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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.
by mapt 13y 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.