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Climate scientists keep telling us that achievable emissions reductions aren't going to be enough to prevent bad climate effects. The single-minded focus on emi
by modeless 1y ago
Climate scientists keep telling us that achievable emissions reductions aren't going to be enough to prevent bad climate effects. The single-minded focus on emissions reduction is not going to save the world and it has a lot of bad effects on economies and ultimately people. We need to be investing in solutions that could actually work, like stratospheric aerosol injection.
- immibis 1y ago[flagged]
- tonyhart7 1y agosounds like an true freedom country answer
- pessimizer 1y agoIf the freedom country were going to bomb the country with by far the world's highest per capita emissions, there wouldn't be a freedom country anymore.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- pierot 1y agoAnd not taking care of the source of the problem? It’s like only pumping the water out of your flooded basement but not willing to fix the leak.
- ivanbakel 1y agoIsn't the consensus from climate scientists that emission reductions are totally necessary, and there is no solution which is solely based on capture of greenhouse gases or cooling technologies? Even if reducing emissions is not enough, I thought it was clear that it needs to be done - and the economic impact is a necessary evil, since in reality we are just seeing the reversal of economic benefits obtained at the cost of planetary temperatures.
- modeless 1y agoI haven't seen an analysis of stratospheric aerosol injection that suggested it couldn't solve the problem. We know it works because it happens naturally via volcanoes, and if we do it ourselves we can do it almost entirely without the other bad effects volcanoes cause. The opposition I've seen to it has been on moral or ethical grounds, or misunderstandings.
- tzs 1y ago> We need to be investing in solutions that could actually work, like stratospheric aerosol injection The problem with aerosol injection is that it doesn't actually lower CO2 levels. It just adds a cooling effect that can counter the CO2 warming effect. The aerosols don't stay in the stratosphere long so you need to be regularly injecting more. If you stop those regular injections the warming quickly comes back. If we have a strong plan to reach near net zero CO2 emissions in some given timeframe and we really can stick to it then adding aerosol injections so that we can stop the warming sooner might be OK. If we don't have that there is a good chance that some large emitters will decide that since the aerosol injections are holding warming at bay there is no reason to not increase emissions as much as they want. Most will acknowledge that we should reduce emissions, but with no immediate consequences they will put it off. Then in a few decades if something disrupts the regular aerosol injects we could get decades worth of warming over a few months. That would not be good.
- modeless 1y agoEmitting CO2 is not morally wrong in an abstract sense. It is only bad to the extent that it has bad effects. The major bad effect is warming. If that is mitigated, then the need to reduce CO2 emissions is legitimately lower and that's OK! The other bad effects of CO2 emissions are less bad than warming. The only really concerning one at realistic CO2 concentrations is ocean acidification, and there may be other ways to address that too. Human CO2 emissions will eventually decline naturally due to the meteoric rise of solar and the eventual exhaustion of economical sources of fossil fuels. We can't increase fossil fuel consumption forever, and CO2 will not continue to rise forever. But it will rise to a point where we will need to implement a proactive solution for warming, regardless of what the EU does or doesn't do. Pretending that emissions reductions alone are going to save the world is doing everyone a disservice.
- croes 1y agoCO2 emission reduction is the easiest way and we already fail at that. What makes you think we‘ll do better at more complex solutions?