Climate Change Tracker

With the recent advances of turning CO2 into other substances, such as propane, should we be focusing more on closing the carbon cycle and simply be producing fossil fuels from the waste products of yesteryear?

Naively, it feels like we understand C, O and H, better than we understand some of the rare metals we're now introducing in the name of climate change.

In a bit more detail:

How about less cars? More effective public transit is good for people and the climate.

Let's do away with golf lawns and pools for every house... Perhaps architecture can be adapted to suit the specific location instead of stamping the same stock photo "American house with garage that can fit 4 cars." Look at passive cooling and stuff. [Again, I'm talking about redefining comfort. Is a personal pool and large car and trimmed lawn really, honestly, what makes you comfortable? Or is it more a product of culture and advertising? You're absolutely free to believe either way, and I don't want anyone to force you to do anything.]

And honestly, we need to consoom less. Devices should not have a lifecycle of one year. You and I don't really need all these gadgets and trinkets, either. Let's stop buying random things

If you think this is a distraction or that it won't work because we can't get everyone to agree: Degrowth and permaculture requires honestly no critical mass. You can choose to buy things that last longer, and use them a bit more. Learn to fix things, etc. These are all nothing but straight benefits to you (more money in your pocket, skills that can make you more valuable in the current system, more time available now that you aren't swiping short form videos all day).

In the end, what the world needs is an abundance of cheap energy without proportional carbon emissions. Everything else is secondary.

Personally, I wholeheartedly agree. Do you see degrowth as a realistic possibility? How would this happen in today's democracies with economic systems relying on GDP growth?

But, where you're definitely right is that we need to be exploring every avenue. No one can really predict what technologies are going to work best.

We saw what a fairly massive reduction in consumption looked like during the pandemic. It basically put CO2 levels back to what they were in 2016. That's no where nearly enough.

You don't need to be a rocket scientist to work out that that's an enormous problem that must be solved. To be honest, with the house well and truly on fire, who cares about hypotheticals like lithium leaching.

I feel the graphs on this site are underselling the problem. The scale should be "last 60 years", "last 30 years". The changes we are making to the environment are profound and speak for themselves.

Now electric cars are definitely more efficient than ICE cars (despite being heavier; excluding today’s monster trucks like the electric Hummer). However a the transportation needs of a significant majority of people could be much more efficiently solved with public transit, even if that public transit is diesel powered. This is why climate policy experts quite often point out how electrification of private cars is generally regarded as a rather poor (and expensive) climate solution, next to other options.

A tactic that "big oil" et al especially likes to use is to paralyze action that could've been effective if acted on, with doomerism like "oh the climate is too messed up to do anything about, why bother"

By believing and spreading optimism, we will see improvement. Which is also why I'm leaving comments like this haha.

Most Europeans make short commutes, so these cars have a sufficient range for the vast majority of drives. They are cheaper, much lighter, and building them uses a lot less energy.

Plus, existing designs and assembly lines can be easily adapted to PHEVs. And in case of long commutes, there is always a gas engine to fall back to and therefore no range anxiety.

Like how deadly they are, microplastics and pollution from tire/road wear, noise in residential areas, the huge waste of area, expensive upkeep of infrastructure, how they make cities less inhabitable etc etc.

We will not have spare renewables for a long time. They are all devoted to residential and industrial.

If fossil fuel companies wanted to fund solar to hydrocarbon, the time was three decades ago. Now they need to realize that electric cars are technologically simpler than the vast complexity of internal combustion, and they cannot reclaim that with "but wait..." any longer.

Our CO2 emissions are warming the Earth and making it unliveable for billions of people in the global south.

The localized toxic pollution problems you mentioned are a secondary problem.

Capturing CO2 and converting CO2 to fuel requires putting the energy back into the molecules somehow. That requires a ton of energy. So either way don't we need to solve electrification?

https://youtu.be/s2xrarUWVRQ?si=HfRWIIMJbDmFhQ-z

The rare minerals and metals we are using to drive the transition are not being combusted into the atmosphere like gasoline additives are: when EV batteries wear out the lithium is right there ready to be recycled; it’s not a consumable.

Yes, EVs are heavier, yes their tires give off more particulates as a result, yea that is a problem. But EVs overall give off way, way, way fewer particulate emissions overall by replacing brake pad use with regenerative braking and by not combusting carbohydrates and pumping the residue out their tailpipes.

The things you list are not mutually exclusive: Reducing car use, replacing ICEs with EVs, replacing fossil fuels with electro fuels etc is an “all of the above” choice

You went straight from "we don't have to lose anything" to "except of course for cars, lawns, pools and technology in general" apparently without noticing the contradiction. This is a good example of why degrowth advocates have no credibility and always come across as anti-civilization Amish wannabees.

There is no such thing as degrowth outside of recessions and wars. If you want to reduce your own consumption, do so! The rest of us who believe in material progress will increase ours to make up for it.

I get the worries, Lithium mining causes ecological damage, but every sort of resource extraction causes ecological damage. Every kilogram of pollution generated from lithium mining prevents many times more pollution generated from oil extraction and emissions. Lithium, cobalt, and the rest aren't exotic materials, the battery industry is huge and has many decades of experience building batteries.

Synthesizing hydrocarbons is an important technology. But that process is incredibly energy intensive, and it's much more efficient to use electricity to just charge a battery. The scale of production of synthetic hydrocarbons isn't anywhere close to where it would need to be to make a dent in climate change. I think that electrofuels will be very important in aviation - they're the only apparent pathway to run jet engines without emissions. But it will be a long time, if ever, before that technology is mature enough to fuel passenger vehicles at a meaningful scale.

[1] https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/comparative-l...

[2] https://afdc.energy.gov/vehicles/electric_emissions.html

[3] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S136403212...

Have you analyzed the impact of the total elimination of 4 car garages, golf courses, "trinkets", and enforced 5-year upgrades on devices? do those rank among the highest-impact against climate change, or do you just not like them very much?

Do you expect that the people who would have the authority to make and enforce these decisions agree with you about which things are important or not, and have also done the cost-benefit analyses correctly and in good faith?

And they're resistant to buy-off by the industries that have the most to lose under a degrowth paradigm?

For example, low emission zones for cars - you have to have a new car to be able to drive in a low emission zone. So, who can afford it?

Cheap airplane tickets, make them more expensive - who will be able to afford to fly? Beef contaminates, make it more expensive, same result.

You can follow the logic from there.

Also of course, you could theoretically build nuke plants in the middle of nowhere that are remotely operatable, then use the power to make fuel. That could avoid NIMBY related costs.

In fact, I feel like if we did things less capitalist, we'd be more comfortable. How about devices that last longer and don't force fashion on you? (I'm looking at apple removing headphone jack, changing the notch, glued batteries, etc)

Further, how about shared pools that can be more comfortable and without requiring maintenance from you? (Or do you hire someone to take care of it for you?) Same with lawns and cars. Why not parks and transit systems?

Curb weight:

  Ford Taurus: 3917 lbs.
  BMW 330i: 3536 lbs.
  Tesla Model 3: 3862 lbs.

> With the recent advances of turning CO2 into other substances, such as propane, should we be focusing more on closing the carbon cycle and simply be producing fossil fuels from the waste products of yesteryear?

There is nothing prohibiting anybody from doing this. Make it cost effective and people will buy it. But those things are all theoretical or uneconomical right now, so until that changes we should carry on with the thing we know works.

The issue is society as currently structured doesn’t exactly work without population growth.

Unlikely the emerging country will listen without the prior wealth being shared. And it’s unlikely for wealthy countries to give up their wealth.

Often asserted, rarely backed up. A LR Model 3 weighs 4000 lbs. A Chevy Bolt weighs 3600 lbs. An AWD Camry weighs 3600, an Audi S3 weighs 3500. It's ~15% more for sedans.

For SUVs it's essentially nil. The #1 factor in the weight of a car is how big a car you get. Weight is also a secondary factor to size, as drag is the biggest cost. AND weight matters less in an EV, because at low speeds where weight matters, the EV recoups energy from regenerative braking.

> Furthermore, we're digging our lithium brines from the environment

Lithium is ~2% of the weight of a battery. It's a tiny amount of what is mined to make a car. It's also absolutely NOT a new thing- batteries were a minority use of lithium until ~2015.

> without really understanding what all this lithium will do once it's leached out into the environment

Absolutely, completely wrong. Lithium is present in low concentrations EVERYWHERE, just like any other salt. The lithium concentration in batteries is so low that if they were ores, it would not be economical to mine them. Economically viable hard rock lithium ore is 2-3x more concentrated.

