I find it's useful to listen to those you have strong ethical disagreements with, in order to challenge your own ego and ideas.
750 karma · joined March 22, 2019
We are. The company I work at aims to eliminate ~60% of global emissions ourselves and provide the economic basis for the other 40%.
The only major section of global emissions that doesn't seem to have an obvious full solution is concrete production, which I'm sure we can offset with sequestration, and reduce with wood-based CLT construction.
Every other major component of emissions has a solution that is in active development right now, or already available and in the process of adoption. I think there's plenty of reason to be optimistic.
This is an issue, but increased atmospheric carbon and the latitude land distribution of the Earth probably means desertification will be net-negative for at least a while. (I don't have a source for this, but I recall reading that we have more trees today than ever in history?) Keep in mind, carbon is what plants eat.
> When every summer, heatwaves take a few of your neighbours you start reconsidering how nice your country is.
This is also a good point, but once again, there are also people who die from cold. I've been living in Toronto for the last year, and there are many people who die of cold in the winter every year, mainly the poor and elderly. It's not clear that global warming is net-negative at the moment for extreme temperature related deaths.
> we're going to have more than a 2°C increase in mean temperature by the end of the century, and maybe 4°C
I don't agree with this. This might be true if population+QoL growth continues and our emissions per capita stay at today's levels, but that won't happen. Like I said, we are going to fix CC by mid-century, and mean temp increase above pre-industrial levels will be less than 1.5°C by 2100 - not 4°C above today's levels.
> Because that's where they arrive
This is a different type of migration. Nobody is migrating internationally because their country is uninhabitable due to climate change, because there are no such countries today.
> About (a), you should probably read this...
Thank you, I'm aware of what's necessary to accomplish this. We are well on our way. If it wasn't for funding and regulatory limitations, I'm pretty sure we could be net-zero by 2028 just based on the technologies we have in development today.
That one was not well-reasoned or patient, but other than that, I've found almost all of Joe's podcasts to be very good. He's definitely one of the greatest interviewers on the planet right now.
Actually, I'm pretty sure places like Greenland, Canada, Russia etc. will be mostly positively affected. I'm mostly concerned about the changes to the ocean when it comes to affecting all humans. The unfortunate reality is that unchecked global warming will probably lower food prices and increase standards of living in many places that are already rich, while causing destruction in places that are already relatively poor.
> alarm bells ringing about the climate...
The third option you left out is that the alarm is overinflated. With an issue as controversial as climate change, you can be almost certain that both the alarmists and skeptics are both wrong, and the truth is probably somewhere in the middle.
Also, I really don't think the end of the world is a realistic result of climate change. If you really want something to worry about, there are always meteors, gamma rays and the potential for nuclear war, superbugs, or biological WOMD.
Almost all countries have ample space that will still be habitable for their entire population in 2100, even if climate change is left unchecked.
Those that don't represent a small portion of the global population, certainly less than 500 million people. I grew up in Botswana, and I know that "all of central Africa is uninhabitable" is not a likely outcome anytime soon. Most of Africa is actually really good land to live in, and will continue to be fairly good through the century.
In any case, Italy does not need to "park 10 million people in camps". Italy is a tiny country in terms of land area, so why would they need to take so many? Russia and Canada alone could easily fit a few billion immigrants each if global warming is really severe in a few centuries.
The notion that the only solution to climate change is to move everybody into already crowded places doesn't seem to have a base. We can solve the migration problem with or without moving people into Europe.
Anyways, my core point here is (a) we won't need to deal with this migration anyways, because we will solve climate change way before it becomes necessary, and (b) even if we didn't lower our emissions, I'm confident we can solve the migration problem without millions of deaths.
> fleeing their then uninhabitable countries ... which will lead to millions of death
I'm not sure if this is true, actually. What is true is that millions of people every year die due to air pollution, but this isn't climate change, it's just our present pollution.
There's like ~50 million deaths per year if I recall correctly, and I'd be very surprised if more than 0.1% of that is caused by climate change. At least 5% of it is due to pollution, though, and I think probably more like 10%+
Web part is simple, as there are countless ways you can get malicious code delivered from what you think is the correct, safe, web server.
Same concept applies to app store / desktop program updates, but with a slightly slower and more difficult attack prospect.
Anyways, Telegram does seem to have the best encryption of any major service, and it's what we use at my company for almost all internal communications.
Do you have any scientific evidence showing a net global increase in extreme weather events in the last several decades?
But even a smaller percentage deals with significant issues due to climate change, today. The changes thus far have been excessively inflated, and may be net-positive so far.
You're right about the worst case scenario, GHG emissions could in theory lead to Earth becoming like Venus or somewhere in between the two where the atmosphere is bad enough to cause the end of humanity. But this is extremely unlikely and might not even be possible with the sum of our economically accessible fossil fuel reserves.
In reality, it seems there is still a threat of huge increase in poverty due to some WW3 type event, or a superbug global plague, or something like that.
I think it's unfair to weigh climate change above poverty at the moment, even for the overall prosperity of the human race.
In fact, I think climate change will end up being much worse for the rest of life on Earth than humanity. We have the advantage of being able to plan and react in advance, so we will probably be fine for a long time to come, but most plants and animals might go extinct.
Yeah, this is probably best practice for people in regions that are projected to be left mostly uninhabitable / with severe barriers to life. This won't really be too much of a problem even if climate change is left unchecked, as Bjørn Lomborg says[1], it will only cost us 2-4% of GDP by end of century.
