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I'm extremely sceptical that climate engineering is gonna help: Mitigating continued CO2 emissions is VASTLY more expensive than reducing emissions themselves (

I'm extremely sceptical that climate engineering is gonna help: Mitigating continued CO2 emissions is VASTLY more expensive than reducing emissions themselves (in every scenario I've seen so far), and we had 4 decades (!!) to do anything about the emissions but nothing happened. I see no reason to assume that governments are suddenly going to spend significant parts of GDP on climate engineering if they could not be arsed to spend a tiny fraction of that on mitigation so far :(

phreeza 5y ago
You're right from a financial standpoint, but I wonder if from a psychological standpoint, it is easier for humans to start doing something new than it is to stop doing something they have been doing for a long time?
- baron_harkonnen 5y ago
  Exactly, this is why wearing masks and getting vaccinated worked so effectively at curbing the pandemic. People didn't want to change their way of life. Stopping the pandemic would have required an extreme economic shut down in April, far more extreme than what we saw. Sure this economic hit would be much less than the long run impact of pandemic never really going away, but it was too much for people. So they all agreed that wearing maskings in public and private gathering, plus universal adoption of the vaccine would be the easier, if not ultimately more expensive path. While the pandemic did stick around for a bit, by spring it was basically gone. Now when I go out I see people in packed clubs, happily drinking and dancing mask free. Sure by comparison universal mask adoption and vaccination is to climate mitigation like building a lego castle is to building the pyramids by hand, but since we solved that problem so effectively I'm extremely optimistic about how we're going to tackle climate change. We showed that we can solve pandemic without effecting the economy or our lifestyles, and we can just as easily to the same for climate change.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - myrmidon 5y ago
    This an extremely alarming comparison, because western nationstates basically observed people dying in Asia in spite of massive (chinese) mitigation efforts and did not do SHIT (for months!) before the pandemic arrived at their homes. With climate change, once we really start to feel the symptoms it might well be too late to change the trajectory and we might suffer the effects for millenia...
Voloskaya 5y ago
The immediacy of a threat is directly proportional to the willingness and resources allocated to tackle it. 40 years ago, no politician was willing to bank their mandate on starting to tackle a problem that was (mistakenly) thought to be a century in the future. This is starting to change. Take COVID. Every government knew it could happen, and the damages to the economy (i.e. cost) it could have, yet none of the countries in the West did anything to prepare for it, and had to foot a much bigger bill in the end than say Taiwan or Japan. Again, because the threat was elusive and didn't feel immediate.

phreeza 5y ago

You're right from a financial standpoint, but I wonder if from a psychological standpoint, it is easier for humans to start doing something new than it is to stop doing something they have been doing for a long time?

baron_harkonnen 5y ago
Exactly, this is why wearing masks and getting vaccinated worked so effectively at curbing the pandemic. People didn't want to change their way of life. Stopping the pandemic would have required an extreme economic shut down in April, far more extreme than what we saw. Sure this economic hit would be much less than the long run impact of pandemic never really going away, but it was too much for people. So they all agreed that wearing maskings in public and private gathering, plus universal adoption of the vaccine would be the easier, if not ultimately more expensive path. While the pandemic did stick around for a bit, by spring it was basically gone. Now when I go out I see people in packed clubs, happily drinking and dancing mask free. Sure by comparison universal mask adoption and vaccination is to climate mitigation like building a lego castle is to building the pyramids by hand, but since we solved that problem so effectively I'm extremely optimistic about how we're going to tackle climate change. We showed that we can solve pandemic without effecting the economy or our lifestyles, and we can just as easily to the same for climate change.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- myrmidon 5y ago
  This an extremely alarming comparison, because western nationstates basically observed people dying in Asia in spite of massive (chinese) mitigation efforts and did not do SHIT (for months!) before the pandemic arrived at their homes. With climate change, once we really start to feel the symptoms it might well be too late to change the trajectory and we might suffer the effects for millenia...

Voloskaya 5y ago

The immediacy of a threat is directly proportional to the willingness and resources allocated to tackle it. 40 years ago, no politician was willing to bank their mandate on starting to tackle a problem that was (mistakenly) thought to be a century in the future. This is starting to change. Take COVID. Every government knew it could happen, and the damages to the economy (i.e. cost) it could have, yet none of the countries in the West did anything to prepare for it, and had to foot a much bigger bill in the end than say Taiwan or Japan. Again, because the threat was elusive and didn't feel immediate.