6 ms·

There is no Plan B for dealing with the climate crisis

31 points by Fej 7y ago

planetzero 7y ago
This is exactly correct. The US only accounts for 12% of the total carbon output into the atmosphere. Countries like India and China have been polluting the earth for decades and the Paris accords won't solve any of these issues because there is no repercussions. Why aren't we going after these countries and demanding answers instead of going after the countries, like the US, that are actually doing something about it?
- Judgmentality 7y ago
  > Why aren't we going after these countries and demanding answers instead of going after the countries, like the US, that are actually doing something about it? My hunch is most voters, and especially those with more money, are more interested in short-term economic gains than contributing to a problem that won't negatively impact them because they'll already be dead.
- itcrowd 7y ago
  Yes, every country must do its part. No, the US is not "doing something about it" and it is clear from the article: > For a time, US emissions continued to decline modestly despite the Trump administration’s environmental vandalism; the inexorable forces of the market meant that aging coal-fired power plants continued to be replaced by cheaper, cleaner, newer, and more efficient plants powered by natural gas and renewables. But growing carbon dioxide emissions due to industry and transportation have more than offset this progress, leading to an estimated 3.4 percent growth in US emissions in 2018.
  - AnimalMuppet 7y ago
    "For a time... continued to decline modestly..." Compare that with, if I understand correctly, every single country that signed the Paris deal, who did not decline modestly, even for a time. The US might well be considered to be "doing something about it".
    - russdill 7y ago
      EU28 has been declining at a similar rate to the US.
    - russdill 7y ago
      BTW, where you you get this information? Do you even bother checking to see if it's accurate before parroting it? Here's Germany: https://www.cleanenergywire.org/sites/default/files/styles/gallery_image/public/paragraphs/images/historic-emissions-de-1850-2018.jpg?itok=uSE6qxaS https://www.cleanenergywire.org/sites/default/files/styles/g...
      - AnimalMuppet 7y ago
        I stand corrected. Interesting that Germany has been declining since 1980, well before Paris or even Kyoto.
    - itcrowd 7y ago
      > every single country that signed the Paris deal, who did not decline modestly, even for a time. Completely false. For example: the UK has been emitting less and less at least since 1990. Source: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/provisional-uk-greenhouse-gas-emissions-national-statistics-2018 https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/provisional-uk-gree...
- SiempreViernes 7y ago
  You can stop paying them to emit much of that any time you want, so don’t pretend there is nothing for the USA to do about Chinese emissions.
  - Pokepokalypse 7y ago
    Exactly. Global banks, if they could all act in unison, (and if fairies flew out my butt), could halt carbon output overnight. This problem is a problem caused by human behavior. Which we apparently can't change.
- the_monocle 7y ago
  The USA has double the carbon emission of china with only a fourth of the population. So per capita an average US citizen contributes 8 times as much to emission as an average Chinese citizen.
  - russdill 7y ago
    (*Half the carbon emissions of china), but yes, per capita we are much higher. In addition, the amount of emissions in China is at least partly related to the huge amount of manufacturing we import from China. https://www.visualcapitalist.com/all-the-worlds-carbon-emissions-in-one-chart/ https://www.visualcapitalist.com/all-the-worlds-carbon-emiss... US is #2 in the world, with more than double the emissions of the next country down the list.
    - joering2 7y ago
      Not the fear monger, but if Trump is allowed to finish his plan on maximum deregulation, USA will become #1 by emissions in less than 10 years. This does not frighten me on its own - each new President deregulate more here, while put new regulations there, depending on (frankly) who has access to put money (indirectly) to his pocket; what does concern me is that the voters seems to be fine with that. And why wouldn't they?? With so much automatization on the horizon, its silly to believe average Joe will chose clean air, clean water and healthy food, over a job security. This seems to be a new norm, I am afraid.
      - russdill 7y ago
        Someone made the point that while a future with greatly reduced carbon emissions are a certainty, every single day that's delayed means millions and even billions in additional profits for certain industries. There's enormous financial incentive to delay.
  - pnako 7y ago
    Per capita does not really matter in this particular case; it's an absolute numbers thing. CO2 emissions go into one same atmosphere.
- deogeo 7y ago
  Because 'demanding answers', instead of leading by example or agreement, will only create conflict, and those countries will refuse to lower carbon emissions out of spite/to not appear weak/score points with voters. According to most climate models, that's not something we can afford, regardless of how fair or not it may be.
- pests 7y ago
  Yes, let's go after poor people in poor countries and tell them what they are and aren't allowed to do. Even if we did the same things to pull ourselves out of poverty.
  - dhhdhdsbdb 7y ago
    Are you recommending we don't work this avenue out of a sense of fairness?
  - planetzero 7y ago
    right..so saving the climate in 12 years doesn't matter to you? It only has to do with fairness? If people were really serious about Climate Change, India and China would be held accountable. The fact that they aren't and have never been really put the whole motivation into question.
