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Comment by smj-edison | Hacker News Reader

Economic viability is how we support human civilization, no? Economics is literally observing how humans interact and prioritize scarce resources like time and materials. So being not economically viable means it not happening.

Is your goal to reduce global temperatures? If so, it needs to be a sustainable effort. You don't get sustainable effort without economic viability.

If your goal is to dramatically reduce temperatures in the next 5 years, why not dump SiO2 in the atmosphere? That would bring the temperature down pretty fast by reflecting out sunlight in the upper atmosphere.

But if your goal is long-term change, we need an approach that works long-term.

Edit: sorry I forgot to mention your point on coal vs natural gas efficiency, I didn't realize it was not that much gain. I still think it's worth it though, since it's still making progress.

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The only reason fossil fuels are "economically viable" is because we're ignoring the cost of the destruction they will bring in the future, and are already causing today. Nuclear is economically viable. We already have lots of nuclear power. Maybe it's a bit less profitable than fossil, maybe if we invested more into it it would be more profitable. Either way it seems entirely viable to me, except of course for all the trillions of dollars being made by extracting and selling fossil fuels to the detriment of all our futures. The only reason alternatives aren't "viable" is because they're priced out by fossil fuels. Take fossil fuels out of the equation and lots of new things become viable.

How is dumping SiO2 into the atmosphere economically viable? How do you make money doing that? If you're thinking that governments should pay private companies to do it, why can't governments simply pay private companies to produce clean power instead? Without having done any actual research on this topic, I suspect you might find that this would be far more "economically viable" than paying for the experimental climate engineering that might not even work, and might have devastating unintended consequences. For example I imagine shitloads of fine sand in the atmosphere would be a problem for aviation, and that's probably far from the only issue with it.

The problem is if you spend the next 5 years building new fossil fuel capabilities, the economic payoff won't be for at least 10 to 15 years more years. We absolutely should not be burning natural gas at that point. Not only would it cause continued havoc on our environment, zero emissions alternatives are already extremely cost competitive in most parts of the world. We should spend the next 5 years, instead, building for the future, not sinking our money into assets that will only cause further harm without providing any real cost savings.

Large scale battery storage, by the way, is already a mostly solved problem, and possible to do at a cost competitive price.

Excess atmospheric CO2 levels in and of itself are a health concern. Geoengineering will not help with the human toll of increasing CO2 and decreasing O2 levels

https://minimallysustained.com/blog/2026-01-11

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