11 ms·

How would it help a lot? The issue with burning things is the pollution it can cause if not filtered properly before emissions released into the air. CO2 feeds

by loceng 3y ago

How would it help a lot? The issue with burning things is the pollution it can cause if not filtered properly before emissions released into the air. CO2 feeds plants to grow, which in turn provides more food and habitat for more life. An incongruence in the West vs. the East's strategy is that we in the West have avoided nuclear - which generates zero CO2 - whereas the East's CO2 production (via building new coal power plants weekly) - has been skyrocketing: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-co2-emissions-per-country?country=CHN~USA~CAN~MEX~DEU~FRA~GBR https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-co2-emissions-per-... In this scenario with China doing the opposite to the rest of the world, there are exactly zero gains for CO2 reduction - far outweighed by the increase in CO2 production. And in this scenario as well the "polluter" or generator of the most CO2 is being rewarded for their behaviour by producing the cheapest energy possible, which allows their cost of production to be lower than the West, which allows their profits to be higher - for us to buy cheaper products to not only perpetuate but accelerate these current conditions.

baq 3y ago
CO2 is also a greenhouse gas and makes our atmosphere store much more energy than it used to which destabilizes ecosystems in which those plants you want to grow bigger actually live. So yeah, they’ll grow faster, and then they’ll all die. The rest of your argument is orthogonal to the issue. Taking CO2 out of the atmosphere works globally, it doesn’t matter who does or doesn’t reduce emissions.
- loceng 3y ago
  "CO2 is also a greenhouse gas and makes our atmosphere store much more energy than it used to which destabilizes ecosystems in which those plants you want to grow bigger actually live. So yeah, they’ll grow faster, and then they’ll all die." There may be a delay but then the CO2 gets absorbed and stored in the plants, and then in more animals that will be added mass to the cycles - the plants dying then goes into the soil, to support more growth, and eventually over millions of years that Earth gets compacted - turned into rock, then arguably more oil will be formed. Your point doesn't argue anything because you stopped-didn't think exponentially through the cycle after they "die" part in the cycle - what happens next? "The rest of your argument is orthogonal to the issue. Taking CO2 out of the atmosphere works globally, it doesn’t matter who does or doesn’t reduce emissions." So you don't think the West "being responsible by reducing CO2" - getting hurt by costs going up - while the East massively increases CO2 production and gets rewarded by doing so, doesn't have an impact? Please actually address my specific points, rather than just making a general claim if you want to continue discussing this.
  - yetihehe 3y ago
    > here may be a delay but then the CO2 gets absorbed and stored in the plants, [...] turned into rock, then arguably more oil will be formed. Yes, the planet and life on earth will do just fine. The problem is can our civilization survive? Like, can our current civilisation survive the next 100 years of worsening conditions? Humans will survive, we are the most widespread species already (from hottest to coldest places on earth). Some areas will be a little too unhabitable of course, billions will die, but who cares, right?
  - hansvm 3y ago
    The political difficulty with handling CO2 appropriately is orthogonal to whether it's bad. A likely outcome without some form of geoengineering is vast swathes of currently inhabited land becoming uninhabitable due to flooding, extreme storms, and lengthy wet-bulb events. In some sense that's also just a political problem, but if we can't agree that CO2 production has significant negative effects then I think we'll struggle to deal with 3B homeless people [0] [1]. [0] Of course, many of them won't be able to migrate at all and will just die (I'll posit that's also bad). [1] Do think through this for just a second. Our current economic systems include property ownership, and basically all land on earth is owned by somebody. If the land owned by 3B people becomes worthless (both in an economic sense and also in that they can't live there anymore), they'll have to either die, or they'll have to start using land owned by other people. Suppose no significant numbers of people move till they have to (since if we can't coordinate on CO2 sequestration/production, we probably can't coordinate on mitigating the harm from that initial lack of coordination). There are solutions, but they all represent at best a global transfer of resources. Is solving that problem easier than handling CO2 correctly to start with?
