I don't think it's as easy as you think it is to cut emissions by that much, and it certainly wouldn't be humane.
Biological sequestration is closer to a real solution, since it is analogous to how the hydrocarbons we're burning were created in the first place. It might be easier to irrigate the Sahara and flood it with Salicornia and salt mangrove than to stop China from burning coal.
http://www.techtimes.com/articles/35172/20150225/how-the-sah...
No, seriously, it really is that easy. The average cost of a new car in the US is $30k, the model 3 is 35k. Every single passenger road vehicle could be replaced with an electric car for ~$1 trillion. It would cost even less to upgrade the grid to full battery-backed solar power and replace gas heating with electric. Over ten years thats 200 billion annually to eliminate 85% of the co2 released by the US and 50% of the methane.
In terms of threats to the country that barely registers as spending. The iraq war was 10+ trillion dollars, we shipped 12 billion in $100 bills on pallets and lost it. Renewable energy is near price parity to fossil fuels, even if you adopt it stupidly it still isnt that expensive.
You make china stop burning coal by buying them solar panels. Nobody says no to free electricity.
My frustration comes from seeing cutting co2 as somehow harder than seeding chemicals into the atmosphere over the entire planet, or building a tube to the stratosphere, or lanching a sunshield into space. Those solutions are an insane level of difficulty above cutting co2.
Yes. Both need to be addressed.
Saying "the problem is easy besides the political component" is not the same as saying the problem is easy. It's an intensely hard problem but the focus needs to almost entirely be on politics, because the rest is easy in comparison. I'm not drawing attention away from the political difficulty by emphasizing how easy the technical side is, i'm drawing attention to the difficulty of the political side.
Also, you miss the context of GP's comment by pointing the discussing in this way. They were replying to another comment that claimed cutting emissions was a difficult problem for reasons that are more... physical, I suppose you could say. GP was merely pointing out that technical challenges are not the obstacle holding us in our current predicament.
I don't disagree with you in that the real challenge we face is our species' collective insanity, but I hope you see that in asserting this point that we are both in agreement with GP here.
I don't agree with that. I don't see anything in the comment indicating that they saw the problem as anything other than easy to deal with. Have a look at the reply they made to me, where they said "if we would collectively stop chewing our cuds, it would be cheap and simple to do those things". That's still trivialising the social/political component, making it out as if somehow it's just a matter of making a choice as a society. You can't just wish for society to change its attitude, and while it's easy to talk about making such changes, there's the very difficult process of actually making those changes happen.
You might as well say "if we would collectively invent an infinite, completely clean source of energy, it would be cheap and simple to solve the problem." Well, sure. But that's just stating a goal. It doesn't mean it's easy to reach that goal.
The most green car is the one you already have, as long as you do, even if it's a SUV.
If people downsized in large numbers it might even move some buyers away from new large vehicles (if the anticipated resale value of large vehicles dropped).
[1]: http://www.ucsusa.org/clean-vehicles/electric-vehicles/life-...