But it might turn out not to be necessary; it's plausible that abundant energy will make carbon-neutral extraction of lime from seawater a cheaper way of making cement, including portland cement, than the conventional approach hard-rock mining. Then the cement will absorb carbon dioxide from the air as it cures, though less than lime cement. And it's plausible that it will make carbon dioxide extracted from air a cheaper source of plastic feedstocks than increasingly scarce coal or oil. Perhaps 30 or 100 years from now the pressing environmental problem will be how to halt the depletion of the atmospheric carbon reserves necessary for plant life.
OK, one person on this thread willing to actually have an intelligent conversation. This is very rare. Thank you.
I take your point about these papers being dated. The sad reality is that no researcher wants to touch this with a ten foot pole. Going against the political grain can be career ending, and they know it. If we do fund research to debunk some of these lofty projections, it is very, very rare.
Let's steel-man your argument: Energy becomes so cheap that it makes some of the old ideas possible.
OK.
I don't know of a single proposal that has been shown to scale outside of a laboratory environment. In other words, if we were to say: We cannot deploy this today, yet, in 50 years, with cheaper energy, will will be able to. We ignore energy issues and show it working at a reasonable scale. The world then devotes the next N years to prepare for the deployment of such a solution.
That would be sensible.
And yet, that has not happened.
We cannot construct an argument based on an imagined solution.
And then there's the other "minor" problem: Solar is a horrible source of energy when you consider the entire life cycle. The procurement of materials, mining, transportation, manufacturing, shipping, installation and operation are not without massive ecological consequences, including CO2 production. Do anything at a massive scale --at a planetary scale-- and the consequences will track with the scale.
And yet, it does not end there. I am not even going to explore the issues with energy storage technology at a planetary scale. From an ecological perspective, that is definitely unimaginable. Let's just agree that this is something significant enough not to ignore.
Yet, onece again, that isn't the entire story.
Solar technology is seriously problematic in one key metric: Operating life.
A solar panel is only good for 15 to 25 years. The electronics, if lucky, could be on a similar time scale. RoHS introduced a degree of planned obsolescence in every single electronic device on the planet. Lovely. Talk about unintended consequences.
The couple-decade lifespan of solar systems means that, if we were to install solar at the required planetary scale, the entire planet would have to rebuild the earths entire solar power generation infrastructure every twenty years or so.
That cannot be ignored. The word "cataclysmic" comes to mind.
Imagine China constantly producing replacement panels and systems for a planetary scale solar array rebuilding from here to eternity. We can't even begin to calculate just how much ecological damage this might cause. It won't be zero. It will not be trivial. It will be at a scale never before imagined.
And that's the problem.
It is easy to say "solar and wind" and point to a solution in isolation of the realities of the idea.
It's like cleaning your floors with muddy water. The exercise does not result in cleaner floors.
> OK, one person on this thread willing to actually have an intelligent conversation. This is very rare. Thank you.
It's always pleasant to discuss issues with you, too! It's unfortunate that there's so much ideological battle on here that it's rare, in part because the structural incentives are for rapid replies rather than thoughtful ones. (The tone of some of your comments in this thread has perhaps been somewhat inflammatory, as well.) I forget, are you on the think.com hackers-l?
> I don't know of a single proposal that has been shown to scale outside of a laboratory environment.
Well, elsethread, I pointed at https://cobblab.eas.gatech.edu/energy/Readings/rochelle2009...., which mentions dozens of power plants that are using amine scrubbing at sub-gigawatt scales for flue gas decarbonization. While this is still three orders of magnitude lower than required, I hope you'll agree that it's outside of a laboratory environment!
It's reasonable to wonder whether current sources of the required amines can scale to those levels. I suspect that with insanely cheap energy it will be more profitable to use cheaper, less energy-efficient materials such as lime. Hopefully it is clear that lime burning faces no obstacles in scaling to the necessary level to terraform Earth, but if you have any doubts, I'd be happy to answer them.
