I don't share a strong sense of optimism that we'll 'beat climate change'. We need to fundamentally change how humans live on this planet and interact with our ecosystems to move past issues like this. Projects like these will certainly help a lot of people in the near-term, but I fear they distract us from addressing the real problems. Sadly, the real problems don't have much of a financial incentive to be solved.
>>We need to fundamentally change how humans live on this planet
If anyone wonders why some resist accepting climate change as a fact, the above statement gets to a big piece of the underlying puzzle. I strongly suspect that if climate change was merely a scientific topic, there would be little-to-no resistance to accepting it as fact.
But it's not just a scientific question, it's (been made into) a question of how humans fundamentally live on the planet. And so of course a subset of society is going to resist societal change. It's not that people are particularly stupid, it's that they don't like the fundamental changes to how they live that they believe will follow.
Of course, we all know all of this, but for some reason we like to pretend we don't.
In my personal opinion, if you truly care about stopping climate change, you should be spending our effort developing solutions that do NOT require fundamental changes in how humans live on this planet. That path is much more likely to be successful in the political realm and thus more likely to actually save the planet.
I think Tesla and Solar City are excellent examples of this. They're not "stop driving, turn off your house lights, etc", they're "keep doing what you do, only now greener"
Of course, issues with the greenlieness of electric cars, etc etc - but remember when solar panels were a net negative? AFAIK, that sure as hell didn't last.
> I think Tesla and Solar City...They're not "stop driving, turn off your house lights, etc", they're "keep doing what you do, only now greener"
Agree 100%! A few years ago Chevron ran an add campaign in DC metro depicting people saying things like "I will use less water" and "I will bike to work" and that shit made my blood boil. Every day I thought to myself "No assholes - how about you supply energy that isn't filthy!"
You can do both: limit your energy consumption and make your energy cleaner. One does not preclude the other.
Given that pretty much all of our current energy sources have a carbon cost (e.g. in the production of solar panels), it makes sense to try to limit our consumption too.
I do agree. My issue was with the single-sidedness of Chevron's campaign. To me it implied that energy consumers are the primary cause of environmental woes.
Speaking for my industry only (commercial shipping), if companies were willing to sacrifice some profit & growth, commercial ships could all operate virtually free of harmful GhG emissions. This is technically possible today.
However, given the fragmentation and overcapacity that currently exists, the international competition is too fierce for any company to make such a leap for the general good. This is why IMO MARPOL emission regulations to include Energy Efficiency Design Index (EEDI) and Emission Control Areas (ECAs) are so critical - because it says to companies "hey, it's o.k. to spend a little extra on CAPEX and OPEX, because everyone else has to also." (1)
Given what is possible today with available technology, however, I think the emission control cap tiers are far too conservative. The final tier (in a few decades) should be zero GhG emissions for all shipping. It is feasible - and really with overcapacity where it is, now is the best time to take the plunge because the reliant markets (e.g. virtually every market) will hardly feel the impact.
Shipping is a very tiny percentage (1.5%) of global GHG emissions (2), so I'd be interested to hear if experts in other fields that are larger emitters (e.g. aviation, automotive, etc) feel about the feasibility of hitting zero GHG emissions.
It's strange to me that Toyota has a hydrogen fuel car in production and for sale today, but it gets almost no attention in discussions like this one. Why is that? Are the CO2 effects of liquid hydrogen extraction a barrier? Or maybe the need to establish a network of hydrogen fuel delivery?
1) There is nothing sexy about the car. Tesla cars aren't just electric cars - they're also fantastic cars. Tesla makes a great (amazing?) car that is electric, rather than a an electric that may be a great car.
2) Yep, fueling infrastructure. You can charge your electric cars at home, at the office; the supercharger and battery swap stations; that Tesla (AFAIK?) charges your car for free... Where do you need to go to get hydrogen fuel?
There's also an analysis - maybe in the Wait, But Why? on Tesla - as to how you can't sell alternative vehicle stock from normal dealerships; it just doesn't make enough sense to the dealer, but ATM I don't remember the reasoning. Also AFAIK, Mr Musk has a good write-up on why hydrogen fuel isn't The Thing.
The economics just doesn't work out, and will never work out.
If you extract hydrogen from hydrocarbon, you're still bound to fossil fuel, and you have to build a hydrogen infrastructure.
If you do centralized electrolysis, you still need renewable energy to not be bound to fossil fuel, and you have to build a hydrogen infrastructure.
If you do decentralized electrolysis, i.e. you plug in your hydrogen car to charge it, you essentially have a battery that is slower, more expensive, and shittier than existing Li-ion batteries.
We have the infrastructure for electric cars already, they're more efficient than hydrogen cars, and they're cheaper to produce so why bother? It's extremely unlikely that the underlying economics and energy fundamentals will change, but if Toyota wants to dump billions into research - fine, I'm not going to stop them.
