this post was submitted on 18 Jul 2023
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We aren't locked in for the next twenty years, only the next ten years.
We could build a thousand RBMK like nuclear reactors in a decade and then suck out 50 ppm of CO2 out of the atmosphere in another decade.
Would cost $500B to $1T or so.
We just don't really think global warming is serious enough to warrant an action plan at the scale of the Manhattan project, Apollo program or Messmer plan.
We're not locked in for the next 20 years. Not for the next 10.
The carbon in the atmosphere is going to be there for the next millenium and the temperature won't level out till the 2100s if we stopped all carbon emission right this second.
Furthermore, if we did stop all emissions right now, the planet would get 0.5-1.5 °C hotter within a year or two due to the end of the aerosol pollution cooling effect that's been cutting the effects of carbon induced climate change in half this whole time.
This year is so hot because they put limitations on sulfur emissions from shipping boats in the Pacific. Those emissions were cooling the atmosphere, but the aerosol emissions (which that sulfur is one of) only last in the atmosphere for about 2 weeks before they're rained out of the air.
We're fucked.
So can't we reintroduce the sulfur?
It was taken out because the pollution was directly responsible for tens of thousands of deaths per year. If we need to geoengineer an aerosol to cool the planet, we can do better.
Deaths from increasing temperatures are estimated to be in the hundreds of thousands a year already, how many of those could the aerosols have prevented? Was that more or less than tens of thousands?
I'm not saying it can't be done or it shouldn't necessarily, I'm just trying to express why this decision happened at a political level. Politics only occasionally leads humanity to the logical course of action.
So which is the lesser evil?
Removing CO2 from the atmosphere is a speculative technology at the moment.
Like, yes, we "can" do it, if you ignore all the materials and energy needed to perform that process. And that's just in theory, in practice its bound to be far more difficult.
No matter how you put it, it's easier to just... Not release the pollution in the first place. If it's too difficult to stop polluting, it will certainly be too difficult to remove that pollution that has been already released. Entropy and all that.
Removing CO2 from the atmosphere is something we should only really start thinking about when the world already runs nearly entirely cleanly.
You ignore political realities.
An Apollo scale program to extract carbon emissions from the atmosphere could be financed by the OECD countries without heavily impacting their economies.
Building a thousand nuclear plants with reduced safety requirements in a remote place would not run into NIMBY problems.
Stopping emissions globally would require Chinese political will, since they emit more than all of the OECD combined.
China has stalled their CO2 emissions since roughly 2012; they mostly pollute so much because there's immense demand of manufactured goods in richer countries; they've been putting far more effort into transitioning to renewables than some Western countries; and they're still below emissions per capita than Canada, the US, Russia, South Korea, Netherlands, Poland, Iran, Israel, Germany and Japan.
If you want China to emit even less, support protectionist policies in Western countries and/or tariff reductions for products that may prove they've been produced with renewables.
That graph badly needs updating. They stalled between 2012 and 2016, but skyrocketed from 10 gigatons 2016 to 11 in 2021.
So no, your premise is wrong.
https://ourworldindata.org/co2/country/china
Isn't it possible to reduce CO2 on the long run by planned forestry management, if we reduce our own emissions enough?