The only realistic solution to carbon removal is massive government investment, like most other major Silicon Valley core technologies. We need the Green New Deal. Anything less is posturing. I would even go so far as to say that on an issue of this importance, where we have maybe a decade left to turn the tide, giving the impression that private enterprise can solve it is irresponsible.
Put those donations into GND activism — it’s a political problem.
I'm an energy investor (primarily focused on renewables), and I couldn't disagree more. I could go on an on with examples of how government intervention has created busts across the renewables space for the past 20 years, and has thrown down the drain billions of tax payer money. I'd like to keep governments out of something that works without them.
My god this is an irresponsible comment. Where to begin? First, it fundamentally misunderstands the history of Silicon Valley tech development, which has been primarily funded by government institutions such as DARPA at its core. This is true for sustainable energy as well — it is federally funded research that is advancing solar panel efficiency, for example.[1]
Second, you have a profit motive to rewrite this narrative and position private tech investors as the key innovation enablers. This happens all the time. The reality is the VC industry cherry picks the fruit that DARPA and related agencies invest in or sustain through government procurement. It takes billions over decades of failures to produce something that can be brought to market, and it’s done at taxpayer expense. The profits are privatized.
I say it is irresponsible in this case because we are literally facing the doom of our planet. This is not time to screw around with easily disproven self-aggrandizing Liberterian narratives that would detract from the political activism we need to solve this problem. We must understand how our system really works if we hope to save ourselves.
It almost certainly doesnt though, and your personal experience over the last two decades or whatever probably means squat.
If the US government is/was capable of succeeding with the Manhattan and Apollo projects, there's no reason to believe that the same wouldn't be true of similar gargantuan efforts today.
I'm not saying that the US can solve AGCC by itself, but I am saying that uncoordinated efforts by loosely coupled private entities cannot.
FWIW, the grandparent's industry specific knowledge is in investment into developing renewable energy companies. This isn't very applicable to the article or problem at hand.
> since when do you have to be vetted/credentialed to participate in a discussion here
Since they're using their credentials to try and lend credulity to their argument. Specifically, it's an "appeal to [their] authority" on the subject, but they don't have that requisite 'authority'.
Since when is providing some background about your experience considered a negative? You should try to be a bit more generous and not assume, on almost non-existent evidence, that someone is being disingenuous.
Government investment is essentially a form of planned economy. There's lots of examples of that not working so well.
I'd argue that the most effective solution is a carbon tax, applied on any carbon which leaves the ground. That would create incredibly strong market conditions for energy saving technologies, and provide a big cost advantage to renewable energy.
We know that pricing effects consumer behaviour. The oil price increases of the 70s and late 2000s reduced miles driven and changed car buying behaviour.
When the right conditions in the market exist, the rate of development will be so much faster than any inefficient direct investment program every will.
The politicians pushing the GND do not care about climate change.
We need a clean bill that only reduces or outright zeros net carbon output, including carbon generated from imports and exports.
It's no good if we just export pollution somewhere else.
The Green New Deal is not that bill.
It is packed with a massive pile of changes to healthcare, finance, and labor laws which are totally unrelated to addressing carbon emissions. Not to mention the call for Venezuela-style nationalization.
That's a non-starter, and rightly so.
If you can't put aside power-grabs and partisan politics to tackle climate change, then you clearly do not care about fixing climate change.
If the GND passes, the important-to-humans part (carbon) will go to the back of the political bus, and the important-to-the-oligarchs part (more power! more money!) will be put in the drivers' seat.
That’s a failed theory. This is what happens when you try to address carbon output without looking at healthcare, finance, labor laws and the impacts on the working class:
It failed. We have to approach this as a complex sociopolitical problem and it will likely require some broader changes to our 200 plus year old economic system.
(And did you say you think GND calls for more power to oligarchs? That’s a weird take.)
