Agreeing with the rest of your comment, but:

>> geoengineering

> You mean the thing that's already gotten us into this mess?

What got us into this mess is geo-moving-fast-and-breaking-things. Everyone chasing short-term profits and dumping externalities on everyone else.

I don't get the hate for geoengineering - i.e. planned, large-scale interventions. Sure, it would be better to not need it, but the way things are heading, we very well might.

Given the huge uncertainty in all models of the climate, how can we be sure our large scale interventions don’t have large scale unintended consequences?

We can't, but at some point in the near future, the consequences of our current course of action will be bad enough to risk it.

Think of geoengineering as chemo for the planet - a very blunt treatment with bad, large-scale consequences, that we apply anyway, because the disease it fights is even worse.

> planned, large-scale interventions.

Unintended consequences. Unless it's direct carbon capture, there is no guarantee we won't create worse problems.

Doesn't explain the hate any mention of geoengineering seems to be getting. "Unintended consequences" shouldn't be used as a generic counterargument/thought-terminating cliché. What particular consequences are we talking about, and how they stake against the problem we're sure to have?

> "Unintended consequences" shouldn't be used as a generic counterargument/thought-terminating cliché.

"Geoengineering" is itself a very generic term.

> What particular consequences are we talking about,

They would depend on the particular geoengineering technique we're talking about.

The whole point of unintended consequences is they are not or could not be anticipated before the fact.

Other than direct carbon capture i.e. geoengineering that's a direct inverse of the problem we have right now, I'm not confident we can predict everything that can go wrong with any given geoengineering solution. Even direct carbon capture is likely to have some serious downsides at scale we haven't yet considered.

Exactly, the point of carbon taxes is that everybody gets a choice. You'll eat less meat, I'll drive around less. It's the least-ideological solution.

I think a carbon tax is one of the most efficient solutions available, but it's proven to be very ideological since the burden of consumption taxes tends to fall on people with lower income. They're very unpopular, and few countries have been able to implement them successfully.

It's still worth trying to pursue a more popular version of a carbon tax because of how efficient they are, but we need to acknowledge their political shortcomings. Perhaps we could pair a carbon tax with an annual distribution of revenue raised to everyone - a carbon bonus - so people see a direct benefit too instead of just the tax.

Regardless we need to explore other solutions too, since it's not going to be enough to stop the climate from destabilizing further.

> Perhaps we could pair a carbon tax with an annual distribution of revenue raised to everyone

Pretty much this. Use it to fund UBI maybe. The Canadian province of British Columbia collects a carbon tax and reduces income taxes by a commensurate amount.[1]

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Columbia_carbon_tax

Yeah that's why I wrote "revenue-neutral". I've no desire to finance even more corruption and wars. The only goal is to penalize carbon and incentivize less carbon.

Agreed. I think we should all focus our energy on that instead of refusing to work together unless the other person supports our specific set of solutions (nuclear power, ending capitalism, whatever).