What can a technologist do about climate change? (2015)(worrydream.com)
worrydream.com
What can a technologist do about climate change? (2015)
http://worrydream.com/ClimateChange/
58 comments
Use less energy.
Here's Václav Smil at Driva Climate Investment Meeting 2019 giving a talk called "Investing in a changing climate – what we can learn from historic energy transitions". https://youtu.be/gkj_91IJVBk
The conclusion is sobering: "Only absolute cuts in energy use would work." ( https://youtu.be/gkj_91IJVBk?t=2283 )
We can do this and most of the technology needed is already invented and available, we just have to get our act together as a species and start using our tech efficiently. We don't have to endure a lower quality of life, just eliminating waste would get us most of the way there.
Here's Václav Smil at Driva Climate Investment Meeting 2019 giving a talk called "Investing in a changing climate – what we can learn from historic energy transitions". https://youtu.be/gkj_91IJVBk
The conclusion is sobering: "Only absolute cuts in energy use would work." ( https://youtu.be/gkj_91IJVBk?t=2283 )
We can do this and most of the technology needed is already invented and available, we just have to get our act together as a species and start using our tech efficiently. We don't have to endure a lower quality of life, just eliminating waste would get us most of the way there.
He can do what everyone can do.
Live a more conscious life, consume less, buy high quality consumer products that last longer, re-use reduce recycle, talk about it, advocate better choices.
Consume greenery/renewable energy, take public transportation, engaged in politics.
> re-use reduce recycle
I believe the ideal order is "Refuse, reduce, reuse, recycle, rot."
Refuse: Just say no to stuff. You don't have to worry about dealing with the waste from things that you don't take in the first place. This can be taken to not-helpful extremes, but in general, this is the best option. It's always depressing to see just how much trash (of the "actual trash" variety) one of our very rare take-out meals produces. If we all (4 of us) have something from a drivethrough, the amount of trash generated by that one meal is very close to a week's worth of kitchen trash for us with other meals. The paper is often too greasy to recycle, waxed paper cups are good for firestarters but little else, etc.
Reduce: All other things being equal, "less crap to dispose of" beats "more." I'll point to standard blister packaging as the sort of thing one ought avoid, if at all possible. Not only is it a very real health hazard during the opening process, it's almost entirely impossible to do anything with it after the fact. This is where bringing your own bags to the grocery store fit in, or for things like loose vegetables and such... just don't use a bag! You get some weird looks in the checkout lane when you dump half a dozen onions on the conveyer, but I remove the outer skins anyway when I work on them, and I don't have a plastic bag to deal with as a result.
Reuse: Anyone with small children (and lacking weird quirks about "You're playing with a box!") is probably an expert at this. I cannot tell you how many times a box something came in has turned into a good play toy for a week or two. Random kitchen boxes can be taped up and turned into blocks, corrugated cardboard is just awesome for everything, waste paper from address labels or such is useful for drawing, etc. Lots of options here. I've considered getting a setup to smash glass up and embed it in concrete I pour for various things, though I'm not sure this really gains me an awful lot in terms of mass.
Recycle: This is the standard first response, and depressingly often, "Recycle" actually translates to, "Oh, yeah, totally buy this thing, it can be recycled!" It's just an excuse to consume more. If you want to be quite upset by this, look at the state of plastic recycling in developed nations. It tends to consist heavily of "We loaded it into a shipping container, sent it to a third world country, and counted it as recycled, we don't care what they actually do with it." "What they actually do with it," often enough, is open burning, or just letting it wander down the river into the ocean. If you're concerned about the environment (as opposed to purely carbon emissions and GHGs), plastics should be a huge, huge problem. Unfortunately, literally everything comes in them.
Rot: Compost. If it's organic, or nearly so, compost it. Hot piles work best.
I believe the ideal order is "Refuse, reduce, reuse, recycle, rot."
Refuse: Just say no to stuff. You don't have to worry about dealing with the waste from things that you don't take in the first place. This can be taken to not-helpful extremes, but in general, this is the best option. It's always depressing to see just how much trash (of the "actual trash" variety) one of our very rare take-out meals produces. If we all (4 of us) have something from a drivethrough, the amount of trash generated by that one meal is very close to a week's worth of kitchen trash for us with other meals. The paper is often too greasy to recycle, waxed paper cups are good for firestarters but little else, etc.
Reduce: All other things being equal, "less crap to dispose of" beats "more." I'll point to standard blister packaging as the sort of thing one ought avoid, if at all possible. Not only is it a very real health hazard during the opening process, it's almost entirely impossible to do anything with it after the fact. This is where bringing your own bags to the grocery store fit in, or for things like loose vegetables and such... just don't use a bag! You get some weird looks in the checkout lane when you dump half a dozen onions on the conveyer, but I remove the outer skins anyway when I work on them, and I don't have a plastic bag to deal with as a result.