Lithium is already in your drinking water, in your dirt, and a huge amount is in the ocean. If we were dumping giant blocks of it into landfills that would be an issue, but nobody is doing that.

> what impact the mines themselves will have.

Lithium brine is found in very arid places like salt flats where no water has washed the lithium into the ocean. Clay and brine mining is pretty non-disruptive, as long as you replace the water and aren't dumping acids everywhere. Hard rock lithium is just like any other quarry, but we need very little of it.

> should we be focusing more on closing the carbon cycle and simply be producing fossil fuels from the waste products

When you have a cycle that is 20% efficient on one side and 50% efficient on the other side, you're consuming 10x as much energy as a pure electrical solution. It's a terrible idea. The sheer amount of fossil fuels burned globally is also like, beyond comprehension. If we did this, it would be a plurality of all human effort to sustain it.

> better than we understand some of the rare metals we're now introducing

lithium is not a rare metal, or a rare earth metal. There are no rare earth metals in batteries. Lithium is as common as lead. Coincidentally, gas cars use more lead than EVs use lithium. Lead is also way, way more toxic.

In practice it's rocket science because:

- The climate is a function of a bazillion factors, many of which aren't well understood at all, and climatologists suck at programming them anyway. That's why the models are so unstable and frequently go crazy to Venus or ice-age like conditions even when simulating a theoretically stable climate with no CO2 emissions.

- There is evidence the CO2 greenhouse effect may saturate logarithmically, which if so would completely change the discussion around climate (in reality it wouldn't be allowed to change, but in theory)

- Nobody knows what the effect on temperature of doubling CO2 is! This is called ECS and over the decades, different teams of climatologists have estimated it yet their estimates have been drifting apart not closer together. The much vaunted consensus has actually been collapsing, with some researchers claiming ECS is a high number and others that it's a low number.

Well, I'm about to renew the annual rail passes (which cover our entire local region) for two of our children, but this approach only works because we happen to live 5 mins walk from a local station and their school is 10 mins walk from another station, on the same line.

Good luck persuading people who don't have the benefit of such "lucky geography" to do the same :/

It's not, but an improvement in CO2 levels that's not enough is way better than no improvement unless we can go all the way.

I believe that I can change people's opinion by talking about this possible world, and they are completely free to act how they wish. I also think that doing these things are straight selfish benefits for you (more money in your pocket, skills that can make you more valuable in the current system, more time available now that you aren't swiping short form videos all day)

The batteries in electric vehicles are a storage technology, so all you have to do is charge your car while the sun shines. If you need the batteries anyway it makes much more sense to put them there so you can also stop burning gasoline.

A high-quality, well-maintained car or a phone that lasts longer is more valuable than the disposable equivalent. Developing dense city centers creates wealth, reduces environmental impact, and improves quality of living all at the same time.

In an economy that really is shrinking, things tend towards stasis and people spend much more time fighting over the shrinking pie. A lot of the built environment needs to change to become sustainable, and that's only possible if the economy is vibrant, housing and transportation are plentiful, and people are motivated to improve their communities.

I don't know the solution to convincing suburban Americans to buy smaller houses and smaller cars, but I think the only way it works is if there is a positive vision of the future with both more wealth and a healthier planet.

Where we live the parks are always safe and almost always clean. The same for the transit network.

There are plenty of apparently weathy places where that appears not to be the case.

The "advances" are relatively modest efficiency improvements, but they don't change fundamental realities like the laws of thermodynamics.

"Unburning CO2" will require enormous amounts of energy. You may shave off a few percent of losses here and there, but the amounts are so huge, it is absurd to think that you could do that and just continue business as usual.

For your example of cars it makes even less sense. You have no practical way of capturing the CO2 from cars short of taking it from the air. So you added another extremely energy intensive process.

Another aspect is that crises are really bad for the poor. Wars, pandemics and depressions is when the biggest poor-to-rich wealth transfers occur. Preventing crises is typically better for the poor than meager after-the-fact concessions.

It's actually a little concerning how your line of reasoning seems to follow the most dystopian path, can't you see any other way of it happening?

Bike, ped, and rail infrastructure can be built at the national, state, and sometimes even local level. These things all reduce the need for owning so many cars.

Governments at any level can reduce how much they subsidize waste removal. Make people pay if they want to throw out more than is reasonable.

Carbon taxes can be levied against corporations, which would flow down to consumers and incentivize carbon-aware spending habits.

And In reality all of SOHO(Greenwich village, Chelsea, Fidi etc) the interior excluding the west side and east side high way could be 90% car free with high speed mass transit to bus/electric street cars you anywhere there could work much better. Cars move at not more than 20 MPH on most streets there any way now and are inefficient at transporting people.

People will realize they can just park outside manhattan in Brooklyn or Jersey City and just take a train in and just use car as a luxury instead of a necessity of transit to work the economics of the auto based economy will change. Cities and areas around them are high density once car use changes there it will change everywhere(LA I am looking at you).

[1] https://www.nyc.gov/html/brt/html/routes/14th-street.shtml

"Airplane tickets are too cheap" is a talking point of French politicians recently. It's likely they will do something about it.

The EU already has a law in place saying no more regular cars can be sold starting in 2035. Of course, with a nice exception for Ferraris.

These dystopian things are happening now, I'm not imagining things.

We have a small car (that transports four adults in comfort) that weighs almost exactly half what the Taurus does. It's also really easy to park!

> There is nothing prohibiting anybody from doing this. Make it cost effective and people will buy it

Perhaps instead of trying to ban new ICE vehicles, the taxes should be gradually raised on diesel and petrol to include an additional levy which covers whatever mitigation strategy is appropriate to deal with the emissions.

I’m not the OP, but if I take one less flight, avoid a car trip and choose not to eat beef, the same has happened with no regulation change.

It doesn’t have to be all or nothing, small steps help and the OPs positive approach is very different to the ‘tax it’ approach you have described.

> Often asserted, rarely backed up. A LR Model 3 weighs 4000 lbs. A Chevy Bolt weighs 3600 lbs. An AWD Camry weighs 3600, an Audi S3 weighs 3500. It's ~15% more for sedans.

Because it's approaching "common knowledge", at least for people paying vague attention to the switch. Here's three articles just from this year - took me 10 seconds to find on Google:

https://www.axios.com/2023/04/28/evs-weight-safety-problems

https://globalnews.ca/news/9587791/electric-vehicle-weight-s...

https://www.npr.org/2023/01/11/1148483758/ntsb-heavy-electri...

Banning them all would make my life difficult in many ways, but there would be some really huge upsides.

In cities this means you have to fight with property owners who want to keep housing costs high by limiting supply. And even if you win it will be years before the necessary amount of new housing is built to even start talking about new mass transit lines, whereas we need to do something now.

And in rural areas it's just not going to happen at all. The farmer is always going to have a truck. But it could be an electric truck.

I think we agree then about "alternative growth" or "eco-growth" where GDP and resource consumption are decoupled, where GDP continues to increase while environmental impact simultaneously falls. Most wealthy countries are already actually at that point already - CO2 emissions are falling while they still grow (adjusted for offshore emissions). It's an important point to me because the degrowth people I've encountered are kinda defeatist and I don't think will be able to grow a coalition, but decoupling the environment from growth is eminently doable.

Noah Smith is my main influence on this topic: https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/people-are-realizing-that-degr... https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/degrowth-we-cant-let-it-happen...

While I agree, it's worth mentioning that this framing overlooks the significant central planning component.

The suburban lifestyle is heavily subsidized from nearly every direction (housing, autos, roads, fuel, power and water grid, shipping) which makes something that is actually a luxury lifestyle feel like a median lifestyle. If suburban living were priced at the free market rate we would see an organic shift to denser developments and more efficient resource usage.

Any new technology like making hydrocarbons from carbon dioxide requires the spending of a very large amount of money before becoming cost effective.

There are already several decades since almost all companies have stopped doing long-term research. Now everybody does research for things that will either become profitable next year or in any case when they are multi-year projects they are just improvements of established techniques, with known market, so that there is a very low risk that they might not be profitable.

The only way in which hydrocarbon synthesis would see the level of investment that is required for making it cost effective would be with some form of governmental intervention.

We could have had already today cost-effective hydrocarbon synthesis if a lot of money and research time would not have been wasted with research in various directions that have been considered as futile by most since the very beginning, especially for methods of hydrogen storage and for hydrogen fuel cells.

