There is no way to solve the problem without taking out what is causing it somehow. But it should not be the only measure taken.
Saying so, if the problem is money, the groups that made themselves astronomically rich putting directly or indirectly that CO2 there should be the main component of that economic equation. Essentially they created a problem, got rich doing that, but all the rest of the world is the one that should get poor trying to fix it is a bad pattern.
Need to balance it by taking out. Trees and algae are doing this. The solution is not green energy or going EVs. The solution already proven very effective and on mass scaleable...it is called ocean iron fertilization. Unfortunately, governments NOT interested in doing that. CO2 is a new source of laws to control masses and taxations. Iron fertilizations method is so successful that governments worldwide band together to discredit and even send in law enforcers to raid the scientists office. Majority academia (I know this first hand in 13 universities western world) have government people visiting and warning deans not to expand this method or even publish anything on it. If iron fertilizations can solve the co2 issue in a year, there is no money in it or enough issues to keep politicians stay elected. Nothing to see. Stick to your EVs, lithium batteries, carbon tax, and non-straw coffee.
"We fucked up the air globally in <50y, lets fuck up the ocean faster to un-fuck the air issue temporarily".
But seriously, we lack the understanding to do local geo-engineering, much less at global scale. Hard pass.
Reducing CO2 emissions by going green and EVs (and not just EV cars), and removing CO2, is a longer but much more controllable and stable approach. I just wish we had better battery technology already, but we spent the last 100y deluding ourselves that a finite non-renewable energy source, that messed up our only biosphere, was the only course of action.
At the macro level, everybody got rich from burning fossil fuels. A thousand or so billionaires who got extra rich doesn’t really make a dent on the activities of the other billions of people.
My power went out for and hours-long stretch recently, and it only highlighted how much richer my life is because our society figured out how to provide everyone energy at very low cost.
The question now is whether we can keep doing so, while diminishing the externalities to a sustainable level. I think we can!
The next question is how to do it. There is no one simple trick that's gonna do it. In my view, figuring this out is the work of our era. In other eras, people have figured out how to make enough food to feed everyone, how to move people around quickly, how to communicate across great distances near-instantaneously, and all sorts of other things. I think this is ours. That's scary but it's also exciting. We can be heroes!
I think I get what you're saying here. I'm rich in that I have access to so many luxuries, and increasingly I see them as such. I can live without coffee, alcohol, videogames, driving frequently, and heating my house to a comfortable temperature (an extra layer works well. We keep the house in the low 60s F in winter, and even that feels like a luxury now. Like other animals, it's best to insulate ourselves rather than our spaces).
People who control the extraction economies are far richer. Is it a pyramid scheme of sorts?
I think a better way to think of this is to attack it from the other direction. What can't you live without? Or more broadly, what do you consider to really not be a luxury, but truly table stakes?
Here are some ideas:
- You say you're happy with "in the low 60s F in the winter", but what if you had no heat? I don't know where you live, but where I live this would be untenable. Because of abundant energy, I can live in a place that is in the 0s through 40s pretty often, without having any wood-burning heat source in my house, or spending a large amount of my time cutting and splitting wood. Not to mention how much deforestation it would require if we didn't have abundant oil (which is much better to refine from petroleum than whales, btw), gas, or electricity.
- You say you're happy without driving "frequently". But what about driving at all? The pre-gasoline solution to getting individual people to individual places was literally horses. Bicycles actually work pretty well now for this, but only because of all the roads that have now been built everywhere to support cars.
- Speaking of that, are roads and sidewalks a total luxury, or are they more important than that? Concrete is another critical component of our modern infrastructure that is downstream of sucking super old dead stuff out of the ground.
There is so much more of this sort of thing: grocery stores, modern medicine, illumination when the sun isn't up, it goes on and on. It is not hyperbole to say that human civilization at anything approaching the current scale and standard of living has been achieved on the back of abundant energy from fossil fuels.
It would not be impossible to roll this all way back, but it would be impossible to do so without devastating impacts to people currently living.
I strongly believe that rather than retreat, the far more promising path is to advance. As abundant as energy from fossil fuels has proved to be, they don't hold a candle to the energy that exists in nature: the sun sends us an astronomical amount of energy each day, the earth is mostly made out of rock that is hotter than industrial kilns, the bonds of particles within atoms themselves contain a huge amount of energy. The challenge is that these forms of energy are much harder to extract than lighting hydrocarbons on fire.
