In order to hit the "brief and rapidly closing window" we have for effective action, we need to look into lowering material flows and energy use by targeting overconsumption. We simply don't have time to wait for a tech miracle, and – as this study points out – the miracle can have huge downsides.
Whatever the topic, I mentally ignore posts which shill the NEXT WORST THING EVER.
Most of the waiting scenarios involve a drastic decrease in farmland for the US/Europe and larger gains in Canada / Russia.
The planet quite frankly doesn’t care if NY / LA / London lose 6 to 12 Ft of land. Even if no one moved and everyone just stayed there to drown, humanity still goes on.
The whole thing mostly fixes itself anyway once population peaks in a few decades. It’s not global warming that kills humanity, it’s our population eventually reaching zero through sub replacement birth rates tho maybe there is a saving grace where once incomes get high enough it rebounds.
I am not so arrogant as to think without humans the planet dies. But maybe unlike most Americans I don't want to sacrifice my grandparents so that people can dine in person at Applebee's, nor do I want to live in a worse, less human-friendly world so that oil executives can make another few decades of profit.
We can decarbonize with the technology we have today. We know it will be more expensive economically to wait until it's too late, but it'll be more expensive for taxpayers instead of maybe the companies doing so well they can spend millions on lobbying every year.
Farming isn't really the issue, we can eke out 10x the calories by cutting pork/chicken/beef. Wet bulb temperatures (where you can't cool off by sweating and die cooked inside out) are a larger issue. Tons of other cycles that we're fucking with besides carbon, like nitrogen and phosphorus. We're also losing arable land to desertification. I don't even have to get started on our available freshwater reserves.
To think humanity will just kinda coast by and that it will all mostly fix itself must be a very nice thought, but it flies in the face of what every single person we pay to study this is saying. And they're not saying humans go extinct.
Per the ipcc model, if we could wave a magic wand and have zero emissions tomorrow, CO2 levels would fall faster than they have been increasing.
We already have free CO2 removal. The challenge is and always has been on the emission side.
CO2 levels are about 420 ppm and go up about 1.5 per year. A 120 year half life yields -3.5 ppm per year.
It is worth investing some money in development for the moonshot possibility of economic viability. Unless it becomes cheaper to capture than build renewables, the the money will always be better spent on green energy.
Anything useful you could make out of CO2 can be made much easier from fossil fuels.
Traditionally, the idea is that the ocean would absorb the 'excess' CO2 put there by fossil fuel combustion over the industrial era. However, this is quite a slow process and it's entirely possible to reach a new steady state of relatively high atmospheric CO2 (and high global temperature, i.e. ice-free poles) and stay there for several million years - it's happened in the past. Furthermore, we have the permafrost melt ongoing across the Arctic, and shallow marine sediments are also releasing methane and CO2. This will continue for decades in the immediate zero-emission scenario, that turning point has come and gone.
Maybe if a full transition off fossil fuels had begun in 1980, when the science was clear, we'd be stabilizing at current conditions (*it takes ~100 years for the climate system to finish responding to current forcing, assuming no additional forcing, mainly due to oceanic warming lag effects). We're in for warming for the next 50 years, no matter what, and the world is clearly not getting off fossil fuels any time soon, all the major fossil fuel actors have plans for status quo production for the next 30 years (rather than say 3% reduction per year, which would mean no fossil fuel production in 30 years).
It's going to happen slowly on human time scales, i.e. the scale is decadal for noticeable differences in the year-to-year average, but it's also inexorable. "It's in the post" is the British saying that applies. Like trying to throw the rudder over on the Titanic after the iceberg is detected, it's all too little too late.
If you can prevent X tons of co2 for $y dollars , it is better than capturing X tons. for $>y dollars.
It only makes sense to capture co2 if you have already prevented everything you can.
Yes it would have been better to start in the 80s, but that doesn't change the math today or tomorrow.
If the carbon cycle changes, it will still be better to stop emissions than capture.
> It only makes sense to capture co2 if you have already prevented everything you can.
Like I said in another thread, it’s this kind of stuff that makes net zero never happen as many people, like yourself, are inherently opposed to CO2 emissions.