Will technology save us from climate change?
media.mit.eduI have no doubt that if humanity wanted to, it could sequester all the carbon necessary to reverse climate change, and more. The question isn't really whether humanity is capable of doing it (we are), but rather whether we will do it.
In particular, for those who have the majority of "ability" to make change, would it be easier for them to take more and more clean resources in a zero-sum battle or have a short to medium term hit in allying themselves with the rest of the world to fix climate change in the long term?
If COVID has shown us anything, the answer to the last question is unequivocally no. COVID has been a very obvious salient problem and most nations failed the test. If we can't beat COVID, we will not beat climate change. No technology can change human nature.
> I have no doubt that if humanity wanted to, it could sequester all the carbon necessary to reverse climate change
While this solution is appealing, it always leads to more questions than answers. Let's assume the How is solved. Where do you store it? Can it scale and if yes with which scenario? - Infinite growth? No way, it's physically impossible. - With a reduction? Maybe, but what will be the cost then? Will it be cost effective?
I think at that point we are back at the OP question.
If only there were existing storage mechanisms that existed in remote areas like forests or swamps. We could probably protect those areas, maybe even put new storage devices in. Ideally, of course, they'd run off a renewable source of energy like solar and be self-cooling. Of course, we wouldn't want the upfront cost to be prohibitive, so something self-replicating would be great. And to diagnose the health of these systems, maybe something humans have had centuries of experience managing? It'd be even cooler if we could locate a bunch of them dispersed throughout the ocean too.
Plants. The answer is, and always has been, to stop emitting additional carbon from fossil fuels, restoring ecosystems, and letting plants and algae and natural carbon sequestration mechanisms do their thing. It also feels pretty inarguable that making that change would be possible if literally everyone on Earth went "yeah, let's do that."
And of course the counterpoint is, plants don't sequester carbon, they only buffer it. Plants are carbon-netural - they release what they stored as they decompose. Being self-replicating and something we have lots of experience with are good features, but to turn this into a carbon sequestration mechanism we need to have a program of continuously cutting these plants down and storing them in places the air can't reach.
Those mechanisms do already exist--marine snow, compacted biomass in wetlands, heck, even things like whale falls store carbon for enormously long periods of time.
The buffer duration/cycle period matters significantly. I agree, turning every bit of carbon released into sticks n wildfire zones won't solve the problem, but in the current situation a) buffering will make a difference in the short term, and b) there are natural mechanisms that do sequester carbon on a functionally permanent basis and keeping those functioning or adding to their capacity through ecological restoration is extremely important and doesn't require new technology.
We are burning the equivalent carbon of millions and millions of years of plant growth, trapped in fossil. Our current available plant mass, even if we cover every square inch of the earth with vegetation, cannot absorb millions of years of carbon. As another poster has replied, plants also release that carbon back when they decompose, unless they are buried. The only answer to digging up millions of years of dead organic matter and burning it is to suck it back into the ground, or fire it into space, or anything else that actually removes it from being recycled in the biosphere.
There is only really one option to store it, underground.
Now you might ask if that’s in pure carbon, CO2, or dead organisms but that is just an economic question. While multiple options exist picking one is far less difficult than funding it’s implementation.
>Where do you store it?
Someone creates some magical building material that is high in carbon, non-reactive (or at least doesn't leach carbon into the air), economically viable and is mostly recyclable.
Imagine something along the lines of synthetic high carbon asphalt or masonry products.
A lot of CO2 has been released.
10 Trillion metric tons / 7.8 billion people ~= 1,300 tons per person which is well beyond the amount of building materials used.
Yup, but the point is that with such magic building material, we could not only build buildings and facilities with it, we could just pile heaps of it above ground for the purpose of only sequestering carbon.
That's about 130 trees or 13 houses. Yes, that's well beyond the amount of building materials used, but not unimaginatively so.
How much pavement exists per-capita? I'm sure that would lower the multiplier a lot too.