The trick is to make sure we use enough the abundant and easily accessible energy we have today as an investment in our collective project to lever up our ability to tap into the even more abundant but difficult to use energy that is laying all around us.
I don't think that's entirely true. 100 companies are responsible for 71% of global emissions (https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2017/jul/10... ); I don't have the statistics—I seem to remember reading something on this recently, but I can't find it—but I think that it's not unreasonable to believe that a few billionaires, and now trillionaires, might have a similarly disproportionate impact on emissions.
> 100 companies are responsible for 71% of global emissions
these companies emitted carbon to satisfy the demands for goods/services from various populations around the world. By pinning the emissions onto the companies like this as responsible, it is indirectly implying that the end consumer has no responsibility. Which is absolutely not true.
The way, i think, to fix it is to price carbon emissions properly. This requires _all_ countries in the world to participate and enforce.
The ultra-wealthy do have a disproportionate impact on resource consumption and carbon emission (lots of air travel, fancy cars, large houses and more) but it’s not 10000x like their wealth might imply. Their companies might be responsible for a majority of global emissions, but guess who’s responsible for a majority of those companies’ revenue? It’s everyone. When we buy a thing, we are funding the activity needed to produce the thing. When we see a small group of people getting ultra rich off economic activity, it’s tempting to blame them for all of the consequences of that economic activity, because that makes the problem seem easier to solve (“just get rid of the billionaires!”). But changing the beneficiary of all that corporate profit doesn’t change the underlying economic activity that is driving consumption and driving pollution.
I’m not saying bad actors haven’t acted badly - demand generation is pretty evil, and we should definitely curtail that - but the problem is ultimately not the man in the boardroom or the White House or the luxury yacht. It’s the man in the mirror.
> The ultra-wealthy do have a disproportionate impact on resource consumption and carbon emission (lots of air travel, fancy cars, large houses and more) but it’s not 10000x like their wealth might imply.
it's actually around a million times. a single air trip alone (let alone a private jet) emits far more carbon than an average family, and the ultra-wealthy fly a lot. plus the rest of their emissions too, of course.
as the twitter classic goes: "the guy with only an Xbox one and a mattress in his room probably has the lowest carbon footprint but no one wants to talk about that". and yeah, that's dead right, the billionaire is probably into the billions of times multiplier over that guy.
that's why it's silly to whammy on consumer electronics etc as supposedly being some horrible social sin - people are going to want to do things, and actually things that keep you in your house and not traveling via car or (especially!) air travel do drastically reduce emissions overall. Even buying a new PC every year is peanuts compared to your spring break in florida.
I think you are interpreting your linked article wrong. The claimed "million times" is if you add up the effects of their investments. Individually (from flying, driving, houses, etc) it says the "average billionaire" uses about 8000 tons CO2e vs 14 for the "average American", so about 600x.
It hasn't made a dent /yet/ but one of the key causes of climate change is that these billionaires were able to become so by taking advantage of a great big externality - dumping waste into the environment.
If the price for (say) carbon had been properly baked into the cost of gasoline, there would have been significantly less fat to skim off the top and we'd have vastly fewer resources and energy billionaires.
That is: yes, it's great that cheap energy has lifted billions out of poverty and afforded them the lifestyle they have today. But now those billions are going to be the ones that have to pick up the tab while also being the most exposed to the dangers.
Given climate change's existential consequences, the price seems like a steal. Compare it to 2023 DoD budget of $773 billion [1] and the _net_ interest the feds paid on national debt in 2023 of $659 billion [2].
Certainly, we should implement numerous intervention strategies to combat climate change. Government spending seems largely unaccountable to citizens outside of the lobbyist elite. Why not, at least, spend some Monopoly money on something that might actually work?
I very much hope Casey Handmer's Terraform Industries succeeds. It's the best case plan I'm aware of for dealing with CO2. Put carbon capture, electrolyser and sabatier style reactor directly next to solar panels, produce Methane, pipe it directly into normal natural gas pipelines, use it to produce fuel and everything we currently use oil for, so everything that uses this methane is carbon neutral.