Reuse: Anyone with small children (and lacking weird quirks about "You're playing with a box!") is probably an expert at this. I cannot tell you how many times a box something came in has turned into a good play toy for a week or two. Random kitchen boxes can be taped up and turned into blocks, corrugated cardboard is just awesome for everything, waste paper from address labels or such is useful for drawing, etc. Lots of options here. I've considered getting a setup to smash glass up and embed it in concrete I pour for various things, though I'm not sure this really gains me an awful lot in terms of mass.
Recycle: This is the standard first response, and depressingly often, "Recycle" actually translates to, "Oh, yeah, totally buy this thing, it can be recycled!" It's just an excuse to consume more. If you want to be quite upset by this, look at the state of plastic recycling in developed nations. It tends to consist heavily of "We loaded it into a shipping container, sent it to a third world country, and counted it as recycled, we don't care what they actually do with it." "What they actually do with it," often enough, is open burning, or just letting it wander down the river into the ocean. If you're concerned about the environment (as opposed to purely carbon emissions and GHGs), plastics should be a huge, huge problem. Unfortunately, literally everything comes in them.
Rot: Compost. If it's organic, or nearly so, compost it. Hot piles work best.
A grocery store plastic bag weighs about 5.5 grams. A gallon of gasoline weighs about 2.86 kilograms, or 520 times more. Minimizing your use of gasoline is far more important than worrying about a plastic bag.
If you worry that plastic recycling is sent to third-world countries and thence into the ocean—and you should worry—there's an easy solution. Don't recycle your plastic. Trash it; send it to a landfill. In the big picture, drilling for oil, making plastic, and then burying it again is its own sort of recycling. And in developed nations, landfilling plastic is environmentally benign. Landfills are lined and covered.
If you worry that plastic recycling is sent to third-world countries and thence into the ocean—and you should worry—there's an easy solution. Don't recycle your plastic. Trash it; send it to a landfill. In the big picture, drilling for oil, making plastic, and then burying it again is its own sort of recycling. And in developed nations, landfilling plastic is environmentally benign. Landfills are lined and covered.
If you are purely concerned about energy consumption and carbon emissions, yes.
If you're concerned with plastics as a rather potent biotoxin (as they seem, depressingly often, to be), the balance shifts.
I actually encourage burning plastics in various incinerators/coal replacement systems/etc. It both eliminates them as a material, and makes it impossible to avoid the "Oh, plastics really aren't that recyclable..." optics.
If you're concerned with plastics as a rather potent biotoxin (as they seem, depressingly often, to be), the balance shifts.
I actually encourage burning plastics in various incinerators/coal replacement systems/etc. It both eliminates them as a material, and makes it impossible to avoid the "Oh, plastics really aren't that recyclable..." optics.
Well, that's certainly makes sense in a roll-coal, stick-it-to-the-libs, screw-the-next-generation way.
Also reduce travel, support remote work.
If you're looking for ways to contribute positively to the fight against climate change, check out relevant job boards like https://jobs.climatebase.org/jobs (no affiliation).
I also lead engineering over at Vow (vowfood.com), where we're hoping to transition the world to cell-cultured meat as a way to dramatically cut back on global emissions, since a quarter of all GHG emissions are food related.[1][2] If you're a Software or Mechatronics Engineer who wants to learn more, shoot me a message. We're hiring in Sydney and for experienced remote software engineers as well.
* 1: https://science.sciencemag.org/content/360/6392/987 * 2: https://gfi.org/resource/cultivated-meat-lca-and-tea-policy-...
I also lead engineering over at Vow (vowfood.com), where we're hoping to transition the world to cell-cultured meat as a way to dramatically cut back on global emissions, since a quarter of all GHG emissions are food related.[1][2] If you're a Software or Mechatronics Engineer who wants to learn more, shoot me a message. We're hiring in Sydney and for experienced remote software engineers as well.
* 1: https://science.sciencemag.org/content/360/6392/987 * 2: https://gfi.org/resource/cultivated-meat-lca-and-tea-policy-...
Buy seeds, and seal them with little sprinkles of wisdom like fortune cookies in places that would be accessible in the aftermath, the new inheritors of the earth will regard you as a prophet or god when they re-learn the ancient art of farming.
Unfortunately, outside some particular environmental conditions that are far from trivial to reproduce most places, seeds don't last indefinitely. The gemination rate tends to drop off fairly rapidly as a factor of years.
They're designed to survive from late summer to spring, not years or the decades that would be needed for that sort of thing.
Now, there's a ton you can do with seeds - work on optimizing various heirloom varieties of plants to your local climate (as opposed to the "one seed for all places, apply energy to the field until they behave!" approach that is widely used today), and trying to keep some genetic diversity in the seeds you use, but I don't think "random seed capsules" are likely to work over the likely timeframes involved.
