And you're going to do this for the rest of the forseeable future?
Way more than anything else it sounds like a cop out to avoid dealing with the long term consequences of what we put out there now and to keep pumping oil
Solar growth is likely to remain exponential for the next decade or so, which will create a number of new opportunities. Other energy sources will also come online. But fossil fuels are unlikely to be regulated away, globally. We are also likely past some serious tipping points— so I prefer to figure out ASAP whether stratospheric aerosol injections are a viable tactic for preventing the melting of permafrost, for instance.
but you're burying the lede: "We are also likely past some serious tipping points—" == we're doomed, just slowly, and we desperately need to be doing something to slow down or stop this metaphorical bus before it falls off a cliff
https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1fx12q1/is_an_em_d...
Some random small group of people get to take these risks for all humanity? No thanks.
Like, say, petroleum exporters?
Especially when the alternative solution to global warming is… degrowth. Which is just not going to work functionally as a political policy in a competitive world.
Fossil fuel use will decrease significantly… eventually.
Btw, did you know that if the USA replaced farmland currently growing biofuels with solar, that land area would produce 4x the current total electricity use of the entire nation?
We need to buy time — we can’t let the permafrost melt because “stupid humans deserve it”
Would it produce that much or would that be the capacity? They're very different things that i see endlessly confused in this context.
Any practical solution will consist of a wide array of approaches executed in parallel.
Talking about suddenly getting the whole world to stop using oil is a hypothetical thought exercise. It’s not going to happen. We have to be looking at all of the approaches together, including some lessening of fossil fuel use.
Unfortunately even if/when we completely stop producing CO₂, it takes at least several centuries until levels go fully back down to natural levels by themselves.
Pumping SO₂ into the stratosphere should be able to regulate global temperatures to reasonable levels while we develop effective CO₂ sequestration.
Unfortunately SO₂ injection is incredibly controversial, as it triggers the "don't mess with nature" taboo, especially among people who have seen Jurassic Park, and affects the whole planet, including those who don't want it.
We do actually know that SO₂ breaks down in the stratosphere in 1-2 years, because we've studied when volcanoes injects it. It also doesn't cause acid rain because it's above the rain cycle.
But these facts are very hard to get across to people.
Suppose we start putting enough SO₂ in the stratosphere to halt warming or at least slow its growth down.
I can almost guarantee that the response of the current US government would not be "Whew...now that we've averted the near term problems we were facing from climate change we can get to work on seriously getting rid of most fossil fuels use".
No, it would be "Great! We can now get rid of those cancer causing wind farms and ugly solar farms and go all in on a 100% fossil fuel economy featuring a massive increase in coal. We should have been doing that all along but enough people believed in the global warming hoax to slow us down. Now we are free of that!".
We'd need ongoing increasing SO₂ injections to counter this, and all it would take is something to disrupt that for a few years and then all that increasing warming that has held back by those injections would come roaring back. But we'd be getting that warming increase over a short term instead of a longer term, making it much harder to deal with.