It also seems pretty clear that the only desirable solution is to use technology to reduce the current level of carbon in the atmosphere while at the same time increasing consumption of energy from current levels, vs. shrinking the population or asking individual people to change their behavior.
Five mass scale solutions include:
- Incorporating nuclear fission into the power grid at mass scale - Inventing and incorporating nuclear fusion into the power grid at mass scale - Inventing direct carbon capture technologies and using them to replace hydrocarbon extraction at mass scale - Continually improving battery technologies to improve efficiency and reduce materials - Continuing the roll out of renewables like solar and wind, where it makes sense
These are all hard technological challenges the types of which should excite the best and the brightest, as opposed to being shot down as difficult for this reason or that.
While there are already good people working hard on each of these solutions, there is no big global government sponsored push to solve them within a specific ambitious timeframe.
The type of program that gets ordinary people excited, brings people together and attracts the best minds to the problem.
Think moon landing or Manhattan Project.
I believe we can do it, and we will achieve all of the above technological solutions. I am trying to understand why we are wasting so much time in getting there. I believe that if humanity can do it by 2100 with no big push, then we can do it by 2050 by making it a priority.
Why is this so and how do we speed it up?
It's a lot easier to get funding for some immediate, foreign looking enemy. The Axis powers drove us to the Manhattan project. Hard to instill that same sense of urgency in the politicos when the threat is always like 50 years away and not simply somebody they can bomb.
Our society is not sustainable as-is. We don't need new tech to make the status quo sustainable, we need actual societal change. Less travel, more localization. Less cars, more public transport. Grow, shop, and consume local resources. Share talents to make that work. Build community, not corporations, etc.
Tech doesn't stop us from doing all that. What stops us is that many people don't want those changes.
Massively scaling up fission power, beefing up the grid, and finding ways to adapt to the cycles of power availability from solar and wind, could go a long way towards cutting our emissions. Especially if we can electrify all of rail transport.
The reason we're wasting so much time is that the 0.01% who own most of the world profit from the status quo, and don't want change. They are quite willing to burn this world for more money.
I think many people here have touched on important reasons why we are wasting time (e.g., governments paying lip service to the problem).
But I think something that hasn't been mentioned yet is that the emerging climate crisis won't be described as a climate crisis.
Instead, it will be described by its indirect effects.
For example, we will have mass flooding problems. We will have mass migration problems. We will have crop failures and famine problems, etc.
And political entities won't say "this is a climate problem."
Instead, they will argue/wage-war/whatever by saying, "We've got to stop this migration at our border." Or "We've had horribly bad look with historic flooding."
If there were an asteroid heading for earth, we could (probably) all band together and try to deal with it because most people could understand the direct effects of an asteroid hit.
But climate change is more subtle and slowly evolving. So, it's easier to convince people that it's just a hoax.
Obviously, I'm speaking from a US-centric point of view. I'm not sure how the rest of the world thinks about this issue.
We have to make a lot of changes across virtually the entire economy including equipment/factories etc that have lifespans in 30, 50,100 years. There are major questions about how fast we can accelerate the timelines as we basically reinvent ourselves
But overall, all them need huge investments, to make huge enough technologies shifts.
And unfortunately, there are not just money investments, but they also need some scarce resources, even human resources are not abundant.
On other side, as we all could see here on HN, humanity is really close to AGI, which could solve issue with human resources, and even more, read more :)
I think, modern market civilization, could continue grow without continue grow use terrestrial resources, by invest in space industries - mining asteroids, produce at least enriched metal concentrates in space.
What slows progress of space industries, mostly, asteroids too far from Earth for just radio remote control, because of speed of light limitation. Solution is obvious - create space enterprise, controlled by AGI.
I see pair of space industry + AGI, as gamechanger, which could alone, without significant shifts in other technologies, solve Earth crisis.
And unfortunately, all these bright future things will not appear instant, even optimistic forecast, will spend decades to start this flywheel spin, and all this time will continue warming, but once, may be in 30-40 years from now, will achieve climate plateau, and than will see pivot and slowly cooling.
