Yes, it will cost a lot. But leaving our children with an increasingly hostile planet isn't a tenable option either (and one which will be even more expensive as well).
But I think the problem is that people care about today a lot more then they care about tomorrow, or next year (and definitely more then their potential future descendants).
EDIT: Apologies for the combative tone below, what I'm trying to say is, it's not as simple as monetary cost.
I'm afraid that's looks like first world thinking. For countries still developing lives are literally at stake right now. Rolling back environmental impact means lower economic growth, poorer infrastructure and therefore people dying in poverty.
It's not all bad news on this front. Modi committed India to opening a swath of new coal power stations before coming into office, but has since changed tack with the collapse in the cost of solar energy[1]. Still, this will be new solar capacity and while it's better than more coal it's still environmentally worse than no new energy generation at all.
[1]https://www.ft.com/content/b8d24c94-fde7-11e8-aebf-99e208d3e...
I don’t understand what you’re trying to say here.
Can you elaborate more on this last point?
Do you mean to imply that one approach to the problem is to build no new electricity capacity?
How will we displaced fossil fuel use for transportation, manufacturing, agriculture, and mineral processing if not with new electricity generation?
Or did you mean to imply the world would be better off if India’s poorest continued to suffer in the dark and cold?
More broadly my point is we cannot expect developing countries to simply stop developing. That's not an acceptable short term cost, as I pointed out when I said lives are at stake. I'm pointing out some complexities in the issue. How you can get from that to me saying poor people should suffer in the cold confuses me.
This isn't true. It just requires a different development path than Europe and Asia have followed. For example, local power generation can bootstrap a small, isolated economy without requiring massive investments in a nation-wide energy grid. And renewable power (solar or wind) lends itself much better to small-scale deployments than fossil fuel generators.
With the exponential recent declines in production cost, most of the cost of solar is now in deployment, not manufacturing the cells. This has made huge desert installations much cheaper per watt than rooftop -- as a result, large-scale installations is where almost all the growth is coming from.
As for wind power, efficiency increases superlinearly with blade length. As a result of this, and improving material science and production/deployment tech, turbines have been getting enormous (Eiffel-tower-sized or more) and no longer fit outside of dedicated wind farms.
As for nation-wide grids, they're are a central part of the solution to solar/wind intermittency (because weather patterns average out over long distances).
I’m also not saying anybody would be wrong to not care about the future. It’s quite understandable to me someone using their freedom to say f the world, question is if everyone needs to be on board to make necessary changes then how do you achieve that.
In other words the point isn't the (admittedly unjustifiable) generalisation, it's that there are people who are not going to be on board unless they see something in it for them. Could be a wealthy childless retiree, or it could be someone in their thirties with four kids travelling round the world for work racking up air miles for their career to support their family.
Most people don’t even move more than, what, a hundred miles from where they’re born? Just because I fancy giving it a go doesn’t mean I expect people to go to Mars en masse even if it was free.
But they could if they needed to.
Absolutely, and to change that, you need to ask why this is the case.
There are many reasons for that. Some people are selfish, some are merely short-sighted. This needs to be fixed by changing the mindset.
But to me the (by far) biggest problem is that too many people simply cannot afford to think otherwise.
Climate change in X years means nothing to someone living in, or close to poverty today. "Green" means nothing to someone hungry today, and it would be absurd and apathetic to expect otherwise. And a very large share of the global population today are poor.
Our ancestors figured this out. Some of them did starve during winter. But we're the descendants of the lucky and prepared.
Why should the future be any different?
Some of us may be the descendants of those who enjoyed their seed corn during the winter and later reaped the cobs planted by their neighbours.
My parents smoked heavily. Even after the causal connection with lung cancer was well-established. Even though both of them lost their father to lung cancer. Even though their child (me) suffered from asthma, to the extent of being hospitalised. I know addiction is a thing. But there was no sense that those choices were made because of the physical compulsion. There were no attempts to quit. The biggest addiction was mental: a lack of any interest in trying.
I don't think it is helpful to claim we are 'addicted' to high-carbon energy. But whatever the label, there is mind-boggling inertia in the human soul.
A solar panel is probably an unaffordable object for at least a quarter of the world's population.
And the poorest ¼ of the world contribute way way way less than ¼ of our CO₂ emissions.
I mean, plenty of ways to show your wealth without it having to be a big FU to the planet.
If you're under 30, you will probably live to see large swaths of the plant that were previously inhabitable become unlivably hot due to human created carbon emissions. Factor in increased natural disasters, and the effects of a warmer climate on our ability to produce food, this is an incredibly serious problem that will affect you and people you know and love.[0]
Now is the time to act and get involved. Look into groups like the CCL[1] or local Green New Deal organizers. Call your congress-person, get involved at the state and local level. Make this a priority.
[0] http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2017/07/climate-change-earth-... [1] https://citizensclimatelobby.org/
"Technology professionals from many companies — such as Google, Facebook, Tumblr, Etsy, Github, SoundCloud, Lyft and many more — are coming together under the banner of ClimateAction.tech to find ways to accelerate solutions to climate change."