I don't know but I guess they don't intend to leak a lot from their own device/tank and once they have sold it to the pipeline they consider it "consumed". The idea is to capture the same amount of CO2 from the air as is in the methane that is consumed.
But afforestation is too slow compared to the rate of new CO2 emissions, so that it will do little to nothing to avoid the huge peak in atmospheric CO2.
Not only are we known for tech breakthroughs, but this is how they happen. That is, people first have to be working on problems, trying (and mostly failing) to get things to work, in order to make those breakthroughs.
That's been my ongoing frustration with climate tech.
Problems need to feel urgent enough to gain sustainable support from society, but climate change doesn't feel urgent, despite it being a five alarm fire relative to the last few millennia.
I suspect we won't get serious about breakthroughs until 2100 or so. Fingers crossed for fusion.
For what it's worth, I get where you're coming from on this in theory, but in practice I don't think this thesis has been borne out.
If this were right, we wouldn't have solar power scaling up by hundreds of gigawatts per year, or the EV and charging network deployment we're currently seeing, or a bunch of recent progress on geothermal power, electrolysis, and heat pumps (including for industrial heat).
I'm not sure which part of your thesis is wrong though. Maybe people do feel sufficient urgency to work on all this? Or maybe people are actually capable of working on things without needing a "five alarm fire" to motivate them. I tend think it's the latter, personally.
Yeah! I think breakthroughs are also sometimes ... more boring than people expect?
Like, there isn't really an "invention of the transformer" singular breakthrough moment for lithium ion batteries. But there absolutely is a breakthrough-level difference in battery technology between, say, the 90s and today.
Maybe battery nerds would say there were breakthrough moments like that, but when I read The Powerhouse (Steve Levine), which is about some of these developments, I came away surprised and impressed by how incremental but consistent the progress was.
Same thing with solar panels. We figured out how to do PV in the middle of the 20th century, but it didn't really work until recently, after tons of "boring" incremental progress on it.
> According to the new report by research firm Rhodium Group, the US needs to spend roughly $100 billion a year on CDR in order to scale up to a level that would help the country meet its climate goals.
That's not expensive. That's less than $300 per person per year.
The US spends $800B on military. If $100B were to make a dent in climate change, that's a bargain.
I'd consider the US spending anything short of $1T / year here reasonable, sustainable, and likely economically-beneficial. That's about 3% of GDP, for reference.
The reason for having a military is to be disaster-ready. Even medical spending is something like 1/3 of our GDP, and reducing pollution would help there. Any way you run the numbers, $100B is not much here, and critically, those costs would go down as we invest and technology improves.
I'm very far from the far-left fringe in terms of believing in some of the horror stories around climate change -- the discourse is polarized -- but even taking relatively right-wing estimates of impact, it's hard to see how a spend on that order is not justified.
The problem here is people don't see the difference between large numbers. $5M, $5B, and $5T all simply look "big."
I think the only truly carbon negative way of doing that is through plants, possibly including burying them. I don't trust any carbon capture company to be truly negative, there is always too much hand waving with their math.
It's not just expensive. It's solving the wrong problem.
You can't capture CO2 unless we have vast amounts of carbon free energy. If we have vast amounts of carbon free energy, we'll stop adding CO2. At which point the problem stops getting worse and (very gradually) improves on its own.
If the problem has gotten to the point where the amount of CO2 is itself a danger, it means we're still adding CO2 to the atmosphere, and sequestering CO2 just isn't an option.
So this is considering a scenario that isn't just expensive, but effectively impossible. And worrying about "things we might do some day" misses the fact that we need to stop using fossil fuels right now. Plotting to remove the existing carbon just isn't helpful and makes things worse.
We need the technology to less gradually improve our solution after going carbon zero, but going carbon zero takes the highest priority.
So carbon capture should still be funded, but it would be on the backburner. I don't know what is the appropriate funding. A billion dollars per year, maybe?
> So this is considering a scenario that isn't just expensive, but effectively impossible.
Plants seem to do OK. I mean, fine, there are technical arguments to be had, but have them with details and not hyperbole. Starting from that kind of position is ridiculous when there's an existence proof all around you.
