Comment by Brakenshire | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Brakenshire | Hacker News Reader

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The thing is, a lot of the necessary changes will have no impact on ordinary people’s lives. The UK is now up to more than 50% clean electricity for instance, and most people are not aware it has happened. And the UK is not even using the cheapest forms of electricity production much (hydro because it doesn’t have the right topology, solar because of the high latitude, onshore wind because of population density and political decisions).

Those renewable sources of electricity - solar, onshore wind and hydro - are now the cheapest way to produce electricity full stop, even ignoring the pollution externalities of the alternatives, and countries that have access to those resources do not need to sacrifice anything except a bit of technocratic hassle to get to a high level of renewable electricity.

Getting to net zero carbon in total (including heating and transportation) would be expensive with current technology, but probably won’t be very expensive given the technological progress which can happen over the next 30 years, if we do the basic things right, follow a reasonable pathway, and give companies plenty of time to make investments and incremental progress. It’s highly likely electric vehicles will be cheaper over that timeframe, for instance.

Your point is true, and it excuses a lack of pressure from the public, but it doesn’t excuse the media lying to their audience to gratify them. Nor representative politicians who are meant to use their own judgement remaining ignorant, and avoiding the boring technocratic steps necessary to help, or even just allow, the transition to take place.

Part of the problem is that many people who are passionate about battling climate change see the "no (significant) impact on ordinary people's lives" as a really bad thing.

I've come across this time and time again. "Electric cars/planes are not a solution because it keeps lifestyles the same! There MUST be lifestyle change to battle climate change."

It's baffling because it's so tone-deaf to the general public. It's as if there's a complete lack of understanding that wide acceptance of climate solutions is necessary for gaining the political capital to actually fight climate change.

Yes, I think that is true, and you can see this in a lot of green parties in Europe.

To be fair to them, environmental damage is very widespread and goes a long way beyond climate change, we do need to rethink quite a few things to protect ecosystems and avoid continued mass death of wildlife.

It’s a shame though that they are often not very scientific or practical about how to go about this. It’s why it’s so important for mainstream parties to embrace action on climate change and tackle it in a pragmatic way.

Maybe they are thinking about such things as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox , or https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/04/economist-meets-physicist... . Or perhaps they feel the modern lifestyle is not delivering happiness. Or, to be more specific, they may be noting as J.S. Mill did that paradoxically technology was improving and at the same time people were working more.

That's why we need tech that doesn't emit net CO2 at all, not just Priuses and improved combustion efficiency.

The analogy would be the development of non-ozone-depleting refrigerants. Technology which emits greenhouse gases should simply be replaced with that which doesn't OR the greenhouse gases must be captured after-the-fact (and the emitters must fully pay for it).

Lifestyles do need to change, or at least change enough so they aren't so extravagent. Not in terms of overt wealth, but in materials used to support a lifestyle.

Buying a tesla really doesn't do you much good on your green karma if there's a beater honda sitting in a used car lot near you. Half the lifetime pollution from a car comes from it's production, so I hope you intend to have this tesla for the long haul (potentially long after tesla stops pushing you updates) because that's what it will take to recoup the environmental costs of you buying that brand new tesla instead of the 2k rust bucket honda that sounds like a weed wacker and still gets 40mpg.

Then there is the costs of the suburban lifestyle centered around vehicle ownership. You have to maintain that road going 20 miles to work. You need to maintain utility connections out to the suburbs. Your amazon packages now have to come all the way out to you instead of you living near the central distribution center. You need a spot to put your car at home, you need one at work, you need one wherever you go, and you probably want it for free.

Then you need room to actually move your car to these places; basically asking to freely move about the city and have everyone stand 6' away from you on the sides, 20' away front and back. Imagine everyone on the sidewalk walking like that--it would look absurd-- but that's what we get with cars and roads going into dense urban areas, and in midtown Manhattan cars can move slower than walking speed.

It's all not very space efficient, which makes it not very time efficient, and more time to get to and fro means burning more gas (or coal, if you have a tesla) to go less distance; it all ends up being very wasteful.

What we do need to do is build transit and remove residential zoning limits. There's no reason why we can't all live in dense knit communities of mid-to-high rise apartments and rely on extensive rail networks to move us around efficiently. That technology has existed for over 100 years, and if we weren't so beholden to supporting the suburban lifestyle centered on car ownership, maybe the LA metro rail map would look like a fisherman's net by now and we'd all be breathing a little cleaner.