I suspect we'll probably come up with something better than lime kilns; the reason that's what I outlined upthread is mostly because it's so simple and well understood, without any unknowns that might come back to bite us.
> We cannot construct an argument based on an imagined solution.
Well, as I understand it, the alternatives would be to construct an argument based on an already deployed solution, which unfortunately doesn't exist, or to construct an argument not based on any solutions, which won't get us anywhere. So constructing an argument based on an imagined solution is probably our best choice. While that approach didn't work so well at bringing about world peace, urban renewal, or Xanadu, its track record is pretty decent at building things like the Apollo program, the railroads, and the internet, so I don't think we should dismiss constructing an argument based on an imagined solution. We just have to be careful and rigorous in our calculations!
> Solar is a horrible source of energy when you consider the entire life cycle. The procurement of materials, mining, transportation, manufacturing, shipping, installation and operation are not without massive ecological consequences.
This turns out to be false, which should be clear from a simple calculation, almost a Fermi estimate. A square meter of 21%-efficient solar panel (the most common kind today) is 210 watts peak, 40 watts average at a 20% capacity factor. It's mostly (>90%) made of 3.2-mm-thick soda-lime glass, which is 2.44g/cc, so it's 7.8kg/m². If we take its rated life of 20 years, it produces 25GJ, which works out to 3200MJ/kg. We know that the procurement of materials, mining, transportation, and shipping to send coal to coal power plants is economically feasible—significant compared to the economic value of the coal as energy, but far from overwhelming, so many coal power plants are located far from coal mines. Coal's energy density tops out at 33MJ/kg, conveniently 1% of the "energy density" of the solar panel, and we know that the majority of the massive ecological consequences of coal mining come from burning the coal, with a small but significant addition from strip mining.
So, even for coal, procurement, and transportation/shipping are insignificant, and for solar panels they're roughly a hundred times smaller even than that. Mining the requisite materials similarly makes an impact that's only roughly a hundredth of the already small environmental impact of coal mining.
(The only rare material used in solar panels is silver, which contributes about 10% of their cost. Everything else is very abundant, far more abundant than coal, and therefore doesn't have to be refined from low-grade deposits.)
The ratio is actually close to 300:1 than the 100:1 I've been using, because the solar panels directly produce electricity, while about two thirds of the coal's energy is lost in the thermal power plant.
Manufacturing, installation, and operation of solar panels can of course be carried out in arbitrarily harmful ways, but they don't carry any inherent environmental costs the way mining and shipping do, and overall they seem to be doing little or no environmental damage at the moment. Operating solar farms may actually be environmentally beneficial in desert and desertifying areas, although we should expect that to eventually be misaligned with some kind of economic objective.
> I am not even going to explore the issues with energy storage technology at a planetary scale.
That's okay! I've been exploring them for several years, and it turns out that, while the energy transition to renewables does create a planetary-scale energy storage problem, there are numerous viable planetary-scale solutions. So there's not really anything to worry about.
> A solar panel is only good for 15 to 25 years.
It turns out that this is only the rated life, and crystalline silicon solar panels (the kind that has virtually all of the current utility-scale market) have actually degraded by only about 15% at 25 years, unless they're broken (for example due to manufacturing defects or vandalism). They do continue to degrade thereafter, but only by a fraction of a percent per year. Crystalline silicon is the silicon analogue of diamond (but without diamond's metastability problem), and its surface oxide layer has a very low diffusivity for oxygen, so the relevant timescale for the solar cells themselves is probably millennia, not years. (The EVA adhesive would probably have to be replaced every century, though.) Most panels manufactured in the 01970s are still operational today and still produce most of their original power.
> RoHS introduced a degree of planned obsolescence in every single electronic device on the planet. Lovely. Talk about unintended consequences.
It turns out that there are exemptions from RoHS, and in particular solar cells are soldered with solder containing lead, avoiding the problem you're describing. Plausibly the power electronics that are connnected to the cells will eventually short out with tin whiskers, but even in RoHS-soldered devices, tin whiskers are not inevitable, and even when they occur in the power electronics, they generally don't damage the solar cells themselves, though they can.