Plants also respirate. Not to mention animals respirate. Fungus break down plants. Granted, plants do generate net Oxygen even with their requirement for respiration, but don't forget everything that depends on plants.
Right, and I'm just saying "granted, plants do generate net oxygen" is an awfully big caveat to "You can't capture CO2 unless we have vast amounts of carbon free energy". These arguments need to happen with numbers, not blanket dismissals.
There's a book that came out recently - "Not the End of the World" by Hannah Ritchie - that starts by digging into a two-pronged definition of the concept of "sustainability", where the first prong is about meeting the needs of current generations, and the second prong (which is the one we usually focus on when thinking about sustainability) is about maintaining an environment in which future generations can meet their needs as well.
The problem with most of what we're doing today is that it fails the second prong: future generations won't be able to meet their needs if the earth is too hot to support human civilization.
But the problem with your proposed solution is that it fails the first prong.
If you were dictator of the world and waved your wand such that nobody ever dug up another fossil fuel, starting from this moment, the result would be upheaval, privation, and death on a massive scale. Human civilization is, at this moment, dependent on digging up those fossil fuels and lighting them on fire.
So what the (great many) people who are working on this problem are doing is trying to navigate a path that threads a needle between these two bad outcomes, transitioning away from the dig-stuff-up-and-burn-it model to one that still works about as well - or ideally, even better! - for people currently living, without sacrificing the lives of people who will live in the future. And yeah, pretty much everyone involved thinks that does mean we'll dig up very little of those fossils, on the other side of this transition. But that is more like an effect than a cause.
Thank you for the balanced take. Stopping oil cold turkey would be a disaster for our civilization. Some think of oil merely as fuel for our cars and trucks, maybe for heating homes and businesses. Stopping all that would be relatively easy! But we've built our entire agricultural system, our entire infrastructure, our entire medical system on non-fuel applications of oil - plastics, fertilizer, synthetics, tar, steel and so many other industrial materials that require fossilized carbon, with no viable substitutes in sight. We need oil now, to build technology that will eventually replace oil! EV, electrified cities, solar panels, wind farms, nuclear and hydro power, food hubs, 15 minute city infrastructure, public transport... all require fossil fuels to bootstrap them.
I think the most helpful framing is to look out ~100 years. In 2124, will humanity be using fossil fuels? No, highly unlikely. Oil is done: either through depletion, or EROI descent, or explicit measures to cap CO2 pollution, or a combination. We will see a world without oil soon, one way or the other. The question is how gracefully can we make this transition without causing massive human suffering? Part of that graceful transition involves the responsible use of our remaining fossil hydrocarbons.
"Just stop oil" gives us zero chance of pulling off a smooth transition and plunges us straight into economic collapse with no regard for human well-being. "Drill-baby-drill" raises the risk of catastrophic climate crises with no regard for human well-being. Neither is a good mental framework if you care about helping humanity deal with this predicament.
I think that is an uncharitable reading of the person you are replying to. I don't think they want to wave a magic wand and stop all oil/coal tomorrow. But investing time/money/policy to move away from fossil fuels is something we could have been doing since at least the Kyoto Protocol and yet we are doing next to nothing, and in fact are still subsidizing oil companies.
Respectfully, I don't think it is an uncharitable reading at all. It is a response to a literal reading of the question "we just need to stop mining and drilling fossil fuels, how is this not obvious?".
It is an obvious idea - and it's totally fine to put out obvious ideas! - but that's also why there are so many well known and top of mind reasons that it is not the solution to our predicament.
To me, this is like a new student of algebra who thinks, "division is defined for all values of the denominator except zero, an obvious solution to that special case is that it should be defined for zero as well". It's an interesting idea for a student to have, but the reasons it doesn't work are very well known.
To what degree are we human animals in a population boom?
Of course we want to maintain and even grow, but there are costs to that.
To address the first prong, would it work to change our culture? Continuing to justify the massive amount of energy we convert, largely because we want to and not because we need to, feels like a problem with solutions that don't necessarily involve war.
I mean, what's your timescale for this "population boom"? Population growth hasn't been speeding up for a very long time (indeed, the opposite).
Clearly we use more energy than we need, but I think lots of people hugely overestimate how much room there is to cut that without many many people dying. A very large amount of humanity's energy usage goes toward the food and other infrastructure of civilization that keeps people alive.
