I'm a conservationist who frequently visits Hacker News. I find it fascinating. I'm also very interested in the extent to which environmental and climate stories feature on here - my guess is that these issues are a real concern for this community. I only wish there was a Y Combinator for massively scalable environmental solutions. As it happens there is virtually no money for early stage environmental businesses or approaches (only growth capital). The money that is available is administered very unimagineatively by bureaucrats. I raise this only because I would be interested in the ideas of this community in getting around this problem - where frequently the benefits of value cannot be reaped by a VC.
I think those unimaginative bureaucrats are your best bet right now. The sort of technology that could solve climate change is probably in the "hard science" category, and startups probably the worst structure to tackle those. What this crowd could contribute is more along the "thousand papercuts"-strategy: shaving off a few watt-hours here and there, and not inventing any more cryptocurrencies that turn coal into ashes and hashes.
Governments and universities have been quite successful inventing the big stuff, and they're also best situated to fight climate change via the other, equally important, avenues: getting agreement on worldwide collective action, incentivising the private sector , and transforming economic structures, habits, cities etc. For example, Germany almost single-handedly financed the 90% reduction in the cost of wind power generation with subsidies.
One initiative from VC-land that might be of interest to you is Y combinator's research effort into the future of cities. That may seem only tangentially related, but a well-designed city could probably eliminate the need for private car ownership and radically reduce the energy need for heating. Add in reduced use of materials for construction (apartments instead of single-family houses), smart concepts to share equipment among neighbours (washing machine, tools etc) and a few lifestyle choices we already see people in cities making, I wouldn't be surprised if energy usage could be reduces by 2/3 without loss in quality of life.
I long thought the killer app for conservation was going to be GIS. And now maybe drones.
It is wicked hard to convey the destruction, loss. Especially to policy makers.
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Methinks the best thing all governments could do is operate with an open ledger. All receipts, contracts, expenditures, procurements, permits, everything publicly posted in real-time.
It's hard to govern not knowing what the hell is happening. Even policy makers are kept in the dark. And they definitely don't have the staff to keep up.
I've done numerous FOIAs (public records requests). It's onerous and almost completely ineffectual. And by the time you get the data you've asked for, the window of opportunity has passed.
IIRC GIS exists in its current form because of the benefit in using it for land management. It's definitely a powerful tool to show climate change etc but unfortunately I think we are past that phase. Most people have made up their mind on the issue - typically along partisan lines. All the maps on the world can't change political belief if people are saturated with media about how it's all a hoax etc.
Great point re data. The tools for dissemination of data are getting better and there is a growing open data movement within government. My own experience has been that greater education is needed for policy makers - they often fear releasing data in case it will be used against them or don't understand the potential benefits of releasing data. In the GIS world there has also been resistance due to policy makers wanting to recover the cost of data acquisition.
> It is wicked hard to convey the destruction, loss. Especially to policy makers.
The problem is that data needs to be transformed into a story, in order to communicate anything meaningful.
But as soon as you turn data into a story, you introduce some degree of bias, which inevitably becomes politicized.
The only way around this is there's no way around this. We have to accept the reality that the agenda hawks (on both sides) will continue to polarize issues. Continue to use the tools and data available to us to tell the best stories we can, while understanding that no one story is the truth. All the while, we have to avoid succumbing to the deep polarization being used against us to divide and conquer. We are all in this together.
Compelled to reply, even though I don't know how it relates (directly).
TL;DR: IMHO, Conservation is an accounting problem, adding externalities to the ledger, making local tax payers aware they're getting screwed.
I volunteered for a wetlands conservation group, about 10 years during the 90s.
Wetlands, riparian areas, bogs, marshes, etc are habitat for birds, fish, their predators. They slow down the water during storms. They clean the water. Etc, Etc.
We might have slowed down some development, in one county that had somewhat better governance than its neighbors. But habitat destruction continues. Ditto flooding. And the fisheries we were trying to protect were later proposed for endangered species status (all but gone).
One signature achievement was creating birding trails, partially funded by state tourism bureau, to better rake in those sweet eco-tourism dollars. (~$140m/yr during the late 90s.)
People will be surprised that Bush Sr signed the first federal wetlands protection legislation. Lots of optimism during the Clinton years. Then Bush The Lesser happened. And after a decade, we just kinda ran out of steam. Today, I honestly don't know who's working this issue locally.
