> This image should terrify you. It should be on billboards.
> As you can see, in either scenario, global emissions must peak and begin declining immediately. For a medium chance to avoid 1.5 degrees, the world has to zero out net carbon emissions by 2050 or so — for a good chance of avoiding 2 degrees, by around 2065.
> After that, emissions have to go negative. Humanity has to start burying a lot more carbon than it throws up into the atmosphere.... Thus far, most demonstration plants of any size attaching CCS to fossil fuel facilities have been over-budget disasters. What if we can’t rely on it? What if it never pans out?
> If we really want to avoid 1.5 degrees, and we can’t rely on large-scale carbon sequestration, then the global community has to zero out its carbon emissions by 2026.
>It absolutely must, or else it's basically already too late:
This is solution bias though. "We need it to work therefore it will"
The universe doesn't owe us anything. DAC has been added to these scenarios as a sort of balancing element to make the models add up but that has no bearing on whether DAC is possible at scale.
My dad sees articles like this and he'll just say that maybe the damage needed to prevent warming is worse than the damage that will be done by the warming.
The cost to ordinary people would actually be relatively minor. You buy an electric car instead of a gasoline one. The average new car price in the US is ~$36,000. A new Nissan Leaf starts below $30,000, Model 3 only a little more than that. Replace coal with alternatives. We can do at least as well as nuclear, which is barely any more expensive than coal has been. Best case is that storage gets a lot cheaper than it is and then the price of electricity goes down from the historical norm.
Capture could cost as little as zero. Renewables inherently have to build over-capacity to compensate for intermittency, but that means there are days when they generate more power than there is demand. Use the rest for carbon capture and it's free.
The real "cost" to fixing it, and the big lobby against it, is that the oil and coal companies would take a nosedive. Literally trillions of dollars in lost revenue. It moves to alternatives. It isn't economic damage, it's displacement. But the specific people who own the oil and coal reserves stand to lose their shirts, and these are not people lacking in political influence. Everything you hear about the high cost -- it's only really a cost to them. To you it's just an upgrade to electric.
But we still have to actually do it. A carbon tax so that people do all buy electric cars and stop burning coal. It's a thing we can do but not a thing we have done yet.
The point of the Vox article is that just switching from gas to electric isn't going to be enough. The argument is that without large-scale carbon capture we will not hit the 1.5C goal.
Large-scale carbon capture is still untested. Reforestation is the only well established large-scale carbon capture but is very land intensive.
"P. oleracea is one of very few plants able to utilize both CAM and C4 photosynthesis pathways, for a long time believed to be incompatible with each other despite biochemical similarities. P. oleracea will switch from C4 to CAM pathways during times of drought and there is transcription regulation and physiological evidence for C4-CAM hybrid photosynthesis during mild drought."
If the wild alarmists are correct that the only way to prevent destructive climate change is to immediately dismantle all human economies and return to a life more like that of the middle ages, maybe we should just forget the whole thing and invest in sunscreen.
It absolutely must, or else it's basically already too late: https://www.vox.com/2016/10/4/13118594/2-degrees-no-more-fos...
> This image should terrify you. It should be on billboards.
> As you can see, in either scenario, global emissions must peak and begin declining immediately. For a medium chance to avoid 1.5 degrees, the world has to zero out net carbon emissions by 2050 or so — for a good chance of avoiding 2 degrees, by around 2065.
> After that, emissions have to go negative. Humanity has to start burying a lot more carbon than it throws up into the atmosphere.... Thus far, most demonstration plants of any size attaching CCS to fossil fuel facilities have been over-budget disasters. What if we can’t rely on it? What if it never pans out?
> If we really want to avoid 1.5 degrees, and we can’t rely on large-scale carbon sequestration, then the global community has to zero out its carbon emissions by 2026.
(emphasis mine)