These vehicles were chosen because they are approximately the same size as the Model 3. You can make whatever kind of vehicle in whatever size you want. There are electric bikes that weigh 40 pounds.

> Perhaps instead of trying to ban new ICE vehicles, the taxes should be gradually raised on diesel and petrol to include an additional levy which covers whatever mitigation strategy is appropriate to deal with the emissions.

Raising energy costs before the existing infrastructure is replaced would be catastrophic, because replacing everything overnight is impossible and in the meantime the poor would go bankrupt and the middle class would become poor. The only sensible way to implement a carbon tax is to refund all of the money to the population.

But that's also all you need to do, because then people would have a monetary incentive to avoid the tax by reducing emissions in whatever way they find most efficient.

Good for you, then don't bother with them. But you're in a tiny minority. The rest of us do in fact very much enjoy chilling out in a nice private pool surrounded by a big lawn on a warm sunny day, relaxing on an inflatable whilst listening to awesome music streamed to our AirPods whilst we drink chilled beer and wait for friends/family to drive over and join us for an epic grilling session.

Normal people don't like these things because we've been "manipulated" by "our system", get a grip. We like these things because they're extremely enjoyable perks of living in the modern world.

> I feel like if we did things less capitalist, we'd be more comfortable

Ah a watermelon, what an incredibly unexpected plot twist that's never been seen before. The green turns out to be skin-deep, and when you cut it open what's inside is bright red.

And “rare earths” aren’t particularly rare, despite the term.

Just from 2020 to 2023, more than $24 Billion in interest-free loans were distributed. https://www.imf.org/en/Blogs/Articles/2023/03/31/the-time-is...

There is no such thing as "enough help", but each country should do its own part, and birth control is for sure important for countries with birth rate > 3 and cannot provide to its people. I came myself from a poor country and I can guarantee that there is no way to develop a long term plan, if the population increases in a high pace. There is no way to allocate money accordingly and create infrastructure in such a pace to support it.

But solar still has the same storage problem in the power grid. You need something to keep the lights on at night. Lithium batteries are cost effective when it means you can avoid the cost of the whole ICE powertrain and replace buying gas with cheap daytime solar -- which also means that the production capacity for lithium batteries is going to go there.

But then you start talking about electrifying heat, for which the peak demand is when it's colder. At night. And for that it makes sense to build some more nuclear reactors.

There was never better structured society as we have today.. or can you point some period where we were better than now?

I moved from an area where I needed a car to an area where I don't and doing so increased my comfort. If areas like this were more accessible I think a lot of people would willingly degrowth and become more comfortable at the same time. Of course people shouldn't be forced to lose their car or move to a denser area if they don't want. And I like my gadgets but it is pretty ridiculous that their lifespans are artificially shortened to prop up profits. I have a computer from 1984 that still works, I would bet a huge amount of money none of the devices I buy today will work in 2062.

Being able to do that cheaply is still science-fiction.

Wind and Solar are here right now.

So solar or wind energy is a prerequisite for CO2 capture, followed by the separation from air by physical or chemical means, followed by the reduction to hydrocarbons, either by direct electrolysis or by using hydrogen obtained by water electrolysis.

But you might not. That kind of technology is highly questionable thermodynamically. You're going to burn coal for energy and then turn the CO2 back into fuel for somehow less energy? Good luck with that. Just leave the coal in the ground where you found it.

The most promising thing in that ballpark is biofuels, but they compete with food production for farmland. Which could plausibly work for aviation but isn't likely to scale to transportation in general, much less production of electricity.

The world does not care about humans and will be okay without us trying to micromanage.

The Romans had a long stretch of expansive rule, though it was not highly authoritarian. Klaus Schwab's marxist ideas will fail, and it will be an exiting decade until political upheaval (maybe ~2032).

Comfort Or reducing their standard of living. Remember for most people in the world this they will keep consuming to get to *a* standard and will not care until they get there. One can say that the average person in a sub saharan african country X consumes 1/10th or 1/50th of the carbon that an american does. But unless N generations of X don't rise well above the poverty line they will continue to emit and it will add up by 2100 or 2200.

You don't even have to go to sub saharan africa. I believe there is non negligible double digit percentage of this country that is on the "edge" when it comes to many important living factors like Health, Education and Childcare Cost. Any of which when breached make one not care about reducing consumption.

Are you in USA? What specific city/county/State goverment practices are problematic? I am interested in seeing the actual codes/laws.

We need to decarbonize the fucking electrical grid. Just get it done and that addresses the majority of the problem.

You'd also probably be better off if you focused on just changing the incentives and regulations which promote disposable culture. The CAFE standards need an overhaul and the Chicken tax needs to go away, that would do wonders towards getting us smaller, cheaper vehicles. Right to repair laws and EU regulations around replaceable batteries that are being imposed now on companies like Apple will help a lot. Better public transportation, sure, but that means building it (which means more economic output and jobs, but differently). But we're not going to manage to forcefully stop a lot of people from consuming, so we need to focus on making that impact less, particularly when it comes to GHGs, because that is more or less an emergency right now. We can have scalable carbon-neutral energy which still powers a lot of economic growth for the future up until we're all dead. And if you argue against that you will lose the broader war for the sake of trying to be a perfectionist (#include <leftists_being_their_own_worst_enemy.h>)

In USA, a person's house value has become their retirement plan. A quick free-market solution is to eliminate the house mortgage interest deduction and make all of the sale price capital gains. Let the builders compete on quality, price, and maintainability rather than being subsidized by tax policy.

My eldest (who travels to school by train every day) has children in his class who are brought to school every day in their parents cars. I know most of these kids, almost all of them live in villages with a regular bus service which would take them to school, yet instead the children get a lift with Mum or Dad in the car.

I'm not sure this is just about more infrastructure. There are some pretty seriously ingrained habits at play, too.

What's the average occupancy in a Model 3? Like I said, our tiny car can happily transport four adults plus shopping or a moderate quantity of luggage...

If everyone drove smaller, lighter vehicles, they'd use less fuel (of whatever variety), right?

You can live in Mackinak and try out the no car lifestyle. Watch out for the crap and piss in the gutters. https://www.michigan.org/city/mackinac-island

Umm, how would one go about selling that policy? Do enough (any?) people want that?

FWIW, my wife and I have spoken at length over the last year about what it would take for us to move, leaving our house and garden and safe streets and clean parks, our open countryside being only a short walk in pretty much every direction, and that our 7 year-old is able to walk the half mile to her primary school on her own every morning...

...and as it stands, there is no job offer _at all_ that would persuade us to move to the city.

Especially after what we saw during the pandemic.

Where I live, in Europe, since I was a little child and until now, the climate has transitioned from winters during which there were three months or more of continuous snow cover to winters during which it snows at most once or twice and the snow melts immediately, usually in a few hours.

When I was a child, temperatures under minus twenty Celsius degrees were not unusual, while now there are more than ten years since the last time when I have used my winter jacket and my winter boots.

So far battery manufacturing facilities and raw materials required for an electric car rollout with equal impact to public transit simply don’t exist, creating the infrastructure for these facilities and expanding mining operation to meet up with the demand of batteries for all these electric cars might take 5-10 years with heavy government involvement, including subsidies to manufacturers amounting to orders of magnitude more than public transit infrastructure would need.

A realistic rollout of electric cars of sufficient magnitude is north of 2035. A realistic rollout of public transit infrastructure is 2030 with benefits starting immediately.

You say of course, but that's exactly what eco-warriors want. Notice how "picture" doesn't think of his fellow humans as fully real, thinking people with their own fully developed opinions. He thinks we're all manipulated into wanting things, and that only if "the system" wasn't "distracting" and "manipulating" us with gadgets and private pools we'd all realize the superiority of collective ownership.

This is a very dangerous attitude. If you don't respect other people's views, and if you think they're all a product of manipulation you definitely don't, then you won't have any compunction in overriding them by force. That's why the degrowth agenda is strongly associated with the road and runway glueing brigade: they don't care if an ambulance can't get past them and someone dies as a result, or if you can't get to work and lose your job. Your preference for petrol powered transport is merely a manipulation by the system and thus has no validity.

In practice, comfort is mostly a function of stuff. Yes there are aspects that aren't to do with stuff but they're things that are really hard to move the needle on: loving families, low corruption, stable government and so on. Once you've got those things it's much easier to raise standards of living with incrementally better stuff than incremental improvements in quality of government, for example.

You can't extrapolate from a feeling about a single lifetime to hundreds of years into the future, that's just nowhere near enough data points. Speaking personally, I've seen no difference in number of snowy winters over my lifetime.

