Comment by betwixthewires | Hacker News Reader

Comment by betwixthewires | Hacker News Reader

All that gas and oil was once a massive biological solar panel, covering much of the ocean, absorbing sunlight, storing it, reproducing, growing only to get subducted and stored for us, like a battery. For a billion years.

When I hear people talk about building solar panels to convert water and CO2 into methane gas for its explosive energy potential to meet our needs, mining pits in the ground all over the world, razing landscapes to steal their sunlight, as if they're going to ever come close to the methane that's already there, and that without doing more environmental damage than our current state of affairs comes close to, I wonder how delusional or dishonest you have to be to pitch an investor. And I'm fearful of the mentality and the utter destruction of the environment this absurdity will lead us to. They would have us pave the earth to save it.

If you're worried about climate change, the only way stop it is to reduce the amount of energy consumed, the amount of plastic produced, the amount of ammonia made through the Haber Bosch process. This necessarily means killing, at a minimum, three quarters of the world's human population, along with the livestock that are alive currently that will feed them. And then you've got to get past the unbelievably massive spike in carbon dioxide as all these carcasses decay, carbon dioxide that was once locked up in oil as well, since all these living organisms are made possible only by way of the fertilizer they were fed that was made from oil.

It's not pretty, but that's the only way to do it. Do you think we should do it?

The problem is more nuanced than that and just throwing out "Population control." is completely meaningless.

You could cull three billion people of the lowest emitters and it would have as much of an effect as halving the CO2 emissions of the top 1% of emitters.[1] And considering that to avoid the worst of the climate crisis we need action immediately or as close to it as possible, waiting for people to die away will not help us. If the entire planet stopped having babies today we would wait 65 years to get to half the current population, and half the emissions.

At best, and I would argue even that is a stretch, population control is one small part of a long term strategy. But it is by no means a solution, so throwing it out there every time people talk about sustainability does nothing but derail the conversation.

What we really need is to to make consumption as sustainable as possible and reduce it where possible, especially for the top consumers. That is not only more feasible in the short term, it is probably more ethical as well.

(Pasted this comment from [2])

[1] https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/carbon-emissions-ric...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29545504

It's not feasible, because our population is only currently possible due to the availability of energy. We can't have global supply chains, food and medicine moving across the world, much less being produced, without oil and gas. You simply don't reduce energy consumption beyond making TV illegal without starving more than half of the people alive today.

It is by no means a solution, that's kind of my point. There is no solution. We are made of the stuff that is causing this. Something like 68% of the bioavailable nitrogen in your body was produced via the Haber Bosch process. Most of the carbon in your body was produced as a result of fossil fuel extraction.

I didn't use the phrase "population control" because it's disingenuous. What I'm talking about is culling. No matter how you dice it, reducing energy availability, paving vast parts of the world to make up for what little energy we truly need, you're talking about killing billions of people and destroying a significant portion of the living surface of the earth. These are not options. And even if they were, the environmental destruction would be worse, it wouldn't even solve anything.

It doesn't derail the conversation, it is the conversation. I'm not arguing for population control, I think the idea is disgusting. I'm pointing out simply that all these pretty ideas people keep talking about, when you look at the magnitude of the problem, they're not viable solutions. If they're not viable then a conversation talking about them should be derailed because it isn't the conversation we should be having.

Ecofascism is a pretty unimaginative, lazy and downright illogical solution to the complicated problem of climate change. It's also morally and scientifically wrong.

I wholeheartedly agree. What's your point?

I think solar panels are a bit more efficient at converting sunlight > electricity than the chemical process of sunlight > photosynthesis > decomposition > burning fossil fuel. Take the ICE that only coverts something like 20% of fuel into motion, the rest is lost to heat. The electric motor is far more efficient.

You'd need to update your reasoning to take into account all the efficiencies lost in the fossil fuel creation and consumption in order to generate electricity.

No I don't, and I'll tell you why.

The amount of energy hitting the surface of the earth is constant, assuming that the luminosity of the sun is constant. Photosynthesis as cyanobacteria/chloroplasts/chlorella perform it might be less efficient than a modern solar panel at converting the entirety of the spectrum to energy, but they did it and produced this fuel for hundreds of millions of years. Even if you get 10 times the efficiency gains on them, you reduce the amount of time it takes to produce the same energy to what, tens of thousands of years, at the same surface area as that of the oceans?

Now let's say the electricity generated is used in a way that is an order of magnitude more efficient than using fossil fuels. That takes us down to 1000-9000 years, let's say best case scenario 1000, a surface area the size of the ocean paved, to achieve the energy we have used in 100 years, and that doesn't account for the fact that we need the energy output we have now, not the output we had in 1920 which was orders of magnitude less. Constant output at current levels I would expect we would've used all that oil in under 50 years, but let's ignore that too.

Now, let's assume that that oil were to last us another hundred years at projected energy consumption rates, peak oil and all that. You'd need to pave an area of the earth, in my very rough sketch, the size of all the oceans, and process the entire earths crust for minerals for it, and keep it like this for 1000 years, to get enough energy to last humans 200 years.

I'm probably wrong about a lot of these numbers. Let's say I'm off (in your favor) by a whopping order of magnitude. You'd still have to pave an area the size of half the earths oceans to get 200 years worth of energy in 200 years. Exactly how much environmental damage do you think such a project would cause? Would you say that such a project would be more or less destructive than current climate change projections?