They're designed to survive from late summer to spring, not years or the decades that would be needed for that sort of thing.
Now, there's a ton you can do with seeds - work on optimizing various heirloom varieties of plants to your local climate (as opposed to the "one seed for all places, apply energy to the field until they behave!" approach that is widely used today), and trying to keep some genetic diversity in the seeds you use, but I don't think "random seed capsules" are likely to work over the likely timeframes involved.
I think it's a bit fanciful to believe that post-apocalyptic people would have any interest in studying or learning from the past. Archeology is a very recent invention. Mostly, people just looted whatever old things they found for their immediate use or destroyed them because they didn't matter. The world will be awash in old crap by then too or if it isn't, the time capsules you leave will be just as gone as everything else.
Stop using X86 chips. I kid, but encouraging more efficient server architecture is surely meaningfully beneficial and will only prove moreso in the near future. Also: don't buy coins.
R&D for marine layer cloud brightening— perhaps using engines to loft salt water behind containerships could efficiently seed low clouds at a massive scale.
Stop using inefficient server side languages in the name of “developer efficiently”? That could cut some CO2. AWS doesn’t run on magic dust.
The market doesn't reward those who optimize their code.
Fastest-to-market and slow beats second-to-market and optimized every day of the week.
Fastest-to-market and slow beats second-to-market and optimized every day of the week.
There is an awareness of power consumption of data centres.
Why not start marketing code to power consumption metrics?
What about fastest-to-market and above average code base = marketing argument? Or even scientific paper?
I think here is is also important to look at smaller companies and not only FAAG.
I think here is is also important to look at smaller companies and not only FAAG.
The market rewards destroying the environment, but that doesn't make it a good thing to do
Of course not, it's a terrible thing.
Also, avoid cryptocurrencies, build simpler web pages, prefer offline (desktop/mobile) to online (web/cloud) solutions, use documentation instead of googling, prefer centralized to distributed systems if possible. All these save energy.
[deleted]
Buy a Raspberry Pi 4. Use it once a week as your main computer.
I'm serious. So much waste (power, e-waste, etc) is generated by the never ending rush towards more and more computationally complex computing that, for the most part, does what we did 5, 10, 20 years ago but on a fraction the compute and a fraction the power.
It drives me up the wall just how bloated most modern code is. A "chat application" is now, often enough, an Electron app with a couple hundred megabyte download size, a memory footprint in the high hundreds of MB, and a CPU burn of "Well, it hasn't pegged out the CPU yet so typing is still fast enough... oh, wait, there it goes lagging." For passing around text messages that are no different from what we used to do on AIM back in the 90s, or, for that matter, still do on IRC today on native applications.
I've noticed a definite trend with web stuff in the past 5 years, which is that it works great if you're on a high end workstation with a 4k monitor or two and gobs of RAM - the sort of thing companies tend to provide to web developers (Google, I'm looking at you). Try to use the same stuff on lower power, older hardware, and... well, it simply doesn't work.
I'm still pretty bitter about the fact that Google's "New" Blogger interface is, quite literally, unusable on older hardware once you have a decent number of photos in the post. I've no idea why the speed of typing text is dependent on the number of images in the post, but it is, and you can even bring a modern high end machine to a crawl if you put enough images in (some larger-than-reasonable number, but it shouldn't matter in the first place). A couple people with high end workstations utterly ruined a perfectly functional interface and made it impossible to write text-and-photos blog posts on older hardware that used to work just fine, for the sake of some responsive, mobile-first rubbish - on a blogging platform. It's quite literally as far from mobile-first as one can get, for the editor side.
Even the power efficient looking stuff we do often has a large power budget on the backend (see "most phone applications that talk to a bunch of cloud servers").
But if you can't run a basic task on a Pi 4, you really need to be reconsidering your approach to the problem.
========
Beyond that particular thorn of mine, if you're in the tech industry and concerned about climate change... does it show? Could someone else looking at your life tell you're concerned about climate change, or do you just look like any other high income consumer, buying shiny luxury toys and jetting around the world?
I'll suggest that "consuming our way out of problems largely caused by overconsumption" isn't a strategy to actually solve problems, though it's quite profitable for those selling the "green" solutions.
Edit: And while I'm at it, I'd just like to point out that Starlink access terminals, at least the one I have, consume a reliable 2+kWh/day, so about 750kWh/yr. Per Dishy. That's pretty well absurd for an internet connection terminal alone.
I'm serious. So much waste (power, e-waste, etc) is generated by the never ending rush towards more and more computationally complex computing that, for the most part, does what we did 5, 10, 20 years ago but on a fraction the compute and a fraction the power.