We are already able to do the conversion from solar light to electrical energy at better efficiency than the plants and sooner or later we should be able to reach similar efficiency with the plants at carbon dioxide reduction into hydrocarbons.

If someone will succeed to solve the difficulties of the direct electrolysis of CO2 or of carbonates, we may exceed the efficiency of the plants, which reduce CO2 indirectly, with hydrogen obtained by the photolysis of water.

The conversion of CO2 into hydrocarbons is precisely the only solution to the CO2 problem that cannot be questioned in any way, because it is the only solution about which it is known with certainty that it works, as anyone can see by just opening a window and looking outside.

Using energy from fossil fuels for carbon capture is so obviously absurd that nobody could do such a silly thing.

Normally any carbon capture installation must be powered by solar or wind energy, simultaneously solving the problem of the energy storage.

The thing preventing it right now is that it's illegal. Most areas zoned for higher density housing already have it, so to make more it would have to go somewhere currently zoned for lower density, which the existing zoning prohibits.

As for whether people want it, why does the existing higher density housing tend to cost more rather than less per square foot? Because it's nearer to jobs and shops and mass transit, and many people like that.

Nobody is forcing you to live there. In fact, if the place you currently live was one of the ares rezoned, it would net you a tidy sum -- the value of the land goes up because now someone can build a condo tower on it, meanwhile you can go use a fraction of the money to buy another single family home for even less than the one you have now is worth because the new construction reduces housing scarcity.

It's possible that it will keep going long enough to be competitive, but it's not a safe enough bet to put all the eggs in one basket.

If we build a lot of nuclear reactors and then it turns out that storage becomes cheaper, it will cost an amount of money in line with what we currently pay to generate electricity, much of which will be paid by the investors who bet on the wrong horse. If we don't build a lot of nuclear reactors and then it turns out storage is not cheaper and so we keep burning fossil fuels, that is bad.

I'm not sure how helpful it is to compare different cars.

Here's a more apples-to-apples comparison: a 2023 Kia Niro (which is itself a conventional hybrid, with a gasoline engine and a small battery and electric motor) compared to a 2023 Kia Niro EV. Almost everything is the same except the drivetrain. The EV[0] is ~500-800lbs heavier than the hybrid[1] depending on trim level and options, which is basically the difference between an empty car and one loaded with four adults and some luggage.

[0]: https://www.kiamedia.com/us/en/models/niro-ev/2023/specifica...

[1]: https://www.kiamedia.com/us/en/models/niro/2023/specificatio...

And yes, it's worth pointing out that in many first world countries (esp. my own), many higher density neighbourhoods actually have relatively high environmental footprints - usually because they're quite affluent ones. But also because they're often occupied by single people who don't have as many opportunities to share/pool resources with others as those in suburbia. So we need to realistic about what could be achieved simply by changes in government policy around subsidisation of various modes of urban development.

Tyranny of the majority is tyranny nonetheless

Blocking cultural change and progress.

Batteries are a storage technology, but we're going to be putting the bulk of battery production capacity into electrifying transportation for the foreseeable future.

ROTFL

All the written texts that I have seen from the last few hundred years describe winters identical with those from when I was a child. The same is true for much more ancient texts, even ancient Latin and Greek texts, though those are more ambiguous.

There is no doubt that at least during the last two thousand years there has never been any period with temperatures as high as during the last 40 years, and during these 40 years the monotonic increase of the temperatures has been obvious, e.g. 15 years ago we still had a few weeks with snow per year, but then the weeks have become days, and then during the last few years the days have been reduced to hours.

I am living in an area with continental climate, far from the sea, which previously had large temperature differences between summer and winter. Now the average summer temperature has also increased, but that is much less obvious than the increase of the winter temperatures from below zero Celsius degrees to above zero. I assume that in areas closer to sea coasts the changes in the average temperature must be less noticeable, as they must be buffered by the water.

Besides the historical texts, the fact that during the last two thousand years there has never been such a warm climate in Europe has also been recently confirmed by the study of tree rings.

Are the high-density shops and restaurants that make those places such desirable places to be going to replenish their stock on mass transit? Or does that fall into your 10% exception?

How about vans for handicapped people? Do they also fall into the 10% exception?

What if it's just a miserably hot day in Manhattan, and you have a crying baby in a stroller and bags full of shopping, and you just want to catch a cab ride home this one time, damn it? Nobody said you had to have a baby and go shopping. Do you get a "necessity pass" then?

> just use car as a luxury instead of a necessity

Just price things accordingly and let people decide what's a luxury and what's a necessity to them. Categorical distinctions don't work very well because they're full of exceptions and ways to game the system, even without getting into the ethical question of who gets to decide what's a luxury and what isn't for everyone else.

I also echo the sentiment that we should both create a culture of questioning excesses, enjoying a simplified lifestyle of essentials: good health (address pollution, agriculture filled with toxic compounds, etc.), peace, arts and culture, instead of often self-destructive excesses; and that we should look at effective interventions: feeling good about it is not enough, we need actual effective change!

Some of the most effective changes you can do individually[1] is (1) reducing meat consumption significantly;[2] (2) Less air travel (3) Use alternative forms of transportation (bike, walk, public transit, live near work?).

(Of course, if you have a huge house with tons of appliances... I'm sure that's highly significant!)

I'm doing all those things personally. And as honest as I can: I think my health and wellbeing genuinely improved (I've lost weight due to better mostly-plant diet, am much more fit due to walking and public transit; I guess there's a psychological factor from knowing I'm helping too!). Public transit is the most inconvenient sometimes (other times it's far more convenient), but then I'm not absolute and take a ride faring app every now and then. Living this way isn't only possible, it's genuinely good.

Discovering places nearby to travel and connecting with local history and culture is something I also think we could do a lot more.

And by all means, be politically active on this issue! (I can't change things like energy matrix with individual habits, but I can vote well)

I'm with you dude :) Hack the planet!

[1] This seems to be a pretty good source: https://theconversation.com/here-are-the-most-effective-thin... I'm sure there are others similar as well

[2] That's good for animals too :)

Farm trucks are a pathological case for electrification. They often have fairly extreme range requirements under adverse weather conditions and heavy loads. They spend much of their time far from the electrical grid, never mind a proper charging station. In some regions they have to account for being too far from a normal gas station, which is one of the reason you can buy barrels of fuel to bring with you or an extended tank.

But it doesn't matter because there aren't that many of them. Certainly not something we need to optimize for.

Just like towers (condos or any other kind) are round here.

Your local politicans are elected? So are ours.

Yes An no.

Yes it is already built.

No because there is a lot that can be done to improve existing infrastructure.

Public transport can be retro fitted rail corridors, dedicated bus lanes, bike only paths, walking infrastructure

Zoning can achieve a lot too. Allowing more commercial pepperpotted amongst residential

You do have to defeat many vested interests, but unless we defeat them they will burn the world for profit, so we must defeat them

A real test for democracy

Everyone says they would love to live in a walkable city, but for some reason, at least in the US, the biggest gainers in population over the recent decades have been all automobile-centric cities (which are probably more accurately described as a large patchwork of suburbs). NYC would have shrunk due to out-migration to other places if it wasn't for foreign in-migration[0]. Chicago lost people 15 out of the last 20 years[1].

[0]: https://www.nyc.gov/assets/planning/download/pdf/about/dcp-p...

[1]: https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-met-census-chicago-me...

That's much harder than it sounds, because (unlike, say, lithium) what's important in propane is the energy stored in it in the forms of chemical bonds, not the constituent elements. Basically, the resulting C/O/H we have is just waste product. We can't "just reassemble it back to propane" because to do it we need energy, and if we have that energy, why not just use it directly? No need to insert propane as an intermediary, barring unusual situations like jet fuel.

It's basically like trying to turn feces and urine back to a beef steak. Having carbon and hydrogen atoms isn't the hard part of producing beef.

I can't say I agree, this feels like a very uncharitable reading of his/her posts. Unless it was edited in after the fact they even said "You're absolutely free to believe either way, and I don't want anyone to force you to do anything."

While it would be insulting to call any individual person's preferences a result of brainwashing, I don't think it is a stretch to say that at a societal level preferences are shaped by mass-media and advertising. Improving access to and making people aware of less resource-intensive forms of comfort doesn't have to come from an authoritarian place. One of my major motivations for seeking out a more walkable area was urbanist YouTubers extolling the benefits. I suppose one could argue that things like bike lanes are hurting drivers but if a city's transit priorities stem from local politics and preferences I don't think it can be reasonably argued that making any particular transit method a priority is more authoritarian than another.