Theoretically, all industries you and comments mentioned, are big industries, so you could just build your own big enterprise, using some super-cool new technologies and change yourself things to better. But in practice, you anyway need somewhere got bright people to work with, and as I said, bright people are not abundant. So, looks like, we are now fortunate got good tickets, and we will build these new industries with AI tech.
You’re trying too hard and missing the obvious answer.
As a global society, we just don’t care at all. Too many people are struggling today to care about what life will be like in 30, 50, 100, or 200 years. Too many people are getting rich because of (not in spite of) the damage we’re doing to the planet. Too many people are too satisfied with their current life to even consider changing it.
There’s nothing to speed up. What you’re imagining isn’t coming in 50 years or 500 years.
All of these will require multifaceted, long term solutions to get to net-zero carbon emissions. An opinion (no necessarily in the book) is that we need short term solutions to bridge the gap. This is not talked about enough. For example, sequestration to start removing the carbon from the atmosphere and climate engineering to reflect solar insolation back out of the atmosphere before it has a chance to get into the heat trap.
Off the top of my head, short term solutions could include putting sulphur back into shipping fuel [notes: 2](probably a bad idea), but other similar things could be investigated. The math needs to be done on whether it would be a net win for humanity. Perhaps there are additives to put into aircraft fuel that could mimic the effect of a volcanic eruption? Probably not even all of the 100,000 flights per day would need to carry it.
This recent post [3] on creating a stable carbon brick that claims $100 per ton will hopefully play out and scale up. Something like $200 billion per year for 20-30 years would solve it. That's a lot of money but on a global scale it's really not. I'm not a fan of nuclear (my first job was at a nuclear power plant), but I would be ok with its use to power sequestration at a massive scale.
All of these should be done - if they aren't already - while working on the decarbonization of the five things.
[1]https://medium.com/feedium/book-summary-how-to-avoid-climate...
[2] https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-how-low-sulphur-shippin...
[3] https://www.geekwire.com/2023/bill-gates-backed-startup-can-...
It's seems likely the wealthiest nations will genuinely reduce their emissions, but they're likely to be offset by the emissions elsewhere.
I hate to be the one to say it, but us starry-eyed Silicon Valley nerds aren't going to put the genie back into the bottle.
I fundamentally reject the notion that we can't sustainably pull all this carbon out of the air. Part of why we have problems with forest fires today is vast over planting of forests in the past (as told to me by a firefighter involved in such management). Further, pull up the xkcd on energy densities by type - uranium is off the charts and many orders of magnitude greater than fossil fuels. Much of the perceived lack of solutions stems from a forced ignorance of the past and centuries of success with large scale projects ala the highway system, the Hoover Dam, Social Security, nuclear powered vessels, etc.
Further, trying to force people to live with less is a losing proposition. Water is life-societies with less water scarcity tend to have less war/violence. Similar is probably a truism for food and generally personal liberties.
Then there's the resources dissolved in the oceans water. Huge amounts of everything we could ever need (lithium, gold, uranium, etc). Pull an amount of carbon out of the ocean and the ocean will pull that amount of carbon out of the atmosphere. Plus, of course, nearly limitless fresh water once desalinated.
The Earth is an absolute gem of diverse life sustaining resources. Just don't be self destructive.
Even battery tech is _way_ more advanced than the current lithium that is cheaply available - only the demand isn't there because its already so cheap - thats again a motivation problem to get the demand up and costs down for alternatives.
We know how to build energy neutral houses (well insulated, produce their own energy/heat, ...) and can produce food much more locally (see how the dutch deliver produce to around the world with minimal resource/land usage, look at what solarfoods is doing, ...) and also energy neutral.
transport can be shifted to EV public transport to a quite large degree, the energy coming from renwewables. excess renewable energy can be used for hydrogen production which then can act as portable fuel, maybe even used for airplanes one way or the other.
