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Comment by goindeep | Hacker News Reader

This is one reason I have a lot of faith in humanity. There are many fear mongers publishing all sorts of scary stories about climate change but I am sorry if we can send people to the moon and cure all sorts of diseases, we can sort out the climate problem with technology too.

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The rate of deforestation peaked. Deforestation is still ongoing.

We can sort out the climate problem with technology, sure. The thing is, we already have it.

What you probably mean is, you want to sort out the climate problem with hypothetical technology that would change absolutely nothing to our ways of life and cost us nothing. Maybe this hypothetical technology should also give us free massages otherwise who would bother changing?

What is the rate of reforestation?

We cut down less trees in the 2010s that in the 1980s but we still cut down trees. The world's forested area is continuously decreasing, just less fast.

But don't you have to measure the number of new trees planted/grown?

There will always be a positive # of trees felled by humans. Even if there are only 10 of them on the planet.

> hypothetical technology that would change absolutely nothing to our ways of life and cost us nothing

AKA nuclear power.

Sure, this should be part of the solution, but nuclear power doesn't cost nothing, it's either quite expensive or quite dangerous.

Also, this only answers the question of decarbonization of the electricity, which is maybe 25% of the problem. You still need to address transportation, heating, cooling, land use, meat consumption, etc. This is where people will need to change their ways of life, at least just a bit.

> transportation, heating, cooling

Cant you already do all these with electricity?

Well, absolutely, and that's my original point. All the technology necessary to combat climate change is already there, but people aren't using it because it's marginally less convenient or more expensive.

Or people aren't actually interested in combating global warming and want to push changes for other reasons.

If you think deforestation is solved, then you didn't read the article beyond the headline.

The risk is that we'll all be dead long before this magic tech is invented.

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