> In practice, comfort is mostly a function of stuff.

No question that it is a variable for most people but I'm not sure I buy that it is the most dominant one. All other variables being excluded, time to do what I want is at least as important for me as stuff (luckily I like my job so time/money aren't usually in conflict). And I think for many people "stuff" like cars and nice lawns aren't inherently drivers of comfort, but rather just possible reifications of goals like "pretty yard" or "fast/easy transit," both of which can be realized in less resource intensive ways. For the yard example, that might be a native garden or xeriscape (in some cases there are rules against these, which actually goes against freedom imo).

Personally I think it's insane to increase CO2 levels by that amount in just a few decades and expect there to be no bad consequences.

The energy comes from sunlight. If you actually use plants, that's biofuels.

> The conversion of CO2 into hydrocarbons is precisely the only solution to the CO2 problem that cannot be questioned in any way, because it is the only solution about which it is known with certainty that it works, as anyone can see by just opening a window and looking outside.

Anyone can also see that you can charge an electric car with solar panels and operate the entire country of France on nuclear, hydro and renewables without ever burning anything.

> Normally any carbon capture installation must be powered by solar or wind energy, simultaneously solving the problem of the energy storage.

Then you've made the economics even worse because your facility can only operate during periods of surplus generation, which everyone else will be trying to minimize by spinning down peaker plants, charging their electric cars and otherwise using competing storage technologies with lower costs.

And the fossil fuel plants are the ones you'd want to shut down during those times, which implies you'd also have to store the CO2 for later use, which requires tanks and compressors and more energy -- energy that comes out of the inefficient side of the system because you have to do that during the times you don't have surplus generation.

It's not really that surprising that this isn't currently cost effective and it's not obvious that it's the most cost effective area of research either.

While I’m sympathetic to the idea of degrowth, people will not go along with it. Instead I think we should advocate for living in dense areas, eating a lot less meat, reducing waste, etc.

Which is kind of the problem, because it implies they took a frame designed for the ICE powertrain and stuck some batteries it, which isn't the optimal way to do it.

Even then the difference is in the nature of 20%, which doesn't seem huge?

And the weight is going to be directional proportional to the size of the battery, which can be of arbitrary size. Electric vehicles with a >250 mile range are nice, but the average commute is a sixth of that.

I'm fairly expecting someone to soon make a sporty little sedan with a 75 mile range and a trailer for road trips that adds +300 miles worth of battery and gives you a place to put your luggage. And then you don't need the trailer 98% of the time and that thing is going to be actually lighter than the equivalent ICE car.

There was an interesting article discussed at length on HN recently about using electrolysis for synthesising propane, which along side the book The Material World has made me start questioning batteries as the storage solution of the future.

https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/P-9-2022-00127...

But they lobby against anything that could practically reduce dependence on fossil fuels, not just nuclear. If you want to do anything about it you have to overcome that.

The archaeological record says the opposite. I don't know what Latin or Greek texts you're reading because they are full of references to things that can't be done today.

The Vikings were practicing agriculture in Greenland. [1] That's impossible now, it's too cold.

The Greenland climate was a bit warmer than it is today, and the southernmost tip of the great island was luscious and green and no doubt tempted Eric the Red and his followers. This encouraged them to cultivate some of the seed corn they brought with them from Iceland.

Bison skeletons have been found in mountain caves at altitudes that imply it was drastically warmer in the past [2].

From this it can be concluded that the beech limit but also the forest line during the »wisent time« (6,000 to 1,200 years before today) was much higher and the average summer temperature had to be at least 3 to 6 °C higher than today. Oaks (Quercus) at an altitude of 1,450 metres around 2,000 years ago also indicate a climate approximately 4 to 7 °C warmer than today.

This is well beyond the level that climatologists assure us means global destruction.

The fact that it was warmer in the past was not actually considered controversial up until Michael Mann started drawing his incorrect hockey-stick graphs. Go back just 20 years and you'll find the warmth of the Roman period being discussed quite openly, like this map [3] of suspected Roman England vineyard locations in which one is as far north as Lincolnshire, impossible in today's climate. This 2001 archaeological paper doesn't comment on the fact that it was warmer back then because everyone knew it and the fact was considered unremarkable.

Climatologists have done a great job of not only erasing this history but making it verboten to point out. Yet the problematic facts remain. Climatology doesn't have reliable methods for reconstructing past temperatures, has sparse data even for the modern era and routinely makes claims directly at odds with very well understood historical evidence.

[1] https://sciencenordic.com/agriculture-archaeology-denmark/vi...

[2] http://www.museumgolling.at/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/9_Sch...

[3] https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/27661.pdf (figure 6)

But the point isn't about farmers in particular, it's anyone who lives in a rural or suburban area without enough density for mass transit. Plumbers and real estate agents in those areas are not going to find a bus there to take. And there are a lot of those.

I don't personally believe people when they say that anyway, so I'd have taken the same stance even if the post had said that originally. Collectivists like that are never happy if people can make their own personal choices. That's why we now have government mandated phase-outs of liquid fuel vehicles on the horizon whether individuals like it or not. They campaign and bully until they get what they want, which as picture states very clearly is bans on anything convenient in favor of non-private property (n.b. they're fine with swimming pools as long as they're shared pools, and already admitted their actual motivation is dislike of capitalism not a belief that restricting golf will actually achieve anything).

Comparing an electric car to a gasoline motorcycle is silly. Comparing an electric car to a gasoline car of a similar size, the electric car is going to be modestly if any heavier and significantly more efficient.

The current problem is that the people who want to live in them are priced out of the areas where they would have to go by the zoning rules they would want to change. Having a 20% lower cost per square foot doesn't make it more affordable to move there when the smallest available unit is required to have three times as many square feet. But since they can't afford to move there they can't vote to change the law there.

It's effectively a local law against poor people living there, which the poor people can't vote against because they don't live there. That seems bad.

In a world that mostly relies on abundant fossil energy. We tend to ignore that and interpolate from "solar improved 3x in the last year, so in X years it will have replaced oil", but that is just wrong. Solar today depends on fossil fuel, and it is absolutely not a given that it can ever replace it (e.g. see next point).

> ... except that it's intermittent.

Yep. So it's not enough. We are at a point right now where it is very likely that what we cannot change anymore (the consequences of what we already emitted) will already cause global instability. I find it crazy that people have the faith to count on technology that does not exist yet.

We need to use (much, much) less energy, that is the only solution. People don't like the word "degrowth", so let's call it differently: let's say we need a "smarter society": less bullshit, less over-consumption, more efficient everything, more minimalistic everything. Probably cryptocurrencies, cheap rockets and SUVs are not part of this world, though.

You need to replace fossil fuels with <whatever you think is the solution>. If you are convinced that solar + batteries can do it, then you need to rethink about orders of magnitudes.

Even nuclear cannot reasonably replace fossil fuels in the timeline that we need (i.e. before global instability that may well slow down many things). Solar is far behind.

Also never forget that we are living a mass extinction right now (it is happening, it is a measurable fact), and that is solely due to human activity in a world with abundant energy. If you find a solution to replace fossil fuels, you may save what remains to be saved on the climate front, but you will finish killing biodiversity. I don't know about you, but that is catastrophic to me.

Conclusion: we need to use much less energy, and therefore we need to be more minimalistic and stop growing just for the sake of growing. It's called "degrowth", but some people don't like that word because they think it means "go back to Middle Age". Instead it just means: engineers (like everybody else) need to work hard on clever solutions that rely less on energy. That's not Middle Age, it's just not the Silicon Valley world.

I agree, it will be hard to change opinions (especially in very liberal countries like the US, where socialism is apparently a very bad word).

But the world we are heading towards without degrowth is a world of global instability, wars, famines (for everyone, not just the poor countries for once).

I don't see democracy surviving in such a world.

Degrowth will happen whether we want it or not. Because fossil fuels are not unlimited, and we are close to the global production peak. We don't have any technology that can remotely replace fossil fuels, and we don't remotely have the infrastructure anyway (it's not just about cars: everything relies on oil).

There are two ways: chosen degrowth is called "soberty". That's not super sexy, but the alternative (where we don't do it ourselves) is called "poverty".

We need to start changing society to degrowth in a controlled manner, for our own sake.

Degrowth is the only reasonable future if you understand the big picture: it's all about energy. Climate change and biodiversity loss are consequences of what humans do with abundant energy. Again: biodiversity loss is not due to CO2 at all, yet we are currently living a mass extinction. Replace fossils with nuclear fusion, you may solve climate change, but you will still be in a mass extinction.