    - pests 7y ago
      Hold them accountable to what? For trying to live their best life? I said nothing about not saving the climate.
- major505 7y ago
  because if you go to china protest against it, you will be thrown in a dark cell, and the key will be thown away.
- c0nducktr 7y ago
  What do you think India and China are doing which causes all that pollution?
- triceratops 7y ago
  What exactly is the US federal government doing? (I won't deny individual cities and states have announced plans) The current administration and party in the Senate majority denies that the problem even exists and is actively purging various government departments of dissenters. It has pulled our (or is pulling out) of the Paris accords, is actively pushing coal and gas production. India is going in the opposite direction. https://climateactiontracker.org/countries/usa/pledges-and-targets/ https://climateactiontracker.org/countries/usa/pledges-and-t... https://climateactiontracker.org/countries/india/pledges-and-targets/ https://climateactiontracker.org/countries/india/pledges-and...
- phire 7y ago
  The existence of non-complaint countries shouldn't be a reason to give up or stop improving. We need to accept a reality where some parts of the world will need to be massively carbon negative to compensate for other parts which are carbon positive. We need to be investing in technology, polices and structures which can achieve this. Once we reach the technology/policy level where a country can choose to be massively carbon negative, we can implement the international policies to create an international carbon trading scheme. The countries that don't want to become carbon neutral can choose to financially compensate the countries who become carbon negative. And then once we have this international carbon trading scheme, countries that refuse to take part can have penalties equal to their estimated carbon emissions leaved against their imports/exports. Though this mechanism, the world can become carbon neutral (or perhaps even carbon negative) without every country having to be carbon neutral itself.
  - pnako 7y ago
    If we think it's an existential crisis, there are things that we could that would cost almost nothing: * abandon any claim on patents related to nuclear power * open source all software related to civilian nuclear power * offer to train nuclear engineers and build, on a pure cost basis, nuclear reactors in every stable country that asks France could do that because its nuclear technology is entirely government-owned or controlled, the President has a lot of discretionary power, and he's been bombastic and defiant about global warming. Just do it. Just transfer all the nuclear technology to countries like India, Brazil, etc. They already have a nuclear industry, but through this technology transfer they'd be able to boost it, and build more efficient and safer reactors. Yet he's not doing that. And he's probably going to buy a house 50 meters from sea shore once he retires. So pardon me for thinking that this entire thing is just "foutage de gueule". edit: actually you can generalize my argument for technology transfer to renewable technology too.
- tobib 7y ago
  > The US only accounts for 12% of the total carbon output into the atmosphere. Should we take population into account? The US only accounts for ~4% of the world's population. so I wouldn't say "only".
zeofig 7y ago
Saying there is no Plan B kind of implies we have a Plan A, which we don't.
- AstralStorm 7y ago
  Plan A is stop pumping GHG immediately by force (including warfare and economical pressure) or fiat and try to adapt to living on a somewhat hotter Earth. It's extremely hard to pull off.
cagenut 7y ago
FWIW if anyone doesn't feel like they already know what "Plan A" is, its fairly well infographic'd in the IPCC's Special Report on 1.5C. Study the charts and graphs here: https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/graphics/#cid_6333 https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/graphics/#cid_6333
abledon 7y ago
In Canada people fight so much over a pipeline, while the neighbors of the north, Russia, are like,, enghhh f* that, investing 180 Billion dollars to dominate oil production there [1]. Like other comments have mentioned here , you can't 'force' other nations to agree to do the same as you. Unfair but you will have to lead the way. [1]: https://newsinteractives.cbc.ca/longform/putin-arctic https://newsinteractives.cbc.ca/longform/putin-arctic
mlthoughts2018 7y ago
> “The upshot is that the total cumulative carbon allocation for humanity compatible with a 50–50 chance of keeping global warming under 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) is, in round numbers, a trillion tonnes. That’s it. Forever. And of that trillion tonnes, we have already used up over 630 billion tonnes, leaving just 370 billion tonnes to go. That might seem like a lot of tonnes, but at current emissions rate, we’d get there in just 37 years, or 2057.” This makes me sincerely feel that it’s likely not worth it to pursue reducing carbon emissions except where it’s super easy and unobstructed. Instead, it would be better to create technology and plans for how best to live in a rapidly warming world. I do not believe we can solve political coordination fast enough so that the long tail of consumer demands, from floss to x-ray machines to smart phones, can be manufactured without accumulating much more carbon emission than this limit. Meanwhile, suggesting we live without these things, especially when they dramatically improve, even save, lives, is equally unrealistic. (It reminds me of the David Deutsch anecdote in The Beginning of Infinity where people were criticising color TVs in the 60s, as a ludicrous consumer indulgence, totally ignorant to the possibility that they would be vital for saving lives (surgical imaging, among other uses) decades later.)
