Comment by erichocean | Hacker News Reader

Comment by erichocean | Hacker News Reader

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I'm curious as well.

If myself (or someone else) were to develop a zero-emission approach to electricity generation (non-nuclear) that could handle "base load" and did not involve filling up the landscape with solar panels (or their moral equivalent), and did not produce waste, would that even help any more?

We globally consume about 20,000 terawatt-hours of electricity right now annually, and in the US, electricity generation is 30% of total CO2 emissions. Presumably, if there was additional power for electric vehicles, we could also reduce overall emissions even further by moving away from gasoline.

But at this point, even NO emissions seems pointless to work towards—we're already screwed. It seems like instead of pursuing lower emissions, we need to work towards reducing the CO2 that's already in the atmosphere.

Large-scale engineering, the kind we'd need to do large-scale cleaning of the atmosphere, or large-scale high-efficiency hydroponic farming, or building huge earthworks to protect cities from rising sea levels, or anything else we might need to do to deal with global warming, is driven by large-scale energy production. Without energy, we can't do the things we need to do to survive without a lot of pain, suffering, and death. With plentiful energy, we can do the things we know we need to do, and new technological advancements become possible.

I wouldn't rule out nuclear energy. There are risks, but it can produce a lot of energy in a small space, and the waste is much lower volume and easier to contain than chemical energy production. In my opinion, we should've built up our nuclear energy production over the past 30 years so that coal and oil could've been phased out by now, while we developed viable solar energy tech to replace the nuclear tech.

At some point it will become feasible to capture CO2 on a large scale and reduce CO2 concentration in the atmosphere.

So, not screwed yet.

If you have enough energy to spend, capturing CO2 is quite feasible.

I'd say the less emissions we have to less severe the consequences will be and the the easier it will be to work around the problems in the future. Every tiny reduction buys us more time.

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