Now let's be honest, we don't know a technology today that can replace fossil fuels. And fossil fuels are not unlimited (we still have enough to finish messing up the climate, unfortunately, but we are around the peak of production globally right now). So anyway, the days of a world with abundant energy are soon over, you've got to deal with it. That's called degrowth.

Either we go into a controlled degrowth, or we go into uncontrolled degrowth (that's poverty, global instability, wars, famines, ...).

If we don't degrow now, we are heading towards recessions and wars anyway. And not small ones: count billions of climate refugees... that's probably the end of democracy everywhere.

I certainly hope we have learned the horrors of colonialism and won’t repeat that disastrous period.

However, if you can get governments to finally roll out lots more public transport, definitely go for it. Preferably with something electric, we don't really need more fossil on the road.

Uncontrolled degrowth it is, for now. You forgot pandemics by the way, those are one way in which the loss of biodiversity and the ever increasing way in which humans force their way into animal territory is manifesting. This isn't exactly news either but I have to say to see it so vividly displayed still took me by surprise.

And that's far from being enough.

> While I’m sympathetic to the idea of degrowth

I think it's the first step. At some point you will realize that it is just not a choice. We will degrow anyway, because fossil fuels are not unlimited, and we can't reasonably replace them.

I am not in favour of degrowth because I find it romantic. I am in favour of degrowth because that's how we can control the fall. I'd rather have a hard landing than a complete crash.

Second, you need to specify what kind of storage you are talking. We will need a lot less short-term storage for overnight than we need for cloudy, calm days. Batteries make sense for short-term storage but are too expensive for long-term. Generated fuels, like hydrogen, may work well for long-term storage and we'll them for other things.

Third, we can overbuild solar and wind. It might be cheaper to make 3x or 5x than needed. Finally, we are going to need extra energy for carbon capture and generating fuels.

How are you going to get people to build nuclear power plants when they could make more money on solar?

Who is going to pay to decommission nuclear power plants when they go bankrupt? Solar drives baseload plants bankrupt, which is why coal plants are going out of business.

With what we have already emitted today (and we are still increasing our emissions every year), it is not clear at all that Europe will always have enough food in the next few decades. I don't know about the US, but seeing the fires in the last few years, I guess it's not far.

Growth definitely means reduced standard of living in our lifetime: we are going towards global instability, wars and famines.

Degrowth means reduced standard of living as well: just trying to keep them as high as possible. Everybody wants the same thing: the highest possible standard of living. Degrowth advocates have just accepted that it will get down in the future.

"Green growth" is a utopia from people who haven't understood the problem yet.

You didn't mention why this transition isn't possible. There is also not enough green energy currently to stop using fossil fuels. It is either transition or death.

You mention things that have a small effect. They would be good to get rid but they won't get us there. To use much less energy, we would need to give up cars, trains, AC, and heat. You probably say we should bicycles, and we should, but guess what gets used to make bicycles. We might have to give up food since industrial agriculture is required to feed everyone.

Well the US is never a good example for that, because the US notoriously completely screwed up their city planning w.r.t. cars.

You need to look at examples of cities that were not built around the individual cars to check whether that's possible or not, and whether people like it better or not.

Which is not enough. We need nuclear + wind/solar + degrowth. Because those energies don't remotely replace fossil fuels.

Still, that is a solution (at least that's the less bad I see). We just need to accept it.

US's GDP is 23.32 Trillion, and US collected 5 Trillion in taxes Americans. Wealth sharing would need to be many orders of magnitude more than 24 billion over 3 years.

How do you propose to use much less energy without starving everyone? Where does the energy come from if not fossil fuels without conscripting people to be peasants? Does it matter if mass death is caused famine or "degrowth"?

Nope: I mean that green energy is just not capable of replacing fossil fuels, just by looking at orders of magnitude. Thinking that it is possible by extrapolating some graphs is just naive. It is not, that's all.

Of course we need to build alternatives (both nuclear plants and renewables), but they will only cover a fraction of fossil fuels. Don't under-estimate fossil fuels, they are extremely efficient energy.

> To use much less energy, we would need to give up cars, trains, AC, and heat. [...] We might have to give up food

That's the whole point of degrowth: prioritize what you can keep. Planes will mostly disappear, that's pretty much a fact. Food has to stay under some form, quite obviously (but meat will mostly disappear).

We are at a point where it is about survival: we need to organize our society and cities such that people don't starve in the next few decades. Let's be optimistic, I believe we can still keep a modern society. But probably we won't change smartphone every year, and people living in cities won't own a car.

That's the whole point: degrowth is about re-organizing society such that we don't starve. There are big efforts of planning for that in many places. Look at the "shift project" in France. It seems to me that the US are very, very, very far behind on that matter. The US seems to still be stuck on the Silicon Valley mindset ("they will save us with new technology"). But that's not representative of the rest of the world.

> Where does the energy come from if not fossil fuels without conscripting people to be peasants? Does it matter if mass death is caused famine or "degrowth"?

The idea of degrowth is that in order to avoid famines, we have to drastically reduce other stuff and reorganize society. Planes are not even a question there: planes will go away, because everyone agrees that we'd rather eat that fly. There are many decisions that are harder to make, though.

Those who don't believe in degrowth and instead think that "there will be a miracle technology that will save us" are just naive. Degrowth advocates are the ones who are actually trying to play with the cards they were dealt.

Based on what? We already have optimistic signs in developed countries where emissions per capita have declined.

As others have said, no idea how you impose degrowth short of dictatorship

My latest train of thought is going semi off-grid just in case degrowth hits us too rapidly. Big cities will not be fun.

What we need is a wholesale conversion to a fossil-free civilization. That means building a whole lot of stuff, and we need a growing economy to afford that.

That obviously depends on the cost of storage relative to the cost of building more plants, but you don't even need to ask the question until after you've already built enough plants to replace all of the existing fossil fuel baseload, so let's start there.

> How are you going to get people to build nuclear power plants when they could make more money on solar?

Regulatory reform to address the maliciously, intentionally high cost of construction and operation, resulting in competitive prices.

> Who is going to pay to decommission nuclear power plants when they go bankrupt?

They don't get decommissioned because they don't result in that kind of bankruptcy. They cost a lot to build, but once they're built, they're going to exist for decades.

If something else turns out to be much cheaper the people who invested in it may get a below market rate of return, but still it doesn't get shut down, because the initial capital expenditure is a sunk cost that has already been paid. The incremental cost of continuing to generate power is much lower.

> Solar drives baseload plants bankrupt, which is why coal plants are going out of business.

Coal plants have a substantial fuel cost, which puts them at a disadvantage. They operate at a loss if the price of electricity drops below the price of coal, and then shut down, and then have to recover their capital costs by operating for fewer hours. Nuclear plants continue to operate at 100% output pretty much regardless of the price of electricity because their fuel cost is negligible. Notice that it's the existing coal plants going out of business and not the existing nuclear plants.

Nuclear also has untapped potential for things like cogeneration, thermal storage and on-site desalination, all of which would make it more cost competitive but are not currently being exploited.

The trouble is they're both intermittent, even independent of time of day. For solar that's much less trouble because the demand is higher during the day, and aligns extremely well with air conditioning load in the summer.

But if you're relying on wind at night and then there isn't any, and you also have no solar because it's night, what's left?

> Generated fuels, like hydrogen, may work well for long-term storage and we'll them for other things.

At which point you have to add the cost of production, storage and generation facilities for some other generating technology.

> Third, we can overbuild solar and wind. It might be cheaper to make 3x or 5x than needed.

But how does that fix it? Sometimes it's calm for weeks, so your wind turbines are generating at 5% capacity for that long. Are you going to overbuild by 20x? Or build enough storage to power the entire grid for that long, even if you only use it for two weeks every three or four years?

> Finally, we are going to need extra energy for carbon capture and generating fuels.

This is a generic argument for building more of any kind of non-carbon generating capacity.

In my country of origin the public transit system is horrendous where politicians picked subsidizing electric cars (despite policy experts telling them what terrible climate policy that is [data exists too on that]) with minimum funding going to public transit expansion. And even there—with the exception of covid—public transit usage is on the rise.

In my current home city of Seattle a lot of funding has gone into expanding and maintaining the public transit system and usage has increased very dramatically as a result.

The reality is that electric cars are not a good climate policy by any standard. Even a lackluster implementation of public transit expansion beats a solid program of subsidizing electric cars.