It drives me up the wall just how bloated most modern code is. A "chat application" is now, often enough, an Electron app with a couple hundred megabyte download size, a memory footprint in the high hundreds of MB, and a CPU burn of "Well, it hasn't pegged out the CPU yet so typing is still fast enough... oh, wait, there it goes lagging." For passing around text messages that are no different from what we used to do on AIM back in the 90s, or, for that matter, still do on IRC today on native applications.
I've noticed a definite trend with web stuff in the past 5 years, which is that it works great if you're on a high end workstation with a 4k monitor or two and gobs of RAM - the sort of thing companies tend to provide to web developers (Google, I'm looking at you). Try to use the same stuff on lower power, older hardware, and... well, it simply doesn't work.
I'm still pretty bitter about the fact that Google's "New" Blogger interface is, quite literally, unusable on older hardware once you have a decent number of photos in the post. I've no idea why the speed of typing text is dependent on the number of images in the post, but it is, and you can even bring a modern high end machine to a crawl if you put enough images in (some larger-than-reasonable number, but it shouldn't matter in the first place). A couple people with high end workstations utterly ruined a perfectly functional interface and made it impossible to write text-and-photos blog posts on older hardware that used to work just fine, for the sake of some responsive, mobile-first rubbish - on a blogging platform. It's quite literally as far from mobile-first as one can get, for the editor side.
Even the power efficient looking stuff we do often has a large power budget on the backend (see "most phone applications that talk to a bunch of cloud servers").
But if you can't run a basic task on a Pi 4, you really need to be reconsidering your approach to the problem.
========
Beyond that particular thorn of mine, if you're in the tech industry and concerned about climate change... does it show? Could someone else looking at your life tell you're concerned about climate change, or do you just look like any other high income consumer, buying shiny luxury toys and jetting around the world?
I'll suggest that "consuming our way out of problems largely caused by overconsumption" isn't a strategy to actually solve problems, though it's quite profitable for those selling the "green" solutions.
Edit: And while I'm at it, I'd just like to point out that Starlink access terminals, at least the one I have, consume a reliable 2+kWh/day, so about 750kWh/yr. Per Dishy. That's pretty well absurd for an internet connection terminal alone.
Please stop using per capita. The system will persist or collapse based on absolute amounts of CO2, pollution, etc. Per capita is not helpful except to deflect blame. It's a political tool rather than a useful tool.
Understand that you can't solve society-wide issues with technology alone.
Hackers can join (or start) an air mining company working on how to pull carbon from the air economically: https://airminers.org/
Keep mining bitcoin and donate the profits to research reducing the electricity cost of proof of work. /sarc
The best thing everyone can do is have fewer children.
This is the elephant in the room that no one wants to talk about.
This is the elephant in the room that no one wants to talk about.
Well, if you're getting into things nobody wants to talk about, how about have fewer non-contributing or low-value children? I suspect that most of the people in the world are deadweight who pollute just to exist while a minority actually make things happen. It's hard to know exactly who will be who but we can use some heuristics.
Any thoughts on my enhancement of your idea or are you afraid of talking about uncomfortable elephants in rooms?
Any thoughts on my enhancement of your idea or are you afraid of talking about uncomfortable elephants in rooms?
Actually, it's fewer high-value children (if you want to judge it this way). 90% of the emissions come from the 10% of the wealthiest population.
Since those productive people are supporting the unproductive ones, they'll go with them. I don't think the Earth can sustain 7 billion hunter-gatherers without technology. It didn't seem to before industrialization.
Just the opposite. Arguably anyone reading these comments - yes, you — ought to have a greater number of children. A world of fecund engineers, executives, mathmeticians and what have you is a world vastly more equipped to deal with climate change than the counterfactual without them.
How's that working for humans so far?
Why don't you come back to me when fertility rates rise.
Careers aren't genetic
Right, that's a cute way of being obtuse. The antecedents to successful careers are, to a degree. The generally-applicable cognitive skillset is the point.
Who is everyone? I'm sure there's data on it.
Nothing, you cannot do anything to compete with the gargantuan mount of emissions corporate makes.
By a "technologist" I assume this means someone with a reasonable level of study of science.
If that's the case, you need to start pushing hard to become a voice for reason.
What's going on with climate change is truly disgusting. It's a political football that, at least in the US, both political extremes use to gather an audience.
Deniers are demented.
And zealots are just as crazy.
"The fight against climate change" is a commonly used phrase. And, yes, this is crazy.
Please, "technologists", engage your brain and do some math. Please explain how it is that we can "fight" planetary scale effects that require 50K to 100K years for a meaningful change by doing any of the things we are being told to do.
First you have to understand the baseline.
What is the baseline?
How long would it take for a 100 ppm reduction in CO2 if humanity did not exist? All of our technology and all of us gone. Poof.
How long?
We know this with great accuracy. The answer is a range between 50K and 100K years.