- imtringued 7y ago
  Using air conditioning will increase the energy usage per capita which will accelerate climate change. More realistically a lot of people will move away from the equatorial regions to the north or maybe even to Antarctica.
  - mlthoughts2018 7y ago
    Air conditioning and heating will be needed well into the hot future. It saves lives (especially of the elderly). Trying to “not have air conditioning” is unrealistic, never gonna happen. So either we devise carbon-neutral air conditioning very suddenly, or else we prepare for hotter planet and geological-scale side effects. (This just by air conditioning... so then multiply by agriculture, consumer media products, medical products, transportation, etc. etc.).
kayaeb 7y ago
Why does this scientific publication read like an op-ed? Absolutist language strikes me as exceptionally unscientific. "it’s time to panic." "We are in deep trouble." "That’s it. Forever." "Forever. Think of what that word means." Disregarding that, the paper seems to address the idea that stratospheric albedo modifications cannot counteract atmospheric carbon buildup since they operate on timescales of decades versus millenia. Specifically they state that: "Deployment of albedo hacking does not in any way “buy time” to get carbon dioxide emissions under control, since once emitted, carbon dioxide cannot to any significant extent be unemitted with known economically feasible technology" Which seems to rest on the absolutist premise that we will never know an economically feasible way to go negative carbon. Otherwise, buying time should absolutely be a reasonable thing to consider. The author closes with a sentence along the lines of: "To decarbonize, however, requires building a political movement that regards the climate crisis as a top priority." Which strikes me as... not exactly impartial (Why would not an economic reason work? Or a grassroots social reason?). Which is obnoxious when the author makes specific appeals to the authority of their profession which has authority by the very virtue of being impartial: "As a scientist, I viscerally dislike repeating myself; I like to think that once the truth is out there, it will somehow win out and it is not necessary to belabor the point." This "article" rubs me wrong.
- black_puppydog 7y ago
  Well, science has been spelling this out in "scientific" terms for the last few decades. And because science usually tends to prefix its conclusions with heaps of disclaimers and "assumings"s, "if"s and "probably"s nobody has been listening. So there you go, scientists seem to be sick of being ignored...?
- antisthenes 7y ago
  > Which seems to rest on the absolutist premise that we will never know an economically feasible way to go negative carbon. Otherwise, buying time should absolutely be a reasonable thing to consider. Well, that absolutist premise happens to be correct. There's no such thing as negative carbon. The carbon is never destroyed. Plants don't destroy carbon either, they just store it. What we need is to find a way to be able to store long term X amount of carbon using X-Y carbon's worth of energy output, netting us Y carbon-free energy output to use for productive activities. So far the best/cheapest method here still seems to be planting trees and burying bio-char, almost entirely replicating the process that occurred millions of years ago before bacteria could break down lignin.
aaron_m04 7y ago
> Barring technological breakthroughs allowing for the active removal of massive amounts of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, Hey, this sounds like a good plan B: https://projectvesta.org https://projectvesta.org
- AstralStorm 7y ago
  It's not enough. There are not enough olivine rock deposits. It also attacks CO2 only, skipping methane and freon. Simple back of the envelope math ruins this alleged plan. It can be a part of the big effort, but alone it won't do nearly anywhere enough. Plus the problem is, the deposits are not in the places that emit GHG. You need to put them where they can be most effective. That's not free. And then you have to get the world to not pump yet more GHG into atmosphere.
  - aaron_m04 7y ago
    I would like to see your back of the envelope math. And isn't it okay that this doesn't address methane, etc. as long as it sequesters enough CO2 to offset the radiative forcing from the extra methane?
russdill 7y ago
For a slightly less doom and gloom point of view: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uSCF6JNW4oE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uSCF6JNW4oE Sean Carroll with "Ramez Naam on Renewable Energy and an Optimistic Future"
adamiscool8 7y ago
Are there any comparable crises in history that mankind eventually wriggled its way out of against scientific consensus? Is history not littered with once-valid and absolutist scientific conclusions that were never borne out?
nkingsy 7y ago
I was tolerating the bombastic language until Russia started pumping out greenhouse gas just to re-unfreeze their sea ice in the future plan b scenario.
tzs 7y ago
Tony Stark in the first "Avengers" movie had a pretty good plan B: "If we can't protected the Earth, then you can be damn well sure we'll avenge it".
lorensi 7y ago
Good post. Thanks for sharing. Keep to continuing.. https://www.westendpress.org/chegg-free-trial-accounts/ https://www.westendpress.org/chegg-free-trial-accounts/
black_puppydog 7y ago
So... flagged because... some people don't like it?
5db8db 7y ago
For all, who missed it: the deep adaption paper [1]. there is written, it's not a crisis anymore, it is already a 'tragedy'. [1]: https://www.lifeworth.com/deepadaptation.pdf https://www.lifeworth.com/deepadaptation.pdf