    - loceng 3y ago
      "The political difficulty with handling CO2 appropriately is orthogonal to whether it's bad." I think rational-reasonable people, who are usually the most competent and resourceful - aside from industrial complexes with wealth and willingness to do bad in order to achieve regulatory capture to selfishly benefit themselves - will and are landing on that CO2 is an issue to address but how urgent and how close to castrophou we are is the question, but that also then has to be balanced by how harmful could or will the response be to it, e.g. increasing energy costs by adding a CO2 tax will then kill off how many millions around the world, slow how many more millions from getting out of poverty sooner, and how much natural forest environment gets destroyed from people now needing to cut down forests unsustainably because they need a cheap fuel for heating and cooking? The issue is "armchair" conversations like this, where most people aren't accounting for or factoring everything necessary for a balanced approach - and there seems to be a big ideological divide and vast amount of teaching to happen, whether people are even calm enough to be willing to listen - or if they're fixed and avoidant, succumbing to whatever hysteria and fear mongering propaganda that they may have been misled by (not to claim everything they believe is false). A bigger threat in my eyes are authoritarians who want to use climate alarmism to manufacture consent to implement further authoritarian-lockdown type policy.
yetihehe 3y ago
It would help because we have too much CO2 in atmosphere now. It accumulated. If we stopped putting CO2, plants and all the other earth chemical loops would take out that excess carbon. > CO2 feeds plants to grow, which in turn provides more food and habitat for more life. Yeah, unless they can't synthesize it because it's too hot and they didn't had a chance to adjust to new temperatures yet. It takes some time and will happen, but we pump CO2 a little too fast. > In this scenario with China doing the opposite to the rest of the world, there are exactly zero gains for CO2 reduction - far outweighed by the increase in CO2 production. Oh yeah, someone litters on the street, let's all litter and get rid of the trash cans. Alternative solution: we should stop buying from them so they will not generate that co2.
- loceng 3y ago
  Saying we have "too much CO2 in atmosphere" isn't evidence and historically there was much higher levels, and much more life. And yes, there will be a delay as part of evolutionary process for when plants and wildlife can adapt - for plants that are better adapted or capable of adapting to hotter temperatures-different climate will adjust - so indeed at minimum reducing the pace at minimum can be useful; and deploying technologies to slow down the increase we have arguably bumped up at least a little bit [remember the distance that Earth to the sun we are is the biggest factor of temperatures, and where are we in that 1000s of year cycle at the moment?] will help, but we could also prepare to pollinate and manage new growth areas with plants/life we know can adapt; the US policy makers on the side of believing climate change is a life-or-death urgent consideration want to spend $40+ trillion "fighting" it - so getting simply helping the Earth adapt, which is what we should be doing because it's unknown exactly how much our changing CO2 levels will actually impact things, is a no-brainer to do regardless - to create more life, to maximize it; and I also believe Elon is correct that Earth can sustain another 10x the current human population - however that will require succeeding in battle against industrial complexes and authoritarian wannabes who're involved in regulatory capture. "Alternative solution: we should stop buying from them so they will not generate that co2." Absolutely a good strategy to stop rewarding that behaviour, if that's the best course of action to not destabilize the world too much - which may not be a good idea to potentially force the CCP-China's hand into highly aggressive or bad-harmful behaviour. But do you think the inflationary policy, money borrowing, $34 trillion in debt, and people currently struggling in the US and West in general will be able to handle the massive increase in costs of goods that will happen if that happens?
tzs 3y ago
The atmosphere does a good job of mixing CO2 emissions, so someone emitting a ton of CO2 affects others pretty much equally no matter where they are. Unless you can make a good case that some people have some kind of natural or divine right to a lifestyle that emits more CO2 than others the only sensible way to allocate whatever global CO2 allowance we decide we need to stay under is per capita.
