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Comment by joelthelion | Hacker News Reader

So it's the year 2020, climate change is already causing major disasters regularly, and if we don't make major changes real quick, it's going to end the world as we know it in a matter of decades.

And yet here we are, admiring a plane that will probably burn ten times as much fossil fuel as a regular plane, which is already far too much.

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The solution to climate change is not using less energy. That would doom us as a species.

The solution is to take that energy without impacting the environment too much. Zero foot print, not zero movement.

> That would doom us as a species.

Doubtful; it would slow down / reverse the economy and probably cause population decline (which would be horrible because it would be through famine and the like), but I don't see how we'd end up gone.

Time is not on our side. Cosmical accidents, our own idiocy or even exhaustion of natural resources could wipe us out.

I believe we have a very small window of opportunity to become a multi planetary species, which would greatly reduce our current "all eggs in one basket" situation.

But fast technological progress is the only way to get there.

We don't know how to replace fossil fuels. Even if we started building tons of nuclear plants and other sources of clean energy, we'd have to reduce our energy use to efficiently mitigate climate change.

We need to act on both fronts: become more sober AND produce more clean energy.

If you’re heading, at speed, for a concrete wall that has an opening that might just be large enough to go through, you may opt for working on precision of steering, but the prudent also will decelerate until they’re through that opening.

Only fools would floor the acceleration pedal.

The thing is, if we miss that opening it doesn’t matter how fast we’re going, that wall will forever limit our species.

So if accelerating increases our chance of going through the opening, I say go for it.

The only way out may be to leverage technology such as carbon capture where advanced engineering skills and companies will be required.

It makes sense to floor that pedal if the opening is slowly closing.

Actually, Boom is planning to be carbon neutral by having their planes burn only fuel made from extracted CO2.

That doesn't make it carbon-neutral. That's like saying that if I have a baby and kill someone, I'm neutral in my effect on the population. It doesn't work that way...

(Also, you don't make fuel from CO2.)

This is the commonly accepted definition of carbon neutral.

>commonly accepted

No, it's a marketing slang. It's like saing E-mobiles are CN just because they are E.

>That's like saying that if I have a baby and kill someone

But that IS actually Carbon neutral.

EDIT: But just if you compose the dead body correctly otherwise methane...even worse

That's a really weird claim to me. Is your objection that the plane isn't carbon-neutral because it still has carbon emissions, and the claimed "neutrality" isn't an inherent aspect of the plane but rather a choice by the company to offset the emissions elsewhere?

What, in your opinion, is carbon-neutral?

Is burning wood from a sustainably-managed forest carbon-neutral in your eyes?

If you add and subtract one person from the population, your effect on the population is neutral.

You're also a murderer, of course. I don't see the "you're a murderer" equivalent in a conversation about carbon dioxide.

The point is that the two actions don't offset each other when evaluating each one of them.

The point is that birth and murder do not offset each other while removing CO2 from the atmosphere and then returning it does.

This is not hard to understand, unless you're motivated to misunderstand it for some reason.

Not, the removal and the addition don't offset each other - in the sense that someone _else_ emitting some CO2 and you planting a tree don't offset each other. The contribution to CO2 sums up to zero (or not exactly zero but nevermind) - but the _actions_ don't offset each other.

Weird / false analogy; CO2 is a molecule and has no (moral) value.

It's more like taking water from the ground, drinking it, and sweating / pissing it out again.

But I too don't see how they can make fuel out of CO2, they're probably doing something with carbon neutrality, planting trees or something (or more likely: giving some money to one of many shady companies that claim to plant trees. You know, a bit like plastic recycling)

There are some companies attempting make petroleum from air:

https://www.nationalgeographic.co.uk/environment-and-conserv...

The key word is "attempting". That's great, and we should encourage such efforts. But it's premature to base industrial projects on this.

First, do we have any reason to believe this "plan" is anything else than a noncommittal greenwashing statement? What will prevent the next CEO from silently dropping it to reduce costs?

Second, we don't really know how to make carbon neutral fuel. There are all sorts of ecological issues with existing biofuels. Other methods have very low yields. And in any case, we can't make enough clean fuels, so what we really don't need is yet another very wasteful way of using them.

Aerospace engines typically cannot run on biofuels. Boom re-engineered their engines so that they can.

and the fuel used to extract those CO2? That's the worst empty promise I've seen.

Sure Teslas don't emit CO2, but electricity generation does, and until electricity generation is carbon neutral, all "we're carbon neutral because we used electricity to create our fuel" is patent bs.

> it's going to end the world as we know it in a matter of decades

You’re not helping your cause by making exaggerated claims unsupported by science or reason.

I invite you to read up on climate change. All credible sources point to hundreds of millions of displaced people, large swathes of land rendered inhabitable, etc. To me that's ending the world as we know it. And it's not me saying it, it's the best experts on the topic.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effects_of_climate_change#On_h...

The climate has been changing for thousands of years, people used to live on the bottom of the North Sea. You would be able to walk from mainland Europe to the UK.

The best experts basically all rely on subsidies for their livelyhood.

Furthermore, we can only measure and calculate properly for a couple of decades.

And finally, don't you see the biblical theme of your message?

> The climate has been changing for thousands of years, people used to live on the bottom of the North Sea. You would be able to walk from mainland Europe to the UK.

In the winter, my house was cold. In the summer, it became hot. The next winter, it got cold again. Now my house is on fire. But it's fine, because it's just becoming hot again. The temperature of my house is always changing, you see.

> The best experts basically all rely on subsidies for their livelyhood.

What's a good neutral source you'd recommend, then?

> Furthermore, we can only measure and calculate properly for a couple of decades.

Says who? And measure and calculate what?

> And finally, don't you see the biblical theme of your message?

what

>In the winter, my house was cold. In the summer, it became hot. The next winter, it got cold again. Now my house is on fire. But it's fine, because it's just becoming hot again. The temperature of my house is always changing, you see.

Ad absurdum. And I am not saying it goes up & down, I am saying it has been going up for thousands and thousands of years already.

> What's a good neutral source you'd recommend, then?

I would recommend to avoid polarization and listen to both sides of the spectrum.

> Says who? And measure and calculate what?

I say so, I have studied computer science, did plenty of math, then 'numerical math' where you discover how hard it actually is to do precision calculation with these damn computers. You might be surprised. Then I worked with a bunch of scientist who developed physics models and experienced first hand how much they struggled to get anything right.

> what

End-of-times. The (grand) deluge. Messiases who predict the end-of-times and offer the solution to it?

Well if the migration of a hundred million people is the “end of the world as you know it”, then it has happened probably a good 5 times in the last century alone. Look at how drastically China has changed since the 70s and that’s the migration of several hundred million alone.

It sounds like the world will end for you a couple of times in your lifetime regardless of climate change because your bar for the end of the world is so low.

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