I got involved in climate advocacy in 2021. Since then I’ve successfully lobbied my local government to start an energy resources study, which will look at ways for my community to quickly transition to renewables. A small thing. But if we all do small things, it will add up!
Still though. My state, Arizona has really terrible people writing awful laws. This legislative session they’re proposing a 12.5% tax on purchasing solar if you’re not a utility, and a bunch of other regressive, anti-free market, pro-fossil fuel legislation [1]. We’re going to vote these people out of office this November and remove barriers to using our states abundant solar resources.
And since HN is a startup and technology forum, we need cheap utility scale energy storage as soon as we can get it. It exists, but solar+storage is just a bit too expensive for most regions of the country. If it does become cheaper than methane, that makes the move away from fossil fuels much easier. If you want to work on this, do it.
But also, citizens engagement is crucial. If you live in a regressive state like mine. It’s super important to get involved. If you live in a place that is going in the right direction, engage on the implementation details, there are so many ways good climate policy can get derailed in bureaucracies. There are a ton of groups that you can work with on this [2] [3] [4].
[1] https://legiscan.com/AZ/bill/HB2281/2024
[2] https://citizensclimatelobby.org/
I think the next phase will be people like me, not climate change deniers but climate change doomers.
The US could go carbon neutral tomorrow and it wouldnt make a dent because of China, India and Russia. 3 Billion people pumping pollution into the the air like their is no tomorrow vs. a couple hundred million reducing their footprint isn't going to make a lick of difference. I think people have always had a hard time understanding things at scale, especially a global scale.
The ONLY answer, live your life like there's no tomorrow because chances are is there isn't going to be.
In reality, an economy transitioned to tech beyond fossil fuels probably enjoys much greater production dynamics. For instance, the US could build out nuclear power to satisfy base board power and then grow that base by which ever rate it decided per year. At some point, mass desalination of sea water becomes affordable because electricity drives down the price. There, too, sea water is a huge resource for literally every mineral we could need (lithium, gold, uranium, you name it). Further, any co2 removed from the ocean will then be scrubbed from the atmosphere-provided the removed water eventually finds its way back, and it would. With more water and more electricity, more of the land is usable for things like habitation, commercial/industrial, and agriculture purposes. (The US and globe has a ton of unproductive land which can be productive with some combination of water+fertilizer.) There's a relationship between the growth of power produced by an economy and its yearly growth of gdp.
The above will also take place with solar. Eventually we will have the tech to power things off whatever sun they get through the paint/coating on their surface.
At some point, the other national players will see those benefits going to other nations and change accordingly. Or they will be left in the past.
In your version of the future, we’re all dead. In mine, the future might include a better life for all.
The problem with this attitude is that it prevents you from solving problems that might actually affect the odds of humans making it to tomorrow or any other near-term date. Right now it looks as if we're in the run-up to World War III. [0] Perhaps we should spend a little energy preventing that. Or perhaps aquifer exhaustion, a long-standing issue exacerbated by climate change. [1] Or solving the political polarization that prevents us from addressing other problems. [2] Humans have faced all of these problems in the past and generally solved them.
Climate change is obviously a serious and challenging problem. But it seems doubtful civilization will be directly overturned any time soon by climate change alone. Europeans and others made it through crises like the Black Plague, which killed a third or more of the population without extinguishing the arc of civilization. [3] It's the knock-on effects we need to worry about, as well as the things that prevent us from fixing them.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/27/opinion/china-taiwan-war....
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/24/climate/global-groundwate...
[2] https://www.politico.com/interactives/2019/how-to-fix-politi...
Mining lithium doesn't require gasoline. Mining can be electrified like many other things. Probably easier to electrify than long distance transport since it is short distances.
Nuclear waste is not a danger in the far future. The radioactive products decay on short time scale. Most of them are gone in century, but they want to store them for.
Lithium batteries aren't a problem if they did decay. Lithium is a common, non-toxic metal. Some batteries, like lead acid in every car, have toxic metals but is small scale overall and not that dangerous.
If any major economy achieved zero emissions for productions of electricity, I wouldn’t be surprised if it was either China using Solar and Nuclear, or France betting on Nuclear.
We call China our enemy, but the biggest enemy of US is US. We can either adapt or live in the past.
Electricity prices haven’t changed much in last 50 years in real currency.
Economies that heavily invest in cheap energy, and high autonomy will win out.
Be as good as you can, regardless of others, so that they will have no whataboutism to hide behind.
Don't underestimate the power of peer pressure, even at the nation-level.
That's one problem. But I'm aware that CO2 is not the ONLY danger to the environment. Hopefully you are also aware of that and can discuss the topic beyond only CO2. We obviously wouldn't replace CO2 with methane, right? So let's talk about the environment, not just CO2.
>Mining lithium doesn't require gasoline.
Name one mine that doesn't use gasoline to mine, haul, store, or transport. Good luck.
>The radioactive products decay on short time scale.
At least 3% of the waste from any reactor is extremely harmful for many thousands of years. The other 97% is irrelevant. Why did you bring it up? Seems dishonest.
Citation: https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fu...
>Lithium batteries aren't a problem if they did decay.
Sure if you manage to keep them all really far away from each other. High concentrations of anything is a problem. Even a basic Wikipedia search can help you here. Leaked evaporation pools, water contamination, huge amounts of water usage in production, etc.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impacts_of_lit...
Go ahead and keep downvoting. Each downvote proves exactly what I'm saying; it's unacceptable to even discuss better solutions.
Yes, the US Constitution gives regulation of interstate commerce to the federal government, but this has been worked around. Lots of states have "use tax" which is an obvious[1] tax on interstate commerce, but they skirt the Constitution by saying they're taxing "use" of the goods purchased within their own state, not the interstate commerce involved. It's possible the AZ law could be written in a way that claims to tax something that happens within the state, while still being for all intents and purposes a tax on interstate commerce. And probably nobody would do anything about it.
[1] The tax is computed 100% based on the money exchanged in interstate commerce, and 0% based on usage.