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"the penultimate problem"

you seem to think "penultimate" is a more grandiose way of saying "ultimate", but it's not. it means "second to last".

Well, "ultimate" means last. So it's really a way of saying "second most important", which I think could easily have been what they were going for there.

Not really. OP made no mention of any other factor.

That's some moral arguments you are using here, it's all nice and well in a debate but it's not moral arguments which will help in any way the humanity to fight global warming. Yes we do need technology and we need it quickly before the problem worsen even further.

Even global agreements like the Paris one are built upon having such technology, no amount of shaming and moral argument will help in achieving anything.

I disagree. We've had all necessary technology all along. It's exactly the lack of moral responsibility that's holding us back. Fighting climate change is more akin to the civil rights movement than to the Manhattan project.

Your argument is a different one already, yes we're definitely not doing much against climate change, and yes some moral responsibility to fight this global issue is badly needed.

But that does not validate the pseudo-moral arguments blaming technology & industry like the one above, this is guaranteed to fail.

There's just been a months-long Europe-wide experiment re reducing emissions which should yield some interesting data, and the early reports do seem to support what you're saying.

I don’t disagree that we have the technology to emit less pollution simply by doing less (the moral decisions in this hypothetical), but the issue is that most (perhaps nearly all) people in the world don’t agree with your morality.

This makes technologies which bypass this problem far more feasible, even if they’re further out from actually solving the problem. They might have the potential to get there, whereas morality probably doesn’t.

Agriculture is a major source of pollution for example, but it’s how everyone eats. The fact that most people in the world are poor makes this problem extremely hard to solve... How do you argue morality with someone who is just trying to feed themselves? If you want them to use less fertilizer, irrigate less, ship their product shorter distances, etc for the sake of climate change, well... Good luck. Now try telling them to stop driving, or use less electricity, or...

> How do you argue morality with someone who is just trying to feed themselves?

Don't change the subject. I am not arguing morality with someone who's trying to feed themselves. I am arguing morality with someone who flies to tech conferences several times a year, drives around in a huge SUV, and screams bloody murder when someone else proposes maybe a carbon tax or something. And then blames it all on poor people.

Poor people are not the problem. Rich people are the problem.

https://oi-files-d8-prod.s3.eu-west-2.amazonaws.com/s3fs-pub...

You’re right, that is a glaring issue and to me it’s indisputable. It cuts all ways though. Targeting the rich alone just isn’t sufficient. I didn’t mean to imply poor people are the only problem at all - just that pleading for moral decisions with the bulk of the earth’s population would be futile.

One of my greatest fears is that I’m right, so I genuinely hope I’m not.

I totally share your fears. I am afraid we are already too late. Though, pleading for moral decisions seems to have worked in the past. Again, see civil rights movement, women's suffrage etc. Let's just hope it will work again, and that it won't be too late.

Those are very good points, you're right. Here's hoping.

I guess the best thing we can do is normalize these behaviours by making the moral decisions ourselves and encouraging the same within our family and peer groups. Just like those movements before us. Stop flying, stop buying things wrapped in plastic upon plastic upon plastic, cycle more places, eat more plants and less meat, etc – the 'drip in the ocean' strategy might be all we have, but you're right... It has helped before. There's no sense in discouraging that.

> but it’s how everyone eats

Beef is the problem. Beef is not a necessary food. It can also cause health issues. The fact that it emits a lot of carbon makes meat a thing to work on.

Using this moral responsibility argument we can stop Covid19 in a fortnight and get world peace overnight.

I'd rather wear a mask and have realistic expectations.

Even if we completely stop all manmade CO2 emissions right now, there still is too much CO2 in the atmosphere already. Actually removing the CO2 from the air in some way will be necessary if we want to stop global warming from getting even worse.

Stopping all human CO2 emissions stops global warming (on average, bad valvano you years will make it worse that year), and reverses it. Plants convert more CO2 than gets converted back by a small amount every year.

You just want something that doesn't need a million years to get back to normal.

Even if CO2 was held constant, warming would continue for decades.

You get downvoted because you provide no arguments for why it is too hard of a problem for eliminate.

You also didn't provide any arguments as to why this specific approach won't work.

It's similar to people closing their eyes when there's fire and screaming "we'll all die". It's your choice to believe that, but don't stand in the doors trying to prevent people from searching for a survival route.

Using fear and other emotions is also a way to make people react. A lot of people cannot really absorb the science and numbers.

>I believe that in the future, violence will occur to stop co2 emissions by force,

By whom? All the most effective military forces in the world belong to the industrialised nations that are doing the emissions.

Do you think Tokelau is going to land their marines in South China and Houston to shut down production?

Ecoterrorism, I’d guess is the idea. Especially since it’s attached to a mini manifesto.

That would explain the blatant projection of claiming Maltheusianism in industrial expansion when they are the exact opposite.

