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Comment by gfodor | Hacker News Reader

Climate change has never struck me as an existential risk. Certainly it is a major problem. But it's slow moving. Slow moving problems are way more soluble than fast moving problems. (For comparison, a hostile AI takeoff theoretically could wipe out humanity in a few minutes given the proper means.) The worst case scenario from climate change itself seems to be a small population of humans living in an artificial habitat in 1000 years. And of course there is a broad spectrum of other outcomes from there. If, for example, we master interplanetary colonization quickly by our effort to get to Mars, this would greatly minimize the impact since we could adapt the technologies used to survive on Mars.

The biggest argument in favor of climate change being a true existential risk is if the conflicts it would spawn would result in a global war.

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A lot of people don't seem to understand that this has always been the real nature of the threat. Climate change will cause severe cultural and economic stresses which will have political consequences which will eventually spill over into physical consequences.

It's far more of a threat to human culture and knowledge than to human DNA. The latter is likely to survive it in some form - albeit probably not a very interesting one. The former is already showing signs of stress and climate change has barely started.

At a macro level in that sense climate change is just increasing scarcity. Humans have been pretty good at dealing with issues of scarcity. There is no shortage of matter and energy in the universe, and we are very close to the knowledge needed to create enough energy for our needs through fusion.

Frankly, my belief is the only thing needed to parlay climate change into an accelerant for human progress as opposed to believing it's a hurdle to leap over is for us to see it that way, and use it as an excuse to build energy generation technologies 100x better than our current ones. The focus on renewables is depressing, and the memes around the solution to climate change to be "use less, consume less, focus on more clean energy" are equally so, since they creates a cynical belief there is a tradeoff between energy use and conservatism. We can have both.

We can't have the status quo and environmental conservatism together. A great deal of damage has been done and the trajectory is awful. I appreciate your optimism but I think climate change is only a slow moving problem in the tiny span of a human life. The chances that fusion is still 20 years away at the time civilization violently collapses seem decent to me.

Not to mention that if the problems created by climate change start costing lives and infrastructure, our ability to implement solutions dwindle as well. We need to have done the research and start on fixing the issues before populations and research facilities have been decimated or destroyed. The only reason we have the ability now to even think about colonizing mars and developing a new and unproven energy generation method is because we have such large societies where these things can eke out of the cracks.

The solutions to climate change already exists and the status quo can be preserved. For proof, you only have to compare the per capita carbon footprint different countries like Sweden, Switzerland and France to to the USA, which has similar GDP and ~1/3 the carbon footprint.

Alternatively, you can compare France to China, which has a greater CO2 footprint per capita, and half the GDP per capita.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_di...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)...

These low-CO2 countries are effectively exporting CO2 production (e.g. manufacturing) to China, no?

I don’t think they are exporting more CO2 production than their GDP peers. For example, The USA has 3x the per capita CO2/GDP of France and the USA imports twice as much per capita from China. That is something I would like to learn more about tho if you have any resources.

> The focus on renewables is depressing, and the memes around the solution to climate change to be "use less, consume less, focus on more clean energy" are equally so, since they creates a cynical belief there is a tradeoff between energy use and conservatism. We can have both.

Many climate change activists aren't even countenancing nuclear power, known to be sustainable as well as much safer now than even in the recent past. I strongly agree that we can have both, we just need to build it.

When considering paths forward for climate change, there always seems to be the caveat "great idea, if we went whole-hog on that 20 years ago." This is doubly true, though, for nuclear plants -- just physically building the things takes a while, even if you ignore the problems around getting a massive pile of startup cash for an investment whose payoff hinges on energy prices 20 years out.

These aren't insurmountable problems, but they are pretty big. With solar, a person can stick it on their house. A grid-level installation can be built over time and starts paying for itself as soon as the things are plugged in.

Our current plans are targeting 2030 for massive carbon reductions, right? I don't see how starting a bunch of nuclear plants now really helps there. The most enthusiastic proponents of preventing global warming have always wanted to target 10-15 years out, so the energy isn't there for nuclear. Unfortunately. It would have been nice if we'd built a bunch of nuclear reactors 30 years ago.

It's true that at micro scale, consumers can buy panels and install them. But what matters at the macro scale is PV manufacturing rate. Installation rate can't exceed manufacturing rate.

PV manufacturing is complex and expensive. Most of the cost of PV is in the manufacturing machinery, since the raw materials are cheap. Adding new manufacturing capacity takes time.

It may be that PV can be ramped up faster than nuclear, but some of the new nuclear designs (NuScale and Oklo) could be cranked out pretty fast also.

Government borrowing costs, even for terms as long as 30 years, are at the lowest they've ever been. We don't necessarily need private startup capital if we agree that this is an important problem to solve. And unlike much of other such expenditure, these plants can be privatized to enthusiastic infra investors at a later date for a return likely well above the borrowing costs. Not to mention the ancillary benefits of stable energy for economic growth & probability.

As for time, the majority of this 20-30 years estimate consists of inertia and bureaucracy. As a country, we've built far more complicated (Apollo Project) and high-risk (Manhattan Project) things in the past in a compressed time frame, we had no choice then because we've faced clear existential risks. Our inability to countenance all this today says more about us as a society, than it does about the do-ability (within say a decade) of the task at hand.

I guess I can agree with you, but only as pessimist, which is a darn shame really.

Nuclear being slow is not an inherent property of the technology.

That's right. Even _if_ the climate change killed off all the members of a civilization, provided there is any life left, it should rise up again in 100M years and presumably not do it again.

I don't even think it's a risk to culture and knowledge, speaking as someone who ranks climate change as our highest long-term priority. Unmitigated it will cause millions of excess deaths and have a substantial drag effect on GDP growth, but it's not going to cause us to revert back to paleolithic or even 19th century living standards. Humanity will just be substantially better off in a century if we deal with it now instead of shrugging our shoulders.

Depends on how resilient the ecosystem of the planet is. There might be differences between planets.

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