| ▲ | imglorp 13 hours ago |
| > direct air capture is the primary escape hatch We MUST MUST MUST stop burning things. Stop it. - We are still mining and burning coal. This is incomprehensible. US, AU, etc Eg: https://www.nacoal.com/our-operations - We are still subsidizing oil to around $1T/year, not counting oil wars. Yes it will take some grid and storage upgrades (US) and continue to embrace renewables. It would be cheaper than the oil subsidy. Otherwise it doesn't make sense to put CO2 into the air with one hand and take it out with another. |
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| ▲ | crystal_revenge 13 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| This is why it's clear we will never do anything to slow the progression of climate change. By far the most effective an immediate solution to limiting the damage of climate change is to simply to keep fossil fuels in the ground. People talk about the economic pain of doing this, but that economic pain is nothing compared to the impact of unmitigated climate change. Even though this would be painful, it is also by far the easiest and fastest to implement solution. It would take fantastically more time and resources to scale up direct air capture (even if it existed in a scalable format today) to come anywhere near addressing this problem. > Yes it will take some grid and storage upgrades (US) and continue to embrace renewables This is not exactly true, we would have to experience global economic collapse in order to reduce our fossil fuel use. 80% of energy is not spent on electricity globally and this is non-electricity usage is where most of the fossil fuels are consumed and this drives most of the global economy. There's a good reason there are multiple wars being fought over for oil. |
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| ▲ | Liftyee 12 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | The economic pain is current. The impact of unmitigated climate change will happen in the future. Thus, the ingrained short-term thinking of the markets and politicians makes this sort of planning ahead difficult. It seems like the whole economic system runs on a quarterly time scale - just look at all the times negligent maintenance to improve profits in the short term have caused disasters in the long term. Not sure what the solution is though, so I won't complain too much. | | |
| ▲ | nomel 8 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > Thus, the ingrained short-term thinking of the markets and politicians I don't think they're the only ones to blame. People want what's cheaper/keeps their standard of living the same. Any of these changes temporality upset and outright destroy large portions of the economy. You would be kicking the silent majority right in the wallet, who doesn't care all that much about any of this. | |
| ▲ | crystal_revenge 12 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > the ingrained short-term thinking of the markets and politicians Honestly, if we made even a step towards the changes necessary to limit the current damage most of HN readership, especially the "green" ones that don't seem to understand global energy usage, would be revolting as well. The pandemic was a great example of what this would look like as a first step. If we even cared a tiny bit about slowing climate change, there would have been at least some amount of people voicing that we should actually continue to follow early pandemic economic restrictions since it did impact global oil usage. I pointed this out pretty frequently at the time and was nearly always down voted for it. People want "green" to mean "buying the right thing", they don't want "green" to mean "slicing my annual pay to 1/3, never using Amazon or large retail company to purchase thing, no fruit in the winter, and expensive locally woven clothes". | | |
| ▲ | senordevnyc 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | Yeah, I don’t want that world. And more to the point, there is literally no way to make that happen. None. It’s as pointless as suggesting we summon magic fairies to cool the earth. The totalitarian government required to get humanity to return to the lifestyle you’re suggesting here would itself consume vast amounts of energy and resources. We can’t go back, and almost none of us even want to. We have to figure this out with the tools we have now. |
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| ▲ | jimnotgym 13 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Genuinely not being snide, I really do not know. Is it possible to produce steel on industrial scales without coal? I know early ironmaking (I live fairly close to Coalbrookdale!) used charcoal, but is that possible at a large scale? | | |
| ▲ | acdha 11 hours ago | parent [-] | | It’s complicated: https://news.mit.edu/2025/decarbonizing-steel-tough-as-steel... This is one of the stronger arguments for a carbon tax: if you can’t ignore externalities, people have strong incentives to use less (e.g. buying a car instead of an SUV or biking) and all of the alternative fuel and process work is going to be easier if the cost comparison is more even. | | |
| ▲ | jimnotgym 8 hours ago | parent [-] | | Thanks for the link. I read about electric arc furnaces reprocessing scrap steel somewhere else recently. Do we really never need virgin steel again, we already have all we need? |
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| ▲ | morphle 13 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > We MUST MUST stop burning things. Yes, we must. It is so rare to see someone saying this in public. Thank you for this simple clarity. Stop burning everything! Fossil fuel, wood, plastic, garbage, paper. Stop making methane. We only need solar energy at 1 dollarcent or eurocent (it will get much cheaper still!!) and a little batteries for the convenience of using electricity when the sun does not shine. In the north and south you need more solar panels in the winter than in the summer by a factor of 50. But that pays it back in summer when you have a squanderable abundance of free and clean energy. We can store that surplus energy in purifying drinking water, melting iron ore or aluminum [5], melting reusable plastics or purifying silicon ingots. Storing surplus heat or cold in the ground is another luxury, because it is more expensive than 1 dollarcent or eurocent solar running a heatpump. Wind and hydro are also more costly than solar so they are another luxury with worse environmental costs than pure solar cells. We need to build Enernet, a peer to peer electricity net and internet between all buildings with power routers. for around 100 dollar per building. You buy and sell your house surplus solar electricity to the neighborhood where it can be stored in car batteries. See my Fiberhood white paper [2]. [1] Enernet: Squanderable abundance of free and clean energy - Bob Metcalfe https://youtu.be/axfsqdpHVFU?t=1565 [2] https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Merik-Voswinkel/publica... [3] Amory Lovins https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v02BNSUxxEA [4] Saul Griffith on the one billion machines that will electrify America https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iEOPx2X-EtE [5] 101 million machines away from a zero emission Australia https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FQ8-uAhG-zs |
