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Personally I am hoping for large scale carbon capture. Environmentalists hate it because it’s too deus ex machina — if you believe it will happen then nothing w
by sulam 9y ago
Personally I am hoping for large scale carbon capture. Environmentalists hate it because it’s too deus ex machina — if you believe it will happen then nothing we emit now matters. I take the tack that we _must_ figure it out because the alternatives aren’t tenable. As a species we do well when it’s clear what we have to do, and I’m bullish that we will figure out how to remove significant amounts of carbon from the atmosphere before climate change effects hit the insane point (insane = 100M sea level rise and mass migration that puts what’s happening now into the “small effect” bucket).
- seiferteric 9y agoI wanted to believe this, but I think it could be too late. Doing so would require gargantuan amounts of energy that I think could only come from fusion but that is at best 30+ years away from first net energy. Even then it would take some time to build enough capacity, and lag effects in the environment mean we will almost certainly see some pretty effects in the next 100 years.
- sulam 9y agoWith today’s technology, yes. There’s good science being done right now that is much more efficient. And all our current approaches are chemical engineering, but I personally think organisms modified with CRISPR could be a better path. You’re just trying to get them to do what they already do, more quickly, and I think that’s in the realm of near-term science fiction instead of magic.
- mark-r 9y agoThe problem with carbon capture is one of scale. Even though we're adding immense amounts to the atmosphere, it dissipates quickly. It's a minuscule percentage of air, only .04%. To remove significant amounts of carbon requires sucking in stupendous amounts of air.