Google Achieves Net Zero Results In Its Best Efforts Achieve Net-Zero

By Wayne Brown
Notes on what happened with Google's efforts are here. "Utopians" tend to assume massive political change. Another popular thread is that the crazy pace of technological innovation will get us to Utopia. It's worth noting that the most famous technical company with infinitely deep pockets has written the effort off as a "learning exercise."

Here, the IPCC models and forecasts of catastrophe are more or less taken for granted. The entire piece relies on IPCC assumptions and models. The problem is, actually trying to reduce GHG turns out to be complicated (duh). In summary:

We’re glad that Google tried something ambitious with the RE<C initiative, and we’re proud to have been part of the project. But with 20/20 hindsight, we see that it didn’t go far enough, and that truly disruptive technologies are what our planet needs. To reverse climate change, our society requires something beyond today’s renewable energy technologies. Fortunately, new discoveries are changing the way we think about physics, nanotechnology, and biology all the time. While humanity is currently on a trajectory to severe climate change, this disaster can be averted if researchers aim for goals that seem nearly impossible.


We’re hopeful, because sometimes engineers and scientists do achieve the impossible. Consider the space program, which required outlandish inventions for the rockets that brought astronauts to the moon. MIT engineers constructed the lightweight and compact Apollo Guidance Computer, for example, using some of the first integrated circuits, and did this in the vacuum-tube era when computers filled rooms. Their achievements pushed computer science forward and helped create today’s wonderful wired world. Now, R&D dollars must go to inventors who are tackling the daunting energy challenge so they can boldly try out their crazy ideas. We can’t yet imagine which of these technologies will ultimately work and usher in a new era of prosperity—but the people of this prosperous future won’t be able to imagine how we lived without them.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Panic Part 6 - The IPCC Summary for Policymakers

By Wayne Brown
Image
Love it or hate it, the discussion revolves around this report Bottom line: I accept the IPCC report as a kind of "hub" around which my view of climate issues must turn. It is important to understand what it is saying, along with its limitations. Legions of cherry pickers have descended on this report - many to raise alarm, many to rebut, many to blow smoke over it. It is not difficult for a reasonably intelligent person to read the report itself, especially to examine the baskets of cherries emerging from the forest. Generally speaking, I have found critics of the report to be highly misleading. To call the report "alarmist" is perhaps simply to admit that there is no shortage of worrying facts in the report. For example, the frequently cited concern of the "alarmists" - namely sea-level rise - is completely well documented. To me, the "let them drown" response at COP26 forms the basis of my assumption that the politicians of the world will not...
Read more

The Carbon Offset Hoax

By Wayne Brown
Image
  Carbon Offsets Explained to the Kiddies (or " Pickle #4") John Oliver presents a funny but true overview of "Carbon Offsets" here . As he points out, the whole thing is a hoax. But it's much worse than he says. It wouldn't work even if it were not a hoax. Planting a tree takes C02 out of the atmosphere as it makes roots, barks and leaves out of the carbon it "breathes in".  But this is a one-time thing . The "carbon offset" idea is based on the tonnage of vegetable matter created by the tree, not the entire life cycle of the tree. The Amazon forest emits more C02 than it absorbs on a net basis. So, for example, the " trillion tree campaign ", in theory, would offset a tremendous amount of carbon once . Next year, we'd need another trillion trees to be planted (or, absurdly, not cut down). As John Oliver puts it, we can't offset our way out of climate change. Even if we could, the idea is fundamentally flawed. In the ...
Read more

Dennis Hoffman and The Nature of Reality

By Wayne Brown
Image
Perplexity Massive data loss.... The great math mystery "Math works so well to describe reality because math is all there is." just 32 numbers and a bit of math Lex Fridman & Dennis Hoffman The Case Against Reality (In Kindle) This may be the wrong question: Does math work so well because it's how we perceive reality or is math a fundamental property of the Universe? Missing is the idea that consciousness itself is essential and that a mathematical description of consciousness could be "fundamental" - more "fundamental" than what we think of as "reality." "The elegance of math meets the messiness of reality" - but this is a clue to how we simplify reality for efficiency. 
Read more