> The couple-decade lifespan of solar systems means that, if we were to install solar at the required planetary scale, the entire planet would have to rebuild the earth's entire solar power generation infrastructure every twenty years or so.
Remember that the amount of material in solar panels is about 1/300 of the amount of coal that they replace over their lifetime. So if we did replace the whole solar power generation infrastructure every twenty years, the amount we'd have to replace is roughly equivalent to the amount of coal we'd have to dig up every month to supply the same amount of power through coal plants. Which is pretty much what we've been doing.
However, this is a place where I think you're underestimating the impact. Right now installed solar power is increasing by about 25% per year, which is to say, every three years, we've been rebuilding the earth's entire solar power generation infrastructure! We just haven't been ripping the old stuff out.
You could imagine (as many politicians and researchers do!) that once we have enough solar capacity installed to supply all of world marketed energy consumption (100 TW peak, costing about 11 trillion dollars at today's prices, to supply 20 TW) we will suddenly stop manufacturing solar panels except for those needed to replace out-of-warranty panels. At the current exponential rate, that should happen sometime around 02042, shortly after the 32-bit time_t rollover. But it seems implausible that a solar panel manufacturing industry manufacturing 25TW per year of solar panels (an amount worth US$3 trillion per year at today's prices, but will more likely only be worth on the order of US$200B/year at that time) will be willing to just roll over and die instead of looking for new markets. We should expect world marketed energy consumption to dramatically increase in the years leading up to that time, spurred by energy costs of a tenth or a hundredth of the lowest prices fossil fuels could ever deliver.
That's when it gets, to use your word, cataclysmic. We're talking about deploying 100'000 km² of solar panels per year at that point, roughly the size of the UK, Italy, Ecuador, or (the land area of) the Philippines. That's still only 1/5000 of the planet per year, and much of it will surely be offshore like the new Shandong solar power plant, but it's sure to start to cause environmental damage as people start clear-cutting natural trees to make space for their artificial "trees".
And that's why I think we should start deploying solar-orbit power satellites well before that point, to start transitioning the most energy-intensive industrial processes off of Earth. O'Neill cylinder habitats made from asteroids can provide abundant living space for extraterrestrial humans. That way, we can preserve its biosphere as a park and a workshop for those who want to continue practicing traditional human crafts such as farming, blacksmithing, CNC machining, and cooking. We probably can't keep the humans from practicing their less laudable traditional crafts, such as warfare and genocide, but we can at least prevent them from annihilating the biosphere.
It sounds like you're arguing against someone elses comment, but I'm glad you've Done Your Own Research and finally found the one true source of truth in a sea of corruption.
If someone else is wrong or you feel they are, two good options are (1) to respond with better arguments and/or more accurate information; or (2) chalk it up to the internet being the internet and just move on.
That might be a sensible objective. It does remain to be seen if this is actually possible at all. Same problem: The concept of net zero carbon is admirable, yet the reality of achieving something like that is closer to a fantasy than reality.
In other words, we might be able to slow the rate of CO2 contribution. It is likely impossible to get it down to zero. Maybe in a few hundred years? That's as easy to predict as someone in 1824 predicting that we would have computers on every desk and our pockets, MRI machines, etc.
Note that achieving net zero does not slow down or reduce atmospheric CO2 accumulation. It will continue to rise.
And, of course, to reverse course, not only do we have to achieve net zero (which is impossible), we would have to go net negative in a very substantial way.
And that's where the "WTF are you talking about?" part comes in when listening to the fantasies being sold. Going net zero would require planetary scale resources and energy we cannot even imagine. Going negative is orders of magnitude worse.