... but all this stuff costs money. money that ordinary people right now are severely lacking, because a few people are hoarding all of it instead. take that money away, use it for fundamental infrastructural projects, done by local companies in parallel (not one megacorp), which creates tons of jobs, which stimulates the economy. Like a green new deal.
This all can be achieved here and now, and once going the prices for relevant materials/tech plummet, and not so rich countries can also start doing it.
Why are people preferring to work themselves into poverty for some billionaires' profits instead? the point of a government is that it oversees areas like the economy and course-corrects when something goes wrong. if everyone including elected politicians worship some capitalism god instead, there is a need to change personell, maybe have a look into alternatives to vote for instead of the past parties that don't act on the important issues?
For one cranking up new reactors became too difficult a long time ago. France (Flamanville-3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flamanville_Nuclear_Power_Plan... , also in Finland https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olkiluoto_Nuclear_Power_Plant#... ) and the US (Vogtle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vogtle_Electric_Generating_Pla... ) projects are horrifically over-budget and late.
China, often presented as building reactors at a fast pace, only produces about 6% of electricity with 50GW nominal electric power, and long-term plans for future capacity are up to 200 GW by 2035 ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_China ): 7.7% of predicted total electricity generating capacity. Given that their previous long-term plan failed flat this meek result even remains to be seen. China already has 253GW solar and 281GW wind (plan for combined solar and wind: 1,200 gigawatts by 2030) ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_in_China , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power_in_China ). Even taking into account the load factor seeing there some 'nuclear renaissance' seems difficult.
Then there is peak uranium. "identified uranium reserves recoverable at US$130/kg ((...)) At the rate of consumption in 2017, these reserves are sufficient for slightly over 130 years of supply". It means that quadrupling the meek world nuclear fleet (which provides about 2.5% of final energy) would limit, under current conditions, the lifetime of all reactors to about 30 years. Betting on some new way to quickly obtain huge amounts of good uranium at low cost would be funny, as the uranium bubble of 2007 massively bumped up exploration with tiny results (+ ~15% up in reserves). Good luck to finance this. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium_mining#Peak_uranium
Strategy also chimes in. Nearly all uranium mining is, directly or indirectly, under the aisle of a politically-loaded power (either Russia, the US or China): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:World_Uranium_Mining_Prod... Therefore nations trying to reduce their influence on them will try hard to avoid becoming dependent on uranium, and nation accepting this will only bet if the power also bets on it, enforcing the uranium peak.
Waste management remains a major challenge. Not a single nation solved it. The more advanced ones (Finland and Korea) don't even enjoy a working solution for the lifetime of their current reactor fleet.
Then there is the NIMBY effect.
Add risk (accident triggered by bad luck/terrorism/act of war...). Various unpleasant events since the 70's showed that the then dreamed "very very low accident rate" nuclear was a mere wish.
Add adverse conditions created by powerful nations/institutions trying to avoid nuclear weapons proliferation.
Nuclear used to be the only way to obtain low-carbon electricity, and this may counterbalance some of those ordeals. But no, as the new kid in town, industrial renewables, is incredibly good and quickly progressing https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/nuclear-renewables-electr...
Innovative ways are far away. SMRs, for example, are touted up and NuScale was quite dynamic but then... their first project is now down. https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/nuscale-power-uamps-...
Closing the 'fuel' cycle (breeder reactors) would solve many (not all) those curses, however after decades and billions poured by many nations into research and prototypes it is not industrial ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor#Development_an... )
Nowadays nuclear is to energy what the mainframe is to IT.
I've talked to people about plastic pollution and how most synthetic chemicals/pollutants are now part of the water cycle. The usual response is that it is depressing to think about and the conversation then changes to some inane news about the latest consumer gadget or toy. Most politicians are not interested in challenging their constituents and their consumption habits because that's not something that gets anyone elected into a political office. Presumably good leaders are supposed to think long term but most politicians are not good leaders and are happy to support policies that basically guarantee a catastrophic outcome.
