alt Hacker News> That's why all this CO2 capture and drawdown using some kind of unspecified, new technology, is such a distraction. Ideally we shouldn't release the carbon in the first place.
This is in my amateur opinion, an absolutely bonkers and crazy stance. I can't understand why any pro-green person would affirm this.
There are two facts, (again, imo) one - all our emission reducing efforts would maybe slow their acceleration or in other way to frame it, maybe we collectively would cut tens percents of annual emissions. We, humanity, will a always emit a lot of CO2 from the sources we can't reduce without going full stone age. Fact two - there is a lot of CO2 and other GH gas in the atmosphere now and even more would be there tomorrow. We MUST remove it somehow. Like, there are literally two components - either we remove the insulator (CO2&Co) or we remove the energy (sun rays). We can't do either of course, yet.
The more greenwashing and muddying happens, with overfocus on cutting emissions while deliberately skipping RnD on the CO2 capture or sun shield tech, the more humans will be fucked in future.
Or to provide a different analogy. We are in a completely closed system here, an oven. Turning the regulator from III to II helps of course, but the meat will eventually cook either way, unless either the power is disconnected or the insulating door is opened.
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The bonkers crazy stance is yours. Carbon capture cannot work. We would need to build at the very least tens of thousands of carbon capture plants, way more than we currently have power plants.
So to me, the bonkers crazy stance is "let's just continue destroying the world, and hope magic future tech will save it". Especially when the tech you're talking about it just completely obviously entirely infeasible. Add to that the fact that we are destroying the world now. The ship is currently sinking. A solution in 50 years is a solution 100 years too late.
The actual solution that we do have is nuclear power. We could have replaced all fossil fueled power production decades ago if we wanted to. That would have reduced our emissions by nearly 50% and we would have been able to put all our efforts into solving the remaining half of the problem.
As it stands right now I fully expect the world to end quite soon. Maybe within my lifetime. Unless I die early I'll definitely see +3C in like 20 years or so, and probably +4 and +5 as well if not even more than that. I'm not having children because I don't want to put someone into this world just to suffer through the end of it. I have absolutely no faith in our ability to solve climate change. I believe we could have, if the world wasn't full of corrupt rich people and stupid people voting for them. But it is what it is. We've doomed ourselves and we're watching the end unfold before our eyes while everyones like that meme with the dog in the burning house saying "this is fine".
Fully agreed. We're not gonna get out of this without something a bit crazy, and CO2 capture at least has an actionable theory: "what if power was 10x cheaper". That's imaginable at least, much more so than "what if we committed a few genocides" as was proposed elsewhere in this thread.