When you move and use resources of any kind at a planetary scale, you will use unimaginable amounts of energy. Physics tells us that no process can ever be 100% efficient. In fact, most complex processes are quite inefficient when evaluated from start to finish. Assuming, say, 50% efficiency, that means that we would have to generate twice the planetary scale energy required to achieve this (if it were possible). The same is true of resources such as minerals, manufacturing, processing, transportation, digging, whatever. Which, in turn, means that we would then introduce a seriously massive amount of pollution and cause collateral effects/damage to the environment, again, at a planetary scale.
That's where the conversations go loopy very quickly. Its easy to say "cover the Equator with solar panels". It isn't easy to explain how we would do that without destroying entire ecosystems around the planet and introducing so much additional pollution that things would get worse rather than better.
The planet will address this problem naturally. We can clean-up our act to help. Yet, we should not go to insane lengths in doing so. The risk is to cause more damage and to do so at a very serious scale. In other words, in an effort to save life on earth we could, instead, succeed at killing everything on this planet.
A nice thing that physics tells us is how to precisely imagine even amounts of energy that vastly exceed the observable universe. In https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42423291 I have calculated roughly how much energy is needed and how much it will cost, in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42424292 I have explained why this doesn't violate either the laws of physics or even the demonstrated of currently deployed systems, and in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42424748 I have outlined how we would do that without destroying entire ecosystems around the planet or introducing additional pollution.
Predicting what will happen is much more difficult than calculating what can happen, but we seem to be on a good path, with atmospheric carbon capture becoming feasible at the necessary terraforming scale within decades rather than centuries.
For once I would love to see those downvoting pushback against the cult of planet-saving to present an argument against the facts as presented.
Take that chart and explain how erasing 14% or even 50% of emissions can save the planet.
Then explain how heat pumps or banning ICE vehicles --which is insignificant when compared to erasing massive modern civilizations-- is superior to erasing entire regions of the planet.
You might not like what I said. That does not make it wrong.
> You're using facts about the magnitude of the problem to justify inaction towards solving it. That just doesn't make any sense.
No. I am telling you that there is no way we can solve it. Doing so requires violating the laws of physics and science in general. That's what does not make sense.
What is clearer proof of the fallacy than knowing precisely how our planet behaves without humanity on it?
We know this. Accurately.
It takes 50K to 100K years for a 100 ppm change in atmospheric CO2.
Nothing. Absolutely nothing we do can improve on this rate of change. I've seen politicians claim we can fix it in 20 to 50 years. Does anyone challenge this nonsense when uttered? No, of course not.
They are claiming we can accelerate a planetary scale problem by a factor of ONE THOUSAND or more and nobody bothers to ask "How?" or "Where is the energy going to come from?" or "How much additional pollution and damage will the proposed process generate?" or "Are you insane?".
We desperately need to start talking about reality and leave these fantasies behind.
> Trivially false—humanity has already changed the CO2 ppm by larger, in a shorter span of time. For the most part without even noticing.
You are trivially confused: The time, energy and resources required to emit these gasses is insignificant when compared to what it will take to capture them back.
That's the problem, and that's what most casual observers refuse to think through and understand.
Go buy a 10 kg bag of fine flour. Walk around your home or office spreading the stuff everywhere.
Now clean up every single particle.
Easy to make a mess. Not so easy in time, energy and resources to clean it up. That's the problem.
Even if tomorrow a giant space-maid robot came by and stole much of our atmospheric CO2 we'd have to eventually make do without fossil fuels. Because if we continue they'd all be oxidized to the lowest energy state (CO2) one day. Giant space-maid or not. Is it that terrible to start a little earlier? Inconvenient, sure, I'll give you that. Massively inconvenient.
To be fair, at the time you made your comment, those arguments against robomartin were only correct, not valid. Some of them were not even correct. They were almost entirely unsupported assertions rather than valid arguments from verifiable facts. Hopefully my comments have improved that situation.
I didn’t downvoted you but can add some thoughts on what you said:
- erasing the USA from the map would very surely reduce some other countries emissions (world factory…). One could argue it would also remove a leader (literally) in consomptionmania and that would give space for other countries lifestyle inspirations.
