It's also not enough. We will have to start sucking up that carbon from the atmosphere whether we cut emissions or not.
The people on the "lower rungs of humanity" emit an order of magnitude less carbon than everyone else, and should be the last to cut.
I see this argument frequently and it annoys me.
Poor people emit less carbon because they are poor. Do you want them to stay poor?!? I want a future where everyone can at least live a life as wealthy as mine. But my carbon emissions are much higher than that of the global poor.
If we can provide everyone with at least a quality of life like mine, then we're going to massively increase carbon emissions globally. Sure, better technology will help us here, but it is completely unrealistic to expect this to cancel out the increases of emissions and for this not to increases prices. This would, again, put my kind of life out of reach for many.
Look at China for a realistic example. China has had one of the highest reductions in poverty in history - from 88% in extreme poverty in 1981 to 0.7% by 2015.[0] At the same time China's carbon emissions per capita went from 1.46 tons in 1981 to 7.169 tons in 2015.[1] That's a 391% increase in emissions per capita, but it's worth it, because people are better off as a result.
Climate change is a problem, but it won't ruin tomorrow. It will slowly get worse, but this means that there's time. I believe that technological (engineering) solutions are the only way we can realistically deal with it. Cutting emissions is not going to be enough and it will come with a whole boatload of side effects.
[0] https://ourworldindata.org/the-global-decline-of-extreme-pov...
[1] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EN.ATM.CO2E.PC?location...
>this seems like it's going to be the hardest thing humanity has had to deal with in recorded history, and make the misery of extreme poverty in China seem nice in comparison.
I don't see how. There aren't going to be major effects for most people for a very long time. This gives us plenty of time to try various things like carbon capture, putting a shade into space etc.
On carbon capture that we can do today: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-09-08/inside-th...
At $600 per ton of CO2 it's not insurmountable. We emit about 36 billion tons of CO2 into the atmosphere. Napkin math:
36 billion * $600 = $21.6 trillion
Global GDP is at around $84 trillion, which means that this carbon capture technology is within our reach. Obviously an enormous amount of work would need to be done, but it's at least in the right ballpark.
The US emits about 4.8 billion tons of CO2. That would cost $2.88 trillion. Considering the US GDP is $21 trillion that's even more reasonable.
Technological advancement is likely going to cut this cost further. However, I'm also sure that there are some emissions that haven't been factored in here, but we would still be at numbers where society can work.
Also, "extreme poverty" is subsistence farming. About $2-3 worth of goods per day of work.
The foremost experts in DAC are emphatic that it’s not a silver bullet that will magically save us, and that the heavy lifting needs to be done by reducing new emissions.
And at this point, going eventually carbon neutral isn’t enough to avoid the 2 degree C scenario, we need to be going negative eventually.
The major effects seem likely to be deadly heatwaves, crop failure in hotter areas, mass migration, and political strain from all of that.
We will have to start sucking it up faster than we've extracted it... which is about 100 million barrels a day. Ain't gonna happen.
It’s not all a negative trade off.