- loceng 3y ago
  Of course, you missed my point though. You can't look at climate in a silo, just like you can't look at the economy in a silo, nor can you look at any one nation in a silo - geopolitics mattering - and the harmful increase in costs the West is taking on with policy is further benefitting the East who's policy allows them to crank up their CO2 production even further, reducing their costs, and benefitting . It's a blatantly obvious disconnect that people pretend doesn't need to be solved at the same time otherwise disadvantage and harm isn't evenly distributed; if harmful policies are going to be implemented instead of technological solutions that don't cause harm but instead accelerate a shift.
__MatrixMan__ 3y ago
> The issue with burning things is the pollution it can cause if not filtered properly before emissions released into the air. CO2 feeds plants to grow, which in turn provides more food and habitat for more life. You're right, provided you're willing to wait a few million years for everybody to adjust to the new norms. That might be quite an uncomfortable transition though, it's not clear what would survive.
- loceng 3y ago
  Adaptation can happen far faster than that, and even faster if facilitated further by conscious effort of humans - like tree planting but on specialized steroids; we could technically "seed bomb" areas with seed species that we know thrive in the newer conditions of the area, and even have missionaries on the ground who help cultivate a minimally adequate ecosystem for it to continue to spread on its own.
  - __MatrixMan__ 3y ago
    I'm not sure we have the knowhow to engineer a minimally adequate ecosystem. It seems like every time we zoom in on an ecosystem we find that it's more complex than we thought. Biodiversity holds secrets which we have a much better shot at discovering than we do at inventing (e.g. novel protein structure and function). Committing to a large scale terraforming project means clobbering the unknown with the known and shutting the door on those secrets forever. It may be one day necessary but it's an outcome that we should avoid at all costs.
    - loceng 3y ago
      We have developed some insights at least, for example a certain type of algae fed to cows reduces their methane released by something like 80% - so mass producing that food additive, ideally in non-harmful way to environment like monocrops cause, and getting that distributed to all cows [which will increase the cost of meat, of the highest nutrient-calorie dense food possible] could be one way to immediately reduce CO2 impacts; but at what externalized costs, if you are taking away-reducing too much of a necessary source of nutrients and caloric intake for certain demographics - and maybe that is more harmful in the short and long-term than executing on other strategies? The best solution, most efficient, and most harmless solution appears to be driving for abundance so more and more people have more money to pay for what's minimally necessary for products-services that follow minimally acceptable processes; raise the floor for everyone, but not while opening up major cracks hurting or killing off millions or potentially billions if a societal-economic systems collapse and ensuing chaos/disorder - virtue signalling it's for "the greater good" while killing off those who are out of sight and out of mind of the constituents voting them into power [assuming democratic-fair election process - even if gamed unethically to win, still needing to keep up appearances to their ideological mob voter base].
genman 3y ago
Carbon tax can solve this issue.
- loceng 3y ago
  Only if it's equally applied globally, at the same time. Otherwise currently, for example, Canadians are suffering with the increasing CO2 tax - while the East is skyrocketing their CO2 emissions - where arguably the majority of Canadian products bought come from; making Canadian produced goods more expensive due to the CO2 tax, making Chinese goods cheaper to produce - and therefore not only ceding power to China but also destroying more ethical production-manufacturing of goods here in Canada.
  - genman 3y ago
    I think my comment was perhaps not clear about what should be taxed - if any form of local tax is applied (a direct tax or other administrative measures that make carbon extensive production more expensive) then imports should be comparably taxed. If economically significant markets implement this then it can have a real global effect. Implementing a local tax only makes the local markets only less competitive and will favor imports from countries that do not implement proper measures.