- by "saving the planet" people mean many different things, arguing against this expression won’t bring much discussion. For me it’s mostly preserving access of the ressources that made humanity so bliss: diverse fauna, diverse flora, clean air and water and a bit of minerals.
- your chart is about CO2e but it’s just a part of the equation. I deplore organizations and govs tends to focus on those levels, they’re often not only a cause but also a consequence. Ecologie is a vast, domain.
- I agree banning ICE is ridiculous, just a bit less than the 90’s moto "remove you wall charger when not in used to SAVE THE PLANET". Those measure are politic (to secure car usage while oils keep draining) and economic (many new car sales, new infrastructures for charging).
This is bullshit. We, humanity, made a HUGE dent just in the last few decades, albeit in the wrong direction warming up our planet to dangerous levels. So we can't revert it back? Everybody knows that already, and that's not what it's all about. It's not about going back to previous levels, it's about damage control and keeping things at some survivable level, instead of burning it all to ashes within the next few decades.
So please don't make braindead, dangerous and lazy arguments that we can't make a difference. We are making a difference. We have to stop making a difference if we want to survive.
No. We are not. And we cannot. That's the point. I realize this is uncomfortable for you to accept from your current understanding of the matter. It takes some effort and an open mind to get past the indoctrination and constant messaging before one can understand reality.
Not to get political, but this is a good example: Lost of us understood that Biden was in cognitive decline years ago. This was was obvious to anyone who could elevate themselves above the constant lies and manipulation from every politician and media source aligned with the "approved" messaging.
It was only when the lie was impossible to hide that everyone who used to lie and support him turned against him, instantly. At the time I used to say: They are not trying to pop him like a pimple. And that's what happened.
Same with this ridiculous fantasy of being able to affect climate change at any level. I don't care if the discussion is about keeping it as it is today or reversing it. This is is irrelevant. The entire idea is a fantasy.
I don't know how much longer it will take for the truth to come out. At some point researchers, politicians and those pushing this for financial gain will have no choice but to accept reality. When that happens, I hope everyone pounding me hard on this here has a moment of honesty and reflects on just how dumb they were to believe the lies they were sold. Today the cult is so strong and prevalent, particularly here on HN, that it is suicide to even dare speak one word in opposition. That's a sad reality with equally sad parallels in the political dishonesty we just witnessed in the US.
> We are not [making a difference]. And we cannot. (...) Same with this ridiculous fantasy of being able to affect climate change at any level. I don't care if the discussion is about keeping it as it is today or reversing it. This is is irrelevant. The entire idea is a fantasy.
But in a comment above you said:
> Humanity burned fossil fuels with incredible energy content per cubic meter. Massive, unthinkable amounts.
> This is how we caused change.
I think the person you are replying to is merely saying in their comment (which you are apparently arguing against) that humanity is currently causing CO₂ buildup and climate change by continuing to burn fossil fuels. It sounds like you don't disagree with what they intended to express, but with some other interpretation. For example, perhaps you are saying that preventing the continued burning of fossil fuels is politically infeasible for some person or group, perhaps collectively the readers of HN?
There are two problems there: ⓐ the collectively suicidal course of action of humanity, of continuing to burn more and more fossil fuels without sequestering the resulting CO₂, and ⓑ the relative powerlessness of that person or group, who hypothetically would be more rational and/or altruistic, therefore choosing a better course of action that would engender a happier future for humanity, even if that meant degrowth. Or have I misunderstood you?
With regard to point ⓑ, I'm not sure what to say. But with regard to point ⓐ, as I explained in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42424292, we're already off that path, even if whatever group of people you're talking about collectively lacks the autonomy to get us back on it.
When your waste is irrelevant vs that of your neighbor, paying a high price to do your insignificant part is simply inefficient. If people really cared about a global impact, the approach would need to be radically different.
Your six year old source itself states that in 2017, China stopped the import of foreign garbage. Meaning plastic pollution will have dropped in the six years since your source was published.