31 points by Fej 7y ago

This is exactly correct. The US only accounts for 12% of the total carbon output into the atmosphere. Countries like India and China have been polluting the earth for decades and the Paris accords won't solve any of these issues because there is no repercussions. Why aren't we going after these countries and demanding answers instead of going after the countries, like the US, that are actually doing something about it?

Judgmentality 7y ago
> Why aren't we going after these countries and demanding answers instead of going after the countries, like the US, that are actually doing something about it? My hunch is most voters, and especially those with more money, are more interested in short-term economic gains than contributing to a problem that won't negatively impact them because they'll already be dead.
itcrowd 7y ago
Yes, every country must do its part. No, the US is not "doing something about it" and it is clear from the article: > For a time, US emissions continued to decline modestly despite the Trump administration’s environmental vandalism; the inexorable forces of the market meant that aging coal-fired power plants continued to be replaced by cheaper, cleaner, newer, and more efficient plants powered by natural gas and renewables. But growing carbon dioxide emissions due to industry and transportation have more than offset this progress, leading to an estimated 3.4 percent growth in US emissions in 2018.
- AnimalMuppet 7y ago
  "For a time... continued to decline modestly..." Compare that with, if I understand correctly, every single country that signed the Paris deal, who did not decline modestly, even for a time. The US might well be considered to be "doing something about it".
  - russdill 7y ago
    EU28 has been declining at a similar rate to the US.
  - russdill 7y ago
    BTW, where you you get this information? Do you even bother checking to see if it's accurate before parroting it? Here's Germany: https://www.cleanenergywire.org/sites/default/files/styles/gallery_image/public/paragraphs/images/historic-emissions-de-1850-2018.jpg?itok=uSE6qxaS https://www.cleanenergywire.org/sites/default/files/styles/g...
    - AnimalMuppet 7y ago
      I stand corrected. Interesting that Germany has been declining since 1980, well before Paris or even Kyoto.
  - itcrowd 7y ago
    > every single country that signed the Paris deal, who did not decline modestly, even for a time. Completely false. For example: the UK has been emitting less and less at least since 1990. Source: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/provisional-uk-greenhouse-gas-emissions-national-statistics-2018 https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/provisional-uk-gree...
SiempreViernes 7y ago
You can stop paying them to emit much of that any time you want, so don’t pretend there is nothing for the USA to do about Chinese emissions.
- Pokepokalypse 7y ago
  Exactly. Global banks, if they could all act in unison, (and if fairies flew out my butt), could halt carbon output overnight. This problem is a problem caused by human behavior. Which we apparently can't change.
the_monocle 7y ago
The USA has double the carbon emission of china with only a fourth of the population. So per capita an average US citizen contributes 8 times as much to emission as an average Chinese citizen.
- russdill 7y ago
  (*Half the carbon emissions of china), but yes, per capita we are much higher. In addition, the amount of emissions in China is at least partly related to the huge amount of manufacturing we import from China. https://www.visualcapitalist.com/all-the-worlds-carbon-emissions-in-one-chart/ https://www.visualcapitalist.com/all-the-worlds-carbon-emiss... US is #2 in the world, with more than double the emissions of the next country down the list.
  - joering2 7y ago
    Not the fear monger, but if Trump is allowed to finish his plan on maximum deregulation, USA will become #1 by emissions in less than 10 years. This does not frighten me on its own - each new President deregulate more here, while put new regulations there, depending on (frankly) who has access to put money (indirectly) to his pocket; what does concern me is that the voters seems to be fine with that. And why wouldn't they?? With so much automatization on the horizon, its silly to believe average Joe will chose clean air, clean water and healthy food, over a job security. This seems to be a new norm, I am afraid.
    - russdill 7y ago
