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I’m sure you may have seen a lot of “how to inoculate yourself against climate disinformation” posts, but we’re experiencing a huge amount of content paid for by Fossil Fuel Interest’s to put pressure on the internet. And it’s been really concentrated for a few months.
The funding is pushing for a cultural shift for people who are undecided in the climate conversation and are possibly more easily swayed. And it’s important to remember, fossil fuel interests wouldn’t pay for it if they didn’t need it.
Most of the disinfo looks like “yeah climate change is real but we can’t possibly do anything to fix it” or “these solutions simply don’t work.” about solutions that are tried and true. They look a lot like nuanced takes, but specifically are trying to motivate inaction.
So if you wake up today and ask “what can I do today that makes a difference?” is honestly post a lot to tip the scales regarding the presentation climate solutions. Silly or serious, for example posting about renewables getting you excited, community food forests that are feeding people, cool solutions to targeting methane, etc. Post about a climate book or show you liked, or whatever. Just make sure it’s clear to an onlooker that there are people who believe climate change is anthropogenic, it was mostly caused by extractive practices and fossil fuel use, and that we can still demand rapid action to fix it. And all of this is true, because the science supports it.
What is weird to me is that the technical solutions are there. They are known, they are old. And they are opposed.
As an engineer I would like to help, but after being asked to sign a petition against nuclear power, against a solar power plant, against electric vehicles, and hearing environmentalists complain about wind turbines, stating batteries will never be a solution, inventing resources depletion problems (for non-fossil materials there is zero depletion problem) I am really wondering if we do want to solve the problems.
There are many scenarios towards a renewable future that are totally doable. From the “business as usual, just replace fossils with renewable electricity” to an ungrowth scenario, a whole spectrum in between and for all a nuclear option depending on your preferences, it is only a matter of political will.
There are currently no technical solutions. Asserting that there are is the same as saying, “Anthropogenic global warming is easy to solve, if it weren’t for all the people.” We need holistic solutions that incorporate technical, political, and social approaches.
You are disagreeing with the IPCC then. It provides strategies to fight the climate change using only today’s technologies. We have the tech for clean electricity production and alternative for almost every fossil fuel use out there: electricity for most, biofuel for a few remaining ones.
I’ve seen the trailer for the AR6 Synthesis Report. It includes advocacy for social and political approaches to a green energy transition. They are different from the approaches I would advocate, but that validates rather than contradicts my statement that we need holistic solutions.
It is not the holistic approach that I am criticizing, it is the “there are no technical solution” claim. We have all the tech solutions. We know their efficiency, we know their cost. We know efficiency can only go up, costs can only go down. Governments of the world have these plans on their desks and without GWB’s decision to make climate change denial an acceptable political stance, the world would have started implementing it 20 years ago.
Vote for people who care about the environment and you solve the crisis in a decade. No need for new fancy techs for the transition.
The only field where new tech may help is for the repair/rewilding post-transition, but to be honest, I am tired of people saying “Oh you just want to greenwash harmful practices” when I mention CO2 capture research. We will need these eventually, I would probably work on that as an engineer if I had made climate change my personal priority but then, there are so many low-tech-hanging fruits that we are not engaging with that I am not sure we need more solutions when most of the good ones are not being deployed.
I think there’s a semantic difference between ‘approach’ and ‘solution’ that encourages us to talk past each other. Waving a magic wand that transitions fossil fuel sources to solar power and biofuel while removing accumulated carbon from the atmosphere would be a climate change solution. Passing legislation to transition to some combination of biofuel and solar power over the next decade would be an approach - it is not likely on its own to solve climate change, but could be part of a greater solution.
Bringing more nuclear power plants online, building more solar energy arrays, and covering windy lands and coastlines with turbines will not ‘solve’ global warming, it will accelerate it. There’s an obvious analog to the well-documented paradox of adding more traffic lanes increasing rather than reducing traffic congestion. These approaches apply elemental analysis of static systems to dynamic systems that require holistic analysis. An economist will tell you more energy to the grid will reduce the price of energy, which will increase demand. A political scientist can tell you that a capitalist economy will be stimulated to grow until it reaches the limits of its resources, and added economic growth will result in more energy use, not less. We can infer that if at any time renewable energy prices drop to the point they become more economically attractive than fossil fuel, demand for them will rise until the prices are competitive again.
