The real practical solutions are trivial, the politics are not. It's a collective action problem, where the US is one of the actors.

There are a lot of money scams out there to be sure.

It's unlikely that something like carbon capture will ever significantly reduce the CO2 in the atmosphere. It's just too energy intensive.

But there are a lot of practical solutions to significantly curb emissions that mostly just require regulations and taxes.

Things like building out rail transport. Heavily taxing air travel. Taxing all forms of carbon emission (fuel taxes would be pretty effective). Subsidizing non-co2 emissions, pushing for electrification when possible and power generation which uses non-CO2 emission. Stop wasteful pipedreams like "clean coal". Force data centers to be better citizens. For example, make them buy the battery/solar systems to offset their consumption. Make them participate in district heating schemes.

There's also some hope that even without intervention some of this will happen somewhat naturally. Solar and battery is already very cheap. Both are causing changes in the shipping and transit equations.

> is the ozone layer repair.

Which was, stop using CFCs, and stop venting them into the atmosphere to "dispose" of them. We also stopped lighting rivers on fire for mostly the same reasons, stop dumping industrial waste in them.

> I guess we should just accept it and adapt?

Ocean shipping produces more pollution than most countries. There are only like 5 countries that produce more carbon than the worldwide shipping fleet. If they cared then "cheap crap from China" wouldn't exist.

It's a scam. They want to monopolize the economy and they're using your environmental consciousness as the wedge to push you against your own best interests.

What about poor people that live in areas in the world that will become completely uninhabitable?

Yes, we got to adapt, we won't cool it down and "repair" what is broken.

However we can slow down the effects and try to stop the effects. So it's "only" 1.5° or whatever, not 3°, 5° or 10°. And if we raise average by 10° at least not by the years 2100, but 2200 to give time to adapt.

"Adapting" means resettling people, restructuring agriculture and food production, etc.

(All numbers are quite arbitrary picks, just as any goal one tried to set before)

Drive less.

CO2 output per person in the US (all sources including industry, etc): ~13-14,000kg

Average distance driven per year per capita in the US: ~20,000km

Average CO2 output of current private vehicle fleet: ~250g/km

Therefore, over one third of total CO2 output per person is personal vehicle use. Considering only CO2 output due to personal choices driving has to be well over half.

Most people don't - or refuse - to consider the obvious choice to take personal responsibility. Drive less.

I heard about this[1] recently, essentially spurring a massive plankton bloom to capture carbon where it ends up on the sea floor and becomes future oil deposits in a few millenia.

The nice thing about it is that it doesn't require global cooperation.

[1]https://www.onepercentbrighter.com/p/the-no-bullshit-way-to-...

Edit: I should probably link where I heard about it to give credit to someone who deserves it

https://uncomfortableconversations.substack.com/p/the-climat...

Look at the degrowth movement. There are solutions but nobody, especially the leadership, are going to like them.

As with most difficult problems, this is a messy political problem, not a technical one. There is zero chance we avoid 1.5C gain. The best you can do is make life decisions for yourself to make your lifetime as comfortable for you as you can, assuming it will happen. I started doing that 5 years ago.

Technologically practical? Certainly. Kick renewables and electrification into high gear. Treat it like the emergency that it is.

Politically practical? Not a chance. It was already a major struggle a decade ago when the political climate was much more favorable to addressing the problem. Now, even the countries that want to do something about it are going to be more concerned about more immediate threats like being invaded.

Our best hope is that green technology quickly gets to the point where it so heavily outcompetes CO2-emitting technology that the latter disappears on its own. But this will take longer than it should.

I'm not sure what we should do, it's very hard to determine what minimizes harm and maximizes benefits at a global scale. It's certainly not as simple as extremists would like to believe. Certainly it would be much (MUCH) less risky to slow warming as much as possible and maintain constant or slowly reducing CO2 levels.

I think from the standpoint of predicting what will happen, my best guess is that people will use fossil fuels until it is economically not viable to do so. If you want hasten it at an individual level, buy solar panels and have your house disconnected from the grid until fees you pay no longer subsidize fossil fuels. Frown at people and refuse to give them positive social cues when they buy a car that isn't electric. Instead of "oh nice car" just say "it would be so cool if they had a plugin version!". Support electrification of things like heat and water heating so long as it can be powered by non-fossil sources.

In the long run I think solar power, effective battery technology, and the peaking of the global population combine to cause fossil fuel usage to reduce over the next 100 years or so until CO2 levels stabilize. Lots of large CO2 emitters are already leveling off - the output is too high to sustain but at least it's no longer increasing year over year - such as from cement production.

Honestly it's not much but that's what you can do, larger social movements and political action do not work when someone's decision is whether to spend $800 a month or $100 a month to heat their house. Anyone who says it does should buy a thermometer, but instead they will get a plane ticket to the next big city to run around in the street yelling at police (literally the only people paid to not care about your slogans) while nobody really notices.

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