The only reasons to not switch are political: the threatened power of the fossil capitalists and the geopolitical struggle with China.
this post was submitted on 16 Feb 2025
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there are some applications that just don’t work without energy dense fuels: planes, rockets, etc
in these cases, i’d argue it makes sense to run them on fossil or bio fuels and then pay to offset 100% of their emission with carbon capture, or in the case of bio fuels perhaps that’s enough since the carbon was captured and you’re just re-emitting it?
either way, emitting carbon isn’t the problem: not cleaning up after yourself is the problem… if it’s more economical to burn fuel and clean up elsewhere, fine… as long as it gets cleaned up
unfortunately the polluters do a lot of greenwashing to get public goodwill. plastic recycling is one of them unfortunately. less than 1% of plastic in use today is recycled...
in the old days plastic recycling would only accept certain kinds of plastic. now they take everything. they don't recycle everything. they take everything. and throw out the other kinds at the recycling facility
I wonder if carbon capture is similar greenwashing...
yeah but then line wont go up for oil tycoons
How about we do both ?
Yeah, we're largely past the arguments about the economics of global warming and should be well into the discussions on what is technically feasible. Not many costs are too great at this point.
Yeah net zero is not enough and using trees and plants to capture carbon probably isn’t enough either. We burned millions of years of plant growth in just a few centuries.
We currently emit a lot so the choice is: emit less with renewables or keep emitting but capture the carbon
Since renewables are much cheaper we reduce emissions much faster then going with carbon capture. That might be a good idea down the line, but currently 80% of our energy comes from fossil fuels, so down the line is probably decades.
Carbon capture WILL be necessary but is absolutely less than useless until every possible power user has switched to renewable electricity
Carbon capture right now is quite literally actively working to make it worse, so please don't do carbon capture except for research purposes
Came here to basically say this. We are going to have to do intentional carbon capture to even reach "net zero", and it would be good reach "net negative".
But, we just gotta stop burning fossil fuels. It would also be nice not to go through our uranium, but I'd rather be using that for base load than coal. I fully expect we can do everything off of solar, wind, and tidal, plus gravity batteries, eventually tho.
basically everything is research scale right now, and we need to do full scale tests to make sure everything works and learn how to optimize things. there's also non-DAC options to work on too
Oh, so will you pay the delta to the uncooperative countries to switch to renewables? No? Then we'll have to do the real expensive thing: both.
I have no doubt that renewables are the lowest hanging fruit at the moment, and that we could get to net-zero mostly using them. But there is a big difference between mostly and entirely. As you approach the higher-hanging fruit, things get exponentially more expensive, and there may come a point at which some form of carbon capture is needed to cover that last segment of emissions? Also, I see no mention of nuclear here. I suspect it will need to play a role, though how large that would be remains uncertain. It should definitely be included in any cost analysis though.
Thing is, the time for net-zero has passed, did you hear that whooshing sound?
To pull back from the brink, what is needed is net-negative, which ain't happening without capture (alongside massive reduction in emissions), economics be damned, it's an existential threat, it's about survival. Could be as simple as massive reforestation, could be fusion generators pulling CO2 out of the air, will probably be many different things, but learning what works, as soon as possible, is imperative.
We're nowhere near net zero, though. We do need to get there first. Since carbon capture removes far less carbon per money spent on it than replacing fossil fuel power plants with clean options does, carbon capture doesn't really make sense right now
The varieities that might work out are the ones that give some other benefit for now. Afforestation can help prevent desertification, for example
Well duh.
It's easier to not to make a mess than making a mess and clean up.
If any of you give a shit about the environment or animals, go vegan.
Going vegan is the single biggest thing you can do to reduce your carbon footprint. apart from unaliving yourself.
Going vegan is a relatively small difference from going vegetarian, which is a small difference from just drastically cutting back on meat. The big thing is that our current systems are unsustainable for animal rights and the environment and everyone needs to cut back on meat drastically at the least. But I imagine that if you could stop driving a car entirely, that would be a bigger difference than losing a reasonable amount of meat from your diet. Though, cutting back on meat is an important step that all of us can take with much more ease.
