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Comment by halfjoking | Hacker News Reader

Telling nations to abstain from carbon emissions is like asking teenagers to be celibate.

The natural way to remove carbon is weathering rocks over millions of years, and it's not hard to accelerate that process so it only takes decades: https://vesta.earth

Why wouldn't that be the best strategy? Just like contraception is the best strategy for teenagers, I think natural methods of geoengineering are the best strategy for climate change. (I'm not saying aerosols are natural, that one is a horrible idea)

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> Telling nations to abstain from carbon emissions is like asking teenagers to be celibate.

Not all nations are born alike. There are plenty of examples of wealthy nations in Europe and Asia with fractional carbon emissions footprint.

Before anyway throws the "they export their pollution" argument at me, you need to look at the stats on global GHG per capita.

Basically the US, Canada, Australia, and the Gulf Countries are disproportionately wasteful per capita.

This is largely due to how much people buy non-essential goods in those countries and how much energy is generated from Coal/Gas. Both of these can be changed without falling into medieval lifestyles.

To assume that nothing can be done about it is learned helplessness which absolutely plays into the interest of the hydrocarbon industry lobby.

edit: Gulf not Golf!

> the Golf Countries

Given the truly impressive number of golf courses in the area (for a desert), this isn't the worst descriptor, but I do wonder if you mean the Gulf Countries, referring to the countries with a shoreline on the southern half of the Persian Gulf? I remember being a kid in the early 90s wondering why they were starting a war over a game...

At least in Portuguese, "Persian Gulf" is "Golfo Pérsico", so that typo is perfectly understandable if the commenter is not a native English speaker (or has recently read non-English texts mentioning it).

> Basically the US, Canada, Australia, and the Gulf Countries are disproportionately wasteful per capita.

Gee I wonder why those countries would be producing so many emissions per capita. I mean it's not like they're supplying the entire world with food and energy, oh wait, they are.

"Before anyway throws the "they export their pollution" argument at me, you need to look at the stats on global GHG per capita."

I think it's more useful to look at carbon emissions per unit GDP, and the change therein. Stuff has to be produced somewhere, and it doesn't matter to the Earth where. What we want is for it to be produced as carbon-efficiently as possible. By this standard the U.S. still has a way to go to catch up with Europe, but it is catching up, rapidly (and our Canadian friends are weirdly awful, I guess because of tar sands and growing food in greenhouses).

Many advanced nations have already seen pretty significant emissions declines, and this is robust even when you factor in offshoring manufacturing. Many of the huge declines in renewable energy production prices haven’t kicked in yet, so we’re likely to see lots more. Getting to net zero isn’t impossible. The problem is that we may get there when it’s too late.

Then the GP suggestion seems to have a role again - if net zero emissions is not enough, carbon capturing is needed to mitigate previous emissions.

The two are not mutually exclusive.

All of these things are part of net zero (and beyond). The problem is that we may already have kicked off a warming/methane/cloud feedback loop (there are several) and so getting carbon emissions down in the future isn’t going to be enough to fix it. These geoengineering solutions scare the life out of me, but they may (soon) be our only option for surviving this.

According to Vesta's own website, even at their projections of "global scale" i.e. 100's of millions of tons CO2 captured, that's still around 1% of the annual fossil fuel driven emissions (tens of billions of tons).

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