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I have one more point to add. It's notable that the "environmental movement" was born in Southern California, where the residents could see the destruction and consequences occur in real-time vs spread-out over generations.
Your last point is a good one. People started paying attention to the environment in Japan after four major incidents of people getting fked up by industrial pollution.
I guess people will only start caring when we literally run out of fish or Alaska melts.
I'm strongly inclined to agree with the accounting-problem element of this, though correcting how economics views costs, value, and price (three distinct elements) would help tremendously as well.
The drawing down of natural capital is simply not accounted for, despite the fact that early models of value (Smith, Boehm-Bawerk, Marshall) were consistent, if not outright encouraging of this.
If oil companies (or the holders of lands from which it was withdrawn) had to account for the 100 million years plus of formation time in their accounting, the economics (or rather, finances) would change markedly.
I'm not sure about a bureaucratic approach, bureaucracy seems to be limited by a need to conserve the status quo. The more popular approach is a company like Tesla which seems to be on the verge achieving - or at least sparking - a huge victory over fossil fuels while realising investor returns.
The challenge is to identify a cleaner and cheaper way to do something and then disrupting the hell out of the existing field.
The guys attempting to grow meat in labs are set to disrupt things when their meat becomes cheaper than slash and burn burgers(it likely already is as the true cost of rainforest loss is externalised - rainforest loss to soya fields that is 70% fed to cattle amounts to the same thing: rainforest loss for meat).
Once they're done with meat maybe it is possible to culture high quality wood in a lab. They'd save the amazon rainforest and make themselves and their investors a ton of money.
But the patten is there, already laid out. The only role bureaucracy might play will be to get out of the way. To not impede.
> The only role bureaucracy might play will be to get out of the way. To not impede.
That's an incredibly myopic view of reality, and of the history of scientific progress. Bureaucrats eradicated polio and smallpox, invented the internet, space travel, GPS – and actually almost anything important you could think of (if you include public universities and publicly-funded research). They have the power to massively support new technology until it is self-sustaining. There wouldn't be any renewable energy production today without the help of bureaucrats organising massive subsidies that allowed these industries to scale up to competitiveness. With regards to power-consumption, regulation has played a massive role in decreasing energy needs: from fuel efficiency standards to seemingly stupid stuff like standby modes, which used to consume dozens of watts continuously because that was a few cents cheaper to manufacture, and consumers just didn't care.
Tesla is a fantastic company. But their best allies are just those bureaucrats and politicians: many countries support electric cars with tax breaks, sane countries have long ago started taxing the externalities of oil consumption, and there are thousands of initiatives on the smallest local level to allow electric cars to compete.
Cities create reserved parking with charging infrastructure, or open bus- and taxi-lanes to electric vehicles. Universities have massively invested in the basic research that made not just those cars possible, but also the generation of it's power from non-fossile fuels. Not to mention that (at least in sane countries), public transport and bike infrastructure have probably prevented CO_2 emissions at a rate that's still 3 or 4 orders of magnitude ahead of Tesla.
> Bureaucrats eradicated polio and smallpox, invented the internet, space travel, GPS – and actually almost anything important you could think of (if you include public universities and publicly-funded research)
I don't think anyone in their right mind would call the purchase of technology from privately funded research at a public university (Polio) to count as bureaucrats innovating, nor would I say that bureaucrats did any of those things, with the exception of space travel which was indeed fully done in-house by NASA.
The real innovation that government could bring to environmental issues is consumption-based pollution taxes instead of convoluted, mis-incentivizing mandates like Obama's call for each auto company to each produce one 54 MPG car by 2025.
Tesla wouldn't need the bureaucrats if we had a fair, simple, liberty-maximizing set of environmental regulations.
> But the patten is there, already laid out. The only role bureaucracy might play will be to get out of the way. To not impede.
It has another potential role to play though: safeguarding the playing field. For each Tesla trying to make the world a better place, there's an Uber, fucking society over for profit. The role of bureaucracy should be to allow the former and prevent the latter.
I don't know if you can say that Uber has made the world a worse place. That requires at least a total ordering on Uber's biggest actions and probably quantification of the consequences.
If the advent of Uber has resulted in a billion drink deaths not happening but one person making $2 less per hour, it's clear. The other way around is clear too. But as it is right now, you can't assert that as is. You have to bring something more convincing to the table.
True, that statement does suffer from overreach. I was stuck in thinking of big government and entrenched players using economic tools to stifle positive disruptors. Of course there is a role for good as well.
