In a strategic retreat in the fight against climate change, the United Nations has acknowledged that Earth has lost its chance to prevent some of the worst of global warming’s harms
We will hit 2.0 C for a year in the early 2030s and 3.0C by 2050. This is already baked in and we are still accelerating CO2 production. The only way out of this is significant carbon capture and we have no technology to do this effectively at all.
I’d prefer lynching the fossil billionnaires, restoring order by removing surveillance oligarchs from life, and fighting politicians that don’t do shit to stop global warming. All three are enemies of the proletariat.
This is great, I love this.
But we NEED TO PULL DOWN CARBON. I want bigger letters. WE NEED TO PULL DOWN CARBON NO MATTER WHAT.
We need to be growing giant forests and pile driving the trunks into the seabeds or some shit. On a scale never before seen in human history by an order of magnitude.
Removing oligarchs from life, or life from oligarchs? Seems like a typo.
Yes? Yes is fine.
The only way out of this is significant carbon capture on top of emitting more and we have no technology to do this effectively at all.
Two responses.
Response #1 is that this is the same logic that the IPCC and many other climate agencies keep bringing up. In my humble opinion they are basically just giving us this idea that mathematically we can still fix this via carbon subtraction but they don’t really touch on the viability of this as a practical alternative. The problematic part is that if the technology doesn’t exist and can’t even theoretically exist because of basic thermodynamics, this is actually not a scientifically / technically sound idea even if the math was numerically valid in some divorced from reality sense.
Response #2 is that the argument is actually fundamentally wrong on one basic element. In order to reverse warming, we would have to now do climate forcing in the cooling direction. What is required is for the earth energy balance to go back in the opposite direction which would require we artificially lower CO2 below the pre industrial starting point and leave it there for decades and decades to actually refreeze the cryosphere and reverse everything. Most of the “net zero/ carbon capture” schemes are only considering a “pause” of additional pollution, not any sort of repair of the earth climate system. Its important to notice they want to do carbon sequestration to limit the warming to 1.5 or 2.0, not to sequester the CO2 to MINUS 1 to eventually put us to 0.0. Zero is the eventual “fix”. 1.5 isn’t a “fix”. So like…
The conclusion is that this is 96.3% psychological and not really a serious idea. This is telling people what they want to hear and nobody wants to be the person yelling fire in a crowded theater and starting an existential crisis…
You can tell this is purely a mirage because some very basic arguments simply demolish the illusion. This is grade school level math and science just being applied critically and the whole idea falls completely apart in a fairly horrifying way. It’s clearly a farce.
The decision of humanity has been made. And it has become rude to point it out.
No capture without a magical energy source. Which we anyway just would use to cook the planet directly.
The climate is merely one planetary boundary. Magical unlimited energy would just draw in all the other limits faster.
We don’t give a fuck, give us cheap gas. We want cheap gas and continue useless consumption. Let’s consume the earth!
I was taught about global warming in school in the 90ies, warned, tried to warn and convince others, but apparently I’m wishing for the impossible and reducing consumption would be an economic disaster. So let’s consume all the earth. I’m sure this won’t be economically catastrophic in the lomg run either.
You don’t even have to reduce consumption. You can consume all you’d like. Fuck with modern solar and energy storage tech we could consume /more/ if we’d just stop setting everything on fire for lazy and stupid reasons.
This is crazy.
We learned about climate change in the 1980s in school, and I distinctly remember that a whole bunch of new cars around 1986 and 1987 came painted green. I had never seen green cars before during my lifetime as a school aged kid. To me it was a new color for a car. In my childhood brain it was an obvious connection to the perception that gas cars were considered problematic. [ * ]
If I remember correctly the mass media around 1988 was saying that we could only grow carbon for a few more years and then we would have to plateau carbon production on a per annum basis.
[ * ] at around the same time as this was going on, there was a famine in Ethiopia, and I learned that automobiles in north America had been implicated in causing the drought in Africa because they modulated ocean evaporation rates. And that globally cars don’t really cause most of the CO2. The system started to seem very complicated and the dynamics were not simple cause-effect chains…
Acknowledging a devastating truth is not the same as giving up. In fact, facing the truth is the first step toward overcoming it.
So, what is your plan?
Are you seriously asking how I’m going to save the world, despite the opposition of governments, multinational corporations, and billionaires?
Consider there is no opposition but physics. How would you do it? Please go into details.
Ok, hear me out… Lasers!
JK, the human species is fucked but at least after we’re dead, the Earth will probably right itself eventually.
Consider there is no opposition but physics.
That makes it seem doable.
First, I’d ban the use of all fossil fuels. Next, the use of chemicals (like pesticides and weed killers) which harm the environment. Forests could no longer be destroyed to create grazing land for animals. People would have to become completely vegetarian, or only eat meat very rarely. Fishing would need to be brought down to sustainable levels. Factories would be required to either completely reduce their damage to the atmosphere or shut down. Microplastics would need to be eliminated, which would affect countless things. Lastly, we’d focus on cleaning up messes we’ve already made.
Basically, businesses, governments, and individuals would have to put environmental impact first every time a decision is made.
I’m sure I missed a few things. I can’t go into detail as you asked, because I am not educated enough on any of these topics.
I thought that your plan would be like this. If you could enforce the fossil fuel ban, than billions would have died within a year. Over a couple decades, some 95% of the current population would perish.
But you don’t even have to this, because it will happen naturally. Just a bit slower, though after a century or two the end result would be the same.
As Huskerx said, your ‘step one’ would mean the death of a massive amount of people. We can’t feed anywhere close to 8+ billion without using fossil fuels. Since we’re talking about facing the truth to get to real solutions, we can’t gloss over that.
Electric vehicles exist. Of course they would be used instead. Remember, I was asked to “consider there is no opposition but physics.” That includes logistics. I’m not glossing anything over, I’m following the rules.
I understood that to mean no political/societal opposition, not that we don’t also have our current physical reality to factor in. Sure, in a scenario of unlimited resources we can wave a magic wand and pluck up anything we’d need that is physically possible. But in our real world there aren’t sufficient electric vehicles to replace all the transport and agricultural ICE vehicles that are currently needed And our electricity grids aren’t able to operate independently of fossil fuels to provide enough power, even to produce the missing EVs. If we shift to a permaculture system of growing food, we’d need 10x the amount of land on earth, without taking into account the quality of the land. And if we took all of the nitrogen that the earth naturally produces, we’d be 50% short of what we’d need for the current population. We really want to underplay how much fossil fuels do for us. So saying there are electric vehicles, therefore problem solved, without taking into consideration the actual real world logistics, seems like make believe to me. In which case, I’m not sure what the point of this exercise is.
Most hoomans only exist due to fossil fuels, so your plan would involve quite the genocide.
And now we will see the air itself monetized. Which was the plan all along.
Every input into a human life monetized, every output monetized, and a strict framework which can be monitored and adjusted for peak efficiency of human livestock.
A boot on the throat of humanity, forever.