The first line of your linked Wikipedia article[1] reads:
> "The yellow vests movement or yellow jackets movement (French: Mouvement des gilets jaunes, pronounced [muvmɑ̃ de ʒilɛ ʒon]) is a populist,[64] grassroots[65] protest movement for economic justice[66]"
The goals listed for the movement, also from that article:
> Increase in the French minimum wage[37], End to austerity measures[38], Improved standard of living[38], Government transparency and accountability[38], Improved government services for rural areas[38], and Constitutional proposal for Citizens' initiative referendum, including constitutional, legislative, abrogative, and recall initiatives[39]
The words "climate change" appear once in the entire article.
Looks to me like climate change was told to sit at the back of the political bus.
You misunderstand. The protest was over environmentally-motivated taxes on fuel which didn’t take into account the impacts on the working class. It was the tax strategy that failed. This was a direct lesson for the crafting of the GND. We must also uplift and include the working class in the economic transformation we must undergo.
It seems pretty unlikely that a very specific bundle of proposed legislation is the only way to address climate change. Are all other countries doomed to failure because they don't have the Green New Deal?
There are similar efforts in other countries, e.g. the European Green Deal.[1] And yes, we are all doomed without massive government intervention and mass mobilization in the next few years.
> It seems pretty unlikely that a very specific bundle of proposed legislation is the only way to address climate change. Are all other countries doomed to failure because they don't have the Green New Deal?
GND is not the only way to address it, but it definitely seems like the most politically palatable option right now inside the US. In terms of options that will have an actual impact and are also legislatively achievable, GND seems to be it. It also doesn't really "address" it so much as slow it.
Other countries HAVE already passed legislation and have taken substantive action, so they would not need to pass a GND. Though the ones that haven't passed anything would need to figure out what they can do that is palatable, yes. The US hasn't, and lately has been rolling back rules and regulations such that we're moving in the opposite direction.
Not because of not having a GND, but if the US doesn't take drastic measures soon, yes all other countries are doomed.
Because the US alone is the 2nd biggest contributor to carbon emissions in the world, and probably the only country that can make China (the 1st carbon emitter) cut theirs.
I agree that it's important to take lots of action on climate change as soon as possible. That's why it seems counterproductive to tell a company they should stop taking direct action and start promoting the Green New Deal. It's too urgent of a problem to insist that only people with a particular political stance should help.
Maybe the specifics of the Green New Deal are getting lost in translation here? The package isn't just about climate change; like its namesake, the Green New Deal includes provisions about labor rights, education, healthcare, etc. Not everyone who wants to address climate change will necessarily agree with the Green New Deal proponents on those other problems. (And that glosses over a lot of disagreement even on climate change - for example, the Green New Deal doesn't include nuclear power which many people feel is essential.)
You are completely right. If individuals and companies can contribute in any way possible that's great. Personally I don't care if it's the GND or whatever, but the government needs to take climate change very very seriously.
The only meaningful direct action here with a hope of saving the planet is large scale government intervention and the mass mobilization needed to bring it forth. You may have disagreements with the specifics but it is false to suggest that there is some apolitical path to turning around 200 years of an economic logic that got us here, inside of 10 years. It is also misleading to imply that what SV companies like this are doing is apolitical: they very much want to market a message that private enterprise can solve this, we don’t need too much government, Capitalism is both a cause and a savior, etc. The silence and obstructionism here on govt intervention is dangerous and telling.
For the past couple decades Silicon Valley has sort of gotten away with marketing this idea of the private entrepreneur ushering forth technological change and erased the absolutely foundational role of federal funding. Because if you recognize the role of the taxpayer then maybe people start questioning whether all the profits should be privatized. That’s an existential threat. What you’re seeing here is not apolitical — it is an attempt to offer a private enterprise answer to the GND. Because you’re right, the GND recognizes that you can’t fix climate without also fixing broader social and economic issues that got us here. You can’t just tax gas without uplifting working class people that would be devastated by it. More people will realize the role the govt plays in tech and that it’s not just Elon Musks (who actually specializes in bringing fed funded tech to market like space flight and autonomous vehicles). The GND would actually provide a lot of opportunities for private enterprise but it would undoubtably diminish some of the SV VC community mythology.
