I feel you. There is this little bit oft hope, that all my effort actually achieves something. But its like hoping for thr existance of god it feels like

Instead of UBI, we should give every citizen carbon credits that they can then either use themselves for cars over certain (adjusting) emission limits or more likely sell to companies. Every company has to pay for their CO2 (and downline for imports)

The interesting thing would be people not necessarily spending their carbon credits like they do money. As there is no real incentive to sell to one company or another, other then tiny rate differences.

Also… always peg the price to what it costs to clean the carbon out. That creates a greater incentive to not skirt, as it might get cheaper over time.

It’s simple, you have a shared resource running out, nobody wants to grab less of it.

Grab less of it yourself - the others will compensate for you. Produce some of that resource - the others will just profit from it for longer.

The biggest emitters are too strong to be climate-crusaded, the smaller ones do successful bribing and greenwashing, but I think there will eventually be climate crusades - against those poor bastards who formally fail to do something right, but don’t really contribute meaningfully to emissions.

Other than finding some wonderful (like in Total Recall) process to turn fossil fuels into matter practically not separable and not usable as fuel, I don’t know what one can do.

Profitable personal mobile nuclear batteries are still not reality.

Some new magical principle of producing energy, sufficiently decentralized (here go big NPPs). There’s none, so prepare for dark future.

Imagine if you could get FREE MONEY by not using all your energy coinz!

Things that reduce consumption are frequently successful in capitalism. Generally, using less, costs less. There are always those selling a thing who are trying to increase the consumption of that thing, but often at expensive of those selling a competing thing. One successful way of doing that is to be cheaper to buy or run or both, by doing more with less.

However, sometimes we want something to be made with more a bit more to last longer and be repairable.

Raw capitalist won’t do all this on its own. The invisible hand isn’t very good at planning long term. Governments need to structure markets for outcomes they want, and keep measuring and correcting.

Carbon capture does not make money, wtf?

People won’t even rise up for their own sake. gestures in every general direction

Not sure if the future tense ‘will’ is appropriate here

Governments will fail. Wherever unpopular “Green” Measures are implemented, the right-wing cockroaches appear, destroying any discourse.

The consequence will be a global war by stupid populists who think that is one solution (which it kind of is,… Dead people won’t emit CO2)

We’ll have a big environmental 9/11 moment where a major American city becomes permanently uninhabitable and then there will alot of handwringing about “What could we have done!?” Then we’ll start getting lukewarm serious about it for maybe a few years, but by that point it’s way too late.

people are only going to change their behaviour once the consequences hit them

Or if there’s a proper incentive to change. We’re seeing that incentive today with solar becoming cheaper than other energy sources, so it’s getting a lot of adoption. We do incentivize those, but they’re honestly about at the point where we don’t need subsidies to get people to switch, and the subsidies merely accelerate adoption.

I’m a perennial optimist, and I’m confident we’ll continue to innovate our way out of problems. We’ll be late like we always are, but we’ll also innovate ways to “catch up.” Maybe we’ll mess w/ geoengineering in the arctic (we’re already experimenting w/ cloud seeding and thickening glaciers), or maybe we’ll come up with other options in the future. I honestly don’t know, but what I do know is that once we’re convinced there is a problem, we do a pretty good job of solving that problem. Look at COVID vaccine development, lead poisoning, or recovery of endangered species.

We’re usually late, but we are also pretty good at engineering our way out of problems. Solutions probably end up costing more than they would with prevention, but I’m confident we will come up with solutions, it just might take a bit of… encouragement from mother nature.

“Fuck it, might as well keep doing what I’m doing.”

And that last group is going to be angry when they can’t keep doing their stuff when insurance rates go insane so they can’t buy houses or cars, or when food prices keep going up even faster than they are now.

It’s the parable of office pizza: some people take 1 slice because there are many people to feed.

some people take 3 slices, because there are many people to feed.

And industrialists!

Only a Sith Lord deals in absolutes.

Two types of people reading this, the cannibals, and the cannibees

It doesn’t make any difference what got us here in the first place. What matters now is what options are the best from now moving forward.

These scientists seem to say that trying to reverse climate change isn’t the right path forward. I wonder why.

edit: I wonder what makes them think that reversing climate change won’t work.

Someone was so offended by their misreading of my comment that they went through and downvote-bombed every comment in my history.

And also irreversible is The decline of biodiversity. Once a species is extinct it won’t come back.

There’s a point made at the end of the article that most people seems to have missed entirely:

Existing facilities that can filter carbon dioxide out of the air only have the capacity to capture 0.01 million metric tons of CO2 globally today, costing companies like Microsoft as much as $600 per ton of CO2. That’s very little capacity with a very high price tag.