> it likely already is as the true cost of rainforest loss is externalised - rainforest loss to soya fields that is 70% fed to cattle amounts to the same thing: rainforest loss for meat
Last time I've read related news those lab-grown muscle cells were supplied with calf blood serum. That makes your sustainability speculation sound more like wishful thinking.
I'm sure they're working on that issue, but we're not even close to being able to feed billions with vat-grown meat. And you need to feed that meat with some nutrients too, probably plant-derived ones. So on a per-calorie basis feeding the humans with those plant-derived nutrients directly would probably be more efficient, if your goal is to reduce carbon footprint.
I left the field of IT/startups to work with this specific issue. Not on the financing side, but on the solutions side. I have experienced just what you describe. There are ways around it, but the finances available are just not the same. It would be good with a group of people to work on the bigger underlying issue here.
Environment problems are not technological problems, their are driven by society. The way we consume, how we reproduce, the responsibilities we are willing to take, how we design our days, what define success, what are our purpose, our values and how we communicate, share, and educate.
Technology is only the thing we use to compensate our failure in the other areas.
But it's a never ending race.
If we don't solve the root of the problem, technology will also bring more power to act badly, which we will need to compensate with better tech, etc.
Several comments have mentioned that sand is not a renewable resource and the need for alternative building materials. Where I live in Hackney in London there has been a gradual increase in the number of buildings built using cross-laminated timber. It offers huge benefits over concrete, it is a renewable resource and much lighter than concrete. Despite expectations the buildings are still just as fire proof as concrete and can be constructed up to 10 storeys high. There are 23 such buildings either built or completed in Hackney.
If they started building so massively and anarchically with timber, it would likely be even worse. Illegal cutting, mud slides, complete destruction of rivers, massive building fires.
The place could turn into a desert.
You likely can't fix this with some simple technological measure. There are just too many people who want to improve their material standard of living. They have the tools and it's a tragedy of the commons from there on.
Sustainable timber production is a solved problem, opposing wood use in general (as opposed to specifically, when done using problematically sourced timber) is counterproductive.
Also, I recall reading that most old-growth forest clearance is to free up the land for agriculture, not primarily to produce timber, so timber buildings aren't causing this.
>>Sustainable timber production is a solved problem
At current demand levels, yes. But if we're talking about replacing concrete with timber, you're going to find it difficult to keep timber production sustainable, since it will have to massively increase to meet new demand.
Glulam beams are actually pretty ecologically sound. They're made from laminations of smaller pieces of wood, so there's less demand for old-growth trees. It can also be made of the smaller pieces left over from cutting larger pieces. And of course, trees are a renewable resource, if managed right via sustainable forestry.
Another benefit to them is that a single glulam beam can replace several ordinary dimensional pieces of lumber. So you end up using less wood because they're stronger.
And when used as architectural elements, they're attractive.
The ones I know about are coming up on 55 years in use and still look good. I expect as long as you keep them dry and insect-free they'll last a long time.
Engineered lumber is quite common in the US for smaller buildings. When we renovated our house, the builder used an I-beam made of such material. I would be interested to hear if this is also being used for larger structures - I doubt if it would be possible to make a 10 story building out of wood.
Can't find a link right now, but I did read an article on skyscrapers being designed out of engineered timber. I think it is something about using the whole box as structure, whereas in a steel building the curtain walling is just dead load. We simply cannot keep building out of concrete, as this story shows.
I was against timber-based construction. Mostly for esthetic reasons. I associated cheap construction with sprawl, waste.
I now think the impermanence is a feature, not a liability. It's fine for a building to last just 20, 40, 60 years. And then get torn down and have the land repurposed.
Until this interesting video [1] by Tom Scott, I had never considered sand as a non-renewable resource. But now, it is clear that we now have one more resource that we might run out of.
In the context of today, yeah, there are tons of resources that we're quickly plundering our way through. The stories mentioned by Tom Scott and the parent article are tragic.
But, big picture, nothing on this planet is "non-renewable". Sand, for example, can be manufactured. As can petroleum, coal, clean water, etc. In fact all those products can be produced from the waste of the materials they are replacing. We can chuck a bunch of plastics into a pressure chamber and, with enough energy, regenerate the original petroleum products.
And that's the real crux: energy. We don't make our own sand and fossil fuels because it would cost too much in energy. But if we had more abundant sources of energy, the cost would go down, and more manufactured materials would become viable.
