>There won't be any ingenious, miracle carbon removal solutions
OK but I think there will be.
OK but I think there will be.
But when you say:
> This is a far easier problem to solve. I’ll leave the solution to your imagination.
It pretty clear you're not really arguing in good faith. Dog whistle is pretty loud.
And even if such a miracle drug did exist, if seems like the better solution is to simply lead a healthier lifestyle to begin with.
We should be pursuing fusion as if the survival of the planet depends on it…because it is likely that it does.
People can hardly be trusted with a dangerous nuclear power.
400 years to boil the oceans, but that kind of timescale means we can have 300 years of business as usual followed by using a von Neumann probe to rearrange Mercury into a Dyson swarm, at which point the Earth's temperature is under total external control because we can switch the sun off when we don't like the heat.
OK, so more like "hiding" the sun — switching it off is still possible with a Dyson swarm but I don't know how long that takes — but from the point of view of Earth it might as well be switching it off.
Starship can carry 2 per trip. Inflatable, polymer hardening, weigh-shift controlled kites gliding just beyond L1 on the solar wind. We would have to launch 3 a day indefinitely, so we would still be encouraged to sort out our CO2 situation.
Plus, climate change is not the most existential threat.
That would be the biodiversity apocalypse in every part of the bio-web being caused by a myriad of pollutants, pesticides, monocultrue farming, habitat destruction, light pollution, and hundreds of other scaled-up human activities, all leading to the breaking of the food web.
When the food web fails, it'll be nonlinear, and humans will not do well.
H2O + (Solar) Energy + CO2 => Useful hydrocarbons (everything form sugar to gasoline)
O2 + Hydrocarbons => Useful Energy + CO2
When you burn a log you're really using a solar battery that took potentially decades to charge and roughly 25x the energy you feel from the fire (photosynthesis is only 4% efficient).
The same process that feeds us powers the global economy, but at the cost of emitting CO2 in direct proportion to the energy we're using and benefiting from.
This is why "miracle" solutions are so unlikely. Because they require a major disruption of this process in a way that it's not clear is fundamentally possible. Anyway to massively remove CO2 from the atmosphere is fundamentally going to require energy. And because of the nature of inefficiency, will always be a poor use of any energy you used to create the problem.
This is obviously where things like nuclear fusion do provide the possibility of breaking this process because they create a lot of energy outside of solar powered carbon cycle.
We currently have financial incentives for producing CO2, which are proving almost impossible to reverse.
But let’s say we reverse them and create incentives for CO2 removal.
How are we going to change the incentive yet again, when it’s time to stop? By the time this happens, the CO2 removal lobby will be strong. Think about the jobs! The taxes! The communities!