I'm still not convinced. At the end of the day, liquid hydrogen is a better energy store than any existing battery tech. All the issues you listed are the same for electric cars--reliance on fossil fuels, need to build infrastructure, etc.
You also ignored the fact that filling a tank is more convenient and faster than charging a battery. Or that batteries have a limited lifespan.
If the economics don't work, why would the leading automaker that originates from an island without domestic fossil fuels bet on it?
You have to do the full systems analysis, you can't just look at the numbers of liquid hydrogen in isolation.
You get less mileage/kWh from a system that consumes electricity and fills up fuel cell tanks, than a system that consumes electricity and charges on-board Li-ion batteries.
Filling a tank is absolutely convenient, but gasoline is safe at room temperature and normal atmospheric pressure. Liquid hydrogen isn't. And there's almost no hydrogen infrastructure in place. We have a lot of infrastructure for charging electric cars already, and charging stations are being built at a rapid pace to satisfy actual demand.
Toyota is spending a ton of Other People's Money on an interesting research project. The government of Japan is perfectly free to subsidize that if they feel like it, and I'm sure we'll get something useful and interesting out of it at the end, but fuel-cell cars are just not going to beat electric ones.
Interesting. I appreciate this thoughtful discussion! I live in Nagoya, Japan (near Toyota HQ) and I've yet to see a Mirai in the wild except at the dealerships.
The fuel cell in Toyota's car is expensive enough that it's an expensive, not very nice, and not very performant car. Combine that with the inconvenience of few hydrogen filling stations, and you've got lack of interest from consumers and the press.
Population growth is leveling out and even dropping in countries with higher living standards. Maybe once everyone's living in tech paradise, the human population will stop growing altogether. We'll still probably have more stuff per capita than today, but it won't continue to grow unbounded as people seem to think today.
Unless you begin to also produce exponentially greater resources over time. Also, temporarily is still a good thing, and will make new resources stretch longer.
Humans have some success in changing their behavior, for example in moving from 5-6 children per family to 2. That change has staved off much more catastrophic effects of population growth and its impact on climate. But it needed technology advances to happen first, namely birth control.
Various other environmental advances have happened through technology without requiring behavioral changes: removing lead from gasoline, removing CFCs from aerosols and so on.
People not living in the developed world still average much more than 2 children. I think the number is reducing there but it has a way to go to reach average 2 per family.
And we're in the process of rapidly developing the 'undeveloped' world. It's not unreasonable to assume that within 50 years everyone on the planet will live in 'first world' conditions.
Indeed - it goes against everything we know about human nature. Have humans ever spontaneously and independently changed their own behavior, at their own inconvenience, en masse? No - not without strong economic, social, or legal incentives to do so. The gains we make in these areas are pretty much all going to be technological, not behavioral. As you point out the technologies are going to need to minimize the cost and inconvenience to human activity. The day it becomes economically irrational to not use renewable energy is the day that we beat climate change.
Yes, in response to strong social pressure. Look at how peoples reaction to tobacco has changed. We need the same feeling of disgust abput dirty diesal engines as a smoker at a kids birthday party.
> But it's not just a scientific question, it's (been made into) a question of how humans fundamentally live on the planet.
I agree with your first point but disagree with the above in quotes. Climate change fundamentally changes the way many global hegemonies do business and make money. That trickles into politics via lobbying and influences what people think because of who they vote for. That's why Elon Musk's (and maybe the tech industry as a whole) capitalist approach to climate change is the best hope we have.
> if you truly care about stopping climate change, you should be spending our effort developing solutions that do NOT require fundamental changes in how humans live on this planet
Yes!
If you make the most environmentally friendly alternative the cheapest, people will choose it, as if by magic.
If you make electric cars cheaper to own and operate than ICE cars, people will switch.
If you make solar power cheaper than coal, energy providers will switch.
If you make synthetic meat cheaper than real meat, there won't be any more factory farms and livestock slaughter.
If an at-home 3D printer can make your clothes and toys and stuff cheaper, you won't need to ship enormous amounts of containers with manufactured goods from China.
> We need to fundamentally change how humans live on this planet and interact with our ecosystems to move past issues like this.
I don't know about that. It seems like moving to mostly-electric transportation and replacing coal and natural gas power plants with wind and solar isn't a huge lifestyle change.
That's not to say that such a change can be done quickly, nor it will be easy. We still have some unsolved problems like energy storage. But it's not like we all need to become hunter-gatherers and live in cob huts. I think that by implying that people are going to have to give up driving or not heat their houses in the winter in order to address climate change, we just make it that much harder to gain political support from those same people.
