cars are not exactly a success story. Both of your examples (cars and internet) are things that had some great applications but also have been mis-used or over-used.
cars: people now live completely car-dependent lives and drive way too much. our infrastructure cannot handle people driving so much and it's extremely expensive and bad for our health and terrible for the environment
internet: well... obviously... social media and all the harms that come with that.
Even if you believe that humanity would have been better if a some global dictator could have stopped the Internet and the Internal combustion system, that's simply not how society works.
If you want another analogy, it's like Feudal Knights complaining about the introduction of the crossbow. Not only were their efforts doomed to fail even the question became irrelevant with the unstoppable march of technological innovation.
But I'm not arguing for stopping the internet or stopping cars from existing. I think both of those things have great applications that shouldn't be ignored.
All I'm saying is that many technologies are a double-edged sword. They can have wonderful uses that make life better, but they can also make life worse in some ways. The Internet and cars are two perfect examples of that. And by the time we realize the harms of these technologies, it's too late.
So perhaps the challenge with any technology is figuring out how to reap the benefits without letting things get out of hand.
I saw a comment by an anonymous Meta engineer who said that it's difficult to leave when you see $2m worth of unvested stock sitting in your account. How many years would you be miserable for $2m? Many people can be easily seduced by that amount of money
I guess it depends - if the miserable conditions and work I was doing only affected me, maybe a couple of years. The problem here is that Meta is a company that actively does harm to the world. They've contributed to genocide in Myanmar, harmed children, and overall have been a net negative on society. So my answer to your question, if we're strictly talking about Meta, is none. I would never work for a company like Meta because I value other humans more than money.
I don't know... I might have said the same thing about email/text/phone spam but it has only proliferated to the point where it's a constant stream of garbage. Email, text, and phone calls are almost completely useless at this point. Sifting the signal from the noise is a non-stop effort.
I think people who want to push a certain narrative might just set up a quick bot and tell that bot to start posting on Reddit or whatever and just let it run. Why not? Little effort on their part and they might actually have influence. The same reason why spammers apparently think sending me 10 text messages per day about a loan I've been approved for. It probably does work 0.0001% of the time, but that's okay if it's all automated.
I mean I think the dynamics are a bit different in online communities at least for actual communities and not drive by subs like r/technology or whatever.
Especially say here on HN with Show HN and such the forcing factors are "i get no votes or community recognition"
But I don't entirely disagree with you I think things won't totally go back I think it will settle way more than now though especially where things are a little more niche.
> “The mere fact that the conference is happening is already a success,” said Claudio Angelo, senior policy adviser at Brazil’s Climate Observatory, a network of environmental, civil society and academic groups
The bar has been set so low that talking about it is seen as success now.
Sometimes I think the only way we'll really make meaningful progress is if we simply run out of fossil fuels. Unfortunately, we're just too good at getting them and too motivated to do so.
The point of that comment is not that the talking is happening, it's that the hope of action isn't going to be blocked by industry-captured and plain moronic countries like Saudia Arabia and US, respectively.
Even if these countries are a smaller part of the climate affecting processes, any forward motion is good at this point. They can also help build economies of scale, and take advantage of the myriad economic benefits of renewables that other countries are leaving on the table.
> Even if these countries are a smaller part of the climate affecting processes, any forward motion is good at this point
China, The US, and India all turned down invites despite generating 34%, 12%, and 7.6% of global emissions respectively [0]
If the world's 3 largest polluters (even if two of them are heavily investing in GreenTech) who represent ~54% of global emissions are not interested in the conversation, it's all for naught.
None of the attendees are in the position to pressure the big 3 polluters. And it doesn't matter - the larger countries know they can eat the cost of climate change. It's the poorer or smaller countries that face the brunt of the impact.
And it's only going to get worse. India turned down hosting COP33 in 2028 [1] because India is deciding to to double down on coal [2] as the Iran Crisis has shown China's bet on Coal Gasification that began during the Iraq War [3] was correct.
It is beyond shameful how Westerners misallocate the blame for pollution, using misleading statistics. India has ~17% of the world's population. That it only produces 7% of global emissions means it is contributing far, far, far less than whatever country you possibly come from in relative terms, so at that point you are besmirching it solely for the crime of having a larger population than your country.