“We cannot squander carbon dioxide removal on offsetting emissions we have the ability to avoid,” study coauthor Gaurav Ganti, a research analyst at Climate Analytics, said in a press release. The priority needs to be preventing pollution now instead of cleaning it up later.

It’s obviously a matter of “why not both?”, and both the article and the scientists behind the report agree on it. However, a lot of people are betting their eggs on the idea that climate reversal technology will suddenly become a lot more effective and cheaper than it is right now. And sure, that may be the case, or not. For how many years have we heard of flying cars or self-driving autonomous vehicles and predicted that they were just around the corner, at most a few years away, but nada so far? Betting on the invention of a new technology that’ll make a very expensive process today way cheaper is a VERY naive and bad approach.

Yeah, though I think currently only emissions cutting should be implemented, mostly because damage reversing tech like DAC take green energy that could otherwise be used to more effectively cut emissions elsewhere. Once we start getting excess green energy to do such things, then it should be implemented. It should still be researched and developed now tho

Exactly, which is why I don’t get the point of this article.

Yeah, even after we get emissions under control there will still be problems, and we’ll tackle those when we get there.

There are many tipping points, and we dont always know if we’ve hit one yet or not. The drastic increase in sea temperature the last two years is possibly a tipping point we’ve passed, esp since the warmer the water is, the less co2 its able to absorb. OMAC shut down (if it happens) is possibly a tipping point, which will only feedback loop into warming waters.

Honestly, the permafrost melt is more likely to be the KO punch after one or more other tipping points accelerate it.

Yeah and it was pretty much going once we hit the twenty teens but took awhile to notice. At this point its about slowing things down as much as possible.

I mean, the whole “startups are doing x” is really code for “venture dollars have been made available for entrepreneurs to explore x”. Startups these days are chasing fields which have investment dollars, so this means the rich are starting to invest in the tech a little more earnestly

Yeah no, it’s just about the latest money grab before we all die

We shit on redditors for being arrogant and having grating personalities.

Yet it’s ridiculously common to come into a thread here and see it flooded with low effort “well duh!” Comments.

Lemmings apparently know everything and everything is obvious to them.

Which doesn’t even make sense here. A lot of smart people are dumping money into carbon capture as a way to offset what we’ve done. Yet here you are, so smart, that this is obviously wrong.

Might I suggest you use the time machine you created to go back and talk yourself out of making the climate change reversal machine. I can think of nothing worse than for you to feel like you are stupid.

if we drastically reduce the human population. Which would not only avoid the issues caused by climate change but also would prevent further increases in pollution and CO2 emissions.

Ignoring the genocide-apologist trend, the pandemic did wonders to reduce global warming…, perhaps start taxing more the companies that force back-to-office when they could clearly keep most of their work force at home?

One difficulty with that is that the way we organize economies currently depends on having a working-age population that is large enough to support the non-working population. When you have far fewer workers than retired people you start having problems. I don’t know what the answer to that is, but it’s another instance of how any plan to seriously address climate change tends to require deep changes to how we run society. The current systems can’t simply be tweaked to make the problem go away.

Yeah. Thanos should simply have made half of all living beings gay. Much less violent and this would probably also make future generations more likely to be gay too. So it‘ll probably have a much more longlasting effect than killing 50% once.

Not sure why you’re being downvoted. Glaciers formed over millennia. If they melt, they’re gone, even if we drop CO2 to pre-industrial levels. The Antarctic ice sheet is millions of years of snow that fell at the rate of a few inches a year and just didn’t melt. If significant portions of that fall off and melt, it’ll be millions of years more for the water it adds to the oceans to cycle back to the ice sheet again. The changes we have made will not be reversed automatically or in many cases at all.

Remember it used to be called global warming, because that’s what’s actually happening. But morons thought a cold winter day disproved global warming, so it was renamed climate change.
And yes we can reverse global warming, but obviously that won’t recreate polar or mountain ice, or lower sea levels quickly, but we can get the temperature down to stop it first, which will also curb the increase in natural disasters, then the restoring of sea levels and ice will take at least decades and probably centuries.

Are you trying to tell me that the spirit of capitalism won’t return to us, dressed in the splendor of new technology, to absolve us of our past planetary transgressions, and take us to a new, perfect place amongst the stars where we will live in profit and harmony for ever?

Well, thats the second time I’ve fallen for that story…

Lol this is the same argument I’ve heard from climate change denialists for years: we can’t possibly change the climate!

Now doomers are saying the same thing, but even more ridiculously because they almost certainly believe we have changed the climate already.

We just change it to something else.