More importantly though, it wasn't even necessarily China's waste. Rich, Western nations like the one you're (likely) commenting from have sent their plastic waste to China, where it ends up in the sea. And you use that for justification that "using less plastic doesn't matter", and that it's "mostly virtue signaling".
Nah, it is mostly local plastic from what I can tell. And I come from a country which is a net importer of waste, not exporter. And China is not the issue, it is mostly the Phillipines. We cannot solve this other than by payibg for and forcing a couple of countries to solve their issue.
It's not virtue signaling. Europe acknowledges that we are already good enough to keep basing our growth in fossils. But developing countries deserve some slack with fossil usage while they converge.
Indirectly, by requiring cleaner cars for example, there's a push toward China designing clean engines if they want to sell in Europe. In fact China is already selling a decent amount of cars in Europe.
Yeah let’s not compare per capita or historic responsibility, or their huge investments in renewable energy, I don’t want to lower my first world lifestyle.
Per capita plastic pollution is highest in a handful of Asian countries, but for CO2 you have a point. Plastic pollution is caused by just a couple of countries.
The EU-27 and China are currenty ballpark; the EU has made a solid effort to come down overthe decades, China has risen by virtue of being the worlds largest trading source .. the argument can be made that western countries have outsourced the CO2 of much of their production to China.
> I feel environmental regulation is going the same path. There is a lot of resistance against improving things just because. Only when something really bad happens, people wake up. But even often nothings happens.
And then a generation or two later they forget that we had so much pollution in our rivers that they occasionally caught fire. "Why do we need these protections?" Protections get weakened, problems recur. It happens everywhere, we forget why we do things a particular way, fail, and then re-learn the lessons (the hard way).
When I was a kid the pollution was so bad in the US, we learned about acid rain. They made changes that nobody liked, but the acid stopped failing from the sky and people accepted it was a better situation.
Change takes energy to implement. It is much easier to not make the change, and for the most part people are just lazy. It takes a determine group to decide to expend the energy to get the changes started.
Still the forgetting part in the danger, the complacency.
I think that’s why the US is in the state it’s in politically. Too good for too long means people are willing to let it get silly again.
I remember this, but it's been decades since I last heard someone mention "acid rain". Young adults today have probably never heard of it. Forgetting the past (or never learning about it in the first place) is a great way to repeat it.
Senna gets a lot of credit for protesting the lack of safety, but he was a supreme hypocrite. He was more than happy to ram his competitors off the track, bullying them so everyone would get out of his way for fear of blowing their budget fixing crash damage - and he'd get clean laps.
FIA could have shut it down at any point but likely didn't because of how many F1 fans he brought in from Brazil and South America.
A book: The Limit: Life and Death on the 1961 Grand Prix Circuit by Michael Cannell, is superb and details much of the racing of the era but primarily focusing on Phil Hill and Wolfgang von Tripps, it is especially eye-opening for those that have grown up on the (by comparison) relatively coddled contemporary racing, there are more deathless pages than not, of course the ending is especially upsetting even if you know what is coming.
Motor-sports safety-related regulations only affected some pilots and the people following those races (or the percent of those followers that were in for the roughness of it all, not the safety aspect). On the other hand, environment-related regulations are affecting people on a global scale, without too much recourse (apart from trying to vote in populists/extremists, when that is allowed of us). That difference in scale matters.
Also, rallye as a sport is pretty much dead now, it has been dead since the late ‘90s, give or take, and those safety regulations were a big part of why it is now dead.
>those safety regulations were a big part of why it is now dead
Well yeah, most people (men specifically) watch certain sports for the high risks/stakes. If you remove those stakes, then it's not worth watching as much. Imagine how boxing would fare if the gloves had enough padding to not hurt the opponent.
Yes, much more severe. Covid alone had a higher fatality rate than Spanish flu. 2012 MERS had a 30% fatality rate. Ebola strains in Zaire and Sudan have had fatality rates over 50%.
