Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by throwawaylinux 1544 days ago
You don't think something that reduces net carbon in the atmosphere is carbon negative, then you're just making up your own definitions of things. Why waste everyone else's time? Seems like a hell of way to go about life.
1 comments
hinkley 1543 days ago
No, you’re making up things. You think you’re asking if we think a net negative is a net negative, but that’s not what you asked. Not even close.

Making something takes energy, as you will recall if you weren’t asleep that entire semester in physics class. If the bit at the end cancels out some of the problems created earlier, you still have some of the problems created earlier.

link
throwawaylinux 1543 days ago
No that's just your reading comprehension problem.
link
hinkley 1543 days ago
You're having a petri dish problem. Taken out of an environment, a lot of experiments and math look very good. It's interesting, might even be new knowledge, but it's not applicable.

That giant machine in their PR materials didn't just appear out of nowhere. It doesn't run on rainbows. It has a considerable embodied carbon footprint. It has an operational footprint, and a transportation footprint. It assuredly produces lots of pm2.5 and not just from the tailpipe.

Undoubtedly less that the process it replaces, but negative is an extraordinary claim, and I don't see any extraordinary evidence here.

link
throwawaylinux 1543 days ago
You're shifting the goal posts because you badly misunderstood my initial post.
link
hinkley 1540 days ago
Projecting. This is projecting.

My goal post is us not choking on our own filth. We are in a closed system. Any bullshit that moves pollution around in time or location doesn’t fix anything, and because of the laws of thermodynamics there are only very narrow envelopes where doing something is globally better than doing nothing. Cooling a house heats the planet more than the house cools.

We can’t be celebrating systems that don’t move us toward 50% of our current budget. And some solutions that move you a quarter of the way there but then get you stuck at that point are a form of bargaining. In the end you have to let those go and he longer you delude yourself the worse things are.

We need less driving and fewer roads. Fuel efficiency and road efficiency actually increase demand. We’ve seen this, it is known.

link