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We need to take CO2 out of the sky – an overview of climate tech
- tito 7y agoCheck out Ryan's Negative Emissions reading list: https://www.orbuch.com/nets-reading-list https://www.orbuch.com/nets-reading-list "Carbon Removal 101": http://bit.ly/carbonremoval-101 http://bit.ly/carbonremoval-101 (I helped write this one) Covers a reading list, accelerators, conveners, platforms, newsletters, and funders. Index of startups working on negative emissions: http://www.airminers.org http://www.airminers.org
- tito 7y agoA friend suggested sharing "Carbon Removal 101" on coda.io, so here's a link: https://coda.io/d/Carbon-Removal-Reading-List_dpKG8YbDWIn/Carbon-Removal-101_susMs#_luX2T https://coda.io/d/Carbon-Removal-Reading-List_dpKG8YbDWIn/Ca...
- ouid 7y agowhy do they get to start the annual temperature anomaly graph at around -.3 in 1900.
- new_realist 7y agoBecause 0 is the average temperature from 1961-1990.
- lopmotr 7y agoIt's not a quantity that has any natural zero, nor is time (year since Jesus?). So you can start it wherever you want.
- xxgreg 7y agoPedantic answer... You could start at 0 Kelvin. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absolute_zero https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absolute_zero
- ouid 7y agothat's not true at all. We're trying to measure the human impact on global temperature. The natural zero is whatever our best guess for the temperature would be without human intervention.
- lopmotr 7y agoIf it was constant, I'd agree, but the natural temperature was always changing and whatever it would have been today will also be changing. So you'd be graphing a different quantity, f(t) = temperature(t) - natural_temperature(t). From such a graph, you wouldn't be able to tell if a change was a change in the actual temperature or just a change in the predicted natural temperature. A predicted natural cooling would look the same as a human-caused warming.
- ouid 7y agoThis is already the case.
- symplee 7y agoI empathize with people who are trying to help by reducing their footprint. Though I fear it'll all be in vain when a machine is invented that can suck a lifetime's worth of frugality out of the air in a fraction of a second.
- throwaway5752 7y agoI have spent a not inconsiderable amount of resources reducing my footprint and I will be thrilled to death if we can manage our way out of this crisis and people get "free lunches". This is just trivial game theory and the sunk cost fallacy. Regrettably, the numbers involved make me pessimistic. I think your idea of some deus ex machina technology is ungrounded optimism, wishful thinking, or denial. Nothing in the linked article gives any cause for such optimism. Climate change math is like the ballistics equation. It is just a cold hard reality check. There is no free lunch in terms of the energy of a chemical reaction. We are all getting really, really close to failing here. I think it's imperative not to be hopeless about it, but we should be honest with ourselves that we may not have modern human civilization as we understand it within a generation or two [edit: unless we act immediately, not soon]
- monkeydreams 7y ago> Though I fear it'll all be in vain when a machine is invented that can suck a lifetime's worth of frugality out of the air in a fraction of a second. In the same way that a year's worth of health insurance is wasted if you don't get sick. So, not wasted.
- tommoor 7y agoIt took me months to save $100 as a kid, now seconds of movement on the stock market earns me more money – but I don't regret saving as a kid :)
- blackflame7000 7y agoI don't think the environment pays compound interest then again, what banks do anymore?
- 7y ago
- pstrateman 7y ago1. Plant trees 2. Cut down trees 3. Sink trees to the bottom of a great lake
- sliken 7y agoSure, that works, and will continue to work. Forests on the other hand help when new, but reach a steady state. However the problem is that at least for the near future burning oil, making plastic, and similar other carbon intensive processes make it near impossible to plant enough trees. Carbon taxes, solar, wind, energy storage, and nuclear offer at least the possibility of offsetting carbon generation.... then plant and sink trees. I do wonder how hard it would be to make a widget that with sunlight could make pure carbon bricks that would be useful as a building material. I think Cory Doctorow described it in one of his sci-fi books. Ideally self replicating of course.
- willj 7y agoTrees take about 10 years[1] to reach their peak CO2 consumption. That’s a long time to wait. Also, trees and other plants seem to be decreasing in how much carbon they are absorbing, compared to what they did a decade ago. [2] [1] http://urbanforestrynetwork.org/benefits/air%20quality.htm http://urbanforestrynetwork.org/benefits/air%20quality.htm [2] https://cosmosmagazine.com/climate/trees-and-plants-reached-peak-carbon-10-years-ago https://cosmosmagazine.com/climate/trees-and-plants-reached-...
