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Comment by jobseeker990 | Hacker News Reader

Environmentalists are against technical solutions to climate change because people wouldn't learn anything. They need to experience the effects of their actions so they learn from it. Otherwise they'd just expect technology to save them every time they cause a disaster.

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> because people wouldn't learn anything

I mean, I suppose that's part of it, but the biggest reason (if by "technical solutions" you're talking about geoengineering) is that it's pants on fire crazy to run uncontrolled global scale geoengineering experiments. Unfortunately it's looking more and more likely that we'll be left with little choice.

Not only is it pants on fire crazy. Most options will almost certainly NOT work. Sequestration, iron seeding, accelerated weathering, and sulfur areosols all suffer from huge scale issues that no one has a serious answer for. I can't keep up with all the crazy ideas, "cloud brightening?", launching 100 MM nanosatellites to dim the sun?, but none of these can scale to the problem. LUCKY FOR US, the problem can be fixed by dramatically lowering emissions. We shall see if we actually come together in time.

US congress is funding sulfur aerosol as well as sea salt cloud seeding research, from what I heard with experiments. I feel that even nobody in the community thinks it's a good idea we're getting kind of desperate since so many politicians are asleep at the wheel.

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/01/us-geoengineering-re...

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