There are lots of interesting projects and support in the slack workspace.
The USA will need to reduce meat consumption, improve public transportation (electric cars if produced at scale will introduce lots of other environmental issues), relocalize industries. They are late to the transition in every domain.
Easy. This has actually been done many times during Cold War.
You do it yourself, and so well, that their citizens will demand it too.
There were many social advances in the West that were imported (usually in a crippled way, but still) to the communist countries (I was born in one). Things like 5-day work week, education improvements, recycling, ecological laws, nuclear proliferation treaties... usually it's very small things, but they do make difference.
What you suggest only works if you're talking about improving quality of life.
> has their people eat as much meat as they want
It's not healthy to eat that much meat anyway.
> then the US would be powerless
And you shouldn't panic. The US is far from powerless. There are many countries in Europe that for example do not have nuclear weapons. Does it make them dead? No, they continue to live, in fact often with high quality of life.
This worry that you somehow "lose the race", it's such a nonsense (reminds me of "mineshaft gaps" from Dr. Strangelove).
Edit: lots of articles about this online, but e.g. http://time.com/5575523/climate-change-inequality/ has some sobering statistics on the likely impact of climate change: e.g. "A 2015 study in the journal Nature projected that the average income in the poorest countries will decline 75% by 2100 compared to a world without warming".
Resource consumption happens by a person. There's only so many resources a person will use while being rich. A rich person might consume far more resources than a poor person, but rich people collectively have a much smaller impact than the poor, because there are far fewer of them. This means that if you start tackling climate change and the impact is that food becomes more expensive, then poor people will be far more affected by this than rich people.
https://theconversation.com/emissions-inequality-there-is-a-... has the Oxfam discussion.
There would be an impact on poor people as you say, but this depends on the exact policies adopted. A study such as the one summarised and linked here: http://bruegel.org/2018/11/distributional-effects-of-climate... would be needed to confirm either way - their conclusion is that climate change mitigation efforts are potentially but not necessarily regressive with respect to wealth distribution.
That's the sort of tradeoff we might be looking at.
There’s also no need to draconian enforcement. We can start with a ramped increasing environmental tax on meat products, reductions in farm subsidies on the same, etc. 50 years ago smoking was ubiquitous as a core social and recreational activity, now it’s marginalised. The same could happen to meat eating.
>50 years ago smoking was ubiquitous as a core social and recreational activity, now it’s marginalised.
Meat is the easiest way to get a reasonably balanced diet. There's a reason why we've eaten meat for longer than we've been humans. You're not going to curb that anywhere as easily as smoking. I would even be willing to bet that there are many many many people in the world who would be willing to fight to be able to eat meat.
A lot of this thread leads like the dreams of authoritarians.
Relocalizing industry is a controlled process, where the direction of the flux of people is known, and housing and infrastructure sizing can be planned and handled, and people won't follow the industry if they can't get acceptable living conditions.
Mass migrations from climate change are due to unexpected meteorological events either directly (floods, heat waves, etc), or indirectly (food scarcity, drinkable water shortages, political instability, etc). The scale, location and time are unpredictable. The people concerned will need to migrate and have to live in unsanitary housing camps.
Nor do we have any real understanding of the equilibrium effects of the climate, and many who are pushing climate models are quite obviously ignorant of shifts in global temperature and atmospheric composition on a paleontological scale.
Nobody really knows what the hell is going to happen, and when presented with rank fear-mongering, it's prudent to puzzle yourself with the classic question, cui bono?
Until the smartest or most concerned folks begin to consistently eat their own dog food I won't either.
A much simpler and less crazy solution is simply to have more grass-fed beef. Their manure and body shade can help recreate green pastures in desertic regions, and this would be pretty much CO2-neutral. It's just more expensive, so nobody does it.
Solutions are here, and they're not that hard. People just don't want to implement them because it impacts their profits and abilities to eat tasteless meat 3 times a day for next to nothing.
Uncontrolled innovation may have unexpected results.
Not OP, but when I personally talk on reducing meat consumption for environmental reasons - I do not have animal farts and burps in mind. The process of growing meat requires a lot of resources by itself and at current human population scales we are wasting vast amounts of resources (energy, land, etc.) to grow meat instead of spending those resources to feed ourselves. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecological_efficiency#Ten_perc...
IMO, feeding animals unusual foods won't solve the main issue and produce more challenges. It's anecdata (cannot cite anyone), but as much as I've read about ecological farming, problems with animal health and infamous though prevalent use of antibiotics in industrial animal farming is due to the diets of the animals. Animals grown in ecological open farms with habitats natural for the animal grow healthier. But as mentioned in first paragraph - at current human population scales - meat consumption must be reduced rapidly.
P.S. I will digress, but as the problem is insanely big human population (and it's exponential growth), it would be great if people globally won't procreate at such rates.
For them is already a hostile planet. I wonder if their governments care more about the environment or provide more people with electricity.
[1]: https://ourworldindata.org/number-of-people-in-the-world-wit...
Yes, "think about our children" is good, but in the end people are still selfish and will think that it's not their problem.
