I'm halfway through the book. That opening bit is so great, and the rest has been a big letdown so far. Really feels like that opening was written as a short story and then the rest of the book was just tacked on. Maybe the second half will be better.
It doesn’t. I appreciate that the author wants to tackle big themes, but there was so much hand-waiving and wishful thinking about how people want to live and choose to live that it really undermined the plausibility of the plot.
I did appreciate some details, like the idea of airships for long distance leisure travel and large swaths of land being returned to wilderness. But overall it didn’t live up to the hype.
Having read a number of KSR books, I admire the creativity, but find some ideas a bit half-baked. The characters and storytelling are generally a bit lacking in depth and development as well.
Consider reading Walkaway by Cory Doctorow if you haven't. Excellent book - I haven't read the one you're talking about but from what you mention I think it deals in similar themes
That's disappointing. I had similar issues with The Mars Trilogy. I've yet to finish the last book, and the middle book took a long time to slog through.
Not relevant to the general topic, but, from that article, TIL Pakistan has a city named Jacobabad (cf. Islamabad), which was indeed named after a (British) Jacob.
I read the opening chapter while sitting in my 95°F bedroom in the middle of Seattle's record heatwave. This certainly made for a viscerally impactful reading experience, but not necessarily one I would recommend.
kim stanely robinson? i remember aurora completely shattering my views on what it might mean to send humans to try and live on other planets. will try to get this one from the library
Yes. It felt a little unrealistic IMO but it does describe throughout the story many different solutions that are more and less effective / politically attainable.
One of the things the article horribly fails to even mention is that when resources are scarce, people don't just sit there patiently and go into a physiological breakdown. Not at all. People get up and fight. When the bottom layer of Maslow's hierarchy isn't met, all civility goes out the window and violence breaks out, as people fight for what resources are left.
From the Wikipedia article about what ACTUALLY happened in 2019:
"Conflicts over access to water have also occurred throughout India. On 7 June, six people were stabbed in Jharkhand during a fight near a water tanker, and one man was killed in a similar fight in Tamil Nadu. In Madhya Pradesh on 5 June, a fight over water led to two men being "seriously injured", while in a separate fight a day earlier, a water tanker driver was "beaten up"."
I'm sure there were numerous other instances not in the news.
> One of the things the article horribly fails to even mention is that when resources are scarce, people don't just sit there patiently and go into a physiological breakdown. Not at all. People get up and fight. When the bottom layer of Maslow's hierarchy isn't met, all civility goes out the window and violence breaks out, as people fight for what resources are left.
Sometimes. And sometimes they don't. Groups that don't are often far more successful. Fiction betrays us into thinking most humans are evil when facing adversity. It's not really true.
Reflective roofs combined with radiative cooling/night sky cooling is one of the most cost effective way to reduce heat indoors. Along with that, India needs to start mandating energy efficiency standards for new construction. Insulation is extremely poor for most houses, leading to very energy intensive cooling requirements in the summer months.
Ancient Indian architects already knew how to passively cool buildings - pools of water or stepwells at the base of the building (https://edition.cnn.com/2012/02/28/world/asia/ancient-air-co...). It was used in Jaipur, Rajasthan but may not be that effective in humid Chennai, however.
This piece is written as if it's covering the event in 2041 as it unfolds, so I read that as just a fictional projection based on what this writer thinks could be in the cards.
This tracks with the general tone I get from the Economist's (excellent) climate coverage: unconvinced we'll get where we need to be quickly enough to achieve the best case climate scenarios, but optimistic that we will eventually hit more of a medium-case scenario, and therefore may need some interim solutions (they often allude to geo-engineering) to bridge that gap.
Most countries had pledged to reach net zero by 2050, China at least said to reach net zero by 2060, with few exceptions. Of course, it must be achieved.
But net-zero carbon emissions means that till that year, the GHG will keep accumulating, the carbon cycle is slow enough to not significantly reduce the amount that you have in the atmosphere for decades.
So the problem won't be solved that year, nor 10 years after that goal is achieved, but when GHG are finally below of pre-industrial levels (I don't know, near half of what is it now) so we lose more heat than what we keep.
All the way till that point, the global yearly average temperature should be rising. And extreme weather events will continue to pile up.
And, of course, net zero doesn't take into account the positive feedback loops that either emit more GHG or rise global temperature.
