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It seems fairly obvious to me that the most cost effective method would be to stop digging up old sequestered CO2 from the ground and burning it. Is this not o

It seems fairly obvious to me that the most cost effective method would be to stop digging up old sequestered CO2 from the ground and burning it. Is this not obvious to others? A simple, yet very effective old proverb is that when you find yourself in a hole, first stop digging.

sgt 3y ago
Cost effective, maybe. But not simple. Far from it. In fact, might turn out to be not so cost effective either if it's almost impossible to force billions of people to change their habits.
dheera 3y ago
> Is this not obvious to others? Unfortunately it isn't. Most people still need to get from A to B and can't afford a Tesla.
- candiddevmike 3y ago
  If externalities were factored in, they shouldn't be able to afford gas either then...
  - dheera 3y ago
    I agree with you, but the externalities hit them 30 years later, and the majority of the population are trying to figure out how to even make it for another 6 months (financially).
  - prepend 3y ago
    Right, then they can’t afford to live. Telling people to stop after all this time is a non-starter unless you’re willing to militarily stop countries from burning oil.
    - CalRobert 3y ago
      Well, burning oil kills people, but they can't afford to defend themselves. When you're watching your kids die in your country's fifth freak heatwave/power outage in a year it will be little comfort to know that at least people in rich countries got to have cheap gas.
      - prepend 3y ago
        It’s not just rich people who have cheap gas. The issue is the billions of poor people who have cheap gas.
        CalRobert 3y ago
        Certainly, but rich people use an awful lot more. Someone in Vietnam on a 50cc Honda is putting out less carbon than someone in Orange County with an Escalade.
        prepend 3y ago
        There’s a lot more people in Vietnam than Orange County. And I expect making them stop using their motorcycle is harder as they have fewer or no alternatives.
    - cmrdporcupine 3y ago
      This is almost entirely a problem of shitty political leadership. There are solutions, and a transition is possible, if the emergency was treated like the emergency that it is. But this threaten very powerful established interests, and those interests have been remarkably adept at mobilizing themselves and spreading disinformation, fear, and doubt in the population. Even the most weak and financially friendly efforts are attacked and undermined. Like a carbon tax with a generous rebate -- like here in Canada, and a policy formerly advocated by conservative economists, but now a target of populist demagoguery and will likely be gone after the next election. Conservative and neo-liberal ideological strains have spent 40+ years steadfastly eliminating the ability of central governments to plan and have coordinated industrial/macro-economic strategies in the west -- something they mostly had after WWII. Now we desperately need it.
  - meristohm 3y ago
    Yep. Gasoline is far too cheap. We've gotten used to it, taken it for granted, and that's a huge problem. We've degraded the land to the point where most of us can't find enough food locally and rely on food grown and shipped thanks to petroleum. To wean ourselves off will be painful, but not impossible. Building strong local community is a good start; I've got to know a few neighbors now in this rural area and we're starting to offer to pick up groceries for each other, thus reducing the car trips to town. Building trust goes a long way to not needing to do everything yourself.
simonw 3y ago
Think of this problem in terms of how many people would need to change the way they do things. And how many financial interests (with the resources to actively lobby against change) would be affected too. If you have an obvious answer that takes those two things into account I'd love to hear it!
- meristohm 3y ago
  Addressing things like this is part of the purpose of government (on any level, be it personal, family, community, on up). Regulations can shift our habits. Does a corporation's existence justify its continued existence? Like people, it'll try to keep on going, but it not being a person, it's okay to let these things go. People will lose jobs, but the answer to that is to revitalize the land so we can transition to getting our food nearby, and spending the time to do it- time well spent. Computers, for example, are a fun diversion we enjoy thanks to our curiosity, ingenuity, and cheap (money-wise, not life-wise) energy. I don't consider them essential. Letting go of a lot of our costly and polluting playthings is the way to go. Children cry when someone takes their candy away, and we'll be no different unless we realize that candy is killing us and we exercise our adult brains to change our habits.
- ndsipa_pomu 3y ago
  > Think of this problem in terms of how many people would need to change the way they do things. Looking to the future, virtually the whole of humanity will drastically need to change the way they do things to cope with the changes in climate. It's likely too late now, but there would be far less changes needed if we stop pumping out so much CO2 into the air and thus reduce the likelihood of climate catastrophes. > And how many financial interests (with the resources to actively lobby against change) would be affected too. Putting financial interests ahead of the health of our environments is how we got into this mess. > If you have an obvious answer that takes those two things into account I'd love to hear it! You've framed the problem in an unhelpful way - you're asking for a solution that perpetuates unsustainable practices.
  - simonw 3y ago
    I'll take any solution that works. We've been trying to convince people to emit less CO2 for decades and that sadly doesn't seem to be working well enough to get us out of this mess.
SkyPuncher 3y ago
Sure, but that’s like saying the simplest way to solve water shortages is to just stop drinking it.
- megabless123 3y ago
  not a fair comparison. water does not have alternatives.
  - chii 3y ago