China, while having a disproportionate share of the pollution relative to its population, only has that pollution because the West offshored almost the entirety of its manufacturing capacity to China. Is China really at fault for pollution caused creating goods for the West? If China shuts down all export manufacturing overnight, and the West is forced to resume manufacturing for itself, resulting in ~the same global emissions, is that what's necessary to stop blaming China even though there's no shift in demand for manufactured goods or total pollution? Moreover, China is investing more seriously into non-fossil-fuel energy than any country in the West, by far. If you let the West resume its own manufacturing, you would actually end up with higher total emissions, because the West does not take this subject seriously at all.
Climate change doesn't divvy impact based on per capita usage.
And large countries and blocs like the US, China, EU, India, etc would survive in a world with significant climate crises. So the incentive to change doesn't exist.
The Chinese government invested ~$1 trillion in clean energy in 2025, while the Chinese economy had a further ~$2 trillion in growth surrounding EVs, batteries, and solar. You talk about "no incentive to change", but things are actively changing. What more would you like China to do, in concrete terms? Stop manufacturing for the West, even though that will, as aforementioned, likely result in a net increase in emissions when Western countries resume their substantially worse per-capita manufacturing for themselves? Or perhaps you would like China to cull its population by half for you? I'm interested in hearing your proposal.
I have no proposal because to a certain extent you are correct.
That said, investing trillions in GreenTech does nothing when China is still emitting 13 gigatons of CO2, and it takes the next 7 countries combined to reach that number. Additionally, India will likely end up emitting a similar amount as China within a decade as well.
Only the leadership of the US, China, and India can decide on a roadmap on how to reduce CO2 usage globally, and everything else is just rhetoric.
Personaly I would like to see China invest less in renewables and more in nuclear power. If France could replace its coal power plants with nuclear power plants in 1970s, 1980s then China should be capable to do it.
China endured famines for centuries, introduction of nitrogen fertilizers helped to solve this problem.
"The meeting of Mao Zedong and Nixon in 1972 changed drastically the fundamental
relation between China and USA. In 1973 China contracted importation of 13 large-scale
ammonia plants with 330,000 t/y capacity and urea plants with 500-600,000 t/y capacity with
the companies of USA, Japan and Europe."
Out of these two, only EU and US are showing reluctance to change quickly. Both China and India depend heavily on imported fossil fuels and for them solar is as much of a sovereignty issues as it is pollution, and then climate.
> China, The US, and India all turned down invites despite generating 34%, 12%, and 7.6% of global emissions respectively [0]
Perhaps this is for the best? I assume if they did intend they would be mostly saying 'no' to everything?
Now things might get actually accepted by willing participants, which might allow it to snowball and gain traction, which might convince one of those 3 to join at a later date.
They can't though. None of the participants hold cards that can convince the US, China, or India otherwise, as those 3 also represent around 42% of the global economy [0].
Additionally, other major polluters like ASEAN (Indonesia, Vietnam, Phillipines, Malaysia), Russia, the GCC (Saudi Arabia, UAE), and Turkiye turned down the invitation.
> If the world's 3 largest polluters (even if two of them are heavily investing in GreenTech) who represent ~54% of global emissions are not interested in the conversation
Even if India and China went 0 carbon today the world will continue heating due to historic emissions. The US and Europe account for 54% of cumulative CO2 emissions. [1]
Not to mention there would be no conversation without China's manufacturing prowess that has made solar panels and batteries so cheap.
> the larger countries know they can eat the cost of climate change
I'm curious how you think India will "eat the cost" of losing most of its freshwater.[2] And if think you it's feasible to do so (which again, I don't see how), then it's even more important that they develop their economy to "eat the cost" right? You can't fault them for doing everything they can to grow their economy. It's not like anyone else is going 0 carbon either, and they're the most vulnerable large country.
Why is it thankful the US has the power to force everyone to keep wasting money on US-controlled energy sources? What's the difference between this situation and a Mafia protection racket?
Many people don’t realize the IPCC walked back (refined as they put it) some of its most dire scenarios… others may choose to ignore the walkback. Akin to the rocket and feather phenomenon that affects pricing.
Many people were saying that things were not as dire as they claimed. I’m glad they revised but you had silly people gluing themselves to thoroughfares (cars stuck in traffic waste more energy) and vandalizing what some people consider precious art and or national patrimony in the name of climate change thinking that those most dire predictions were indeed correct and we were all headed to hell in a hand basket.