You’re symptomatic of the problem when you mention CO2 capture research as an afterthought. There needs to be a significant decrease in energy use and carbon generation, and a significant increase in carbon sequestration. That is currently the primary obstacle we are facing in solving the problem. Carbon sequestration may be amenable to technological approaches, but decreasing energy use and limiting that use to renewable resources is a deeply social and political problem, and has no technological solution.
Let’s start with the end:
That’s like being blind to the air you are breathing. It is indeed not a technological problem anymore like it was in the 1980 because the technological problems have been solved. And technology has also helped solving the economic problem as well by lowering the cost of these techs. Indeed, there is little more that tech can solve there.
Now the paradox you mention in your first part is called the Jevons paradox, or the rebound effect, and is one of the most misquoted and misunderstood piece of economics in these discussions. It states that if you make a process more efficient, you may increase the total cost of it. Here is what is often misunderstood:
This is false. This is even a lie and you should know better than to spread it. I am tired of ungrowthists shooting down climate solutions and pretending to fight climate change denialists while themselves ignoring the parts of the IPCC reports that they dislike. Renewables and EVs are a crucial part of the transition, and nuclear plays a role, though a smaller one. The easiest way to shut down fossil fuel power plant, by far, when you holistically take into account the economics, the politics, the sociology, the psychology, etc. is to have the ability to switch as painlessly as possible to a renewable mode of production that changes as little habits as possible.
Am I thinking this is the best theoretical way or the most moral one or the most enlightened one? No. But you talk about a holistic approach, this is what it is: the shortest path is the path of lower effort. Waiting for MAGA hats or impoverished people to adopt the enlightened ways of economic growth rejection is as realistic as betting on nuclear fusion to solve all energy problems once and for all. Want a quick transition? Let’s them keep their oversized SUVs and meat-heavy diet while making them CO2 neutral. Put the human in the equation, but put the real human in it, not the humans you would like to exist.
EDIT: Preferred to remove an overly aggressive answer about the CO2 capture part, but too tired at the moment to make a polite retort to the frankly offensive assumptions you make about my position.
I see you’re aware of Jevons Paradox by name. I posted about it 10 days ago.
I don’t appreciate your tone. It’s typical of STEM people who are rigid structural thinkers, and mistake that for rationality. It’s easy to find an engineer who thinks he has a more profound understanding of a specialty he’s considered for five minutes than a non-engineer who has studied it her entire life. Despite rapid technological development, both fossil fuel use and renewable energy use has increased apace (except for a brief dip during the pandemic.) All three of your bullet points are also non-sequiturs. This may be due to a language barrier - I appreciate you holding this dialogue in my native language.
In particular, the Jevon’s paradox is not about the number of lightbulbs consumed, but efficiency and energy use. Lights are part of a larger system so long as fungible energy is used to power them. The electrical power conserved by LEDs results in lowered energy prices, and increased energy use elsewhere. To escape Jevon’s Paradox under capitalism long enough to solve the crisis, you would need everything to suddenly become so efficient that even exponential economic growth would not be fast enough to make up the difference between the transition and the point we reach decarbonization.
People have drastically adjusted their society to meet existential threats before. You assert that the people who tightened their belts and grew victory gardens to defeat the nazis are not real humans. Your assertion that people like me and many of the other members of this server are less real humans than meat-heavy oversized SUV driving MAGA hats is revealing. I consider this cynicism towards human nature alarmingly inconsistent with reality and a form of climate change doomerism.
I encourage to you reflect on what you’re implying here. I appreciate that you consider yourself anti-capitalist, and I would advise you to conserve your venom for people to the right of you, rather than lecturing the left on how to be more respectable. Many of us have taken moral stances that prevent us from easily prospering in a capitalist system, but in so doing we’ve shifted the discourse left enough that your toothless anti-capitalism is considered part of the mainstream, and you face no discrimination in employment. We culture-jam, ride bikes, and occupy so that you can ride your EV to a cushy white-collar job and daydream about “changing the system from the inside” in your copious leisure time.
Maybe take that gift in gratitude, and if you’d like to give us something back, let it not be more half-baked essays on how those on the left are irresponsible, irrational, and inferior to you. If you truly want this exchange to end, you can concede my points. I regret that this discussion has become personal, but I feel your statements about facts deserved a rebuttal.
I usually refrain from answering to personal attacks, I am not here to win internet points or leftist certificates from random people. I prefer to focus the discussion on facts, but between a dozen (hilariously wrong) assumptions about my life and strawman arguments, you don’t leave me with a lot of material.
So let’s talk about the Jevons effect. Not sure why you mention a post you made 10 days ago, if you are interested I made almost the same argument I did in the previous post 5 months ago and had to discuss it in professional settings more than 10 years ago. That’s not a concept I discovered yesterday.