by loceng 3y ago

baq 3y ago

CO2 is also a greenhouse gas and makes our atmosphere store much more energy than it used to which destabilizes ecosystems in which those plants you want to grow bigger actually live. So yeah, they’ll grow faster, and then they’ll all die. The rest of your argument is orthogonal to the issue. Taking CO2 out of the atmosphere works globally, it doesn’t matter who does or doesn’t reduce emissions.

loceng 3y ago
"CO2 is also a greenhouse gas and makes our atmosphere store much more energy than it used to which destabilizes ecosystems in which those plants you want to grow bigger actually live. So yeah, they’ll grow faster, and then they’ll all die." There may be a delay but then the CO2 gets absorbed and stored in the plants, and then in more animals that will be added mass to the cycles - the plants dying then goes into the soil, to support more growth, and eventually over millions of years that Earth gets compacted - turned into rock, then arguably more oil will be formed. Your point doesn't argue anything because you stopped-didn't think exponentially through the cycle after they "die" part in the cycle - what happens next? "The rest of your argument is orthogonal to the issue. Taking CO2 out of the atmosphere works globally, it doesn’t matter who does or doesn’t reduce emissions." So you don't think the West "being responsible by reducing CO2" - getting hurt by costs going up - while the East massively increases CO2 production and gets rewarded by doing so, doesn't have an impact? Please actually address my specific points, rather than just making a general claim if you want to continue discussing this.
- yetihehe 3y ago
  > here may be a delay but then the CO2 gets absorbed and stored in the plants, [...] turned into rock, then arguably more oil will be formed. Yes, the planet and life on earth will do just fine. The problem is can our civilization survive? Like, can our current civilisation survive the next 100 years of worsening conditions? Humans will survive, we are the most widespread species already (from hottest to coldest places on earth). Some areas will be a little too unhabitable of course, billions will die, but who cares, right?
- hansvm 3y ago
  The political difficulty with handling CO2 appropriately is orthogonal to whether it's bad. A likely outcome without some form of geoengineering is vast swathes of currently inhabited land becoming uninhabitable due to flooding, extreme storms, and lengthy wet-bulb events. In some sense that's also just a political problem, but if we can't agree that CO2 production has significant negative effects then I think we'll struggle to deal with 3B homeless people [0] [1]. [0] Of course, many of them won't be able to migrate at all and will just die (I'll posit that's also bad). [1] Do think through this for just a second. Our current economic systems include property ownership, and basically all land on earth is owned by somebody. If the land owned by 3B people becomes worthless (both in an economic sense and also in that they can't live there anymore), they'll have to either die, or they'll have to start using land owned by other people. Suppose no significant numbers of people move till they have to (since if we can't coordinate on CO2 sequestration/production, we probably can't coordinate on mitigating the harm from that initial lack of coordination). There are solutions, but they all represent at best a global transfer of resources. Is solving that problem easier than handling CO2 correctly to start with?
  - loceng 3y ago
    "The political difficulty with handling CO2 appropriately is orthogonal to whether it's bad." I think rational-reasonable people, who are usually the most competent and resourceful - aside from industrial complexes with wealth and willingness to do bad in order to achieve regulatory capture to selfishly benefit themselves - will and are landing on that CO2 is an issue to address but how urgent and how close to castrophou we are is the question, but that also then has to be balanced by how harmful could or will the response be to it, e.g. increasing energy costs by adding a CO2 tax will then kill off how many millions around the world, slow how many more millions from getting out of poverty sooner, and how much natural forest environment gets destroyed from people now needing to cut down forests unsustainably because they need a cheap fuel for heating and cooking? The issue is "armchair" conversations like this, where most people aren't accounting for or factoring everything necessary for a balanced approach - and there seems to be a big ideological divide and vast amount of teaching to happen, whether people are even calm enough to be willing to listen - or if they're fixed and avoidant, succumbing to whatever hysteria and fear mongering propaganda that they may have been misled by (not to claim everything they believe is false). A bigger threat in my eyes are authoritarians who want to use climate alarmism to manufacture consent to implement further authoritarian-lockdown type policy.

yetihehe 3y ago

It would help because we have too much CO2 in atmosphere now. It accumulated. If we stopped putting CO2, plants and all the other earth chemical loops would take out that excess carbon. > CO2 feeds plants to grow, which in turn provides more food and habitat for more life. Yeah, unless they can't synthesize it because it's too hot and they didn't had a chance to adjust to new temperatures yet. It takes some time and will happen, but we pump CO2 a little too fast. > In this scenario with China doing the opposite to the rest of the world, there are exactly zero gains for CO2 reduction - far outweighed by the increase in CO2 production. Oh yeah, someone litters on the street, let's all litter and get rid of the trash cans. Alternative solution: we should stop buying from them so they will not generate that co2.

loceng 3y ago
Saying we have "too much CO2 in atmosphere" isn't evidence and historically there was much higher levels, and much more life. And yes, there will be a delay as part of evolutionary process for when plants and wildlife can adapt - for plants that are better adapted or capable of adapting to hotter temperatures-different climate will adjust - so indeed at minimum reducing the pace at minimum can be useful; and deploying technologies to slow down the increase we have arguably bumped up at least a little bit [remember the distance that Earth to the sun we are is the biggest factor of temperatures, and where are we in that 1000s of year cycle at the moment?] will help, but we could also prepare to pollinate and manage new growth areas with plants/life we know can adapt; the US policy makers on the side of believing climate change is a life-or-death urgent consideration want to spend $40+ trillion "fighting" it - so getting simply helping the Earth adapt, which is what we should be doing because it's unknown exactly how much our changing CO2 levels will actually impact things, is a no-brainer to do regardless - to create more life, to maximize it; and I also believe Elon is correct that Earth can sustain another 10x the current human population - however that will require succeeding in battle against industrial complexes and authoritarian wannabes who're involved in regulatory capture. "Alternative solution: we should stop buying from them so they will not generate that co2." Absolutely a good strategy to stop rewarding that behaviour, if that's the best course of action to not destabilize the world too much - which may not be a good idea to potentially force the CCP-China's hand into highly aggressive or bad-harmful behaviour. But do you think the inflationary policy, money borrowing, $34 trillion in debt, and people currently struggling in the US and West in general will be able to handle the massive increase in costs of goods that will happen if that happens?

