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Not arguing your main point, but going on a tangent: One wouldn't need to "seriously throttle down the world economy" to achieve significant amelioration of pol

by _broody 12y ago

Not arguing your main point, but going on a tangent: One wouldn't need to "seriously throttle down the world economy" to achieve significant amelioration of pollution. There is plenty of low-hanging fruit to lower industrial emissions and pollutants. Everywhere you look at in industrial sites there are stupid environmentally damaging practices, such as incinerating garbage and spilling chemicals into water sources without as much as a sorting process, which let extremely nocive pollutants into the enviroment. In the face of such irresponsible behavior, which shows zero concern for its consequences and possibilities of improvement, I don't buy that improving emissions is this insurmountable problem that would cause our economy to implode. Fact is, "standard" industrial practices are idiotic, misguided and unnecessarily destructive to a completely inexcusable degree. On the other hand, pollution also significantly throttles down the global economy. You're saying losing 1% would be extremely bad in the long run. Well, in China's case it's estimated that as much as five to TEN percent of GDP is lost anually due to the effects of pollution. That figure has grown from a rounding error at the beginning of their country's industrialization to an aching burden today, and which shows no sign of slowing down unless something is done about it.

mapt 12y ago
This is not that. CO2 is not a simple pollutant that in trace quantities causes harm, which we can almost completely delete with semi-trivial changes in tech. That is the story of a lot of other air pollutants. Burning fossil fuels for energy necessarily involves generating CO2. All combustion does - that is the end product of essentially all of the 'carbon' in 'hydrocarbon'. Reducing CO2 requires reducing the amount of fossil fuels burned for energy. Speaking as someone that has spent a lot of time on this area: There are no effective substitutes, at all, for reducing the amount of fossil fuels burned for energy. Carbon capture & storage is a red herring with no long-term effective mechanism, a very limited temporary reservoir system, and energy companies that don't even want to use those without the government writing them a huge check. Affirmative carbon credits for things like forest-growing are very limited by nature (forests only take in so much), and more effective as a way of preserving ecosystems than reducing anthropogenic carbon - so far they're mostly guilt-exemption tickets which change nothing about the degree of resource utilization happening. Ocean seeding seems to sequester a lot less than we first expected, because other nutrients become bottlenecks. Don't get me wrong, I remain in favor of phasing out fossil fuels for most purposes, but they are really useful things, and we're going to have to attempt to leapfrog the entire 20th century of mechanized technology in developing countries to do it, after we complete the process in our own economies. This is not a small thing to ask.

by _broody 12y ago

mapt 12y ago

This is not that. CO2 is not a simple pollutant that in trace quantities causes harm, which we can almost completely delete with semi-trivial changes in tech. That is the story of a lot of other air pollutants. Burning fossil fuels for energy necessarily involves generating CO2. All combustion does - that is the end product of essentially all of the 'carbon' in 'hydrocarbon'. Reducing CO2 requires reducing the amount of fossil fuels burned for energy. Speaking as someone that has spent a lot of time on this area: There are no effective substitutes, at all, for reducing the amount of fossil fuels burned for energy. Carbon capture & storage is a red herring with no long-term effective mechanism, a very limited temporary reservoir system, and energy companies that don't even want to use those without the government writing them a huge check. Affirmative carbon credits for things like forest-growing are very limited by nature (forests only take in so much), and more effective as a way of preserving ecosystems than reducing anthropogenic carbon - so far they're mostly guilt-exemption tickets which change nothing about the degree of resource utilization happening. Ocean seeding seems to sequester a lot less than we first expected, because other nutrients become bottlenecks. Don't get me wrong, I remain in favor of phasing out fossil fuels for most purposes, but they are really useful things, and we're going to have to attempt to leapfrog the entire 20th century of mechanized technology in developing countries to do it, after we complete the process in our own economies. This is not a small thing to ask.