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There is almost certainly a point where the costs of massive planet-scale intervention outweigh the costs of doing nothing. I'm not sure exactly where that poi
by alexose 2y ago
There is almost certainly a point where the costs of massive planet-scale intervention outweigh the costs of doing nothing. I'm not sure exactly where that point lies, but I'd guess it's somewhere between Solar Radiation Management (SRM) and glacial geoengineering projects like the one in this article.
The question in my mind is not whether or not to fund these efforts (we will need to), but how to fund them quickly enough.
There aren't many investment vehicles that are truly global in scope. We've seen individual nations do incredible things when they stand to benefit. The Delta Works project in the Netherlands comes to mind, as does the Three Gorges Dam in China.
But how do we source capital when the whole planet stands to benefit? Especially when many nations either don't have the money and/or the political will. The scale of the problem far outstrips what charity or nonprofits can provide, and private companies can only do so much without a functional market.
I don't mean to suggest that this is an intractable problem. It really isn't-- There have been some really interesting financial innovations already. But we need way more attention on this stuff from the investment class. The bankers, fund managers, and policymakers that work in global development need to get creative, and fast.
- lstodd 2y agoThere is always the tradeoff between fighting the nature and adapting to it. SRM and glacial are bullshit, they first won't ever be able to attain enough finanicing to make them convincing to whoever wants to be convinced that "Something Is Done", is from engineering perspective pointless, and all in all resources are better be spent on like, stopping people being killed than on some shit that everyone pretends to care about so that they don't need to care about real issues. Like energy grid instability, Saudis being all butthurt, Iran going batshit crazy, Israel going to hell, Syria already there. And not to mention Ukraine. If you want to save a world, start small.
- joak 2y agohttps://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aba7e7?s=09 https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aba7e7?... Here the estimate for solar radiation management injecting aerosols in the stratosphere is estimated at $18B/year per degree Celsius. For the whole planet. Seems to me pretty cheap, even a private initiative can finance that.