Your thinking is that we can't build solar panels and nuclear reactors fast enough, but we can build housing fast enough to move a significant fraction of the population to higher density areas where they don't have to drive as much? Because that's the low-hanging fruit on energy consumption, and it's a massive scale long-term construction project with significant political opposition.

And we should still do it, if only to get housing prices out of crazyland. But what makes you think we can do it any faster than we can build generation capacity?

The problem with talking about smartphones and planes is that they aren't enough. For example, a big portion of energy usage is heating and cooling homes. Are you saying people need to give up AC and die in the summer? Or give up heating and die in the winter? Obviously, we should insulate houses, but like solar panels, that takes fossil fuels.

Overbuilding means that can use solar and wind more of the time. Partly because wind and solar are anti-correlated, partly because you build them in different spots, and partly because there is some energy being generated. 3x means that only need a couple weeks per year need backup. 5x means that couple days per year need storage.

The generated fuel production would already exist because need them as fuel. Repurposing natural gas storage should work for hydrogen and there is lots of that available. The power plants would need to sit around but should be able to convert natural gas to hydrogen.

> 5x means that couple days per year need storage.

But that's the problem. If you need the long-term storage at all because you have a period with ~0 output from renewables, you then need to maintain enough generating capacity to run the whole grid from something else during that period, even if you only use it once a decade. Which is enormously expensive.

> But night time usage is small, and things like charging cars can be delayed.

The night time usage is about half the peak daytime usage during the summer, and a significantly higher proportion in the winter. And it will get even higher if we switch to electric heating from fossil fuels.

You already want to be charging cars during the day anyway because solar is cheaper, but none of that is included in the existing numbers because the current number of electric cars isn't a major proportion of power consumption. We could perfectly well charge electric cars entirely from solar, but you still need to handle the existing nighttime load with something.

The transformation of agriculture is inevitable or we will all die.

Similarly homes can be insulated, roofs can be made of heat reflecting materials, trees can be grown to provide shade. We can build cooling centers in cities.

A good example or problem with degrowth is proclamation that things like planes won’t be possible. Aviation is 2% of emissions. There are lots of little things that they add up. Like concrete being 3%, but nobody says that have to give up concrete. The big ones are things like heating and cooling and transportation that are hard to give up.

The other problem is that we mostly know how to solve aviation. Hydrogen or liquid fuels should work, both produced from green energy. New technology but no miracles. We know how to do green electricity.

I agree with you that we need to change the world a lot. But it won’t work if impose suffering on people. Or do things that don’t work or don’t help.

Talking about "degrowth" doesn't just imply that you somehow get a say in allowing countries to grow, but also suggests that people aren't allowed to get out of poverty. This is unconscionable and unrealistic, a distraction from the only real answer — engineering our way out of it.

https://spiders.ucr.edu/daddy-long-legs

Based on the consensus on how much we need to cut our CO2 emissions, and on checking orders of magnitudes on "what we can do before degrowth" (which generally implies replacing fossil fuels with something else, which generally implies extrapolating numbers or hoping for non-existing technology).

> We already have optimistic signs in developed countries

It's too late to be optimistic unfortunately. We don't need to slightly reduce emissions per capita, we need to drastically cut them.

> As others have said, no idea how you impose degrowth short of dictatorship

Oh I agree with that (especially in the US). I think we are going towards global world instability, wars and famines (even in developed countries) in our lifetime. Doesn't mean I cannot wish we got reasonable for our own sake.

The only thing that can save us is controlled degrowth. Which is a very challenging problem. Yet too many are hoping for CO2 capture and miracle technology. Society will probably collapse, but that sucks.

Aviation came with oil, it will disappear with oil. It's not a problem of emissions per se, it's a problem of energy. Fossil fuels are not unlimited and we don't know how to completely replace them.

> The big ones are things like heating and cooling

We need to work hard on building isolation, obviously. And people need to live in smaller habitations.

> and transportation

We need more trains

> Hydrogen or liquid fuels should work, both produced from green energy.

Same thing: if you look at the numbers, we won't have enough green energy to produce enough hydrogen for aviation, even if technically we can make planes fly with hydrogen. We will have to choose where we use our hydrogen: for planes, or for steel and agriculture?

> But it won’t work if impose suffering on people.

Yep, we need to teach people and hope they accept to do what's needed to survive.

> Or do things that don’t work or don’t help.

Totally agreed here. Hoping for anything short of degrowth doesn't help. We need everything PLUS degrowth. And still, it will be hard because climate is already pretty messed up (with inertia) and biodiversity is looking bad.

"Batteries are heavy. That’s why, generally, electric cars weigh considerably more than otherwise similar gasoline-powered vehicles"[0]

"Electric vehicles can be anywhere from hundreds to thousands of pounds heavier than similarly sized gas vehicles because EV batteries are so much heavier than engines."[1]

EDIT: I just looked up the weight of my little car's engine, it's just 69 kg (152 lbs). The weight of the battery in a Renault Zoe is 326 kg (719 lbs).

[0] https://edition.cnn.com/2021/06/07/business/electric-vehicle... [1] https://www.axios.com/2023/04/28/evs-weight-safety-problems

But to make knowledge scalable storage simply does not exist beyond maybe 48hrs. It may well come, but it's not here.

For some reason some people assume it is not a problem.

We need a order of magnitude improvement to make the globally growing car use remotely sustainable. Reducing car usage can be done many ways, eg ensuring gas is taxed enough that gas-based cars don't stay in everyday use, and developing non car transport and urban structure.

We need to use less energy (because energy is CO2 emissions, and because we will have less abundant energy in the future), and therefore we need to rethink society to work without abundant cheap energy.

Some parts of economy will benefit from that (e.g. building bikes should work well), and many will not (typically the airspace industry will be reduced dramatically, probably the whole modern software has to go back quite a bit and stop wasting resources all over the board, etc).

Why is that is relevant? Do you think that US should share more money from US taxes payers with the World? I can imagine that the majority there holds a different opinion than you in such topic.

> 24 billion is equivalent to jeff bezo's buying you a Happy Meal at McDonalds, followed by hope you enjoy the shared wealth.

Why is it relevant for the discussion? AMZ is a private company, built in the last 20 years, without any colony exploitation.. they own $0 to the poorest countries in the World.

We don't currently have inexhaustible amounts of green energy, and we don't have any viable solution right now. If you think that because we can make 1 solar panel, we will be able to replace fossil fuels, then you have obviously never done any kind of engineering in your life. Problems come with scale. It's not being hyper-pessimistic to know that.

I am precisely saying that we need to prioritize. I would rather survive the summer and not fly far away on holiday than die in the summer.

> Is the plan that everybody becomes a peasant?

Well big cities are a problem, and people working in services definitely rely on a society built on abundant energy.

I don't know exactly what the solution is. What I know is that our society is built on fossil fuel, and not only those are limited, but they are killing us. So we need to remove fossil fuels. Then looking at the numbers, it appears that we can't reasonably hope to replace fossil fuels entirely. Hence we have to use less energy, hence we have to degrow.

I hardly advise reading https://www.amazon.com/World-Without-End-Blain-Christophe-eb..., that's from a well-known french engineer.

Also, the beneficiaries of new housing construction are diffuse (if I want to move to Berkeley I want to have a choice of housing, but I'm not likely to go to community meetings to voice support for any particular project), while the opponents are concentrated (if I have a $2 million house right by BART in Berkeley, I have a very strong incentive to prevent new home construction near me, and I will definitely go to community meetings).

In a sense, this is a failure of democracy - there are parties whose voices are unheard but (arguably) deserve representation.

Even for people whose desires re: housing should be net neutral, it doesn't pan out. If I live in Berkeley but want to move to SF, I want to see SF build lots of homes and Berkeley to build none. But I can only vote in Berkeley, so my net voting behavior is anti-housing. Even if there is someone else in SF who wants the exact same thing but in reverse!

The problem with doomers and degrowthers is that they are pretty ignorant people. They just assume that there's no solution or that green energy is just too weak to solve problems. This is why they are arrogant and not just pessimistic. They believe they already know the answer despite never looking for possible answers in the first place.

Your idea of "doing less" seems to entail something more, can you give some examples.

Knoll's law.

> I just looked up the weight of my little car's engine, it's just 69 kg (152 lbs).

Gosh, so heavy. That's more than twice as much as the 365hp motor in the Model S!

How much is the transmission, alternator, water pump, radiator, coolant, exhaust system, fuel tank and fuel?

