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Comment by version_five | Hacker News Reader

Cynically, I expect a continued growth in climate bureaucracy, where various office jobs get set up in the name of tackling climate change, but for the most part are just doing the usual stuff you'd do in a bureaucracy.

It would be nice (despite the irony of suggesting a bureaucratic task) to see some analysis or thoughts about what jobs have the biggest real impact.

For example, I wonder how many people are looking at becoming farmers or builders or other sustainable trades, vs who wants to do software development or data science.

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Hot take: The most important jobs are building and installing renewables (drives out coal, natural gas, and diesel/oil fuels), electrifying transportation (drives out petroleum), lab grown proteins and protein replacements (drives out emissions from factory farming emissions), and air source carbon extraction (paying back the credit card of CO2 we spent industrializing as a species).

You can add battery research to your list.

I always wonder if it's worth it for me (30yo) to learn a new trade, like the physics to advance battery research, when I now know a ton about computers and could rather be a dev or sysadmin for a company doing battery research. Probably I need to make that decision soon if I want to make it ever.

I think battery research is more chemistry than physics, but of course there's overlap.

See, that's my current level of expertise in the field!

other hot take: soil restoration, reforesting and ocean deacidification. We need to reduce carbon emission, but also restore natural carbon sequestration processes in a way that supports ecology.

Have to start sucking the CO2 we've already overloaded the atmosphere and oceans with if those efforts are to provide meaningful value. Otherwise, you're dressing wounds on a the victim who is bleeding out from an artery.

nature itself sucks CO2 out of the atmosphere, primarily through soil, plants and the ocean. The ocean is a CO2 buffer (ie, just stores CO2 rather than consuming it) but soil and plants actively consume CO2.

I do agree that we also need some kind of technological carbon sequestration. I'm skeptical of the "pump it underground" approach and think that things like CO2-negative building materials and processes would be a way to couple CO2 extraction and economic incentive.

Lots to unpack here. First, consider the delta in PPM between present day and pre-industrialization [1]. Next, consider that the ocean has acted as a carbon sink [2] (you mention this), but to great detriment to its chemical composition (more CO2 = increased acidity). We should absolutely not rely on it further as a carbon sink if we expect to use the ocean for aquaculture and to sustain life. Finally, soil, plants, and trees are in no way able to absorb CO2 at the rate necessary to mitigate climate change. This leaves air source extraction as a critical need. I'm partial to Climeworks [3], but any technology that can sequester CO2 underground in a stable form will do.

[1] https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/...

[2] https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/03/srccs_chapte...

[3] https://climeworks.com/

I specifically wrote that we need further work on ocean deacification, because of all those things you've mentioned.

It's not an either/or proposition: we need to do all of these things:

- restore the ecosystem's ability to consume CO2

- decrease our production of CO2

- develop technology to artificially sequester and consume CO2

Alongside other, non-CO2 related things like restoring biodiversity and ecosystems (where possible, mass extinction is still a thing), reducing our chemical output and destruction of nature etc.

How about nuclear energy? Germany's decision to do without a few years back was overreaction to Fukushima. Renewables plus batteries great, nuclear is a good base and fallback.

Will never be cost competitive. Enough sunlight ("fusion at a distance") hits the Earth in 30 minutes to power humanity for a year. Batteries, solar, and wind will get cheaper while nuclear still can't be built cost effectively (if even at all, considering cost overruns and construction disfunction). HVDC transmission can be laid on ocean floors and buried underground to avoid natural disasters and NIMBY, you can push ~1-1.5GW over a pair of 5" HVDC conductors.

Grid operators will balance variable supply with variable demand, and storage will grow as battery costs come down as manufacturing for battery cells scales up to meet EV demands.

you really think it'll be cheaper to lay power cables under the atlantic ocean than build some nuclear plants to power the American continent during the night?

No, I think it'll be cheaper to use HVDC transmission and interconnects to network the largest electrical systems in the US [1] so that you can shift power across the continent. No need to run cables to Asia, Africa, or Europe. We already import clean hydro from Canada to parts of the US (specifically between Ontario and New York state). Also, as I mentioned, I expect the cost of battery storage to come down, to where it combined with renewables at ~1 cent/kwh is still cheaper than fossil fuels even assuming long duration discharge (8-10 hours).

I can call Tesla today and have a Megapack installed in a few months. Same for solar and wind utility scale installs. If I break ground on a nuclear reactor today, it will be at least a decade before you see the first kilowatt generated. Georgia's Vogtle units 3 and 4 nuclear generators are six years behind schedule and costs have ballooned to almost $10 billion [2]. $10B buys a lot of renewables and batteries.

[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/f4/NE...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vogtle_Electric_Generating_Pla...

Sorry, when I said "the American continent" I meant, like, the entire continent, where a billion people live and night time is all at the same time (so no solar). You're saying the solution is just batteries? Why did you mention power cables on the ocean floor?

> Why did you mention power cables on the ocean floor?

"you really think it'll be cheaper to lay power cables under the atlantic ocean" -- TremendousJudge

Those are definately the most important technologies, but how are those going to get done without lawyers, and other boring not-saving-the-world-directly jobs, jobs that could generally be called "bureaucracy" if you wanted to make them seem bad for some reason.

As long as these young people vote out the climate change deniers, and society get serious about not rewarding people who generate externalities there will be jobs aplenty, that will be taken by people who just want the money. If they don't then it won't matter what they do.

