Decarbonizing is happening, at least to electricity generation and transportation. There is a group insisting on denying this, but it's just your usual form of denialism.
There is reasonable freedom to debate the last 10% of emissions. Those are not being replaced right in front of our eyes. There is also room to claim that decarbonization is not enough. But then you'll have to claim that stopping things as they are is either catastrophic or won't stop the consequences from changing. That's not unthinkable, but not a reasonable default assumption either.
I imagine you are talking about that last one assumption. If so, starting from it is kind of an extreme position. Anyway, it's not clear what kind of cost you are classifying as insurmountable and why governments that are used to spend real amounts of money on all kinds of projects just can't spend on those.
What I want to say is: atmospheric carbon capture is not the deus ex machina that one might be tempted to believe it is after seeing news of startups like Climeworks doing it.
I responded to a comment implying that if there is a philantropist like Bill Gates camping out in the desert sucking CO2 out of the air, we won’t need a massive collective effort.
Maybe this will be a somewhat effective solution one day for areas where fuel energy density is important (e.g. flight), but that’s about it. Carbon neutrality will still need a distributed effort as point source capture is massively more economical where feasible.
marcosdumay|4 years ago
Decarbonizing is happening, at least to electricity generation and transportation. There is a group insisting on denying this, but it's just your usual form of denialism.
There is reasonable freedom to debate the last 10% of emissions. Those are not being replaced right in front of our eyes. There is also room to claim that decarbonization is not enough. But then you'll have to claim that stopping things as they are is either catastrophic or won't stop the consequences from changing. That's not unthinkable, but not a reasonable default assumption either.
I imagine you are talking about that last one assumption. If so, starting from it is kind of an extreme position. Anyway, it's not clear what kind of cost you are classifying as insurmountable and why governments that are used to spend real amounts of money on all kinds of projects just can't spend on those.
ponyfleisch|4 years ago
I responded to a comment implying that if there is a philantropist like Bill Gates camping out in the desert sucking CO2 out of the air, we won’t need a massive collective effort.
Maybe this will be a somewhat effective solution one day for areas where fuel energy density is important (e.g. flight), but that’s about it. Carbon neutrality will still need a distributed effort as point source capture is massively more economical where feasible.