- quixoticelixer- 7y agoNot really, this is going to be a problem for a while
- agumonkey 7y agoyou need very tall trees to suck co2 in the atmosphere
- FooHentai 7y agoexplain please
- maerF0x0 7y agoWhy do we always phrase it as changing the climate instead of facing that it's an energy balance issue? Too much energy is entering the earth and getting trapped. We can solve it by letting less enter, or otherwise sinking some of it. Consider if we stored the excess energy as chemical energy? or reflected some fraction of the energy back out away from us? reducing consumption is a failing project and the greener technology gets the more people increase their consumption in a compensatory way (Heat – George Monbiot) ...
- willj 7y agoIt’s not just an energy issue. The abundance of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere contributes to ocean acidification.
- maerF0x0 7y agoThis is a good point. Thank you for pointing it out.
- millstone 7y ago"Energy balance" isn't the right diagnosis because the energy balance has not changed significantly: the sun is and has forever been the dominant energy source in climate terms. Broad-spectrum sunlight hits the earth, and is later emitted as infrared. CO2 is transparent to UV, but absorbs infrared. So global warming is a consequence of the fact that the major fossil fuel emission is opaque to a wavelength of light emitted by the sunlit earth. "Letting less enter", "stored the excess energy", and "reflected some fraction" are all huge engineering solutions to the global warming crisis. And I support them all! But space mirrors and geo-scale energy sinks are sci-fi, they will not save us any time soon. Reducing consumption buys time. Switching to renewables buys time too. Maybe you use renewable biofuels and capture the CO2 emissions: now your car is carbon negative, without launching a space mirror!
- Ono-Sendai 7y agoIt's absolutely an energy balance issue. The Earth is heating up, because it's radiating away less energy than its receiving.
- lngnmn1 7y agoThere were trees and bushes for that. Plant the good damn trees. They will take another 20 years to grow? Well, that is the price of being stupid.
- tempestn 7y agoI'm interested to see what comes of this: https://projectvesta.org/ https://projectvesta.org/
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- ProjectVesta 7y agoHi thanks for the mention! We are available to answer any questions. And we'll have a new version of the website out soon with some updates.
- tempestn 7y agoThanks. I actually just took a look around there and was disappointed there wasn't a 'News' section or something like that, so glad to hear there will be updates soon! I do have one other question: is there any chance you'll partner with a Canadian charity, or other ex-US charities for that matter, to accept tax-free donations from other countries?
- avip 7y agoI have a lot of questions about the feasibility of projectVesta. What's the best communication channel?
- Fiahil 7y agoHave you tested it in secret somewhere in the real world already ?
- ComputerGuru 7y agoWhat the article leaves to the conclusion is what needs to be stated up front and center: it's virtually impossible to do this efficiently, cheaply, or effectively because there's so little CO2 in the air, meaning a) adding even a little bit more greatly affects the CO2 levels b) with a global ppm of ~400, it basically means that you need to filter 2500 molecules of air to get a single molecule of CO2, and that's assuming perfect binding and effectiveness. There is no magic powder we can mix that'll cause CO2 to precipitate out of the atmosphere and fall to the ground like snow; it's a grueling energy intensive process to filter that out of the air around us.
- ttul 7y agoIf you can capture the CO2 using transient power from wind or solar and use it to make a synthetic fuel, then you have a potentially viable option. Carbon Engineering in Squamish BC is doing this for $100 a tonne. Their synthetic fuel costs about $2/L to make - still too expensive, but not if the carbon price rises to about $100/T.
- taneq 7y agoThat’s way better than I thought it would be, aren’t some European countries fairly close to that mark?
- sime2009 7y agoThis morning I paid about 1.68 euro/L as a consumer for plain gas/petrol here in the Netherlands.