> So we are no longer worried about catastrophic or runaway climate change based on these revisions?
Don't listen to mc32, they're intentionally confusing the issue. This is the paper they're presumably referencing from last month[1].
The IPCC reports are based on a number of carbon emissions scenarios based on how the world acts: how do countries coordinate, what are the mixes of new electricity generation that come online, how are old fossil fuel plants shut down, what cars are sold, etc. In their reports they simulate multiple scenarios to show what could happen depending on the choices made, since you can't really simulate policy decisions (like presidents paying companies billions to shut down wind projects), wars (ahem), and economic changes.
There were five main scenarios in the IPCC sixth report, from very low to very high GHG emissions.
What was "walked back" is not about climate simulation or feedback loops, but they've retired the very high emissions scenario they developed in the mid 2010s of a world that went all in on heavy economic growth all powered by fossil fuels and little effort toward electrification or decarbonization.
Basically based on renewable energy prices in the years since, electrification, etc, it's just not plausible that the world will grow in that way, so it's no longer worth trying to do simulations based on it.
Note that this was literally called the "very high emissions scenario" in the report, and that's there's still a "high" emissions scenario that will be included in the seventh IPCC report as an upper bound of plausible emissions. A couple of economic models already estimated that we'll likely emit less carbon than the new upper bound high emissions scenario, the same as it was for the very high scenario in the sixth report. Like then, though, it's still worth simulating because it is at least still plausible, and you never know how things will develop sociopolitically (this paper proposes six scenarios from very low to high and a new "high to low" scenario, see section 2.3) .
That’s tough to say. Weather systems are difficult to model. We have minimal understanding of the causes or inputs that control the very long climate cycles. Like we know that some day thousands of years from now we’ll have another unstoppable glacial period. We’ll also have a period free of polar ice. Those are cyclical and independent of CO2. We cannot stop either. We live in a very precious time.
I also think we should limit or be judicious as much as we can about what we pump into the atmosphere (or oceans or ground)
Unfortunately the crisis will get much, much worse before ordinary people go "Wait, so, we're all going to die? How do we prevent that?" and the idea that it's too late isn't compatible with their model of the world so they will reach for increasingly crude "solutions" to what they have belatedly realised is a dire situation.
It might I suppose be fun to catalogue, what are the priorities? Do we kill all the poor people before we decide that maybe we can't afford to keep obligate carnivores as pets? How about the elderly? When do the animals kept for meat go, is that later? At some point I expect there's a backlash, a phase where the populists who insisted that say, if we just murdered everybody with the wrong skin colour, or the wrong religious beliefs or whatever that would fix it - well what if we kill the populists instead? But it won't last, following is in people's nature.
Fossil fuel consumption declines, belatedly, as the human population goes extinct. The mass extinctions eventually settle into a new order. The warm, damp rock is slightly warmer, for a while, and a few non-human niches expand and something else occupies them. And maybe one day an intelligent life eventually wonders why, according to the best available data, in the long depths of pre-history there was a weird climate spike. Huh.
50-250 years to the general population realising they're fucked and looking desperately for a non-existent way out. It is extremely unlikely that both of us would live long enough for me to collect.
My naive understanding is that climate change poses no real risk of human extinction, or even anything approaching it, at least not for centuries or longer. Which isn’t to say that the high cost of climate change is something we should shrug and just pay, especially because it will fall on the poorest.
But c’mon now, you’re being wildly overdramatic, and that doesn’t actually help our ability to deal with the threat.
Extinction isn't a mechanical consequence but a cultural one. Each generation of future humans learn that their ancestors squandered better conditions, and their offspring will definitely experience even worse conditions and they despair and have net fewer kids. We're not altering the climate for a few years, or a few decades, or even a few centuries, but more like millennia.
I don’t think there’s any evidence that the human population will decline to anything approaching extinction levels due to people’s attitudes about the environment. To the contrary, we have the population that we have today because humans reproduce in spite of horrible conditions.