I guess I'm not sure what to tell you here. If we can't figure out a way to address climate change without dragging in all these other controversial issues, I don't think we'll be able to address it.
Sadly I think far too many people will not evaluate the Green New Deal on it's actual merits and instead write it off because Bernie Sanders, AOC, and others have written/supported it. The strife and division we are seeing in the US will be a significant impact to climate action. We've already seen its impact on something as simple as mask wearing becoming politicized and difficult to coordinate on.
I can only hope that those driving the division (older people) will be dead soon, so that the younger generations who are by and large more eco-friendly can get on with the difficult work that needs to be done.
Its past time for the old, rotten way of thinking to be plowed under.
What an arrogant statement. When old and young disagree on a political issue, you assume the old are wrong? Why? Is there some fact they don't know? Have they not thought through all the correct chains of causation, whereas you have? Of course not. They might turn out to be right. You can't assume you're right just because all your peers agree with you and the outsider group is wrong because that's not the group you belong to.
I know a child who's afraid of climate change. Not in a political way but afraid of drowning in high sea water or her house being destroyed by the weather or something like that. Her grandmother reassured her that it's all blown out of proportion and people will manage to cope just fine. Who's right - old or young? Don't pretend you know the answer because you don't. Nobody does.
Or maybe I'm completely right and you're just making ad hominem attacks because you can't deal with the fact that there are people who rightfully fear that the basic underpinnings of life are being threatened? Can i ask how old you are? Because in my experience, age correlates strongly with a tendency to look inward towards oneself rather than outwards towards the problems in the world.
You seem threatened by pessimism. I see it as a tool.
Yeah, it's a class conflict and class/wealth is correlated with age. Bernie (who is old last I checked) being one of the biggest supporters gives the lie to this.
I think the split is among party lines. The closer to the political right you go the more resistance against solutions of climate change you're going to see at any age group. Trump is pretty much the poster child but not because he is old, it's simply because he is a republican.
The average age of congressional representatives is roughly 60, and has been creeping up for 40 years. Im not sure how to not analyze that as a problem with ideological stagnation.
Additionally, people from younger generations never experienced the relative boom period of the 50s and 60s so there's not as much dogmatic inertia there.
The interests opposed to actual change are the oil+coal industry most obviously, but also the rich more generally who are opposed to the redistribution which is necessary to make real climate action politically viable. (We will need to reduce certain forms of carbon-intensive production, and without wealth redistribution to compensate for that, the resulting society will be unstable.)
Unfortunately we can't wait for the coal industry or the rich to die, they reproduce themselves.
There are also people, like myself, who just don't like the negativity of it all. We want progress and not regression but are told to use less of this, do less of that, ban this, ban that. But most importantly, stop looking forward to a brighter future for humanity. We should move backwards, not forwards. Destroy what we've created and make the future worse than the present because good things are bad, like puritanism. For optimistic people, this is just painful. For hopeless aimless people, it might give them a sense of something to fight for.
Totally agree. That’s the idea the Green New Deal tries to articulate. The book “A Planet to Win”[0] describes a detailed vision of how we can come out of a transition off fossil fuels as a stronger, more prosperous society. To quote some reviews
“the tone of the book is urgent and pragmatic. It's also refreshingly optimistic and future-oriented, filled with specific ideas.... Their portrait of a planet transformed by the [Green New Deal] is designed to spark that effort."
And "its optimism is inspiring....The authors’ battle-ready tone on this score breaks with the often moralistic and soul-searching mode of some of the higher-profile climate books of the last few years."
Put those donations into GND activism — it’s a political problem.