50K and 100K years.
How do we know this with such certainty?
Ice core atmospheric samples going back 800K years. This is a highly accurate and reliable dataset of what the planet was doing when we were not mucking with it.
Where do you find such data?
Here:
https://cdiac.ess-dive.lbl.gov/trends/co2/ice_core_co2.html
All you have to do is apply very basic analysis to determine the slopes of the up/down cycles to reach a very simple conclusion:
We cannot do a thing about climate change.
Why?
Because if we left the planet entirely it would take 100K years for CO2 concentration to come down by 100 ppm.
What do you think is going to happen if we do anything LESS than leave the planet?
The answer is very simple: Nothing. Well, not nothing. Atmospheric CO2 will not drop. It might stabilize at some higher level at some point in the future. Drop? No way in hell.
Use less energy you say? How is that BETTER than leaving the planet? Leaving the planet puts us on a slope of -100 ppm in 100K years. Using less energy? It won't even bend the curve.
Drive electric cars? How is that BETTER than leaving the planet? It isn't. It won't do a thing.
Stop using oil and its derivative products? How is that BETTER than leaving the planet? It isn't. It won't do a thing. Besides, this is impossible.
I am not trying to be a defeatist here. When the data tells you everyone is missing the true conclusion by a light year, all you can do is your best to make people think.
If you think you can "fight" climate change, stop, study the data I provided a link to, do some math (YOU HAVE TO DO SOME MATH TO UNDERSTAND THIS) and then realize we are mercilessly lying to ourselves.
As for climate change deniers: The above doesn't mean you are right. In fact, you are horribly wrong. Once again, look at the data. Climate change is very real. And yes, we made it worse.
So, what can you do as a "technologist"?
Understand the truth and force a shift in the conversation towards what we have to do in order to deal with the reality of the matter rather than some fantasy being used for political and financial gain.
I have been asking people from varied disciplines to refute my conclusion (scientifically, not with "feelings", blind political alignment or religion) --because I WANT to be wrong. In the decade or so since reaching this conclusion nobody has offered any argument against the baseline of the ice core sample data and the conclusion it represents.
The best paper I found so far that hints at a "we can't do a thing about it" conclusion is this one:
https://storage.googleapis.com/pub-tools-public-publication-...
If you are a "technologist" this is definitely worth reading.
If that's the case, you need to start pushing hard to become a voice for reason.
What's going on with climate change is truly disgusting. It's a political football that, at least in the US, both political extremes use to gather an audience.
Deniers are demented.
And zealots are just as crazy.
"The fight against climate change" is a commonly used phrase. And, yes, this is crazy.
Please, "technologists", engage your brain and do some math. Please explain how it is that we can "fight" planetary scale effects that require 50K to 100K years for a meaningful change by doing any of the things we are being told to do.
First you have to understand the baseline.
What is the baseline?
How long would it take for a 100 ppm reduction in CO2 if humanity did not exist? All of our technology and all of us gone. Poof.
How long?
We know this with great accuracy. The answer is a range between 50K and 100K years.
50K and 100K years.
How do we know this with such certainty?
Ice core atmospheric samples going back 800K years. This is a highly accurate and reliable dataset of what the planet was doing when we were not mucking with it.
Where do you find such data?
Here:
https://cdiac.ess-dive.lbl.gov/trends/co2/ice_core_co2.html
All you have to do is apply very basic analysis to determine the slopes of the up/down cycles to reach a very simple conclusion:
We cannot do a thing about climate change.
Why?
Because if we left the planet entirely it would take 100K years for CO2 concentration to come down by 100 ppm.
What do you think is going to happen if we do anything LESS than leave the planet?
The answer is very simple: Nothing. Well, not nothing. Atmospheric CO2 will not drop. It might stabilize at some higher level at some point in the future. Drop? No way in hell.
Use less energy you say? How is that BETTER than leaving the planet? Leaving the planet puts us on a slope of -100 ppm in 100K years. Using less energy? It won't even bend the curve.
Drive electric cars? How is that BETTER than leaving the planet? It isn't. It won't do a thing.
Stop using oil and its derivative products? How is that BETTER than leaving the planet? It isn't. It won't do a thing. Besides, this is impossible.
I am not trying to be a defeatist here. When the data tells you everyone is missing the true conclusion by a light year, all you can do is your best to make people think.
If you think you can "fight" climate change, stop, study the data I provided a link to, do some math (YOU HAVE TO DO SOME MATH TO UNDERSTAND THIS) and then realize we are mercilessly lying to ourselves.
As for climate change deniers: The above doesn't mean you are right. In fact, you are horribly wrong. Once again, look at the data. Climate change is very real. And yes, we made it worse.
So, what can you do as a "technologist"?
Understand the truth and force a shift in the conversation towards what we have to do in order to deal with the reality of the matter rather than some fantasy being used for political and financial gain.
