Hacker News Reader

Comment by hvasilev | Hacker News Reader

What is the technology that we do have, but we refuse to use in order to solve the problem?

Nuclear power for energy.

Forestation/harvesting for carbon capture.

If I have to choose between mass nuclear to replace fossil fuels or the alternative of global warming .... I choose global warming.

Can you elaborate on why?

To my mind:

- We have not solved storage in a way that is reliable enough for nuclear waste

- Nuclear uses another limited resource that will run out, then we'll have to switch again

- Nuclear isn't much better than renewable, and renewable is also available (and has problems that are currently tractable)

Forestation for the win! But apparently there are a lot of people looking into it (http://trees.org, http://edenprojects.org, https://onetreeplanted.org -- which even has awesome mini-crowd-funds for your company/wedding/etc: https://www.classy.org/campaign/tree-ambassadors/c200082).

How do you get large scale adoption though? Laws? Government projects? Millionaires?

I'm wondering about crowdfunding and putting the land into a national land bank.

Government projects, on the international scale.

Government could subsidize the price of lumber. You want it to be a more economical alternative than farmland. Then leave things like efficient use of water, tree density, and type of fast growing tree to the market, those are probably already optimized.

Tax incentives. It's how we encourage a lot of good samaritan behavior.

Offer tax deductions for trees and watch forests pop up everywhere.

I've seen some promising research from olivine rocks for carbon capture: https://projectvesta.org/. I can't vouch for the science behind it because I'm not knowledgeable in this but it sounds a good idea.

Solar everywhere is a great start. Massive promotion of electric vehicles, combined with carbon taxes pegged to temperature. Contraceptive use promotion to reduce unwanted births.

What is the device that captures solar energy, but does not produce massive amounts of pollution while it is being produced?

Solar cells. They have offset the energy needed for production in a couple of months. And of course, you can use solar energy to produce solar cells.

Tech is not the problem here. The problem is that we refuse to adapt our society and standards to external constraints.

"Refuse to use" is the wrong expression, as we are using the technology to solve the problem as in solar, wind, wave, water, etc. It is just that we are refusing to give up on fossil fuels (coal, oil, gas) quickly enough. We should be pushing at the maximum possible speeds to make the transition. For an intermediate time, using gas instead of coal and oil also reduces the CO2 footprint, as gas has a 1/3rd less carbon compared to coal. Which is also a reason, why Diesel cars don't save as much carbon as the fuel consumption suggests, as Diesel fuel is about 10% more carbon-rich than gasoline per litre.

Geoengineering. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratospheric_aerosol_injectio...

Contraception.

> What is the technology that we do have, but we refuse to use in order to solve the problem?

Money, laws and maybe some coercion tools.

Rail transit

Jean-Marc Jancovici has IMO the best analysis of energy options when it comes to climate change (his whole website is excellent reading), and he does not think that rail transit can directly substitute for car and truck use with today's population distribution in developed countries: https://jancovici.com/en/energy-transition/transportation/co...

I don't remember Jancovici having a proposition that lets us sustain the current population distribution, especially for large cities, rail or no rail.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com