tzs 3y ago

The atmosphere does a good job of mixing CO2 emissions, so someone emitting a ton of CO2 affects others pretty much equally no matter where they are. Unless you can make a good case that some people have some kind of natural or divine right to a lifestyle that emits more CO2 than others the only sensible way to allocate whatever global CO2 allowance we decide we need to stay under is per capita.

loceng 3y ago
Of course, you missed my point though. You can't look at climate in a silo, just like you can't look at the economy in a silo, nor can you look at any one nation in a silo - geopolitics mattering - and the harmful increase in costs the West is taking on with policy is further benefitting the East who's policy allows them to crank up their CO2 production even further, reducing their costs, and benefitting . It's a blatantly obvious disconnect that people pretend doesn't need to be solved at the same time otherwise disadvantage and harm isn't evenly distributed; if harmful policies are going to be implemented instead of technological solutions that don't cause harm but instead accelerate a shift.

__MatrixMan__ 3y ago

> The issue with burning things is the pollution it can cause if not filtered properly before emissions released into the air. CO2 feeds plants to grow, which in turn provides more food and habitat for more life. You're right, provided you're willing to wait a few million years for everybody to adjust to the new norms. That might be quite an uncomfortable transition though, it's not clear what would survive.

loceng 3y ago
Adaptation can happen far faster than that, and even faster if facilitated further by conscious effort of humans - like tree planting but on specialized steroids; we could technically "seed bomb" areas with seed species that we know thrive in the newer conditions of the area, and even have missionaries on the ground who help cultivate a minimally adequate ecosystem for it to continue to spread on its own.
- __MatrixMan__ 3y ago
  I'm not sure we have the knowhow to engineer a minimally adequate ecosystem. It seems like every time we zoom in on an ecosystem we find that it's more complex than we thought. Biodiversity holds secrets which we have a much better shot at discovering than we do at inventing (e.g. novel protein structure and function). Committing to a large scale terraforming project means clobbering the unknown with the known and shutting the door on those secrets forever. It may be one day necessary but it's an outcome that we should avoid at all costs.
  - loceng 3y ago
    We have developed some insights at least, for example a certain type of algae fed to cows reduces their methane released by something like 80% - so mass producing that food additive, ideally in non-harmful way to environment like monocrops cause, and getting that distributed to all cows [which will increase the cost of meat, of the highest nutrient-calorie dense food possible] could be one way to immediately reduce CO2 impacts; but at what externalized costs, if you are taking away-reducing too much of a necessary source of nutrients and caloric intake for certain demographics - and maybe that is more harmful in the short and long-term than executing on other strategies? The best solution, most efficient, and most harmless solution appears to be driving for abundance so more and more people have more money to pay for what's minimally necessary for products-services that follow minimally acceptable processes; raise the floor for everyone, but not while opening up major cracks hurting or killing off millions or potentially billions if a societal-economic systems collapse and ensuing chaos/disorder - virtue signalling it's for "the greater good" while killing off those who are out of sight and out of mind of the constituents voting them into power [assuming democratic-fair election process - even if gamed unethically to win, still needing to keep up appearances to their ideological mob voter base].

genman 3y ago

Carbon tax can solve this issue.

loceng 3y ago
Only if it's equally applied globally, at the same time. Otherwise currently, for example, Canadians are suffering with the increasing CO2 tax - while the East is skyrocketing their CO2 emissions - where arguably the majority of Canadian products bought come from; making Canadian produced goods more expensive due to the CO2 tax, making Chinese goods cheaper to produce - and therefore not only ceding power to China but also destroying more ethical production-manufacturing of goods here in Canada.
- genman 3y ago
  I think my comment was perhaps not clear about what should be taxed - if any form of local tax is applied (a direct tax or other administrative measures that make carbon extensive production more expensive) then imports should be comparably taxed. If economically significant markets implement this then it can have a real global effect. Implementing a local tax only makes the local markets only less competitive and will favor imports from countries that do not implement proper measures.