Improving energy efficiency is certainly one component of decarbonization. But to my knowledge, nobody suggests it is enough on its own, or even a particularly large portion of the mix of solutions.
Addressing things like this is part of the purpose of government (on any level, be it personal, family, community, on up). Regulations can shift our habits.
Does a corporation's existence justify its continued existence? Like people, it'll try to keep on going, but it not being a person, it's okay to let these things go. People will lose jobs, but the answer to that is to revitalize the land so we can transition to getting our food nearby, and spending the time to do it- time well spent.
Computers, for example, are a fun diversion we enjoy thanks to our curiosity, ingenuity, and cheap (money-wise, not life-wise) energy. I don't consider them essential.
Letting go of a lot of our costly and polluting playthings is the way to go. Children cry when someone takes their candy away, and we'll be no different unless we realize that candy is killing us and we exercise our adult brains to change our habits.
> Think of this problem in terms of how many people would need to change the way they do things.
Looking to the future, virtually the whole of humanity will drastically need to change the way they do things to cope with the changes in climate. It's likely too late now, but there would be far less changes needed if we stop pumping out so much CO2 into the air and thus reduce the likelihood of climate catastrophes.
> And how many financial interests (with the resources to actively lobby against change) would be affected too.
Putting financial interests ahead of the health of our environments is how we got into this mess.
> If you have an obvious answer that takes those two things into account I'd love to hear it!
You've framed the problem in an unhelpful way - you're asking for a solution that perpetuates unsustainable practices.
We also do not - yet! - have carbon-neutral alternatives for energy usage, either in amount or kind. This is why people are working both to scale up the kinds of energy use that is already carbon-neutral but which there is not yet enough of, and to figure out alternatives for things that do not already have carbon-neutral solutions.
but it is a fair comparison - there's currently no real alternatives for fossil fuels. Renewables do not have the density required for a lot of transportation, not to mention fossil fuels like oil are the feedstock for a lot of chemicals required for modern day manufacturing.
Some sources of electricity could be replaced by renewables, but not all. And certainly not as cheaply as oil or gas is.
Alternative to fossil fuels are synthetic fuels, for example E85 (ethanol 85%). Government can subsidize a clean local production of ethanol from air, like it did for solar panels, to boot start it.
Yep! I'm optimistic that we're going to (painstakingly, with a lot of work) get to net-neutral emissions over the coming decades.
But then I believe we'll almost certainly want to go net-negative for some period of time. And we'll need to do a bunch of research and experimentation into carbon removal techniques to figure out how to do that. The earlier we start doing that, the better!
I think everyone understands that but it’s cheap and the world depends on energy. So it’s not they people don’t get it, it’s that the world is working toward getting renewables cheap enough to fulfill current and future energy needs.
> I think everyone understands that but it’s cheap and the world depends on energy. So it’s not they people don’t get it, it’s that the world is working toward getting renewables cheap enough to fulfill current and future energy needs.
The realization that needs to be reached (but won't, because people don't think that way) to power real change is that it's not cheap; we just don't pay the externalities at the pump, so we get used to thinking that it's cheap.
Yep. Gasoline is far too cheap. We've gotten used to it, taken it for granted, and that's a huge problem. We've degraded the land to the point where most of us can't find enough food locally and rely on food grown and shipped thanks to petroleum.
To wean ourselves off will be painful, but not impossible. Building strong local community is a good start; I've got to know a few neighbors now in this rural area and we're starting to offer to pick up groceries for each other, thus reducing the car trips to town. Building trust goes a long way to not needing to do everything yourself.
I agree with you, but the externalities hit them 30 years later, and the majority of the population are trying to figure out how to even make it for another 6 months (financially).
Right, then they can’t afford to live. Telling people to stop after all this time is a non-starter unless you’re willing to militarily stop countries from burning oil.
Well, burning oil kills people, but they can't afford to defend themselves. When you're watching your kids die in your country's fifth freak heatwave/power outage in a year it will be little comfort to know that at least people in rich countries got to have cheap gas.
Certainly, but rich people use an awful lot more. Someone in Vietnam on a 50cc Honda is putting out less carbon than someone in Orange County with an Escalade.