Our crisis is not that we'll run out of resources. We have plenty. Our predicament is a lack of energy sources. We make up for it by consuming energy our planet has stored, in the form of fossil fuels and other so-called "non-renewables". The solution is to transition ourselves away from this handicap. We need to have more sustainable and abundant sources of energy. That pretty much amounts to solar, as there are no other truly sustainable sources of energy.
So the real solution has not much to do with using less "non-renewables" and more to do with improving our abundance of solar energy.
Yes. I suppose my comment kind of comes off as saying something obvious. Obviously if we had infinite energy we wouldn't have any problems.
But really what I was trying to get at was that our focus, with respect to the environment, is perhaps in the wrong place. We focus so much on reducing use. Really our focus needs to be on how we can get _more_ energy.
It's like in a business. Don't focus on the cost centers, focus on the profit centers. How can we drive _more_ business rather than making the existing business more efficient. For a growing company that's usually the best advice.
So why, as a growing species, are we optimizing our energy usage? Screw that. Let's get more energy! Let's blanket the land with solar panels so we have enough "fuck off" energy to do whatever the hell we want. In particular, enough energy to get into space and build a Dyson sphere so we can get even more energy.
Imagine if we took all the money and time invested into optimizing energy usage, and instead had spent it on solar panels?
It's all really counter to public opinion. Environmentally conscious people love their LED lights. I do too. But I also love optimizing systems, and optimizing systems is often not what's smart for a business.
> But really what I was trying to get at was that our focus, with respect to the environment, is perhaps in the wrong place. We focus so much on reducing use. Really our focus needs to be on how we can get _more_ energy.
The article mentions, among other things, thieves who steal sand, sell it, and bribe police to look the other way. While that's the state of affairs, lowering the cost of energy is beside the point.
No, it would be profitable for them regardless. You might live in some science fiction world where energy and automation were so abundant that manufacturing sand from something other material and shipping it in made economic sense.
cost = energy-intensive manufacturing + lots of shipping
It wouldn't prevent this crime because it's never going to be as cheap as going to the river and filling up a truck.
cost = a short drive + a few bribes
Technology is absolutely not the solution to everything (although sometimes it helps a lot).
How do you propose sourcing Helium? Barring a few atoms here and there from fusion experiments and H-bombs I don't know of a good source without leaving the planet.
If the natural production of Helium via radioactive decay in the Earth isn't enough, we can use create it from Boron and Lithium after using copious amounts of energy to accelerate protons into them, or for just Lithium, Deuterium.
A similar eye-opening for me was when I've learnt that Saudi Arabia is importing sand and camels from Australia. I couldn't find a reliable enough source now with a quick search, but here's a similar story on BBC: "Even desert city Dubai improts its sand. This is why." http://www.bbc.com/capital/story/20160502-even-desert-city-d...
I am from Kerala, in India. The amount of damage the illegal sand-mining done here in rivers is pretty alarming.
I think we should adopt living in smaller houses, which are built out of locally available materials, instead of cement concrete. As far as I know, concrete buildings do not have a lifetime exceeding 40 years, where as older construction techniques do give us longer lasting buildings.
Local concrete used in India include a mixture of slaked lime, honey, water chestnuts, rice husk etc. - e.g. [1] Seems to last a couple of centuries, at least.
Interesting - comments elsewhere here are disparaging about wood and laminates due to perceptions about longevity, while the stuff concrete is replacing in India was hardly short lived.
Seems like the #1 reason we are running out of sand, is concrete doesn't last very long. The #1 reason for concrete not lasting long that is rebar. Sure rebar lets you use less concrete, but then it doesn't last nearly as long. Without rebar concrete can last 1000s of years (like the roman aqueducts.)
I'm fairly certain Roman concrete also relied on chemistry as an alternative to thermal energy in its manufacturing process, as thermal energy simply wasn't as abundant to the Romans.
The longevity may simply be a fortuitous consequence, though a highly significant one.
Roman engineering was also rather more overengineered. You compare their columns to modern or say gothic ones, and they clearly have a lot of excess strength.
What I understand is that desert and beach sand tends to be old/heavily weathered sand that is too fine with rounded edges. And is physically weak. Sea sand also tends to have chlorides which causes problems.
The foundation of the house I'm living in was probably made with beach sand (1908 construction). One wall that gets wet frequently is turning to dust.