As engineers, I feel it's our responsibility to make environmentally friendly solutions that are simply more economically viable than the unclean/unsustainable alternative. I'm working on the oceanic shipping industry myself.
If we just started doing our parts and didn’t worry so much about other people doing theirs we wouldn’t in this mess.
In UK councils quote 50% recycling rates. And that's with most supermarkets still producing food in unrecyclable packaging.
Yeah ... I've not investigated that yet. But I have seen some of our local recycling facilities and they seem to be operating rather than secretly filling shipping containers.
It does trouble me visiting my town's rubbish dump, there is so much usable stuff in the skips, so much waste.
Presumably China now refusing other country's trash is shedding new light on these issues.
I think we have to fix our entire economic systems in order to solve this, and I don't think that's going to work readily because people will always exploit others for financial/political gain at the expense of the environment. We're going to have to seriously curtail individual freedoms that allow people to make excessive use of resources. We can't do that under our current market-based systems.
Take a simple example, fleece fabric is great, cheap, used widely but is a massive source of microplastic pollution - we're going to have to make it expensive, and stop people from throwing it away, and use the income to do proper filtration and recycling.
We're going to need to start treating fraud wrt environmental issues as akin to manslaughter - actually put businessmen in jail who are responsible (knowingly, or unknowingly through negligence) for things like shipping recycling abroad and not confirming it is recycled, or lying about car MPGs, or failing to filter effluent, or allowing runoff to poison water sources, ....
We probably need something akin to a global one-child policy as well. We can't go on increasing population and just expect resources to stretch. Things are going to break much harder with population rates left as they are.
I better stop ... /rant
Nice metaphor...
People seem to be talking about replacing existing energy suppliers with clean ones. Instead we need to be talking about what it will take to generate 10-100X the amount of energy in a few decades and what that would enable. Cheap clean energy enables a lot of things that are currently too expensive/polluting to consider. Countries that manage this will be able to grow more rapidly economically. China looks like it is well positioned for that.
I'm not against nuclear but it will have to come down in price and upfront investment cost for that to have meaningful impact short term. As long as people still dream about maybe being cost competitive with coal/gas one day, the ambitions are simply not high enough. It needs to be vastly cheaper than that. 2-3x would keep it competitive with solar and wind for some decades.
IMHO any price comparisons against current prices are in any case effectively obsolete since those are likely trending down for solar and wind for some time to come. If prices drop by another few double digit percentages, a lot of home owners will do the math and put some solar on their roof.
Carbon capture schemes only make sense when the combined cost of that and keeping the carbon producing stuff they offset functioning is lower. However, even without carbon capturing a lot of these solutions are already problematic in terms of cost and making them more expensive will only speed up their demise. With coal, that has already happened. Natural gas will last a bit longer. However, when wind and solar bids start undercutting these solutions consistently the same will happen there. There's a real chance that remaining gas plants switch to clean sources of gas (i.e. generated using solar/wind/nuclear) when that gets cheap enough.
So we make our own planet, a space in the universe we are literally evolved to use, unlivable at some point.
The solution is that we'll magically figure out how to make space, an already hostile environment, livable?
Honestly, space settlement makes for nice headlines for the new ruling class to pat themselves on the back with, but for the rest of us, the natural outcome of unlimited growth is population crash.
Well, potentially yes, because it would offer us to relieve the pressure on Earth - and the spin-offs from the process of creating space infrastructure and space habitats would be mightily useful for fixing the damage we've already done to Earth.
We didn't break Earth out of spite; before technological civilization, life on Earth was shit. We're breaking the planet out of desire to make our lives better, and we might fix Earth out of the same desire - but only if we get the chance to do it in time.
I mean, what else do you want? You don't want the mass death of population crash, nobody has the power to order billions of people to stop wanting things and live in poverty, no one person or group can change government policy of all nations, and we can't keep polluting and increasing energy use at current rates.
There's no way back to an ideal perfect before-time. The only way is forward, and the only way forward without mass death is more technology. I hope someone can work out a way to put the polluting energy intensive things away from where we live.
And by no means is the "duck curve" or storage an impediment for adoption. I will not go as far as identifying it as a "core" issue here.
But I would put my money on reflow batteries in the long run if they weren't so far behind, simply the decoupling of storage capacity from power density feels like an engineering perfect storm to me. I was lucky enough that my pet technology made it in =)
Why do you think inertial storage might be superior? I've talked to a fair number of people working on it and it sounds totally doable but I'm unclear that it actually costs less per joule stored or why it would. Granted a flywheel costs less per unit mass and compressed air is cheap, but on a capacity and fabrication basis? Maybe. I don't think I'd call it a shoo-in though and wouldn't invest in it myself.
Its power and energy density is next to nothing in the industry.
Fabrication, cost on the market? Even most basic flywheels like one used as industrial UPSes can be used right away for grid storage, and be more or less competitive with their high round-trip efficiency.
This just shows that how low a commercial opportunity for energy storage as such is. You need truly monstrous daily variations in energy price to make people put money it it.