We've had deaths due to climate related storms in NZ now, and we haven't been hit anywhere near as hard as, say, Pakistan who had 1/3 of their country flooded in one go. And it's getting worse. That may not be human extinction but its definitely plausible that mass casualty events are possible
Even artificially limiting their availability causing prices to shoot up does not quench the thirst. I am always confused why the conversation seems to be about switching the toggle switch from fossil fuels only to renewables only. It's obvious the best way is more of potentiometer where you slowly change from one by adding renewables to the point of being able to reduce the reliance on fossil fuels. We're seeing it happen all across the planet. That should be the low bar.
To "simply run out of fossil fuels" is like that potentiometer you mention, it isn't like you run out all at once but you run out of the cheap ones first and it gets more expensive.
in the early 2000s which was about the coming peak of conventional oil production and it turned out to be wrong in the sense that we knew in the 1970s that there were huge amounts of oil and gas in tight formations that we didn't know how to exploit. People were trying to figure out how to do that economically and had their breakthrough around the time that book came out so now you drive around some parts of Pennsylvania and boy do you see a lot of natural gas infrastructure.
I remember being in my hippie phase in the late 1990s and having a conversation with a roughneck on the Ithaca Commons who was telling me that the oil industry had a lot of technology that was going to lift the supply constraints that I was concerned about... he didn't tell me all the details but looking back now I'm pretty sure he knew about developments in hydrofracking and might even have been personally involved with them.
Just to be clear... Are you saying "amen" to not running out of fossil fuels, or to the possibility of a large number of people dying from heat stress, or both?
Ethanol is quite a useful thing to have though, as a multi-season stable store of energy. We will need to synthesise it (or other synfuels and feedstocks), to fully transition away from fossil sources, and that 10x efficiency factor will be essential, as synthesis is highly energy-lossy.
> Ethanol is quite a useful thing to have though, as a multi-season stable store of energy.
Am I missing something? Ethanol is hydrophilic and hygroscopic. In concentrations used as a fuel (e.g., E85), it acts like a desiccant and spoils quickly. In a closed system this ends up with phase separation and the freed water causes engine corrosion.
I'm not sure we want people running a still or molecular sieve in their homes to deal with fixing long-term-stored ethanol.
Ethanol doesn't "spoil". It is a very stable molecule and miscible with water.
The main issue is that it has a strong affinity for water so it needs to be stored in containers that are sealed from the environment. The same issue exists with the ubiquitous ethanol/gasoline blends.
> In concentrations used as a fuel (e.g., E85), it acts like a desiccant and spoils quickly
Citation needed. (hint you won't find one because it isn't true). Be careful here - this myth has been repeated enough that a search will find plenty of claims that don't check out.
High concentration alcohol doesn't spoil. Even lower concentrations don't spoil, but they mix with poor quality gas that does spoil. Well when you get very low it will, but alcohol is poison to living things and so it won't spoil. (I'm not sure how ethanol stands up to UV - but we generally keep it in a tank so that isn't an issue)
Ethanol will absorb water, but it doesn't take it out of the air anymore than anything else.
nah, it loves to absorb water out of the ambient air.
ethanol that is distilled forms an azeotrope has a hard time getting past 98% on its own. even if you used advanced techniques and additives, it has a strongly hygroscopic nature, meaning it actively attracts and absorbs water vapor directly from the air.
in other words, it will do everything it can to get back to 98%.
to keep ethanol above 98%, you need airtight seals or "molecular sieves" (zeolite beads) inside the tank to constantly "bead up" and trap any incoming water molecules.
What is the conversion efficiency for electricity + C02 + H20 -> ethanol/hydrocarbons?
Because that is the overall path (for long-term storable chemical energy, i.e. usable for transport or seasonal energy storage in countries where solar is highly seasonal).
Yeah, concentrating CO2 from atmospheric concentrations is not easy. The benefit is that it actually removes carbon from the atmosphere. Whether it can ever be done on a large scale is a question, though.
Is there any work on doing that, at a low energy cost? (I mean concentrating CO2, not removing it by weathering rocks?)
Yeah, ships are not really weight constrained, unlike airplanes, really cheap sodium batteries should be feasible.
A brazilian "senior policy adviser" patting himself on the back over a conference taking place is always amusing. One could easily get the impression the brazilian government was not actively taxing the crap out of solar panels, solar installations, electrical vehicles, pretty much every good alternative to fossil fuels, literally right now.
If the world is to stay within a range of carbon emissions that avoids catastrophic global warming, 80 percent of the fossil fuel industry’s reserves must remain unused in the ground.