As for those other diseases there is zero evidence that climate change has made them more severe. It's not impossible but we simply have no reliable evidence of a causal relationship one way or the other.
What about the false alarms that are done in the name of environmentalism? Why is there no accountability for, say, plastic straw hysteria, or recycling programs that emit more CO2 than just throwing it away? You can't criticize anything done in the name of the environment even if it's blatantly wrong. Why is that?
Why isn't bringing manufacturing jobs back home part of the "green" strategy?
In the US the incoming president denies climate change and is preparing to gut environmental regulation. The new Congress is likely to reverse tax breaks for green initiatives while simultaneously cutting taxes for the most wealthy and dramatically raising the deficit. The judiciary has already knee capped the regulatory agencies and is now set to do the same for any corporate policy that acknowledges environmental issues as a shareholder issue.
The idea that the green agenda is ascendant and dominating strains credibility to the point that I can only assume you are trolling.
If you think I'm trolling that proves my point: there is no room to criticize or question anything the far left does. Double the trucks on the road? Fine. Send "recycled" plastic back to china to dump it in a landfill? Fine. Try to stop it? You're a monster who denies climate change. Life is easy when you force everything in two bins: "you're either with us [environmentalists] or you're against us [trolling]". Which president said that again? You have more in common with conservatives than you realize.
They think you're trolling because of the objectively false things you're saying about censorship, not anything you're saying that's actually about environmental policy.
You're also moving the goalposts by a mile if you go from "you can't criticize" to "the left will dislike you if you criticize".
> Which president said that again?
None of them said that. Replacing half the words in a sentence and asking who said the other half is not a way to make a coherent point.
George Dubya Bush said it. The modern liberal has more in common with a republican president than he does with the modern voter, as evidenced by the DNC's loss last month.
> Why isn't bringing manufacturing jobs back home part of the "green" strategy?
It often is. Then you have the coal/gas lobbies fighting against it, as well as any and every politician whose constituency includes jobs in these industries. Germany used to subsidise solar, then it stopped, which wiped out the solar industry in Germany overnight. It's no different in the US. This isn't a problem with environmentalism, it's a problem with nascent industries fighting change with tooth and nail. And paying the media to convince people like you that it's the environmentalists' fault.
Do you even remember what the infrastructure bill recently in the US even did to invest in green energy and manufacturing/jobs for green energy?
Stop falling for it. Stop falling for the lies and propaganda. There are people trying to make real change for the better, and they're not the ones fighting against green energy. Why aren't you able to recognize it?
The problem I think is that if you take the two extremes/limits - e.g. the "do as little as possible until we absolutely have to" and the "do everything that could feasibly make sense" sides, in the absence of an existential event, the former outcompetes the latter both in the short and long term because if you regulate _everything_ then you end up in absurd situations that kill progress.
What we really need is a time machine. With the benefit of a time machine we could implement a bunch of safety mechanisms, many of which would be inconvenient and retard progress, and then go back in time and tell people which ones made sense and which ones didn't make sense.
You don’t need a time machine. Smart people are pretty good at figuring out the costs and benefits. What you need is to cultivate an environment where safety is a priority, but it’s recognized that it also has a cost and tradeoffs, and there’s a sweet spot that isn’t “maximum safety at all costs.”
The American FAA is a pretty good example. They’ve made air travel extremely safe while also allowing it to become very cheap. Their safety record has become essentially perfect but that doesn’t come from preferring safety at all costs. They put a dollar figure on each life to determine if a safety requirement is actually worth the cost. And they recognize when unintended consequences result in a worse overall outcome. For example, child safety seats are not required on airliners despite clear evidence that they would save lives in the event of a crash. Why? Because the expense and inconvenience would push some parents to drive to their destination instead of fly. Driving is much more dangerous. They ran the numbers and found that requiring child safety seats would cost lives on net.