I have been asking people from varied disciplines to refute my conclusion (scientifically, not with "feelings", blind political alignment or religion) --because I WANT to be wrong. In the decade or so since reaching this conclusion nobody has offered any argument against the baseline of the ice core sample data and the conclusion it represents.
The best paper I found so far that hints at a "we can't do a thing about it" conclusion is this one:
https://storage.googleapis.com/pub-tools-public-publication-...
If you are a "technologist" this is definitely worth reading.
1. One thing to do is to reframe from not just climate change to thinking in terms of planetary boundaries. The stockholm resilience center goes into this: https://www.stockholmresilience.org/research/planetary-bound... . There's even a netflix documentary out now called 'Breaking Boundaries' hosted by David Attenborough and all. I stress this because too many people think just in terms of climate and not also recognize biodiversity collapse, biogeochemical flows, etc. There may be opportunities in thinking about regions more from this standpoint too, a la Kate Raworth's Doughnut Economics.
2. Realize there are social practices to help deal with some of these problems, not necessarily just technological fixes. Things like possibly working at a neighborhood scale to have more local circular flows, cohousing, etc.
3. Have some concern that a route of having a 'climate' plan may accidentally end up with more ghg emissions or miss the mark on environmental/social issues. Some things I've been thinking about lately have been the results of south korea's climate plan ( https://youtu.be/x0ckvo2Z5BU?t=4 ) and an argument that the green new deal is a moral hazard ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DSae5F__yQc )
4. Think about niche construction, and what caused anthropogenic climate change - getting into the economic & social factors.
5. Consider that it's possible to do ecosystem restoration, as evangelized by groups like https://ecosystemrestorationcamps.org , https://ecosystemguild.org , etc. There's also things under the umbrella of 'assisted migration' as climactic shifts happen.
6. Some of the more basic things like water might be of more interest than energy depending on where you are. There's all sorts of things to be talked about in terms of 'decentralizing water'. Again, goes in hand with understanding ecosystems.
While super inspirational, I've actually found myself rethinking what worrydream wrote in this piece. It's too focused on just climate - feeling a bit too inspired by Saul Griffith (who with the otherlab team's creating amazing things like http://energyliteracy.com ). Some like Joe Brewer have already touched on all this with 'The Design Pathway for Regenerating Earth' - https://www.chelseagreen.com/product/the-design-pathway-for-... (bias: I know the author, google the book), works from the Post-Carbon Institute, etc.
2. Realize there are social practices to help deal with some of these problems, not necessarily just technological fixes. Things like possibly working at a neighborhood scale to have more local circular flows, cohousing, etc.
3. Have some concern that a route of having a 'climate' plan may accidentally end up with more ghg emissions or miss the mark on environmental/social issues. Some things I've been thinking about lately have been the results of south korea's climate plan ( https://youtu.be/x0ckvo2Z5BU?t=4 ) and an argument that the green new deal is a moral hazard ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DSae5F__yQc )
4. Think about niche construction, and what caused anthropogenic climate change - getting into the economic & social factors.
5. Consider that it's possible to do ecosystem restoration, as evangelized by groups like https://ecosystemrestorationcamps.org , https://ecosystemguild.org , etc. There's also things under the umbrella of 'assisted migration' as climactic shifts happen.
6. Some of the more basic things like water might be of more interest than energy depending on where you are. There's all sorts of things to be talked about in terms of 'decentralizing water'. Again, goes in hand with understanding ecosystems.
While super inspirational, I've actually found myself rethinking what worrydream wrote in this piece. It's too focused on just climate - feeling a bit too inspired by Saul Griffith (who with the otherlab team's creating amazing things like http://energyliteracy.com ). Some like Joe Brewer have already touched on all this with 'The Design Pathway for Regenerating Earth' - https://www.chelseagreen.com/product/the-design-pathway-for-... (bias: I know the author, google the book), works from the Post-Carbon Institute, etc.
Nothing. China emits more greenhouse gas than the entire developed world combined, a new report has claimed. The research by Rhodium Group says China emitted 27% of the world's greenhouse gases in 2019. Any version of a "green new deal" changes nothing globally until China and several other major polluting nations join the fight.
How would those gasses be attributed if you took the end users of the products produced in China, and assigned the CO2 emissions to those nations instead?
If I buy a FizzWhizz Mk 3, which is produced in China (on coal power), shipped (via container ship) to the United States, and then trucked to me, where I use it for 5 years... is it really fair to count those emissions as "Chinese" for tracking purposes?
Yes, I agree they are emitted in China, but they're emitted in China to serve demand in a totally different country with a different end user.
Cleaning up your emissions by exporting the manufacturing to another country (with far worse environmental standards) doesn't seem like anything beyond a shell game.