In case anybody missed the subtlety here, I assume that throwaway0a5e is talking about wood and similar products such as bamboo.
> If COVID has shown us anything, the answer to the last question is unequivocally no. COVID has been a very obvious salient problem and most nations failed the test. If we can't beat COVID, we will not beat climate change. No technology can change human nature.
I think COVID actually teaches a different lesson. Our experience with COVID teaches that it has to be technology that addresses climate change, not political or sociological solutions. Lockdowns ultimately failed in even the most socially disciplined countries like Germany. But we got a vaccine developed in record time.
Similarly for climate change, solutions that require "everyone to cooperate and do their part" won't work. It just won't. Even if the USA and Europe went to zero emissions tomorrow, growing CO2 emissions in industrializing China, India, and Africa are going to keep increasing global CO2 emissions. It's rational for them. Bangladesh is going to be one of the hardest-hit countries from climate change--an estimated 30-50% hit to GDP by 2100. But investing in rapid growth and industrialization, even at the cost of climate, still makes sense for Bangladesh. One, because of game theory--Bangladesh cannot by itself avoid climate change, due to emissions by other countries. Two, because of math--a 30-50% hit to what Bangladesh's economy could be in 80 years with strong growth would still leave it better of on net than risking doing anything to compromise the 5-7% annual GDP growth it has now and stagnating for that time.
To mitigate climate change, the developed world needs moonshot technologies. We need to not only be investing in renewable energy--although that's necessary, going to zero emissions will still not be enough. We need to be investing massive amounts of money into carbon sequestration technology.
And to those who point out "China, Taiwan, South Korea, Australia, and New Zealand were able to suppress COVID through lockdowns", it's important to note they were able to nip it in the bud, before community spread had become established. This does speak to the effectiveness of a drastic lockdown, combined with travel restrictions, in eliminating COVID if there are only a small number of infections, and we should commend those countries for being able to do so. However, if you don't lock down very early, lockdowns don't seem to be able to control spread enough to eliminate the disease, only to somewhat reduce the infection rate, and even a successful suppression of COVID spread in a country will fail in the long term if travel restrictions are not extremely strict (see the EU).
In other words, suppression achieved through lockdowns is an unstable equilibrium. Only herd immunity, ideally achieved via vaccination, produces a stable equilibrium for suppression.
Similarly with global warming, while we may be able to temporarily reduce emissions, at significant economic cost, via political and sociological solutions without new technology, this reduction is an unstable equilibrium. The only permanent solution - the only stable equilibrium - is via technological means (cheap renewable energy and carbon sequestration).
> If we can't beat COVID, we will not beat climate change. No technology can change human nature.
Erm, looks like we are doing pretty well to beat COVID with vaccines developed in record timing.
500,000 dead in the US, largely due to failure to wear masks and observe distancing protocols, is a strange way to "beat" COVID.
There is very little evidence that the death rate in the US is "largely due to failure to wear masks." Mask wearing in different countries is all over the map. The US is actually on the higher end in terms of mask wearing: https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2020/07/08/face-off....
Meanwhile, countries like Denmark and Norway with very low rates of mask wearing have seen very low COVID death rates.
EDIT: More recent data from YouGov showing same pattern: https://yougov.co.uk/topics/international/articles-reports/2.... Mask-wearing rates in Denmark and Norway picked up in 2H 2020, but were still on the low side.
There are massive gaps between losing to COVID (which would’ve been 1-10% deaths depending on if they happened suddenly enough to overwhelm the healthcare system or not), versus what actually happened in any given nation (0.2% in Belgium to 0.00003% in Burundi, 0.155% in the USA), versus the best possible combination of decisions and actions in response to this virus (it being stopped in China before it ever spread outside Wuhan).
Same with climate change. Worst case is Venus, we’re heading for a few degrees Celsius change that persists for centuries, we could’ve prevented almost all of the problems we’re looking at now if we’d made the best choices even as late as the 60s and 70s.
and your point is? The fact that vaccines are here makes the COVID problem irrelevant a few years from now. That's called beating COVID.