      Someone made the point that while a future with greatly reduced carbon emissions are a certainty, every single day that's delayed means millions and even billions in additional profits for certain industries. There's enormous financial incentive to delay.
- pnako 7y ago
  Per capita does not really matter in this particular case; it's an absolute numbers thing. CO2 emissions go into one same atmosphere.
deogeo 7y ago
Because 'demanding answers', instead of leading by example or agreement, will only create conflict, and those countries will refuse to lower carbon emissions out of spite/to not appear weak/score points with voters. According to most climate models, that's not something we can afford, regardless of how fair or not it may be.
pests 7y ago
Yes, let's go after poor people in poor countries and tell them what they are and aren't allowed to do. Even if we did the same things to pull ourselves out of poverty.
- dhhdhdsbdb 7y ago
  Are you recommending we don't work this avenue out of a sense of fairness?
- planetzero 7y ago
  right..so saving the climate in 12 years doesn't matter to you? It only has to do with fairness? If people were really serious about Climate Change, India and China would be held accountable. The fact that they aren't and have never been really put the whole motivation into question.
  - pests 7y ago
    Hold them accountable to what? For trying to live their best life? I said nothing about not saving the climate.
major505 7y ago
because if you go to china protest against it, you will be thrown in a dark cell, and the key will be thown away.
c0nducktr 7y ago
What do you think India and China are doing which causes all that pollution?
triceratops 7y ago
What exactly is the US federal government doing? (I won't deny individual cities and states have announced plans) The current administration and party in the Senate majority denies that the problem even exists and is actively purging various government departments of dissenters. It has pulled our (or is pulling out) of the Paris accords, is actively pushing coal and gas production. India is going in the opposite direction. https://climateactiontracker.org/countries/usa/pledges-and-targets/ https://climateactiontracker.org/countries/usa/pledges-and-t... https://climateactiontracker.org/countries/india/pledges-and-targets/ https://climateactiontracker.org/countries/india/pledges-and...
phire 7y ago
The existence of non-complaint countries shouldn't be a reason to give up or stop improving. We need to accept a reality where some parts of the world will need to be massively carbon negative to compensate for other parts which are carbon positive. We need to be investing in technology, polices and structures which can achieve this. Once we reach the technology/policy level where a country can choose to be massively carbon negative, we can implement the international policies to create an international carbon trading scheme. The countries that don't want to become carbon neutral can choose to financially compensate the countries who become carbon negative. And then once we have this international carbon trading scheme, countries that refuse to take part can have penalties equal to their estimated carbon emissions leaved against their imports/exports. Though this mechanism, the world can become carbon neutral (or perhaps even carbon negative) without every country having to be carbon neutral itself.
- pnako 7y ago
  If we think it's an existential crisis, there are things that we could that would cost almost nothing: * abandon any claim on patents related to nuclear power * open source all software related to civilian nuclear power * offer to train nuclear engineers and build, on a pure cost basis, nuclear reactors in every stable country that asks France could do that because its nuclear technology is entirely government-owned or controlled, the President has a lot of discretionary power, and he's been bombastic and defiant about global warming. Just do it. Just transfer all the nuclear technology to countries like India, Brazil, etc. They already have a nuclear industry, but through this technology transfer they'd be able to boost it, and build more efficient and safer reactors. Yet he's not doing that. And he's probably going to buy a house 50 meters from sea shore once he retires. So pardon me for thinking that this entire thing is just "foutage de gueule". edit: actually you can generalize my argument for technology transfer to renewable technology too.
tobib 7y ago
> The US only accounts for 12% of the total carbon output into the atmosphere. Should we take population into account? The US only accounts for ~4% of the world's population. so I wouldn't say "only".