    but it is a fair comparison - there's currently no real alternatives for fossil fuels. Renewables do not have the density required for a lot of transportation, not to mention fossil fuels like oil are the feedstock for a lot of chemicals required for modern day manufacturing. Some sources of electricity could be replaced by renewables, but not all. And certainly not as cheaply as oil or gas is.
    - meristohm 3y ago
      To what degree could we be okay using less energy?
    - oneshtein 3y ago
      Alternative to fossil fuels are synthetic fuels, for example E85 (ethanol 85%). Government can subsidize a clean local production of ethanol from air, like it did for solar panels, to boot start it.
  - sanderjd 3y ago
    We also do not - yet! - have carbon-neutral alternatives for energy usage, either in amount or kind. This is why people are working both to scale up the kinds of energy use that is already carbon-neutral but which there is not yet enough of, and to figure out alternatives for things that do not already have carbon-neutral solutions.
nope1000 3y ago
Absolutely and electric cars and heat pumps powered by renewables are great but it's nice to have when we still want to have air travel or meat while maintaining net zero.
- dheera 3y ago
  I recently moved into an apartment that has a heat pump. I save $50 on my electric bill per month but I also pay $1000/month more in rent because "woo wah it's new and fancy and modern" As long as environmental friendliness is a luxury, nothing is going to happen. This is the dynamic that needs to be disrupted, somehow.
prepend 3y ago
I think everyone understands that but it’s cheap and the world depends on energy. So it’s not they people don’t get it, it’s that the world is working toward getting renewables cheap enough to fulfill current and future energy needs.
- JadeNB 3y ago
  > I think everyone understands that but it’s cheap and the world depends on energy. So it’s not they people don’t get it, it’s that the world is working toward getting renewables cheap enough to fulfill current and future energy needs. The realization that needs to be reached (but won't, because people don't think that way) to power real change is that it's not cheap; we just don't pay the externalities at the pump, so we get used to thinking that it's cheap.
  - sanderjd 3y ago
    It is cheap for the people using the energy, because the externalities are not paid.
sanderjd 3y ago
That is a result, not an action. There's a book that came out recently - "Not the End of the World" by Hannah Ritchie - that starts by digging into a two-pronged definition of the concept of "sustainability", where the first prong is about meeting the needs of current generations, and the second prong (which is the one we usually focus on when thinking about sustainability) is about maintaining an environment in which future generations can meet their needs as well. The problem with most of what we're doing today is that it fails the second prong: future generations won't be able to meet their needs if the earth is too hot to support human civilization. But the problem with your proposed solution is that it fails the first prong. If you were dictator of the world and waved your wand such that nobody ever dug up another fossil fuel, starting from this moment, the result would be upheaval, privation, and death on a massive scale. Human civilization is, at this moment, dependent on digging up those fossil fuels and lighting them on fire. So what the (great many) people who are working on this problem are doing is trying to navigate a path that threads a needle between these two bad outcomes, transitioning away from the dig-stuff-up-and-burn-it model to one that still works about as well - or ideally, even better! - for people currently living, without sacrificing the lives of people who will live in the future. And yeah, pretty much everyone involved thinks that does mean we'll dig up very little of those fossils, on the other side of this transition. But that is more like an effect than a cause. Hope that helps!
- tasty_freeze 3y ago
  I think that is an uncharitable reading of the person you are replying to. I don't think they want to wave a magic wand and stop all oil/coal tomorrow. But investing time/money/policy to move away from fossil fuels is something we could have been doing since at least the Kyoto Protocol and yet we are doing next to nothing, and in fact are still subsidizing oil companies.
  - ndsipa_pomu 3y ago
    > I don't think they want to wave a magic wand and stop all oil/coal tomorrow. Tomorrow is far too late. We should have started reducing our dependencies on oil since the 1970s.
  - 3y ago
jonnycomputer 3y ago
There is already too much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere for use to not exceed temperature targets. We need carbon capture. And carbon capture in the oceans promises to be much more cost effective.
- sanderjd 3y ago
  Yep! I'm optimistic that we're going to (painstakingly, with a lot of work) get to net-neutral emissions over the coming decades. But then I believe we'll almost certainly want to go net-negative for some period of time. And we'll need to do a bunch of research and experimentation into carbon removal techniques to figure out how to do that. The earlier we start doing that, the better!
johnsea 3y ago
yes, and: Limits to Growth. It was known in 1972. The number of people is too large. Much too large. But what can we do (nothing?)
- meristohm 3y ago
  Yeah, seems we're in a population boom because we can. Lynx population grows with rabbits, wolves with moose, etc. This increased carrying capacity of the earth is thanks to the energy we pull from the ground (and air, water, sun), and in times of plenty maybe we're a little wasteful... How many people can Earth reasonably support? Edit to answer your (rhetorical?) question: What we can do is build strong local connections; that's the first step towards decreasing our level of domestication, per Why We Need to be Wild, by Jessica Carew Kraft.
Biologist123 3y ago
The one thing we must do is somehow the one thing we cannot do. It’ll send you crazy if you think about it too much.
oneshtein 3y ago
I was downvoted multiple times for this obvious idea. How you plan to strike those coal power stations?
- sanderjd 3y ago
  I didn't downvote any of this, but for what it's worth I do think it's pretty common to see downvotes for ideas that everyone has seen a million times before, for which the counterarguments are just as well known and only slightly less obvious.