And I think a valuable COVID lesson is: once a natural process is started (the virus spreading worldwide) we don't have much power to stop it. But we can successfully mitigate it by developing vaccines in record time and manufacturing them in large scales.
Similarly, for global warming it would be a waste of time and effort to try to stop the natural process (limit human activity to revert the temperature increase) and instead focus our innovation and resources into mitigation (carbon capture, green energy, fortifying coast lines...)
There are reaction time after which the problem becomes something different and harder to solve.
With COVID letting it become so widespread with not enough protection before the vaccines, means that more people got the disease, the virus got more opportunities to mutate, and new strains are coming out, some of which could be more fatal or maybe resistent to vaccines. Getting late may makes it harder to solve, if possible at all.
With global warming is worse. Is not just stopping emissions, but what we already emitted is already driving the change. And positive feedback is already being triggered, with less albedo because less ice in the north pole, methane emissions in northern places like Siberia and Canada, and each time more frequent/bigger forest fires. So to slow it down you don't just have to capture the equivalent of what we emit (100k barrels/day makes a lot of greenhouse gases, think in 0.5-1 ton of greenhouse gases per barrel, and you have coal and others to take into account too), but also the amount we already emitted, and what comes from positive feedback (that eventually could become orders above of what we emit).
And I'm talking about greenhouse gases, not heat in particular, you are not dealign directly with warming addressing the gases, so that is something that should be taken into account regarding mitigation.
Some nations stopped it. I live in Australia and aside from a handful of days long lockdowns life has basically been normal. China stopped it and they have heaps of people. The US failed spectacularly because it was being run by a bunch of anarcho capitalists
> Australia
It's fairly easy to prevent stuff from entering the country when you are an island. Singapore also had no problem in doing it. Notice some kind of pattern?
> China stopped it and they have heaps of people
Do you trust any data coming from China? Because North Korea also claimed they had zero death from COVID.
Also, it's fairly clear by now that there is some genetic component with COVID: there are less death in asian ethnic groups compared to others, so having less deaths in China/Japan/Korea is consistent in that regard anyway.
> The US failed spectacularly
Comparing to death rates across Europe, not that much different actually. Media brainwashing much?
Yes you are clearly the victim of media brainwashing.
The same anarcho capitalists running France, Spain, Italy, Germany, etc?
Well ... in a sense, the UK is worst hit and were slow to act because of their right wing governments. In Australia our right wing federal government mishandled things but the states were the ones who kept it under control. The rest of continental Europe has been nowhere near as bad as the US, you guys are a total shit show right now
France, Italy, and Spain are in the same ballpark as the US. The US is basically tied with Italy and Spain in deaths per capita. https://www.statista.com/statistics/1104709/coronavirus-deat...
Order that data by the final column (deaths in the last 7 days) descending. Spain and Italy were both hit relatively early, and many European countries are suffering second and third waves because of lockdown fatigue and libertarian propaganda on Facebook. But the US winter has been absolute mayhem and it was all driven by trump trying to get re elected by hook or by crook.
Not only that. The countries that are capable of rejecting the ideology of individualism, like China, have actually much better track record in beating it.
For the record, I am not advocating completely ditching liberalism, but we should understand that it became (in the form of neoliberalism) too ideological in the Western world. That prevents us seeing alternative social solutions that can be very effective in beating the pandemic.
(And I am writing this from Prague, Czechia. Strangely enough, our government managed to beat the 1st wave by doing lots of early restrictions, but then we were massively hit by 2nd wave in the reluctance to do restrictions again. This cannot be explained away by human nature, it was purely a matter of cultural perspective.)
Of course they are. People in the west couldn't even be arsed to wear a mask, the simplest thing one could do to at least show some social solidarity.
The kind of shit individualism has evolved into is ridiculous.
It’s not an evolution it’s engineering. This whole movement is a deliberate libertarian project.