zeofig 7y ago

Saying there is no Plan B kind of implies we have a Plan A, which we don't.

AstralStorm 7y ago
Plan A is stop pumping GHG immediately by force (including warfare and economical pressure) or fiat and try to adapt to living on a somewhat hotter Earth. It's extremely hard to pull off.

cagenut 7y ago

FWIW if anyone doesn't feel like they already know what "Plan A" is, its fairly well infographic'd in the IPCC's Special Report on 1.5C. Study the charts and graphs here: https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/graphics/#cid_6333 https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/graphics/#cid_6333

abledon 7y ago

In Canada people fight so much over a pipeline, while the neighbors of the north, Russia, are like,, enghhh f* that, investing 180 Billion dollars to dominate oil production there [1]. Like other comments have mentioned here , you can't 'force' other nations to agree to do the same as you. Unfair but you will have to lead the way. [1]: https://newsinteractives.cbc.ca/longform/putin-arctic https://newsinteractives.cbc.ca/longform/putin-arctic

mlthoughts2018 7y ago

> “The upshot is that the total cumulative carbon allocation for humanity compatible with a 50–50 chance of keeping global warming under 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) is, in round numbers, a trillion tonnes. That’s it. Forever. And of that trillion tonnes, we have already used up over 630 billion tonnes, leaving just 370 billion tonnes to go. That might seem like a lot of tonnes, but at current emissions rate, we’d get there in just 37 years, or 2057.” This makes me sincerely feel that it’s likely not worth it to pursue reducing carbon emissions except where it’s super easy and unobstructed. Instead, it would be better to create technology and plans for how best to live in a rapidly warming world. I do not believe we can solve political coordination fast enough so that the long tail of consumer demands, from floss to x-ray machines to smart phones, can be manufactured without accumulating much more carbon emission than this limit. Meanwhile, suggesting we live without these things, especially when they dramatically improve, even save, lives, is equally unrealistic. (It reminds me of the David Deutsch anecdote in The Beginning of Infinity where people were criticising color TVs in the 60s, as a ludicrous consumer indulgence, totally ignorant to the possibility that they would be vital for saving lives (surgical imaging, among other uses) decades later.)

imtringued 7y ago
Using air conditioning will increase the energy usage per capita which will accelerate climate change. More realistically a lot of people will move away from the equatorial regions to the north or maybe even to Antarctica.
- mlthoughts2018 7y ago
  Air conditioning and heating will be needed well into the hot future. It saves lives (especially of the elderly). Trying to “not have air conditioning” is unrealistic, never gonna happen. So either we devise carbon-neutral air conditioning very suddenly, or else we prepare for hotter planet and geological-scale side effects. (This just by air conditioning... so then multiply by agriculture, consumer media products, medical products, transportation, etc. etc.).