If I buy a FizzWhizz Mk 3, which is produced in China (on coal power), shipped (via container ship) to the United States, and then trucked to me, where I use it for 5 years... is it really fair to count those emissions as "Chinese" for tracking purposes?
Yes, I agree they are emitted in China, but they're emitted in China to serve demand in a totally different country with a different end user.
Cleaning up your emissions by exporting the manufacturing to another country (with far worse environmental standards) doesn't seem like anything beyond a shell game.
Literally doing nothing (as in, not buying anything) could have an impact if enough people stopped spending discretionary income on physical things. Problem, of course, is nobody thinks they're part of the problem.
I know plenty of people who recognize they're part of the problem, and they tend to buy rather radically less than the average bear, and to buy things like "repair tools" so they can fix stuff that would otherwise be sent off to the dump. Or, at least, turn it into as many useful things as possible.
I spent a rather long chunk of my life extracting the residual value from otherwise broken or nearly-broken things. I spent most of a decade driving cars that were either literally rescued from the junkyard (to the amusement and entertainment of the junkyard counter folks - I thought they were nuts, they thought I was nuts, it was a good arrangement) or intercepted on the way ("Hey, if you're getting rid of that, give me a call first." "Junkyard offered $125, beat it and it's yours." "I'll be up in half an hour with $150."). The same goes for repairing laptops, or obtaining a variety of broken laptops and building serviceable ones out of it (plus selling anything useful - the value of a broken laptop, parted out, is further from $0 than I was willing to let anyone else know at the time).
It's just that none of this is popular in the tech industry for reasons I don't understand.
I worked at a tech company in the greater Seattle metro region for a while, and I was quite literally the only person in the office who was willing to dive into replacing cell phone batteries, repairing laptops, buying and refurbishing broken phones, etc. I didn't mind it - I made rather good coin doing it - but it was bizarre to me that in an office of several thousand people, I was literally the only person I knew who was willing to take a soldering iron to someone's laptop power jack to repair a failed power connection.
I spent a rather long chunk of my life extracting the residual value from otherwise broken or nearly-broken things. I spent most of a decade driving cars that were either literally rescued from the junkyard (to the amusement and entertainment of the junkyard counter folks - I thought they were nuts, they thought I was nuts, it was a good arrangement) or intercepted on the way ("Hey, if you're getting rid of that, give me a call first." "Junkyard offered $125, beat it and it's yours." "I'll be up in half an hour with $150."). The same goes for repairing laptops, or obtaining a variety of broken laptops and building serviceable ones out of it (plus selling anything useful - the value of a broken laptop, parted out, is further from $0 than I was willing to let anyone else know at the time).
It's just that none of this is popular in the tech industry for reasons I don't understand.
I worked at a tech company in the greater Seattle metro region for a while, and I was quite literally the only person in the office who was willing to dive into replacing cell phone batteries, repairing laptops, buying and refurbishing broken phones, etc. I didn't mind it - I made rather good coin doing it - but it was bizarre to me that in an office of several thousand people, I was literally the only person I knew who was willing to take a soldering iron to someone's laptop power jack to repair a failed power connection.
> Despite the large total of CO2 imports and exports, US emissions are only 6% higher and Chinese emissions are 13% lower when CO2 transfers are taken into account. https://www.carbonbrief.org/mapped-worlds-largest-co2-import...
Energy related carbon dioxide emissions peaked in 2007 in the United States. They didn't just get hidden by imports replacing domestic manufacturing. Even incorporating imports into the national balance, US emissions are down from the peak. This is largely due to efficient combined cycle gas turbines replacing coal plants and -- to a lesser but growing extent -- a larger proportion of renewable electricity in the national electricity mix.
Chinese carbon dioxide emissions have not peaked yet. As of 2017 (referenced above), 87% of Chinese emissions are attributable to domestic consumption. That should moderate hopes that Chinese emission trends could be reversed by CO2 tariffs. It should also moderate anxiety that Chinese emissions are "really" the offshored emissions of Western consumers.
Energy related carbon dioxide emissions peaked in 2007 in the United States. They didn't just get hidden by imports replacing domestic manufacturing. Even incorporating imports into the national balance, US emissions are down from the peak. This is largely due to efficient combined cycle gas turbines replacing coal plants and -- to a lesser but growing extent -- a larger proportion of renewable electricity in the national electricity mix.
Chinese carbon dioxide emissions have not peaked yet. As of 2017 (referenced above), 87% of Chinese emissions are attributable to domestic consumption. That should moderate hopes that Chinese emission trends could be reversed by CO2 tariffs. It should also moderate anxiety that Chinese emissions are "really" the offshored emissions of Western consumers.
The assumption used when you move the pollution to the end user is that environmental regulations does not exist. An product produced through coal power with little regard to the environment is assumed to be cause the same emission if produced where the end user is.