If we "run out" we'll have done ourselves terrific injury.
There is so much coal. There is at least 130 years worth at current consumption levels. And despite what everyone says about renewables and green energy and etc, world use still hit a high in 2024. We aren't going to run out of (coal at least) for a long time--and usage is still going up!
Also, China and India are both doubling down on coal after the Iran Crisis as their Coal Gasification [0] strategies [1] were made for this kind of supply chain risk in mind.
I miss the optimism too. What drew me to tech was how it felt like we were trying to make people's lives better.
These days, it feels like tech is primarily interested in extracting value from us. I guess this is nothing new. Profits at any cost, and all that.
I don't know, I'm just kind of sad about all of it. Even though my smartphone is like 100x more powerful than my first computer, it still feels like something was lost
There was the sense that tech and the internet would change human systems. Information wants to be free and all that. The individual power granted by tech would lead to individual liberty. Traditional power structures would crumble when faced with this.
We didn't realize that it only felt that way because the people with power didn't care yet. Tech was like an ant crawling across a picnic blanket and thinking it's powerful because the people aren't doing anything about it. Once traditional power structures woke up to tech and the internet, they coopted it all.
It's all feels though. If you stare into the void, the apocalypse is coming. OTOH, bringing an AI assistant to every person in the world to make their lives better, is one perspective to take. It's all a matter of framing.
> These days, it feels like tech is primarily interested in extracting value from us. I guess this is nothing new. Profits at any cost, and all that.
Not just that but the whole "shaping the future whether you like it or not" push.
In the 90s, building the computing future meant figuring out a user need and building a product that fit that need. Now, there is this idea that technology companies are just building their idea of what the future should be, minus any product imperative, minus input from customers or the public, and then it's up to us to "get on board" and adopt it. The cart is driving the horse.
It's frustrating that it's hard to know what's going to be good quality.
I bought a base layer years ago that basically fell apart after 1 month. It was like it was made of tissue paper. I bought a different one that has been AWESOME and has lasted 4 years so far with no signs of wear.
I remember when Elon came up with the hyper loop idea and everybody I worked with at the time thought it was revolutionary. These were very smart people who were fooled.
In hindsight, how could we all have fell for this? What a profoundly stupid idea, but I distinctly remember at the time it felt right.
I guess what I'm saying is that I think a lot of people just wised up and started seeing through his B.S.
> I remember when Elon came up with the hyper loop idea and everybody I worked with at the time thought it was revolutionary.
When I first saw it, my thoughts were 1) it can't possibly be that cheap, and 2) the turning radius!
It's not that it can't be done. It's that it would probably cost like the very expensive Chūō Shinkansen maglev, which really does work. And has all those necessary things Musk hand-waved, such as emergency access shafts in case there's trouble deep under a mountain, cross-tunnel connections for emergencies, fire suppression...
Anyone who assumes they won't be fooled is setting themselves up for disaster.
The biggest of Musk's warning signs, for me, was the hype. Hype can drown out valid criticism. When the hype is big enough, valid criticism ends up being drowned out by rage based, critical rhetoric that's in a screaming match with proponents.
(The worst part about being hype averse is that I can end up averse to legitimately exciting things.)
It's funny you mention that because I remember at the time of HyperLoop somebody said "what about just ... trains?" and we all scoffed at it as if trains were some outdated technology
I genuinely don't know how the mental model of such a person works where they look at Elon who got multiple world changing bets right but they focus on the ones that were wrong.
I feel like a lot of the ideas are over-attributed to him. Tesla already existed, electric cars aren't really a revolutionary idea. He's a hype man and he does the hype stuff well. Cybertruck was a pretty unmitigated disaster. self-driving is not really working out as he promised. I still remember arguing with people in 2020 who thought you'd be able to sleep in your car in a few years. Seems like Waymo is beating them to robo-taxis. Hyperloop was a bad idea.
Starlink + reusable rockets... alright, not bad, but not exactly a "world changing bet". Seems far more hyped than anything. So he gets credit for just combining the idea of reusable rockets to send satellites into space? okay fine.
He had a lot of money and threw a lot at the wall to see what stuck. If I were a betting man, I'd bet against his "next big idea". He'll over-promise and under-deliver.
