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Comment by totalZero | Hacker News Reader

Agreed.

The only way out of our petroleum mess is to roll out more efficient products that consumers naturally prefer. There are many positive externalities to reducing oil demand. Imagine a world where the US lacks a resource incentive to wage war in the Middle East.

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We could also (radical though there) put a price on negative externalities, so the market would do the right thing. That will do a lot for the natural preferences of consumers.

A dollar per gallon of gasoline would more than pay to recapture the atmospheric carbon burning the gasoline would release.

Math: 1 gallon of gasoline releases 20lbs of CO2

1 ton is 2000 pounds, so a gallon releases 1/100th of a ton.

Atmospheric carbon capture technologies are projected to cost $17-70 per ton, or $0.17-0.70 per gallon of gasoline.

Right, so set up a market where carbon capturers can sell carbon credits and you need to buy carbon credits to pump oil out of the ground or dig up coal. Don't speculate on some future efforts to suck the carbon back with money that is already spent on other things. I'm pretty sure that right now, and at the scale we release carbon, it's a lot more expensive than 17-70 dollars per ton.

Banks are what will kill oil. There's going to be a reverse economies of scale as the market shrinks. But in particular, what billion dollar multiyear oil project would get private financing with the uncertainty fossil fuels face with EVs, Solar, Wind, and grid storage? There might still be government pork that keeps some development alive, but the bankers will probably kill oil.

In what universe is the demand for oil declining? China is coming online, the rest of the world is developing. We are going to go from 20,000 passenger planes to 200,000 planes, each of which is going to be burning tens of thousands of gallons per flight, and from 130 million trucks to 400 million trucks. Cars, equipment, are all increasing. Shipping is increasing. Global oil production is steadily increasing as well.

In the universe where we can still expect to life a good life in thirty to forty years.

Science says catastrophic warming will happen even if we stop all CO2 release today.

Might as well enjoy the time we have left.

Science says warming gets more and more catastrophic the more CO2 we release. It's very much not a binary choice how the climate future will look like.

It’s the difference between 70% of humanity dead and 80%. It’s splitting hairs at this point.

If the numbers you cite were true that something like 800 million people difference. Hardly "splitting hairs" imho.

Deck chairs on the Titanic.

Your reasoning is that because if P is true you would feel bad, therefore P must be false.

I hope acquiring this level of logical rigor didn't require large student loans.

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