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It really does seem like it’s going to be impossible to stop rich lunatics from having a go at geoengineering instead of just actually helping to slash emission

• ch4s3 1y ago
  > just actually helping to slash emissions The word just here hides a lot of complexity and difficult tradeoffs.
• mslansn 1y ago
  Don't know what rich assholes have to do with it, when all things I've seen proposed hurt poor people the most. Make meat unaffordable, make private transportation unaffordable, make travelling by plane unaffordable, make new clothes unaffordable, and the list goes on forever.
  • tonyedgecombe 1y ago
    Do you think carbon emissions are coming from poor people’s consumption? Even in the US only half the population will fly in any year and you can be sure it’s not the poorer half. It’s not the rich half using public transport, they are only going to benefit from a transition away from private car ownership.
    • throwaway5752 1y ago
      Yes. Poorer people buy things made overseas that requires a lot of shipping, and are lower quality that require more frequent replacement. They tend to have more children. They usually have more polluting energy sources. And there are many orders of magnitude more of them than rich people. None of this is their fault, but ignoring it isn't good either. All aircraft emissions are just 3% of US total. If all rich people (either the top 1% or 10%) reduced their emissions to zero tomorrow we would still not reach reduction targets needed to avoid catastrophic warming. Everyone needs to contribute.
      • sorcerer-mar 1y ago
        Shipping the things that poor people buy is almost unfathomably eco-friendly. Gargantuan slow ships are actually a great way to move stuff.
      • trollbridge 1y ago
        I'm a little sceptical of claims like "poor people cause more pollution because they have more children than rich people do".
        • throwaway5752 1y ago
          Having a child is on of the most carbon intensive actions any given person can make. The numbers are what they are. Rich people have much greater obligation to reduce their emissions. They benefit most from economic activity and they cause the most emissions per capita. If there were zero rich people tomorrow we would still have an emissions problem for the climate.
          • bilsbie 1y ago
            What if the child is a climate activist?
          • adolph 1y ago
            > Having a child is on of the most carbon intensive actions any given person can make. What about continuing to live at all? That is a decision people make every moment of the day and are not being held accountable for it at all. If there were zero people tomorrow there would be still be an ongoing problem for the climate from the changes wreaked already.
            • thejazzman 1y ago
              You're correct that 24h is not enough time, but wrong to suggest that the world would remain perfectly static instead of changing. There would be dramatic reforestation, algae growth, etc.
            • 1y ago
  • MildlySerious 1y ago
    That's exactly what rich assholes have to do with it. Why do you believe all the consequence falls onto the working class and the poorest, when the richest have per capita the largest emissions, by whole orders of magnitude? Yeah, the changes required are systemic and go from the top all the way to the bottom, and the things you mention are part of that process, but pricing people out of everything without offering an off-ramp is sadistic bullshit, and the only reason it's a thing is because rich people and stock prices have more representation in politics than the poor and the environment.
    • IncreasePosts 1y ago
      Who cares about per capita emissions? Billionaires could have 1000x the emissions as normal people, but there are so few of them, cutting their emissions down to zero would have absolutely no impact on climate change.
      • deleted 1y ago
        [deleted]
      • phatskat 1y ago
        Do you consider the factories, farms, etc that they own to be part of the equation? I do, and so if you were to “cut the emissions down to zero” of the owner of a large chicken processing company, all those factory farms disappear and that’s not peanuts for climate change.
      • MildlySerious 1y ago
        You could cut the emissions of the top 1% in half, or reduce the emissions of the bottom 4 billion to 0. Same result. Which do you believe is likely the lower hanging fruit, has a higher return per dollar spent and is likely to be more ethical and less invasive? So yeah. I care about per capita emissions on the grounds that things need to change fast, and adjusting the lifestyle of a few million is radically easier than wiping half the planet off the emissions map.
        • 1y ago
• zahlman 1y ago
  What do you suppose is the net worth of the people spearheading efforts in solar power and electric vehicles?
• zemvpferreira 1y ago
  Cut carbon emissions to zero tomorrow and we’re still in a great deal of trouble. Earth is a lagging system and the damage has been done 10 times over. I don’t blame anyone for looking at radical solutions. We’re not putting out the fire by putting the wood back in a pile.
  • sorcerer-mar 1y ago
    What about blaming people for grabbing an assortment of different non-wood, non-water objects and throwing them on the fire? There’s obviously some need to experiment to see if we can find solutions, but historically our track record for engineering complex systems has not been great.
  • bilsbie 1y ago
    [flagged]
• sweettea 1y ago
  I mean, we're already having democratized geoengineering: Make Sunsets (https://makesunsets.com/ https://makesunsets.com/) allows you or anyone else to fund deploying high-altitude clouds for geocooling.