I feel a bit overoptimistic that article. Or that they try to push that solution tried by Hyderabad as a magic wand (or a cash cow).
Pledges for things that will happen after a politician dies are even more meaningless than pledges made before an election. Zero value should be attached to them.
The only thing that matters are actions that are happening now which is... not very much.
It is what we have. A president could discard all pledges as Trump demonstrated during his mandate.
Maybe different kinds of governments, with less variation of ruling parties (China, Russia) or broad agreements in their political systems (EU?) may keep their promises in this topic.
So, the effect of all excess CO2 put in the atmosphere in 2050 will have an impact between 2065 and 2070 (roughly). The atmospheric CO2 "half life" is more than a 100 year.
I don't have access to this article so I'm not 100% sure, but at a guess they mean "many nations have made public claims that they plan to target reaching net-zero by around <some date>"
To my knowledge, carbon emissions are still increasing every year, and increasing in their rate of increase every year. I would love to be wrong.
I would also assume that there are still billions of people around the world aspiring to live lifestyles like people in the US/Western Europe, so absent the development of an energy source comparable to the convenience and low price of fossil fuels, any slack in demand from US/Western Europe will be picked up by the poorer billions.
I'm at least hopefully because this one appears longer (~9 years; if you count 2012-2019; most of the other drops were shorter and seem to be tied to major economic events - the 73 and 79 oil crises, fall of the Soviet Union in 91 and subsequent recession in Eastern Europe, and the great recession in 2009.
Seeing an apparent flattening in a period of major economic growth is really encouraging.
That sounds insane to me. You'd need a large carbon sequestration program running, which means you'd need to be producing enough clean energy to supply all human needs and sequester the carbon.
Sounds pessimistic to me. I think we can make it there earlier. Don’t underestimate technology, the solutions to carbon sequestration and clean energy are getting exponentially better each year.
There are identical stories to write about onshore wind, offshore wind, and lithium ion batteries. This summer has seen a huge number of new storage chemistries announced from startups with skin in the game and experienced management that will close the gap for longer term storage.
The most optimistic prediction for renewables were too pessimistic. It's likely that we are still in the same situation today, and not nearly enough people are predicting the future accurately by short-changing new tech.
There probably aren't too many people on HN these days that remember computer tech in the 80s and 90s, but it had far fewer doubters, and didn't have an industry dedicated to creating a propaganda cloud about how awful computers are. And still, the internet and computers are far more advanced and penetrant into everyday life in ways almost nobody anticipated.
The renewables revolution will likely be as big. We will have more cheaper energy accessible to us than ever before. This may be enough to jump to a new stage of technological development.
There's a lot of stuff that you simply can't prevent from emitting CO2, for example various chemical processes, and other applications like air travel where fossil fuels are simply too much better than alternatives. True zero emissions is not a realistic goal. But net zero emissions is much more reasonable - you can still use carbon where you need it, you just need to make up for it.
Growth in wind and solar production is really really high, we are roughly on course to produce enough electricity for current needs by 2035 entirely from clean resources.
We could expand production even more, but private producers would probably need some guaranteed buyers for that expanded future production.
Fossil energy is on its last legs. The question is not if it will be phased out by 2050, but how many more years of new fossil fuel infrastructure we let FF companies invest in before banks stop backing it entirely. Already, large institutional investors and banks are demanding changes. It's only crony capitalism that allows for new extraction, and this will end up hurting share holders in the long run. FF companies are already taking our loans to pay dividends, so as not to spook investors. The future is clear.
Africa and other places will skip over thermal fossil fuel electricity generation, just as they skipped over sites telephones to cellular networks. Micro grids and batteries will be far cheaper to deploy than large transmission lines and large central generation.
As for carbon dioxide removal, we will probably have to start that in the 2040s, but the best tech is not yet clear. You are right that trees are insufficient, and recent fires are showing that forests can by carbon sources in addition to climate sinks. (I believe that Canada's "managed forests" have become net carbon sources this year, for example.)
I don't think this passes the usual concerns around base load, local energy needs vs. overall network totals, and storage capacity for nighttime use. Maybe that's ok. Maybe we just get a ton of solar and what we can't do in batteries we just funnel into carbon sequestration. And at night we just turn off the lights unless it's an emergency or high priority task.
But I have my doubts that this is likely to play out...
