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>There won't be any ingenious, miracle carbon removal solutions OK but I think there will be.
by leesec 3y ago
>There won't be any ingenious, miracle carbon removal solutions
OK but I think there will be.
- suby 3y agoWe shouldn't be operating under the assumption that there will be.
- notfish 3y agoHow? Unless you get a breakthrough with fusion, I just don’t see us finding the energy to make carbon removal feasible. You either need huge tracts of land to power forests, or massive amounts of energy from another source to do it with tech, and neither of those is going to be the easy fix people believe is coming.
- ben_w 3y agoThere's a nice handy fusion ball in the sky; but that isn't sufficient for CO2 removal, and if we do have a genuine incentive to remove it, I wouldn't want to bet that the incentives stop at any particular level and thus would give equal a priori credence to us ending up with too much or too little atmospheric CO2 with such technology.
- doctor_eval 3y agoThis is exactly where I sit too. We currently have financial incentives for producing CO2, which are proving almost impossible to reverse. But let’s say we reverse them and create incentives for CO2 removal. How are we going to change the incentive yet again, when it’s time to stop? By the time this happens, the CO2 removal lobby will be strong. Think about the jobs! The taxes! The communities!
- standardUser 3y agoIt's hard to imagine how someone can look at the track record and then think "impossible! we will never figure it out!" when human history is basically a detailed record of us constantly "figuring things out" that previously seemed impossible. When something has yet to be figured out you are supposed to be baffled because the part where it all make sense doesn't come until after we figure it out. It doesn't guarantee we will figure out this or that specific challenge, but the well-established pattern gives ample reason to be optimistic.
- etrautmann 3y agoI appreciate the case for optimism, and I agree that as a species we can be quite clever. We can also fail to address important issues with simple and obvious fixes in ways that boggle the mind (e.g. getting vaccinated or wearing masks during COVID). Whereas I might have once thought that our ingenuity would rule the day, it seems like a functional society requires more than just technology.
- lotsoweiners 3y agoGetting vaccinated wasn’t an option during the halcyon days of Covid and like 95%+ of people I saw at public businesses in my red state were wearing masks (or at least attempting to) during that time period. But unfortunately people still needed to eat, work, purchase necessities, learn, get treated, etc. This all to say that I don’t really think your analogy really holds up in this context.
- ramblenode 3y agoSurvivorship bias. You're missing the big graveyard of civilizations that thought they could persist in the face of changing external circumstances but miscalculated. Many of those are buried in what are now deserts, created by their misguided land management.
- nologic01 3y agoTechnically there might be. There is plenty of brains around to explore all possibilities and there are far worse ways to waste talent. Just don't bet the planet on it, don't create a sense that a painless fix is just around the corner and then we can simply go on.
- aydyn 3y agoThere's no other possibility except a technical solution. Expecting humans to change their behavior collectively, across the globe, is magical thinking.
- suoduandao2 3y agoAnd yet the birth rate keeps declining. Maybe we're collectively smarter than we fear.
- merouan 3y agoHere’s the thing: actually, we need the behavior of a _very small_ number of humans to change: the rich. Not only is their personal CO2 consumption the majority of personal CO2 consumption, but the capital they control drives the behavior and policy of everything else. This is a far easier problem to solve. I’ll leave the solution to your imagination.
- DoreenMichele 3y agoSadly, many of them would rather plan to ruin the world and then flee to a (cough) "safehouse" (cough) in New Zealand than in any way get a clue.
- ben_w 3y agoKinda, but most people on this website are in the global top 1%, and 1% is both a small percentage and still 80 million people.
- aydyn 3y agoThat's actually completely and entirely untrue. The largest delta of CO2 in the coming years will be coming from developing countries as they rise up to modern standards. But when you say: > This is a far easier problem to solve. I’ll leave the solution to your imagination. It pretty clear you're not really arguing in good faith. Dog whistle is pretty loud.
- atoav 3y agoYeah, but they won't matter because they will not be things that we can deploy at scale.
- time_to_smile 3y agoThe problem lies with carbon's essential role as part of the energy cycle that powers the majority of this planet. H2O + (Solar) Energy + CO2 => Useful hydrocarbons (everything form sugar to gasoline) O2 + Hydrocarbons => Useful Energy + CO2 When you burn a log you're really using a solar battery that took potentially decades to charge and roughly 25x the energy you feel from the fire (photosynthesis is only 4% efficient). The same process that feeds us powers the global economy, but at the cost of emitting CO2 in direct proportion to the energy we're using and benefiting from. This is why "miracle" solutions are so unlikely. Because they require a major disruption of this process in a way that it's not clear is fundamentally possible. Anyway to massively remove CO2 from the atmosphere is fundamentally going to require energy. And because of the nature of inefficiency, will always be a poor use of any energy you used to create the problem. This is obviously where things like nuclear fusion do provide the possibility of breaking this process because they create a lot of energy outside of solar powered carbon cycle.
- toss1 3y agoThere is a LOOoong... distance between "I think there will be" and "there is and it works" Plus, climate change is not the most existential threat. That would be the biodiversity apocalypse in every part of the bio-web being caused by a myriad of pollutants, pesticides, monocultrue farming, habitat destruction, light pollution, and hundreds of other scaled-up human activities, all leading to the breaking of the food web. When the food web fails, it'll be nonlinear, and humans will not do well.
- lisasays 3y agoOk - why, specifically? Or is just ... this feeling you have?
- CharlieDigital 3y agoIn the context of the post you're replying to, that's like believing there will be a miracle pill so you can eat whatever you want, however much you want, drink as much alcohol as you want, and the magic pill will prevent obesity, cancer, heart disease, and liver failure. And even if such a miracle drug did exist, if seems like the better solution is to simply lead a healthier lifestyle to begin with.
- K0balt 3y agoFusion is the key. Replace all of our dirty energy, and produce enough surplus to sequester carbon. We should be pursuing fusion as if the survival of the planet depends on it…because it is likely that it does.
- raffraffraff 3y agoWhat if fusion is impossible though, from an engineering perspective? Why not continue to pursue fission using safer, modern reactor designs? It works. The timelines for fusion, if it ever works, are too long.
- SXX 3y agoMost polluting regions are also the least politically stable. Today at any moment disaster could happen on largest nuclear power plant in Europe because madman decide to play a conqueror. People can hardly be trusted with a dangerous nuclear power.
- suoduandao2 3y agoWe already have a conveniently-placed fusion reactor that's boing to be operational for a few billion years.
- woleium 3y agoStill need to be concerned with the amount of latent heat generated on the planet surface
- tambourine_man 3y agoOK but based on what?