> Not only that. The countries that are capable of rejecting the ideology of individualism, like China, have actually much better track record in beating it.
Oh we all know that data coming from China is super reliable, right? After all, they never lied about the Wuhan fatalities in the first place.
You assume the wealthy and powerful want to save everyone. I'm quite sure they don't. Just being upper class seems to turn most people into assholes who would rather let the poor die. "Why can't they make it, I did" is a common theme.
The wealthy and powerful will be fine even as millions die off in newly unlivable areas. That's the brutal reality.
> Just being upper class seems to turn most people into assholes who would rather let the poor die. "Why can't they make it, I did" is a common theme.
That's dumb upper class. Smart upper class realizes their wealth and lifestyle are entirely dependent on keeping the rest of the world working, and satisfied enough they don't try to tear everything apart.
There is a major part of this debate that keeps getting brushed under the carpet due to decades of fear-mongering. Nuclear energy.
It is a large scale solution that works today, not at some indeterminate point in the future. Yes there are problems, yes there are limitations, yes there are risks and yes it is expensive but many of these can be addressed by governments and through regulation.
A major part of reducing carbon emissions is to transition Asia and Africa away from coal and towards nuclear energy and not by the free market but by government supports. This can be supplemented by the plethora of technologies available today viz solar, wind, demand response etc.
What is of prime importance is that we limit carbon emissions today and keep doing so even as economies grow and energy consumption increases.
The cost and time scale of nuclear make it completely infeasible. Wind and solar are cheaper than just the thermal side of a nuclear power plant. IOW, if the nuclear part cost $0, it would still be cost-ineffective.
And nuclear plants take >20 years to build. That's too long.
And the batteries that solar/wind need are cheaper than HVDC power lines.
Of course tearing down existing nuclear is silly, but building new ones is a non-starter.
Please be careful with labelling wind and solar cheaper. They have zero fuel cost which is true however there are a slew of other costs - mostly balancing the grid and dealing with the uncertainty and unreliability of wind and solar - that are not paid for by the wind and solar generators. Those costs are paid - by consumers but if you add them to the wind and solar farms, they suddenly aren't as cheap.
Nuclear power needn't take that long to build. China is building them in five or six years. Standardisation helps immensely with timelines and safety.
Batteries are not an energy solution. The current largest batteries around the world can only provide minutes of power for typical western grids. Yes, minutes.
One huge factor that affects the environment is land use footprint. Nuclear has the smallest, by far.
> costs
Solar is an entire order of magnitude cheaper than nuclear. That's a lot of wiggle room for incidental costs.
> Nuclear power needn't take that long to build. China is building them in five or six years. Standardisation helps immensely with timelines and safety.
That's only counting the time from when shovels hit the ground. Even in China they spend 5 years before that in planning.
> Batteries are not an energy solution. The current largest batteries around the world can only provide minutes of power for typical western grids. Yes, minutes.
Neither is nuclear. Current nuclear designs cannot provide peaking power, and new designs that can are even more ridiculously expensive than current designs.
What you said is absolutely true under the current regulatory regimes.
Its important to note though that significant progress has been made on compact nuclear. It's safer, easier to produce, and can be centrally manufactured and delivered onsite, relieving much of what causes cost overruns. The largest hurdles involve allowing such nuclear plants to be deployed, which requires regulatory change.
That's why I phrased the cost comparison the way I did. Even if the SMR modules were completely free, the rest of the plant would still be more expensive than solar.
safe* nuclear energy.
It doesn't have to be safe. If we reduced safety regulations to the point where we were having a Fukushima-scale disaster every year, to enable a massive increase in nuclear power deployment, we would still come out massively ahead if it allowed us to keep to a 2C versus 3C outcome.
He and his team (mostly composed of scientists, not economists) provide very interesting insights on global warming/energy transition. Unlike others, they provide the big picture of the situation and are not trying to hide their sources.