It's really pretty obvious, there are only 2 paths forward: get humans into space, where we can build solar panels to catch some of the unbelievably vast majority of solar energy that is not required by life on earth, out of material not currently underneath the ground life lives on, and use the lucky accident of these fuels to do it now before they run out, or take humanity down a few notches, kill three quarters of our population, somehow prevent the CO2 from our decomposition from entering the atmosphere, and start cooking with wood and cowdung again.

Or we can keep pretending that these pitches about carbon sequestration using solar and wind are actually viable and keep being frustrated that nothing is being done to stop it.

I follow your logic but the sun is going to be hitting you for 70+ years. Your body surface area is probably equivalent to my 400W solar panel. That's a few KWh per day for 70+ years. How much oil will your decomposing body produce? How much energy will the vegetation in the Sahara desert produce?

You misunderstand, my decomposing body will produce carbon dioxide.

The Sahara desert is a great idea, probably our best bet. And if we can source all the material needed to pave it with panels right from underneath it, all the better. But that's unlikely, and still, that's 2% of the earths surface. Not enough surface area to cover our energy needs, despite what anyone says. If we really have reached peak oil, that is, used half or more of the oil available to us, in 100 years, that took 75% of the earths surface a billion years to produce, paving the Sahara desert won't make a dent. Even using energy from the sun 100 times more efficiently, that's still 50 times less energy than we need, 2% of what's needed, and that doesn't take into account increasing energy needs worldwide.

>Let's say I'm off (in your favor) by a whopping order of magnitude.

No, let's say that you are off by three or four orders of magnitude. Because your first estimate really is that bad, and without it, your entire "argument" falls apart.

So draw me a picture then. Let's say I'm off by 3 or 4 orders of magnitude, photosynthesis is .001% efficient or whatever. Show me how you create enough energy, the equivalent of a billion years worth of solar energy shining down on three quarters of the surface of the earth, every 200 years. 2000 years. 200,000 years. Without unfathomable environmental destruction. Or how you reduce the energy consumption of 8 billion people to a point where it is manageable without killing most of them. Give me more than one sentence.

It's not photosynthesis that's .00001% efficient or whatever, it's the whole process, because it's also fuelling the entire lifetime of those organisms before they become fuel in the ground, and all those organisms that don't have just the right conditions for becoming fuel in the ground, and all the fuel in the ground that didn't stay there over those millions of years because it didn't have the right conditions.

And in any case, the problem we need to solve is not at all replicating the amount of energy stored by fuel in the ground. The problem we need to solve is generating the amount of energy we're actually using. And that has the advantage that we know that number quite precisely, instead of having to derive it based on ridiculously imprecise guesses.

And TFA makes a projection for required area using exactly this, and arrives at

> 300 TW of solar generation capacity, occupying about 5% of Earth’s land surface area, and split between roof top installations in cities and dedicated plants on nearby less developed land. For comparison, agriculture uses 18% of Earth’s land surface area, and largely uninhabited deserts are 33%.

And that completely ignores the additional power generation capacity of wind power.

Alright, so I'm off by how many orders of magnitude then? 4? Or 20? If I'm off by 3 or 4, whatever the reason, my previous comment applies, and the amount of energy you need is still off by orders of magnitude! So how many am I wrong by?

wind power takes up surface area too. In fact, wind is just solar energy. The amount of energy you can get on earth from any source besides nuclear, fossil fuels and geothermal is hard capped by the surface area of the earths apparent disk and the inverse square law and necessarily requires environmental destruction.

> So how many am I wrong by?

Doesn't matter at all because, as I pointed out, the whole approach is ridiculously wrong-headed. We know how much energy we actually need, and it has nothing to do with how much is in the ground and how it got there.

> wind power takes up surface area too.

However, that can even be the same surface area you've already put solar panels on.

> The amount of energy you can get on earth from any source besides nuclear, fossil fuels and geothermal is hard capped by the surface area of the earths apparent disk and the inverse square law

This is correct. But the cap is at about 26000 TW (see https://medium.com/earth-47/how-much-energy-does-the-earth-r...) and the amount we need is about 300 TW, so if we manage to capture only about 0.12% of the available energy, all our needs are already met.

> and necessarily requires environmental destruction.

Sure. But not even remotely close to the degree you're claiming.

300TW is 1.2% of 26000TW, not 0.12%.

Where do we get this 300TW number from? Does this include heating in winter, cooling in summer, fuel for moving goods and people in cars, trains, ships, airplanes, agriculture future energy consumption, and the energy needed to remove CO2 that has been created as per the proposal in the article at the top of this thread?

So the sun shone, for a billion years, to keep it simple, 26000 TW per year, and the photosynthesis on the surface of the ocean only saved what, projected oil reserves another 100 years, 60k TW at best? That puts photosyntheses of the ocean surface chloroplasts converted into oil at 0.0000001% efficiency. Either that or there's triple digits orders of magnitude more oil under the surface we don't know about. You believe that?

And suppose that is true. That would mean the amount of carbon coming from it is absolutely miniscule. Think of the number of tons of carbon dioxide that could've been in the atmosphere when the photosynthesis started, subtract out what would've been locked up to store this miniscule amount of energy, that's what you get, hardly anything. We know that's not true, so we can safely guess that the energy from photosynthesis that was stored was significantly more efficient than 0.0000001%, if it weren't you wouldn't have a climate crisis, which means humans use much more than 300TW. And that's just currently.

Wherever you're getting these consumption numbers from, they're just simply not possible. The carbon that has been produced in the last 100 years outweighs the amount that would be released from oil during that time if it were constant 300TW yearly, let alone with the comparatively small amount 100 years ago.

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