Isn't Greenpeace's ideology aligned with degrowth nowadays? I remember reading how they were against carbon capture (and, of course, geo-engineering).
Carbon capture has constantly been shown to just not work at any scale. and geo-engineering causes so many extra problems and will absolutely lead to termination shock at some point.
if not, then you are just littering with words.
Geo engineering to the degree necessary to revert climate change is bad sci-fi, not science, no matter what billionaires selling personal EVs are telling you.
On the other hand we know that we are seeing an immense problem of overproduction which is incentivized by the economic system and impossible to tackle by blaming consumers for bad choices and asking the industry nicely to reduce waste or letting them get away with greenwashing by planting trees and raising honey bees. We could change that but it would require significant market intervention, which we (most Western nations at least) have been ideologically opposed to for decades.
No, this statement only work under a certain set of assumptions (eg. source of energy).
As I wrote to the sibling comment: Let's not mix up beliefs and scientific reasoning.
It requires sucking in and processing inconceivable quantities of air requiring inconceivable amounts of land for the facilities, because the carbon we need to capture has been released and distributed into the earths atmosphere.
The engineering required to scale out any existing or envisioned technology to put a meaningful dent just on our yearly emissions is more than simply replacing the worlds energy production with zero emissions generation and storage.
A scientific argument transcends personal beliefs.
You might believe that such a feat is inconceivable, but lets agree not to pollute the language any more by using the word "scientific" when we mean "believe".
Nothing can produce "truths". If you want absolute truths, pick a holy text and decide for yourself what absolute truth you can pin on it.
What we call ‘truth’ is just the beliefs we think are most accurate. ‘Just follow the science’ is silly because it essentially means following beliefs on faith without questioning whether they are the best theory. In many cases the better theory goes against the consensus.
E.g. mothers who ‘just followed the science’ and took Thalidomide caused their children untold suffering. They could have been skeptical but instead they had faith in science, which was unfortunately done badly.
“Follow science” and ‘follow “the” science’ are two different things, and we just need to go back in history to understand that humans did some horrible stuff because of “the” science.
To me when they say they “follow the science” it does not imply an end state. To me it only implies “everything we know so far”.
I am sure that if scientific results showed the opposite of their current idea, they would once again update their view.
E.g. heliocentrism, germ theory, cigarettes being unhealthy, lobotomies being optimal
As a physicist in quantum sensing. I follow the science (opinion) of climate scientists as they're the experts of that field. And that opinion is constantly evolving, but I follow that.
Anything else is just being an armchair scientist.
I could after significant research as suggested. But that is a significant endeavour, hence following the opinion of the field is typically sufficient.
It's like a fronted developer making comments on kernel development and vice versa. It's both fundamentally code, but different fields.
In the same way that I can verify a SAT solution, I don’t need to know how to code a sat solver.
Unfortunately there are fundamental disagreements about most of the critical parts of climate science, so going by the opinion of the field isn’t foolproof (who to choose? How to choose?). Many fields have had false consensus beliefs before, and most of their problems weren’t 1000th the difficulty of climate modelling.
This has been a long standing criticism of climate change models and I had expected it to be a major focus of research.
A scientist is someone who found someone to pay them. Nothing more, nothing less.
Ignoring ideas unless they came from a brand is the opposite of science. Then you drop your brand (physicist) and expect others to judge your opinion as more important. It didn't work. As a senior physicist in quantum sensing I'm invalidating your brand.
Are these scientifically founded opinions. Not necessarily, hence why "following the science" is valid if you are following experts in their field.
If you're a software consultant, would you take on the opinions from a marketing client on the best algorithm to implement for their solution? Probably not.
If someone put in the effort and time to throughly research the topic and draw an opinion from that. Regardless of their title or their funding, then why would you discount it?
If you can't judge something on it's merits and must rely on other signals then you end up judging the envelope and not the message.
This has veered off from my original point. In that saying "follow the science" is not a issue - there is nothing wrong with following the opinion of experts in their field.
We don’t have enough data on geoengineering to judge yet, there is no real science to follow.
Also I don’t understand this attitude of rejecting potential solutions outright. Science doesn’t “prove” things, we can’t ‘follow’ it due to the problem of induction. So we should stay open minded and support all potential solutions, not just those we like best.
[Citation needed]
That list is a bunch of pilot projects and commitments AFAICT. One of the projects is burning methane from oil production to produce hydrogen to recapture carbon. That’s not really gonna save the world.
I couldn’t find much evidence in there that carbon capture is being done at scale or in a way that isn’t using energy in ways that it would be more efficient to just not do it, since it is pulling from a grid that is partially carbon powered.