sgt 3y ago

Cost effective, maybe. But not simple. Far from it. In fact, might turn out to be not so cost effective either if it's almost impossible to force billions of people to change their habits.

dheera 3y ago

> Is this not obvious to others? Unfortunately it isn't. Most people still need to get from A to B and can't afford a Tesla.

candiddevmike 3y ago
If externalities were factored in, they shouldn't be able to afford gas either then...
- dheera 3y ago
  I agree with you, but the externalities hit them 30 years later, and the majority of the population are trying to figure out how to even make it for another 6 months (financially).
- prepend 3y ago
  Right, then they can’t afford to live. Telling people to stop after all this time is a non-starter unless you’re willing to militarily stop countries from burning oil.
  - CalRobert 3y ago
    Well, burning oil kills people, but they can't afford to defend themselves. When you're watching your kids die in your country's fifth freak heatwave/power outage in a year it will be little comfort to know that at least people in rich countries got to have cheap gas.
    - prepend 3y ago
      It’s not just rich people who have cheap gas. The issue is the billions of poor people who have cheap gas.
      - CalRobert 3y ago
        Certainly, but rich people use an awful lot more. Someone in Vietnam on a 50cc Honda is putting out less carbon than someone in Orange County with an Escalade.
        prepend 3y ago
        There’s a lot more people in Vietnam than Orange County. And I expect making them stop using their motorcycle is harder as they have fewer or no alternatives.
  - cmrdporcupine 3y ago
    This is almost entirely a problem of shitty political leadership. There are solutions, and a transition is possible, if the emergency was treated like the emergency that it is. But this threaten very powerful established interests, and those interests have been remarkably adept at mobilizing themselves and spreading disinformation, fear, and doubt in the population. Even the most weak and financially friendly efforts are attacked and undermined. Like a carbon tax with a generous rebate -- like here in Canada, and a policy formerly advocated by conservative economists, but now a target of populist demagoguery and will likely be gone after the next election. Conservative and neo-liberal ideological strains have spent 40+ years steadfastly eliminating the ability of central governments to plan and have coordinated industrial/macro-economic strategies in the west -- something they mostly had after WWII. Now we desperately need it.
- meristohm 3y ago
  Yep. Gasoline is far too cheap. We've gotten used to it, taken it for granted, and that's a huge problem. We've degraded the land to the point where most of us can't find enough food locally and rely on food grown and shipped thanks to petroleum. To wean ourselves off will be painful, but not impossible. Building strong local community is a good start; I've got to know a few neighbors now in this rural area and we're starting to offer to pick up groceries for each other, thus reducing the car trips to town. Building trust goes a long way to not needing to do everything yourself.