Lightbulbs to LED transition is a textbook effect of a small Jevons effect. It totally applies. You can apply this to lighting, where the effect is smaller than the energy gains. You can apply it to the wider system of energy production where yes, indeed, lower energy costs increase total energy demand.
You keep using “efficiency” in different meanings there. Jevons paradox is fed by the economic efficiency (USD/kWh) of energy production. We are interested in its carbon efficiency (CO2/kWh). Replacing a coal power plant by a wind farm of the same capacity and same economic efficiency (aka cost) has no reason to cause a rebound yet would cause a huge change in terms of carbon efficiency.
Yes, and I am sure that they could again. I remind you that I am the one arguing that solving the climate crisis is easy and just a matter of will and I therefore consider that this is now out of my department.
You are the one insisting on a “holistic” approach, which, I am arguing would involve not only taking into account a realistic model of the population to understand why, politically, these easy solutions are not implemented or are implemented too slowly. It means not only to consider the mindset of ecologically minded people (which, obviously, I do consider to exist and to be human, I have a hard time you take that strawman you built seriously) but also the mindset of the majority that blocks these solutions. I don’t like it and you probably don’t like it, but an “holistic” approach would be techno-solutionist: it is harder to make most people change their habits than to make carbon-neutral alternatives to the products they use, so favor that approach if you want a quick transition.
If you would favor a “morally superior” way to lower CO2 emission over a fast and effective pragmatic but “impure” one, it means climate is not your top priority, that you put some ideals over it (which can be fine! Just don’t pretend defending climate when you are defending your preferences)
Yours is just one of many versions of ‘why I personally don’t do anything’: I’m all for change, but the others don’t want!
Society will never be fully aligned on the solutions and you cannot expect everyone to agree with you, but you still can work for your preferred solutions in smaller groups?
I do many things but the impact is limited. I switched to heat pump and soon to EV but I can’t change my country’s electric mix by myself. Indeed, the others don’t want. Because it would be easy if they would. I’ll continue vote and support people who want to solve this and to be fair, we are getting there, just too slowly.
That’s fine: I am working on other changes as an engineer, trying to make AI and robotics veer away from a dystopian timeline. There are other fights where I am more useful
I would love to hear about your work if you’re willing. I am so fascinated by the potential of robots in a solarpunk future.
Edited to add that I appreciate you knowing what fight is yours and what isn’t. It’s certainly a necessary skill for mental health and focus nowadays.
With pleasure!
I am working on 2 things:
Professionally (but switched to part time this year) I am helping a typical startup create an AI tool to help medical researchers. We are a lot on that niche but I am frankly afraid at how many companies do not seem to understand how crucial accuracy is in the medical field and just slap together models and vector DBs without understanding what they are doing. I think and hope there is potential to actually have an impact on life expectancy there so I will work on that project for as long as the company pays me for and probably would do something similar in open source if it kills the project.
Half professionally (technically doing it on free time but still getting minimum wage compensation for that) at a non-profit I am assembling and programming an automated fleet of 3 robots to explore the feasibility to automate the assembly of mechanical machines. We are receiving public funding to explore that in the field of “alternate vehicles”. Here is a post I made on a show event organized by the effort (I recommend trying to translate the post in French if you are interested in the thing, it has more info in it). My goal is to automate small scale production of open hardware projects. There are tons of useful machines publishing their plans out there but few of them are duplicated. It often takes a week of work to make it happen and I aim at lowering that cost. Hopefully eventually all you will have to do is to buy components, put them on a shelf and let the machine assemble the project, only asking for help on very specific actions.
About fights my general philosophy is that one ought to focus on one big subject to fight for but remain an ally (or at least not an obstacle) in all the other fights they deem worthy. It can happen that people who can’t devote all the time they would love to a cause rationalize it by belittling the cause (I guess it is a kind of cognitive dissonance. I wish I could help ecologists, feminists, antifa, antiracists, educators, social workers, medical practitioners, worldwide anarchists, but there is only so many time for these things. However when I stumble upon low hanging fruits that can help them or barriers that are easy for me to remove, I’ll do. Also remember: giving time to a cause is good, but unless you can devote a good percentage of your free time to it, sending money is usually preferable and even $5 helps.
Those projects both sound exciting to work on! What a fun field to be in.
And yeah, we’ve got a similar philosophy regarding things to engage with. I’m having trouble implementing it though 😬