With nuclear umbrellas? Even with eco-fascist fundamentalists at the helm it is a hell no, absolutely no nuclear power even pretends to be that crazy.

It might have been a viable geopolitical picture before WW2 and a useful pretense for causus beli against other industrialized powers or a sick justification for lebensraum - effectively used like eugenics as an intellectual justification for why these current travesties are moral imperatives.

Now it would be even less effective than screwing for virginity. I mean screwing is capable of producing more virgins at least.

We solved the nitrogen problem in food production with technology. We'll solve the CO2 emission problem with technology as well.

I'm with Captain Kirk. I don't believe in no win situations.

CO2 is an oxide. I barely remember my chemistry classes, but i think than without solvent, oxides need energy to be broken. And even with 70% of our planet covered with a solvent (the sea that absorb CO2), our emissions are still going through the roof.

If fusion happens in less than 20 years, we may be able to absorb CO2. I'm not high on this, but with supraconductors, you never know when the next breakthrough is.

However, if we manage to hit +3°C average (we are already at ~+.9°C average), the living conditions will become hotter than the Sahara for 1/2 to 2 billion people. And that's without counting wetbulb temperature that will be reached in Florida more than a dozen day a year. I know that +3° average is hard to understand but consider this. Between the last ice age, where France was basically Siberia, Scandinavia was under 3km of ice and you could make Calais/London by foot, and 1850, there was a 5°C average temperature difference. The change was over 20 000 years.

Also CO2 emissions today will have an impact in 20 year (CO2 in low atmosphere does not seems to have more than marginal greenhouse effect, its high-altitude CO2 that cause our troubles).

That's the political challenge:

- Are the predictions for +3° around 2070 right? And i'm not talking about RPC 8.5, i'm talking about the one with constant CO2 emission btw. If they are at least right on magnitude order, will we be able capture CO2 before 2050?

- Will technology be able to grab CO2 out of low atmosphere? It seems we need incredible amount of energy for that (compared to our production). So fusion it is then. Is fusion before 2080 possible? At least China is advancing faster than France so maybe? I'm not high on this, and i'm a supraconductor optimist since 2009.

- Will we be able to capture increasing amount of CO2 out of our electric centrals, cars and trucks? This is what i think is the more likely. But this technology still don't exist, and we need it right now.

- Are we hoping that either fusion or CO2 captation will come soon enough to limit the CO2 emissions, and... That's all? Or are we vastly investing in research? Or investing in energy/consumption economies? Do people understand what does it mean for a country to reduce its CO2 emission by 4% a year? Do politicians and economist understand, or are we still stuck with "green growth" for another decade?

I will order my research once i quit my job, try to order my sources (or find more precise ones), clean my code and write a long, long post on what it really means to stop using fossile fuel, even "only" -4% a year (what we need to do to respect the 2°C Paris agreement). From what i've read in the last GIEC report, if we don't find a new technological ace right now (ten years ago even), the win solution might be hard to swallow for the western world, and even harder for those living in tropical areas.

The only thing i'm really sure is that if we don't take care of the problem, the problem will take care of us.

Comparing the nitrogen problem with the problem of CO2 emissions is apples to oranges IMO:

- Nitrogen is very abundant in the atmosphere and bound nitrogen (i.e. fertilizer) has an inherent short-time value that is higher than the cost of nitrogen fixation (i.e. fertilizer production). So this is something that the market readily solves via technological progress.

- On the other hand CO2 emissions result from extracting energy stored in fossil carbon. Currently a significant part of the energy needs of the whole planet are satisfied by extracting energy from fossil carbon (e.g. burning coal). Removing CO2 from the atmosphere does not have any short-time value to whomever does that. No market force working towards that. Also, removing the CO2 probably needs (depending on technoligy much) more energy than was extracted from the carbon in the first place. Humanity does not currently seem to have any energy sources available to "return" the energy havested from fossil carbon. Good luck waiting for a magical technology that can easily satisfy the energy needs of a whole planet-wide civilization with less negative side-effects than combustion of fossil carbon. Also the deadline for undoing CO2 related damage may be quite close [1] so that any such technologies would need to be available for global deployment within a few decades.

- Climate engineering [2] may be a way to compensate CO2 related damage without having to remove CO2 at all. But again, no short-time benefit to whomever does that and all available technologies would also incur immense cost and do not evenly undo greenhouse-gas induced temperature changes over the whole planet (plus all the other possible side-effects)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tipping_points_in_the_climate_...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_engineering

I've chosen to suspend disbelief and adopt the same conclusion.

Otherwise I wouldn't be able to get out of bed every day.

It's a problem of fossil fuel combustion [1], not capitalism. The per-capita CO2 emissions of the USSR were also above the presently sustainable level for Earth's 7.8 billion people.

[1] And land use changes, larger herds of ruminant food animals, high altitude airplane contrails... But mostly fossil fuel combustion.