simonw 3y ago

Think of this problem in terms of how many people would need to change the way they do things. And how many financial interests (with the resources to actively lobby against change) would be affected too. If you have an obvious answer that takes those two things into account I'd love to hear it!

meristohm 3y ago
Addressing things like this is part of the purpose of government (on any level, be it personal, family, community, on up). Regulations can shift our habits. Does a corporation's existence justify its continued existence? Like people, it'll try to keep on going, but it not being a person, it's okay to let these things go. People will lose jobs, but the answer to that is to revitalize the land so we can transition to getting our food nearby, and spending the time to do it- time well spent. Computers, for example, are a fun diversion we enjoy thanks to our curiosity, ingenuity, and cheap (money-wise, not life-wise) energy. I don't consider them essential. Letting go of a lot of our costly and polluting playthings is the way to go. Children cry when someone takes their candy away, and we'll be no different unless we realize that candy is killing us and we exercise our adult brains to change our habits.
ndsipa_pomu 3y ago
> Think of this problem in terms of how many people would need to change the way they do things. Looking to the future, virtually the whole of humanity will drastically need to change the way they do things to cope with the changes in climate. It's likely too late now, but there would be far less changes needed if we stop pumping out so much CO2 into the air and thus reduce the likelihood of climate catastrophes. > And how many financial interests (with the resources to actively lobby against change) would be affected too. Putting financial interests ahead of the health of our environments is how we got into this mess. > If you have an obvious answer that takes those two things into account I'd love to hear it! You've framed the problem in an unhelpful way - you're asking for a solution that perpetuates unsustainable practices.
- simonw 3y ago
  I'll take any solution that works. We've been trying to convince people to emit less CO2 for decades and that sadly doesn't seem to be working well enough to get us out of this mess.

SkyPuncher 3y ago

Sure, but that’s like saying the simplest way to solve water shortages is to just stop drinking it.

megabless123 3y ago
not a fair comparison. water does not have alternatives.
- chii 3y ago
  but it is a fair comparison - there's currently no real alternatives for fossil fuels. Renewables do not have the density required for a lot of transportation, not to mention fossil fuels like oil are the feedstock for a lot of chemicals required for modern day manufacturing. Some sources of electricity could be replaced by renewables, but not all. And certainly not as cheaply as oil or gas is.
  - meristohm 3y ago
    To what degree could we be okay using less energy?
  - oneshtein 3y ago
    Alternative to fossil fuels are synthetic fuels, for example E85 (ethanol 85%). Government can subsidize a clean local production of ethanol from air, like it did for solar panels, to boot start it.
- sanderjd 3y ago
  We also do not - yet! - have carbon-neutral alternatives for energy usage, either in amount or kind. This is why people are working both to scale up the kinds of energy use that is already carbon-neutral but which there is not yet enough of, and to figure out alternatives for things that do not already have carbon-neutral solutions.

nope1000 3y ago

Absolutely and electric cars and heat pumps powered by renewables are great but it's nice to have when we still want to have air travel or meat while maintaining net zero.

dheera 3y ago
I recently moved into an apartment that has a heat pump. I save $50 on my electric bill per month but I also pay $1000/month more in rent because "woo wah it's new and fancy and modern" As long as environmental friendliness is a luxury, nothing is going to happen. This is the dynamic that needs to be disrupted, somehow.

prepend 3y ago

I think everyone understands that but it’s cheap and the world depends on energy. So it’s not they people don’t get it, it’s that the world is working toward getting renewables cheap enough to fulfill current and future energy needs.

