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There are lots of good reasons to burn carbon to produce energy. What we need is a carbon tax that goes to operations such as these, bound to the waste energy
by bdamm 12y ago
There are lots of good reasons to burn carbon to produce energy. What we need is a carbon tax that goes to operations such as these, bound to the waste energy from nuclear or solar plants, for example. That way the carbon emissions can be offset by the carbon intake.
Maybe we could burn all the carbon we wanted, at a rate even far exceeding the rate we make carbon emissions today, if those emissions were balanced with large-scale carbon removal. If that carbon removal produced fuel, that would be fine - the balance would be a lot closer to zero, and more importantly, we could have a control on the acceptable carbon in the atmosphere.
- AnthonyMouse 12y agoThere is no "burn all the carbon we wanted" regardless of climate change because we're eventually going to run out of cheap oil. The cost of recovering it will eventually exceed the cost of renewable energy. The problem is that waiting until that point to stop burning oil and coal would do catastrophic damage to the planet. The thing that makes much better sense is to have a carbon tax and use the money to subsidize non-fossil energy on a per KWh basis, and set the amount such that it makes non-fossil energy cheaper. Do that and the market would sort it out in short order.
- bdamm 12y agoWe are in complete agreement in that the way out of the current mess is a world-scale governmental movement to assert policy change that at least tries to solve the problem of human created environmental change, and carbon dioxide specifically. I don't think we will run out of "cheap" oil though, since oil can be produced from coal and coal is hugely abundant. I agree that waiting for oil to become more expensive than renewables before investing in renewables, or in other words expecting free market dynamics to solve the problem, is not going to work.