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| ▲ | reducesuffering 12 hours ago | parent [-] | | > Stop burning everything! Fossil fuel, wood, plastic, garbage. I don't understand the wood argument. Isn't it widely accepted we need to do burns to manage forests? Wood is a short-term cycle of carbon. It releases when it burns but frees up space to capture it right after. When people live on rural plots and trees fall, should they burn for heat (and lessen needing other energy sources) or let it decompose and cause the same thing? It's not the same as extracting deeply embedded carbon sources that won't make it to the atmosphere if untouched (fossil fuels) | | |
| ▲ | morphle 12 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Wood and plant burning requires a longer nuanced answer than the Hacker News format allows. Humanity must not cut forests or grow plants unnecessarily. If you must use wood to build a house -(there are better and cheaper materials in terms of energy and climate change enhancing emissions, see for examples Amory Lovins book Reinventing Fire or his lectures on Youtube) - then first grow those trees in a place that has no natural forest. And then do not burn the wood after you demolish the house. Do not use wood from forest, humans should let the forest manage itself. Same with clearing the underbush of Meditaranian and hotter climate forest to prevent forest fires. If humanity had not managed those forest (grazing animals, building roads, harvesting) in the first place than there would have been no buildup of excess material that sustain wildfires past its natural rate. | |
| ▲ | imglorp 11 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | The trick to forest management is allow or create small, frequent burns that clean up dry, overgrown understories. Nature does this without our help and some species even depend on it. If we interfere with this, eventually there's a big fire instead that levels the place. |
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| ▲ | simonsarris 13 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| US, AU? https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/coal-consumption-by-count... |
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| ▲ | getnormality 11 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > Otherwise it doesn't make sense to put CO2 into the air with one hand and take it out with another. I agree that it doesn't make sense, but I also want to challenge the engineering assumption that an extremely relatively inefficient solution should be ruled out. If direct air capture worked and simply required absurd amounts of carbon-free power, say from nuclear, it would mean that we no longer have to fight political battles against the entrenched incumbents. They could simply emit whatever our elected politicians let them get away with, and DAC would soak it up. I completely acknowledge that it seems somehow egregious to do it this way. I am an efficiency-minded person and would hope that we could do it the efficient way. But given all the ugly constraints and lack of progress so far, should we really expect this to be solved the way an efficency-minded engineer might prefer? If we get to that level of desperation though, I would hope that we could simply pay the emitters to install carbon capture. What I don't think will work is a politics of rage, righteous or otherwise. I don't recall any incidents in history where a politics of rage led to cool-headed, efficient technocratic solutions. The perennial problem is that the same politics of rage is equally accessible to your opponents, and it spirals down from there towards disorder and violence. |
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| ▲ | tsoukase 13 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| Stopping burning fuel now will return us centuries in the past, I suppose to about 1700. Twenty years ago it would return us to 1500. Then a handful of people had heating in their homes and a horse to travel. This will happen again if we stop burning now. |
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| ▲ | adrian_b 12 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Such claims are ridiculous. Nobody needs burning fuel. Everybody just needs energy and it does not matter which is its source. If enough energy is produced by other means than burning fossil fuel, nobody will return to the past. I happen to be one of those who does not use directly any kind of energy, except electrical. Despite the fact that I am still connected to methane gas distribution, I have never burned it for already around a decade. (And unlike most, I cook myself from raw ingredients everything that I eat, but I stopped using flames for that many years ago.) If burning fossil fuel would stop completely right now, that would not affect me at all, much less would return me centuries in the past, as long as the electrical energy supplier has enough sources in its hydroelectric, solar, wind and nuclear plants, all of which are abundant where I live. For aircraft and spacecraft, hydrocarbon fuel will remain the best solution, but synthesizing hydrocarbons was already possible at large scale before WWII and it could solve easily this problem in a CO2-neutral manner, if a fraction of the money wasted for various useless or harmful things would be invested in improving the efficiency of such critical technologies. | | |
| ▲ | joquarky 11 hours ago | parent [-] | | Most people can't afford to go 100% electric. Many of them are already sacrificing health care to afford food and shelter. |
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| ▲ | danny_codes 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Bro what are you talking about. Nuclear power exists. You simply scale one we have now by 10x and buy BYDs EV capacity for 5 years and you’re done. It’s not even particularly expensive relative to GDP. |
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