- ttul 7y agoThe World Bank has compiled a database that you can query [1]. Sweden's carbon tax is USD $121, the highest in the world. Next best is Switzerland and Lichtenstein tied at $97, followed by Finland at $68. Sweden's tax covers 40% of emissions from that country. Finland covers 36%. Switzerland covers 33%. British Columbia's tax is lower, but it covers 70% of carbon emissions - a very broad-based tax. It will be USD $38 in 2021. Personally, I think it's better for governments to focus on total coverage rather than the price. The more broad-based the tax is, the more efficient it is in shaping the economic development of the region. You don't want carbon "leaking" into sectors where it's cheap to pollute - that's inefficient. Far better to have all sectors equally incentivized to decarbonize. [1] https://carbonpricingdashboard.worldbank.org/map_data https://carbonpricingdashboard.worldbank.org/map_data
- beefield 7y agoTL;DR: We need dirt cheap energy. It would have a couple of benefits: First CCS would be feasible. Second if (non-fossil) energy is dirt cheap, nobody bothers digging fossil energy sources from ground. Third, there are always more fun things available when energy is cheap vs when energy is expensive) So, keep on pushing solar and try to make nuclear competitive with something like small modular reactors, they are pretty much only ones with massive enough potential to properly disrupt energy markets.
- newyankee 7y agoI mean if so called wonder materials like Graphene can actually be harnessed to make new generation ultra cheap solar cells may be something might happen. What we need actually is a Global Manhattan project which focuses on something like the 100 most promising approaches and builds and tests prototypes. This should be funded both by Govts. and the rich individuals. I think sharing of intellectual property can do a lot of good in solving the Carbon free energy conundrum and then getting it cheap enough for everything else. My guess is that a project like this can deliver solution(s) 10-20 years before free market will.
- petre 7y agoJust pump air into ponds of algae/kelp or grow Azolla on the surface. Feed it with fertilizer runoff that's otherwise thrown into the rivers, seas, oceans. No need to build expensive solutions to remove CO2 from the atmosphere.
- snaptravisty 7y agothat sounds like an expensive solution. I can't napkin math any of this since I don't know how much CO2 you could extract along with the other engineering and logistical problems: * which areas are suitable * how much energy is required * how much area of land is required. I hesitate to give credibility to any answer that starts with 'just... [do this thing]'. If you have any references I'd be curious to learn more
- petre 7y agohttp://theazollafoundation.org/azollas-uses/as-a-co2-sequester/ http://theazollafoundation.org/azollas-uses/as-a-co2-sequest...
- AncientTree 7y agoMy biggest concern about CO2 is the cognitive impact it has on humans - at levels 800ppm and higher, mental performance is impacted. It will take a while for the atmosphere to reach this level (hopefully it never does), but it is common inside houses and offices. As atmospheric CO2 rises, it becomes more difficult to ventilate buildings, and human mental performance degrades. In terms of geoengineering, it seems like these two are our best bets: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratospheric_aerosol_injection https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratospheric_aerosol_injectio... to prevent runaway warming. As a side effect, the dispersed sunlight helps plant growth. Solar power generation is negatively impacted though. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_fertilization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_fertilization to sequester CO2. As a side effect, marine life and fish stocks would be boosted by the greater plankton food supply. In any case it seems absolutely bonkers that we are still selling fossil-fueled-vehicles and building coal power plants when we clearly have the technology and capability to replace both of them.
- cs02rm0 7y agoHave you got a reference for the 800ppm bit? Not being provocative - it'd be genuinely useful to me.
- throwaway8941 7y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide#Below_1% https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide#Below_1%
- AncientTree 7y agoThere are multiple studies on the issue, and another user linked to Wikipedia. I'd personally recommend buying a CO2 monitor: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/32887534678.html?spm=a2g0o.productlist.0.0.ad21e803I1BRqT&algo_pvid=a6f15dbf-97bc-4346-a5f3-9efd5a46e35e&algo_expid=a6f15dbf-97bc-4346-a5f3-9efd5a46e35e-0&btsid=0ab50f0815827071300405942e7277&ws_ab_test=searchweb0_0,searchweb201602_,searchweb201603_ https://www.aliexpress.com/item/32887534678.html?spm=a2g0o.p...
- dcolkitt 7y ago
- jiri 7y agoOr, we should just get used to live with more CO2 in the air.
- xornor 7y agoOr, have less people producing waste everywhere.
- aforwardslash 7y agoThat won't remove the co2 already in the air. And we also produce gases that alleviate warming, not only greenhouse effect ones. Stopping all emissions today would probably result in a temperature increase, not a drop. The facts are, there is no magic today to capture the co2 in the air. To reverse the process, you'd need at least to put the same amount of energy as the one dissipated when co2 was released. So, imagine producing at least the same amount of energy of burni g 100years of fossil fuels.