You're right, and I was remiss in not including this, and yet it is most important:

Support political candidates and run for office in order to put those who understand the science behind and believe in climate change and who will commit to policy to contribute towards solutions (and tilt the scales away from fossil fuels). Otherwise everyone working towards the cause is swimming upstream.

> As long as these young people vote out the climate change deniers

The gigantic problem is that we can’t. Old people have by far the most voting power.

And in the US those seem to be pretty securely glued to their TVs running Fox News (I know my american relatives were).

There's definately some skullduggery when it comes to restricing democracy, but it's still the most straightforward and achievable avenue, and it sits upstream of everything else.

Imagine that one of the many nuclear zealots on HN invents a nuclear plant that is cheaper than fossil fuels, but only if you include the cost of carbon externalities? They wouldn't be able to build a business on that without societal support.

SPOILER: existing nuclear plants are already cheaper than fossil fuels with reasonable carbon fees [1]. Why haven't they been rolled out more? Because carbon fees have been fought by fossil fuel interests who spend a lot of money convincing young people that it was all the treehuggers fault.

1. https://www.oecd-nea.org/jcms/pl_14674/carbon-pricing-power-...

Hot take: The most important job is soldiers going to polluting countries and beating the shit out of them until they fall in line. As long as compliance is optional it wont matter how green you personally are.

...air and point source carbon extraction and sequestration. A friend is dating a fellow who has just accepted a job at Shell Oil in carbon storage

https://www.shell.com/energy-and-innovation/carbon-capture-a...

https://www.worldoil.com/news/2021/7/13/shell-sees-a-profita...

Carbon capture is just marketing for oil companies; it doesn't make sense energetically. And just looking at the numbers provided in their marketing page, it's clear that it's absolutely useless. In 2018 Shell extracted more than 4 million barrels of oil a day [0] -- with 430kg of CO2 per barrel [1], that's 1.591 billion (with a B, a thousand million) kg of CO2 extracted from the ground per day.

Meanwhile, on that page that you are quoting, all of those projects are on the ballpark of a million tons (a billion kg) per year. With luck, all of those projects put together (by the most ""climate responsible"" oil company nonetheless), each year would cover 15 days of Shell's carbon extraction. And that's without taking into account the fact that these projects have emissions of their own, which are definitely not taken into account for these totals.

Carbon sequestration is an interesting effort for sure, but the only use it has is give oil companies excuses for their existence.

[0] http://priceofoil.org/2019/05/20/shell-emissions-still-going... [1] https://www.epa.gov/energy/greenhouse-gases-equivalencies-ca...

I mostly agree with this assessment although I think it's still good for such efforts to continue. I wouldn't say carbon sequestration ventures only use is marketing (it's definitely the largest use and definitely the primary disingenuous monetary driver though).

There are groups that assume fossil fuels will still continue in some capacity regardless for some time, so if technology can be developed (without generating vast amounts of emissions in the process) to reduce undesired side effects of fossil fuels continued use, it's worth exploring. It may also become useful on the global stage where certain states don't seem to care at all about developing clean energy (e.g. China). If you do develop an effective cheap way to sequester carbon emissions for fossil fuels, you have a much better chance at persuading China to use and adopt it than telling them to shutdown all their coal fire power plants.

While I agree with the fact that China has a lot of coal power plants, afaik they are the ones investing the most into new nuclear tech. And also it's not like their emissions happen on a vacuum; first the world outsources all of their factories to China, and then they complain that they pollute a lot, as though the demand for consumer goods was China's fault.

For a practical example, the government of the UK likes to claim that they are on track to be "zero emissions"[0] -- great effort on their part. However, here all the imported manufactured products that definitely are not "zero emissions" aren't counted. All these emissions were exported to China, and then they have the gall to complain that China's emissions are too high.

[0] https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-uk-is-now-halfway-to-me...

https://www.carboncommentary.com/blog/2021/7/30/the-struggle...

Carbon sequestration is probably going to be important, but if it in any way enables more fossil fuels to be burnt, then it's probably a net negative. We need it to take stuff back out of the atmosphere, not extract and then store yet more fossil Carbon.

> and point source carbon extraction and sequestration.

CCS at the extraction point is just propaganda to keep extracting more CO2. This is not a solution it's just an excuse to keep pumping CO2 out of the ground and into the air. The end result of CCS is just more emissions. Both because they don't capture every CO2 released during extraction and because they can't address the usage of the extracted material that will release more CO2.

We know what the solution is: renewables + storage and/or nuclear.

The solution is not to get more CO2 out of the ground.

I'm also cynical because a bunch of "top minds" in my graduating high school class have gone on to work at think-tanks and other climate policy NGO's. As far as I can tell, they haven't made much tangible progress beyond mere punditry. The few kids that went off to become electricians have probably done more to reduce carbon emissions by installing home solar panels than any of the climate advocates.

Policy is important though. For instance, designing an HOA policy or local law allowing for solar panels for instance is way more important than the actual installation, drawing from my personal experience.

I don't deny that policy is important, especially on a local level, but these folks are off in Northern Virginia / D.C. doing lord-knows-what. I also can't help but think they are preaching about things we already know need to be done. Almost like how the Susan G. Komen foundation spends so much more on breast cancer awareness than actual research.

Indeed. A lot of companies are talking about environmentalism and sustainability, but a lot of that is just people figuring out how to market what they already do.

I'd say humans, we're still in the assessment phase, slowly coming right out of denial. Data science would be very useful. A recent economist article shows how polluters skirt EPA rules for instance.

Is there any career overlap between software engineering / data science and fighting climate change? Was hoping the article would touch on it.

Given that literally everything is software, probably yes.

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