It's likely that we will have a ton of excess capacity because solar is so cheap.
These are all solvable problems. Christopher Clack has been doing global optimizations for renewable grids for a long time, and finds that lots of upgrades to the distribution grid today, along with additions of storage and distributed solar, is a surprising cost optimal route.
People always doubt the new, but it's really hard to prove that it's not possible. And once it's done, it will seem obvious in retrospect.
India will a bigger problem much sooner, there is less snow melt from the mountains. The great rivers have less water and it is occuring now. Add a bad heatwave and C19 will look a normal flu season.
Whitley Strieber wrote a similar kind of fictional warning about Denver’s air quality in the opening chapter of Nature’s End back in the 80s. Thousands of people in 2019 die over a few days from a black smog event. It’s part of a story where humans are headed for extinction because they have killed off most of the forests and badly polluted the air and ground. It’s an apocalyptic story from the the late 80s worry over deforestation, acid rain and over population. But it does predict serious wildfires rather well.
It doesn't. It pontificated, not predict. Predictions say "this, and only this, can and will happen". Fictional pontification says "this is one of the millions of things that might happen, let's have a look at how one of another million ways it can play out, plays out."
The difference between the two couldn't be bigger.
What is the status of abiltity to predict these heat waves? YoY extrapolation that can be managed via policy, a few weeks of heads up from meteorlogic predictions, or sudden onset like a natural disaster that leads to mass casualty event with no warning?
What is a bit tiring is that we already have quite a good solution for a lot of it (for the jobs most people on HN have): internet. The fact that a lot of people (even here) want to travel to offices is frustrating. Stay home, work from home, walk or cycle to get groceries (I cry when I see people taking the car to get an egg, yes 1 egg, from a shop 1km away, what is that?). The only thing in the way is your own resistance, but that is very high... For reasons I myself never understood. Understand and accept that the new communication is digital and no longer in person and that it is healthier, in every single way (meaning for you and the world), to walk or cycle everywhere.
Decarbonize as soon as you can. If you own a house, add rooftop solar. It can be financed pretty easily these days. If you have extra spending power, give money to Climeworks or Carbon Engineering. Tradewater might be even better bang for your buck.
Consider changing your career path to work on climate issues.
Invest in moonshot ideas like sustainable fuel, small-scale nuclear, fusion, etc.
Get involved locally. Set a good example, and help others follow your lead.
All those are good examples, especially for HN readers who can leverage their work experience and investment portfolio. I’ve done that with the mindset that if those investment don’t work, I wouldn’t have a world where to retire so those are sound either way.
I'll add, at a personal level:
* promote remote work: commutes are an astounding part of the carbon footprint, and unlike a warm home and diverse food, often not that enjoyable; this is the one where you can influence your colleagues the most: if you are at home, why would _they_ go to the office have a meeting with you?
* set-up a heat pump, preferably a ground-based one, if you have a heating bill; isolate your house better either way, have horizontal shades to block Summer but not Winter sun;
* eating less red meat and dairy — once a week, once a month; I’m no vegan and I’ll gladly share a Porterhouse with you for either of our birthday, but in the Wednesday bolognese, plant-based substitute are fine;
* travel less far, by train if you can.
There’s more you could do, like recycling, but if you check, the impact of those is minor for now or at least, your ability to encourage those as a consumer isn’t great. Running a personalised carbon estimation is a good exercise to see what’s your most impactful effort.
> If you own a house, add rooftop solar. It can be financed pretty easily these days.
Before you do that, check where and how your power is generated. You might never break even (carbon-wise) on your solar roof.
If your energy is already clean, gas heating and electric cars are the way to go. EVs are getting better and better, especially if you have two cars, check if one of them isn't only used to make small sub 100 miles trips.
I think there's a case to be made for rooftop solar even when your local power generation is green. The reason is that the grid is a distribution network. By lowering demand on local generators, you're lowering the relative price of green energy across the grid.
This might have worked twenty years ago, had we as a society done anything. But it is too late for that now. Since we put off doing anything, it is now going to be much harder to solve the problem. Eating any beef at all now is immoral.
A roundtrip flight from LA to NY releases 1.1 CO2 tons. A sustainable carbon budget is somewhere between 1.5 and 2.5 CO2 tons / year / capita. [edit]Among many other creature comforts[/edit], mass aviation simply has to go. No more vacations in Thailand. No more Thanksgiving family visits. No more business trips. No more tech conventions. No more scientific conferences.
