Nah, we can also debate about it some more as we cook to death...
Fucking democracy, the EU governments wanted to improve environmental protections and fucking farmers protested all over.
It feels like a dictatorship would work better, e.g. in China there are no NIMBYs about nuclear plants or solar panels. Well there are, but a visit by the police would quieten them. No I wouldn't like to live like that but the alternative is having to be considerate to every fucking Karen's opinion as the world burns...
https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/china-climate-change-polici...:
> In 2019, renewables accounted for nearly 15 percent of China’s energy mix, compared to 7 percent a decade earlier. China has used hydropower for years, and it is installing more solar panels and wind power generators as the world’s leading manufacturer of those technologies. It is also boosting its nuclear power capacity, with seventeen reactors under construction as of mid-2021.
Whereas in the US, in 10 months the climate policy could be "It's a hoax, folks. Just a big hoax. The biggest hoax ever.".
They will probably profit from the solution regardless of where you decide to send your support. For example, one of the byproducts of oil refining is sulfur. If you burn sulfur in the presence of oxygen will turn into SO2. Then you can put up in the stratosphere and cool Earth until the last drop of petrochemical is burned or alternative energy is close to free and as accessible as oil and gas.
As a co-founder of Make Sunsets, I'd like to clarify the role of SO2 in climate control. SO2 is considered "easily removable" because, when combined with water, it forms sulfuric acid and precipitates out. This mechanism partially explains why 2023 was the hottest year on record; the EPA's stringent regulations on SOx emissions have significantly reduced the aerosols in our troposphere, removing critical reflective materials.
The impact of SO2, including its effectiveness and atmospheric residence time, varies based on its deployment location (latitude, longitude, altitude), concentration, and particle size.
For instance, the International Maritime Organization (IMO) 2020 regulations have reduced SO2 emissions from cargo ships in the troposphere, leading to decreased respiratory illnesses near ports and less acid rain. However, this reduction in SO2 has also warmed ocean shipping lanes, prompting discussions about reintroducing sulfur into the troposphere. [1]
Deploying SO2 in the stratosphere, above most of the atmospheric water vapor and where winds reach speeds of 200kph, allows it to spread globally and remain airborne longer (1 to 3 years). This higher placement necessitates less frequent applications for the desired reflective effect. The 1991 eruption of Mt. Pinatubo demonstrated this, injecting 20 million tons of SO2 into the stratosphere [2], cooling the Earth by 0.5°C and, according to some models, temporarily reversing decades of warming.
Stratospheric aerosol injection (SAI) is likened to Earth's sunscreen, [3] a temporary measure to reflect the Sun's energy and mitigate warming while we address the larger challenge of removing over a trillion tons of greenhouse gases emitted since the 1850s and transitioning away from fossil fuels.
Climate change demands immediate action, and SAI offers us the critical time needed to live in a world with fewer catastrophic climate events.
[2] For reference, estimates suggest that global SO2 emissions were around 131 million tons in 1970 and continued to rise, peaking at approximately 150 million tons by the late 1980s in the troposphere.
> Dr. David W. Fahey, Director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Chemical Sciences Laboratory revealed that studies show sulfur aerosols from stratospheric aerosol injection could impact the ozone layer, but not catastrophically. The 1991 Mount Pinatubo volcanic eruption demonstrated the ozone layer's resilience after temporarily cooling the planet by 0.5°C. Despite uncertainties, these findings suggest geoengineering methods like SAI could be explored without causing irreversible damage to the ozone layer.
OP here, I'd really like to understand why people are writing these comments. Is anyone willing to hop on a video call and stop hiding behind their keyboards? Here's a link to do just that: https://calendly.com/andrew-makesunsets/30min
Cool regards,
Andrew Song
Co-founder of Make Sunsets
That sounds about right, I took a domestic flight from SFO to PSP this week. I had a full-sized tube of toothpaste going there, with no issues, and they took it away coming back.
Not all but some. The increase of 10% on crops is interesting one, but i'm thinking mainly at the ocean biomass, algae etc.., there are models on this?
SAI can be an option to consider, fast to apply, but maybe the biggest critical question is: how to realize at the same time all the fundamentals actions on co2 reduction and (probably) removal? A scenario i see is: SAI begin and 1deg reduction is reality, an idea begin to circulate: ok we have time, reduction/capure can wait a little more..
Two of the biggest (non industrial) CO2 emitters are heating and transportation.
One of the lowest hanging fruits would be reducing CO2 emitting car use, using a massive capital expenditure to enable lower emitting public transit and cycling to enable people to drive less.
It's endlessly frustrating that even those polices, where are relatively cheap in the grand scheme of things are apparently too impossible for our political leadership.
If we make reducing emissions profitable our existing system will do it.
The other alternative is to completely rebuild our political/social system around something other than profit. Good luck with that, that's a fools errand.
When you put it like that it sounds really difficult, but what exactly would it mean to "completely rebuild"?
IMO it could look something like this:
- Governments around the world set up a Climate Change Council
- The council is given power to regulate industry, and assign national resources
- High impact industry is shut down or refactored. For example, coal should be banned, but oil companies should be nationalized and fazed out while alternatives are built
That's pretty much it. It's hard, and it's a large effort over a long period of time, but there's nothing impossible about it. We don't have to reimagine society to do it.