I'm surprised to see one of his presentation on HN, where the opposite opinion reign I think. As an example, they are really "bearish" on the Green New Deal, as it will simply not be enough to address the challenge ahead of us. Curious to see people' reaction.
Is there a written summary of version of this talk that you'd recommend? I am curious but not curious enough to watch the whole thing.
Not that I'm aware of. This talk is in itself a summary of a 10+ hours course he gives to his studends.
Is the first time I have come across a presentation of this guy in english and this is why I wanted to share it here. But basically it is a re-hash of the limits to growth arguments, with more modern data.
I look briefly, but could not find any... The issue is that they are mostly presenting at French engineering schools/colleges, and the presentations are... in french. There are no usually no transcripts nor even translations. At that point it's a cultural thing I guess to be bad at sharing knowledge world wide (Disclaimer: I'm French).
I could not recommend enough to listen to it though. The viewpoint he is presenting is unusual enough to be worth it.
Spoiler: No, but it can help.
I'm really tired of this technology vs. policy vs. behavior changes discussions. It's a false dichtomy. We'll need all of that.
I just finished reading the book released by Bill Gates titled "How to Avoid a Climate Disaster." In it, he described how tackling this problem will take an extremely difficult combination of technologic advancement, government policy, and market alignment. We need to do everything we can to be sure that choosing the green energy option isn't just the morally correct choice, but is also the rational choice for everyone to make.
I recommend the book BTW. Though it tries its best to be optimistic, I finished it thinking "well shit, I don't know if this is possible." He is right in saying that it won't be easy.
And during the past decade a market emerged to reward individuals and companies for consuming as much energy as they can: bitcoin mining. The "rational" choice seems to be to just throw as much energy at it as we can. Of course that's completely absurd if the result is to destroy the environment, but that seems to be what is developing.
I start to be really pessimistic about our ability to fix any real issue.
The solution is very simple: bigger government. We have been tricked over the past 40 years into accepting that “small government” is a valid policy objective. Solving the big problems and creating big innovation in the 20th century came from a comparatively big government, the private sector was more about commercialisation than innovation and still is.
I thought Bill Gates was a business owner. I'm going to ask the guy that runs the auto parts store what he think 'we' should do.
If that auto parts store guy committed a billion dollars to the fight, hiring and listening to many scientists he'd be an excellent guy to ask.
I have a hard time taking anything that guy pushes given his associations and flights with Epstein.
I personally hold to the ethos of innocent until proven guilty, but suit yourself.
Me too in a just society.
How would assuming guilt until proven innocent lead to a more just society? It seems to me like that would just lead to mob rule.
I don't dispute that assuming guilt before innocence is wrong and in general leads to a worse society. But clearly Mr Gates and his class aren't even subject to the system of justice I and likely you are. It's common knowledge that he's associated with Epstein long after his conviction. That's enough for me to question his credibility.
It has to. Every prescription I've read almost exclusively focuses on changing behavior. That means telling huge numbers of people - billions really - that their pursuit of wealth and convenience and modernization must be handicapped. In some cases, we're told there are too many people altogether.
That's a recipe for unrest and war on a global scale. A technological solution might avoid all that.
> Every prescription I've read almost exclusively focuses on changing behavior.
This sounds like a big strawman. I honestly have never met anyone who thinks we can fix climate change exclusively with changing behavior.
If I'd said 'largely', would that have helped?
Policy can help, good stories can do a lot of work too
For anyone else utterly fascinated with the debates between technological development advocates and lifestyle alteration advocates in response to climate change, I absolutely cannot recommend The Wizard and the Prophet enough.
From the author of “1491” fame which is quite popular here on HN—it’s actually interesting I see that book on pre Colombian America recommended more often here on HN than the one on technology and climate change.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34959327-the-wizard-and-...
While it is important to be good stewards and not pollute etc, I don't think we are competent to solve climate issues as a whole, when we can't trust each other to keep our word (so much of the time), and especially when we have rejected the specific advice of the planet's Creator.
