Shiny Techie Climate Plan The Latest Billionaire Must-Have; But Confront Big Oil? Heavens, No!

[hatrack]

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Elon Musk, founder of Tesla and one of the richest people in the world, has pledged $100m in prize money for technology that would best capture planet-heating carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Jeff Bezos, the Amazon founder who tops the global rich list, has vowed to give out $10bn to worthy climate initiatives. And Bill Gates, another multibillionaire and Microsoft co-founder, has recently released a book on how to drive emissions to zero. Together, the three men have an estimated wealth of $466bn and some of the biggest personal carbon footprints on the planet. They are also emblematic of a Davos-centric worldview that sees free markets and technological advancements as the answer to an existential emergency already upending the lives of millions of people.

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Climate campaigners have welcomed the interest and financial heft of the US’s wealthy elite following a year when record wildfires and hurricanes pummeled a country suffering the escalating consequences of global heating. But some also point out that the most vulnerable Americans could benefit right away from less glamorous interventions, such as more public green space and shade in cities to escape rising heat. “It’s great they are coming up with new ideas, but I think first and foremost we need to ensure communities affected first and worst are resilient, rather than picking up the pieces afterwards,” said Adrienne Hollis, an environmental justice campaigner at the Union of Concerned Scientists. “If you aren’t exposed to something that many poorer people and people of color are exposed to, you probably aren’t thinking about it as much.”

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The sight of one of the world’s largest and most powerful companies committing to climate action was welcomed by climate campaigners and has already proved influential with other businesses. Others, however, have highlighted the lack of detail in how Amazon will actually get to net zero emissions, while some of the company’s workers are unhappy that Bezos refused to sever contracts that provide cloud computing services to fossil fuel firms.

More broadly, the growing number of corporations making emissions reduction promises is offset by a lack of political muscle, according to Weihl. A recent report found that the US’s largest tech companies were spending comparatively very little on political lobbying. “Amazon was slow to get into the game but they are stepping up with the climate pledge,” said Weihl. “But these tech companies are letting big oil dominate the policy debate. Big oil is fighting hard to weaken and delay policy while most other companies are sitting on the sidelines rather than twisting arms. They need to lean in and make sure lawmakers know this is an existential issue.”

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https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/mar/25/elon-musk-climate-plan-reward-jeff-bezos-gates-investments

[Miguelito Loveless]

1. Musk had the audacity

to suggest in a letter to the UK government about two weeks ago, that they increase the sales tax on gasoline/diesel cars to offset the damage these cars actually do to human health and the environment. Two days later, with no warning, the UK government cut the EV subsidy 17% and changed the price cap so that Tesla's Model 3, the only Tesla EV eligible for the subsidy, no longer qualified.

The message was clear. Big oil owns the UK government, and will brook no challenge to that ownership.

[hatrack]

2. The same UK government now encouraging MORE N. Sea oil & gas drilling

But it's OK, 'cuz all those emissions will be captured by some technology that'll be deployed somewhere someday.

And let's not forget those non-binding zero-emission pledges for 2035, 2050, 2060 or whenever. We need only trust in the beneficent, caring people running the world's most powerful businesses and all will be well!

[Miguelito Loveless]

3. Someone was recently telling me that everything

would be fine, the UK is committed to Paris Climate Accords. I asked them to remind me about the enforcement mechanism. Last time I checked it wasn't even a pinkie swear.

[NNadir]

4. The reality is, like it or not, that any effort to address climate change while addressing human...

...development goals, which include the decline of poverty, will inherently involve the rapid scale up of (gasp) technology.

The scientific literature is rich with solutions; I spend a lot of time tracking them.

This said, the engineering challenges are vast; even the best of these solutions stand at the edge of feasibility and quixotic daydreaming. Engineering is scientific knowledge applied to meeting human goals. We now need engineering more than anything else, and I'm not talking about engineering huge steel hauling diesel trucks running behind bulldozers and guys with chain saws.

I fully recognize that for the time being, quixotic daydreaming has won the day, but this said as my own life draws inevitably toward its end, I am feeling rising faith in the rising generations. They simply will not accept rhetorical fantasies that do not work. They're smarter than we were.

To the extent that billionaires throw their money at engineers as a hobby, it's not a total negative. While I think that Elon Musk is a tiresome fool whose car for millionaires and billionaires certainly impedes human development goals, I rather feel inclined to trust the intentions of Mr. Gates.

As for the Guardian, people in glass houses should not throw bricks. Many times they produce articles that prove that you cannot get a degree in journalism if you have passed a college level science course.

The best way to eliminate "big oil" is to make it go the way of the Western Union telegram. This is feasible, not popular, but feasible.

If we want to know who is behind climate change, a mirror would certainly prove a useful tool.

[hatrack]

5. And every week, every month, every year, atmospheric carbon Keeps. Going. Up.

You're entirely correct that there are far worse uses for the MuskBezosGates fortune than spending a slice of it on potential technological fixes. You're also correct nothing is going to change without investing in applied science - on a scale that we've never even thought of doing before.

Meanwhile, we're already over 418 ppm for a number of daily readings for March, and we've still got a good six weeks to go before the seasonal peak.