The economic forces that caused it were based on resource extraction.
Resource extraction is the core of our economy. Its why the US has vested interests in countries that have natural resources, and why the US is so quick to act when resources are nationalized.
We can either directly use taxpayer money to fund these initiatives and give them priority over things like starting wars and playing world police, or pay private individuals and ask very nicely that they help.
I much rather that national approach as I don't think middle men sapping a fat percentage is a great solution.
Its essentially a protection racket at the end of the day.
The city where I live is considering a tree ordinance, driven by some local NIMBYs. I did some rough numbers based on things I found around the internet and:
One year of carbon sequestration from a mature tree == 1 or 2 days of commuting to the city 20 miles away that many people who are priced out of this town drive back and forth from.
Trees are great, and most places should plant more street trees. But if you preserve trees at the cost of building dense cities that are more environmentally friendly, you're doing it wrong. Dense cities also allow for more trees in actual wild lands outside of them, rather than sprawl.
In the US, transportation and heating are our biggest individual contributions to climate change.
There is no single silver bullet, but if you combine tree planting with nuclear / renewable power with remote work with electric vehicles ... eventually it starts to add up.
Shooting down solutions because they aren't the entire solution will mean we never make any progress.
Sure; I wasn't saying don't plant trees (street trees provide all kinds of benefits: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/tag/street+trees ), just that transportation and how we build our cities are so critical. I did not realize the huge, orders of magnitude disconnect between exactly how much CO2 driving puts out and trees sequester.
Replace EVs with mass transit, and you've got something there. Density as an important component in reducing consumption doesn't end at the apartment building/Nplex lobby. Walking and cycling infrastructure also reduces health costs. Do you want to help curtail the oncoming Medicare crisis? Make Boomers bike.
That... seems obvious. Why do you assume the person you're responding to is proposing we increase sprawl? Increase density, increase public transit, and rewild outlying areas. It all goes together.
Maybe mandate twice as thick wooden frames - that would capture more carbon in the house walls, and also conserve heating, as wood is a good insulator?
Just "Reduce conversion of natural ecosystems" is the second biggest GHG impact, after solar and just above wind (though at a slightly higher cost), according to the IPCC:
> Current studies suggest that mangroves and coastal wetlands annually sequester carbon at a rate ten times greater than mature tropical forests. They also store three to five times more carbon per equivalent area than tropical forests.
If we planted trees on every square meter outside of current cities (and let them grow without disturbing them), would that make a dent in carbon sequestration?
Serious question. Planting trees and re-growing ecosystems seems like a simple, straightforward solution, but I feel like it's a red herring.
Afforestation pretty much linearly absorbs carbon based on the size of the area you cover with trees, as a percentage of current forest area.
So if we doubled the size and carbon trapping of all the forests on earth, yes, it would make a big dent (solve the problem entirely, maybe). But that's unrealistic, because forests currently cover 30% of the land area of the planet, so we're practically never going to get to 60% forest coverage. It would involve giving up important things like farming.
It's not entirely a red herring, it will undoubtedly be a big part of climate change mitigation, but the first and most important step is to stop pumping oil out of the ground and burning it, like the article.
There's something you've missed there: forests - not just trees but the forest's understory, the animals living in it, the microbes in the soil etc - sequester carbon constantly. It isn't just "how much does the tree weigh, we've sequestered that much", it is about the ecological processes involved.
To give a fairly obvious example, think about deciduous trees: once a year they shed a large amount of carbon (leaves) which then goes into the soil. The nitrogen content is used for matter for plants, while the carbon is not.
Over time, this deposits more and more carbon in the ground itself. This is a good, safe place for it, and the model above is one of the simplest. Ecosystems are great at this stuff if we stop setting them on fire or otherwise killing everything.
Well, the studies I was summarizing basically take that into account. The raw tree mass itself is both a) not that big and b) renewed, as you say, by decomposition.
Really the purpose of forests is more in terms of soil creation and preservation, as you point out, a lot of the times in the form of shrubs, leaves, or needles and downed wood being infiltrated into substrate.
It’s just not enough. Fossil fuels represent millions of years of the stored output of fully wild ecosystems. Rewilding the Earth today only gets us to the starting line to repeat that process.
Sequestration only starts making sense when we have basically unlimited green energy to throw at it. I know some moments have excess green energy already but you're not going to build a huge plant and run it only 2 hours a day.
The amount of natural resources needed to build enough plants to make it more than a drop in the bucket is also going to require significant mining operations and other big polluters. It's a nice idea but science fiction for now, at least at a scale that is actually effective at countering climate change.
And even if we had unlimited energy and materials the inertia of greenhouse emissions (the CO2 heating us now was emitted decades ago) building it at scale will come too late to avert a crisis.
It's still much easier and more efficient to avoid emitting the carbon we still do than to try and capture it back. Though even that will come too late really.
Correct, completely insignificant, this is our "hello world" deployment, but we're pushing to prod and skipping staging. As more people buy, we will increase our payload and measure what we can. It's extreme, but if you have a better solution like scaling up fusion tomorrow, we're kinda fucked if we don't cool the planet.