Space-X's success is due to Gwynne Shotwell, who really is a rocket scientist.
Musk didn't originate Tesla's car concept. He did, however, promote into a large scale business. That's the real achievement.
Promotion isn't enough, though. I heard Shai Agassi of Better Place speak once. That was the Israeli guy with the car battery swap startup. He was really good looking, a great speaker, and his 10x growth per year business plan was utter bullshit. Better Place went bust. It wasn't a totally unworkable idea; there are successful battery swap operations in China. But he spent time and money schmoozing with heads of state and setting up demo centers in multiple countries, while not delivering much.
(More fundamental problem: battery swapping is a bet against fast charging and battery progress, which appears to be a losing bet.)
In general, people who focus on the many things he got wrong or lied about, will all at least admit that he got a few things right.
But the people who focus on his successes always seem to downplay, blame-shift and defend when it comes to his negative side. They'll never admit he was wrong about anything. It's the same worship / cult of personality that affects politics too.
Definitely not. The companies that were prototyping it all went bankrupt. The "Vegas Loop" is just a tunnel with Tesla car traffic in it and I don't even think they're fully self driving! Very very underwhelming. Not even remotely close to the "NY to DC in 29 minutes" which he promised.
We would have been much better off with investment in tried-and-true boring old trains.
Personal responsibility is important. But at the same time, we don't let people open up a heroin shop and then claim it's your personal responsibility to not buy it and use it. We don't put slot machines in schools but tell kids that they need self-control to not get addicted to gambling.
I don't know what the answer is, but it feels wrong to lean _entirely_ on personal responsibility. We live in a world in which we were simply not evolved to live in. People literally make a good living by engineering and exploiting our weaknesses for profit.
> raise everyone with the forethought to know what might be addictive, the self-awareness to realize when you are addicted to something, and the self-control (and support systems if and when necessary) to stop
If only it were that easy. If you've ever known somebody who struggles with a serious addiction you'll know that even when they know it's destroying their life they still can't stop.
but then again, vehicle miles travelled per-capita has been mostly increasing in the US since as far back as 1975. There could be a lot of confounding factors. Like astronomical housing prices in urban areas forcing people live very far away and incur more VMT at a faster rate than WFH decreases VMT. I'm no expert here, I'm just spitballing.
Absolutely not. There are tens of millions of Americans who have jumped full speed onto the "It's not even happening" train, let alone the "It's actually a good thing because plants" or "It's not our fault" or "We can't fix it so we shouldn't try" or "It's too expensive to fix and I can't do long term math" trains.
And this is a massive reversion too. In the mid 2000s republicans were openly advocating that we needed to do something about climate change and that it was a serious problem and then we opened the cash floodgates to American federal politics and would you look at that, oil companies have a lot of cash.
Keep in mind that the real cost of transitioning is very likely to be less than what we spent on the stupid oil wars of the 2000s. We can literally afford it now, let alone if we hadn't burned all that cash bombing the desert because of oil politics.
Oil companies themselves are fine to be "Energy" companies and invest in Solar and other renewables. They will be profitable just fine. Our country is tearing itself apart over a lie to ensure they remain more profitable.
In 2008 McCain openly talked about greenhouse gas cap and trade. I think the driving force behind it was fear of peak oil. Secure your energy supply. With fracking supply concerns went away.
In the mid-2000s there might've been individual Republicans concerned about climate change, but it was the Bush administration who opposed the Kyoto Protocol and pushed for adaptation to climate change on the basis of protecting the economy.
Yeah, I've always seen it as a hot potato issue. I think a lot of people who don't play ball on dealing with climate change aren't deniers, they just want the next guy to have to do the work. It's very, very hard to sell to anyone, "this is going to be incredibly costly and painful for you and you won't enjoy any of the benefits. Your grandkids might."
Agreed. I care enough about it to sell my car, stop buying stuff I don't need, give up most meat, and live in a small energy efficient house.
However I do know people who really do not care. They may say they care but their actions and voting record show that in fact they don't care (or don't want to make it a real priority). But those same people get very upset when they're stuck in traffic
cars: people now live completely car-dependent lives and drive way too much. our infrastructure cannot handle people driving so much and it's extremely expensive and bad for our health and terrible for the environment
internet: well... obviously... social media and all the harms that come with that.
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