Comment by john_moscow | Hacker News Reader

Comment by john_moscow | Hacker News Reader

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I'm not sure how many people are skeptical about the global warming itself, but there are definitely good reasons for skepticism about the proposed political solutions. I have yet to see a quantifiable and accountable proposal in a format "let's allocate $X billion, implement measures A, B and C, so with the probability of Y%, the point where Earth becomes uninhabitable due to global warming will shift by N years into the future". Instead far too many people who haven't tried running even a lemonade stand, are talking about raising billions by taxing things most of us enjoy with a very hazy perspective of having some great outcome way past their own political lifespan. Given that everyone else manages to cooperate in a completely unprecedented way.

To give an example, I personally hate commuting and believe that spending hours sitting in traffic every day is a major waste of time. However, if a politician came by and promised to raise gasoline prices by 50% in order to invest $X billion into WeWork so that they could solve the commute problem once and for all, I would never have voted for them. Not because I love commuting, but because I don't believe this will solve the problem at all, given the track record of WeWork. Of course, people with a financial interest in WeWork would gladly label me a commutist and would try to make sure my arguments are not heard.

There are plenty of ways to reduce the emissions that are much easier to quantify and implement: making nuclear power safer, improving biodiesel, even a national standard for replaceable EV batteries so you could switch one out not much slower than filling in a gas tank. But instead we keep hearing the original sin [0] rhetoric on how we should eat less, not buy a big house and give up on having kids.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_sin

> I'm not sure how many people are skeptical about the global warming itself.

Climate change denial denial. Very meta.

https://www.wired.com/story/americans-trust-scientists-until...

> However, if a politician came by and promised to raise gasoline prices by 50% in order to invest $X billion into WeWork so that they could solve the commute problem once and for all,

Than you should like carbon fee and dividend scheme[1]. Tax emissions, divide equally between all citizens. The end result is unchanged populations spending power, but redistributed towards less carbon-intensive products.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_fee_and_dividend

Carbon taxes should be uncontroversial. They're economically sound and use levers we already have and trust to control other aspects of society without much debate (sin taxes are widely used despite the odd objection). But people on the extreme eco-warrior end are suspicious because they look like paper-pushing without doing anything, and people on the extreme capitalist-growth end dislike them because they will in fact be disruptive. It takes a kind of well-intentioned pragmatism that I think is rare - one tends to get selfish pragamtism, or else well-intentioned idealism/fanaticism.

That would mean taxing most productive or enjoyable activity (raising kids, going to business trips, fine dining) and rewarding depressive low-carbon-footprint sitting in front of the TV and waiting for death. I would rather spend that money subsidizing greener alternatives to common CO2 sources (e.g. EV subsidies), but that's already being done.

Where would the incentive to reduce emissions come from then? If you divide your tax of increase in emissions by 300+ million people, your effective tax increase will be low compared to the money you could make by increasing emissions.

When I hear people say that making nuclear power safer is easier than eating less meat, it kind of feels like people are just promoting the solutions that dont involve them making any sacrifices.

And why should people make sacrifices if you could solve the problem without making sacrifices? This smells of a religious dogma that people should suffer because of the original sin.

If you think CO₂ is something we should reduce, the tree planting idea that's been talked about recently looks pretty good. Even if their costs are off by a factor of 10 it's still affordable; trees are an almost ideal carbon capture tool.

Planting trees will trap some atmospheric carbon in the lumber. However, once the lifespan of the tree is over and it starts rotting away, most of the carbon will get released back into the atmosphere, as it has been happening for millions of years.

In my opinion, it's not about planting the trees, it's about finding a way to turn the carbon trapped by them into something logistically and economically comparable to fossil fuels.

That's not a problem because new trees will grow in their place. Those trees can capture all the carbon humans have put into the atmosphere so far.

But that means that planting a tree binds a finite "tree lifetime" amount of carbon. So, in order to neutralize the worldwide carbon emissions using trees, we would need to keep planting them as long as we keep releasing CO2. So we would need to consume X square miles of agriculturally suitable land per year to simply keep the net emission at zero.

Now, IIRC, the energy density of oil is much higher than the one of lumber. I haven't done the calculation, but we might simply run out of suitable area way before any reasonable effect is reached. Don't forget that the logistics of tree planting will spend some CO2 as well, and given the finite CO2-per-planted-tree amount, it could be considerable.

Also if the trees have not spread naturally in the past millions of years in the area where you would want to plant them, there might be some ecological reasons to it. Hence, they may not survive long-term, or may get wiped by forest fires, or may require irrigation, fertilizers or other support that also produces CO2.

I agree it isn’t a complete answer to the question of how to return co2 levels to some level forever, but it has a good cost benefit ratio and could buy 50 years.

The study showed that the available land at a low cost, much less than alarmist propaganda, is enough to reverse all the co2 emissions so far.

That sounds interesting. As a numbers person, I would appreciate a link to the study and some basic TDLR napkin math.

This article contains a link to the paper: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/jul/04/planting...

I really like and vouch for the last paragraph

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