But things can be OK in the long run if we really try to learn what we should do, and do that. I would include praying, honesty, and kindness among those things. Really there is good reason for hope for the best; many of these things are expected.
A clean and sustainable source of energy exists in a form of controlled nuclear _fusion_. Unlike Nuclear _fission_ (current nuclear technology) fusion works with hydrogen (deuterium and tritium isotopes) and produces no lasting radioactivity or dangerous materials. The source material is just water. Commercial use is still a decade away [1]
Iter is 5 years away at least, and is not at all designed for commercial use. The next iteration isn't either. Iter tech for fusion won't be commercialized until 2050 at the very best. Alternative to tomawak exist though, so maybe?
> Alternative to tomawak exist though, so maybe?
Your probably meant tokamak.
No. People need to take a thermodynamics class. Unless you go nuclear, you're not moving away from fossil fuels anytime soon. Most all OECD nations have decided that nuclear "isn't worth the risk."
We're going to be burning coal for a long, long time.
Without 'thermo-industrial' development, a large percentage of 'us' wouldnt even exist. So while predicting the future of technology isnt possible, we do know that technology created us.
And it can also destroy us.
I think we're staring ourselves blind, straining to see any possible high-tech solution that will solve climate change neatly, easily and without any significant sacrifices.
The problem is not technological. It is political and societal, and those cannot be solved by technology.
At this point, even trying to mitigate the consequences of climate change will take large-scale mobilization, on a scale we have never seen before, much larger than the wartime mobilizations of WW2. Considering our current stumbling response to a global pandemic, with possible consequences much lesser than what climate change will bring, I'm sorry to say that the outlook is quite grim.
We have act as humanity collectively, not as individual bickering nations.
I’m rather more optimistic; WW2 was an extremely large mobilisation, and I think this could have been done at the scale of the moon landings a decade ago, but now the tech is cheap enough for people to make a profit while saving the environment.
I'm still waiting on the crisis to materialize. Florida was suppose to be under water 10 years ago and 50 years ago we were suppose to be in a second Ice Age. Oh and the Ozone was suppose to be gone by now.
Sea level rise happens over centuries. I don’t think Florida will have any serious problems before 2060. But Florida is almost completely going under water over 2100 - 2200. It’s understandable that some exaggeration in the urgency is needed else people will not care at all.
And if that sounds hypothetical it means your kids or grand kids have no hope of living in or inheriting any property there. Once the reality hits around 2070 or so property values will drop drastically and there will be a mass refugee style exodus from such areas to others which could lead to stuff like “Build a wall to keep the Floridans out”
>And if that sounds hypothetical it means your kids or grand kids have no hope of living in or inheriting any property there.
95% of people don't really inherit property and many people these days are forced to move for economic reasons.
Florida being "under water" sounds apocalyptic, but as you say, the chance will "happen[] over centuries." Every storm will slowly destroy some part of the developed area and will be rebuilt somewhere else.
To put it in economic terms, what the net present value of losing Florida in 2180? Probably not all that much.
That’s for large parts to be completely underwater. It’s not a sudden event in 2180. It will start by 2060-2070
It started 50 years ago.
It already does. Central heating and cooling.
Global warming has nothing to do with turning on the air conditioner. It certainly didn’t help anyone save their homes from forest fires in California or Australia. Even if you had ACs you wouldn’t want to live in a place hotter than the Sahara desert (when humidity is taken into account). So you’ll move.
And let’s say you do live in a good area. An exodus of a billion people all over the world trying to move into places like yours will get nasty.
Drastic changes in climate patterns also risks the food supply.
The better question is who can save us from ourselves?
As long as it seems preferrable to dream of some hypothetical set of technical solutions rather than mildly discomforting us by adjusting habits to be less wasteful, I see little hope for that endeavor.
With every day that passes without self-moderation the damage increases. Sorry flora and fauna, your world ends before consumerism does.