Flip-side of that is the timbers are all old growth redwood. If you ever poke at the stuff after 100 years as long as it didn't get wet it's fine. 50-50 chance whoever buys this place will replace the foundation. And hopefully with proper concrete. Do that and the building will last into the next century.
The point is supposedly that providing housing for the current exploding population is more important/urgent than their great-grandchildren having to tear down and rebuild their houses in 100 years.
There is a beach in south Sweden which was mined for sand, I think it was for biosand filters for water purification. The said they exported sand to Saudi from there. I presume different sands have different properties.
Surreal to see it covered here. I have been frequenting Greater Noida (& the region on the expressway) for a decade & have seen the extent of transformation that has taken place there. The real estate boom almost ended in a whimper with unfinished construction sites and unsold condos/flats rotting away in an Indianized urban decay. The crime was so bad that it was unthinkable to move on that route after 6 PM.
There have been improvements, with big names like ST Micro, Sapient, KPMG, Accenture renting offices in that area, however a bigger socioeconomic, positive impact is dampened because of inherent corruption, lobbying by real estate/sand mafia & bureaucracy.
I recently was in the Greater Noida area for work.
I saw lots of unfinished or abandoned construction projects and massive pollution.
I also stayed at the golf club they mentioned in the article. That part would have been nice if not for the thick layer of smog that never dissipated the entire trip.
Given the number of planes I see in the sky and the data you did.
I live near Paris, and every time you will watch the rivers flowing nearby (may it be Seine or Oise) you will notice this weird patches from the sky near the loops of the rivers. It is/was sand harvesting.
You will notice raw montain near montpellier a hole while approaching ORY from london in a place named cormeilles en parisis.
You may not notice but it may be insidiously happening near your place, everywhere in the world.
Even the desert (cf occidental sahara, UN claim vs Marocco), oceanic islands are targeted.
The law of thermodynamics are saying "any pure enough chemical entities are a resource", and the entropy lost will never be recovered without a way bigger energy than the one for harvesting them.
Thus the reasoning on fossil energy (Hubert's Peak) also applies for sand, water, potasse, alumine, iron ores, bitumes, absestos, helium, nitrogen, coal, gas, uranium....
Why no one cares?
Because there is an economical incentive to ignore the consequence of your actions: the lack of financial liability for the pollution/increase of entropy you are generating.
If you make your own compost and grow your vegetables (lucky us) you can build an intuition of what is wrong here.
But for the other one, our education makes it impossible to understand the slow cycles of resources. So, I bow.
"All that was left was a question, one that haunts river communities all over India: Why would any village so willingly accept such paltry gains for certain catastrophe?"
Surely one answer is obvious: if one person didn't, their neighbours would and the disaster would still happen and still affect all the people who didn't participate.
That's an excellent story hiding under a too-cute headline, covering a whole slew of factors.
I see: short-termism, unintended consequences. A cost, price, value failure: the riverfront property owners charging Rs. 150 per truckload for transit to the river sand, and having to pay Rs. 2000 for water after the sand-mining depleted the acquifer.
There's the backward-S supply curve of those desperate for any income.
There's the attraction to liquid cash.
There are the problems of ineffective and toothless regulation and enforcement. Of corrupt businessmen (dying in duels and gunfights), and of an uncaring attitude.
We're not going to run out of sand as long as we have rocks and power. Sand is routinely made by rock crushing. Here's a Youtube video from a company in China which makes the machinery for that.[1]
An interesting comment from a company that sells used cone crushers: "Do you want equipment that is simple in design, easy to trouble-shoot and repair, and built to last? Or do you want equipment that uses high technology such as electronic sensors, computers, control consoles, and designed for high production but short useful life?"[2]
First, the article states that there's sand which can be safely taken from rivers, if it's taken from the right places.
Secondly, costs and prices matter (and are profoundly determinative in economics, especially absent effective regulatory mechanisms). The competition is already between opportunistic harvesting of sand from places in which it can result in tremendous harm, vs. managed and sustainable (even useful) dredging from elsewhere.
Thirdly, crushing rock itself takes energy (or transport to a location in which that energy is provided -- perhaps a river, or solar panels), plus capital equipment, which likely has a limited life (rock is tough stuff...). So: higher costs and complexity, and a much higher bar for entry, vs. locating a truck and a likely spot of riverbank from which to harvest sand.
Interesting refs for the used crushers, but I don't see cost or energy data.
