alt Hacker NewsThe 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".
First - I'm well aware about CO2 capture being a fantasy and not viable today. The "tiny" problem is that it is still one of the 3 possible faint solutions to overheating and we WILL need at least one of them operational in the next 50-200 years. If we won't start the RnD today, then it would still be a fantasy in a century or two, when we won't have any time left to play around.
Second - where exactly did you get a notion that CO2 capture = "let's just continue destroying the world"? Of course every other tech should be mobilized and improved too in parallel.
Third - nuclear generation at scale is as fantastical as DACs. Please read about actual issues with real life construction of plants and about actual emissions attributed to each plant cumulatively, without greenwashing like selectively ignoring whole parts of supply chain and maintenance and decommission. I love nuclear energy btw, despite literally suffered through the worst accident in their history (I'm from Kyiv) along with my whole family. We do should construct more of them and SMRs can't come quick enough.
Fourth - there is a collective delusion that moving 100% to renewable energy would cut emissions by 50% or any other similar fantasy number. In reality the whole world energy generation is only 1/4 to 1/3 of all world emissions, and course the so called "net zero" or "carbon neutral" catchphrases are greenwashing, it is impossible. A 100% world renewable generation would only cut part of that part of global emissions. So let's say renewables reduce energy emissions by 50% or maybe even 75%. So then the non-generation emissions would decrease by only 15-20% (for example Xnew = Xold * (1 - 0.25 * 0.75) = 0.8125 * Xold or 18% decrease in other words). This is what is often ignored in a green advertisements.