kayaeb 7y ago

Why does this scientific publication read like an op-ed? Absolutist language strikes me as exceptionally unscientific. "it’s time to panic." "We are in deep trouble." "That’s it. Forever." "Forever. Think of what that word means." Disregarding that, the paper seems to address the idea that stratospheric albedo modifications cannot counteract atmospheric carbon buildup since they operate on timescales of decades versus millenia. Specifically they state that: "Deployment of albedo hacking does not in any way “buy time” to get carbon dioxide emissions under control, since once emitted, carbon dioxide cannot to any significant extent be unemitted with known economically feasible technology" Which seems to rest on the absolutist premise that we will never know an economically feasible way to go negative carbon. Otherwise, buying time should absolutely be a reasonable thing to consider. The author closes with a sentence along the lines of: "To decarbonize, however, requires building a political movement that regards the climate crisis as a top priority." Which strikes me as... not exactly impartial (Why would not an economic reason work? Or a grassroots social reason?). Which is obnoxious when the author makes specific appeals to the authority of their profession which has authority by the very virtue of being impartial: "As a scientist, I viscerally dislike repeating myself; I like to think that once the truth is out there, it will somehow win out and it is not necessary to belabor the point." This "article" rubs me wrong.

black_puppydog 7y ago
Well, science has been spelling this out in "scientific" terms for the last few decades. And because science usually tends to prefix its conclusions with heaps of disclaimers and "assumings"s, "if"s and "probably"s nobody has been listening. So there you go, scientists seem to be sick of being ignored...?
antisthenes 7y ago
> Which seems to rest on the absolutist premise that we will never know an economically feasible way to go negative carbon. Otherwise, buying time should absolutely be a reasonable thing to consider. Well, that absolutist premise happens to be correct. There's no such thing as negative carbon. The carbon is never destroyed. Plants don't destroy carbon either, they just store it. What we need is to find a way to be able to store long term X amount of carbon using X-Y carbon's worth of energy output, netting us Y carbon-free energy output to use for productive activities. So far the best/cheapest method here still seems to be planting trees and burying bio-char, almost entirely replicating the process that occurred millions of years ago before bacteria could break down lignin.

aaron_m04 7y ago

> Barring technological breakthroughs allowing for the active removal of massive amounts of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, Hey, this sounds like a good plan B: https://projectvesta.org https://projectvesta.org

AstralStorm 7y ago
It's not enough. There are not enough olivine rock deposits. It also attacks CO2 only, skipping methane and freon. Simple back of the envelope math ruins this alleged plan. It can be a part of the big effort, but alone it won't do nearly anywhere enough. Plus the problem is, the deposits are not in the places that emit GHG. You need to put them where they can be most effective. That's not free. And then you have to get the world to not pump yet more GHG into atmosphere.
- aaron_m04 7y ago
  I would like to see your back of the envelope math. And isn't it okay that this doesn't address methane, etc. as long as it sequesters enough CO2 to offset the radiative forcing from the extra methane?

russdill 7y ago

For a slightly less doom and gloom point of view: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uSCF6JNW4oE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uSCF6JNW4oE Sean Carroll with "Ramez Naam on Renewable Energy and an Optimistic Future"

adamiscool8 7y ago

Are there any comparable crises in history that mankind eventually wriggled its way out of against scientific consensus? Is history not littered with once-valid and absolutist scientific conclusions that were never borne out?

nkingsy 7y ago

I was tolerating the bombastic language until Russia started pumping out greenhouse gas just to re-unfreeze their sea ice in the future plan b scenario.

tzs 7y ago

Tony Stark in the first "Avengers" movie had a pretty good plan B: "If we can't protected the Earth, then you can be damn well sure we'll avenge it".

lorensi 7y ago

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black_puppydog 7y ago

So... flagged because... some people don't like it?

5db8db 7y ago

For all, who missed it: the deep adaption paper [1]. there is written, it's not a crisis anymore, it is already a 'tragedy'. [1]: https://www.lifeworth.com/deepadaptation.pdf https://www.lifeworth.com/deepadaptation.pdf