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The most frustrating thing about the climate change discussion for me is that everybody's focused on the high effort, low impact changes. There are millions of
by cedws 3y ago
The most frustrating thing about the climate change discussion for me is that everybody's focused on the high effort, low impact changes. There are millions of hectares of rainforest being torn down every year... maybe we should turn our attention to that?
SAF will allow us to stop taking carbon out of the ground, but it does nothing to take carbon out of the air.
- protastus 3y agoI think most of us would love to preserve the rainforest, but lack the tools to do it. We are therefore working on parts of the problem that are still very real, very consequential, and that we can control. Solving climate change requires switching the infrastructure of humanity's heaviest industries, that produce at enormous scale, and are the product of centuries of optimization. Doing this without a heavy green premium requires technology and innovation, allowing the replacement solution to be cost competitive. Otherwise, the lack of economic competitiveness will prevent new methods from replacing the old at any reasonable scale. We've already seen that policy alone (i.e., taxes) can't make it happen across all the sectors at the necessary speed, due to being vastly unpopular.
- pstrateman 3y agoUnfortunately millions of hectares of rainforest is also mostly irrelevant compared to the amount of CO2 going into the atmosphere from burning fossil fuels.
- cedws 3y agoYou have to take into account not just the annual sequestration of carbon dioxide by rainforests, but also the carbon already stored within them that is released when they decay or burn. A lot of the land being deforested is used to make way for livestock which adds insult to injury. Moreover, the deforested land accelerates the greenhouse effect by absorbing more energy from the sun.
- wussboy 3y agoWhy is the land being converted to meat production? Surely the problem is one of economics, development and poverty more than anything else? Give the people that live there better options and the deforestation will take care of itself.
- blooalien 3y agoThe filthy rich (and constantly growing richer at the expense of everyone else) who are doing it have zero interest in giving the people that live there anything more than they absolutely are forced to give in order to be allowed to rape the planet for more profit. Giving the people that live there better options is the last thing they want to do, as then those people would have no incentive to give up their land and rights to make those rich people richer.
- genman 3y agoRight, but is anybody willing to pay for this? Not taking down the rain forest is opportunity cost. Who is going to pay for this?
- smt88 3y agoIronically, saving the rainforest is high-effort (requires Brazil's voters to elect leadership dedicated to it) and low-impact. Replacing fossil fuels with renewables is the most attainable and impactful tactic at this point.
- marcosdumay 3y agoIs Brazil the only country with rainforests still standing? Anyway, we should be working on artificially "hardened" cellulose. As well as ivory-like calcium-carbonate. I never heard about anybody working on those, but they clearly are in demand.
- smt88 3y ago> Is Brazil the only country with rainforests still standing? No, but 60% of the Amazon is in Brazil. The next-highest country is Peru at 12%, and the rest are much smaller. Brazil is also the most egregious destroyer of rainforest in the world, and it's not even close[1]. "Saving the rainforest" is equivalent to "regime change in Brazil". 1. https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/deforestation-rates-by-country https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/deforesta...
- boulos 3y agoYou could imagine sanctions on Brazilian beef. Either a blanket ban or something targeted at particular producers. I doubt it would happen, but that's a different plan.
- marcosdumay 3y ago> Brazil is also the most egregious destroyer of rainforest in the world Yet on that graph it has about the same color as every other country, way apart from the extremes.
- smt88 3y agoLook at the numbers, not the colors.
- yukkuri 3y agoBecause the things that would actually work are political suicide because it would decrease the amount of "score" the plutocrats can accumulate in the "I'm richer than you".
- photochemsyn 3y agoWell, feeding the captured atmospheric carbon into stable material synthesis (carbon fiber and diamond, basically) is a more-or-less permanent removal mechanism. Over the long run, steady-state is most desirable when it comes to the global atmospheric composition of course.