The technical problem should be (roughly), how can we continue to enjoy our lives and the standard of living we have achieved, and continue to bring more of the world to that level, in a way that is sustainable long term. There are lots of promising routes to making this happen, and we have already seen lots of progress towards reducing environmental impact.
But there are people that want to move backwards, to reduce our standard of living, to reduce our freedom to make our own choices, and to enforce some kind of forced mediocrity that will help ration our natural resources. I reject this (and weaker versions of it) and believe there is more to be gained by focusing on progress than on telling people what to do.
Your standard of living relies on exploiting amounts of energy equivalent to several hundred slaves per person. That amount of energy can't be found in renewable sources only.
How much of a slave master am I? https://jancovici.com/en/energy-transition/energy-and-us/how...
1.) overall humanity is still very inefficient at extracting productivity & comfort from energy. e.g. there is no inherent reason why buildings should need any energy flow to stay at a comfortable temperature. GP did not argue against reducing energy needs but against trying to make people reduce their quality of life.
2.) even at the current consumption I'm not so sure that 10Bn people could not be sustained. there's a hell of a lot of energy incident by the sun, it's just a matter of storing it where we have scaling issues. a whole bunch of battery tech ideas could help with that.
Overall I don't think we're that far from mass producing net energy positive houses (solar roof + industrial battery + near perfect isolation through e.g. low pressure zone in a double wall system). Inhabitants could either sell their energy on the market or use it for their transport needs.
I don't see it. You just deploy some existing technology that is slightly more expensive upfront but cheaper in the long run. You turn off old technology that is not compatible with the goal. You can make the technology cheaper by simply putting more money into it and deploying it more. There is literally nothing left to do other than doing it. Power generation technology like nuclear, solar, wind will get cheaper the more you deploy. You cannot just wait it out and hope that it gets cheaper on its own. It gets cheaper precisely because you keep deploying more and more and more.
The same applies to electric cars. As you keep deploying them newer cars will be cheaper or have greater capabilities.
One day people will wonder why we even insisted on the old way of doing things. It's purely about cooperation and thus politics.
>But there are people that want to move backwards, to reduce our standard of living, to reduce our freedom to make our own choices, and to enforce some kind of forced mediocrity that will help ration our natural resources. I reject this (and weaker versions of it) and believe there is more to be gained by focusing on progress than on telling people what to do.
Obviously, progress is the only answer if we want a solution for everyone. There are lots of people who simply are indifferent. If you give them a good enough compromise they are going to switch over to your side. If you tell them that they are bad people and should change their behavior they are going to do nothing, find reasons to tell you that you are wrong or just join the opposite side because they hate being criticized for something that they do not have influence over and now get to criticize you in return.
We always talk about money but money won’t mean anything without the people to use it.
I am personally willing to devote part of my time to work for free towards building a solution that is being ignored just because someone said it’s too expensive.
Climate change.
Sure, it would be lovely to find a solution that would require no sacrifice from anyone. That is what everyone wants.
It doesn't exist.
If it did, do you think people have just been ignoring it? When it is exactly what everyone wants?
No. Sacrifice is required, to avoid an even greater sacrifice in the future. And it is time for you to step up and take responsibility, and act towards that end goal.
That is a very myopic view.
That is myopic in the extreme.
This has been decided? By who? When? Can you prove this?
So where is the extraordinary evidence for Climate Crisis? People have been claiming this or similar for the last 30 years giving us deadlines that have been repeatedly passed. So what's different now? nothing as far as I can see.
This is a popular idea, I think people are a bit deluded by the fact that Wind+Solar got so cheap. Don't get me wrong: This is great. We'll likely be able to get rid of fossil-based electricity simply due to costs (even though it's too slow).
But it's simply not plausible that you will find a cheaper technology in every area.
Finding a way to fly a plane without carbon emissions is a challenge to begin with. Doing it cheaper than with kerosene - there isn't even a faint of an idea how to do that.