The main difference here is that the weight of a gasoline car is proportional to the size of the car, because a bigger car needs a bigger engine and transmission and all of that. A bigger electric motor adds a trivial amount of weight and you recover most of what's needed to accelerate a larger mass from regenerative braking, so the weight of the battery is proportional to the range.

But for a normal midsized car as you might see in the US, the weight is about the same even for a range in excess of 300 miles. It should be possible for an electric truck to weigh less, because you can put a 500hp electric motor in it (which is still light), remove the 900lb engine and 350lb transmission and all of that, and have well over 1000lbs left for the battery before it's actually heavier.

If you want a tiny little thing you can still make it arbitrarily light, you're just going to have to charge it more often then. But the average commute is 41 miles.

The parts of Chicago you'd think about when you think "walkable cities" are thriving.

Yep, that's on track with degrowth. The whole question then is: how much do we need to remove? Realistically, given how much we need to cut our CO2 emissions in the next couple of decades for hoping to keep the climate in a "bearable" state (as per our climate models which more and more appear to be optimistic themselves), we will have to remove a lot of stuff.

> Your idea of "doing less" seems to entail something more, can you give some examples.

Aviation has to mostly go away. Most meat, most fishing too. Individual cars in cities need to completely go away (at least in countries that can possibly do it, e.g. all of Europe) and public transportation has to be dramatically increased everywhere. In the countryside, people will probably still need small electric cars to compensate for the lack of public transportation.

We need to electrify trucks (because they bring food into cities), that's much more important than cars (not that it's easy to remove cars, but if we remove trucks, cities starve).

Cities should not be too big, they need to stop growing (same thing, it takes energy to bring food there). All buildings need to be properly isolated (for heat/cold).

IT needs to change. We don't need 5G to watch TikTok on our brand new smartphone in the bus. We don't need clouds for everything, not everything has to always be connected/tracked/serving ads, we don't need AI for everything, we don't need every single commit to run a CI on the cloud on 50 machines, etc. To me, this all says "we need to make good IT that makes sense", and as a developer I would like that. Since I started programming, I feel like IT has become a big joke of for-profit bullshit.

Because of the reduction of fossil fuels, importations will go down. We need to deal with that. Produce what's most important locally.

Globally it means degrowth, GDP will go down. But that does not mean going back to Middle Age. We can find a new number to optimize other than GDP, try to teach people that ultra-consumerism is not making them happier (it's actually killing us all), and there is a lot to do (typically the bike industry should go up, there will be job there, etc).

I guess my point generally is that it is super hard to solve, because it touches everything. But it seems clear that we won't be able to compensate for fossil energy in the needed timeline. For nuclear plants, because it's super slow to build. For solar/wind, well we can't control them (if there is no sun, you get no photovoltaic energy) and we can't properly stock the energy they produce. And in any way, changing everything everywhere to work with electricity instead of fossil fuels is super hard, time consuming, and won't work for everything (oil is used for everything, not just cars).

So yeah, it's super challenging, it requires a lot of work and care everywhere. But the first step is to accept that we can't solve the problem by throwing more technology to it. We need to use technology wisely to get as much energy as we can, but in any case we have to drastically reduce our consumption, and therefore change society.

And that's perfectly fine. I'm not forcing anybody to do anything. I just provide my opinion on what I believe is good info.

> watermelon

So it's a personal dig about how I'm communist? I'm not, I don't think either state organization or anarchy will fulfill the promise of socialism to achieve an egalitarian society. But I do recognize the benefit of "public goods" that the "socialists" bring to the table, like roads and hospitals. Communism has failed many times throughout history, but I certainly don't think laissez-faire capitalism is any good either.

If you are a die hard believer that capitalism will lead to the best outcome for people, then ignore anything I say. If you perhaps don't realize how strongly identifying with the name of an idea alone lead you to a narrow perspective of the world, I urge you to take some time to reflect on your own opinions.

Plus, if your only reference is the price of solar power today, then you are highly uninformed on the subject at hand. Of course solar power is cheap: in many places it is subsidized, and it is built with cheap, abundant fossil fuels. But make no mistake: solar today is absolutely marginal. So you are extrapolating from the current marginal energy production of solar to 100% of the world, with the only argument that "last you checked, solar today is very cheap" and "those who believe they know slightly more than me are arrogant, I won't listen to them".

> while not having any desire to learn.

Let me take you on that. I will share with you my favorite introduction book on the subject (it is cheap, from a really respected french engineer, and it took me 5h to read). If you do have any desire to learn, read it seriously. Now in all fairness, if you share with me the title of a serious book that explains why degrowth is "arrogant and stupid", I commit to reading it.

Do we have a deal?

My choice is "World without end" (in French: "Le monde sans fin"):

https://www.amazon.com/World-Without-End-Blain-Christophe-eb...

You can build solar and wind power without fossil fuels, or at least not much. We are able to power large vehicles and industry with renewable energy now. Most notably, with the advent of green steel, infrastructure projects in general no longer require significant use of fossil fuels. Now to be fair, this was not known to the greenies, who thought that solar panels on the roof and an EV in the garage will magically solve everything. But this is known to those who actually study this problem. This problem is rapidly resolving itself in reality.

I cannot read a book in a short amount of time. But from the sample it is just repeating fairly simplistic arguments against green energy. It is mostly a repeat of what was being said on theoildrum.com from a while back. Even then, they were mostly wrong. These days, the few areas where they were right are also being proven wrong. It is akin to the “god of the gaps” argument, where the gaps where we didn’t know how to eliminate fossil fuel usage are constantly shrinking.

First, I don't think we need to go that far. Second, I don't see how you will ever achieve this without a brutal dictatorship on a global level. It's a complete non starter as far as I can tell unless you have a new idea for how to achieve it.

You don't think we need to, or you hope we don't need to? And based on what? On my end it's pretty simple: fossil fuels have to pretty much disappear (and if we don't do it on purpose, they will anyway because they are not unlimited) and we don't have anything that remotely replaces them. Look around: all the ideas to replace them right now are wishful thinking. Given the timeline, we are almost certainly too late.

> Second, I don't see how you will ever achieve this without a brutal dictatorship on a global level.

Yeah that's a completely different problem. I personally think we're doomed. We won't manage to save what remains to be saved, so we will suffer the consequences (which will most likely destroy democracy globally, because we are talking mass immigration and famines at a level never seen before).

Still the only chance we have now is to start accepting that we should do that. Then we could start trying to do it.

I'm researching this to have some concrete data, but I doubt I'll have it together soon enough to share in this thread. Will definitely share on HN when this topic comes back around with what I find.

> Look around: all the ideas to replace them right now are wishful thinking.

I don't think this is true at all. Solar is improving at a rapid pace and is already cheaper. We need a large scale rollout, but that's a will issue, not a tech issue. Nuclear is always an option as well. You can see this in many places, here's a graph of solar production in the US, that rise looks amazing!

https://www.eia.gov/totalenergy/data/browser/index.php?tbl=T...

Solar is indeed improving at a rapid pace, but in a world full of cheap and abundant fossil energy. What will be its price in a world without fossil fuels?

Also it's obviously much easier to quickly go from "almost no solar" to "a little bit more solar", but it is not linear: the more solar you make, the harder it is to double the production.

It is most definitely a tech issue. Take absolutely whatever you want and try to get it to a whole different scale, and it will become a tech issue. And next to that, you can't control solar (if there is no sun, there is no electricity), and we don't have a convincing technical solution for that today.

> Nuclear is always an option as well.

Every year that we spend doing nothing, it becomes less and less of an option. It's pretty clear that fusion is way too late for the party. Now for fission plants, it takes decades to build, so we don't have a whole lot of time to start. Still you will get the scale problems again: you can't replace fossils entirely with fission.

Don't get me wrong: we absolutely need fission and nuclear and all the renewables. But we have to realize that they won't completely replace oil, and therefore we won't have enough energy to keep doing everything we are doing the way we are doing it today. Therefore we will have to choose what we prioritize, and that is called "degrowth".

> Now, you can choose to be a techno-pessimist about all this if you want. You can assume, if you like, [... adds an incomplete list of stuff that could prevent technology from solving the problem ...]. Yes, with enough mental effort, you can ignore a technological revolution in progress. > > But ignoring a technological revolution in progress will accomplish nothing.

Let's be real: this article does not prove that solar can replace fossil fuels. It has faith that it can, and believes that "anyway if that doesn't work, we're screwed, so we have to believe in it".

It merely extrapolates from the growth of solar in the last few years. That is not enough.

My turn to suggest a different view: https://www.amazon.com/World-Without-End-Blain-Christophe-eb...