Harder, we must learn to let go across all sectors of the economy, for all countries, for all society strata.
Action follows desire. As a species, we must shift the conceptualization of the world from globalism to localism. Return to the world view of people living in 1900 or before.
The average individual view of the world must stop 100 miles from the place he/she was born. As a New Yorker, seeing an image filled with beaches and palm trees advertising Cabo vacations should raise the same level of revulsion as an image filled with vast open spaces and wild horses advertising for Marlboro cigarettes.
Aviation is also a sector where emissions are pretty much unavoidable (long distance electric flight is untenable), and offsetting emissions is the only path forward. Drawing a line and restricting aviation can't work: think of all the important connections, collaborations, business deals, etc that require aviation. One might argue they aren't needed, but such restrictions will reduce the rate of progress/innovation, which is a necessary prerequisite for climate change action. A new solar cell (for example) will not be developed in isolation.
The fact that governments don't mandate carbon offsets for aviation at this stage is appalling though. Trivial to do relative to the impact and doesn't really raise ticket prices a whole lot.
Governments forcing action will not work. Or maybe it will but indirectly: people will revolt, chaos will ensue and economic activity will drop like a rock. For example flying will become too unpredictable.
Assuming we want to preserve some semblance of social order, the task ahead is to downsize our intimate desires and expectations of the world.
For things like gas in cars, I’d agree with you: making electric cheaper is the way. But aviation is seen as a luxury and a corporate expense, not something for which people would go to the mat. Even the most authority-defying actors have exemplar record on safety (flying, on-board behaviour and identity checks); it’s an international body by construction.
As long as a tax or a compensation program is announced in time, fair, uniform, rational and effective, they won’t have the political power to oppose it. You can encourage research and development of electric planes: it’s unclear if it will make sense for larger, or longer distance, but politically, encouraging a shift in technology is a better message than banning, or discouraging flying altogether.
If you demand it now, after 18 months of near bankruptcy, many companies will go down (which could be the goal, but I’m not sure that’s the easy way to put it) but if you make the impact on ticket prices progressive in time and clear, I’m not seeing anyone in the street — other than pilots and attendants, and they’ll find a new job.
This is like those Californian appeals to shower less to save water, when some ridiculous majority of water use comes from irresponsible agriculture. You can tell they are bullshit, and as a result through a 'crying wolf' effect they weaken the power of better informed calls to action.
Aviation contributes a relatively small amount of emissions in the transportation sector, which in turn also contributes about 1/4. So why does it have to go? Why not attack the actual big problems first? That would be passenger vehicles and medium/large trucks. I am pretty encouraged by where the industry is going so far, even if the trucking sector is not as far ahead as the passenger cars seem to be.
> Harder, we must learn to let go across all sectors of the economy, for all countries, for all society strata.
I fully appreciate your frustration. I have a similar reaction when I hear cycling being proposed as a solution, with one difference: flying is largely an optional luxury, driving to work is not.
As an individual, flying roundtrip once from LA to NY, is sufficient to eat up about half the CO2 budget for the year. That is too much in itself. It does not mean that there mustn't be deep cuts everywhere else too. Americans, and especially well off Americans like the ones I expect populate HN, fly around without even thinking of the costs.
Therein lies the immensity of the task ahead: nobody is willing to give up their creature comforts. Not even relative luxuries like the vacation in Cabo. No, we rationalize our inaction by pretending the problem will solve by itself, via some futuristic tehno wand: carbon capture, fusion, solar power, anything but downsizing our expectations and desires.
For anyone who flies, aviation is a huge fraction of their personal emissions. It isn't about "targeting aviation." Just any individual (who isn't an anarchist) should reduce their flying. But as you say, they should also reduce their emissions from ground transportation.
Beyond the personal, on the broader political scale, I also don't know that targeting any particular thing makes sense. All emissions, from all contributors, need to fall. Something like a carbon tax would cleanly attack the least efficient carbon emitters first.
> Action follows desire. As a species, we must shift the conceptualization of the world from globalism to localism. Return to the world view of people living in 1900 or before.
Ouch. Lots of one way tickets for anyone who isn't white in Europe or America.