In some areas like cement the only option seems to be carbon capture and storage. There's no way whatsoever that a cement plant + a ccs plant is cheaper than a cement plant alone.
The reasoning behind the carbon tax is simply that every participant can make a decision for themselves. "Do I need CO2 emissions to run my business?" "Does a different business have a greater need to emit CO2 emissions?" This is the type of thinking one is trying to encourage with the introduction of a CO2 tax.
Sure, maybe you can't make efficient electric planes. But maybe you can replace 90% of short range flights with trains and make electric planes unnecessary.
That is actually a misconception. There is no such threshold, at least not for carbon dioxide (it's a bit more complicated for methane and some other greenhouse gases). It accumulates in the atmosphere.
There is some uptake of co2 by natural processes, but that's roughly relative to the amount you put in. If you put in more co2 the concentration of co2 in the atmosphere will keep growing.
Yet, improving the cement plant and the carbon capture one makes it much easier for a government to intervene and require zero emissions.
We'll get aviation and steel production to use synthetic fuels in due time, and we will have plastics produced from captured CO2. Yes, those are more expensive, but nobody is saying that the solution should be left entirely to the market. But neither of them make any sense right now, and that's because the technology isn't there.
That's a political choice, and it doesn't have to be that way. You think it's a hard political problem because we'd have to make very hard choices (reducing quality of life) with the currently deployed technical solutions.
We could push along the R&D levels tech that's already researched, just not deployed (renewables and storage for their intermittent production like li-ion utility scale batteries), and research more some stuff that's barely researched (next gen nuclear, fusion).
Having palatable tech solutions would mean not making unpalatable political choices.
The only answer is to tackle the issue from both a technological point of view and a political one. Waiting for someone to find a tech solution, and then failing to find one, will make things so much worse.
For example, when it came to the ozone layer, it was chemical engineers that led to alternatives to the aerosols of the time that allowed the Montreal pact to even be feasible. The ozone is still on track for full healing in 2060 because of that.
I just think tech folks in general have a hubris problem. To "solve poverty and gov control on currency", 37 megatons of extra co2 gets pumped in the air: https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption. Let alone all the companies claiming to make the world a better place by harvesting private data and controlling what content the public is allowed to see or agree with.
It's a shame because mechanical and electronic engineers developed light bulbs (LED) that used a quarter of the power compared to traditional (incandescent).
It's also mechanical engineers that are developing better renewable energy generation.
So yes, engineers can help the environment. Most here are just the wrong kind of engineer that can actually do more than hold a glittery poster board saying, "I'm upset".
I switched out of dev to work in the concrete industry so I can do my part in cutting unnecessary co2 emissions.
More generally, political solutions are important but technical solutions are necessary too.
Bill Gates' new book goes into this in detail, with the concept of a "green premium," the percentage cost increase of going with a carbon-neutral solution in place of whatever we're using now. In some areas of the economy, the premium is quite large, and finding new tech to shrink it would help a lot.
Technical solutions won't make many green solutions cheaper than fossil in the foreseeable future, so we still need politics, but making the expensive stuff more reasonable makes the political task easier.
To say that something is a political problem is an empty statement, it attempts to pass the buck. Politics is decision making, as is coding. If we had decision makers who understood things like how the natural world works, we would have fewer problems with it.
I am even allowing a very broad definition of what engineering is: understand some dynamic well enough to intervene in it.
Parse information in a way which helps people fighting climate change is helpful.
Though, I also think joining a climate movement is very important.
The rest is the political problem of the anti-science attitude of one party in the US being spread to the rest of the world.
Would you be happy for Iran to build a fleet of dozens of nuclear reactors to replace its current fossil fuel consumption?
The massive cost and time overruns don't help its case. When is Hinkley Point C going to be finished?
My opinion is: keep any current reactors running while they’re in decent condition, but don’t bother trying to plan new reactors for electricity because PV is faster and cheaper to deploy even if you have to add LiIon batteries. (I’d be fine with making new reactors for big new cargo ships, but I believe someone tried something like that already and it didn’t work out).