JadeNB 3y ago
> I think everyone understands that but it’s cheap and the world depends on energy. So it’s not they people don’t get it, it’s that the world is working toward getting renewables cheap enough to fulfill current and future energy needs. The realization that needs to be reached (but won't, because people don't think that way) to power real change is that it's not cheap; we just don't pay the externalities at the pump, so we get used to thinking that it's cheap.
- sanderjd 3y ago
  It is cheap for the people using the energy, because the externalities are not paid.

sanderjd 3y ago

That is a result, not an action. There's a book that came out recently - "Not the End of the World" by Hannah Ritchie - that starts by digging into a two-pronged definition of the concept of "sustainability", where the first prong is about meeting the needs of current generations, and the second prong (which is the one we usually focus on when thinking about sustainability) is about maintaining an environment in which future generations can meet their needs as well. The problem with most of what we're doing today is that it fails the second prong: future generations won't be able to meet their needs if the earth is too hot to support human civilization. But the problem with your proposed solution is that it fails the first prong. If you were dictator of the world and waved your wand such that nobody ever dug up another fossil fuel, starting from this moment, the result would be upheaval, privation, and death on a massive scale. Human civilization is, at this moment, dependent on digging up those fossil fuels and lighting them on fire. So what the (great many) people who are working on this problem are doing is trying to navigate a path that threads a needle between these two bad outcomes, transitioning away from the dig-stuff-up-and-burn-it model to one that still works about as well - or ideally, even better! - for people currently living, without sacrificing the lives of people who will live in the future. And yeah, pretty much everyone involved thinks that does mean we'll dig up very little of those fossils, on the other side of this transition. But that is more like an effect than a cause. Hope that helps!

tasty_freeze 3y ago
I think that is an uncharitable reading of the person you are replying to. I don't think they want to wave a magic wand and stop all oil/coal tomorrow. But investing time/money/policy to move away from fossil fuels is something we could have been doing since at least the Kyoto Protocol and yet we are doing next to nothing, and in fact are still subsidizing oil companies.
- ndsipa_pomu 3y ago
  > I don't think they want to wave a magic wand and stop all oil/coal tomorrow. Tomorrow is far too late. We should have started reducing our dependencies on oil since the 1970s.
- 3y ago

jonnycomputer 3y ago

There is already too much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere for use to not exceed temperature targets. We need carbon capture. And carbon capture in the oceans promises to be much more cost effective.

sanderjd 3y ago
Yep! I'm optimistic that we're going to (painstakingly, with a lot of work) get to net-neutral emissions over the coming decades. But then I believe we'll almost certainly want to go net-negative for some period of time. And we'll need to do a bunch of research and experimentation into carbon removal techniques to figure out how to do that. The earlier we start doing that, the better!

johnsea 3y ago

yes, and: Limits to Growth. It was known in 1972. The number of people is too large. Much too large. But what can we do (nothing?)

meristohm 3y ago
Yeah, seems we're in a population boom because we can. Lynx population grows with rabbits, wolves with moose, etc. This increased carrying capacity of the earth is thanks to the energy we pull from the ground (and air, water, sun), and in times of plenty maybe we're a little wasteful... How many people can Earth reasonably support? Edit to answer your (rhetorical?) question: What we can do is build strong local connections; that's the first step towards decreasing our level of domestication, per Why We Need to be Wild, by Jessica Carew Kraft.

Biologist123 3y ago

The one thing we must do is somehow the one thing we cannot do. It’ll send you crazy if you think about it too much.

oneshtein 3y ago

I was downvoted multiple times for this obvious idea. How you plan to strike those coal power stations?

sanderjd 3y ago
I didn't downvote any of this, but for what it's worth I do think it's pretty common to see downvotes for ideas that everyone has seen a million times before, for which the counterarguments are just as well known and only slightly less obvious.