In order to calculate the actually virtual emission value of the consumer, one would first have to convert the FizzWhizz Mk 3 to the emission values as if a real factory in your location produced it.
If we assume that people will always export the manufacturing to the country with the worst environmental standards, having any environmental standards above the worst is pointless and have no impact on the environment. It also give little incentives for countries with a lot of high export to reduce emissions.
One could try to adjust this with tariffs that reflect the environmental costs the manufacturing country, but right now that is not a very popular concept.
In order to calculate the actually virtual emission value of the consumer, one would first have to convert the FizzWhizz Mk 3 to the emission values as if a real factory in your location produced it.
If we assume that people will always export the manufacturing to the country with the worst environmental standards, having any environmental standards above the worst is pointless and have no impact on the environment. It also give little incentives for countries with a lot of high export to reduce emissions.
One could try to adjust this with tariffs that reflect the environmental costs the manufacturing country, but right now that is not a very popular concept.
Agree. Some people have modeled this, and attributed emissions back to household consumption:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/289373031_Environme...
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/289373031_Environme...
Thanks - that looks like an interesting read, but the abstract reads roughly as I'd assumed: "The wealthier the area, the more the impact."
I remain generally annoyed at people who go on and on about how important stopping climate change is, as long as someone else does it. That the most anyone could be expected to do is vote some way or another, every 2/4 years... that's a "I want to be seen caring about it but don't actually care that much" sort of answer.
If you're earning tech money and car about climate change, there are a lot of things you can do. They just involve "not spending all your money on luxury toys and huge houses."
I remain generally annoyed at people who go on and on about how important stopping climate change is, as long as someone else does it. That the most anyone could be expected to do is vote some way or another, every 2/4 years... that's a "I want to be seen caring about it but don't actually care that much" sort of answer.
If you're earning tech money and car about climate change, there are a lot of things you can do. They just involve "not spending all your money on luxury toys and huge houses."
The only fair way is to attribute some to the purchaser and some to the seller. Both parties have benefited from the transaction and neither party has paid the associated social cost.
So? Consumption CO2 per capita is what really matters.
https://www.gapminder.org/tools/#$model$markers$line$data$fi...
https://www.gapminder.org/tools/#$model$markers$line$data$fi...
Why is that what really matters? Having fewer children makes a big difference which is invisible by this metric.
What really matters is the negative impact on the environment. If we half emissions per capita but 10x the population size mother nature isn't congratulating us.
What really matters is the negative impact on the environment. If we half emissions per capita but 10x the population size mother nature isn't congratulating us.
That is what really matters because we can't really do much about population.
We could talk about population if we had unusually high birth rates, but that's not true. A high birth rate was the default state of all humanity pre-industrialization. Poor countries with high birth rates that plummet as they get richer is normal. A large portion of the world is still poor. Every highly developed country used to have extremely high birth rates in the past. There is nothing unusual about this, this is standard demographic transition. If you care about freedom, you can't just force poor countries to have fewer children. You have to wait for them to get richer and develop, and birth rates will drop automatically.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QsBT5EQt348
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_transition
We could talk about population if we had unusually high birth rates, but that's not true. A high birth rate was the default state of all humanity pre-industrialization. Poor countries with high birth rates that plummet as they get richer is normal. A large portion of the world is still poor. Every highly developed country used to have extremely high birth rates in the past. There is nothing unusual about this, this is standard demographic transition. If you care about freedom, you can't just force poor countries to have fewer children. You have to wait for them to get richer and develop, and birth rates will drop automatically.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QsBT5EQt348
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_transition
There's not a single thing we can do? Where do China's products get sold? Here. So it seems to me like there's lots we can do.
Everyone everywhere has to lower emmissions. The USA historically has produced the most carbon, it also has one of the highest carbon emmissions per capita.
You can slice it up however you want and you'll always be able to point the finger at some group that's emitting more.
Until China, or the 1%, or the oil industry, or meat-eaters, or drivers (or everybody but myself) stops emitting carbon then what's the point?
The point is, any demands you make of others lack credibility if you've done nothing about it yourself.
You can slice it up however you want and you'll always be able to point the finger at some group that's emitting more.
Until China, or the 1%, or the oil industry, or meat-eaters, or drivers (or everybody but myself) stops emitting carbon then what's the point?
The point is, any demands you make of others lack credibility if you've done nothing about it yourself.
Don't worry about it. Sea level is rising 1-3 mm a year, temp has only increased .04 C per year the last thirty. We can easily adapt.
I'm glad the climate is simple enough that we can approximate it as a simple linear system
I'm just saying that what we've seen so far isn't out of normal oscillation over years and decades. And you are right, climate is too complex. Yet we put a lot of faith and policy into the models that can't even be back tested without falling hard.
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