- imtringued 7y agoAre you going to install ACs in developing countries and pay their electricity bills?
- phosphophyllite 7y agoWe don't need to remove CO2 from atmosphere. Let warming happen. Everything will be okay.
- the6threplicant 7y agoOne of the problems I see with CO2 sequestration is that it will be a nice way for companies to suck at the teat of taxpayers the world over. I'm sure Halliburton-like companies have a 3 step plan to be right at the front of the money firehose when governments are forced to reduce CO2 or face even bigger costs (both financially and politically) in the coming decades.
- hnarn 7y agoThis assumes that the only way a project like this could be pulled off would be for the state to open a "money firehose" and spray it onto buckets held by private corporations. Is there any reason it couldn't, in theory, be a state controlled venture? Especially for something as seemingly basic as "planting trees", I don't see where the corporate expertise comes in that the state could never replicate. "The state will handle this" is not only a legitimate structure in totalitarian dictatorships, it's used across the developed western world for most public services.
- scatters 7y agoYou'd rather the world burn than companies you disapprove of be part of the solution?
- Phenix88be 7y agoArticle like this make me so depressed. The conclusion is always (from my point of vue) : we are fucked. We need a magic device that will remove gigatons of CO2 out of the atmosphere in less than 30 years and we need it to do it without using energy or consuming rare material. And you can't do much with CO2 at the end.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- lopmotr 7y agoBefore you get too worried, remember that positive stories about climate change are politically forbidden in most mainstream publications. You're only getting the gloomy side of it. The harm it will do is still finite and not even really known. Maybe we can just suck it up and suffer the consequences? Do you have an idea of how bad it will really be? Worse than World War II? Worse than communism? Worse than the Spanish Flu? All that stuff happened in the same century and killed close to 10% of the earth's entire population! Yet somehow we're doing great.
- Hermel 7y agoI’m paying Climeworks 1000$ to remove a ton of CO2 every month. Not very cost effective, but a start.
- adrianN 7y agoYou could pay $100 and buy two tons of coal every month and $900 to bury it somewhere.
- paulcarroty 7y agoBuying coal isn't effective by design - you'll only encourage market to produce more & more coal.
- adrianN 7y agoYou raise the price for people who want to burn it.
- Fiahil 7y agoYou could also plant 100 trees every month for the same amount, and in 5 years you would have a small forest + removed 1079 tons of C02 instead of 60. In 10 years, you would have 12000 trees and removed 4283 tons of C02 instead of 120. Trees are not really the best carbon removal tool that one could hope for, but at least they're a decent comparison. PS: Very approximate carbon removal per tree per year rate of 5.9kg. Bigger trees can remove more carbon (>22kg for a 10yo tree) and the tree species also have a role to play, but you get the point, climeworks effectiveness is extremely small and you're lighting piles of cash on fire.
- hawski 7y agoHow much CO2, on scale, let's say, 10 years, planting 1000 trees a month would remove? I have https://teamtrees.org/ https://teamtrees.org/ in mind, they claim to plant one tree for each dollar.
- Fiahil 7y ago
- otabdeveloper4 7y agoNo we don't, not unless you want the plants to starve.
- pixelbash 7y agoAt a guess a lot of things would happen before that becomes a concern.
- baq 7y agorecommended related reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azolla_event https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azolla_event "The event coincides precisely with a catastrophic decline in carbon dioxide levels, which fell from 3500 ppm in the early Eocene to 650 ppm during this event."
- jokoon 7y agoI don't like those sorts of articles because they dismiss the idea of reducing CO2 emissions, while only talking about hypothetical technologies. I don't think it's a good idea to wait for such undeveloped technology to mature, because the clock is already ticking. It is still much more important to reduce emissions now. What would be much better, for example, is developing smaller cars. I would rather see society organize for a voluntary reduction of co2, because capturing co2 seems like scientifically too fastidious. Also, I'm european and I tend to be very pessimistic when looking at US co2 emissions per capita.