It's a little ironic, because transit was how cities used to function. Cars were the lifestyle change. Before that, people living in Los Angeles and most other major American cities got around using extensive streetcar systems. As car ownership lead to traffic that jammed up these streetcar networks, for the most part politicians responded by switching to buses and tearing up tracks for more lanes rather than giving streetcars signal priority and separating grades. Reverting back to a transit oriented lifestyle is reverting back to a lifestyle that American cities were originally designed to grow around.

Electric cars can be bought and sold used just like any other car. That Honda was once new, too. I bought two used electric cars for a pretty decent price. Just because Tesla's are nice cars doesn't mean they're bad. Additionally, a lot of the statistics thrown out about manufacturing emissions for cars is actually false and based on old data. Besides, we need to change our manufacturing base to decarbonize entirely as well. Which will be a LOT easier if electric vehicles are widespread (as many vehicles are needed in the manufacturing process, from mine to distribution).

I am in favor of densifying cities and zoning reform, etc, but you have to realize it took half a century to get to suburbanization, and it will take another half century at least to reverse it. Climate change isn't going to wait for our lifestyle changes. It won't. We can't afford the time.

Technical solutions are faster than cultural ones with the possible exception of martial law.

Hey,

Not sure what you mean by "no impact on ordinary people's lives." The evidence we see seems to suggest the exact opposite.

We're seeing a massive uptick in the amount and intensity of "once in a century natural disasters." These disasters destory homes, destroy crops and cause serious life loss and economic damage to everyone directly affected.

But these disasters also lead to the downstream effects: We're seeing significant inflation in food prices and insurance prices. In Canada last year, vegetable prices increased by ~16%. In comparison, inflation was ~2.5%. Throughout the world we see higher prices in food - this makes everyone poorer. Especially "normal" people.

Similarly, we're seeing insurance rates go up. This is for insuring farms, for insuring houses and anything else that is affected by climate. This is a real economic cost. Moreover, if your home is no longer insured from flooding - when that more frequent and devastating natural disaster happens, you're not covered!

We have all these hidden "taxes" from climate change that affect us all.

Sorry, obviously I wasn’t clear, I’m saying the changes necessary to avoid climate change will often not affect people, not the outcomes of climate change.

Thanks for clarifying.

On that point of what we need to do not affecting normal people - I don't think that's accurate either.

We WILL need to live different lives in the developed countries. Our lifestyles (beyond carbon emissions) are not sustainable.

If everyone on earth lived as those in the US did, we'd need 4-9 earths. So long as higher quality of life looks like how we live, people around will strive to adopt that. China is by volume, now the largest emitter, but it's only 1/6 of the US in per capita emissions!

I find it hard to see a scenario where we've addressed climate change and ecological collapse, while we live the way we live today.

But your "we" and "our" should be split up more.

Many people in the US live close to sustainable lives. they live without air conditioning, take transit everywhere, they eat chicken and not beef, they've never flown in an airplane. They're poor.

And then a small percentage of the US population lives insane lives. Gigantic houses with the windows open and the air conditioning on max for the garden party. Fly to Paris 14 times a year. Yacht idling in the harbor.

The carbon-production standards of most people, even in the US, don't need to change much.

How so? When you tax energy consumption more, poor people won't be able to afford driving a car. It doesn't affect the upper and upper middle classes, that's very true, but if i.e. transport of goods is taxed by travel distance, or flying is taxed more heavily, that will just mean that the lower classes can't fly and can't afford tropical fruits.

That depends exactly what we mean by "coal power subsidies". For example, the UK came under a lot of criticism recently for the scale of its subsidies for fossil fuel power, but if you look at the fine print the vast majority of those subsidies were the result of us having a lower rate of VAT on all domestic electricity and heating regardless of its source. Getting rid of that lower rate would put up the price of electricity for ordinary people across the board, no matter whether it was generated by clean or fossil sources.

That's a good point. And that could easily lead to a worse result. For instance, the cost of diesel in Germany is lower than in the UK but the price of electricity is significantly lower in the UK than in Germany, which basically punishes electric cars (which have significantly lower lifetime emissions per km than comparable diesel vehicles) in Germany while encouraging them in the UK.

This is one thing we need to pay attention to as more and more of global emissions are transportation related instead of electricity related: punishing electricity production without also properly tariffing liquid fuels could backfire by discouraging electrification of transport.

That's not in itself a bad thing: for any kind of power source, you can reduce it by either removing it or replacing it. Removing it is always cheaper.

The ideal would be no subsidies for any kind of power, and the externalities of carbon pollution would be priced in via a carbon tax or cap and trade. You can then provide a general rebate of the funds raised to the everyone, and they can either choose to use it to make up for the power they were priced out of, or on things they find more valuable.

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