The FAA is far from perfect and they seem to have been slipping in recent years. But they’re a good example of how this can be done. The hard part is getting people to allow it to be done. A lot of people will insist on spending a billion dollars to save one life. Or insist on focusing on one particular area and saving lives there, ignoring a loss of life caused elsewhere. This can be resisted but it takes a lot of work.
I agree with this but I think that the FAA comes with pretty heavy caveats which limit the wider applicability of the model.
An airliner is something that is essentially impossible for a garage crew to produce, even less so if they want to be FAA accredited, but that doesn't really matter because, well, it's basically impractical for someone to build a jet anyway.
Most industries aren't like this and if you had an equivalent of the FAA for say, hand car washes, either they would basically do nothing at all, or it would be so onerous that suddenly the only people that can open car washes would be megacorps. That might mean we still have widespread inexpensive car washes, but it would come at the cost of tilting the economy towards big business and away from small owner operators which is a net negative IME.
You definitely need to account for enforcement, not just pretend your rules will magically be obeyed, when making your decisions. But I don’t see why the situation would be so dire that you can only choose between a free-for-all and destroying all small business. Licensing and inspections go a long way, and there are plenty of industries like that which haven’t been taken over by a few megacorps.
Consider air pollution from cars, for example. It starts with the manufacturers who are required to meet certain standards. But individual owners can and do modify their cars to break the rules. Despite this, air pollution from cars has been dramatically reduced with a combination of regulating manufacturers and regulating individual car owners with emissions testing.
Ironically there are really severe restrictions on car washes in some US states now due to water use limits and the environmental impact of runoff. It's really tough for a small operator to open a new car wash in California.
I think time machines would be used to opposite effect if they existed. If something bad happens, you just rewind a few minutes and say "hey Jim, be careful on that ladder, eh?"
Depending on what you mean by "at least", the warning could still be a very effective safety mechanism, or we might realize there's no point in trying to be safe at all, or something else entirely. I think the implications need to be nailed down before a convincing argument can be made.
> I feel environmental regulation is going the same path. There is a lot of resistance against improving things just because. Only when something really bad happens, people wake up. But even often nothings happens.
Also after something gets improved there is eventually pressure to roll it back. Similar thing with financial regulation: something bad happens, then there is bipartisan legislation to try to keep it from happening again, and then maybe a decade later that legislation is repealed or weakened...and the cycle starts all over.
I'm kind of fed up with it. My current job is slowly winding down and I'll probably retire when it ends, but if I decide not to retire I'm going to be way more open to jobs that in the past I would have ruled out over ethical concerns.
For once I'd like to see what it's like on the side providing the screwing instead of the side getting screwed.
So as long as I don't have to do anything that is actually illegal, I'm paid well enough that whatever havoc the work causes in the economy won't interfere with my lifestyle, and I'm far enough from the front lines that the I won't have to do things like testify in front of Congress and won't have to worry about angry mobs showing up at my house then no problem.
What an outstanding way to look at things. Don't you care what kind of world you leave your children? This is an honest literal question, not even a provocation.
I don't have kids. I'm not sure it would make a difference if I did though.
Keep in mind that my reasoning that jobs I would have previously considered unethical (because I thought they made the world a worse place in general) would maybe be acceptable to take is based on the observation that whenever we actually accomplish making such jobs illegal or at least regulate them to mitigate the harm a few years later people elect representatives that reverse those protections.
After enough cycles of that it is hard to avoid concluding that voters are nowhere near figuring out that they should stop electing those people. And its only getting worse due to people getting more and more of their information from less and less reliable sources.
If I had kids then my planning would be based on the idea they are growing up in a world where there will be lots of businesses doing things that will destabilize the economy or lead to recessions or depressions, lots of people pushing questionable investments and questionable health products, even lots of outright scams, and no realistic prospects that government will do anything to curb that.
The kids would have the best chance if I taught them how to avoid personally falling for those things and left them enough wealth that they will have an easier time getting through the recessions/depressions.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_driver_deaths_in_motor...