- phtrivier 7y agoI think the author actually agrees with you, per the article itself: "there are two general approaches to keep warming to below a certain level: - Reducing emissions - Removing previous emissions from the sky If you remember one thing from this piece, it should be that we need to do both. Gone are the days where optimistic emissions reductions kept us below a 2-degree warming target."
- jokoon 7y agoExcept reducing emissions seems much more doable, safe and simple. It's just politically difficult. I have little hope that technology will be able to capture co2 in a manner that will be sufficient. I don't like those sorts of techs because people will brandish them as a solution, while it's highly unlikely they will help at all.
- acd 7y agoWe need to stop consuming like there is no tomorrow. This is driven by advertisement convincing consumers they should buy products they may not need. Secondly we need to make products which lasts a life time. I see root cause that we need to remodel the economy from market economy consumerism to a circular sustainable economy. Most current economists is saying expand expand expand, but that increases co2 levels due to increased energy consumption of manufacturing which we cannot sustain. Thus we must use things which are long term sustainable and circulate and repair these things. Remove co2 out of the sky is also a good thing. The best thing I can think of then is to lower the temperature of the earth because then the oceans will act as a Co2 buffer sink. Think like carbon beverage, when you cool cans during production for putting carbon in them you cool them. If you heat a can they release stored co2. The same process with the oceans but at a much bigger scale.
- philbarr 7y agoHow would this "circular sustainable economy" work? People tend to think of there being only two versions of the economy available - the government tells us what stuff to make, or free markets determine what we make. We would need a way of incentivising re-use, and of incentivising companies to make things re-usable. Currently the only way to make more money is to make and sell more stuff.
- lm28469 7y ago> We would need a way of incentivising re-use, and of incentivising companies to make things re-usable. That's what happened pre 50s. My mother still uses the sewing machine my grandma was using and it was made in my country, not in buttfuck nowhere SE asia. As it turns out making long lasting products isn't the most profitable thing so we shifted to producing to the least reliable standards people would still accept
- lotsofpulp 7y agoPeople shifted to buying the cheapest products available.
- dd36 7y agoIf only bitcoin worked in reverse...
- anonsivalley652 7y agoNet negative emissions must be a global goal within 5 years because this is a climate change emergency. It doesn't mean no emissions, it means deeply net negative. Even going crazy to get to zero emissions, it doesn't change the inconvenient fact that an excess of GHGs are already in the air. Sequestration (CCS) and solar shades (SRM) are the primary, big-$tretch approaches that are most readily-apparent to moderating insolation. CCS seems much more doable than sending a giant blackout curtain into space or spraying tons of SO2 into the air to return as acid rain. Here's the thing about CCS: direct air capture is like a junior engineer's naive, brute-force solution because it's way too expensive and not scalable for the several teratons that need to be sequestered. Bio CCS remediation approaches are superior because they use biology to do more of the work for less resources. Kelp, phytoplankton (including ferrous seeding) and other ocean-based CC are the natural solutions to lock-up carbon. There's a massive kelp forest right now off the Yucatan in Mexico stretching nearly to Africa. Harvesting, expanding and fertilizing such an ecosystem with an army of specialized ships seems like a better plan for tackling it. Such a plan would still require assuring the Sequestration in CCS such that biomass sinks to deep ocean trenches OR harvesting, compacting and pumping underground. If we can manage and offset GHGs down to a sane level at some point in the future, then it should be an immutable prime-directive that GHGs cannot be emitted without first purchasing or accomplishing an equivalent assured CCS. PS: As luck would have it, I happen to subscribe to several climatology and related academics on various video platforms, including Paul Beckwith, who does a good job of summarizing the latest research and underscoring events and trends. EDIT: https://paulbeckwith.net https://paulbeckwith.net
- galangalalgol 7y agoFerrous sulphate seeding also produces kelp mats much more reflective of light than water is.
- AlgorithmicTime 7y ago>Net negative emissions must be a global goal within 5 years because this is a climate change emergency. No, it's not. You know how I know it's not? The people who keep telling me this keep flying on jets, private jets even! In any case, with any plausible amount of warming, humanity will be fine.
- shafyy 7y agoOne danger of promoting carbon sequestration is that people might think that they can emit as much as they want, since its' going to be removed from the atmosphere anyways. More dangerous yet, lobbies pushing this way of thinking to the public and trying to get away with more emissions: "Yes we are extracting oil, but we also spend X$ each year for carbon sequestration. This is a little bit how these lobbies have been pushing changing personal habits "turn of the water while brushing your teeth, don't use plastic straws". Or also CO2 compensation (or absolution as I call it). Not to say that we shouldn't invest in sequestration, but just need to be careful with the phrasing. This article does a good job, saying BOTH need to happen (reduction of emission and sequestration).