>>We need to fundamentally change how humans live on this planet
Don't worry. As the climate changes, it will fundamentally change how humans live on this planet. Oh you wanted to choose how we change. Well, then, I share your pessimism.
I'm with you on that one. The current patterns of human consumption are too slow to change in the face of the type of climate change we are looking at. Even simple things like the obscene volume of packaging used for marketing and antitheft measures speak against real reform occurring soon.
I can't help but be reminded of the factoid that in 1898 international planning conferences were flummoxed on how on earth to deal with the ever-increasing problem of the amount of horse manure in cities... by 1912, not so much.
Now solar is cheap, coal seems incredibly unwieldy. Not just the poles and wires, but the mine, the railway to take the coal from the mine to the plant...
We are now a year or two past an inflection point -- building new coal plants at this time would seem like a much riskier investment. And that means the rate of construction is going to drop way below the rate of retirement pretty fast & pretty soon.
And because solar has high variability, it's going to get overbuilt (nobody wants their battery to go flat much, so it'll spend most of it's time full). ie, there is going to be a bunch of "spare power" lurking around that is effectively free.
And since a lot of problems can get turned into energy problems, that's a pretty happy place to be.
Rash prediction:
The Gold Coast currently has a mothballed desalination plant, and a water line from it to the South-East Queensland dams (built during the "Millenium drought"). I would not be surprised if within 30 years, it is running full-time, and pumping inland, even if the town-water dams are full -- because the marginal cost of running it instead of not-running it is zero, and with a bit more engineering the spill-over can be redirected to top up the Murray-Darling's flow. It'd require about 69kms of additional pipe, to connect Wivenhoe Dam to Cooby Dam. (Cooby Dam is in Toowoomba, which also has a bore into the Great Artesian Basin, so at that point you're inland enough to pump back into the basin. Draws from the basin have been blamed for the reduction in flows of springs that feed the Murray-Darling system...)
The quantities of water down a pipe might be small, in river terms, but if the marginal cost of power during periods of excess is zero, and seawater is free, then it might start to seem odd not just to leave it turned on whenever there's spare load...
I think we already changed significantly how we lived from a few decades back. Not because of climate change, but because of technology.
Renewable energy becomes competitive in many places worldwide since ~1-2 years, which will fuel investments and change the way we generate energy. Not because of climate change, but because of economics. Batteries are vastly more efficient than a decade back. It doesn't need a huge invention for batteries to be competitive with ICEs in cars, a few more years at current development speeds will likely be enough.
It was started with investments by people worried about climate change, but once it's economic it will be adapted by (nearly) everyone.
I think that we can beat climate change without needing to convince people that they have to fight it. Sell a decent electric pick up with ample range in the US and the extra power you get from an EV, in combination with home charging (finding gas stations on the country side can be annoying) could easily make it the best selling vehicle in the US. And I'm pretty sure it won't take too long for Ford to bring exactly that to market.
Technically I am an optimist. 50 Billion for fission plants and we are done. Socially, I am a pessimist----this is the perfect problem to defeat our institutions.
Problem with the startup crowd is they tend to get the former better than the latter.
Tokamak style fusion is efficient only at extreme scale. That's not five 10GW nuclear power plants, it's one terawatt scale plant. For reference, the entire Three Gorges Dam and its electrical plant cost ~$30bln and it has a nameplate capacity of 22.5GW. $50B seems low for a terawatt-scale fusion plant.
You'd need 3 of those plants to replace all electrical generation on earth, assuming they're at a 95% capacity factor. So call it a trillion dollars, maybe. Then you've got to look at total energy usage, which is order of magnitude larger, at 120TWh, so you'd need 12 to supply every energy need of current civilization. Maybe ~$50 trillion all included.
So one year of the entire world's productive output.
You'd need to account for the complete revamp of power distribution which would have to accompany any single source of so much power. Another couple billion (or more).
No, it's that they are expensive. Even in China reactors are only 30% cheaper than in the US, and in Korea only 25% less. In Europe they are around 10% more[1].
Note that at these prices it is cheaper to build solar, and in some cases (and places) solar AND pumped hydro power storage.
> Projects like these will certainly help a lot of people in the near-term
The priority is of course that it helps a company called YC make money, which should work. Keep in mind that this is the reason why companies are created and exist in the first place. It's called capitalism (and the reason for over-consumption, which lead us here). If it helps other people as well, then that is welcome, but not a priority.
You could also look at it a different way. If you assume that we can't beat it. Then what should we do to remedy the results of it? What solutions should be built
It feels kind of fruitless to continue this discussion with two sides that just don't agree even on what the discussion is about.
So my suggestion to those who believe there is no way back; start companies that build solutions to some of the consequences you fear.
One of possible and very effective, though quite radical solutions to stop climate change were discussed on another post's comment thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13302635