This is the dumbest thing I've read today. It's noble, but just completely and utterly unachievable. Most people would choose the global warming over not seeing family for Thanksgiving or not being allowed to travel over 100 miles.
I believe that a lot of people did opt for a video-conference family events in the last 18 months. That was to prevent millions from dying.
I don’t know how many people you or everyone expect will die from global warming, but I believe that the number is some orders of magnitude around millions; I also believe that the estimated impact in people’s mind will consistently go up, and that more people will opt to make remote family function more common — of use trains, electric cars and boats to travel.
I anyone had told me, two years ago, that my elderly and technophobe mother would have an informed discussion about which VC technology to use for us to attend my brother’s wedding, I’d be dismissive (maybe not insulting) too: she barely understood that FaceTime and Facebook are not the same thing. But after her mother’s funeral on Zoom, and her nephew’s wedding on Hopin and her being asked to help film christening because she became her parish tech expert… Things have changed.
The easy answer is to point to some of the myriad things one can do. Aviation has perhaps the biggest bang for the buck, easy to unilaterally give up and with quantifiable significant impacts. And yet, utterly insufficient by itself.
The hard answer is that we need to downsize our expectations by an order of magnitude.
People have been incredibly more ignorant in the past, it's the power brokers and influencers (wealth, media, political class, etc) that guided the unwashed masses to at least somewhat expedient futures previously, but who now seem to have either vacated their responsibility / succumbed to greed or short-term thinking or alternatively some breakdown of systems of power and democracy because of technology or legal changes and their effect on media, fragmentation of public knowledge, erosion of institutions, etc.
On a very real level, we have better technology, more people learning greater chunks of knowledge, higher literacy rates, etc. than we did in the 1700s or 1800s or 1900s, so you can't blame widespread ignorance alone.
Stopped reading when it imagined for a southern India heat wave in 2041 a temperature lower than has already been hit this year for three consecutive days in Canada.
If you'd actually bothered to read it, this paragraph explains the difference:
The real killer in Chennai is the humidity. The combined measure of heat and humidity in air is the “wet-bulb temperature”—the lowest temperature to which something can be cooled through evaporation from its surface. In dry air, even at temperatures well above 37°C—human body temperature—people can sweat to cool down. But at wet-bulb temperatures of 32°C and higher, “it becomes unsafe to perform most physical labour,” says Moetasim Ashfaq, an atmospheric physicist at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. Few people can survive a wet-bulb temperature above 35°C. In the past decade, wet-bulb temperatures in Chennai have regularly risen above 32°C. But for much of the past week, wet-bulb temperatures have repeatedly crossed 36°C—a fatal level.
230 people died of heat related causes in British Columbia recently. 230. In 2021. So for an article about India, leading off with lower temperatures (including effective temperatures taking humidity into account) all the way out in 2041 and only 11 deaths (versus the 230 in one week alone already this year in British Columbia for god’s sake) is just plain silly and does not show how serious the problem really is. They really think it’s going to take until 2041 to get serious?? We are already there now, today, this year. And the death counts are way higher, even for a northerly temperate region.
Heat index or humidex is not the same as wet bulb temperature. You still fail to see this. A wet bulb of 32°C is equivalent to a heat index of 55°C. I can’t find anything to indicate the recent heat wave in British Columbia was even above 50°C humidex (highest I can find is 46°C humidex). The Canadian humidex record appears to be 52°C. So, again: the wet bulb temperature described in the article is higher than any Canada has seen.
Don’t get me wrong, I do appreciate you geeking out on this. But the fact is,
230 dead from heat in BC is
a lot more striking than the described imagined relatively tame scenario from 20 years in the future.
Another way to say it is if we are already seeing this in Canada in 2021, the reality in southern India in 2041 is going to be a helluva lot worse than the article portrays.
But…the article doesn’t describe a more tame scenario. You really just seem to have completely misread it. You say it imagines “only 11 deaths” but it’s talking about just people waiting to get into one hospital, not the wider area or impact. If you bothered to read on you’d see the actual imagined death numbers are in the tens of thousands.
Please read the article before commenting falsehoods about it. You claimed the imagined temperature was lower (it’s not). You claimed the imagined deaths are lower (they’re not).
Wet bulb temperature (which is discussed in the article) is usually very different from the dry bulb (conventional “air temperature”). Do not conflate the two.
I highly recommend it if this stuff scares you, and you need a little climate hope.