Going vegan is the single biggest thing you can do to reduce your carbon footprint
how can you prove this?
That's the opinion of one of the authors of the study. it is not a substantiated by the study itself.
Its not just one. This is pretty common knowledge among people in their field. These are specialists in their field, their opinions don't just come from nothing, they are informed by information from the studies.
https://www.livekindly.com/scientists-say-going-vegan-help-save-planet/
your first link doesn't speak to your claim at all. your second link depends on the same author.
Here's a link to the research article itself with all the data from which they drew their conclusion: https://josephpoore.com/Science%20360%206392%20987%20-%20Accepted%20Manuscript.pdf
they are misusing the LCA data. since it was gathered through disparate methodologies, it can't be combined as they have done.
edit: regardless, this paper doesn't support the claim you made.
They aren't, but I don't feel like going into it with you. I will use a simpler data-point to prove that my initial claim was correct.
Livestock and their byproducts account for at least 32,000 million tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) per year, or 51% of all worldwide greenhouse gas emissions. If everyone went vegan, that would remove the majority of greenhouse gas production. So put simply, it would be the "biggest" thing everyone could do to reduce CO2 emissions.(That is just CO2, there are many other horrible things related to animal agriculture.)
Sources: Article: https://www.independent.co.uk/climate-change/news/study-claims-meat-creates-half-of-all-greenhouse-gases-1812909.html
The paper: https://www.fao.org/4/a0701e/a0701e00.htm
your article makes a claim unsubstatiated by the paper itself. and the paper is almost 2 decades old, and does not, itself, make any claim about the best way for anyone to reduce their GHGe.
They aren’t, but I don’t feel like going into it with you
they are. their reference papers state this explicitly
If everyone went vegan, that would remove the majority of greenhouse gas production.
This is just false. The biggest source has long been fossil fuel burning, not agriculture, and that remains true even when you include fossil fuel use by agriculture.
On top of that, meat and dairy are only part of agriculture; a big chunk of methane emissions from agriculture come from rice farming.
A huge cut in meat (and dairy) consumption is going to be needed to get to net zero emissions, but it's not a majority of what is needed. People recommend it strongly in large part because ending meat consumption doesn't cost people money, so everybody can do it.
Please don't repeat false claims here.
If everyone went vegan, that would remove the majority of greenhouse gas production.
there is no causal mechanism by which anyone going vegan reduces any ghg production
This is unfortunately not true. There are several mechanisms through which meat production increases greenhouse gas emissions:
- Bacteria in the stomachs of cattle and other ruminants produce methane, a potent greenhouse gas. So the more cattle being raised for meat or milk, the more methane in the atmosphere. Reduce the size of the herd, and the concentration drops.
- Animals consume energy from the food they eat; not every calorie they eat ends up as meat or milk. In the case of cattle, only about 1/10 ends up in that form. So a lot of land needs to be converted from natural ecosystems to produce food for animals. This conversion causes carbon sequestered in trees and soils to be released into the atmosphere.
- That increased area of agricultural land needs fertilizer, and the process for making nitrogen fertilizer involves burning huge amounts of natural gas. This both releases CO₂ into the atmosphere, as well as CH₄ via pipeline leaks.
Both of you need to cool it here.
those are all problems of production. production doesn't decrease because anybody goes vegan. veganism has been around since the '40s, meat production has only increased since then with a few exceptions that have nothing to do with people being vegan.
Almost nobody has gone vegan during a time period where the population affluent enough to afford regular meat on a regular basis has increased many times over.
If a meaningful chunk of the affluent population went vegan, we'd absolutely see a lot less meat produced. At the individual level, it's going to make a very modest difference, but that's how mass changes start.
At the individual level, it's going to make a very modest difference, but that's how mass changes start.
there's no reason to believe it makes any difference at all.
Oh Okay, you're just out of your mind. Thanks for confirming that so I don't have to waste my time anymore.
Livestock and their byproducts account for at least 32,000 million tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) per year, or 51% of all worldwide greenhouse gas emissions.
that's simply not true. GHGe for all of agriculture come out to about 20% of total GHGe.
No shit sherlock, mature and low cost vs experimental and unreliable