How about we aim for ‘reduce emissions’ or ‘develop solutions’? Or even better ‘stop opposing people who are trying to help’?
All tech starts at small scales. Yours is an absurd rebuttal.
Can you point to a promising project from the link you posted? Like I said, it lists a lot of funding, but not a lot of actual carbon sequestration.
Your rebuttal doesn’t actually provide evidence that carbon sequestration is a technology that is on its way to working on the small scale. All of those projects are sequestering carbon by consuming massive amounts of energy from sources that are partially or completely carbon powered.
Imagine using the same logic in the 80s “solar panels produce hardly any power and use lots of fossil fuels for production, why are we wasting resources developing them?”
Or the internet in the 90s “it will have less impact than the fax machine.”
It’s just emotional nonsense. We should support the people working on solutions, not complain from the sidelines.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorgon_Carbon_Dioxide_Inject...
Chevron are not "trying to help", they're actively engaged in smoke and mirrors.
If the Australian Government held their feet to the fire they would have sequestered the promised amount. However they didn’t, and Chevron has no incentive to fix it properly.
Do you want me to complain that I had to spoon-feed you that?
I don’t understand why people think this is “used” to sell carbon neutral plans: why wouldn’t you count carbon sequestered using CCS? It’s no different to assuming batteries will get a lot cheaper: it’s not a certainty but it’s heading in the right direction.
Let’s put it this way: if we could use CCS to produce carbon neutral power from natural gas, would you reflexively oppose it? Or would you be thankful that we now have another carbon neutral power source?
I still think reflexively opposing a potential solution is stupid. Skepticism is healthy, automatic rejection is a waste. I wholeheartedly agree politicians spout a lot of nonsense, and that the solutions are closer than we think, we just need to get the bad policy out of the way.
This doesn't sound like a terribly scientific assessment.
Climate change is either an environmental disaster and geoengineering would be a huge risk - or climate change is an existential threat to humanity in which case we have nothing to lose. Which is it?
Being under threat doesn't justify making things worst. I know I'll die some day but that's not a reason to be suicidal.
Ignoring the potential of geoengineering implies you are sure that we have a better solution which will work. I hope we don’t have to use geoengineering but I am certain the status quo of hoping renewables and batteries in the 1st world will save us is not going to work.
I’m not saying this is a good way to think, just that it shows the fault in your logic.
You are conflating the cost of not extracting a fraction of a fraction of current production capacity with the risk ending human existence through changing systems we do not have anything close to a full understanding of nor precise control over.
Degrees of risk matter, in fact they are the whole point of GPs logic.
If you don’t have some measure of cost / benefits / risks, how can you reject a potential solution outright?
The answer is you can’t, so if you are doing so your reflex is based on emotion rather than reason.
I was just exposing a flaw in _your_ logic :-) You said:
> Existential threat means things can’t get worse
And I disagree, things can get a lot worse. You know, like replacing a threat with certainty...
If you knew you were going to die next week, what's to stop you from picking up smoking right now?
The truth is we don't need geoengineering because the truth is that it's not an existential threat for humanity, it's just the future is going to suck really hard for a lot of people if we don't get off our our collective asses.
Going around moaning "we're all doomed and there's no use trying" is exactly the opposite of what we need right now.
Look at it this way. Someone who is bitten by a rattlesnake is at risk of dying (an existential threat). Certain medical care, like giving the patient Advil or any other form of blood thinning pain killers could actually end up making matters worse which in turn could increase the chances of the patient dying.
No one here is saying we’re all doomed and there’s no use in trying. What they are doing is pointing out that carbon capture and geo-engineering may not be the most fitting solutions to this existential threat, and that these solutions could even potentially make matters worse.
>“How can something be worse than an existential threat?”
If something you do makes your chances of surviving an existential threat worse, the consequences of your actions could make the initial existential threat harder to manage and in turn make it more likely to succumb to said threat.
The rich love using future carbon capture to justify present day inaction.
The only thing that's ideological is advocating for a technology that uses virtually as much energy to put carbon back into the ground than the carbon yielded in the first place, when the alternative is to simply not take it out of the ground to begin with.
Carbon capture is like trying to cool your room by leaving the fridge door open or running on the treadmill while eating fast food. Trying to delegitimize efforts just by labelling them 'degrowth' as if that is an actual argument, needs to stop. It's the pro-growth cult that causes us to constantly have to invent solutions for problems that we could avoid in the first place.
And when I say "carbon capture" I of course mean "pinning our hopes on carbon capture". If actual, working, viable carbon capture existed then nobody would be against doing it, but that's a pipe dream. It's always going to be more economic to not burn stuff than to burn it and then unburn it.
Kind of like carbon credits. If they were real they'd be a pretty decent idea, but they're basically full scam.