There’s a lot more people in Vietnam than Orange County. And I expect making them stop using their motorcycle is harder as they have fewer or no alternatives.
This is almost entirely a problem of shitty political leadership. There are solutions, and a transition is possible, if the emergency was treated like the emergency that it is.
But this threaten very powerful established interests, and those interests have been remarkably adept at mobilizing themselves and spreading disinformation, fear, and doubt in the population.
Even the most weak and financially friendly efforts are attacked and undermined. Like a carbon tax with a generous rebate -- like here in Canada, and a policy formerly advocated by conservative economists, but now a target of populist demagoguery and will likely be gone after the next election.
Conservative and neo-liberal ideological strains have spent 40+ years steadfastly eliminating the ability of central governments to plan and have coordinated industrial/macro-economic strategies in the west -- something they mostly had after WWII.
Absolutely and electric cars and heat pumps powered by renewables are great but it's nice to have when we still want to have air travel or meat while maintaining net zero.
I recently moved into an apartment that has a heat pump. I save $50 on my electric bill per month but I also pay $1000/month more in rent because "woo wah it's new and fancy and modern"
As long as environmental friendliness is a luxury, nothing is going to happen. This is the dynamic that needs to be disrupted, somehow.
Yeah, seems we're in a population boom because we can. Lynx population grows with rabbits, wolves with moose, etc. This increased carrying capacity of the earth is thanks to the energy we pull from the ground (and air, water, sun), and in times of plenty maybe we're a little wasteful...
How many people can Earth reasonably support?
Edit to answer your (rhetorical?) question:
What we can do is build strong local connections; that's the first step towards decreasing our level of domestication, per Why We Need to be Wild, by Jessica Carew Kraft.
I didn't downvote any of this, but for what it's worth I do think it's pretty common to see downvotes for ideas that everyone has seen a million times before, for which the counterarguments are just as well known and only slightly less obvious.
It might be expensive with current technology, but cost will likely get down with more research + as a side effect it will be a basis for terraforming of planets and creating controlled environments on the Moon, i.e. domes in craters.
That website is a great example of how density of advertising impacts perceived credibility.
Is that information accurate? It's hard for me to tell, but the amount of junk on that page (especially on mobile) gives me a really bad first impression.
Algae with nitrogen fixing organelle (nitroplast) can be such "plant", because it will need air, water, and micronutrients to fixate CO₂ and NO₂, so it can be used as fertilizer, which will offset cost of CO₂ fixing.
I guess all those pesky scientists are in on this control scheme, must be so as governments pay them in many cases. Only big oil fights for our freedom to stop this.
> If CO2 was really a problem, we have the technology to easily pull it out of the air and store it: trees.
It's not in any doubt that CO2 is a major problem leading to climate catastrophes (or at least catastrophes for how and where humans currently live). However, trees could be part of a solution in capturing CO2, but humanity is reducing the number of trees, so that's not really going to help matters.
> It's not in any doubt that CO2 is a major problem leading to climate catastrophes
There's actually a lot of doubt regarding that
> but humanity is reducing the number of trees, so that's not really going to help matters.
Sure, so if the CO2 nuts were really serious about helping the planet they'd be organizing to plant massive amounts of trees. Not standing in the middle of highways yelling at people.
> Sure, so if the CO2 nuts were really serious about helping the planet they'd be organizing to plant massive amounts of trees. Not standing in the middle of highways yelling at people.
I suspect that you haven't really thought through the best way of effecting change and are instead just putting forward a political opinion.
> Also there is no reason to do it as it's not a man-made "climate change". People need to adapt, not fight it.
Even if you believe it's not man-made, the historical way that organisms "adapt" to climate change is by going extinct in favor of new organisms that can handle the new climate. "People should just go extinct" is, I suppose, a proposal that one could make, but I don't think it's useful along any axis.
That's because other animals (mainly) rely on natural selection to deal with environmental changes. Humans can use what's effectively Lamarkian selection to deal the environmental change.
Saying so, if the problem is money, the groups that made themselves astronomically rich putting directly or indirectly that CO2 there should be the main component of that economic equation. Essentially they created a problem, got rich doing that, but all the rest of the world is the one that should get poor trying to fix it is a bad pattern.