- LatteLazy 7y agoWe need to do lots of things. But we are not going to. Discussing the tech ignores that this is fundamentally a political and economic problem...
- snarf21 7y agoI agree. We need to move to more renewables like solar but that is just for the future, burning less CO2 in 30 years from now. The warming will continue to happen, technology can't stop it. The population will grow to 9B but the global growth rate keeps dropping. This planet can't support that many people, no matter how clean we use energy. Look at all the water resources and food resources we are burning and the biodiversity we are killing so people can eat and make a living. It feels like 4B is about as much as we can sustain. The population will continue to drop and the places where the birth rate is high, we need education and empowerment of women to drive the birth rate down to more western rates. This is where we should be spending money, not a machine to pull CO2 out of the air. Nature already knows how to do that quite efficiently but it will take time. We'll have a few hundred years of consequences but it will eventually fix itself.
- neilwilson 7y agoMandating 100% carbon scrubbers on power stations should be the first step. Let’s stop putting it into the air first
- ykevinator 7y agoFox news tells me it's all a hoax, who to believe?
- sebastianconcpt 7y agoIf we do we kill al the plants. Genius.
- sebastianconcpt 7y agoWell, I'm Freeman Dyson's team. Reference: https://e360.yale.edu/features/freeman_dyson_takes_on_the_climate_establishment https://e360.yale.edu/features/freeman_dyson_takes_on_the_cl...
- nnq 7y agoLook, it's cool that we consider all these fancy solutions, but we had and still have a more obvious solution of pricing-externalities into things - a proper carbon-tax and recycling-taxes for plastics high enough to make them undesirable, increase gas (and coal) prices enough to make electric everything look cheap and maybe even nuclear power look cheaper in the new comparison! Stop pending the argument that "it's politically impossible / toxic / whatever / unenforceable etc.", that's a dumb argument. Just take politics out of the equation! Or more precisely, take "democratic choice" out of this particular policy decision! If countries amend their constitutions to disallow any party or individual not in support of this to even be part of any election, then this particular aspect would simply not appear in political campaigns. Have "dark room" deals in most countries of the world put this into place and move on. And once the major international players are on board, for any country not playing the same game, just kindly point the missiles at them! In the end, most national governments would approve of such taxation because they'll have the opportunity to formulate it in their own terms and slightly increase national budgets (maybe investing a bit more in the military and gaining an advantage over their neighbors that don't do it... ugly but any incentive in the right direction helps). And multinational corporations would also not mind it much if it's done across the board, without favoring anyone... and actually corporations could be "hired to enforce the tax" in more advanced schemas, offering opportunities to profit while punishing misbehaving countries.
- tehjoker 7y ago"Just take politics out of the equation! Or more precisely, take "democratic choice" out of this particular policy decision!" This is such a scary sentence! The problem of climate change has been cause precisely by a lack of democracy. The military, the large oil refiners, the design of our infrastructure has been deeply affected by corporate priorities at the expense of a manipulated populace. We have climate denial in the US in large part because of corporate propaganda (and the fact that if people's oil sector jobs disappear there's no organized democratic approach to help them, they're at the mercy of the private sector). Furthermore, real democracy would include all the people affected by climate change that didn't cause it! The people of the Marshal islands should certainly have a say in how we approach this problem. Saying we don't need democracy is an extremely America centric approach. In the circles I'm in, we talk a lot about eco-facsism, which is the way the ecological crisis will be used to promote fascist policies with a green tinge. These include blaming immigrants, cracking down on poor people, and denying democracy in favor of the technocratic actors who caused the problem in the first place. We need the opposite! We need complete renewal of democracy and democratic practice in order to solve these problems. This idea scares the powerful because solving this crisis necessarily requires democratic control of major parts of the economy, which is a threat to the existing beneficiaries of the economic system.
- unixhero 7y ago/Meta Why are there two climate tech on the upvoted list on Hacker News. What causes topics to trend like this? Are they being cherry picked? That's okay, I'm trying to understand here.