> Civilizational collapse is a slow process. I doubt the people of the later stages of the Roman empire felt their society collapsed.
I'd like to point out an important note: the guy said civilization would collapse, not a civilization. I'm not sure if you mean the same thing he does, but civilization itself has never, in history, collapsed, even during the plague and fall of the roman empire. We've been pretty much A-okay on a global level since 12,000 years ago.
You're definitely right about individual states, and it is almost certainly true that several countries may end up collapsing due to climate disruption, but not the big ones and probably no time soon.
Bjørn Lomborg says[1] by the end of the century, climate change left unchecked will only lower the global GDP by a 2-4 percentage points of what it would have otherwise grown to, which is going to be 300-1000% higher than today. So basically, best case scenario 980% GDP growth, worst case 288% GDP growth.
This shows climate change is a problem, but it's too slow to cause a global catastrophe by 2100.
Even better news, I'm very confident it will not be left unchecked, in fact I think we can get to net-zero emissions by 2040 or so.
Who are we to claim that climate change is the most pressing issue facing humanity, when much of humanity faces unrelated life threatening issues?
I don't believe most would agree here. There are a lot of problems humanity faces, and humanity is a lot of different people. Those still living in extreme poverty today probably don't care about our worries of climate disruption.
> Arguably, working on anything that doesn't help there is not just wasted effort, but actively harmful.
Why is this?
> Direct hydrogen-fueled aircraft are feasible, and more efficient than with kerosine, but the design cycle is too long.
This is really interesting but doesn't strike me as true based on my background. Do you have anything I could read regarding? I would be very interested
> Without massive progress in the next decade, civilization will probably collapse by 2035.
This I really don't agree with or understand.
I'm very worried about emissions, but I don't see why civilization would collapse any time soon, if at all. 2035 is very soon.
There are a lot of promising mostly mix-able design choices in MSRs that have become apparent in the last few decades, so we are never fully committed to a particular set.
My personal philosophy about technological progress is based heavily on the idea that material science is the principle barrier to what we can accomplish. That's why humanity's progress is recounted in "ages" named by material.
So, I think solar panels can get maybe 2-10x more economical, whereas other options like new hydrocarbon sources, fission, and fusion can probably all get at least 10x more economical than the maximum possible with solar, purely due to the physical limitations of the technology.
Become a specialist, or drive funding/regulatory pushes towards these new hardware technologies. Figure out what you see as the barriers to their commercialization, then figure out what component of that problem you'd love to work on, and become an expert in that.
My biased answer:
If you're in the position to spend a lot of time learning and experimenting with new stuff (e.g. a highschool or uni student), I'd recommend becoming an expert somewhere along the liquid fueled fission reactor stack. Chem eng, nuclear eng, rare earth extraction, uranium extraction, working with molten salts, working with liquid metals, anything like that.
If all goes well, I'll be needing people in just about every specialization there.
I think we will probably get fission to like 4/5 of the world energy supply and 95% of electricity within our lifetimes.
Solar panels are a great thing to have on your house if you can afford them and want the security in the case of some kind of grid problem. They're also good if you need energy in the middle of nowhere. We want to put fission reactors in most remote communities, even small ones, but if small enough groups of people are going out into uninhabited places it doesn't make sense, so solar panels are better.
I don't really see any utility in wind energy at all, other than in areas where solar doesn't make sense.
Batteries are a really environmentally bad idea for non-transport/device energy supply, because of density. So I think it's best we avoid intermittent sources for most of the grid power.
Breeders however (whether you go with Th-U or U-Pu fuel) both should be able to take us to at least another 10,000 present-equivalent years on a wholly nuclear powered economy.
You're also right to suspect fertilizer, I feel the same way. I've seen some of the phosphate mines around the world and it's kind of horrifying, so I'm hoping asteroid mining can fix our metal extraction problem.
I heard C-Type asteroids have plenty of phosphorus, but I'm definitely not an expert on asteroid mining. If they do, though, it will likely be enough to sustain us for quadrillions of human-years (humans * years) because the asteroid belt is just so damn massive compared to the Earth's crust.
· Waste management is easier since our waste will be ~5x less mass per kg fuel (~500x less mass per kWh energy), and also returns to natural radioactivity much faster (one or two centuries). We actually plan to sell most of the fission products as useful materials.
· As of now, our reactors are planned to be mostly stainless steel. Most of the lifetime mass-throughput of current GI-GIII fission plants is concrete and steel, of which we have basically none of the concrete and much less steel because no pressure vessel. So, decommissioning is much easier and probably will be internally profitable.
You're right about the last part, because solar will almost definitely get at least 2x cheaper than it is today, and within not more than a few decades.
My perception is biased (ofc), but in my view it's actually very likely that we will reach or surpass our goal, though, so I personally wouldn't bet on renewables.
Also, w.r.t. population, the way I see it our population is growing very quickly whether we like it or not (look at Africa). I think there's a good opportunity for us to support a population much larger than we have right now with improved sustainable energy tech.
(Solar panels are also getting cheaper, and will probably run around $0.02/kWh in the near future if iteration continues, and are probably capable of supporting us up to 20 billion people as well)
Solar cell record efficiency is 46%, that only gives room for 1.12 doublings theoretically, and thermodynamics is nasty in the real world so we probably cannot even get past 1 doubling from here.
Also, gold is not inherently valuable. It will become a regular common metal once we shift extraction to the asteroid belt.
The truth is there really isn't much with "inherent" value out there, with the notable exception of potential energy.