Meanwhile, AWS continues to provide massive computing power to the oil & gas industry for even more development of a resource we can no longer afford to use if we're even remotely serious about retaining some sort of predictable climate in 2050 or 2100.

Meanwhile, over the past five years, the 60 biggest banks in the world loaned a grand total of approximately $3.8 trillion for oil, coal and gas developments, and China has another 700+ GW of coal power either planned or already under construction, and Russia is touting the benefits of the Northern Sea Route (New January Grand Opening Sale!) in wake of the Suez cock-up.

Amazon can trumpet their plans to buy electric delivery trucks by 2025, or 2030, or whenever, but I have yet to figure out who's going to buy them. Their "independent contractor" drivers busting their humps to make $10/hour after taxes and expenses? Their warehouse workers? Maybe their public relations team?

We don't have time for vaporware anymore. We don't have time, period. Every part per million is another 2.13 billion tons of carbon that has to go somewhere - mostly the ocean to date, and that won't be for much longer. Even the emissions "gains" produced by COVID at a horrific cost in lives, careers and treasure were fleeting, swept aside as we eagerly move to get "back to normal".

So, 420+ ppm this May, 423+ ppm May 2022, 426+ ppm May 2023, and so on while at least a third of the citizens of this nation fight tooth and nail against the idea of even trying to move from Kubler-Ross 1 to Kubler-Ross 2, aided and abetted by an entire political and financial apparatus at least as eager to avoid any change whatsoever.

Maybe you're right. Maybe the incoming generation, with increasingly less to lose and a lower tolerance for bullshit, can drive the process to where it needs to be. I'm not so sure, given the human capacity for creating hope out of whole cloth, to say nothing of our infinite distractibility. And what will remain? My best guess is that it will be a permanently diminished and mutilated world, with little space for anything but us, our stuff, our pets, our livestock, our crops and our waste.

I sincerely hope that's not the case, but I've seen very little to indicate that the kind of change you're talking about is on the horizon.

[NNadir]

6. I'm not here to defend Amazon and in my posts elsewhere on DU...

...and even here I've thoroughly ridiculed the idea of electric vehicles - Amazon's putative electric trucks or Musk's cars for the oblivious - as even remotely relevant to the deep reality.

I simply know, having convinced myself with very, very, very, very detailed study of the literature, that none of this has to be so.

At the end of the day, it's really not about big bad guys in some unearthly powerful and nebulous infrastructure dedicated to destruction via greed and libertarian mega-capitalism.

It's about us, all of us. We seem to feel if we chant the same things over and over and over and over and over it will make a difference.

I've been here nearly 20 years; I've seen very little willingness among us to stop what many of us were repeating 20 years ago, here. What we believed in so strongly has failed. We also threw trillions of dollars at solar and wind energy in this century. If it were all about money, that would have done something, wouldn't it? Besides amazon trucks, there are also trucks hauling solar cells, and stuff to make solar cells, and fuels burned to give the heat to make them and mines to dig copper to connect all this stuff, and 18 wheelers to haul coal derived steel wind turbine posts over asphalt access roads bulldozed into wilderness, aren't there? More than ever I think.

We are not even close to thinking clearly, those of us, this generation that still clings to power like senile emperors.

I hear all kinds of bullshit right here at DU about what is "too expensive" as if climate change is cheap, and what is "too dangerous" as if climate change is absolutely safe.

Some of what is said here often sounds like things drooled and dribbled all over the pages of "The Fountainhead" and "Atlas Shrugged."

My generation was a celebrant of selective attention, embedded in delusional claims of self declared ethical purity even as it conducted an orgy of blank consumption and sybaritic celebration of narcotic indulgence, thrown in with rigid conservative dogma chanted like sacrosanct mantras.

I'm fairly certain we'll see 420 ppm this year, less than ten years after we first saw 400, and I'm aware that the laws of thermodynamics require that we must produce more energy to remove this carbon dioxide than we recovered in the act of burning the fuels that put it there.

This said, I know it is at least feasible to do it. It is feasible to remove this carbon. It won't be done easily or cheaply, it won't be done with whirligigs and glass coated with dubious and often toxic semiconductors, but it can be done. Again, it's feasible, not more than that, but not less than that either.

These kids coming up will have little choice but to engage in sober clear analysis. Just as great Presidents in this country follow disastrous ones, so it is with great generations. My generation was the James Buchanan of generations, and it's no accident that we produced the likes of George W. Bush and Donald Trump.

Still...still...

...as I discussed with my wife over breakfast this weekend, the origin of the renaissance was arguably the black plague...

Human beings are at their best when things are difficult and seem impossible, and worst when things are easy.

Computing power is now a cheap commodity and many problems that only a short time ago were intractable can now addressed at unbelievable speed. It's not only the dangerous fossil fuel industry that has this access. I visited my son a week or so ago. He was running a modeling program on his laptop that 20 years ago would have required a "super computer." He wasn't studying oil or gas or coal.

These kids are powerful, and as we have let them down, and saddled them with disaster, and tied them down with the illusion of despair and hopelessness, they will rise, and they will succeed, once they learn to flex their muscles and recognize their strength.

I don't see this view as something as platitudinous "hope." I see it as something inevitable. In spite of it all, I still believe in the human race.